I am home. Nine days of transit and vacation filled constantly with the frenetic energy of children. At home, once the cat has settled down, I am greeted with a deafening silence. I turn on WBUR and listen to the sound of people talking — some sort of interview about cows. Better than nothing.

The television was almost never on. There were no radios. There were many iPods, all set to shuffle. I kept up with the news of the world and my various internet feeds via my iPad. None of it seemed particularily important, none of it moved me. The only thing I felt the need to check in on daily was the comics.

There wasn’t much of a plan, aside from go to the beach now or go to the beach later. We sailed in the sound. A kayak ended up in a swimming pool. Lacking a volleyball, we used an enormous beach ball as a surprisingly effective substitute. I played RISK for the first time. I won at RISK for the first time. We made tacos, and the kids were enthralled. Near the end of the week, the jellyfish invaded.

I’ve generally been of the opinion that one should spend one’s — that is, my — limited vacation time exploring new places or doing new things. I’m not rushing to do everything, moving too fast to take anything in; at the same time, I don’t want to waste time doing nothing. This vacation was an interesting combination: North Carolina’s Outer Banks are new to me, but the beach is very familiar. There was no set schedule, but there were some clear goals.

Continue reading “Everything’s Ducky”

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I am trying to figure out how to get my calendar back. I have data going back to 1997, and now everything is corrupted. Some events are duplicated over five hundred times. When an event with an alarm goes off on my iPad, it won’t let me get back to what I want to do until I acknowledge the alarm. Five hundred times. I’m not sure how this compares to water boarding, but it sure seems to qualify as an enhanced interrogation technique.

After reading In Defense of Food I have been trying, with some success, to follow the Pollan approach to eating, focusing more on fresh fruits and vegetables, cutting back on meat, and avoiding most processed food-like substances, especially products that make elaborate health claims on their packaging.

I do feel better about what I am eating, in part because rather than treat this solely as a health exercise, I have framed it as a competition — me vs. the agro-giants that are out to ruin my health. If you start thinking of Kraft, Nestle, and all the other huge food conglomerates as evil corporations more concerned with their profits than the fact that they are increasing juvenile diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease, it is a lot easier to avoid their products. Since said products are custom-engineered to trick your taste buds into thinking they are good for you, the mind-over-matter approach is important to avoiding them.

Articles like this recent one in the Times about salt content are especially effective, at least for me, in engendering loathing and disgust towards packaged foods:

The power that salt holds over processed foods can be seen in an American snack icon, the Cheez-It.

At the company’s laboratories in Battle Creek, Mich., a Kellogg vice president and food scientist, John Kepplinger, ticked off the ways salt makes its little square cracker work.

Salt sprinkled on top gives the tongue a quick buzz. More salt in the cheese adds crunch. Still more in the dough blocks the tang that develops during fermentation. In all, a generous cup of Cheez-Its delivers one-third of the daily amount of sodium recommended for most Americans.

As a demonstration, Kellogg prepared some of its biggest sellers with most of the salt removed. The Cheez-It fell apart in surprising ways. The golden yellow hue faded. The crackers became sticky when chewed, and the mash packed onto the teeth. The taste was not merely bland but medicinal.

“I really get the bitter on that,” the company’s spokeswoman, J. Adaire Putnam, said with a wince as she watched Mr. Kepplinger struggle to swallow.

I think the point here is less about the specific problem (excess salt) and more about what that salt is covering up — the true essence of the food we are scarfing down, a sticky, gray, medicinal extruded corn mash.

I don’t agree with everything Pollan says, and In Defense of Food is less footnoted than I would like. In particular, he is widely critical of food science and nutritionism, but then uses many scientific studies of food and eating habits in making his claims, without adequately explaining why some studies are more reliable than others. But on the whole, I feel the book is well worth reading, and it has had a major impact on me and my eating habits.

One Pollan prescription is along the lines of “if it doesn’t go bad, it isn’t good.” I understand why this is the case, but the consequence is that I keep buying good things and not eating them before they go bad, a problem I didn’t have to deal with quite as much before.

