Best Recruiting Email Ever

I just received the greatest recruiting email of all time. This is for a job with a large software company in Redmond, WA. I kid you not. The end of the mail enumerates the requirements as follows.

Needs to have familiarity with:

• Python and/or Ruby Experience
• Chef and/or Puppet Experience: Desire persons whom have been exposed to programmatic automation
• CCNA level network knowledge: Desire network understanding of subnetting, network management protocols such as SSH / SNMP / serial console interactions
• Linux experience
• Knows how to use either VI or Emacs editors

If interested, please reply with current Word resume. Thanks!

David

Wow... Just wow. Bonus points for the incorrect usage of "whom". But at least they're trying. My Pyrrhic victory over Microsoft will be complete when I do not have to ever even contemplate giving them money, directly or indirectly, in order to use software unrelated to them. Progress has definitely been made! The world is definitely a better place. Who knows, once that situation exists, maybe I will work for them.

Fortunetelling Like An Oracle

It starts out with an email from a friend saying that they are looking into acquiring a storage server for their science lab.

------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2010
From: A Friend In That Lab
Subject: Fwd: Fwd: server config pricing spreadsheet
To: Chris X Edwards

We're looking for recommendations for something you know a lot more about than I do, so if you have time, I thought I'd ask what you think...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Subject: Re: Fwd: server config pricing spreadsheet
To: PI
From: Someone The PI Knows Who Knows-About-Computers
Cc: A Friend In That Lab, Person Responsible For System Administration

Hi folks

I like the x4440 the best, it seems to be the best value. Nothing wrong with the x4275, though the extra power would be good.  If you did purchase the x4275, I would recommend and even number of drives (4 or more) and configure with a RAID 10. [Blah blah blah]

[A bunch of talk about various server options which is uninteresting.]
------------------------------------------------------------

I offered to go to their lab meeting and tell them my perspective on storage servers. This offer was accepted and I met with this entire group (PI, PRFSA, et al) on March 16, 2010. I explained to them the
McNett Storage Server Architecture, build it yourself from components that are easily replaceable and if in doubt, buy two and put one on the shelf. And, of course, use Linux.

In the previous couple of months I had just built such a storage server of similar capacity. I showed them my notes on that specific build. They were looking to buy a used Sun machine. With storage capacity and RAID configuration similar to my box, their prospect was, despite being used, about three times more expensive.

I clearly told them that the storage server they were looking at would be a proprietary machine which would limit their responsiveness to problems. I enumerated all the ways that storage servers fail and
addressed how the McNett design accommodates those failures. By having easily obtainable cold spares of anything that could fail on hand and ready to go you greatly reduce your dependence on uncontrollable entities in keeping the machine running.

They were very skeptical, instead appearing to favor the apparent greater security of Sun's very reassuring warranty (which this machine apparently would be "covered" by). I explained my experience with warranties and how big companies are more motivated to make the
service seem good before the sale than after.

In March of 2010, I basically described the exact course of events which ultimately took place 3 years later after they bought the Sun...

------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Jan 2013
From: Person Responsible For System Administration
Subject: [admin-mailinglist]  Spare hard drive for a Sun Fire x4540?
To: admin-mailinglist

Hi everyone.

I realize this is a long shot, but does anyone have any spare hard drives for a Sun Fire X4540 ("thor") ?  We currently have 2 failed drives and are waiting on replacements from Oracle, but they are backordered with no ETA.  If one more drive fails, we could lose all of our data, so naturally I'm very concerned.

Thanks,
PRFSA
------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Jan 2013
From: Helpful Sys-Admin
Subject: [admin-mailinglist] Re: Spare hard drive for a Sun Fire x4540?
To: Person Responsible For System Administration

What size?

If you have a hardware support contract, Oracle is bound to specific response times (2 hours onsite for "Premier").

        http://www.oracle.com/us/support/premier/servers-storage/overview/index.html

Are they not honoring that?
------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Jan 2013
From: Person Responsible For System Administration
Subject: [admin-mailinglist] Re: Spare hard drive for a Sun Fire x4540?
To: Helpful Sys-Admin

It's a 1 TB drive.  Oracle has responded, but only to tell me that the drives are backordered.

Thanks,
PRFSA

------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Jan 2013

From: Helpful Sys-Admin

Subject: [admin-mailinglist] Re: Spare hard drive for a Sun Fire x4540?

To: Person Responsible For System Administration

Sorry, our thors have 500GB drives.

Oracle's response sounds unacceptable to me.  They should have stock on hand sufficient to cover their contracts. Obviously that's not entirely feasible.  What if a earthquake took out some major sites with lots of drives?  But barring any such disaster, they should have a replacement drive on-site in 2 hours, as their contract obliges them to.

Have you tried to escalate it?

------------------------------------------------------------

My storage servers have Linux software RAID1 OS drives, minimal lean secure Gentoo, custom kernels, and daily notifications that failure has not occurred. But I owe a big debt of gratitude to Dr. McNett for showing me the wisdom of doing it right by doing it yourself.

Telephones and Telegraphs - Not Internet

Wow. AT&T kicked me in the balls pretty hard at the beginning of this month. I didn't pay my bill because I didn't know it was due. Apparently AT&T prefers some kind of antique Pony Express kind of notification system using dead trees. Since that's buried under so much AT&T spam packing the mailbox in my yard, it's easy to let a couple of them slip by. But I got that sorted out.

I remember during one of my many hours on the phone with AT&T customer service telling someone of the impossibility of using AT&T's web site to do simple things like pay a freaking bill. But I was assured it was not just possible, it was easy. So I tried again. And shaking my head in disbelief, I requested that AT&T send me an online registration number by Pony Express. That arrived and I have the number! Great! So I fill in the web form. Then I fill it in again because of shockingly stupid restrictions on username composition (which made the stupid restrictions on the password look less criminally insane). Great. Account created! Super.

Except not. Except instead of logging into my account, I see this:

Then I click the "contact us" link in the error message and I click the topic related to logging in. It then suggests I log in. Which produces the same error. Grr. Getting out of that loop I start to compose my description of the situation and there is some unspecified limit to how much I'm allowed to say? WTF? At the very least that space should be as long as AT&T's freaking terms of service which they wanted me to read!

I'm totally not amused here. I don't even use this idiotic land line. I just need it for my internet connection and it follows that I want to do my business over the internet. This would be less ridiculous if AT&T was not claiming to be the post 19th century company that they wish they were. No, AT&T keeps sending me dead tree spam trying to get me to use them as an internet provider too. Hell, why not just go with carrier pigeons?

Internet provider that can't bill its customers using the Internet: Epic Fail

DSLexia Extreme

My internet per se comes from DSLExtreme (which I call DSLexia Extreme) and that requires an old school telephone land line. The economics barely are worth it, but I like to pay AT&T as little as possible. My recent nightmare has fully developed that sentiment. AT&T (ironically for being a major ISP, for example all iPhones before last year) has a shitty web page with shitty features to manage your phone account online. I could not figure out how to pay bills on line. I'm pretty sure it's not simply my computer-using clumsiness. I timed one AT&T promotional web page loading in *eight* minutes - at SDSC.edu, best network in town! So something is rotten with AT&T's web page and that's just a start. They force me to call with a telephone and press buttons to pay my bill. No email reminders, but rather paper bills hidden among as much of their paper spam. I missed a couple of these among the spam bin that is my snail mail and lost track of when I'd last called and suddenly one day, no internet.

I call DSLexia who kept insisting that to figure out why I had no internet, I'd need to give Steve Ballmer a foot massage. Finally *I* figured out that, hey wait, no phone line (because I don't use it for anything else because of AT&Ts dirty surreptitious habit of charging "long" distance rates for calls to points I can reach in 30 minutes - by bicycle!). Once I realized that it was the phone that was really dead, I called AT&T and told them to turn it back on. To their credit they lied to me the good way, they said it'd take 40 hours and it took about 25.

