deeper

facebook interface woes

2011-01-22T11:43:00.000-08:00

so, i want to keep a friend but not see their posts (i like the person, but i can't handle the deluge of posts that cause me to miss other important posts). logically, this would be to click on the user, then edit some person specific settings, but i'm not finding any ability to do this.

first one with correct solution gets $1.

how to add/delete members from group aliases in outlook 2010

2011-01-21T18:09:00.000-08:00

Click address book on ribbon, ADD the name from the address book to the To line, right click, select properties. The one that auto populates pulls up a different properties page than if you actually pull the address from the address book.

This is so awesome. Same email address, same menu selection, different property pages. Very cool!

[sarcasm]

Ebook?

2010-09-28T20:50:00.000-07:00

I just got a book ordered on amazon, algorithmic trading and DMA. It showed up today, Sept. 28th, 2010.

It was printed Sept. 20th, 2010.

Ebook?

Rack Attack A+ Customer Service

2010-08-11T18:49:00.000-07:00

So, I had a bad thing happen with my new Bianchi Infinito Carbon Fiber road bike. We theorize it was somehow related to the fork mounted Yakima roof rack I was using. I was bummed because the rack is only 5 months old and the bike about 2 months. However, upon describing the situation (carbon fiber fork cracking) to the store I bought it, they basically said 'bring them in and we'll swap them out, no charge. We want you to be happy.' and with that they swapped out my bike racks for a new set that don't come in contact with the fork.

I thought this was amazing customer service and deserved a few kind words. Highly recommended.

I'll keep you posted on how Bianchi does at replacing my fork, along with the folks at Lakeside Bicycles in Lake Oswego.

Visual Adrenaline Interview on Game Programming Gems 8

2010-08-04T10:53:00.000-07:00

Was recently interviewed at for Intel's Visual Adrenaline regarding Game Programming Gems 8.

The video is 20 minutes long.

D3D .dlls, and system32 vs. syswow64

2010-01-24T14:04:00.001-08:00

This is nerdy, but i bet i'm not the only one who thinks this is going to be useful to dig up later. if you have questions, post them and i'll try to answer. time constraints limit me from cleaning this up right now. (TODO: cleanup post).

windows\system32 vs. windows\syswow64

WOW = windows on windows. on 64 bit systems, 32 bit .dlls go into the syswow64 directory. its for emulation of 32bit functionality on a 64 bit system and includes some other windows glue to make this happen, like on a 64 bit x86 microprocessor it switches it between 32 bit and 64 bit mode when needed.

for d3d11ref.dll: if you are running an x86 (32 bit) binary, it will look in the syswow46 directory for the 32 bit .dll. if its not there, IT DOES NOT LOAD
THE ONE IN system32. this was verified by actually moving the working 32 bit d3d11ref.dll into system32, watching the .dlls that were loaded into the application in visual studio, it did not grab the .dll when it was moved. a 32 bit system will load from syswow64. if its not there it does not look for a 32 bit version in system32.

when running a 64 bit build of the same binary, the d3d11ref.dll was loaded in from sys32, and it would not load the one in from syswow64 even if it didn't have one in sys32.

syswow64 is part of the search path for 32bit systems, system32 is part of the search path for dlls for 64 bit systems. you will not pull in a same named file, even the right d3d11ref.dll binary from the wrong directory. this can be verified by watching the load modules window in visual studio as your application starts up.

the naming convention (system32 vs. syswow64) is done for compatibility reasons, and my specifics are related to figuring out search paths for d3d .dlls. did not verify this was a general rule of thumb for all .dlls.

No blogs in 2009?

2010-01-17T10:38:00.001-08:00

I've been quiet for all of 2009. Why? Well, mostly I used the time that may have normally been used for blogging on serving as Editor for Game Programming Gems 8. After a full year, we're in the final stages now of getting proofs back from layout and on track for a publication in Q2 of 2010. This was incredibly rewarding and time consuming, so I had to make decisions and the blogging was something that just had to get dropped. Indeed, lots happened in the past year, and 2010 looks to be just as interesting.

Cheers,

--adam

Church Brewery in Pittsburgh!

2009-05-25T16:28:00.000-07:00

I know Matt (aka Father Fife) will love this one: in an old catholic church in Pittsburgh they've converted it into a brewery rather than tear it down. Its a really beautiful building with great food and imbibes.

these were taken on a recent short stay in Pittsburgh area around Mother's day. We spent a solid day sightseeing all around Pittsburgh that includeed a tour of several neighborhoods, a view from Mt. Washington, and a tour of the Frick Estate.

The Ultimate Rock Band Setup

2009-05-25T16:07:00.001-07:00

This is the ultimate Rock Band setup a friend of mine has built. It has a real drumset wired into the rock bank drumkit wiring so you can practice and improve your playing of real drums. Each note maps to the correct drum.

There is a projector hooked up for the guitar, bass, and microphone band members and the drummer has his own HD LCD so he does not have to look away from the drumset.

Game Programming Gems 8 Call for Abstracts!

2009-05-22T08:26:00.000-07:00

Abstracts for Game Programming Gems 8 are now being accepted at http://gameprogramminggems.com/subform.html. The eighth of this popular series, as with previous versions, aims to gather and share the latest gems from the game development community. Game Programming Gems 8 will include sections on General Programming, Mathematics, Graphics, Artificial Intelligence, Physics, Networking/Multiplayer, Audio, and a special segment on General Purpose Programming on GPUs for Game Developers. Join us in advancing the state of art in Game Development!

Experienced game programmers are encouraged to submit proposals by July 10, 2009. Final articles will be due on October 1, 2009. Series editor Mark DeLoura, book editor Adam Lake, and section editors will help select and prepare articles for publication. The book will be available in time for the Game Developers' Conference in 2010, with authors receiving a royalty based on the book's sales. Submission guidelines are available on the Web site: http://gameprogramminggems.com/guidelines.html. Please feel free to forward this announcement to other potential authors.

Portland Parking Ticket online payment

2009-04-13T08:50:00.001-07:00

its completely impossible to find online, and if you call during non business hours you can't get a website for payment (just a vx mail that says 'we're closed now, call back during...'). i am completely baffled, nowhere on the citation nor the envelope is any of this listed.

To pay by credit card, go to this website (but only from 6am to 9pm, the hours the internet is open i guess): www.ojd.state.or.us/mul

Game Programming Gems 8

2009-04-05T10:58:00.000-07:00

Looks like I'm going to be doing the Game Programming Gems 8 editor, and i'm looking for a few good people for section editors.

Please send me an email if interested.

--adam

laptop thief in NW PDX coffee shops...

2009-03-29T11:45:00.000-07:00

if you've got a habit of leaving your stuff at your table while your using the restroom, think again!

from craigslist:

i want my 13.3 inch macbook back, you jerk! - $1 (stolen in nw downtown portland)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reply to: sale-ajgwc-1096703391@craigslist.org [Errors when replying to ads?]
Date: 2009-03-28, 3:17PM PDT

hello out there, I am appealing to the craigslist crowd to help identify a man worthy of a karma kick straight to the ass. This week I was a college student on spring break, sitting at a cafe working on my new macbook aluminum that i slaved away to purchase to use during college. As a trusting girl that I am, I went and used the bathroom for under a minute while I left all of my belongings in the busy environment of the World Cup cafe in the seemingly friendly neighborhood of 16th and glisan. To my surprise (surprise is the nicest word for it) when I returned my computer was gone. I later found out that two other computers were taken by the same guy in the nw area within four blocks of where I was. Although to be 'out for blood' is an over statement, the other victims of this computer theif, myself included are left without their new macbook pc's and a little peice of each of our hearts. My small business is absolutely obliterated, since it all lived on this 3 month old golden egg investment of a computer. The police officer I spoke with told me that a guy matching all of our descriptions also broke into a hostel across the street from world cup and stole three young traveler's wallets, another stomach churning loss for those people I am sure.

What I want is for anyone buying a macbook aluminum pro or the regular 13.3 inch-er to email me or run the serial code in the portland police dept. database. You will not be held accountable for checking. What does this snatch and run computer theif look like? Around 28 years old, thin, 5 foot 10 inches, (kenian or ethiopean) african male who will wear dark clothing, maybe an ipod or thick framed rx glasses. Believed to be homeless. He walks into cafes in the nw (nw only as far as we all know), doesn't order anything and hangs out people watching. when someone steps out to use their cell phones or take a leak, he casually walks up and takes the open computer in front of everyone. after leaving the building with your investment he will run like hell. We believe he is selling to someone else who may be his dealer or another party that redistributes. If anyone has any information or has also been wronged by the same guy, please send me an email. thanks guys.

Improving the Multiplayer matchmaking experience

2009-03-22T17:38:00.001-07:00

We’ve been having a blast playing gears of War 2 multiplayer. A few of us got cocky and decided we’d try our hands at playing the kids online. I can’t help but imagine a more helpful environment for multiplayer:

A multi-dimensional visualization tool, color coded with some bar graphs of the number of players online playing different styles of gameplay. Maybe putting such a tool on xbox live is kinda a big complicated deal. Fine, just put it on a per game website or some such, let me view it with my PC and/or cell phone while I’m playing and/or before I logon to the servers. How many people are playing? Why am I having such a hard time finding matches? Is it because nobody is playing? If I wait will a game end then I will be able to join? Am I in a ‘waiting to play’ game queue that is just waiting for available server time or something? Ugh…. push the data to this environment so I know when I log on what will give me the most likelihood of getting a match in the quickest amount of time. Better yet, just make the queries possible and allow others to build websites around the interface, may the best man win…but then you don’t get control….

Gears of War 2 Update coming March 24th!

2009-03-22T17:32:00.001-07:00

Hey folks, I was going to rant about the online multiplayer issues larry, jake, charles and myself were experiencing. Poking around the web i found out that epic has an update coming....in two days!

http://gearsofwar.xbox.com/Templates/CMBlog.aspx?id=1408&blogid=47896

complete patch notes here: http://gearsofwar.xbox.com/Templates/Secondary.aspx?id=1406

hope this fixes some of the issues we've been dealing with for awhile.