I speak of salsa as we Americans understand it. A product that comes in dozens of varieties, probably more. It is frequently tomato based, but need not be. It works well mild, hot, or any degree in between. It is usually made almost exclusively from real, old-fashioned, non-bioengineered, non-preserved fruits and vegetables. When properly served, it is wonderfully healthy and safe — the worst it might do to you is give you a bit of excess sodium. It works great atop a wide variety of foodstuffs, or as a dipping sauce, or even eaten alone. The nature of the traditionally included ingredients are such that preservatives are rarely needed, even in canned, store-bought varieties. You can get great salsa at the super-expensive local organic market, and you can get great salsa for cheap at Target. There are so many varieties of salsa that everyone can find one they enjoy, and yet all of these very different sauces are recognized as salsa. I salute you, various peoples, regions, and cultures that created the sauces and dips that we now collectively know as salsa. You have made the world a better place!

Random House Dictionary suggests I get over one of my pet peeves:

Since the early 20th century, literally has been widely used as an intensifier meaning “in effect, virtually,” a sense that contradicts the earlier meaning “actually, without exaggeration”: The senator was literally buried alive in the Iowa primaries. The parties were literally trading horses in an effort to reach a compromise. The use is often criticized; nevertheless, it appears in all but the most carefully edited writing. Although this use of literally irritates some, it probably neither distorts nor enhances the intended meaning of the sentences in which it occurs. The same might often be said of the use of literally in its earlier sense “actually”: The garrison was literally wiped out: no one survived.

I’m literally throwing up right now.

I recently had a chance to speak with an engineer at the company that runs WordPress.com, the blogging platform that hosts almost 10 million blogs and serves over a billion pageviews a month. I used to use the precursor to the WordPress software for my personal blog, and continued to use WordPress as the blogging platform evolved and improved over the years. I’ve also managed a small WordPress multi-user install, serving about 300 blogs and 300,000 monthly pageviews at Harvard Law School.

What is remarkable about WordPress.com is that, despite being absolutely gargantuan, the technological underpinnings are very similar to the open-sourced WordPress code that is available for anyone to use. Unlike Twitter, with its well-known performance woes, or Facebook, with its huge interconnected network of users, WordPress, with it’s blog-centric approach, scales nearly linearly. With the exception of a few global features, like single sign-on, blogs are relatively self-contained. The WordPress crew wisely chose to move complex operations like search out of the core (utilizing Lucene), so that as usage grows, scaling is as easy as throwing more computing power and storage at the problem.

At the database level, they run stock MySQL, and not even the latest version, because their code doesn’t require anything more complex than simple SELECTs, INSERTS, and JOINs. Rather than attempting to optimize every layer with hyper-efficient C code, they instead cache content aggressively using the powerful Varnish reverse proxy.

As the WordPress platform has gotten more complex and plugins more sophisticated, I’ve had less need to actually delve into the code to customize my blog to my liking. Taking a look at WordPress 3.0, I see that things have evolved significantly from earlier versions. The developers have wisely focusing on beefing up the plugin API over the last several revisions. Because of this, WordPress.com coders are free to spend time developing cool new features and improving functionailty using the same modular plugin and theming architecture as standard WordPress. This in turn means that development is non-stop, and developers actually push out updates to the main WordPress.com code on a daily basis.

The WordPress.com approach is not appropriate for all, or even most, large-scale web applications. But it is instructive. Rather than spending huge amounts of time re-writing and hyper-optimizing, the WordPress crew focused on incrementally improving their core product, implementing common-sense technologies to simplify their traffic management, and building a solid foundation for continuous platform improvement. As a result, WordPress.com has grown to a top-10 web property in terms of traffic while keeping a staff of only 50 globally distributed employees.

All that, and the core product, the WordPress platform, continues to be free software overseen by a non-profit foundation and open to anyone. Pretty neat and, if you ask me, not a bad way to run a business.