Great! I thought I was back in action. Only the DSL didn't work. Then back to DSLexia. These guys really were exasperating. I called at least a dozen times and spent at least as many hours on hold. Some "tech" "support" personnel still wanted to do the old "Press the Start button" script (moot for Linux) but since I knew the root cause of the problem, I could usually get them to move on to their next phase - being completely stultified. They would consistently elevate my call to tier 2 support and after a while the tier 2 guys would start to realize what was at issue and they believed it wasn't a technical problem, but rather one of re-signing up for service. They'd transfer me to billing. Then billing would deem it a technical problem and transfer me to tier 1. Then the process would repeat. About half of the time the wait times were about 10 minutes. The other half, they were indefinite.

But this was wasting valuable time to experiment with just how long they could keep me on hold after promising to come back in a minute. Eventually I learned that billing and tier 2 will *not* eventually pick up your call if it's not conventional weekday business hours (didn't figure out which US time zone exactly). We could have saved a lot of trouble had the tier 1 staff been honest and/or knowledgeable about that.

Finally I talked to Danielle in California (not the Philippines) who was not clueless. She knew my problem in a familiar been-there-done-that way that made me believe what she said. She also didn't seem eager to lie to me about the prospects of when I might get my connection back. I had been assuming all this time that all that needed to happen was someone just resets my connection and I'm done. But she made the reality sink in that basically a new order was going to have to be placed. This meant a projected outage of almost two weeks.

Even though I had just paid the AT&T weasels $40 to turn my phone back on, I checked into switching to cable from Warner: expensive to setup, maintain, and no quicker to get back online. I asked what it would take to get AT&T to just take over DSL and they really balked at that as if it were hardly even possible. They are emphatically moving to their Uverse technology and it sounds superior, but the up front costs are high (for a non TV watcher) and its lead time was not helpful either, weeks hence. I would add that this makes sense since it is madness to think that true *high* speed internet can come delivered over an analog phone line. Most previous experience with DSL Extreme has been them telling me to do voodoo nonsense with my physical phone wires to improve the connection. If that is really necessary, then I'm afraid those wires are too obsolete for using in that way.

Basically there was going to be no high speed internet service at my house for 2 weeks. It definitely sounds like a white person problem to be so dependent on a stupid internet connection, but it's like with a lot of people how important their car is. If it breaks, they don't get to work. Same with me and the internet. But with internet, there are no "rentals". This is a very big problem that telecommuting pioneers like me are discovering.

I did explore the possibility of borrowing a cup of internet from my friendly neighbors. But my neighbors aren't really any friendlier than I am and when it comes to the internet they are much more hostile. For the past 9 month I've let my neighbors use my open wifi if they aren't doing conspicuously naughty things, but no reciprocity in my time of need. As much as I wanted to "borrow" a connection from access point "GO_F_YOURSELF", alas, they used a strong password wpa psk scheme. I checked.

I looked into tethering and in the future this will be the correct solution, but right now, it required creepy client software (not available for Linux) or rooting the phone. Since my new smart "phone" was my last dwindling ray of light to the outside world, I did not feel like experimenting to see if I could avoid bricking it.

Not quite ready to accept defeat, it was time to open a mighty can of ancient technical whoop ass on my lack of internet connectivity. Since I had already signed up for this moribund 19th century "telephone" "service", I realized that I had, barely, all the ingredients to go back in time, almost 30 years, to use an ancient technology to temporarily solve the problem: dial up.

Getting Linux (or any OS) to know what to do with a telephone modem in 2011 is not exactly easy and without a network connection, it's very challenging. But by ferrying some things (pppd, wvdial, minicom, setserial) from work, a visit to an internet cafe, and reading man pages on my Android phone, I did it. I then found that almost all modems that could be plugged into the inside of a modern PC are "Winmodems" which means that you probably won't find necessary drivers if you use Windows and they probably won't exist if you use Linux. Amazingly some clueless people were clearing out an office building downtown and posted a NIB proper external 56k modem. They asked too much (the clueless part), but it was their lucky day since I was on a serious mission; I guess when they tell the story, I'll be the clueless character.

Once back home, the computer I was preparing for this project stopped booting and started smelling like burnt electronics. Much voodoo later, I was able to drop its power draw down and get it to boot and run. Finally, I got the modem recognized and responding, then, making calls. I'd already laboriously mapped out which of the access numbers from the dial up ISP I'd signed up for were in Zone 1 (not long distance). After some configuration issues that required me to read the C source coded of pppd, I finally got an internet connection. Then I was in more familiar territory (as a practicing professional) when I set this computer up to be a port forwarding IP masquerading gateway firewall router. I rewired a few things on my network and now, my house once again has internet. Whew.

It's not fast, that's for sure, but one of the very nice advantages of doing things in the spartan text-console-based world I like to work in is that I don't *need* very fast. I can not watch lolcat videos and stream music while using on-line office suites, but I can ssh to my main server and do all the stuff I need to do (like compose this entirely over the line, i.e. I'm at home and the editor is running at work). I even did a Gentoo `emerge --sync` which needed to happen to then `emerge iptables`. That was slow and took many hours, but it did work.

I don't know how this story will end. Maybe DSLexia was jacking me around and they'll keep billing me and not providing service indefinitely until I get legal representation to menace them with a law suit. I did, for example, find out in the course of this that their "free" DSL modem actually means "free lease". Apparently "free lease" is a euphemism for "loaned". They *loan* you the modem because when you cancel your service, they want it back or they hit you with a $100 charge. Shady bullshit like that, the necessity for paying two bills, and the questionable technical service is probably enough to make me not recommend them despite how much I hate giving AT&T any money ever.

I may be without high speed internet for between 2 and 4 weeks, but thanks to my serious effort I won't be pressured without internet while I make a more careful decision about which of these predatory companies are the lesser of evils.

Visualizing Types Of Databases

I made this graphic to illustrate how I thought of various database strategies. Enjoy.

The Comforts of Java

Java is such a pain in the ass. I suffer terrible struggles to get it installed for people who need it. I went to the Sun Oracle website to hunt for it and I saw this graphic which instantly reminded me of the pain and discomfort of the entire experience of dealing with Java.

There are many ways to say "Evil" in Spanish: Net10, TracFone

Let's talk about evil first. Net10 has a slogan that says "No Evil". Do you know why? They have this slogan precisely because they are "Evil". Here's how it happened. They started out with a reasonable idea which was squeezing money out of people so wretched that they couldn't qualify for the oppressive plans normally offered by the cell phone "service" providers. They called this evil thing TracFone. But then smart people figured out ways to take advantage of TracFone. I, for example, bought their "lifetime double minutes" card. After using that for two years, a funny thing happened, it mysteriously got converted to a "1 year double minutes" card. Ahem. Evil. So TracFone is clearly evil. I know it, you know it, everyone, even TracFone knows it. So what does TracFone do to fix that? Become less evil? Noooo. They just create a phony new company. This is Net10. From a page on the Net10 website:

"All NET10 prepaid wireless service is provided by TracFone Wireless, Inc, America's largest prepaid wireless service provider. TracFone Wireless is a subsidiary of America Movil (NYSE: AMX, Nasdaq: AMOV), Latin America's largest mobile phone provider, with more than 165 million cellular subscribers across the continent."

America Movil... Hmmm take out the "o" and turn the "M" 90 degrees counter clockwise. I think you're seeing things clearly now. This means that if you've been burned by TracFone's flagrant evil, don't let Net10's "No Evil" (comically displayed on the same web page) fool you. When Net10 says "No Evil" what they really mean is "We needed an alias to avoid being recognized by our hallmark which is being evil".

