Green Festival, garden, chainsaw, work, babies, eve online... All things!

I always have a hard time to decide if I should write a title to a post before or after the post itself. In general I try to do it before to restrict the contents of the post, but what it does is that it ends up being out of sync with it. So today I decided to just add everything in the title and see what I can cover in the post. If some things are not mentioned, oh, well... Just know that they are important somehow to my current mental state.

Starting with yesterday: we went to the Green Festival mostly because we've received a free admission by shopping at PCC. It was interesting. There were about 4 types of groups represented: home improvements (solar panels and windows being the most common), green associations (like some sustainable neighborhood groups), organic/natural food sources (with lots of things to try - with an very large amount of teas, actually), and natural clothing/diapers/beauty stuff. There were also a few other things, like the Rachel Corrie Foundation with tasting of Palestinian olive oil and Za'atar (but they weren't there for the food).

In general, the festival wasn't terrible, but it wasn't that exciting either. Maybe it would have been better if we actually watched some of the talks. Just going around the people selling/advertising things you don't really get all that the festival was about.

Then today the day started with family things: talking with my parents, then talking with A's parents and then transformed into working at the garden and cutting down trees with a chainsaw (yes, I still have all my fingers - although it's not that easy to cut a finger with a chainsaw. It's easier to get a tree falling on your head, or things splintering into your eyes, or a chain breaking and flying to your arms, torso or legs. None of those things happened). Now the garden is a little bit more open, has two new trees, a rhubarb plant and I'm US$550 richer (through not being $550 poorer). There is still a lot to do, but we are slowly getting there.

Now going back to the past and considering my two new "projects" (not in many details. More details to go onto the other blog some day): a new recipe organizer project and EVE Online. A and I (where I is not an acronym) have decided to cook more often. What that means is that we plan recipes on the weekend and days each will be cooking. It's been interesting, but I feel like I can make the experience better.

First it still seems that we end up wasting food, because we try to diversify our meals and end up with ingredients that we have to buy in a larger quantity than we need for the recipe and don't use that in another recipe. Maybe if we were more aware of ingredients that would be left over, we could plan meals around those (if we could easily search for recipes by ingredient). Second, I would like to force more variety, especially on vegetables. Having something to make us aware of our imbalance might help on planning. Finally, I want to keep track of what we've tried and how it worked so that we can know what we can suggest to other people.

There are some websites out there with the ability to search by ingredients, to keep track of recipes and nutrition. However, they have two main problems: they are great for the recipes they have, but it's painful if you want to add recipes from different sources, like magazines. Also, in the nutrition side, they focus on calories/protein/carb/fat counting, and I don't think that this is what I want to track. What I want is to track things like grains, fruit, vegetables, etc. I don't mind much those nutrient counts.

Now onto EVE Online... Well, not much I can talk about this one that I haven't mentioned before. I'm still playing. Maybe 15 minutes to 1 hour every day or so. But I've reached the point where I was disappointed last time: one that your enemies get much better than you and you have to keep killing one or two and getting back to fix your ship. Then go back to it and slowly finish it. That's hard to do playing only at most 1 hour at night. So, we'll see...

I guess that's it. I was planning on going to a concert tonight, but spending the afternoon in the garden drained all the energy I had (ignoring the fact that the concert starts in 5 minutes and we finished the garden work for the day only half an hour ago and had to shower...). Now it's time to sit down and rest until dinner time.

Did I cover everything? Almost... I've skipped babies... That's just friends getting to the "having babies" period of their lives. It's exciting!

And that's the end of Battlestar Galactica

(don't worry, no spoilers here)

So I just came out of the final episode of Battlestar Galactica. I'm glad it's over. It wasn't a bad last episode, but it was a little long. Two hours of scenes that just didn't seem to finish. It's like the director knew that it was the end of it (or sort of - more on this later) and could make us bored. The series was good. Lots of people try to compare it to Babylon 5 as for the depth of the plot, but I think BSG was a little more linear, more focused on developing the characters than the story of old races just wanting to destroy the universe, while other old races don't want it to happen, but don't want to do much either.

In the end they both center around the human race and the evolution of it. That we have cycles, but we get better over time. And of course both of them have spaceships and space battles (although certainly BSG battles were much more intricate). It's actually interesting to watch again "old" series and see how much more effort has been put into realism and even acting.

What makes me sad is that it's not really over. They employ this "leftover energy" to just bank on it. Next month there is a new series starting, Caprica, from the same producers of BSG. It happens chronologically before BSG, which allows them with some opportunity to bring back the characters for a special appearance here and there.

But if this was not enough, they are also advertising for a new movie, Battlestar Galactica: The Plan, which is supposed to show the events of BSG in the eyes of the cylons. Give me a break... Just let it go and move onto new ideas! Don't do like Crusade, the spin-off from Babylon 5 that had some interesting ideas, but just didn't get anywhere and died after 13 episodes. Check the wikipedia page that I've linked above to see some information about the mess that happens in the series, including episode orders and chronological orders...

Alright, now that I was person number 1 million to post about the last episode of BSG, I can go and rest. Weekend ahead!

Blogging and reading and spending my time

Maybe it's because I'm an engineer, maybe because I have been working for "real" for some time, but one of the things that I spend a lot of time doing is paying attention to how I'm spending my time. Probably I do this to convince myself that I haven't done XYZ because I really didn't have time, and not that I was procrastinating. One of the things that I pay the most attention about is my time spending reading books.

As mentioned in more than one occasion before, because now my commute is much longer than it used to be, I'm now reading much more on the bus, which means that a larger piece of my day is spent on reading things. At the beginning I mostly read books, and was going through them in a rate of almost one a week (until I hit The Time or Our Singing, which was way too long to finish in a week).

But after some time, I felt like I had to spend more time better. So I decided to get a newspaper on my Kindle to read in the commute in the morning and leave the book only for the way back. I mentioned this already in the previous post that it didn't work quite well to do this morning-afternoon division, but I'm still sticking to it. Just going way slower through Tobias Buckell's Crystal Rain.

This weekend and early this week, though, I decided to add one more thing to my list of current reads. Something that was bothering me greatly that I had stopped devoting time to reading: scientific papers. But not only this, in the spirit of a previous post I'm actually planning on taking the time to play around with the algorithms, post about them (not on this blog or else I would lose the few visitors I still have to this blog), and maybe even start discussions with the authors. That last part I'm a little afraid to commit to, based on my history of taking months to reply to emails. But at least I think I should start something.

And that should have made me quite energized and excited, right? That's what I thought so, but I still haven't felt it. I'm still a little numb. It feels like I need some sort of big change in something I'm doing. I just don't know which kind of change yet. Maybe I'm spending way too much time looking at shoe sizes and considering how wrong it all is. My orderly brain is shutting down not to thing too much about why such a simple concept can be implemented in such a terrible way. For example:

* Who came up with the idea of making US shoe sizes go to size 13.5 and then wrap back up to 1?
* Why did Mexicans decide that 26 for a shoe size is too big, so some brands simply decided to drop the "2" and call it a number 6? And, yes, there is a second number 6 for kids.
* Why are women's and men's shoe sizes different for the same shoe in US, Australia, UK (although some brands don't make it different), and Japan (although also the difference is not everywhere) - probably there are others too?