Since the Bank of America fiasco I find myself constantly logging into my account to make sure my money is still there. My new bank account won’t be open for a few days and the transfer of investments to E-Trade takes two weeks. Why is everything related to banking still so slow? And to top it off, today when I tried to use my Citi card to book an airline ticket it was rejected, even after going through some asinine verification process that for all I know may have been a phishing attempt. One thing I will say for BofA, they have never made me jump through stupid hoops like that.
Continue reading “Bank of America updates”

On Friday I received a message from a nice-sounding man who identified himself as being with Bank of America’s fraud department and requested I give him a call back. I didn’t get around to it on Friday, not realizing the urgency of his innocuous request. On Saturday I discovered that both of my Bank of America credit cards were blocked and my account had a hold on it for $888,888.88.
Continue reading “Bank of America is scary and powerful”

I am happy to report that in spite for previous failures I have finally made my way through a complete David Foster Wallace piece, namely Shipping Out (pdf) also known as the title essay in his collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. This treatise on luxury cruises is spot-on and engrossing, and difficult to describe. I read something that said that Wallace’s gift is for honesty and conversation without irony. He just sort of talks to you, the reader, mixing high prose and pedestrian language interchangeably, with footnotes and asides, meandering discussions, and the occasional bit of straightforward insight. In Infinite Jest it drove me batty, but in Shipping Out it worked for me. And it was odd, reading this essay, a narration of DFW’s week at sea, feeling like I was getting inside his head, and then remembering how he is dead. So odd.

Ars Technica, the popular technology site, recently wrote an article with the ominous title Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love. It has reignited (somewhat) the debate about the use of ad blocking software in web browsers. I have been blocking online ads for years now using specialized software. But I suspect almost all of us block ads to some degree by utilizing our browsers’ built in pop-up blockers.

I’m not ready to go back to annoying pop up windows, but I decided to embark on what I’m dubbing the “Ars Challenge,” and disabled my ad blocking software this morning.

The results…well. Around 2pm I went to the New York Times web site, and by 2:02pm I had re-installed a plugin called ClickToFlash in order to silence their huge distracting Adobe Flash advertising. But disabling things that move and make noise seems to me in line with the spirit of the challenge. I will tolerate ads that are respectful of me, that don’t unduly invade my space and attention or hijack my browsing experience.

So I soldered on another 2 hours, until I stumbled across this LA Times article.

Can you see it? I’ve highlighted it with a red box. Everything around it is ads and white space. Less than 20% of the screen is devoted to the actual article, and the font and spacing is such that in the entire first page on a relatively large computer screen I am able to view only about 40 words of actual article text without scrolling. Unbelievable.

And so, at 4:25pm, less than 5 hours after the challenge began, I’m giving up. Back to the ad blocker, and back to sanity.

Megan McArdle makes the point that our health care debate is skewed because we are debating a full coverage program rather than also discussing the need for catastrophic coverage. The latter is in some ways much easier to justify and to insure, but our framing covers the entire health care market, with all the concerns about care rationing, government intervention, standards, etc., pushing aside what should be a far simpler to implement government mandate.

One of the comments on her blog explains it well using an analogy of groceries and flood insurance. We all need food to live, but we are “trusted” to choose it and pay for it ourselves. For those with limited income, government subsidies in the form of food stamps and other programs help them and encourage but do not require good decision making. In healthcare, first-dollar care means our employer- or government-provided insurance is intimately involved in all of our health decisions, including normal checkups and things like breast cancer screenings. We are not making our own informed choices about which health care to pay for out of pocket (self-insurance) or which free market insurance company to choose. Since it is someone else’s money, there is no incentive for that sort of decision making, the market for services is not competitive, and thus prices rise.

In much the same way, we need shelter and choose on our own how and where to obtain it, be it by buying, renting, subletting, or taking advantage of a government assistant program if we are poor. But for people who live in flood zones, the government mandates flood insurance. This catastrophic insurance is required and usually subsidized or provided free by the government. In the event of a catastrophe, this insurance (in theory) kicks in. In much the same way, the government should mandate catastrophic health insurance coverage for all Americans. A policy that covers things like heart attacks, strokes, car accidents, etc. Since the shared risk pool is massive, the cost of insurance can be fairly low. While most people will never need it, it is a public safety net for everyone.

I’m not entirely convinced by this libertarian-minded argument, since I tend to see healthcare as an entire ecosystem with good choices in preventative care paying large dividends down the line, and with chronic conditions sopping up most of our health care dollars. But in terms of getting something passed through Congress to improve our system and cut costs, the idea of tackling catastrophic insurance first does have some appeal.