Now it gets funny. Since TracFone screwed me, I've been hard at work screwing them and I encourage you to screw them too. The first thing to note is that they really want your nuts in their mouse trap and this is why they have "special" "deals" on phones. The interesting thing is that one can buy 300 minutes of phone time for the eponymous 10 cents per minute *and* get a phone thrown in. Note that Net10 does not offer any real incentive to buy a 600 minute card over a 300 minute one. Why not buy 2 phones that are charged with 300 min each? (Hint: google.com/voice is your friend.) If you do this you can basically get a spare battery and charger for free. Or a whole second phone etc. And it gets better. You should always search the web for "promotion codes net10" before ordering. I got my 300 minutes for only 23.91 complete which is less than $.08/min. Oh, and the W375 "phone" thrown in purely as a bonus.

The last time I did this, I got a phone with 200 minutes on it and a 300 minute card. They've caught on to this and now they don't send a separate card (ahem, quite easily fungible (sellable) on eBay) anymore. However, one can get minutes transferred to the new phone and aggregated to the new minutes.

How did all that go? Not too great. The process starts out with "Press 1 for English" but there's no option for intelligible English. After being on a (landline) phone for about 30min with customer "service" everything seemed set up, number transfered, minutes transfered, activated, signal.... yet all calls resulted in "Call Failed". Then about an hour on the phone with another tech support guy. I had given them all the info they could possibly need and since they were able to remotely set the number my "phone" was clearly in contact with a base station. The ball was in their court. The only thing they had to say by way of excuses is that it could take up to 72 hours. That's THREE days for those keeping score at home.

Ok, so at this point this "phone" still can't make or receive phone calls. Maybe its other fantastic functionality will make it worth the electricity it has used.

First off it has a Bluetooth functionality because my computer told me it detected it. Great! Only not so much. Turns out that the Bluetooth is only for headsets (verified by a customer "service" person).

Ok, how about the extremely helpful-looking USB connection? I tried connecting the "phone" to a USB memory device: nope. How about to my computer's USB port: nope. Surely you can charge from the computer's USB port's power supply: nope. So much for the USB port.

On to the "Camera"! This is so ridiculous that it's actually funny. After reading up on the "camera" and asking the tech support person about it, I was left with the question, why? Why did they include fancy CCD electronics on this "phone" when they could have just skipped that part? You see, if you take nearly any object, say a banana, you can say it's a "camera" banana because the photons constantly hitting the banana are indelibly changing the subatomic structure of the fruit. In fact, it's really a "video camera". The problem with our "video camera banana", of course, isn't that this is untrue, but rather how does one extract this video information that does, in fact, exist in the banana? It's such a stupendously hard problem that we tend to think of bananas as not being video cameras. And so it is with this "camera" "phone". Oh sure it's mysterious internal state is recording variation in incident lighting, however, that recorded information is trapped forever inside the device. In other words, you can "take" photos, but they're forever stuck in the "phone". The only thing you can "do" with them is to joyfully delete them. Fun!

So let's see, not only is the "camera" "feature" no better than that of a banana, but the calling service is also no more satisfying than a banana. I think I'll stick with a banana in the future because of its long battery life and pleasant ring tone. Also, with the banana, you can at least feel good about eating it.

Wishing you creative luck at screwing whichever cell phone "service" incurs your wrath!

HOWTO: BE THE UNIX EXPERT

This xkcd explains the way to troubleshoot a normal computer. Here's my Unix version:

Weather - Bring It On

I'm a big fan of Jill from Juneau. It's weird that a woman like that is not purely fictional. Recently she has been grumbling, quite reasonably, about the challenges of long bike rides in the worst possible weather. I would write her an email, but like less nonfictional women she's not easy to get in touch with. So I thought I'd share my wisdom on this topic and maybe more people can get some benefit from it.

First of all, it may strike you that I am entirely unqualified to dispense advice about anything more severe than putting on a long-sleeve shirt. Don't let the fact that I live in the acme of fantastic weather, San Diego, California, fool you. I've paid my dues. I have spent several years in Alaska. Much, much worse weather-wise, I have lived in Ohio. My crowning achievement which gives me confidence to give advice to Juneau Jill took place in France.

I had camped on the lower slopes of the HC climb to Chamrousse during the 2001 Tour De France. When I woke up, it was cranking rain, serious full-blast lawn sprinkler stuff. First, to simply camp in this and pack up with all but one component, a tarp, getting wet is a job well done, but the real magic act was yet to come. That morning on my loaded trekking bike, I climbed every meter of that mountain in full driving rain.

At the top was a scary scene. Le Tour attracts many nut cases such as myself and scores of them had also ascended, unfortunately, not as well-prepared as me. They arrived on their light racing bikes in their tropical bird-colored lycra. Getting soaked on the way up didn't seem like a problem to them. I knew better. Le Tour is in July, but at these high Alpine elevations, winter can occur at anytime. On this morning, the temperature of the summit was much colder than the base, just around freezing. These guys got to the top only to find the course closed and their return route blocked. They had to stay at the top in the freezing rain dressed in scant, soaking lycra. I, however, had not even gotten especially wet on the way up. Being close to freezing was actually kind of refreshing for such a climb. Of course I had warm clothes to put on, clothes that were fastidiously kept dry. I stood up there comfortable and happy after having made the climb in the most comfortable way I think it could have been done.

How did I do it? When I was a lad in Ohio, I once asked my wise father, "Say Dad, you grew up on the island where I was born, you know, the one with the wretched weather, and you rode a bicycle. How did you Britons cope?" (Before ruining the entire place with cars.) His answer, "A rain cape." A rain cape? I still remember the first thought I had, "Well that's the gayest thing I've ever heard." Obviously, I was too cool to be caught dead in such a dorky looking garment.

Fast forward many years to early springtime in Bavaria. Sounds nice, doesn't it? Well there's a reason people there invented Mercedes: the weather sucks ass. I was bike touring through this area spending day after day in freezing rain. I was really at the limit of my weather resisting abilities. I stopped for a rest day in a town called Regensburg, literally, "Raintown", aptly named. I had planned to buy some latex dish washing gloves and some waterproof spray, which I did. But I also happened to pop into a bike shop and I asked, "What the heck do cyclists do in this kind of weather?" Answer: a rain cape. Hmm. Ok, I'm getting it by now.

Of course if you say "rain cape" in a bike shop in the USA, you'll be asked if you are speaking Klingon, but in this bike shop, they had a large selection. And a large selection of Ortlieb stuff. You see, when riding in European weather, look to the Europeans for guidance. I picked out a magnificent rain cape and pretty much instantly my fortunes changed. The rain cape is good from about -7C to 25C when it's cranking with rain. Below -7C, it's not raining and some fancy Goretex suit is going to work great. Above 25C, just get wet, it'll feel nice. Most importantly the rain cape is great for that range right around freezing. You can wear the right layers and modulate them as necessary, but they shouldn't need to get soaked from within.

The only thing the cape is not good for is very high winds (which are not direct tailwinds). In this case, I claim that a Gortex suit solution is not going to be too hot because of the breeze.

My other tips are wearing OR Crocs Goretex gaitors. These do not overheat you, yet provide tons of protection right where you most need it. When I'm really serious, I wear them over latex overboots sold in industrial supply places (by the way, this is why I use toe clips when I'm planning on lots of rain, to avoid a big hole in the bottom of my shoe). Also fenders are great. Don't get the stupid American-looking ones that are trying to copy the aesthetic of an internal combustion engine driven two-wheeler. Get the proper European kind (I like SKS/ESGE) that fit close to the wheel and provide long coverage.

Riding in the rain can be done and done comfortably. For me in San Diego, riding in the rain is a special treat which I very much enjoy.

In Praise Of Watered Bottles

The gods of the road leave many interesting things for the two-wheeling gutter caste. A long while back, I found a fancy polycarbonate NALGENE bottle, an $8.50 value according to REI. These are spiffy vessels for putting drinking water in. They are favored by the people who are slightly cooler than the cool because to have one of these is to show that you're concerned about the environmental impact of the bottled water habits of typical yuppies. Unfortunately this path to environmental utopia is marred by reports such as this from Stuff White People Like:

Previously, the gold standard was the Nalgene bottle, however recent studies have shown the plastic can leak toxins into the water. Currently, white people on the cutting edge are really into metal bottles of water with a twist cap. It is recommended that you buy one of these as soon as possible.