I'm writing code that, given a set of locales, it spits out all possible sizes in global order from smallest to largest. Yes, global ordering is not technically possible, but approximate global ordering can be good enough. I thought that this task was going to take about a day and a half to be done, but I've been working on it for about 2 1/2 days now and, although it's close, it's not finished yet. I'm yet to build all possible variations on size combinations.

Alright, I think i've spent enough time on this post already. I should go to bed. For some reason I woke up last night at 5 AM feeling fully refreshed, which was odd considering that I went to bed at almost 2 AM. Maybe that's one of the reasons why I'm feeling extra numb today.

The confusion about taxes

Before you waste your time reading this, I have to warn you that I'm not an economist. My single class during college on economics for engineers cannot be considered background for what I'm about to discuss here, but I felt like it and, well, that's the beauty of self-publishing.

Anyway, now onto the point: I was reading an article on The New Yorker today:

NOT INSANE by Hendrik Hertzberg

The article discusses in general a controversy on how to give stimulus to the economy. He said that one of the latest suggestions by a group of republicans (that have to be contrary to the government - but that's reserved for a post on politics, which that's not the goal of this one) is to do a "payroll-tax holiday for a couple of years". In other words, not collect tax on salaries for some time, effectively increasing people's salaries.

The author then says that it's not a terrible idea, just not the best one and then suggests considering this later as a substitution for taxing things we don't want people to do, like carbon footprint, or using natural resources, polluting, etc.

It's an interesting thought. Tax what you don't want people to do, and not tax what you want to happen more often. Great alignment of incentives, right? Well, I quickly see four main problems with this:

1) It causes a shift on all finances: you make more money, but your cost of living also increases (as companies are now taxed more to produce things). In other words, automatic inflation. And what happens on a time of inflation spike? Everything that you've saved immediately loses value. You stop trusting savings, which increases the risk of the market and makes investments harder to happen.

2) It makes taxing more subjective: how to tell that my pollution should be taxed more than the other company's pollution? And I'm planting trees. Should I be getting some of my tax back even though it's hard to tell exactly how much a tree is offsetting my carbon footprint? It's very easy to get money out of money. It's all in one unit of measure.

3) Globalization: if you don't make the whole world adopt this, suddenly all your products become pretty much impossible to compete with foreign products. It's already hard because of the cheap labor in countries like China and India, now you add more taxes on the products. You can try to "fix" some of it by raising import taxes, but then you're going against the main conclusions of globalization: the competition and increased market of a globalized world is worth in the long term any cannibalization of local markets.

4) What about the things that are not tied to consuming? What about health care and social security? If you have a taxing plan that allows people to pay less taxes if they are smart, the income of the government will reduce over time instead of increase, which works against the needs for any first world country with populations that will keep aging and needing help. Yea, yea, we are talking about republicans that believe that public health and social security are a waste of government money and that people should be choosing what they want to do with their own health. I did consider this line of thought for a long time, but that goes against people's nature. I don't know how many times I've heard sick people deciding that it was better to just go to a pharmacy and pick up something that does not require prescription and get the wrong thing, just because going to a doctor was too much hassle. That's a sign of a broken system.

Anyway, as I said, who am I to have ideas about this? I'm sure those people that are proposing this had endless discussions with economists that built multiple models of the economy and believe that it does make sense in the medium or long term. It was an interesting article, nevertheless. I'm actually enjoying starting my week reading The New Yorker and skimming through the Wall Street Journal every morning. It's all because the Kindle 2 is a much better device for reading news.

The only problem with this is that I'm reading less books now. It takes me about 1 hour to go through the WSJ, which only leaves about 30-40 minutes of book reading every day. On Mondays that's usually taken by reading The New Yorker. So now I probably need to start reading when I'm at home too. So many things to do... But that should be the topic of another post some other day.

A Sunday

Today is Sunday. And I'm having a semi-lazy day. Baking bread (that I'm not sure is going to work very well, as it didn't grow that much overnight), watching Tim Berners-Lee's TED talk on Linked Data, and planning on giving EVE Online - Apocrypha a try. I tried EVE Online for some time last year and it was kind of fun. Last week they released their new major expansion that handled some of the things I was annoyed about, like having one skill being learned and when it's done you had to realize it and be online to add a new one to learn. Now there is a queue that apparently lasts for about 24 hours (you can set a list of skills to learn as long as they last one starts in less than 24 hours).

Other things I hope to do today: add one more feature to my "text brain" (if you don't know what it is, don't worry - neither do I, I just created the name), and play around some more with entity extractors (hopefully starting to use some of the APIs to see how they do). I hope the rain stops for a little (and it doesn't start snowing again) so that I can check the level of my oil tank (for the heater). I need more data points to have an idea how much oil I use for heating the house.

Anyway, long day ahead! Hopefully...

A link is required

I've been reading about Wolfram|Alpha on this article on TechCrunch. The article's author is certainly a little too excited about it (Nova Spivack, the guy behind twine), but I think there is something to his excitement. Most commenters don't get it at all. Every time they hear something about somebody building a product to answer questions on the web, they think that it's a bust. History taught us that it's very likely to be a bust. Why would Wolfram have it different?

This is not the blog to go in details about this, but I think that, like most projects out there, they will only learn by trying. And it's not like other startups that build something like this hoping that they would be bought before they have to actually make it useful, Wolfram is probably a little too big to be going this path. Also, they have a name. Not a huge name outside the scientific community, but it's a brand anyway. So, they need to be careful with what they release. (what a terrible reason to be hopeful about a product, I know...)

But back to a high-level personal opinion: I hope they show us something new and not just flashy answers to the questions they've trained on and nothing else (that people like me can find). I've seen too much of this on [true knowledge] and it drives me crazy. I'll eventually go back to my project on modeling knowledge. I've been away from it for way too long.

That's how violent Brazil is...

There is this uninteresting article on a man kidnapping an old lady near Brazil's capital (in Portuguese). So, if it's uninteresting, why am I sending a link to it? Well, because I found out about this article due to this Great review of the gun technology on Engadget.

The weekend

It's already Tuesday and only now I'm going to talk about the weekend, huh? Oh well, at least I convinced myself to post (to try to forget today and force myself to remember more interesting things).

So, last weekend I participated on Microsoft's Puzzle Hunt 12. It was an all-weekend event (which means that it starts at 10 AM on Saturday - I had to be there at 9 AM to set up my computer into the Microsoft network - and ends at 5 PM on Sunday) in which teams are given puzzles to solve and the team that wins is the first one that solves the final one, or the team that solves the most number of puzzles (technically, there were values for puzzles, so some puzzles were worth more than others). There were about 85 teams and my team was ranked 21st, which is not bad at all!

It was my first Puzzle Hunt, so I can't say that I did very well. Most of the puzzles don't really have instructions on what you have to do, just the knowledge that the answer is a word or short noun phrase. So, in order for you to do well, you have to get used to finding the patterns that suggest what kind of puzzle it is and how to solve it. For example, you look scrambled letters and if you see too many odd letters the first thing that should come to your mind is that it's gone through some sort of encryption.