Gears of War 2 Title Update 3—March 24, 2009

A culmination of the tireless efforts of the Gears team and mounds of player feedback, this latest Gears 2 update is our biggest yet. Title Update 3 contains a bounty of additions ranging from new features and achievements to exploit fixes and matchmaking tweaks, with highlights below:

New experience-based ranking system: The new system gives you 100 levels of player experience, gained through scoring in Public matches. The game still uses TrueSkill to set up the most competitive matches possible, but skill ranks are now hidden. Players who quit matches early see their experience docked as a penalty.
Public Match autobalancing: Bots now automatically join a Public Match to fill any slots left vacant by players who quit early or disconnect.
Improvements: You get region preference for matchmaking, improved standby detection, playlist optimization, plus nine new achievements—six of which require the Snowblind Map Pack—worth a total of 250 points.
Exploit fixes: Title Update 3 eliminates the ability to mantle greater distances by swapping weapons during cover slide and to melee attack through walls while holding an enemy weapon, plus adding many more fixes.
General fixes: These include more reliable chainsaw interruption detection, improved headshot detection for certain character model heads, improved flag AI in Submission games, plus other fixes.
Balancing: Title Update 3 makes changes to Subway weapon spawns for greater balance, reductions to smoke-grenade stun duration, an increase to the forward angle that triggers chainsaw duels, and several other balance revisions.

Real-time parametric wave simulation published on Gamasutra!

2009-01-29T14:27:00.001-08:00

This one has been in our back pocket for quite some time now...finally got it out the door. Read here.

Pandora says....

2009-01-08T18:32:00.001-08:00

"Based on what you told us so far, were choosing this track because it features a subtle use of vocal harmony, repetitive melodic phrasing, intricate melodic phrasing, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation and mixed minor and major key tonality"

Little Big Planet and a few other notes....

2009-01-02T11:00:00.000-08:00

My XBOX profile says I haven't been gaming, but that's not true. Stacey and I have been playing her copy of Little Big Planet on the PS3 for the past few days/weeks. I really think Media Molecule did a fantastic job with this title. Beautiful graphics, fun gameplay, well balanaced puzzles, interesting experiences...its been a joy. I just keep thinking to myself after playing 'wow, i really had fun tonight'. I like how easy it is to customize your character, which seems silly but is actually done in a really fun way. I also like the way they motivate you to get involved with others in special sections of levels that require x2, x3, or x4 people to accomplish them. Not too manyubut a few. Haven't played much with the user generated content but would expect it to be pretty fun.

One thing that can be frustrating is the 'do entire level over' problem that annoys me when any game developer does this. They have checkpoints with limited number of tries. Unfortunately, these are not proportional to the number of players, you get so many restarts, usually 4, no matter how many people are playing. In some sections, you get 8. I understand they need to do this for the challenge, but once again i'd like a 'employed, unemployed' option that allows those of us with full time jobs to complete the game in a reasonable amount of time and not repeat the same game mechanic 20 times for 5 minutes just to clear that one little hurdle at the 95% of the level completion. Can't game developers spend the 20 minutes it takes to create an adaptive solution to this? (more 'restarts' each time, lower boss hit points after 20 tries, whatever).

Grand Theft Auto IV was so bad at this (great game, just this one thing i consider a bug in the design) was that I spawn in the city 20 miles (author exaggeration) from all of the next 3 possible quests. Dying means I spend my valuable meatspace lifespan repeating 5-7 minutes worth of tedium before getting to the quest. They should have called it Groundhog Day, the game :) It caused me to stop about 40-ish% of the way through because i couldn't stand the monotony. Monotony is the enemy.

In summary, we are loving Little Big Planet, its great fun.

Oatmeal in a Rice Cooker: The Oatmeal Wars: Part IV

2008-12-29T14:59:00.001-08:00

A few people including myself commented that the previously written blog that cooking the Bob’s Red Mill Steel Cut Oats (determined to be the best after a number of taste tests) resulted in an overflowing rice cooker. The obvious solution is to reduce the amount of rice and oats proportionally. Since I wanted at least two servings I tried 75% and that still resulted in overflowing. However, I recall that Stacey washes rice before cooking it and the result was better tasting, fluffier rice. I decided I’d try the same thing with my oats. Result: worked like a charm. Ended up having no bubbling over of the oatmeal and it tasted great. So, new rules: reduce water and oats to ¾ cup of oats and 3 cups of water, stir/rinse in a colander until the water is almost clear. It will start milky and get clearer the longer they are washed. If just running the colander under water than just work them for about 60 seconds. I think you’ll be pleased with the results.

Starbucks Oatmeal: The Oatmeal Wars, Part III

2008-12-29T14:58:00.000-08:00

I was walking through the airport one day a few weeks ago on my way to LA, saw that Oatmeal was now being offered by Starbucks. Having an idea of what good oatmeal should taste like, I wanted to try some but wasn’t particularly hungry. This week, with 14 inches of snow on the ground christmas day I decided to walk over to the local starbucks at 21st and overton and give the oatmeal a try. Blech! Its advertised with this picture of beautiful oatmeal and all these fluffy letters talking about ‘wholesome and nutritious’. Turns out, its just rolled oats with some hot water poured over them. nothing more than instant oats. For fruit: some really dry and hard raisin things, its clear that craisins are superior topping for oats. The brown sugar wasn’t awful, and a little packet of nuts (no, nuts do not go on oatmeal).

Avoid the Starbucks oatmeal. For the price of it, you can buy yourself a box of quaker oats, ask for some hot water, and be just as well off.

What they COULD have done, to actually do something truly customer oriented, would have been to have real oatmeal cooked up in each store in the morning, served fresh with craisins and some organic brown sugar. Charge 3.25 and everyone would be happy. When you attempt to cheat customers with solutions that only go half way you can tweak your balance sheet in the short term but in the long term you create negative value. Starbucks no longer has any brand trust with me. I can’t trust their baristas to have any pride in their work and I can’t trust their food to have any authenticity to the ‘premier experience’ they are trying to create.

Economic reflections, Gold, and Peter Schiff

2008-12-29T10:55:00.000-08:00

While taking a little vacation time I’ve been chewing on my investing strategy for 2009, changes I want to make to my portfolio, etc. I grabbed a couple books at Powell’s the other day that, after sitting down, I discovered were actually written by the same author, Peter Schiff. The two books were Crash Proof: How to profit from the coming economic collapse and The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets. I had seen Peter on a few Youtube CNBC videos discussing his views on the economy and decided I want to get more of his perspective. I’m not sure about some of his conjectures: in one sentence: buy commodities (think mostly gold), and foreign stocks. Duh. Fundamental to his premise is that we incorrectly give faith in statistics compiled by a government whose vested interests to maintain stability is to keep these numbers in check. Perhaps even worse, we put faith in Wall Street itself to provide us things like bond ratings (whoops!) or give merit to investment houses who make more money the more often we buy and sell stocks. A question that’s been looming in my head about the past 8 years is this: did we create any real wealth in the past 8 years? If we really calculated what I might call a ‘true GDP’ would it have gone up? It seems to me the answer would be NO. Essentially, consumers used inflated home prices to justify loans to get money to spend on krap to fill their gigantic spaces of suburban sprawl. Money changed hands, but the fundamentals of a strong economy would be if that money was used to buy things like manufacturing tools and technology to get better productivity: more chemicals for cheaper prices, more efficient fuel consuming devices, longer lasting paints, stronger structural materials, more efficient fabrication facilities (intel calls them ‘fabs’). How much of this occurred relative to people acquiring buying higher end coffee that has turned into the swill that any sufficiently advanced capital market provides? (TODO: short essay on the decline of quality and value during the maturation of a capitalistic enterprise as investors seek to maximize return). There is a difference in the dotcom boom. This was fueled by real value. Metcalf and Moore’s laws observed real productivity boosts for business. The consumer was given a greater degree of choice and price transparency.

Schiff has an important thesis about the stock market and its ‘true value’ has declined over the past 8 years. To draw this conclusion, he uses gold instead of US dollars. The US dollar, and all other major currencies, are fiat currencies—backed not by anything real but instead by the faith and credit of the institution that issued them. If you assume the real rate of inflation is 8% (and I agree with something closer to this number than the CPI the government gives) then the Dow has lost 42% of its value. If you use gold, the Dow was worth 43 oz of gold in 1929 and is worth less than 12 oz today. (granted, gold rallied over the past few years) [page 26 of author’s note]. My question is simple: why is gold any better than the faith and credit of the us government? One might say ‘because its real’. What does that mean? Its real? You mean its physical? Oh, okay. folks, IT’S A SHINY ROCK. It has no more intrinsic value than an economy. Its pretty? Its limited? To a similarly artificial degree, so is land. so what would we obtain if we divided the Dow by the avg. price of a square foot of land in 1929 vs. 2008? I don’t understand humanities fixation on gold as a ‘gold standard’. By the way, I can pound lead with some additional goodies (protons, neutrons and such) and make gold. At some point, this becomes economically feasible, so the ‘gold is fundamentally limited’ premise is simply not true. What about oil? Well, oil is only good so long as it’s the most cost effective energy source. As soon as it breaks that barrier, oil is just some dirty junk better left underground. I simply don’t have a good way to measure any real value..I can observe relative fluctuations. Is economy science, religion, or math? We use math as a tool in our economic arguments but this does not make it math any more than using math in science makes science any more than a religion backed by math.

Philosophical arguments aside, Peter’s book has been a good read so far, and I do think it is influencing my investment thinking. The last influential author was Benjamin Graham who advocated a 50/50 strategy between stocks and bonds. This adjustment in thinking has had benefits in the recent past. With that said, I should point out I was pummeled in 09 regardless of the diversification, just less so than I might have been had I not taken his advice. Now, I’m challenging the current ‘US as stable place for my money’ and entertaining thoughts of more direct international exposure and commodity markets. The bubbles in India and Shanghai have burst, and this may have provided good entry points to these markets.

XBOX and the battle for the living room…

2008-12-29T10:54:00.000-08:00

Changes…changes…changes….was looking at my stack of XBOX360 games and thinking about the conversations 8+ years ago about ‘the battle for the living room’ that PCs were going to face. “How could the PC ever get in beyond the hardcore hobbyists?” Recall the conversations of how futile it would be for Microsoft to even try to get a Windows machine into the sacred living room. I now have 2 xbox 360’s, 10+ titles purchased at $60 each, a number of online transactions for movies or the yearly XBOX live accounts renewed for the third time recently (approx $600+$600+$150+$50 > $1400). They consume a significant portion of my entertainment dollars as well as my time for relaxation in every form: alone and with friends in both meatspace and cyberspace. When we have parties, some portion of the guests end up on the xbox for some portion of time, typically playing guitar hero style or trivia style games. While it may not have reached its full financial payoff yet for shareholders, I think this XBOX thing has been a monumental success, 25 million units in living rooms throughout the world and growing. A more interesting analysis would put together the amount of money made per title, avg. # titles purchased per year in each geography as well as online content amortized over the 5-10 year life cycle of the console and get a number that I think more than justifies their decision to enter this ecosystem. Way to go Microsoft. Might be good lesson for other large companies to learn from when entering entirely new ecosystems, seems their persistence and bringing in the right talent allowed this battle to be won. I appreciate, as both an investor and consumer, Microsoft’s permission to let the inmates run the asylum. In many cases, this would have been a catastrophy, but in this case created a more interesting world for us all.