I've had a lot of experience with water carrying and I've never seen the appeal of these Nalgene bottles. I used to use the normal bike waterbottle for riding, but they are delicate, stinky, plasticy, hard to clean, too small, leaky, vulnerable to UV damage, expensive, and bad at handling both physical and thermal shocks. Perhaps the Nalgene bottles are a big improvement on that, but why mess around with another type of bottle that is expensive?

I buy my water bottles now at Trader Joe's. They're only $.59 and they even put some water in them to get you started. These incredible vessels never cease to amaze me with their indestructibility. I've sent them flying into the road to get batted about by cars several times without losing any water.

I was cleaning the garage and I came across this Nalgene bottle. Given the kind of people who own this kind of bottle, it's probably free from leprosy, but because of its unknown provenance and my complete lack of enthusiasm for it, I started to carry it to the trash.

Then the enthusiasm hit me - destructive testing! I have to say that I didn't plan the test very well, I just chucked the thing into the air as high as I could (which just clears the roof of a second story structure). Then it lands on the concrete with a satisfying smack. The Nalgene bottle was filled about half full (same water I found it with). After two rounds, the top came askance and water leaked out, but I resealed it and it seemed fine. However after four landings, there was a gurgle following the impact crack of landing. Hmmm, not indestructible after all.

That itself was interesting, but then I wondered how that would compare to my Trader Joe's bottle. I then made a mistake by filling it 2/3 full which was the ultimate capacity of the Nalgene bottle. I had forgotten that the Nalgene was only half full. So the Trader Joe's bottle got a more challenging challenge. After three successful launches, I was completely unsurprised. But on the forth, I was quite surprised to see a rent in the bottom of the bottle. Hmm, so they are not indestructible either.

I think that a lot of people think that a polycarbonate bottle is going to be stronger and that is their motivation for the increased liability of it. But my test, strongly indicates to me that this is a not necessarily true. For hiking, biking, climbing, and other weight sensitive endeavors, it's worth noting that the empty 1 liter Nalgene bottle is 150g. The Trader Joe's bottle which has a maximum volume of 1.5 liters weighs 38g.

Notice I didn't say that it was a 1.5 liter bottle. Unlike the Nalgene bottle, you can flatten it when it's not in use. This makes it much less than a 1.5 liter space liability when you're trying to pack it.

Two more things to bear in mind. First having a Nalgene bottle lying around to destroy was a special occasion. Having a Trader Joe's bottle on hand for destruction, despite the fact that it was in active use, is completely mundane. But here's the most incredible part: now that these bottles have big holes in the bottom of them they are worthless, right? Well, the Nalgene one is. However, the State of California will buy back my destroyed Trader Joe's bottle for 17 cents on the dollar.

Maybe If They Hadn't Hyped It I'd Be Kinder

I have mixed feelings when I recall my first bicycle. One might expect that I would have dropped cycling not long after taking it up; that first bicycle had no seat.

This segues to today's topic, the Segway. With such an introduction I hope you see where I'm going here with a review for a product I don't even need to use to know it's dumb.

Every morning a Segway whines down the alley outside my bedroom. When I ride home through the park in the afternoon, I often see a herd of tourists on Segways as it is apparently part of some sightseeing tour. I've seen them other places too with surprising frequency. Surprising because they are just so dumb.

As a nerdy guy, I can definitely appreciate the idea and I could see how it'd be fun to build such a thing and play with it. However, as a mode of transportation, it is extremely restricted. It pretty much is in the same transportation category as the unicycle.

This analysis is pretty easy for me because I know of another type of vehicle that has *all* of the advantages of the Segway plus many more and none of the disadvantages. Of course I refer to the bicycle. I've seen enough videos of people learning to ride the Segways to know that it's not quite perfectly intuitive. With a bicycle, you can at least learn when you're young and unbreakable but I've never seen a Segway for half-sized people. Accepting that both vehicles are reliant on a decent sense of balance and taking riding skill as given, we can move on to other issues.

I would be very nervous about how the Segway handles inevitably treacherous road surfaces. Clearly the thing is going to perform very poorly off road, especially in single track, but I find the worst riding surfaces are on bad pavement. If you jar one wheel on a bike, you'll probably jar the other one, but nothing perturbs your stability.

Then there is the long list of practical issues. Can a Segway carry cargo? Where? A kid? A trailer? You get the idea. Bikes are a pain to transport on buses and worse on airplanes, but it's at least possible. You can mail a bicycle relatively easily. A Segway weighs 48kg, about what my expedition bike weighs when loaded for winter trekking. I've never seen one locked up anywhere. Is that even feasible? It seems like a huge liability to leave it locked up all day somewhere.

Of course the real advantage that the Segway has is that you can arrive at your destination free from the symptoms of physical exertion, you know, like being in shape. With bicycles you have to expend a modest amount of energy while the Segway magically transports you. I should point out here that on a bicycle I have kept up with the Segway's rated top speed of 20kph for about 10 times the thing's 38km range (yes, in one day). That may be slightly extraordinary, but if the thing really only has a top speed of 20kph, I'm confident I can beat it anywhere, anytime on a bicycle without cracking a sweat. The reason that powered propulsion is not an advantage anyway, is that if you want to use your body to provide the motive power for your Segway you can not. On the other hand, if you're a lazy cyclist and want some or all of the motive power provided by your utility company, you can get an electric bike. Or a moped. Or at $5k-$6k, just buy a motorcycle.

Maybe Segway fans have something against bike seats. Certainly the seat interface is one of the main complaints about bicycles. I don't know about you, but standing board stiff while directly facing a persistent wind doesn't sound too comfortable to me. And if it did, I could just do what I do sometimes when I see the Segway tourists in the park. I just stand up on the pedals and lock my knees in an awkward-looking position, but one that is unmistakably that of a Segway pilot.

Second Time's A Charm

Monday Van and I went camping again. This time the weather was really superb, quite a proper San Deigo evening. This time I went to the Sweetwater Reservoir. This campground is relatively close to my house which is probably it's main compelling feature. Unfortunately it's a bit too accomodating for the snowbird land yachts and although I've been to much worse campgrounds, this one had a bit of that parking lot feel. There was a nice grass section that is uncharacteristic in this region and after I had set up my tent on it, I was warned by someone about the nocturnal sprinklers. Of course! I should have thought of that. Oh well. Van and I had a nice evening outside, the way evenings in this area should be. With that I could say that the mission was accomplished.

I decided to use my North Face Tent since I was fairly certain that it would not be raining. (That's right, my expensive Expedition 25 from TNF is completely pervious to water! It went from being waterproof to being useless in less than 6 months, and although I'm still alive, TNF refuses to honor the lifetime warranty.) In the middle of the night, I started to notice that my throat was beginning to hurt. I thought that maybe the fumes of the tent stored for so long were not so healthy. The next day I woke up and my throat still hurt. This was a bit mysterious, since the previous and only other time my throat felt this way was when I had suffered arsenic poisoning by drinking water out of a new vessel designed to carry water. I actually didn't know this at the time and complaining to the manufacturer didn't help, but eventuatlly the manufacturer sent a recall notice admitting that arsenic poisoning was possible.

Once I got back to work, I was thinking about how my throat really felt exactly like that time I had arsenic poisoning and I was trying to figure out what was going on. So I naturally turn to wikipedia and I found this in the main page on arsenic:

"Although the use of CCA [chromated copper arsenate] lumber was banned in many areas after studies showed that arsenic could leach out of the wood into the surrounding soil (from playground equipment, for instance), a risk is also presented by the burning of older CCA timber. The direct or indirect ingestion of wood ash from burnt CCA lumber has caused fatalities in animals and serious poisonings in humans; the lethal human dose is approximately 20 grams of ash. Scrap CCA lumber from construction and demolition sites may be inadvertently used in commercial and domestic fires. Protocols for safe disposal of CCA lumber do not exist evenly throughout the world; there is also concern in some quarters about the widespread landfill disposal of such timber."