Another important thing to learn is that they love to use pop culture (which I don't know much at all), so you have to look at a clue and quickly tie it to some pop culture reference to figure things out. Let me give an example:

All you have in your puzzle page is two columns of "equations" that one look like this:

26 = Z in W or MW

And the other looks like:

? = FKFFP

First you realize that it has some odd characters, so it must be going through some sort of encryption. Then, you have to realize that "W or MW" is in italics and could mean a name. Then you look at 26 and realize that it's the number of cases in the TV game show "Deal or No Deal". Finally you are able to tell that actually each capital letter is a word that starts with the decrypted letter. So:

Z => C
W => D
M => N

Then you'd have to apply that mapping that you learn on the first column onto the second column and figure out what phrase can be on the second column to fill out the ?s. Finally you reapply the decryption to what you find in the "?" (which were single letters) and find a question. The answer to the question is the answer to the puzzle (or something like that, I quickly realized I wasn't going to be able to answer this puzzle and let more abled people on my team deal with it).

It was certainly interesting. The people that organized it put a lot of work into it, including building a custom Halo level that was a puzzle by itself. Again, tiring (I didn't get any sleep all weekend long), but very interesting. I'll need to be more prepared if I decide to do it again in the future (if my team invites me again, as I was probably the person that answered the least number of puzzles on the whole team).

Another interesting perk that I got out of this experience was being in the Microsoft campus. It's very different in many ways to the Amazon buildings. First, it's a campus and not a spread of buildings around Seattle. Second, it has a lot of "empty space", while things are all quite "cozy" at Amazon. Third, their kitchen is way more well-equipped: with free soda and auto coffee maker (the one that you press a button and it makes coffee for you, instead of the one at work that somebody has to change the filter, put new grounds and brew new coffee). Chairs in the conference room were much more comfortable too (although we were on a VP conference room, so it's probably unfair to compare).

I don't really care about those things. I don't drink soda, I have times that I do drink coffee about once a day or so, but lately I've been buying and taking my own tea, so I don't even drink coffee any more. I like the fact that money that I'm helping Amazon make is not being spent on things that I don't really care to use. It's sort of the same way as living in your house and going to a hotel. The bed in the hotel can be more comfortable than yours, the TV might be bigger, the heater/air conditioning might work better, you have somebody to clean your room and make your bed every day, but it's not really a place you'd want to live. It just was build for a general guest and not for you.

Anyway, I guess that's the sum of my weekend. I've been a little introspective this evening, kind of bummed out because I didn't get much done today at work and ended the day with a 2-hour meeting to talk about plans of things to do that just made me realize that I'm completely confused about priorities and goals of the team. Maybe it's all a puzzle that I haven't figured out how to interpret yet. Next time I'll pay attention to all the words that people say while they are rubbing their nose and see if everything makes more sense this way.

An evening with Izzy

Sorry, I didn't really mean to call Itzhak Perlman "Izzy", but it sounded more interesting.

So, yes, today finally was the concert I was most excited about this season: Itzhak Perlman recital (well, it was the one I was most excited about because it's probably the only one that I really knew I was getting when I chose what I was going to watch). It was a violin and piano recital with Rohan De Silva at the piano (interesting name for a person born in Sri Lanka).

Well, it was quite amazing. But not life changing. Yes, Itzhak Perlman is funny and knows how to play the violin, but I felt that it was missing some emotional attachment with the public, between the musicians and on the pieces themselves. It really seemed like Mr. Perlman was running everything in auto-pilot and Mr. De Silva was just following along very competently.

Maybe it's all back to my inability to connect very well with music any more, but I was impressed but not moved. I left the concert hall a little disappointed.

One interesting thing, though, was the public. Seattle is a very politicized city, so the most common thing that people were talking about is that Itzhak Perlman played at the inauguration with Yo Yo Ma. I almost said: "so what? Who cares about who is playing at the inauguration? It's not that it's a venue where they present and criticize high art!" Anyway, I didn't...

Other things that I saw (and took notes):

* The huge diversity of people, from old-timers that probably followed Mr. Perlman's carrier since the beginning; to young people wearing jeans and eating protein bars inside the concert hall.
* People that really don't go to concerts, but were trying to impress their dates with a US$75/seat concert with a lot of useless and sometimes incorrect knowledge, like the incorrect way of pronouncing Sri Lanka.
* People amazed by a piano tuner in the intermission verifying and adjusting the tuning of the piano.

Anyway, I didn't want to make it not as exciting, but I am now suffering a little from the trivialization of a good experience by writing it out. Suddenly the things that I wasn't so excited about became so much more important than listening to one of the most important violinists of my lifetime (and my parent's lifetime).

We are what we want other people to see what we are

Today has been a reasonably slow day for me. I've started the day wrapping up performance reviews (mostly copy-and-pasting what I've written in an offline text document during Friday evening and Saturday) and then just hanging out thinking of how I can spend more money (or not) and what I learned with the process of writing performance reviews.

It's actually interesting to not only look back on your year and think what your accomplishments were, but also looking back on the year for multiple people (I had to review 11 this year). My conclusion from it is that it doesn't matter what you tried to do, it matters what you've delivered to production. In other words, if it's not out there for other people to see and criticize, it's not worth much.

Another example that made me think about it was a blog that I've come across very indirectly while browsing Twitter looking at people that randomly start following me (BTW, she was not the one that added me, but annbkeller:

Bookoftea's Journal: on... yes, tea! An interesting field to write about as there are probably as many tea drinkers as wine drinkers. It's hard to get numbers here, but I'll cite some:

• The wine industry in the USA was a 21 billion dollar industry in 2007 [source]
• While the tea industry is only a 6.8 billion dollar industry [source]
• 600 million gallons of wine are sold in the US each year. [source]
• While Americans drink 35 billion gallons of iced tea every year (if you consider that tea). [source]
• Apparently 90% of the tea consumption in the US comes from iced tea [source], so that means that Americans consume about 6 billion gallons of "non-iced tea" a year!

So it's a lot of tea and not so many people to really cover this.

Anyway, I don't plan on starting a tea review blog. But I'm getting to the conclusion that I have to plan to start something. Maybe I'll just stop reading so much and start writing something. Or maybe coding in the bus to work, working on my hundreds of data mining/structuring projects and blogging about what I think. Or even more easily, make sure that I post comments on people's blogs when I find them interesting, reply to discussions on the FreeBase data modeling mailing list, or just at least send emails to my friends or call them on their birthdays (I missed a very important one last week that I'm still angry with myself because of it).

And I'll rephrase myself to end this post:

It doesn't matter what you intend on doing: If you are not ready to take criticism, there is a red flag right there. Probably your time is better spent doing something else.

Always Welcome

Since I move to the new house I've been receiving regularly some sort of "welcome to the neighborhood" package with coupons or just advertising. Yesterday I've received another one. A puzzling one. The "introduction" said: "Please accept the enclosed gifts from neighborhood businesses who are anxious to meet you. [...]" Who are they?

Hollywood Video - ok
Ace Hardware - still ok
Dirctv - local?
Vonage - again, neighborhood?
Labels - (a company on Salem, VA that does cheap address labels)
Proactiv - acne product
Sheer cover - makeup
Gerber Life Insurance Company - in White Plains, NY

So out of the 7 ads/coupons that I've received, only two were from local companies. When I see those examples of bad advertising methods is when I realize why Google makes so much money. Their advertising tries to be more meaningful and not just "there is a new address in town, let's flood this person with all we've got - one might stick!". I'm sure something works, or else they wouldn't do it, but I wonder how much more effective it could be.