I’ve heard people say ‘the wii has won’, as if that was a competitor. Sure, people split their dollars between these devices, but ultimately they also compliment and reinforce the acceptance of similar play metaphors for the living room. Similarly with the playstation’s of the world, they will compete for the split of consumer’s wallets but validate the battle because they all can be successful in this space. In this round, Sony seems to not have gotten the numbers MS did, but this will reinforce their vigor to get it right the next time around. In the end, humanity benefits in this competition, despite the Orwellian oligopoly this ecosystem has become.

Me at the top of a hill in Mendoza Argentina.

2008-12-07T14:03:00.000-08:00

Me at the top of a hill in Mendoza Argentina.

2008-12-07T14:02:00.000-08:00

Me in China

2008-12-07T14:01:00.000-08:00

Mike's dog Murray!

2008-12-07T13:59:00.000-08:00

on top of mt. st. helens.

2008-12-07T13:57:00.000-08:00

testing the blogthis feature in picasa2...

Gears of War 2: Insane checkpoint glitch in Act III

2008-12-07T10:00:00.000-08:00

On insane mode, in Chapter 3 Act 3, when you have reached the entrance to the temple at the top of the mountain, it seems there is a bug in the checkpoint system. When you go through the temple entrance, it does not register the checkpoint. To address the issue, go backwards to the start of the chapter. There will be a giant tree fallen across the path, drive to this point, then turn around and go back to the temple entrance adn the checkpoint will clear. I hear this also affects hardcore mode.

Gears of War 2: Killing Bloodmounts

2008-12-07T09:50:00.000-08:00

The Gears of War fest continues. Yesterday 5 of us managed to hit the 50 horde levels achievement. So, the bloodmounts, how to kill?

Two relevant facts: a well placed shutgun shot will dismount the rider on the mount. Additionally, shots at the head of the mount itself will cause it to pause to knock off its metal facemask. while the mount is performing this action, one can continue to pump rounds into its head. If you haven't dismounted the rider yet, he will fall off, then get back up but a quick chainsaw will take care of him. If you have dismounted the rider, remember he's still alive, just knocked off, so he will come after you, but he's relatively weaker and less of a threat than the szhizophrenic mount, so take care of the mount first.

What best to shoot the mount in the head? We've varied through just about every weapon here, pick your favorite. Typically the Lancer is good because you can leverage the chainsaw when the rider jumps off.

Gears of War 2

2008-12-04T08:36:00.001-08:00

Been online for several nights this week with friends blasting away through Horde mode on Gears of War 2. We're through 48 stages, 50 we get an achievement. Its been an awesome awesome trip.

Kim P. also recommended Left 4 Dead...have to check that out as well. But first, we get through 50 levels of Horde!

Impressive new robot

2008-12-04T08:31:00.001-08:00

Just watch!

tapas...

2008-11-28T12:25:00.001-08:00

so...what is tapas spanish for? overpriced small portions of mediocrity?

by having these small portions you usually end up with a bill larger than getting an actual meal.

ugh....fad.

Funny and introspective coffee shop review...

2008-11-28T12:16:00.001-08:00

was trolling the review boards for the local restaurant scene and found this well articulated review of a local place, the pharmacy cafe, RIP as of about a week ago. it was personality conflicted and never really quite sure what is was.

Nom e.

Portland, OR
1 star rating11/15/2008

This is a great place to witness the progress of human societal breakdown and the disintegration of the real-world community.

Through the large plate-glass windows lining NW Glisan you can see a few people scattered about, and even sitting next to one another at busier times, with their faces lit up from the business side of an iridescent apple and their ears plugged-up with white wires. They won't look back, nor up from the screen, nor at one-another.

Welcome to the new cafe life, where a congress of zombies type anything interesting they have to say into a device, sealed off from the world around them.

But then again one can't blame them after experiencing the place from the inside. Just the act alone of stepping to the counter can trigger an episode of mild depression.

There are random products scattered around the counter from horrible looking cookies under scrunched layers of plastic film, to bagged chips and candies. You feel like you're waiting in line at an independent gas station. Dark, filthy, and dank. The music blaring forth is usually loud and industrial.

You'll wait at the counter for 5 minutes before someone appears. They are always working in the back. Always. Moving supplies, or fixing something or other. Then they will make you a terrificly bland coffee-drink.

The dessert counter is terrifying. It seems that their desserts are end of the day donations from the lunch pails of local children.
What appears to be half-eaten apple pies, squished brownies, and a smattering of other foods only made unpalatable by their close association in this fluorescent death chamber will make you feel cheap, dirty, and tainted.

This place lacks a purpose, vision, or point. They don't take food, drink, nor coffee seriously. They do take trying to sell anything seriously. Coffee? We got it! Beer? That too! Heck, we'll even try to force an impulse purchase at check-out.
Gas? Where's the gas? Coming soon!

Only then, after experiencing this little piece of hell, will you understand why the poor souls inside are so intent with distracting themselves from the here-and-now.

The rest of the reviews and source are located here.

Midwestern retrospective and Time editorial

2008-11-26T06:50:00.001-08:00

Had a good visit back to the midwest. One of the most worthwhile aspects intellectually was the suprisingly thoughtful constructions that had been created in support of the McCain-Palin ticket. Conversations with an older generation of folks with compelling arguments of support for the superiority of this ticket over Obama. Brought home the disadvantage of the lack of political discourse in Portland. It seems everyone is a liberal and nobody debates the other side. Then, when you enter battle, you go weak and unarmed.

in this information age, I was startled how we had self selected for a variety of reasons information that the other parties did not possess. How does this happen? we're delluged by data. Too bad the same can't be said about knowledge and wisdom, which unfortunately require some combination of time, reflection, and experience.

"In the end, though, it will not be the creative paralysis that defines Bush. It will be his intellectual laziness, at home and abroad. Bush never understood, or cared about, the delicate balance between freedom and regulation that was necessary to make markets work. He never understood, or cared about, the delicate balance between freedom and equity that was necessary to maintain the strong middle class required for both prosperity and democracy. He never considered the complexities of the cultures he was invading. He never understood that faith, unaccompanied by rigorous skepticism, is a recipe for myopia and foolishness. He is less than President now, and that is appropriate. He was never very much of one."

Editorial here

Election results....

2008-11-05T20:09:00.000-08:00

Summed up nicely in video below.

The closure to those mistakes is inspiring. It has been said many times that leaders that rule through fear are weak. May the universe give back what you have given.

PS3 DVD Playback vs. XBOX 360 DVD playback vs. stand-alone DVD player

2008-10-30T01:24:00.000-07:00

Recently I did a comparison between a mid-range Sony DVD 1080i dvd player and the dvd playback capability in the PS3. They were both hooked to the same TV through an HDMI cable. My thinking was that the PS3 would be better or similar to the DVD player. This was absolutely not the case: the stand alone player was far superior in details and lack of blockiness that were present in many scenes with the PS3. I would not recommend using a PS3 as a stand alone DVD player and find the small price of a true DVD player worth it. I recall being similarly disappointed in comparisons with the DVD player in the XBOX 360, but I am using component output for that unit.

Gears of War Game Designer CliffyB interview in New Yorker

2008-10-29T13:53:00.000-07:00

Allen Hux, otherwise known as 'irregular z-buffer wizard', pointed me to this article in the new yorker that gives some insight into the game development machinery that is Epic.

Trivia of the day: Where does the 'kill' sign, the skull inside the gear that you see when you get damage, originate?

$10 for first person to email me the correct answer.

Article by Oddworld creator Lorne Lanning

2008-09-29T17:16:00.000-07:00

Found this interview with Lorne Lanning. I find his comments about merging of content creation pipelines for movie, gaming, etc. very aligned with my thoughts on where the entertainment industry will evolve in the next decade. See the article here. Lorne's gaming experiences and content are some of the best in the business. One of my top 3 favorite gaming experiences has been Stranger's Wrath, and Stacey's was Munch's Oddysey.

Travels to Salta Argentina

2008-09-25T11:06:00.000-07:00

After our 20+ hour bus ride from Mendoza into the Andean highlands we made it to Salta. This is a pretty bustling town in the northwestern part of Argentina. There are some beautiful colonial style buildings in the middle square. Today we also saw a fairly random parade display in the main square with horses and a bunch of folks dressed in gaucho clothing. We also walked several kms through town to an artesenal market. More of the same stuff for sale: ponchos, mate cups, bombillas, leather goods, some weaved stuff, and all the jewerly they sell at the mall stands and lollapalooza festivels. Yesterday i bought a nice watercolor painting from a vendor on the street for a good price. People are warm and friendly everywhere. Had a fantastic dinner last night at a traditional restaurant, El Solar del Convento, with some great service. Woke up to no COLD water in the Condor Pass hostel...that was a first! Normally, its no HOT water. They fixed it right away though. Once again, wireless access points everywhere. Tomorrow we head back to Buenos Aires and have a day and a half before we head back to the US to return on Sunday.

travels to bariloche Argentina

2008-09-19T01:26:00.000-07:00

we've spent the past three days in the Patagonia region of Argentina. Bariloche is a fairly large town set in the lakes district and serves as a jumping off point for lots of national park and winter sport activities. We did some horseback riding for an entire day cmplete with some empenadas roasted on a fire and some yerba mate with our hosts....was a super cool day. I was a little freaked out a few times going through some deep water on my horse when it decided to start playing in the water. Our guide casually explilained it wanted to roll over and it was no big deal...whatever. Scared me quite a bit. Despite those moments it was an incredible journey that went pretty far out across several ranches in the area up I to the snow pack then back down again. A big challenge was keeping warm since we've packed lighter than ever for this trip. 2 weeks with carry on only and if I can I will always do this in the future!

Bariloche is known for it's chocolate and there's several little shops around, all with a slightly different taste and their own unique styles. It's been fun just sampling them. Our favorite have been at a place call choula gouya and another who's name I think is mama lua.