Ah ha. Very interesting since the wood I was burning in my campfire was from demolition debris. I am very careful not to ever burn anything with paint or glues on it and I certainly would not burn obviously pressure-treated wood with its greenish tint. The wood I was burning, however, was dimensional lumber made from some very fine old growth pine tree, probably Douglas fir. The reason to not just reuse the wood was that it was riddled with termite bores. I had wondered if perhaps the wood had been the problem. I was thinking that after many iterations of "tenting", where the entire house this wood was a part of was covered and pumped full of poison, the wood could have become toxic. If it is arsenic, the good news here is that if it doesn't kill you, it seems that the body clears it away pretty quickly. So that's probably not going to kill me.

Then on the freeway on the way home from work, I looked up from my book and, since I was near the front of the bus, I looked out the front window to see a box about the size of lawn tractor sitting in the freeway. The bus driver was just able to miss it. I had a flashback to an incident on that same freeway where I was driving and suddenly came upon a box the size of a queen-sized bed.

I've really had enough of freakish potentially-fatal events getting a replay!

I Like Locally Grown Produce, Not Films

It's that time of year where I want to receive a marketing email promoting the San Diego Latino Film Festival, but try as I might to get on their mailing lists, I can not. Fortunately, they couldn't keep this event a secret from me. Here are my thoughts about the three films I've seen so far.

El Ciudad En Celo

If you ask me about the plot of this movie in about a year, I won't have a clue. If you ask me if I'd want to see it again I'd probably say yes. It was the typical complicated love triangle, or let's just say polygon in this case, but done in a light-hearted way so as not to be as depressing as real life. It is entertainment after all.

There were about a dozen tango friends in the theater with me, and for us there was hardly enough tango. In the film, when they finally cleared away the tables for some presumably authentic dancing, I doubt I was the only one who cringed to hear American jazz, fine as it may be.

For me the movie pretty much relied on my nostalgia for being in Buenos Aires. Their Spanish is the easiest for me to understand by far. I realized that with my bicycle and a couple of months of free time I was able to scour that city pretty thoroughly. Little details that reminded me of that time pretty much made the whole movie worthwhile. If you've ever been to Buenos Aires, this film will amplify your memories of it, good or bad. Your mileage may vary.

El Clavel Negro

This movie was certainly the kind of thing that I find fascinating. When I was riding my bicycle around Bs.As. the sights I sought out were the landmarks of El Proceso, the Argentine civil liberties nightmare of the late seventies. I'm just fascinated by this kind of thing. It seems that it's so easy for people to forget how seriously wrong things can go and I appreciate movies like this for their ability to remind. This movie is about the mess in Chile in the 70s, but it seems that the point is that it could be anytime, anywhere.

This movie had some affiliation with Amnesty International and I think their message got through well. Their message seems to be, don't bury your hand in the sand and face up to the really bad stuff going on in the world. Life can be depressing enough; it's little wonder that people don't want to think about the events of the Chilean political mess and current events which bear an eerie resemblance to them.

The movie's plot was based on a true story and revolved around the charismatic yet enigmatic Swedish ambassador who did not turn his back on refugees. It seems that at great personal risk, he was responsible for saving hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives.

The film was well made and the acting was excellent. The leading actor was superb as the ambassador. The only complaint I had about the movie is that it was bizarrely in English most of the time. I tried to imagine that Swedish diplomats just resign themselves to always speaking English, but there was not a single conversation in Swedish even among Swedes in the embassy. And there were many situations where Spanish would have been spoken in real life, yet it wasn't in the movie. If you don't like reading subtitles, you understand English well, and enjoy well-made Latin American films, this one might be ideal.

Quien Mato A La Llamita Blanca

This Bolivian movie really deserves a lot of credit. In less than two hours, I learned more about Bolivian culture, history, politics, society, and geography than I ever thought I could know. However, this was no dry documentary. The plot followed the adventures and misadventures of a young indigenous couple who turn to a life of crime. This provided ample opportunity for car chases, gun fights, drunken mayhem, etc. as the main characters zoomed around the country.

I think maybe the main characters were metaphors of Bolivia. On one hand, they were relatively good as criminals and were pretty fastidious in their profession. They were criminals, but they took pride in being criminals that say they're criminals as opposed to the rest of the society who they felt were criminals who wouldn't own up to it. For example, the two policemen who pursued them seemed not too much less criminal. Fitting the Bolivian metaphor, the main characters kept making self-defeating decisions. If "shooting oneself in the foot" translated well into Spanish, I'd have expected to see that gag.

Although the movie was light-hearted and outright hilarious in places, it had an undercurrent of seriousness that was probably designed as a bit of an exposé of the country. One of the ways the film achieved this effect was with the brilliantly creative narration technique. The film actually had an on-screen narrator who would talk about the story and even more about political, social, regional context. What was hilarious about this is that his voice-over would begin to narrate as a complex and action packed scene pulled back to end, but then the camera would swing a bit and focus on an extra and then start to zoom in. This extra had been in the shot the whole time, but at this point, the viewer realizes that it's the narrator. For example, the main characters are dancing in a local festival with the entire village out partying. After the scene is over, the camera focuses on one of the dozens of brightly-dressed indigenous women dancing in their idiosyncratic bowler hats and you realize that it's the narrator and he's giving the narration while actually in the scene dancing with these women. It's a brilliant effect that will probably be imitated, but probably should not be.

If you're interested in Bolivia at all, this movie is surely one of the most entertaining ways to learn all about it.

It Actually Is Not Personal - They Just Suck

I got some feedback about my recent real estate-oriented essays that felt that I was a bit too harsh or maybe just too strident in my reproach of real estate agents. It's true, I did leave it sounding a bit unfair, but unfair it is not. I'll try to make it sound a bit more reasoned and then I'll try to drop the real estate topic for a little while. The fact that it's huge mainstream media news right now probably means I should move on to more interesting topics.

Real estate agents a.k.a. REALTORS® (note that is a trademarked word), are they feckless creeps? Yes. They are. Here is why.

1. They have a dreadful conflict of interest. The book Freakonomics does a fine job of reviewing the ways that RE agents are *not* on your team. They are on their own team and that is generally at odds with your team's objectives. An extra $10k might be a lot of money for you, but it is only $350 to them. On a $200k house (imagine a market far away from Southern California), they stand to make $7000 anyway. Why would they want to do hard work by going the extra mile for just $350? And it turns out, empirical evidence shows that they do *not* go that extra mile.

2. They take way too much money from the transaction. Bring me a RE agent who has sold a *median-priced* home in San Diego ($566,700 in 2005) and let him/her look me in the eye and tell me they *earned* every penny of $19,834 (!). And the buying agent, who also makes as much, would do well to not get too close in case I vomit on them in the middle of their lie. Imagine that your sewer backs up one day and you call a plumber and he tells you that a long section of pipe in your front yard has collapsed and 30 feet of sewer pipe needs to be replaced. Do you think, even if you took the highest bidder, that this would cost anywhere near $19k? Not a chance. Between that and selling a house, which job would you rather not do? So look at what you're getting and think about that. One more thought experiment- what would help to sell your house more? An in ground pool or a real estate agent; the former is much cheaper!

3. They are largely useless in performing useful services. This mostly pertains to the selling agents. If I stood to make $19k from just selling someone's house, damn, I'd make a crusade out of it. But RE agents can't even put together a coherent web page of a property. I have done this myself, yet the RE agent who is probably going to be the most expensive service worker you'll ever hire, can't accomplish this. The MLS as a web page does not count. For $20k, I want them to buy a domain or three and host a flawless website with dozens of professional quality photos and video walk-throughs narrated by Robin frickin Leach. I want detailed floor plans and text about all flattering aspects of the house. Just look at a typical MLS listing and it's pretty much disgraceful for its dearth of all but the most rudimentary information. For $20k, I want a Pulitzer prize winning work of prose fiction designed to make a potential buyer visualize the perfect life which can only be realized by living in this house.