In general I believe that a world of easier information transfer should just kill those advertising models. What I think should win is something more in the lines of the "Progressive Auto Insurance" model: you need auto insurance, so come to our site and check out your options. One of the options is ours, but you can end up going somewhere else. You get the traffic, the customer-selected information of what they want so that you can better tailor your products to sell more, and you might even get referral money from some companies.

Die, junk mail, die!

Going back in time and realizing that some things were left behind

For some reason yesterday I decided to listen to some music and realized that I never actually transformed some of my CDs into MP3s, so there I went ripping all CDs that I found that I hadn't ripped before. And among those CDs I found a CD I've received from a cousin with a (not too official) recording from 2001's R.E.M. concert at Rock In Rio.

Of course as I've entered the CD, it didn't recognize any of the tracks so I had to enter all the information manually so that I could find things again after recording the MP3s. So I decided to challenge myself to remember the names of all the songs by only listening to them. It was more challenging than I was hoping (well, I should have imagined that, as I learned a long time ago that I can't trust my memory for anything). I got about 15 out of the 19 without help. These were the ones I couldn't remember the name:

* The Lifting
* Find the River
* At My Most Beautiful

And the only one I was really sad I couldn't remember:

* Pop Song 89

Oh, well... I probably wouldn't have remembered "So. Central Rain" if they hadn't announced the song name before they started playing it.

Now I should be working on performance reviews, but I've lost inspiration after about 15 minutes of it. Inspiration-hunting is time consuming.

Weekend driving

So this last weekend we went for the first time (well, actually it was the first time for me) to the Olympic Peninsula to relax and have some time away from all the work and home duties. It was nice, but a lot of driving. If you want to know what a lot means, well, here is an approximation of our trip:



It's pretty long, huh? Well, my car left with a little less than 2K miles on its odometer and came back with almost 2.5K. But I was quite happy with its fuel consumption. If I had enough courage, I could probably have done the whole trip in a single tank of gas. But I did put on gas when it was a little less than 1/4 left on the tank, 80 miles from home. On average about 32 miles a gallon, which is pretty impressive for driving in some mountainous roads and a 2.0 turbo engine.

If you are interested in pictures, you can check my SmugMug gallery. I'm impressed with myself for having it up this quickly. I knew that if I didn't put the time to get it out now it probably would take another couple of months until I would have enough energy to do it. And it would have forgotten a lot of details about why I decided to take some of those pictures.

So now I'm back to real life with a lot of things happening at the same time. So it's time to try to get some of those things done.

Finally another book done

I had convinced myself that I was going to stop to enumerate all the books that I read, but I guess I have to talk about this one. I have to do it because it was probably one of the books I had the hardest time to finish. Not because the story was bad, or it was difficult to read (I have given up reading books because of those reasons before), but it was because this book made me depressed. So before I continue on explaining why, I think I need to introduce the book, huh?

Richard Powers's: The Time of our Singing

It's a great work of literature. A very captivating and feels very realistic. So, is reality what made me depressed? Actually, that's not incorrect. If I sit down with my psychologist (which I don't have) and talk about it, I think I can distill down to three sources for my annoyance:

1) A good part of the story describes the struggle that was being African-American in the early to late 20th century in the US. Lots of things going wrong, lots of hurt people, lots of people with no perspectives of going anywhere in their lives. Not only this, it depicts the "white society"'s disgust towards them. I was never able to understand this type of behavior towards people. Yes, it's natural to be afraid of the people you don't know. It's expected that you should be worried about people that fit your mental profile of being dangerous (like people that walk on the streets with guns), but being disgusted by their presence? Why?
2) The story goes around a family of a physicist and a former singer that have kids that they teach music from very young and music becomes a part of their being. They can think and communicate using music. I think I envied that ability. I've been struggling a lot lately about my relationship with music and the book was making me remember that some time in my life I used to be able to read much more into music than I am right now.
3) The main protagonist of the book is a middle brother, Joseph. His job throughout the book (and hoping I won't spoil much of it by saying this) is to go and be there for for his family. He ends up having no real life of his own (except for things that I won't mention here), never graduating from college, never marrying, never really having the career that he trained all his life for. But he is there for his family and that is what keeps them from completely collapsing. I'm the middle brother and where am I? I don't even reply to emails...

So now you see why I'm very glad that this is over. I've been very stressed at work lately. And arriving to work depressed due to reading this book was not helping at all! Now I need my next book to be something simple and uplifting. Haven't decided what yet. I have until 3 AM tonight to figure it out, as I'll be awake babysitting a process that has to run successfully tonight or else I'll be in big trouble trying to deliver a project by Friday and having the weekend to celebrate.

People with some time in their hands - great!

So I was randomly watching an episode of Wine Library TV and Gary Vaynerchuk had a visitor that owned Freezer Burns. What is this site? Well, it is a video blog of some person, Gregory Ng, trying frozen meals and providing his review on them. Have you ever seen a wine tasting video (especially from very excited people, like Gary Vaynerchuk)? Well, think of the same thing being applied to frozen food. He even sniffs the food and tries to explain what he is smelling.

All and all, I think it's awesome that somebody is putting the time and providing real information about things for people freely. The frozen food world is much smaller and slower-moving than the wine world, so we probably won't see much competition coming in this line of work. Also, I'm not sure how long he can sustain this show. He is already at episode 54 with only a few months of work. So maybe I should visit the frozen food aisle more often and realize how diverse and changing it is.

I wished more people did things like this. I actually thought of doing a series of side-by-side comparisons of products. Probably I would never make a video blog about it because I'm not very good at talking to people, but I always thought that being able to compare things side-by-side is the best way of deciding what is better for your application. What review places like Consumer Reports is missing is the details of what their rates actually mean. Also, their bandwidth is quite limited and they try to cover a lot of different types of products. In the end, they are always behind on the latest versions of things (especially consumer electronics that change very quickly), so by not knowing what they actually think is important, you can't extrapolate their ratings to the newer models.

Other review places, like Amazon, provide reviews that vary too much on completeness and objectivity. Yes, everything is subjective, but if you don't know what a same person thinks about their experience in all the products you are considering buying, it's hard to make a very well informed decision.

So, go Gregory Ng!

The music of random harmony

So, as I mentioned on my previous post, this morning I had a choir presentation during the morning services at Congregation Beth Shalom. It went alright. We sang a few pieces in place of the Rabbi's sermon. But this was not the interesting thing of the event (at least for me). On preparation for the day, the person that was organizing the event said: "One of the hidden goals for this event is to make people realize how nice it is when the congregation harmonizes with the cantor. So, you choir singers, harmonize!"

Before I explain what happened I have to point out that very few people in the choir actually have any background in formal music theory. But most had experience singing and think that they can sing well. So, what was the result: people did their best to harmonize with the music by themselves. Even when they didn't know the melody at all.