For the last time people, it’s not about specs! Processor speed, RAM, and graphic chips are not how you judge an Apple product. This is faster and that is smaller and this one does multitasking and has USB ports and a network jack. It doesn’t matter.

I won’t prognosticate about how the iPad will sell, or how successful it will be. I will simply say that the iPad is innovative in the same way that the iPhone and iPod Touch were innovative. It’s just a bigger iPhone, you argue? Of course it is! That is an argument for it, not against. Remember Minority Report? Remember every other cool movie or tech demo that showed amazingly slick touch screen interfaces? How many of them had standard menu bars, or windows with close and minimize buttons, or Start menus? None of them did. So why is it that when people talk about tablets, they talk about shrinking Windows or Mac OS to a smaller screen?

The iPhone succeeded in large part because Apple conceptualized a whole new user experience. The iPad, if it succeeds, will do so in large part because, like the iPhone, it is familiar. It uses gestures we use in life, its iconography is rarely confusing, and it just works in a smooth, clean, fluid way that totally abstracts away the whole notion that we are using a powerful little computer with files and folders and processes and RAM and software updates. The reason that every tablet so far has failed, and the iPad may just succeed, is because instead of taking a 1980s-era desktop metaphor and shrinking it down, Apple took an entirely new direction, the iPhone direction, and blew it up.

On Windows, every app has its own user interface conventions and different sized and shaped buttons and windows. Every version of Office re-arranges things and adds new colors and shapes and shortcuts. The modern Mac aesthetic, in contrast, generally strives towards minimalism. Most of the best apps use standard platform UI conventions with minor enhancements that are intuitive and clean. Powerful and expensive apps look simple and almost boring at first glance: the full potential is hidden and gradually becomes apparent as the app just works the way the user expects, the same way as other Mac apps. Still, almost all desktop computers, Macs included, overflow with confusing error messages, dialog boxes, file save windows, and various other extraneous nonsense. My codecs are out of date? You need to modify what registry? Windows demands to shut down right now to install critical updates? Why do I have to deal with all this stuff?

Apple has created a whole new set of interface conventions and user experience standards for the iPhone and, now, iPad. These opinionated guidelines and development frameworks make it very easy to do things the “Apple way” and much more difficult to do things in non-standard ways. Apple has cut off low-level access to the system, restricting applications (err, “apps”) so that if they break, they leave everything else as they found it. Apple has created standard system-wide gestures, buttons, and interaction paradigms that just work — everywhere. The iPad puts the content front-and-center, and hides all the needless chrome. I doubt you will be able to find any successful apps on the iPad that behave like a Windows or Mac desktop app. They will work like iPad apps.

Now, I was disappointed by the iPad announcement in one major way. I expected groundbreaking content deals for interactive media. Neat new technologies for reading magazines or multimedia newspapers. But now I’m convinced that Apple did not take that path because it just makes more sense for subscription content providers, like newspaper and magazine publishers, to create their own apps and try their own experiments. Apple has given them the platform, given them the guidelines, given them a UI that gets out of the way, and said, “innovate!” The ones that succeed will be the companies, like the New York Times, that embrace the challenge.

Judge the iPad, not by what you see, but by what you can imagine. If there are over 100,000 apps on the iPhone’s App Store, it isn’t much of a stretch to imagine that there will be thousands more made just for the iPad. The real wonder and power of the device will come from what those apps let you do.

I’ve been neglecting the blog lately. I compose thoughts and entries in my head, but never commit them to the keyboard. It has been a fun and busy last few months, and I have a lot of things to record that I may never get around to recording. Some highlights…

I saw this really amazing interactive theatre piece called Sleep No More put on by Punchdrunk in association with the American Repertory Theatre. It is a retelling of Macbeth mashed up with Hitchcock’s Rebecca, and I had to go back and see it again, and still didn’t feel like I had adequately explored the piece, spread across over 30 rooms in an old school building in Brookline. The show got immensely popular near the end, with people flying in from all over the country to experience it and every showing selling out weeks in advance. I’m glad I caught it early in the run, but am disappointed I wasn’t able to pick up a third showing.