4. They perform many useless services. Driving me around in a Cadillac to look at houses? I'm sorry, but I wouldn't take a $10 cab to go buy groceries; why would I take a few $5k cab rides to go buy a house? It doesn't make sense. The big post in the yard, is that strictly necessary or is that actually the homeowner fronting billboard space for the RE agent's business? Looking up things on the MLS used to be a critical "service" provided by agents, but in reality this practice was actually the withholding of information.

While I sincerely want this profession to die in the blaze of ingloriousness it so richly deserves, I'm not advocating death camps for these people. I'll settle for a radical reform of the profession. Buying a house is a complicated matter and having an advocate is not categorically a terrible idea. But they must actually be on your team. Perhaps the banks could pay them just like my credit union pays for a service that will help you find and buy a used car. There is no commission and these people really are only motivated to give you a good experience so that you're encouraged to not avoid it in the future - more business for the banks financing loans. I would suggest a flat fee or even better, an hourly rate with itemized billing. If you put a REALTOR® crucifix in my yard and want to charge me 100 times more than a team of gardeners who would make the yard into an immaculate garden that would impress a Buddhist monk, then that should probably be printed right up front on the invoice where people can laugh openly at it.

RE agents should be integrating information, not still guarding Balkanized databases. The fact that some bigger real estate outfits are doing a good job in this area (Zillow, Redfin) gives me hope that this is changing. All house listings should be free and available to everyone instantly. That's the modern reality unless some very powerful trade lobby (like the N.A.R.) is damming up that information flow.

Finally, RE agents need to professionally sell the place. I'm astonished by the poor quality of photos that plague the MLS. It seems that only the builders hire professionals to take their photos. And why be skimpy with photos. Photograph *everything*. Why waste my time making me go look at a house that could have been culled from contention by more easily obtainable information? And I mentioned dedicated websites showing a degree of professionalism. If it were my house for sale, I would not want my marketing message drowned amongst the dross of the REALTOR'S® stupid web site with it's ads for various agents, loan products, the parent company, etc.

If real estate salesmen started acting in their clients' best interests and started actually doing a professional quality job at marketing and/or providing advice or analysis, I'd be much less likely to spend my time thinking of ways to eradicate this profession.

Ok, let us not mention this topic again for a long while.

Real Estate - The Storm Hits (Part 1 of 3)

PART 1 of 3

"The money feels good
And your life you like it well
But surely your time will come
As in heaven, as in hell."

I just sat down to write this and since I just saw my fellow duplex dwellers leave our small building, I put on the Clash nice and loud. It sure seems like the perfect music for the topic, which today is real estate finance.

In all of the other parallel universes, this topic is as dull as it sounds, but unfortunately in our very bizarre universe, this topic is so important that some normal people are actually starting to notice it. According to the mainstream media (aka MSM in blog speak), here in California, 57,158 families noticed because their dwelling was the object of a foreclosure filing. Folks, that's almost half a percent of all residences in the state in one month!

I really hate being interested in the real estate market, I really do. Although there should be nothing wrong with it, real estate is where con men, realtors, and other punks get their rich quick.

In the last week, I've been reading a geometrically increasing amount about the housing situation. It's weird to see the MSM suddenly realize what for years should have been patently obvious to anyone smart enough to fog a mirror: the housing market is in serious deep shit. The shit is so serious and so deep that if the damage was merely contained to recent home buyers becoming indentured servants to Saudi princes, we'd be getting off lucky.

When I first arrived in SD in around 2000, I wasn't really concerned about real estate. I couldn't have afforded it and I figured that when the time came and I could, that I would be at least as well off as normal people and it wouldn't be a problem. Turns out that was wrong in two ways. When I finally had a credible amount of capital, I learned that, one, I still couldn't properly afford real estate and, two, which is much more bizarre, that it didn't matter. Nobody could afford California real estate so banks were basically buying houses for people to take care of. This investment was justified with the unassailable logic that house prices never go down. I suppose mortgage lenders are not very bright, are mostly criminals, or both. This is one of those times where I was happy to have the ability to empirically size up the situation and determine that just because everybody else seemed to be doing something stupid, was actually evidence that everybody else was indeed stupid.

I was sitting on plenty of cash by the end of 2005. I'd roughly noticed some house prices without too much research. Things seemed crazy, but I wasn't really paying attention. By the beginning of 2006, I felt that things must have cooled down a bit and I'd go out and see what was what. I went and looked at a lot of houses. For such an expensive market, San Diego has some spectacularly awful real estate. Always the feeling I got was, first, I could only barely stand to live here, and second, what kinds of millionaires wanted to live here? I was not oblivious to the median income here which led me to believe that the only people who could afford the houses I was looking at were bank presidents, movie stars, real estate con men, etc.

Since I'm a "do the math" kind of guy, I calculated exactly how the typical home would affect my day to day finances. It looked like it was vaguely possible, perhaps, for me to pull it off, but there was one problem. What if real estate didn't "always go up"? Of course the real estate agents must have a special laugh they practice designed to convey, "Good one! Ha ha! That's hilarious because real estate prices never go down. Ha ha!"

This actual quote is taken from "www.realtor.org".

"Know What to Say
Get scripts on how to respond to prospective clients' most common objections, from those pesky questions over a sour housing market to FSBOs who think they don't need you."

You know what other profession uses and practices scripts to allay their victims' misgivings? Con artists. I guess that probably pushes nervous thoughts from the minds of most buyers, but I am highly suspicious of these clowns and when they insinuate something like this, I start imagining prices changing levels as they've done in the last 10 years, but going the other way. I started realizing that even small fluctuations of a few percent could wind up being financially ruinous at these overblown prices. These real estate agents are sending families to their dooms.

Real Estate - Meltdown (Part 2 of 3)

PART 2 of 3

I became rather fascinated by just how screwed one could become by buying a house in 2007 and I started to really research things. The more I learned the more I realized that California was in for a huge nasty shock when reality caught up with real estate. I realized that these houses that were worth a million dollars were not actually worth a million dollars unless there was an endless supply of suckers. While this is not far from true, the supply is finite and I realized that this was like any other classic Ponzi scheme.

I have been explaining it to people in terms of a Ponzi scheme for a year. Now, it's funny to hear that mentioned in the news by "credible" people. The basic problem with any pyramid scheme is that once you start dealing in the *idea of getting rich* as the commodity, it is easy to lose sight of what's really going on. Through this mess I have learned that I can indeed get rich in real estate. The only thing that's required is patience and an endless supply of people who will stupidly ignore the fundamentals.

(To instantly understand what "the fundamentals" entail, see these simple graphs .)

The rules for guaranteed success are shockingly simple, and I would have thought difficult to ignore, but ignored they were. Basically a house has a utility. This is the aspect of a house that is like a hotel room, you need a place to stay? Here it is. If you go to a normal motel and they want $1000/night, you aren't going to say, it's ok, I'll book two nights and find a sucker to sell the second night to for $2100. This is how the California housing market worked for the last 8 years.

Since so many people got caught up in this game, there are a lot of people who aren't going to get the cake now that the music has stopped. All indications that I've seen indicate that the unimaginable number of houses empty and owned by banks is going to continue to increase. A lot. What compounds the problem is that houses, thanks to the bubble, represent a lot of money. For this huge segment of the economy to suddenly go very flat is very unsettling. Basically people were taking out home equity loans or taking profits from earlier in the Ponzi scheme and fueling the economy very nicely. That will be coming to an abrupt halt, oh, about right now.

This is, in my opinion, so huge and so many people are so screwed that if the USA avoids another "great" depression, I'll be amazed. People are losing their homes and they are saddled with incredible debt levels. The credit party is finally over as lenders are so over extended, they're not really in a position to postpone financial Armageddon with yet more bad loans.