Oh, I'm to blame for it too! I actually do that all the time during services. It's a fun experiment but I usually do it quietly, mostly singing to myself. This time people were doing it loudly enough to rival the cantor. And I stayed back and tried to listen to what was coming out of it. It was awesome! There were interesting rules to it: people were looking for thirds and fifths, playing around with basic counterpoint rules, like working with contrary and oblique motion, and sometimes just enjoying the bottom of their range (especially Basses).

What was interesting was the combination of it all: a wall of sound that was mostly harmonious, but generally purposeless. I wished I had good enough music ability and memory to write things down. It would have been an interesting study of harmony and the ability for humans to perceive chords.

I was briefly talking to one of the singers after services. I mentioned to him my observation and he said that part of it was based on people's musical background on their interpretation of the harmony. That some people might be thinking of a minor chord while other people would be thinking of a major chord.

I didn't hear any of this type of confusion. Mostly what I heard was people mixing scale modifications. Like some people using the harmonic minor, while other people doing a plain minor scale, or a melodic minor scale. Added to general mistakes from people without enough singing knowledge/experience, that's where the dissonance would come from. As I said, the actual problem was that there was no purpose to the counterpoint. Each person was doing their own and you just got all the notes all the time, instead of movement.

Anyway, I've spent way too much time trying to convey this experience in words. Maybe one day I'll put enough time on my music studies to be able to transcribe what I heard and make people listen to it and get their own conclusions. Now it's time for me to move onto something else. I'll hopefully find out what before it's too late.

New changes - giving DISQUS a try

I decided to enable DISQUS on my blog. It's not that it will make much difference in general as I have very few people that actually comment on my posts, but I decided that it was worth the test. Hopefully it's something that works. Today, after my choir "concert" this morning (it was a short participation during Shabbat morning services at Beth Shalom - more on this on another post), nothing really worked out for the rest of the day. I tried to go back to my research project, but my computer decided to become unstable and froze a couple of times. I should be coding on my Mac and not on my Windows box...

Anyway, I think right now I should start thinking about dinner. Then I'll come back and post about the choir event this morning.

Another concert evening...

It's interesting that most times that I come back from a Seattle Symphony concert I get kind of introspective, thinking about life and what my priorities are. But what worries me the most is not that this happens on my way back home and when I try to sleep, but that it happens during the concert and I completely space out. It's like I've lost the ability to keep enough of an attention span to watch a concert! Shouldn't surprise me, as "modern life" is just like that: you need to keep busy because there are too many things to do, too many things to learn. But is this that life we should be living?

Well, I won't try to answer this question here. It's probably not a question that can be easily answered. There are lots of factors involved, like the cost of success and the benefit of it. It goes back to the fact that most of the cheap hotel/motel business in the US is owned by Indians, Mexicans and Middle Easterns. It's hard work and they can do it, so they take the business. It's that simple. So if you want quality of life you automatically close some of your options in life.

Maybe having less options is good, though. Completely changing subjects here, I decided some time ago to move around on RSS readers (My last post on the subject) and moved away from online readers to using RSSOwl. There are some interesting features about it and I was starting not to miss being able to read the same stream anywhere I was until today when it decided to do a database cleanup and... Lost most of my feeds for some reason. And now I have to subscribe to everything again! I guess I'm going back to online readers. At least their bugs are less destructive (at least as far as I know). If I had less options at least I would spend less time adapting to a new reader and moving all my feeds from one reader to another (well, this time I don't have to as I've lost 90% of them).

House depreciation in Seattle

I came across this odd map posted by Zillow:

Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA MSA - Map of Real Estate Market Year over Year Home Price Appreciation



The areas are not that interesting, besides saying that Bellevue got hit with over 13% depreciation, which is pretty big (and my house is in the tip of the area that only was down 0-11%). What I found interesting is the ranges:

<0% (appreciation)
0-11%
11%-13%
>13%

Note the 2 percentage point range of the blue region. Seems too arbitrary... Fishy...

Causality and statistics

One of the first things that people learn when they start taking statistics seriously is that most of the statistical studies out there are completely meaningless (or as some people might put it, 87.2% +- 0.5% of them - sorry, couldn't resist). The reason they are meaningless is that they try to conclude causality without actually having any methodology to do so. The example that triggered me to think about it was on a Brazilian newspaper:

Ficar muito tempo na frente da TV e do computador aumenta depressão - Staying for too long in front of the TV or computer increases depression. The problem with this story is that there is certainly a causality that goes on the other way: people that are depressed have the tendency of isolating themselves from social contact and end up staying in front of their TV and computers more often.

Then they try to prove causality by using time as a causal agent: they look at adolescents that watch too much TV or stay too much in front of their computers and then check how many of them end up more depressed. Then they start trying to explain it by saying that if they interact more with people it makes them less likely to be depressed. However, if they are already spending too much time in front of computers and TV when they are young, maybe it's because they don't have engaged parents that provide them with more things to do. And that could be very well be a much more important source for depression (lack of stability at home) and watching too much TV and staying too long at the computer are just a measurable side-effect.

Actually, those types of news are what make me depressed. And I read them because I read things on the internet. If I didn't spend this much time on the internet I wouldn't be depressed. So there you have the causal connection!

Google is harmful problem

Just as an update on the post that I've written a few days ago: it was apparently a glitch on all Google's results:

Oops! Google glitch highlights users' dependence

It does point out that the more people only use one system, the more dangerous it will be if this system starts having problems. And amazingly enough, it's very easy for software systems to have problems (it tends to have more "moving parts" than non-software systems - although I always find bogus the idea of being able to explain software engineering using terms from mechanical or civil engineering).

Anyway, I won't say much more than what the article already says. Errors happen and Google was there to fix the error as quickly as they could.

A month of spam

So my month of analyzing how well the spam detectors for gmail, Yahoo mail and Hotmail work. The results are a little hard to interpret, but they are interesting anyway. Before you look a the table, here is some nomenclature:

True negatives: Email that I've received on that account that was not classified as spam and was not spam
True positives: Email that I've received on that account that was correctly classified as spam
False positives:Email that was classified as spam but were not spam
False negatives:Email that was spam but was not classified as spam

Provider	True negatives	True positives	False positives	False negatives
Gmail	251	555	6	2
Yahoo	72	71	1	31
Hotmail	20	25	1	2

So, what is the conclusion? Well, first that Yahoo's spam classifier isn't very good in catching spam. About 1/3 of the spam that I've received ended up on my inbox. And only one real email ended up in the spam folder (which is statistically the same as gmail or hotmail). Gmail seems to do a very good job at classifying spam, but it does seem to err more on throwing things on my spam folder than letting spam pass into my inbox, and that does annoy me a lot. As you can see, it's the account I use the most and receive the most amount of spam. If I don't check spam for a couple of days sometimes it's hard to sift through 70 spam emails to find one non-spam there. Unfortunately I don't have much to talk about hotmail because that account is mostly dead.

Other things we can say about this? Well, we can look at any date trends on spam. Do they happen more often on weekdays or weekends? (unfortunately my data is not split by time - the date on the email many times doesn't make much sense and I haven't checked my emails often enough to annotate time) Let's look only at gmail where there was enough data to make it interesting:

Sunday	56
Monday	94
Tuesday	70
Wednesday	76
Thursday	106
Friday	87
Saturday	66

Or as a graph:



I wished there was much there to show. Probably I'll need to look for longer than a month to get a better trend there. Look at the raw data day-by-day in the month for gmail:



Two of the spikes you see are Mondays and one is Thursday. The interesting trend that I've seen right now is that it seems like I'm getting significantly less spam in the last few days. Let's see if this trend continues.