Our hostel here is awesome. It's on the 10th floor of a mixed use building right in the heart of town. Has a weird feel to it because you feel like you're entering an office building, take the elevator to the top
Floor and look for a discrete door labelled '1004'. When you enter it feels like a typical hostel but with giant windows and great views all around the town, the mountain ranges, and the lake.

We leave later today on a 20+ hour bus ride to the wine region and town of Mendoza. After a few days there we will be taking another 20+ hour ride to salta in northwestern Argentina deeper into the Andes.

Meltdown has arrived!

2008-09-19T01:05:00.000-07:00

hold onto your hats. Market looks to finally be in a real correction mode. Healthy for the long term, always scary at the front. Very happy to have readben Grahams ' the intelligent investor' back a few years ago and have been diverifying away from the stock market since that time to a more balanced portfolio. Makes times like these a bit less nerve racking.

I've gotten messages from a few folks asking opinion and such, I think mostly wanting to commiserate about the situation. I just want to remind myself and anyone else thnking ok g term that the wrong thing to do is get panicked and sell if you have a long term strategy. I recall several studies that showed if you were out of the market for it's best 10 days over the past 10 or so years you lose over half of the gains the market made over that period. I should look the details up later, it's quite significant. It is important to not try to predict when those days will be.

Selling now could get you cut by the same knife twice.

Travels to Argentina - buenos aires

2008-09-19T00:45:00.000-07:00

Spent three days in buenos aires. Got to walk around town and sample the various neighborhoods. Favorite was Palermo area and the microcentro. We stayed at hotel frossard which was good location for first arrival but a bit touristy. Lots of people mentioned the steaks here as something to be amazed by butnso far it's been quantity over quality. Price is amazing, around ten bucks for a huge steak. Wine has been equally even a better value actually living up to expectations completely. One great suprise is the homemade pasta everywhere. A real treat.

Visited the street markets and got a sense of the local flair. Stacey found a nail in her quiche at a famous cafe where lots of writers artists and such from argentinian history have their photos on the wall.

Was pleasantly suprised at proliferation of wifi nearly everywhere it made sense. Mccafes, bars, random restaurants and coffee shops. The folks in Argentina love their cafe con leche. It's in everything they can shove it in and get away with it. Basically Its a soft caramel substance . Tasty but preferred in smaller quantities.

Writing from my iPhone from a hostel in the Patagonia.

Stacey the handyman!

2008-09-07T18:11:00.000-07:00

Stacey does it again...replaced the entire faucet today. Crazy!

Mountain Biking Trails near Portland

2008-07-27T17:31:00.000-07:00

was looking for some specific references to Scapoose and found this link by a bike shop out in Hillsboro area.

Hunting for Insurance, Allstate wins!

2008-07-27T11:38:00.001-07:00

I recently went on a hunt for a lower cost/better value insurance for our two cars and one condo. I’ll share my experience here hoping it saves others some time/money. Realize that situations vary widely and what was best for us may not be best for you.

First, I constructed a representative situation for us and posed this to 5 insurance companies: nationwide, progressive, country, state farm, and allstate. There are 100+ insurance companies, and I really did not want to talk to every one of them. I had determined the optimal allocation as a single male with a condo was the condo with one company and the car with another, but there is some additional hassle with that as well as not leveraging the discount one receives when they carry multiple policies with the same company. As a single male, I was not able to get a sufficient discount to put vehicle and condo with the same company. The reason was simple: some companies classified my car as a sports car and some as a coupe. Progressive happened to have classified it as a coupe while Country classified it as a sports car because of the Type-S VTEC. The cheapest for car insurance was different than the cheapest for the condo even after factoring in any discounts.
After getting estimates back from these 5 companies (which took 5+ hours of leg work). I reduced down to 2 scenarios to get detailed bids. [1] Allstate and [2] a Progressive/Country combo were the lowest, so I did the detailed bids where we give them VIN numbers, driving records, condo details, permission to run credit reports and got specific numbers. After this process, Allstate came out as a killer deal when combining all the policies, discounts, etc. I was actually quite surprised by how much I could saved, probably around 35% when compared to a no discount scenario, IN ADDITION to being the cheapest before any discounts were applied. So while this process was rather time consuming, the end result is that we will save several hundred dollars a year, so the ROI will be worth it.

Everyone’s situation is different, and the quants at each firm have different goals and risk profiles they are tweaking every year, so if you’ve been with the same insurance company for 3+ years its probably a good idea to take a look and review your policies. Progressive was creeping up this year after actually going down in some previous years.

Insurance agents can be frustrating. When finalizing our insurance plans, we found numerous errors before finally getting the final policy in place. On the car policy we got listed as renter, the address was wrong, they started charging us as if we had coverage when all we wanted were bids, we were listed as single at one point, etc. Some of the insurance folks were just baffled and seemingly afraid of their computers. Looking over their shoulders as they enter information is informative because you can see how the systems are setup and obtain a more favorable cost basis. One example was ‘profession’ which can give you a discount. For example, there is no category for software engineer nor architect yet there is one for programmer! (this tells you how outdated and slow the insurance companies are in updating their IT systems…the allstate folks were typing information into a WYSE/VT220 terminal emulation program on a Windows machine). They didn’t give me a list to pick from to see what might apply to my situation, just asked what I did, so had I not seen the actual categories one day in the office I would have had no idea that I was eligible for a discount for the category of ‘programmer’. When I said software engineer they didn’t see a category for me thus I didn’t get the discount. Agh! In summary: Go into the office, review each and every component of your policy to ensure it matches what you expect, and get a printout of the policy details to make sure what you tell the agent actually gets entered into the system. Also, ASK WHAT THE OPTIONS ARE and get a listing of them, best face to face or by entering the information yourself. And don’t drink any coffee that day, your likely to explode in the insurance agent’s office at how slow everything moves.

With Allstate, when the detailed policy came in the mail from headquarters everything was listed including all the discounts in an easy to read format. When talking with the agents, they seemed a bit confused and unable to tell me exactly what discounts were being applied and how much. When I asked for an explanation for how they didn’t know they said it changes from year to year, the IT changes from year to year, and its just difficult to keep up with all the changes and discounts.

Travels to Sarejevo

2008-06-24T10:18:00.000-07:00

Spent the past week in Sarejevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The people here like stay out late and people watch on the streets as people walk by the cafes and bars. They also have outdoor areas where people were watching sports on huge TVs and projectors in the middle of the street, kind of communal television. Unlike the TVs in most bars in the US that serve as background, it seems these folks actually come to these outdoor areas to watch TV with friends and sip a coke, coffee or beer. Computers do not seem to be a major part of anybody’s life. I think in the whole city I’ve seen 3 internet cafes, one wireless connection at the sister hotel to the one I’m in (no room at the wireless equipped hotel), and one store with a wi-fi connection sign (which for the life of me could not relocate the next day in the winding streets of the section of town built in the byzantine era!). Lots of small cars in the streets, HUGE and steep hills to walk up around the edges of town. Its warm here, in the middle of the day the sun beats down like any meditteranean city, but the humidity did not seem bad this time of year.

One thing you can feel here is the heterogeneity. Mashup of all different religious temples dot the hillsides, Muslim temples and catholic chuches, all of them hundreds of years old. Probably something most people in eastern Europe are used to but for those from the US this strikes me. Music is an interesting mashup that actually was quite appealing: rock beats and Islamic chants, also some Bosnian loves songs play in some places. Kids drive by and have rap and red hot chile peppers blaring on the stereo to give the occasional reminder of English words.

The city is in a valley surrounded by mountains with a stream running through the middle and the best tasting water I’ve had EVER, including any bottled water, I can’t believe how soft it is. I walked most of the main parts of town with little shops and places you can get Bosnian coffee, which is a served in a little pot with a handle, some sugar, a tiny cup, and a Turkish delight. Its very good, nice to have something a little different in the coffee department. The people here have been super super friendly as well, and I’ve been surprised how many speak very good English.

This is the place World War I started, and I got to stand in the very spot that the Archbishop was assassinated, setting off the conflict (him, not me of course). Also was the city that was under a 3+ year siege when the Bosnian Serbs sat in the hills, shot mortars and sniped down into the city, cut off all water and fuel supplies, killed over 10,000 people. Since that happened a little more than 10 years ago, the topic is still fresh in the people’s minds. For three years they wonder why Europe did not come to help them (some theories: many in the city were muslim? no critical resources? Didn’t know there was a problem? Couldn’t afford it? Policy of non-intervention?). Finally, Bill Clinton saved them. It was not the US, for 3 years the US ignored them as well. Somebody moved Bill Clinton to address the issue, that’s what I remember, and that’s how it should be remembered. I remember no rallies for the people in the region. I remember watching CNN, I remember apathetic voices on the television, if you don’t remember listen to how we talk about the people of Darfur today, like what happens to them isn’t connected, like these are not our problems. On the other hand, we complain about money going to fight somebody else’s wars. It’s complicated, more some other time.

After the Bosnian Serbs killed 8000 people in 3 days in other areas of the territory, the UN negotiated control of the airport to bring in food and medical supplies, 3 flights a day, hardly enough for a city of this size. I saw a secret tunnel that was dug under the airport that led to routes not controlled by the Bosnian Serbs. Gaining the airport opened a channel to supplies: the people dug a tunnel from the city, under the landing strip, and into the hills that they controlled. Before the tunnel, If they tried to cross over the strip at night the UN would shine lights on the people trying to cross. When the lights shined on them, they made easy targets for the Bosnian Serbs in the hills. If somehow you made it to the airport, the UN would round you up and return you to the city under siege. This was part of the agreement with the Bosnian Serbs.

I didn't know.

Why I love this city

2008-05-20T20:16:00.000-07:00

Portland, you make me proud.

Trip to Visit Northern Exposure location (Roslyn, WA)

2008-05-18T18:26:00.000-07:00

After finishing the 6 seasons of Northern Exposure we decided we'd take a little road trip to Roslyn Washington where a significant portion of the show was filmed. We had lunch at the Brick, also prominent in the TV show, and walked the main street in this quirky town, complete with seemingly stray dogs just wandering about.

The Brick from Northern Exposure

2008-05-18T18:24:00.000-07:00

here's an image of the Brick, one of the favorite hangouts of folks in the show Northern Exposure.

Chris in the Morning from Northern Exposure

2008-05-18T18:17:00.000-07:00

Here's Minnifield Communicatins KBHR with Chris in the Morning pontificating on recent mental comings and goings....good way to start many of the shows.