What I worry about is even more insidious. The banks loaned huge, huge money because that's what they thought made them money. And it did. Huge money. For a while. But now they find themselves hugely over-invested in deadbeats and real estate that isn't worth anything. You can try to imagine some accounting trick that can bail them out, but fundamentally, when they loaned $2 million so someone could buy a house that should have been $1 million, someone got that real money. The banks (whom we presume to be left holding the bag as the borrowers bailed out) just lost a million real dollars. And this scene is repeating itself with disturbing regularity.

My concern is that when I go to withdraw my hard fought savings, the bank will just say, whoops! Sorry! Because if everyone who has an oppressive mortgage is bailing on the banks, do you think it's far-fetched to imagine the banks bailing on their investors, the depositors? Of course that depends on if the bankers are more scrupulous than the borrowers. Oh shit!

One idea to help with this problem is to invest liquid capital in foreign markets and currencies. Here's the problem with that scenario: the rest of the world had the same kind of ridiculous housing Ponzi scheme too. If you think the Pound and Euro are going to do great after the shit hits the fan in Britain where real estate stupidity was similar to that in the USA, I think you'll be in for a shock.

"London calling to the underworld
Come out of the cupboard, all you boys and girls
London calling, now dont look at us
All that phoney beatlemania has bitten the dust."

Real Estate - I Have A Dream: Cookie Kwan, Homeless (Part 3 of 3)

PART 3 of 3
I don't really know exactly what to do. I guess I'll diversify among a couple of banks and maybe invest in something else too. If you can pull your cash from under the mattress at the right time, I think this market collapse could be quite advantageous. But things should never have reached this point. It's ridiculous that the situation has to get to the point of a complete economic meltdown before a correction occurs. One could blame Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve or other aspects of the government. While this may have merit and I'm sure many will, I don't blame them. One could blame the mortgage companies, and to the extent that they loaned what they couldn't cover, they deserve tons of blame. But the heart of the problem, in my opinion, is the most nefarious collection of miscreant scoundrels that currently stake out a place on the economic landscape - real estate agents.
One of the things I like about working in computer science is that I imagine that I'm doing my part to obliterate this profession. I want to make the entire idea of real estate agents obsolete. I want the entire profession crushed and it's foul practitioners relegated to the status currently enjoyed by "interviewers" during the Spanish Inquisition.
Let's consider how these feckless creeps affect life. Tradition dictates that real estate agents receive a commission on the sale of property, usually 7%. This means that if you want to buy an expensive, difficult-to-afford thing like a house, you'll have to work 7% harder to get it. Thanks to real estate agents. This means that you'll be making mortgage payments for an extra 25 months on a 30 year loan just for your real estate agents' invaluable help. How invaluable is their help? In my experience, their help is entirely without value.
When buying or selling a house, these jackasses obstruct my access to centralized databases. This cartel with the MLS has fuelled the entire profession for 30 years. Once the emerging competitors (zillow, craigslist, etc.) achieve a critical mass, it is my fond hope that all real estate agents will be homeless, sheltered from the cruel elements only by poetic irony. Other than acting as very expensive gatekeepers to the MLS, real estate agents seem to do very little. They can't market a house using the web worth a damn. I've been involved in several projects where *in my spare time* and *for free* I use the web to market a property far better than a real estate wanker will.
You'd think that with such a brazen plan to rip you off that they'd at least be at your house everyday to help you clean and mow the lawn, etc, but, really, has anyone ever heard of that?
Think about the numbers for a second. If the median home price in the US is around $200k, then the shifty agents are going to pocket a whopping $14,000! At $20 per hour (I'm being generous) one would expect to have a dedicated advocate working an exclusive full-time job for 4 months. But is that the reality? No. I'd say the typical investment is far less than a brain surgeon who removes a tumor from your head. Who do you think makes more?
One thing that I found tedious about the book "Freakonomics" was that it presented the factual conclusion that real estate agents do not generally act in their customers' best interests as if it were some kind of scientific breakthrough when, in fact, it should be readily apparent to most primates. The book goes into detail regarding the obvious regarding that, but consider this different way real estate agents screw you. Imagine you're looking for a house and a good deal doesn't exist, but a *great* deal does. Say you want to spend $250k and the real estate conman finds the perfect house that's easily worth $250k, and it fulfills all your needs, but imagine the price is $25k. This kind of thing can happen. Are you going to be delighted to pay a dime on the dollar? No, because you will never find out about a truly great deal. The fact is, if a house is really, *really* a great deal, the real estate agent will have the first shot at it and buy it themselves.
My proposal is this - get it into your head that real estate agents taking a commission is bad. Very bad. Bad for me, bad for you, bad for everyone. If they want to mow my lawn for $20 to help me sell my house, fine, but don't ask for $20k and leave the grass uncut. Whenever possible, support alternatives to real estate leeches. Use Zillow, and on-line "For Sale By Owner" services (you know your agent isn't going to check there). If enough people finally get it that these devious charlatans are bad news, they will simply cease to exist. It's really that simple. And people will be free to buy real estate with out pressure from some cretin with a severe conflict of interest. Maybe that can help curb future cycles of idiotic price increases and false hopes of a quick path to riches.
"Baby, baby drove up in a Cadillac
I said, Jesus Christ! Where'd you get that Cadillac?
She said, balls to you, daddy.
She ain't never coming back!"

"Only we would be here on a day like this."

I have just returned from a little camping trip. I've been disappointed with my lack of outdoor time, especially camping, ever since I've lived in San Diego. With a climate that's as near to perfect as real places ever have, you'd think that everybody would be outside pretty much all the time. Sadly that's not the case. I, however, have made up my mind to not be one of those indoorsy people and I have resolved to put my car to use in getting me out more often.

I realized that with a car, camping should be so easy for me that I can even throw other complexities into the operation. One of those is the idea to do it on a weeknight. And the other, of course, is to take Van. With that being the conceptual program, Van and I set out for a nice evening at Dixon Lake in Escondido (33.158382, -117.045524). I'm sure in the not too distant past, this place was way out in the middle of nowhere, but these days, it's just up the hill from suburbia. But that fits fine with the idea of a very low impact camping trip that can be completely accomplished between workdays and planned on the spur of the moment.

This place is in the small set of mountains northeast of Escondido and it overlooks their drinking water reservoir. It's really a nice location with some campsites having lake views and some having city views. We had a nice lake view and several hours of daylight to enjoy it since I allowed a little more time for this first outing.

It was cloudy when we got there however, and I could tell that the chance of rain was "inevitable". Still, having a car with a dry inside and carrying anything you can imagine, how can you go wrong? I set up the tent, laid out the sleeping gear, and rigged a tarp over the picnic table. They want you to not make wood fires because of the wildfire hazard but since the chance of wildfires this week is nil I quickly had a hybrid charcoal/wood fire going. All this took about half an hour and there it was, the scene I was after. Instead of spending a normal night inside, I was sitting on a mountainside looking over a tranquil lake about to cook my dinner over a glowing fire.

The reason the lake was tranquil is because we were the only people in the whole park. Besides simply being a Thursday night in February, the reason we were alone is because the rain did start to come down. But even with hasty preparation and a lot of carelessness by my standards, we were able to sit completely dry under the tarp and eat a meal that was better than what I'd have made at home. By the time we'd finished and cleaned up after dinner, it was definitely dark and the rain was misty and erratic.

With waterproof shoes on our feet and umbrellas in our hands, we went for a little walk to check out the place. It's definitely a very nice spot. Finally we retired to the tent and Van and I played a few games of chess using my little computer (which fits neatly in a one gallon zip lock bag) as a board. Then it was time to listen to the rain and get some sleep.

We both slept pretty well despite the fact that the rain seemed to increase in intensity all night. In the morning, it was still coming down. I decided to not mess around with breakfast there in the rain and quickly packed up. Again, that's much easier than I'm used to because you can just toss everything in the car. About this point Van said something about other campers and I pointed out that I thought we were alone in the place. That's when he said, "Yes. Only we would be here on a day like this." I said, "Yup. You ain't seen nothing yet."