Well, I guess that's it. It was fun! I should do things like this more often. Now it's time to start my day.

The danger of algorithms

Sometimes it's very easy to make algorithms that have very odd side-effect. Especially when doing data analysis and classification. I remember when I used to work on classification the amount of crazy things that my algorithm did, like calling a "3 Person Extra-Comfortable Couch - Mango" a Mango (the fruit). So this picture posted by newobj was great:



First time I tried it was already fixed, so probably didn't last very long. But it's easy to see why Google could classify itself as a harmful site: it dynamically links to all sorts of different places, including harmful sites. It's reasonable to believe that if a site has a very low proportion of harmful things, but still has some it might be classified as harmful. So, if they don't remember to filter out content-less search engines they will always end up saying that Google or any other search engine, is dangerous to you.

Maybe the solution is to just stop using them and only work on controlled sources like Wikipedia or Mahalo or Twine or any of the other million of sites and products out there that try to provide you with the ability to discover things in a more human-controlled fashion.

I do believe that that's part of the future of the web (and you can claim that since the early stages of Yahoo it has been the past of the web too): a sea of information with personalized filters. The personalized filter is aware of your social network (i.e., it trusts information approved by your friends more than the information approved by complete strangers) and your current state (I'm on my cellphone in a city I've never been before searching for "gas station" should be very straight-forward what to return). Little by little hardware and software are converging there.

And there I went in a complete tangent from my original post. Probably I just don't want to do what I need to do: work. But today is my only real chance. Tomorrow I have a superbowl party which will consume most of the day.

Magic Berry tasting and everything else is just that - everything else

So today I was able to participate on an interesting event: Magic Berry Tasting (also known as Miracle Fruit). It's a little berry that basically turn all acidic things sweet. So you can eat a lemon and it tastes like an orange. Very interesting experience. Not life-changing, but interesting nevertheless. In my opinion, the weirdest things that I've tried were:

• Lemon: as I've mentioned, it tastes like orange
• Guiness (yes the beer): it loses all its sour components and has some hints of chocolate and coffee.

As I said, in general it wasn't life-changing. Most things just tasted more ripe, sweeter and without the normal after-tastes. Quite worth the experience, though.

And now I have to get back to life. I've been having problems finishing a project at work. I have most things done, I just don't seem to like the way I did them, so I'm slowly rewriting everything instead of just walking away. And this has been driving me crazy. And this week is quite busy with a lot of evening events, which always makes it harder.

Oh, and I received a curious link today that I'm still not sure what to do about it. It's about a set of challenges launched by one of the most important molecular gastronomy blogs, Khymos: TGRWT (They Go Really Well Together). Somebody comes up with two odd ingredients and people have to suggest recipes that bring those ingredients together. This month's challenge is Malt & Soy Sauce, which is a very curious combination.

The month is almost over, so I won't try to do anything about it. I'll wait until next month and consider it. Probably I should start challenging my culinary abilities more often. Prove to myself once more tha I don't really know how to cook. I just know how to fake well. :-)

My life in pictures

Sorry, the title is not really right. I just wanted to post a couple of pictures to represent last's post. First with small things that remind me that I now own a house and have to care for it... My first damage:



Snow fell on it and it couldn't handle the weight. Not that I really liked it, but it was a good example of what is to own a house.

Now for my cheese. Before waxing:



After waxing:



More on this in 3 months when I'll give it a try. Hopefully I've waxed it enough so that it won't become a blue cheese.

No new books this week

This is the first week I haven't finished a book this year. Quite amazing! Part of the reason is that I'm reading Richard Powers's "The Time of our Singing", which is a 600+ page book. That will take me some time. I've also been reading the news in the morning and listening to more podcasts. The most interesting one that I've read was:

Daniel Tunkelang talks about Endeca, Search, and ‘Reconsidering Relevance’ from Talis's Nodalities.

It's an interesting interview that discusses things that I can relate more than the usual discussions about SaaS and linked data. As this is not my technical blog, I won't get much into why I found this interesting. Eventually I'll write some notes about it.

Things at work have been a little stressful lately. And it's not really because of work itself, but mostly because I have been a little unfocused. Maybe it's the new house, maybe it's because I'll have visitors in town this weekend, maybe it's because the cleaning people killed my lucky bamboo this week, or maybe it's just the moon, I don't know. I just hope it will go away soon.

What else can I talk about my week here? Well, last weekend I decided to finally do an actual hard cheese. I chose one of the easier ones to start with: cheddar. Last Saturday to Sunday I did the whole preparing the curds, cutting them, heating, and pressing. This week it was drying and today I applied cheese wax to seal it from mold and let it age for at least a couple of months. The trick now is that, without any experience, when will I decide to open it?

Also in two months I should open one of my bottles of plum wine to try. I tried a little when it came out of the clearing up process and it was alright... Won't win any prizes. I've been thinking of starting a new batch of something, but I'm not sure what yet. It's not that hard, it's just such delayed gratification and moderate risk that is tough to be very excited about it. And I think I do need some excitement in my life right now. Just too many things to be worried about that I feel I don't have full control over. Like my poor lucky bamboo.

Fun bus experience to start the day

I was running a little late today (too many things to do this morning and I was only able to do 1/3 of them) and got to the bus stop about a minute after my bus (74) was supposed to show up. Another person that takes the same bus as I do was at the stop too, so I thought I was safe. A minute after that the bus that comes after my bus (75, and does not take me to work) arrives. We ask the bus driver if our bus is late and he doesn't know and says that some buses are not running today (it's Martin Luther King day). So we take the 75 that should take us to a hub where many buses that go to downtown stop. I was convinced that my bus was a little early and that's why we both missed it.

So we get to the other stop and stand there and wait for the next bus to get to downtown. Two show up that take the slow route and I decide not to take them (the other confused person that took the 75 with me go onto one of those buses). Then, after about 10 minutes waiting the 74 shows up! It was late and not early and it takes a slower route to this hub. So I end up getting to work about 5 minutes later than usual.

With all this experience what I learned is something dangerous: I can be a little late, get the 75 and still be able to catch the 74 later in the bus line. The only trick about it is that usually the 74 is full at the time it gets to the hub (not today because of the holiday), so it's not something I would want to do every day, but good (or bad) to know that I have this option.

Oh, and you might be asking: if it's a holiday, what are you doing going to work? Well, in order to "help" businesses, the US government does not impose any holidays onto companies. So companies pick and choose what holidays to give to their employees. Amazon didn't choose MLK as one of these holidays. And it's not that unusual for this holiday to be one of the ones that are ignored by companies.

Two more books for the year

I'm quickly running out of books to read, I guess. Last week I decided to read something completely random, which ended up being Jim Butcher's Storm Front. Why this book? Well, I was reading on random things, which ended up taking me to an old series that died some time ago, The Dresden Files. Which reminded me that it actually came from a book series. I kind of enjoyed the TV series (although I wasn't very sad when it was gone), so I decided to read the first book of the series. It was mildly entertaining, but probably not enough for me to read more on the series.