Dr. Joel Fleischman's place from Northern Exposure

2008-05-18T18:14:00.000-07:00

Here's the storefront where Dr. Joel Fleischman had his Dr's Office. In the window they still have the Dr. Joe(l) Fleischman sign painted. Very cool!

Free Cassettes at Everyday Music!

2008-05-18T00:37:00.000-07:00

A few months ago i was stopping by a local new/used CD store to check for some new music and out in the trash bin I found this! A treasure chest of casettes being tossed!

Idea for the Bioshock game to be made a movie

2008-05-11T14:35:00.000-07:00

a dystopic ayn rand storyline also identified as a continuation of the deus ex series is going to be made into a movie (http://www.stuff.co.nz/4520856a28.html). i'm sure its not the first person to think of this but it seems in this case there is a unique opportunity due to one of the critical in game mechanics: the ability to choose whether to harvest the little children to increase your magic power or to rescue them from their trance. Here’s the basic idea: 2 versions of the film, released at the same time, one is ‘the savior’ version, the other is ‘the harvester’. Film them both at the same time to keep costs down, each 85 minutes of film, both have unique goodies to help you better understand the world to incent seeing both films. As a consumer, I think this would be worth watching both, and as a studio, I think the cost structure is would be favorable and the folks seeing both movies would be pretty high, with the caveat that the differences have to be sufficient enough to have word spread its worth seeing both. Of course the dvd package will include both versions with an extra level of gameplay, etc. you’ve got the plotline, now harvest!

Consumer Spending and Inflation Visualization

2008-05-05T08:27:00.000-07:00

A great visualization of consumer spending habits by the NY Times.

new iPhone SDK with OpenGL ES emulation

2008-04-26T08:42:00.001-07:00

got this email from apple this week:

The fourth beta version of the iPhone SDK adds OpenGL ES support to the iPhone Simulator. You can now quickly build and test your mobile applications and handheld games using OpenGL ES on the iPhone Simulator.

Sweet! Now OGL ES programs can be written for the emulator.

Detailed report on housing overvaluation in America

2008-04-26T05:38:00.001-07:00

A great report from National City on housing prices in American, how much they're overvalued, and where. Bend, OR is #1 most overvalued market in the US, and Portland is #11. See the .pdf here.

Evansville, IN high school team crushes competition!

2008-04-14T14:32:00.000-07:00

way to go mater dei high school, 2,834 MPG. while a long time rival of my own castle high, this is an incredible feat! they beat out some of the best colleges in the world!

cool to see a little small town news make it to cNet.

read the article here.

unsnobbycoffee.com by McDonalds ?!?

2008-04-13T06:34:00.001-07:00

Mcdonald's launches unsnobbycoffee.com and a whole list of cafe's in Washington! Taking on Starbucks in their home turf. Free coupon as well as mini-games on the website.

My experience at McCafe's in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand has been very positive.

Gas Leak, Yikes!

2008-04-12T17:13:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I made some dinner…some fresh caught sockeye salmon, cream sauce, and some fresh noodles with peas on the side. It was frickin’ amazing. Anyway…later that day stacey asks if I smell gas. ‘well’, yeah, I do kinda, but just figured it was ‘cause I just cooked’. Next day, we still smell gas. Next morning she calls the gas company to come out and check out the situation. Sure enough, gas leak. I was out working on edits to a SIGGRAPH paper so I wasn’t around. Gas dude tells her where the leak is and how to fix it, she’s off to home depot, buys all the gear, gets in there and replaces the gas line. Cool or what?

Anyway, gas leak is gone thanks to Stacey.

Married!

2008-04-02T20:18:00.000-07:00

had an awesome time at the Wynn in Vegas this weekend. was a total blast and great to see everyone. seemed we just got engaged a few months ago. time flies! next, i plan the portland gathering.

2007 Portland Street of Dreams data...

2008-03-31T21:02:00.000-07:00

recently, a few friends and i were talking about the street of dreams. we were wondeirng if the homes for sale last year had sold yet in portland. here is the data. apparently, one of them has sold, the others are still on the market!

Joyous iPhone SDK is released!

2008-03-23T15:53:00.000-07:00

Downloaded the iPhone SDK a few days ago and i've been playing around with it. had to scrounge up a macbook and download mac os x 10 to get started, no windows development capability (yet). the SDK is very cool, and apple has lots of great information on their website including some demo apps and extensive documentation....looks like they've done this before :). just playing right now but have a few proof of concepts of cool new things to do with an iphone i wanted to try out. ran into a few things i wish they would have spelled out right away on the site that i've learned:

you can use a simulator to do development (the Aspen Simulator), very nice with identical in look/feel to the iphone EXCEPT for the things that are not yet completed. a few of those details i've learned so far:

the accelerometer is not yet simulated. this was mentioned in a document buried somewhere deep in the SDK. at least provide us with a left/right button to simulate sending events along a specified x,y, or z axis ASAP please :)

there is no OpenGL ES simulation yet. i confirmed this later with some documentation, but i originally poked around for a few minutes to determing that this wasn't possible. the documentation also points out that rendering a transparent EAGL surface (alpha blending w/ the framebuffer) is 'very intensive for the GPU and not recommended'.

SDK developer vs. the developer program:

when i attach my iphone it asks me to have a newer version of firmware. since i do have the latest version i conclude that downside of only registering to download the SDK is that you cannot develop for a real device with just the SDK, you have to be in the developer program, and that was a very limited subset that i am not a member of.

for now, i'll workaround these limitations, plenty for me to get used to in the apple development world, including objective C, XCode, and i'm sure i can dig up an OGL simuator for my PC somewhere's on opengl.org if i need it. i can put the pieces together when i get access to the developer's firmware update.

for the OGL ES simulation, this should be easy enough, just compile into the simulator an OGL ES .dll that supports all the API calls into OGL ES via emulation on x86. this shouldn't be more than a week's worth of work provided the source code is already developed for an OGL ES software simulation, but i can understand it not being the top priority this early in the game. later they can connect it into the real GPU hardware on the platform you are running Aspen for acceleration, but this gets complicated with various IHVs hardware needing OGL ES drivers or wrappers around the definitely existing OGL drivers, etc.

just wanted to capture these notes for anybody else joining the revolution.

Nihzny Novgorod

2008-03-20T20:40:00.000-07:00

Spent the week in Nihzny Novgorod. This time I was with a few folks from work who had been there before. My experience this time was much better than the previous trip, and I’m motivated to pick up more Russian. We’ve eaten at some great places and I’ve had a good time with the team here but inside and outside the office for the week. Jet-lagged and weary though at 4am in the morning. we leave in about 24 hours for the Nihzny airport.

Staying at the Nikolai House near the main pedestrian walkway and the kremlin. Its not as nice as Alexandra (place I stayed last visit, which had a river front view, big room, individual controlled thermostat, and I believe better channel selections including CNBC). However, Nikolai’s location is much much better because you can walk right out to the city area. Also, doesn’t feel so crazy in the winter. Summertime there were a lot of kids drinking out in the streets and such, cars were going by really fast all around and music blaring around every corner. Fewer cars, more pedestrians and tons of snow! It has snowed every day since we’ve been here, and I’m glad I came prepared with a couple coats, hat and gloves.

Travels to Frankfurt

2008-03-20T20:25:00.000-07:00

On my way to Nihzny Novgorod I had a 7 hour layover in Frankfurt. Took the time to head to the main shopping area/downtown area and wandered around with co-workers. Kinda cold this time of year but wandered around, found the Zara and some cool churches and such.

Oregon Drivers....

2008-02-24T09:25:00.001-08:00

This is not a rant about Oregon Drivers being bad. Actually, I see less accidents here than ANY state i'v ever lived in. Also, I generally think the drivers here are really good. For me, having lived in NC, IN, AL, NM, OR, and PA, one constant I observed is that people think 'the drivers here are awful', and 'the drivers from the nearest neighboring state' are even worse. Its the same little localized urban legend everywhere.

However, one thing I've noticed for quite awhile about Oregon drivers that has just baffled me is this: they seem to not understand that the slow lane is on the right, the passing lanes are on the left. You don't get to decide which lane you get to drive in: the law states you drive in the right lane if you are moving slower than the other traffic. Additionally, for traffic moving up behind you, it is against the law to pass on the right. You create such a dangerous situation, and its like nobody seems to even notice their in the wrong, its baffling.

In oregon, I am just blown away by the number of people who think that the right thing to do is spread out across 3 lanes of traffic then drive either the same speed or SLOWER in the fast lanes. This is very dangerous and very illegal. Once you pass, you are supposed to get back to the right as soon as its safe...why does nobody seem to know this? don't we take the same driver's exam?

I've noticed new posted signs on most major highways now that state 'slower traffic keep right'. These signs are new and prolific throughout the highway systems near portland. I hope they have their intended effects. I recommended this in a face to face conversation 2 years ago to the head of PDX Metro (its like the local version of ODOT and they are also in charge of the MAX, streetcar plans, etc.). Maybe they actually listened. I even offered to pay for the signs on highway 26, in addition to one that says 'Maintain your speed uphill'. My offer still stands.

Equiment ettiquette (also known as : baubles in babylon)

2008-02-24T09:12:00.000-08:00

Why do men seem to think its okay to have the latest bang and olufson bluetooth headset in their ear all the time? If you don't care how you look, I don't care either, but just to be clear: you DO look like a dork. And when you have one of the older motorola headsets you look like a cheap dork.

And what's with the utility belt? Dude, you're not Batman and you sure as hell couldn't get to the top of the building with one of those redundant devices, so put them in your pocket. Why is it men think its cool/okay to have these phones and junk hanging off their belt? I appreciate the 'i don't care what it looks like its practical', if that is your philosophy than fine, but again, DORK.

Actually, I think there is something from an anthorpological perspective going on here, like peacock feathers. These guys are showing 'Look at the baubles I have, I am desirable, I have all these baubles, if you hang with me you can be with a well baubled guy'.

Microtasking...

2008-02-24T08:51:00.001-08:00

People say they multi-task, but they don't. When they think they do, they distribute their resources among whatever tasks they are doing and the end results are proportionate. "Sure, I can do email on my blackberry and listen to you at the same time"....[a few minutes later] "what? sorry, i missed that, ....".