More exciting though, coming out of the show the first time I got a surprise call from Shaina, letting me know that she and Brian chose their three year anniversary as an occasion to get engaged to be married. Wow. My little sister is getting married. I feel old now. And a little behind.

Spurred to competition (kidding!), Meghan and I discussed living together, and then decided she would move in. Now we’re caught in an awkward position where her lease doesn’t end until July 31st, and we have to keep looking wistfully forward by six months. It does give us time to do some redecorating, including repainting and refurnishing the bedroom with a fancy new bedroom set that set me back by a few trips to Iceland. Today is our nine month anniversary.

So no travels abroad in the near future, alas, but there was Christmas fun in New Jersey and then Connecticut with Meghan’s extended family, followed by California with my family through New Years. We explored LA and San Diego, had some nice meals and got to experience the Rose Parade, including a sad Ronald MacDonald when his float broke down. On the outside he was smiling, but I could see through the painted facade to the pain beneath.

It was fun discovering my home state anew through Meghan’s eyes. Venice Beach was a blast, and of course we went to In-N-Out, as well as the Farmer’s Market on Wilshire. We’re planning to hit up the northern part of the state at some indeterminate point in the future, especially San Francisco and perhaps Sacramento, but nothing too soon (see above re: bankrupting furniture purchases!).

All this travel and family time left me feeling a bit cut off from friends, especially in the dreary month of January, but that was delightfully remedied, first by a ski day with Jeremy, and then by a lovely Egremont weekend. We traveled to Meghan’s family’s house in the Berkshires on the New York border, with a dozen friends in tow. There were many board games, some good skiing at Jiminy Peak, bowling, and even some unexpected snow shoveling. My Hanukkah gift of new skis performed brilliantly, and I got to experience the strangest feeling of not being in terrible pain at the end of the day. The joy of boots that fit my oddly-shaped feet!

There has been some trouble at work with a big new deployment that went hideously awry and had to be rolled back. Now the rest of my work plans have been derailed by fruitless efforts to determine what went wrong and how to fix it without making wholesale changes to our environment. It’s a mess and no fun, but hopefully will pass soon, and I will be able to move on to more interesting things.

My Harvard contract expires in mid-March, so I interviewed for some other jobs but ultimately decided that where I am is where I’d like to stay for the time being. We’re going through some complicated renewal/term-to-perm process that hopefully will be resolved prior to my last day.

Those are the highlights, I suppose. Lots more I could talk about, but now I am late for work. Coming one day: pictures from California, and maybe even the pictures from my big Birthright trip to Israel back in August!

What have you been up to?

A great On the Media radio story I heard today discusses the problem of old newspaper articles haunting sources or subjects forever, due to the permanence of data online, even long after the news in question has faded from importance. Should an arrest a decade ago, in which all charges were dropped, lower a lawyer’s chances of landing a job at a big firm? Should an article a college student wrote about Craig’s List sex make him afraid to teach fourth graders, for fear they (or their parents) will stumble across it while Googling his name?

The conclusion of the piece, by producer Nazanin Rafsanjani, reflects a shift, I think, in OTM’s coverage of this issue, perhaps because our general conception of the issue itself is changing as we all are subject more and more frequently to these online data permanence conundrums.

First this, from Houston Chronicle editor Dean Betts:

It’s an unforgiving world right now, and that’s one price that we pay for having such access, unrivaled, unimaginable access to information. My information is part of that too. Your stuff is not your stuff anymore. You don’t own it if it’s on the web. It’s out there.

And Nazanin concludes the story as follows:

Perhaps there will come a point when we’ll all have something awkward, or even potentially damaging about us on the web. And if it’s public for everyone, then maybe we’re protected by the crowd. All of us, living out our most embarrassing moments, one Google search at a time, in front of one another.

In 2007, On the Media host Bob Garfield told me that he is obsessed, not with the “permanence” of online data, but “with the convergence of permanence, irresponsibility, invasion of privacy, and malice. […I]t raises alarms, because there will be victims.”