Then came the hard part of this whole scheme, traffic. Because that night we got about as much rain as normally falls in all of February, the roads were a mess with the radio reporting 60 accidents. Rain in San Diego is like an ice storm in normal places. We spent about 75 minutes to go the 35 miles and this included about 10 miles of carpool lane, which allowed Van to profoundly contribute to the mission just by being in the car.

The rain was kind of a drag, but I had just purchased new tarps, umbrellas, a cute little rain poncho for Van, and a very cool hard plastic pannier that looks as bulletproof as waterproof. So my mind never rests when it comes to weather pessimism. With normal San Diego weather and some more practice, I believe this kind of quick trip will become easier than staying at home.

Future of Sports Coverage

I was watching the Amgen Tour Of California today and I approve.

What's really cool is that today was the toughest climbing stage of the race. On the profile maps there was a horrendous descent of about 30km. When I saw that, I thought, wow, I'd love to climb that. Then I noticed it was Silicon Valley's Mount Hamilton which I already have climbed! Yea me!

Based on my previous experience with this mountain, I was quite keen to see the stage and so I checked out the Adobe "TourTracker" found on the main page. This TourTracker is a Flash monstrosity, but it is undeniably cool. It shows lots of things at once providing a kind of idealized cycling coverage. They show a scalable satellite map of the route with real time updates as to where the main field and any breaks are. They also show a stage profile so you can see where the important components of the race are with respect to the climbs. They also show a box listing who's in any breakaway. There is also the running text commentary feed and even a little chat application to make your own text commentary. As if that wasn't a huge leap forward in bike race watching technology, there is live streaming video!

There was some whinging about the choppiness of the video feed, but for me it was good. I should say that the frame rate was good. The picture quality was excellent allowing me to recognize riders that would have just been a blur on television. Another interesting trick is that they let you choose which camera you wanted to watch. Basically you could watch the camera that the producers thought told the story best or "the other one". They even had a picture in picture option that did actually work.

Another thing I liked is that they have nice little video recaps of the stages which allowed me to get caught up. Reminded me of Il Giro in Tre Minuti (The Tour [of Italy]) in 3 minutes) which was very worth watching even in Italian.

And that brings me to the point that could be improved. The commentators are awful. I won't bore you with why, but it did give me an interesting idea. Why not let me choose the commentators? There was a good tense breakaway of two guys, one of whom was German. I'd loved to have changed the channel to hear the German coverage.

This idea is actually bigger than that though. It doesn't apply to just cycling and it doesn't just apply to professional sports announcers. I have just realized that modern technology is laying the foundation for *anyone* to be a commentator. OLN/Versus used to show those ads with ex Tour racer, Bob Roll, practicing calling races in his underwear so that he might one day be able to call races (which he obviously has done). I claim that at this point, anyone who has ever dreamed of being a sports announcer can simply do it.

Here's how. Just get an internet radio feed. I'm not sure how this would work as a practical matter, but in theory, all the technical pieces are in place. It would not be hard to get the MythTV guys to figure out a way to delay sports broadcasts by a couple of seconds and then sync them with coded signals from internet radio.

I personally don't really want to call races, but I would appreciate an explosion in merit-based sports announcing. Imagine flipping the channels until you found voiceover coverage that suited your personality (or native language). The present state of the art of bike racing coverage is very good. The future looks incredible. I'm not just saying that because I have low standards based on ABC's erstwhile coverage of Le Tour, such that it was. The spectators ABC was courting apparently tuned in only to see crashes. That's nice, let those morons have their own coverage.

Enlightened Tea

I'm hardly delighted to be the owner of an automobile, but now that I have it, I do want to put it to good use. Usually, I find myself confidently driving around the remote regions of San Diego County knowing exactly where I'm going because I have previously explored the route by bicycle. Today I decided to do things the other way around. Today I burned about half a tank of gas just driving around looking at things in the back country. Specifically I wanted to check out potential camping locations that were at the end of dead ends that, by bike, would have been unpalatable. I took a drive up to Palomar which was still covered in quite a bit of snow. There was no snow on the roads and this is a point worth remembering and part of the mission was to find this out. I had planned to go hiking up there, but, amazingly, I couldn't find a place to park. The entire mountain top was covered in Mexican (really, greater than 90%) families who'd gone up there to see some snow. It was kind of cute. It was quite the busy attraction. That's another point to bear in mind in the future.

On the way down from Palomar, I got the odd notion to scout the Rincon casino. I wondered if it might be a good staging area for a Palomar mission. It's certainly close enough to the base of the mountain. First off, the casino seems to have plenty of parking and a nice touch here is that it can be in a parking garage which can afford some shade (though obviously you don't want to drive in there with bikes on the roof). Inside the casinos, I checked out the bus situation. The casino runs a fleet of buses designed to round up those people who've had to sell their cars to pay gambling debts. I found out that one can travel from San Diego to Los Angeles (about a dozen specific destinations) pretty much for free. All you have to do is spend 5 hours at the casino. Basically you take the morning bus from San Diego and then take the afternoon bus to LA. Next day, reverse the process. Losing money at the casino is not actually a requirement. If I could get a road bike on that bus, it'd be a great way to get out to Palomar, but I don't think that'd go over well. Walking through the casino, I noticed that they have easily accessible bathrooms and even free coffee and soda. Both points might make it worth a quick stop if biking by. The amazing thing about this place is that while I'm hardly the best looking guy in the world, at this casino I am. It was really weird. There were some reasonably attractive employees, but as far as guests, wow. I guess the difference is that I was thinking thoughts about how the place could help me assault Palomar Mountain in some kind of athletically flamboyant way, not where could I get more rent money after I'd gambled it away. I was also shocked, with actual dropped jaw staring, to see some miscreants inside a public building in California *smoking a cigarette*! Turns out it's legal! Astonishing!

Back at base camp, I wanted to play with a new toy I bought, a Vargo Titanium Triad Stove. This is basically like the end of a soda can with some holes poked in it. In fact, less well-employed people get by fine with exactly that. But mine is *titanium*. Yes, titanium! Just by being able to incant the word "titanium" while referring to my gear, my load is lightened. How much you ask? Well this stove is a mere 25g! Ha! Only 25g! That's amazing! That means my ability to boil water in the wilderness weighs almost nothing! Uh. Except for the 41g of alcohol it burned. Ok, ok, 425g of H2O, pot=196g, lid=74g, cup=65g, pot handle=53g, lighter=17g, and the tea bag was 3g. And I used 8g of aluminum foil to make a wind screen, which is not bad since this doubles as a "tin foil hat". But still, thank goodness for *titanium*!

As far as operation of the thing goes, it's a bit like I spent years as a lion tamer and now I am working with housecats. My MSR Whisperlite stove is a monster compared to this thing. Unlike the MSR, but just like housecats, pretty much any problem with this stove can be cured by smacking it with a towel. The alcohol stove is quiet and mild, and now that I've used it, I'd say it's chances of bursting into a huge fireball are pretty slim. Can't say that about the MSR which bursts into a big fireball every time you start it. To get the alcohol stove to light, I finally just resorted to dumping fuel (thanks to MvW for that by the way) all over it including a nice puddle on the concrete and just lighting the whole thing. It would be a very satisfying experience for a pyromaniac. Eventually it warms up and operates in a stove-like fashion. For comparison, the Whisperlite operates in a cutting torch-like fashion. It managed to boil water as promised and it seems to work as I'd expect. It's also much cleaner than the MSR with no detectable soot. I was also able to pick up the stove within 10 seconds of it going out and it's completely cool in about a minute. Definitely a nice addition to the line up. And it's *titanium*! It's so awesome because it's titanium! Real titanium! You can hand it to your friends and say, "See how light this is?! That's because it's titanium!"