There is no such thing as human multi-tasking. However, there is microtasking. The sequential run through of a large amount of small activities in a relatively short amount of time. I don't mean breaking megatasks down into mircotasks in any conscious way, but microtasks are things like: clearing up/adding things to TODO lists, responding to quick email questions that are 2 sentences or less, locating something online, putting dishes into dishwasher, response to an IM, signing forms, addressing envelopes, paying bills...things that can happen very quickly and require very little thought, just action.

MSFTYHOO Part 2

2008-02-17T17:13:00.000-08:00

An article in Barron's talked about here by Andrew Bary mentions that the MSFT buyout of YHOO is a bad idea. I couldn't agree more. Too expensive, no cultural alignment, exodus will ensue. More importantly, it says the following:

"Ballmer is a great operating man but he lacks financial acumen. He ought to be thinking more of Microsoft employees who own a lot of Microsoft stock and have nothing to show for it in many years. If the stock doesn't start doing better, Microsoft will lose good people."

I suspect there are other large companies whose top employees feel similarly, and are growing tired of subsidizing fat cats who sit around the organization pontificating powerpoint slides, action plans, and indicators in domains in which they have no knowledge, understanding, or experience. Meanwhile, the stock price languishes......

MSFTYHOO

2008-02-07T21:59:00.000-08:00

yahoo has been one unexciting company in the past 5 years. given where they were, its depressing to see where they are today, a lack of interesting and useful innovations in a world so filled with opportunity.

the disappointing part about this bid is the fact that this is acknowledgement of a lack of aggressiveness on msft part. they should not need this to take out yahoo, they should be able to do it by being a better player. there seems to be no passion left in this company anymore, somebody took the helium out of their ballon. they'll still grow earnings, they'll still have things to sell that we want, but they won't have the talent they once did, nor the innovation, it'll be just sleepy more of the same-ness.

to the end of the microsoft era,

--adam

Suprise! CEO of Countrywide lied.....

2008-02-03T02:17:00.000-08:00

I posted here when the CEO of Countrywide said it would be profitable in Q4 that there is no way I bought it. Stock shot up so CEO and friends could dump at higher price points. Article here:

"The net loss for the quarter totaled $421.9 million, or 79 cents per share, compared with a profit of $621.6 million, or $1.01 per share, a year earlier. On Oct. 26, Countrywide projected a quarterly profit of 25 cents to 75 cents per share. Analysts on average had expected a loss of 32 cents per share, according to Reuters Estimates."

Hope nobody bought it.

My opinion: meltdown isn't over just yet. Reset your loans while Bernake tries to get rates down low enough that enough people can refi those 2 year ARMs.

Doing your S-corp taxes yourself...

2008-02-02T12:42:00.001-08:00

Just a few notes for future expense tracking to make doing taxes easier. Useful list for a small biz with simple tax filing.

classifying your expenses with the same terminology that the tax man uses to make your life easier at end of year or end of quarter. Do it using these categories then tally it up at the end.

its not shipping, freight-in and postage
for storage, its rent, not storage

if you charge shipping and handling, that is INCOME. later, you will take it out as shipping

don't mix these up:
interest incoming (paid to biz)
interest outgoing (paid to loaner)

no donations: there are contributions, cash and non cash
donations at 50% level, at 30% level, need to determine difference

meals can be recorded on line 19 and line 5, along with a few other things that are redundant with some being classified as related to cost of goods sold. i guess the other stuff is 'the cost of getting goods sold'.

there are no office products, there are office supplies

deductions on first page:
taxes and licenses (yes, there are multiple places this is listed), one reduces income and others do not
interest (again, as a deduction, so its what you paid)
advertising

line 19 includes:
supplies
bank charges
consultation charges
delivery (not pizza)
dues and subscriptions
insurance
office supplies and expense
postage
print and copy
promotion
pro fees
software
telephone
small tools
utilities

line 5 includes:
travel
meals
entertainment
indirect labor
rent
freight-in
supplies
taxes
utilities

some categories to keep in mind and keep track of as well:
rent
state income tax
local income tax
licenses

Yahoo! math

2008-02-02T12:38:00.000-08:00

have a little stock ticker on yahoo on the left hand side of my home page...looks like this:

XXX 72.83 1.99 2.81%
YYY 74.74 1.24 1.69%
ZZZ 24.85 0.43 1.76%
WWW 60.61 1.20 2.02%
CCC 7.73 0.27 3.62%
Total M A 10.40%

Wow! Look at that, managed to get a 10% gain from a bunch of gains under 5%. i deleted fund names and total value, not relevant.

Wonder how this hasn't been caught?!?

Larrrabee press mention...

2008-01-18T17:36:00.001-08:00

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/01/18/taipei-rumours-nvidia-fails

"In the meantime, Intel keeps very quiet on the Larrabee GPU performance and futures. Well, it doesn't need to talk much in advance, as the CPUs are feeding them well right now. By all means, they got a good team and nearly infinite resources to get the job done by the end of this year - if they do, another headache for a company using that NVDA stock sticker. µ"

Article here.

Great video on housing bubble from housingpanic blog!

2007-12-30T17:30:00.000-08:00

How to get your Capital One Rewards Card 25% annual bonus...

2007-12-30T12:07:00.000-08:00

For some peculiar reason beyond my comprehension, the 25% bonus that makes this the most superior cash back card in the consumer credit ecosystem does not explain how you receive this bonus in their brochures or on their website, so I gave them a call.

Transferred to India to ask the question over a VOIP solution that was choppy and hard to understand, transferred back to the US for the actual answer, I was told that the balance is automatically applied to your balance one to two billing cycles after your november bill and is applied to your previous october through november balance. This is great news and the right way to do it. Just wanted to share because I know most people I know have moved to this card due to 1.25% return on everything you buy being the best you can find. And if you find a better one, please share! This assumption is based on the fact that there is no way I buy enough groceries or gas to make the 1% plus 5% on gas and groceries a better bet, but maybe if you buy lots of either of those they are better.

The other thing that makes this card a must have for your wallet is NO foreign exchange fees. Citi cards have huge fees for any business done in foreign currencies.

Book Review: The Origin of Wealth by Eric D. Beinhocker

2007-12-29T12:38:00.000-08:00

Quote on front cover “A brilliant piece of intellectual history” from the Washington Post. Sure, if you consider a survey paper ‘a brilliant piece of intellectual history’. Beinhocker annoys reader with supposed insights that are really just obvious statements about business dynamics. Book is divided into 4 sections. The first and second related to defining traditional economics as the neoclassical approach, what we were taught in school about economics was wrong, and that the economy really acts as a complex adaptive system. Gee, that’s freakin’ brilliant! At least he doesn’t take credit for that observation and points to the folks at SFI for arming him with the data to repeat this now well understood notion. I don’t mean to be bitter here, but he doesn’t say anything really new. He does summarize how complexity theory and economics have had an affair for the past couple decades and references work by Mandelbrot, Holland, etc. to give credibility to his point(s).

He also summarizes his points about economics and its ‘truth’ as a complex adaptive system by summarizing results of the Sugarscape experiments which also demonstrated the notion of punctuated equilibrium in economics. He summarizes the work Mandelbrot did disproving the random walk hyptothesis, and summarizes a bunch of obvious business implications of complexity theory in section 3. Section 4 gets a bit more philosophical and discusses the implications of sections 1 and 2 for civilization overall with epiphanies like “companies don’t innovate, markets do”. Blech. “if a company’s total resources are fully committed to executing legacy business plans, it will be incapable of evolving any new ones (page 346)”.
If you haven’t read anything on complexity theory and its application to the stock market chapter 2 would be okay but reading mandelbrot’s recent text (reviewed previously in my blog) is much better.

Here’s what annoys me: It doesn’t tell me anything new, the book is called the origin of wealth and I guess I got my answer: its born from complex interactions of agents whose optimal path is dependent on where they are located in the current fitness landscape….thanks man. You should pay attention to these issues when thinking strategically about where to take your business.

Another reviewer mentions that he is ‘a storyteller of first rank’. I’d have to agree with that. Author does actually tell a good story, its just a story I’ve already heard. Author is also extremely well read and has an extensive list of citations and references at the end of the book. He does a great job summarizing things like the Sugarscape experiments and makes complex economic arguments easy to understand. I could see some parts of this book being a reasonable text for a tour for undergraduates or high school students.

I will give it a 3 out of 5. Its an average read, but I’ve reviewed other books that are better elsewhere in my previous blog posts. By better, I mean they have more meat on their bones, are more efficient, and don’t seem to wander all over the place. I feel like I’m reading his first draft. Part III could be dropped out altogether and would have strengthened the book.

The Oatmeal Wars, part II

2007-12-21T16:02:00.001-08:00

Returning to the oatmeal saga: Previously I used John McCann's oatmeal from Trader Joe's as my oatmeal of choice to cook in the rice cooker. After extensive research and testing, I found what I believe to be a superior product, and I'll explain why. The product is Bob's Red Mill stone ground oatmeal. The primary reason is that I was having problem with a 1 cup serving boilng over in my Zojirushi rice cooker. Bob's Red Mill Steel Cut Oatmeal is giving me no such problems. I also think the texture of the oatmeal is slightly better.

This was discovered when we recently paid a visit to the Bob's Red Mill grocery store in Portland, OR. Was a fun experience, they had lots of dried stone ground goods besides oatmeal including whole wheat chocalate cake mixes and a bunch of other goodies. Its about 20 minutes from downtown but worth the trip! Lots of healthy stuff to eat, and they serve a breakfast and lunch menu to try out their products. As I move my diet towards less processed foods, I can imagine Bob's Red Mill products becoming quite popular in my pantry!

Half Life Saga Summary....

2007-12-21T16:00:00.000-08:00

I was commenting the other day after finishing half life 2 episode 2 that I was having a hard time remembering what the story was all about. After all, the first half life happened like 8+ years ago. Shonuf, stumbled upon this link today.