My view, at the time, and now, is that we need not greet this revolution with fear. There will be victims, there will be suffering, but the positives will — must — outweigh the negatives. It is all a question of what sort of world we want to live in, and how we choose to live in it. We will lose much of our online anonymity and privacy, we already have, but as I wrote in 2007,

[I]n other ways we are going to gain more, as the community in which we exist extends beyond all geographic bounds, as the amount of information increases faster than the ability of the tools to analyze it, and as we find new ways to “own” and control our own data, rather than allowing others (vendors, identity providers, governments, credit agencies) to own all the data about us.

The excitement of the week is that Trader Joe’s opened a new location by Alewife. I went over today to check it out and it was pretty exciting. All the employees were friendly and seemed to genuinely enjoy discovering new TJs products that they weren’t aware of. Of course the Trader Joe’s Song was running through my head the whole time…

I picked up some natural organic granola hormone-free pet-safe carbon-neutral bacon, and decided to follow the directions on the packaging exactly. Unfortunately, there were three sets of directions: microwave, broiler, and pan fry. So I did all three, and compared the results.

Continue reading “Three paths to bacon”

Haven’t written much here in a while. Been busy during the week with work and on the weekends out exploring. There are many pictures to be posted, soon as I get to that. On Saturday Meghan and I checked out Halibut Point State Park in Rockport, which was an interesting old quarry that we could walk around. It was unseasonably cold, a precursor to yesterday’s snow — SNOW! Last weekend was Harvard Square’s annual Oktoberfest fair, with a bunch of crazy lefty-hippie bands marching a “honk” parade. The week before we saw the 1,500 lb. prize pumpkin and other fun things at the Topsfield Fair. Had a great chili cheese dog at the B’nei Brith booth. Go figure.

Going all the way back into September (man, how did I get this behind?), there was a fun excursion to a cabin in the woods of Vermont that deserves an entry of its own. Along with that, a trip to the Tunbridge World’s Fair which included some really neat historic components, including old farm equipment, a blacksmithing demonstration, a one room schoolhouse, and hundred year old steam and gas-powered engines.

We also spent a long weekend in Baltimore, spur of the moment, because JetBlue was offering super-cheap fares. We explored the Inner Harbor, went to a book fair, hung out with a couple of Meghan’s friends, saw a dolphin show, and climbed through a submarine. Pretty cool. (You may ask, “where are the pictures?” A fair question. Soon.)

Otherwise, not much to report. I’m behind in my Ruby class, behind on my reading, and behind on my chores. Igor is away from the next few weeks, a good opportunity to caulk the tub and do other household maintenance, so I should do those things. Soon enough it is off to Cleveland to explore and see one of the final Springsteen shows of his tour. This whole frequent travel thing is starting to become a trend, between trips to Israel (still haven’t finished blogging!), Ireland (never blogged, never posted pictures!), and less glamorous but just as fun destinations like Vermont, New Jersey, and New Hampshire. The number of US states I’ve visited has probably doubled in the past year, and I don’t plan to stop. As winter approaches, skiing trips might start to dominate. Just as soon as I go out and buy a set of skis!

Summit Spring’s new “Raw Water”:

Pullen said the water is nutrient rich, “living” spring water, with essential minerals and gravity fed straight into a clear glass one liter bottle. The glass bottle is placed immediately into a recycled-content brown paper bag lined with wax, to protect it from sunlight’s corruption and spoiling, further preserving the taste and clarity of the water inside.

We last checked in as spring approached, but my mood was decidedly winter. Now summer is in full swing, and, much as I detest the Boston humidity, I’m certainly in a summer state of mind. Work continues to be what it is, but there is much else of value in the world: kayaking the Charles, walks when the air is cool, cooking when I have the energy, and eating out when I don’t. The occasional frisbee game, a visit to the New Jersey State Fair, ice cream on a waffle cone, farmers markets. Trips to the Berkshires, for mini-golf and canoeing. A holiday in Dublin with friends, just for fun.

And best of all, I am three months in to a wonderful new relationship, chock full of mutual respect and shared interests and happiness. Not a bad summer so far.

Next week, off to Israel on a Birthright trip, which I will try to deconstruct here if I have the time.

A short 3d-animated film set on a futuristic oil rig.