That was last week. This week I decided to start reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success. I just finished it on my ride back home today. The book makes very interesting points on why people become successful. The core concept is that everything counts. You can't become successful just based on intelligence, or school, or social background, or cultural background, or luck. You become successful because of the combination of some or all those factors.

I won't get more into the book, as I won't be able to do justice to all the things that he talks about. What is a little depressing about the book is that it sort of shows that unless you focused on something from early on in your life, you'll very likely never be successful. That means that "moving downstream" is not likely going to be a success story. Oh, well...

An Excel guy playing with Apple's Numbers

I've done a lot of Excel in my life, and still do. I can't say I'm very proud of it, but I have to admit that it's one of the most powerful tools that "normal people" seem to use.

Well, so Apple decided that one of their big Macworld Expo keynote announcement was their new version of iWork, their Office competitor. So I decided to give it a try and see what I thought of it.

As expected, installation is easy and startup is straight-forward. It starts with template choices, which was a surprise for me. I know that pretty much all the office suites have templates, but I think I have repeatedly tried to use them and never found any template that was really helpful to me, so I gave up on them a long time ago. Well, Numbers still has them. And they look pretty with odd things like Home Inventory, Baby Record and even Garden Journal.

But I kept to my normal experience and chose a blank file.

The next thing I notice is that by default it is highlighting the top row and the leftmost column, as if to notice that they should be used in a special way. Excel offers that also, but it's not the default behavior.

Another thing that struck me at first was the ability to add tables to a table. Not only a simple table, but a pre-formatted table, like a checklist or one that already contains the sum calculation in the bottom. And it can go into the same sheet, embedded under the current table.

I found that concept very interesting. Many times I did want to have one sheet, but multiple different pieces of information with different formatting. Many times I wished Excel had this feature and you didn't have to keep adding new sheets or putting everything in long set of columns.

I didn't spend too much time using it, so the only other thing I have to say is that it does have a lot less options than Excel. This could be a very good thing though. People never know even 20% of what Excel can do for them. And when they do, many end up spending a lot of time trying to understand how to do it. For example, what the parameters of v-lookup mean, how to get pivot tables correct, and so on. I can't tell yet if they've removed too much stuff from it to be useless.

I'll continue giving it a try. I have another 29 days left.

And I might eventually look at the other things you get on the suite, like Keynote and Pages, and post something about them. Now it's time to follow X's suggestion and go to sleep. It's barely 12:30, so that's certainly better to check if his way of coping with it works for me too.

8 years in the US

This would have been a much better subject for my 400th post, huh? Well, unfortunately I'm not sure I have much insightful to talk about this one. Most of it has been the theme of this blog: "moving downstream". Just going with the flow, towards the path of least resistance. Yes, you might find a waterfall here and there. But the path seems never to really branch out. Only other paths join in and become one big way... downstream.

It's probably a little too late also to have deep thoughts about this. Lately I've been busy and stressed. Lots of things just don't seem right. Projects are just not complete, ideas flow around and don't get much attention, and new things keep piling up on top of the incomplete things.

For example, I've set up my office here. I have both my computers on, chair, but it's missing my printer, there are still some stacks of papers that I haven't figured out where I'm going to store them, things are inside my drawers, but still wrapped up. It's mostly functional, but just not finished. I have 5 email drafts that I can't seem to finish and send them to friend. Projects at work are almost at the same state. And my mind keeps trying to convince me to do something new. Probably is some escapist need to keep me away from my weaknesses.

At least I'm blogging and being able to finish my posts. So, changing subjects back to the original intent of the post, thanks US for the last 8 years. They were comfortable.

Spam day today, huh?

This month I decided to aggregate some statistics about spam detection on all my mailing systems (i.e. how many false positives/negatives I get on Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail). So I'm building this spreadsheet with how many spam messages I get a day on each of those services. With this amount of visibility, it's interesting to see some odd patterns. Like, for example, today I received so far roughly double the average spam I receive a day (which is around 17 messages - today I'm at 33 and the day is not over yet).

What have I found so far besides that? Well, I can't really tell. I receive way too much spam on my gmail account and very little on my other accounts. So I don't have any statistically significant numbers on the other accounts. Current numbers are:

Gmail:
True positives: 159
False positives: 1
False negatives: 0

Hotmail:
True positives: 3
False positives: 0
False negatives: 1

Yahoo:
True positives: 25
False positives: 0
False negatives: 1

If I was not statistically inclined, I would say that, as I was expecting, gmail seems to err on the side of classifying things are spam when they are not spam, which was the biggest problems on early spam detection systems (which had a much higher false positive number than the 0.6% that I'm seeing here). Hotmail and Yahoo learned with this bad experience and decided to miss more spam messages in order for people to be able to use the "empty" button to get rid of all their spam messages without having to go through each of them.

But, as I am "statistically inclined", I'm not going to conclude anything yet and just wait until I have more evidence.

Oh, yes, and this is my 400th post. Interesting number. This blog has been alive for 4 years and 3 months, approximately. My previous blog that lived for 3 years and 8 months had 1,049 posts. Just a small difference, huh?

Half an hour is a long time!

Warning: this is probably going to be a very boring post about routine change.

Since the move, almost two weeks ago, I had to change my morning schedule. My bus ride is longer, so in order to get to work at about the same time as before (between 8 and 8:30 AM) now I have to leave half hour earlier. I decided not to wake up 30 minutes earlier (which is good as lately I haven't been able to convince me to go to bed before 1:30 AM), so I end up having 30 minutes less at home in the morning (which are now spent in the bus). It's odd how hard it's been for me to adapt to it!

In the past, my morning routine used to be:

• Wake up
• Check emails
• Check favorite blogs
• Read news
• Shower
• Have breakfast
• Reply to one or two emails (only the time-sensitive ones, usually from my family)
  
• Read more news
• Leave for the bus listening to a podcast
• Listen to podcast in the bus (except for towards the end of some weeks that I ran out of podcasts to listen to and I would either listen to music or an audiobook)

Now my routine (if a week of doing something can be called a routine) has been:

• Wake up
• Check emails
• Shower
• Have breakfast
• Check favorite blogs
• Leave for the bus listening to a podcast
• Sit on the bus reading a book

It's a lot of things that were cut out of my morning. When I get back home, I do try to check news, but that makes my evening way longer and less productive (that's part of the reason why I haven't been able to force myself to go to bed before 1:30 AM - I have to feel like I did something productive at home). I tried to read the news on the bus using my Kindle yesterday and today, but it's just not the same thing. "Normal" news have been quite boring for some time. The economy, and Obama setting up his people, and now the Israel-Gaza conflict (which is depressing, not boring at all). And I miss the ability to navigate through news to get more information on things that seemed interesting to me.

Well, I probably need to revisit my plans. Maybe I'll reconsider setting my alarm to wake me up earlier. Or maybe buy a tablet PC with a 3G wireless card so that I can do my news reading with browsing on the bus (no, not an iPhone, or equivalent - the screen is too small for my taste). Or maybe I just need to get used to it and reorganize my evening around it. I've been arriving home earlier (because there are no good buses to get me home that leave work after 6:20 pm)...