4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss

2007-12-21T03:38:00.000-08:00

i was blown away by the content and succinct representation of said content. i thought it was going to be a fair amount of fluff, robert kiyosaki type 'one good picture and 250 pages of big font double spaced obviousness', but i had some vacation time and what better way to spend vacation time than figuring out how to get more vacation time?

tim ferriss is smart. he's also quit witted and a good writer, or at least he convinced me of that (heck, for all i know he outsourced the whole book). better yet, he had one person do the actual content and then paid a comedian in india to add ' 3 funny parts in each chapter' for 4.50 an hour....i wouldn't be able to tell and the result would probably have been just as good by taking his own advice.

if you are interested in how to get the most out of the time you work, whether trying to reduce your time at work or not, his points are excellent and good to hear, although most producers i know (about 1 in 10 employees) practice these tools regularly already. he discusses points about when and how to read email, tactics on how to spend less time in the office and more time working where you want (for many that is moving from place of low productivity to high productivity), and how to outsource many components of your life. He talks about dreamlines, essentially mapping out a plan of what you want to do and a step by step plan on how to do it.

i had a fairly strong emotional reaction to this book. it has a ton of appeal to me, mostly because i hear what tim is saying and strive to practice much of his advice already. so i had these strong feelings of 'yes yes, that's exactly what i've found to be the best way to do it', to other moments of his missing the point of some of the interactions that take place on a day to day basis in the hallways of business.

it seems tim's end goal is to spend less time in the office and therefore get more time to do what he wants, and i like his idea of pursuing one kinesthetic and one intellectual goal in each of the places he lives for awhile, but i'd like to counsel him on a few things about the work environment as i see it. it sound like he's been in some bad job situations, and not understood what the point of some of the interaction that takes place on a daily basis. in america, the corporation has become one of the social tribes. it is within these tribes that a significant amount of mentorship and stewardship is practiced. we leverage our time in the 8 hour day in these interactions helping those around us with making a better life through understanding how to achieve their goals. we're not there to produce products. we're there to produce better people. to produce those better people, we work on a shared goal, a product of some sort. through this shared goal, we all end up learning more about ourselves and how to relate to others. during that process we pick up tools that we leverage not just in our jobs but in our personal lives as well. likewise, many of us actually are still naive enough to believe that the tools we produce will raise the standard of living of people throughout the world.

all the points stated above seem to be lost on the author who seems to be a fairly typical self absorbed mid 20s guy on this front. his goals seem to be purely to optimize time utilization for himself and its not clear that he understands the stewardsship or mentorship roles many people have in those big offices.

this book has no one single overall message, instead he has lots of interesting ways to think about life, what its meaning is, and good advice on how to pursue those things whether within the confines of the corporation or striking out on your own to sell vitamins or whatever is your ticket out of corporate servitude.

while i'd advocate many of the ideas put forth in this book, i'd also say i doubt anybody could seriously take them too literally. the origins of his feeling the need to search so hard for something else and have such a disdain for meetings, etc. were due to being enveloped in a culture that fostered useless meetings and had some magnetic attraction to non-type A personalities to sit around and talk about random stuff all day. in general, i just don't work in that type of environment. its fast paced, people are succinct and to the point, and when the meeting is over and its time to go people get up and walk out (or in many cases hang up). you have to foster and build a culture like that in your business, and his time at TrueSAN just wasn't like that. his career experience in the middle of the internet boom was at a surreal time for all of us in tech, and its no wonder he thinks its such a soulless experience, but i disagree with him on the implication that because his experience in the middle of hiring everyone with a pulse for whatever they wanted to do applies when all the excess capital gets washed to the next boom industry.

highly recommended reading, very good use of time, and fun. 5/5. estimated reading time: 2.5-3.5 hours. thanks to brent insko for the recommendation.

Book Review: The First 90 days

2007-12-21T03:33:00.000-08:00

Full title: The First 90 days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels, by Michael Watkins. Carl Marshall recommended this book to me when i was making a recent job transition. One year later i finally had the time to read it. Its aimed at sr. level executives (or just sr. leaders) and has lots of good tools to make a successful job transition. Even though its primary value is the first 90 days, it has value at any time in your job, particularly addressing some of the common problems in organizations and how to lead a group through those problems. Its like this: if there is a transition happening, the tools in this book can help you understand what phase your organization is in. After this, it will help you formulate a plan and the required relationships and tools to help in that particular business phase. For
example, identify which of these 4 situations your business is currently involved: turnaround, sustaining, startup, realignment. Next, apply tools in book to achieve success. Very good book, very quantitative, very dense, 4/5.

Portland Housing Blog auction story from the O

2007-12-16T15:03:00.000-08:00

Oregonian has an article on the Auction as well. See Portland Housing Blog for more info.

Portland Home Auction by REDC and Buena Vista Homes

2007-12-16T13:09:00.001-08:00

I stopped by the auction today to see how it was going. The room was actually quite full. I watched for about 30 minutes and took a few notes on what places were selling for to get an idea of how far out of market value current list prices are. Assuming the 'previously valued at' on the price sheets we were given is current list price, I have found that the homes were selling on average around 75% of the previously price. This includes a 5% fee that the auctioneer tacked onto each sale. A hefty profit for the auctioneer considering the work involved!

This was mainly for homes within the portland suburban area but NOT considered downtown. Also, this is not a large or statistically significant (>30) sample. However, it would be enough to influence the amount I would pay for a home in the pdx suburbs. To add creedence to the value, a number of economists seem aligned with this current overvaluation of the market. I've read quite a few who have expected that if people cut prices ~20% the market would pick back up.

Insert Mystifying white space here.
.
.
.

Neighborhood	Sq. Ft.	Sold w/ 5%	prev. val	% of prev. val	$/sq.ft.
hamilton ridge	2616	246750	392000	62.95%	94.323
hamilton ridge	2332	246750	361950	68.17%	105.81
jcksn hills pII	3581	456750	529950	86.19%	127.55
vista heights	2550	346500	465950	74.36%	135.88
sunrise hts	2935	367500	487950	75.32%	125.21
lincoln hts	2550	341250	424950	80.30%	133.82
avg.	2761	334250	443792	74.55%	120.43

Portal is the most subversive game ever?

2007-12-14T09:01:00.000-08:00

This may be old news to the game folks out there, but I found this article very IU. I say 'IU' because it reminds me of the discussions I used to have with friends when they'd come back home from school at Indiana University and were in the midst of a class on feminism or some class they watched movies like Top Gun and critiqued them for gender/sexuality themes. The link is here.

I've also found, as a resident and often time typer of Portland, that my fingers CANNOT move to type Portal correctly the first time EVAR!

The mortgage fix...

2007-12-05T01:21:00.000-08:00

okay, real quick: i'm thinking about doing a refi due to mortgage rates dropping a bit. i'm just wondering if i can get one of those new types of loans. you know, the one that if i get in over my head, or say i don't read the terms of the loan, the government/big banks will just let me keep the lower rate for awhile longer. yeah, that's right, the one that gives no reward to the people who did their homework, looked at the numbers and said 'ain't no way that loan makes sense for me, look at what it does after 2 years'.

now, i definitely feel bad for the people that were lied to by mortgage brokers and such, but this feels very unfair to people that did the analysis and did the responsible thing during the years of low interest rates. where's our reward for doing the right thing?

First blog from my iPhone

2007-11-24T19:46:00.000-08:00

just wanted to see if it would work

Managing Humans: Biting and Humourous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager

2007-11-23T12:24:00.000-08:00

I just finished a book recommended by Matt Pharr, a recent hire in my Advanced Visual Computing Group at work. We were discussing some of the challenges of our work environments and he sent me a link to this book. If you are a manager, architect, team lead, or even a jr. engineer I'd recommend a review of this book. It has a conversational blog like tone but is very well written bite size chapters. If there is one thing I got out of this book was a reassurance that I was not alone in the spectrum of what I do on a daily basis for my job. Covering NADD: nerd attention deficit disorder, distinguishing The Zone from The Place, discussion of the nerd cave, organics vs. mechanics, free electrons, etc. all provided a colorful, useful way of thinking of the various people including yourself that you come across with every day in an engineering organization. Unlike many business books I actually recommending reading all the chapters becuase they actually cover very different material, not 1/3 the book full of some new ideas than 1/3 rehashing those ideas then the other 1/3 trying to sell you the other books the author has written. 4.5 out of 5 stars for an engineering manager, of little value to others in non-technical fields

Cooking Oatmeal in a rice cooker

2007-11-22T11:42:00.000-08:00

Oatmeal...in a rice cooker?

Stacey and I had been frequenting a local coffee shop over on Hawthorne, Common Grounds, handily one of the best of many in portland. They have had some impressive oatmeal on their menu, and we were dropping a few pennies a week on this stuff. Way better than the instant oatmeal i eat fairly regular in the mornings at work. I decided to try to recreate it.

First, I went to trader joes and stared at the various oatmeal offerings...irish oats, rolled oats, steel cut oats, various instant oats. I decided to go for a very innocent, old fashioned looking can of John Mccann steel cut oatmeal.

Next, I went home and followed the instructions, boiled some water, put the oatmeal in, total freakin' disaster. Didn't absorb the water, was a glutenous mess. Reminded me of my experiences trying to cook real rice. That's it! Use the rice cooker.

So, I pulled out the rice cooker and looked at the settings. Turns out there is one called 'porridge' on my fuzzy logic zojirushi 5000 so i went about setting it up, turning it on, and putting in the appropriate ingredients (oats and water as described on the oat meal container). After about an hour and a half (including 45 minutes soak time that the rice cooker appropriately counted down for me without any intervention on my part...i love this thing!) the rice cooker beeped at me and out came some absolutely DELICIOUS oatmeal. Great stuff, I mean legendary for those cold winter days.

I also added some organic brown sugar, craisins, and homemade granola from Elephants Delicattesen to give it some crunch and sweetness. I'm not sure the 'organic'-ness adds to the brown sugar, I think its more like 'not the cheap stuff' that makes it better than just average brown sugar.

So, takes longer than the instant stuff, but it tastes great. I'll be adding this to the cooking arsenal.

Portland homes go on auction block...

2007-11-22T11:01:00.000-08:00

From a portland housing blog comes a very interesting link about an upcoming auction in portland suburban homes. This might come in handy, say, if you were relocating from a town, like say, maybe seattle, and maybe wanted to pick up a good deal on a house, might be worth at least checking out.

Graphics doesn't matter anymore for games?

2007-11-22T10:57:00.001-08:00

Thoughts on games....

I've heard it said more than once "Graphics doesn't matter anymore for games...".

Improved graphics in games is like all the other components of a platform. The end result of a bunch of these various factors: screen size, audio, gameplay, level design, ..., amount of memory, make the game experience.

Gameplay for humans takes place on whatever platforms we have. We had dice made of ivory and marbles made of stone and jacks made of steel and now we have games made of silicon and plastic. Games allow us to engage and teach early and provide a form of play that should probably sit somewhere in maslow's hieararchy around the self-actualization and esteem building component of the pyramid. This gets lost because so often in order to get there we engage in shooting things. Most games aren't about shooting things they are about solving conflicts or figuring out puzzles.

My point, poorly articulated above, is that the argument that there is some platform that suffices as complete for gameplay is backwards. We define as a society what to create playable experiences upon first, then we create forms of play with those devices, not the other way around. In other words, games track technology...it tracks the current social and industrial capital. Therefore, there will be no point at which games will have 'whatever they need forever'. Furthermore, the creation of both games and productivity at each level is what inspires the components of the next level. Our need for play is just as important as our need for production, and it is neither silly nor incorrect that the future of our silicon be driven by one need or the another.

Looking at the Wii and the xbox, basically two larger form factor gaming platforms of this era is really looking at two points in the design space and creating a set of interesting, mostly playable experiences. One doesn't kill or outdate or outmode the other one. The amount of ink spilled on these arguemnts is silly. its all uninsightful, unthoughtful noise to generate pageviews on the lower rungs of the information hieararchy. Furthermore, boardgames, cardgames, etc will continue to evolve with society, exposing us through play to social norms of the day. They give us a safe place to explore leadership, spirtuality, magic, power, loss, winning, sportsmanship, relating with others, and the whole host of other lessons in life we need to survive and succeed.

Home Theater Update....

2007-11-21T10:04:00.000-08:00

Here we are, unloading the goods, call this the 'before', that's Charles in the back of our rental pick-up:

So, last year I put off buying an HD TV for two reasons: spent too much money on furniture already (although, i have to say, we got a great deal and an amazing couch). The second reason was the fact that the 60Hz TVs had motion artifacts around the edges of fast moving objects I found intolerable relative to my CRT.

This year I've researched, studied, analyzed, lost sleep, and came up with my perfect TV (for this year anyway). Its a 120Hz Sony XBR5 w/ motionflow (motion estimation and smoothing). Now, motionflow wasn't impossible at 60Hz, it just didn't seem to be included, its not related to 120Hz.

Gaming is amazing on this TV. I was kinda getting annoyed because content, especially ports from the PC, are absoultely unplayable at 480i (Orange Box, for one example). I wasn't even able to read the text on Dead Rising which was a bummer and made that unplayable.

Now to go hunting for that HD-DVD player!

Black Friday ads posted!

2007-11-16T15:25:00.001-08:00

From Charles comes this link to black friday ads. Thanks dude!

Pat Gelsinger speaks about Larrabee

2007-11-07T12:54:00.000-08:00

See the video here.

Countrywide says profitable in Q4, yeah right!

2007-10-27T18:50:00.001-07:00

and the stock shoots up 32%?!?!

is ANYBODY watching what's going on? moody's finally issued updated ratings on CDOs to the approrpriate JUNK status, the dollar is falling, the CEO has dumped 2 MILLION shares since May 1. He keeps cheerleading as the ship is sinking.

I have a philosophy: judge a man by his actions, not his words. if HE is selling, why should YOU buy?

i'll bet we'll see a press release, sometime in q4: "the credit market did not stabilize as we anticipated, in fact, what we saw was just the tip of the iceberg" and suddenly they will act suprised as the real estate market continues to falter. ugh...the knife is still falling. check out merrill lynch, they claimed 6.2 billion or so loss about 2 weeks ago, then announce earnings and say 'whoops, it was really 8 billion'.

Those 'useless' strands of DNA

2007-10-27T17:55:00.000-07:00

DNA thoughts....

i'm not a physicist, and i'm certanly no biologist. however....one way to track civilizations progress in any domain is the resolution with which we can measure in that domain and how it increases. in physics, everything was composed of the aristotelian elementals of air, water, fire, and dirt, then we found the molecules, then the atoms via cloud chamber trails. now, we're trying to figure out a recipe for atoms that allows us to create the illusion of a deeper understanding of the world around us from ever smaller particles, strings, and other random theories.

so, moving to how this relates to DNA, we've observed its useful to speculate about DNA as a composition of a 4 state encoding labelled A, T, G, and C. combinations of a set of these, many millions of components long, makes a DNA strand. we've decoded some of these strands, call them genomes (the easy part of deconstruction), and now are working to understand how to interpret this mass of information.

something funny scientists do...when scientists couldn't figure out how light travels through empty space, speculated it must be travelling through a medium called 'ether'. later they figured out what it was, but that didn't change a few generations of textbooks. with increasing resolution of scientific devices we found out what that 'ether' was. in space, we can't figure out where all the mass is coming from, so we call the stuff 'dark matter'. 'dark matter' is a placeholder for 'stuff we don't know about, but stay tuned...'.

Some scientists now claim that there is lots of junk in our DNA strands. This statement is irresponsible. it creates the illusion this is proven, and is the opposite of the application of the scientific method. quite the opposite: we don't KNOW what its used for. think about this from a programmer's perspective, and a few heuristics: 20% of a codebase is executed 80% of the time. meaning 80% of the code a programmer writes is rarely/never executed. this hardly makes it useless or junk. quite the opposite, this is the code that handles the corner cases that might cause a crash or handle a defect or insufficient data returned from some other component of a complicated set of components working together.

its there for robustness. i am scary suspicious that these 'useless' code strands are likely to contain some important code. maybe some components are currently dormant, maybe some really is just extra storage. maybe there are things happening during recombination beyond the resoultion of current devices with these subsystems? maybe they are just components that are only triggered when other components are triggered, like a chain reaction that lights up those code segments. the parallels between a programmer's logic and the program that resides in your DNA are uncanny.

Team Fortress 2: What I learned about leadership from a 12 year old

2007-10-20T12:06:00.000-07:00

My squad leader is younger than me. He is faster than me. He is a better communicator than I am. He is able to be calm and cool under fire, gently reminds those with lesser skills on ways to improve, all while keeping himself alive under hostile fire and achieving a common goal with the 5 other squad mates. He comes over to show me where to hide. I learn from him, I am a better player because of his gentle advice and positive reinforcement. And for years, he has been honing and developing a set of leadership skills beyond his classmate. I can't imagine what school is like for this kid.

Maybe recruiters should look to their favorite MMOG to find some solid leads. Within the Narnia forest, is that the next CEO of Apple behind the tree with a bow and arrow aimed at me?

Parents should limit the amount of time kids waste doing homework so they can focus on important areas of development. Get an XBOX, get a future.

Based on discussions with co-workers at a recent lunch at an Indian Buffet: Josh, Aaron, David P.

Zune-ness of Zune 2.0

2007-10-18T19:06:00.000-07:00

is there a single more ugly device on the planet today than the zune?

pray tell, how did microsoft do this? sure, version one, first one out the door, the OEM manufacturing could only do this box like plastic thing that looks like its from a second rate taiwanese manufacturer. but...they liked it so much THEY DID IT AGAIN!! its an ugly hunk of crap that no user could get past. maybe its actually an experiment to find some interesting lower bound in aesthetic but maximum leverage of the brand to get high ROI.

get the folks that designed the xbox360 controller to design a zune. hint: think smooth edges, SMOOOTH.

iPhone Safari Browser Web Links not working...

2007-10-13T16:25:00.001-07:00

came across this post in the apple web support discussion forums and it worked:

Re: Safari - links not opening when clicked
Posted: Oct 2, 2007 8:09 AM in response to: Ashley Gwozdz Reply Email

A friend of mine bought a new iPhone yesterday and came to me with this issue a little while ago. I've never experienced this myself, but I suggested that he reset the application by holding the home button for six seconds. For him, this reset of Safari solved his problem.

Portland Condo Market continues to sour quietly...

2007-10-13T10:44:00.001-07:00

While there have been one or two articles on the market of condos in Portland, nobody in the press is discussing the death of the Pearl. On a run yesterday by the waterfront I went by a building where the normal 10+ units for sale with all the signs posted FINALLY had some lower prices after a year of holding onto irrational valuations. There are holes in the ground with no construction workers. Its quiet, like remnants of a bombing in a city the world has forgotten. The beautiful Wyatt has moved from condo to apartment, the civic up the street on burnside isn't selling.

The sooner these folks wake up and get the prices back down to reality the sooner we can get on with it. They are holding on and telling how 'things are just going back to normal', but that isn't how markets work and there is no normal, only a bouncing back and forth around a theoretcially 'normal' line of 6 month inventory.

While not really suprised by the lack of coverage, I am disappointed. Not that I ever had any faith in mainstream journalism, but the lack of any quantitative profiling of the cave in is interesting. Makes me think about some of the conflicts around the world going. Seems if the press isn't there, it isn't happening.

One reasonable article from last week is here. They say Portland is immune from the downturn that's infected other big cities. Job growth remains strong, and people continue to move to the area, providing demand for urban living. "It's steady as she goes here," Scanlan said. "There's no reason to panic."

Adam and Stacey Engaged!

2007-10-13T10:33:00.000-07:00

After 3+ amazing years Stacey and I have decided to get married. We've had a great time, travelled around the world, and even lasted a two person kayak trip. I think I surprised her when i handed her a brown paper bag stapled shut, the look on her face was: "why do you think i would want a croissant at 9pm at night?" There was an engagement ring inside. She always said she wanted it to be a suprise.

Over the years Stacey has continued to demonstrate a superhuman sense of compassion, understanding, patience, and fruit consumption. I marry her not because of what I want for me, it is what I want to be for her. Through her happiness I receive a feeling of completeness and happiness far greater than I can through any achievement of my own. I look forward to the challenges we may face together.

Book Review: Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

2007-10-02T09:12:00.000-07:00

This was a fantastic book, very educational. Think of this as the thinking man's version of fast food nation. If you want a deeper dive into where your food comes from, gain a better understanding of our vastly distorted agricultural free market, this is your book. 4.5/5, just don't waste time with the last 1/3 of the book, by then you have gotten the main point. As a reader, you have a right to not waste time on the 'drivel' portion the writer is forced to write to attain a certain page length. The first 2/3 of the book is filled with real data, real experiences, references to other literature to give a picture both of what things are like now and what they could be like.

I especially liked the education I was given on the grass farmers in Virginia and New Zealand and the distortions to the corn and meat economies. This book has moved me to look deeper into the origins of my food supply. Also digs into the marketing hype of the 'organic' food movement. Unocvers some of the inconsistencies in what you might think is going on vs. what is really going on when you purchase organic food. Stay raw, stay close to the source, know your farmer....perhaps unrealistic, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't aspire to a higher plane of existence.

Recommended as part of your educated consumer arsenal, 4.5 out of 5.