Anyway, I said this was going to be a boring post. I'm not sure why I wrote it... And now that I did it, I can't convince myself not to publish it. Oh, well, maybe this will force me to post something better soon to compensate for my personal ramblings. Now onto work!

The first book of 2009

It's kind of cheating to say that I've finished my first book in 2009 today, considering that I've read most of it in 2008 (actually I read 80% of it this week - the joy of longer bus rides), but, well, I'll add to the list anyway.

So, to the book: Firstborn

It's actually the third and last book of the "A Time Odyssey" series, and I thought it was the most interesting of them. Events happen in a much more exciting pace. I bought the series when I heard that Arthur C. Clarke passed away. I was in the bus going to work and bought all the books on my Kindle. Later I found out that I had already bought the hardcover version of the books... Oh, well..

It was a good series. Not Arthur C. Clarke's or Stephen Baxter's best, but quite good anyway. I'm not sure how much I can say without spoiling it for people, but the whole idea of it is this fight with a race of highly advanced beings that seem to not really care about other life forms in the universe. There is no real interaction with this race, just a struggle for the human race to keep alive.

What is next on my list? Well, I'm still reading João Ubaldo Ribeiro's "Viva o povo brasileiro", a 600+-page tome of Brazilian literature. Tough and rewarding read. It's actually interesting to read it and realize how much different it is to read works of literature in Portuguese to English. Not that I'm calling "Firstborn" a work of great literary depth - it wasn't meant to be that way. I'm not drawing the comparison to it, but to the more general English-language literature, like Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing.

In any way, the Brazilian/Portuguese literature that I miss is much more psychological and, in many ways, metaphorical. Time goes by slowly as the author takes time on the characters' reactions to what is going on more than the event itself. Sometimes you can't even really tell what is going on as it's so small compared to the world inside the mind of the protagonist that draws relationships to other events on their lives or world events and, more disturbingly, keeps replacing the current events to things in their past in a form of "internal metaphor" that you have to keep following in order to understand the book. As I said, tough but rewarding.

And I think that's the main things I have on my list right now. I did buy Malcom Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success, but I'm not sure I want to read it right now. We'll see what surprises I'll find once I finish unpacking and organizing my books back onto my shelves.

Happy new year

It's 2009. Kind of shocking how quickly all those years in this new decade/century/millennium are going. But, well, many things have happened on those years, so it's not that I'm just realizing that I haven't accomplished anything. But I'm not sure I can say the same thing about last year.

Anyway, let's start with the obvious: Happy New Year to all my readers. There aren't many of you out there, I know, but it's not what is important.

So, what are my plans for this blog for this new year? I'm actually not so sure yet. I still have plans of keeping a personal (this) and a technical blog separate. But maybe I'll finally work on my homepage and migrate both blogs there. It's been on my plans for the last year, but didn't get even close to doing anything about it. I think most of it is because I want too many things on that homepage. Things like:

• Research interest/links to my papers: not that hard as I have stopped writing papers some time ago
• Technical interest/links to my project designs/alpha implementations: this is a little trickier, because I'm not sure how many of my projects I actually really have a consumable design or implementation. But that's where my other blog would be linked
• Aggregation of my pictures: that right now are mostly on SmugMug
• This blog
• A twitter-like feed of interesting links: It's what I'm trying to accomplish with the FriendFeed side bar, but the current way I find hard to really navigate

It's a good amount of things and integration with things. Especially when getting to my projects up somewhere and running.

Anyway, I also know that a good part of this year is going to be devoted to the new house. The list of things that might need some work is getting long. I'm planning on not starting on anything until I have enough experience with the house and weed out things I want changed not because they are unusable, but because I'm used to something different from my previous houses/apartments. But I'm sure that there will still be a lot of things to do. And right now my goal should be finishing setting up my office, which right now is a sea of boxes with a small island of my chair and a small part of my desk, where I'm sitting and writing this post. It's actually quite impressive how many books and magazines I've collected in the last 8 years. I came to the US with pretty much no books. But now I have a Kindle and the speed of my book collection growth might slow down a little. Hopefully.

Alright, time to start the work today. Happy new year again and wishes to a wonderful year, full of accomplishments, to everybody.

Economic crisis or just newspapers doing what they like most: create fear?

I was reading this article on BBC today: Chinese warned off lavish gifts. It talks about how the Chinese government said it's forbidding Chinese officials to buy expensive gifts for Chinese new year. They claim that this is because of the difficult state of the Chinese economy due to the world crisis.

If you stop reading the article at this point, like most people do, they will end up with the idea that the Chinese government is really worried about the state of the Chinese economy and is telling people not to spend too much money. Then, if you read further you find:

[...] Each year too the Communist Party exhorts its officials to avoid conspicuous consumption. [...]

Which might be the only actual note that the Chinese government sent. The same it sends every year. But then reporters took this as being a sign of impending doom. If Chinese officials are asked not to spend all their bribery money on their "friends", it means that something really bad is going on. With all the things that the economy is doing, that has to be the cause! And people should be warned of it. No more parties, no more happy Chinese. No more happy Chinese, worst quality at the Wal-Mart stores. Lower quality on Wal-Mart, lower quality on most US households (because people won't stop buying - it's so inexpensive). Lower quality of products in US households, higher chance of accidents. More accidents, more medical bills. More medical bills, more unhappy citizens. More unhappy citizens, more stories to put in the newspaper. So it must be true! Q.E.D.

Living in the new house, and tired

So my life has been centered on the big move lately. Nights were spent putting things in boxes, except for when my father was in town. Not that I could do much more, as we had a freak snow storm in Seattle that kept us stuck at home for days. But now everything is much better.

Anyway, back to the move: it was supposed to happen on Friday, but got postponed on Friday morning by the moving people because they couldn't get their trucks out because of the snow. But we had everything ready. The bed was in pieces, all clothes were packed. So we decided to just take the air mattress and move anyway. And I was working on Friday, which worked out ok, because once we got to the house we didn't have anything else to do. So I was able to get good work done in the evening and this morning.

The house is doing well. As I start to live in it I end up finding a lot of small things that could be improved, but it's how it goes. It feels kind of odd that I now can do things with the house and when I see blogs that point to gadgets for the house, I can actually pay attention to them. Very time-consuming and potentially harmful to the wallet. But I have been good so far in trying to organize things and prioritize.

Tomorrow is finally going to be the real moving date (I hope), so it's waking up early and going to the old house, making sure everything is ready to go, being bored waiting for them to pack their truck, come to this house and direct traffic to make sure I don't have to haul furniture around the house once the movers are gone.

After that it's putting everything in the right places and start to plan the new year's party that will happen here on Wednesday. Mostly I have to have the kitchen ready enough to cook and then start to think of what I'm going to cook this year. The theme is "something new", so it has to be something I haven't tried before.

Oh, there was one problem with the house because of the snow: it had an awning in the back that didn't survive the weight of the snow and collapsed. Fortunately it didn't damage anything too much on its way down. I just will probably need a new cover of some sorts in the back to protect my grill when it arrives tomorrow.

Alright, enough about this. Time to go to sleep as I probably will have a long day ahead. Moving is very painful.

The great things of 24h chat support

So I've had my problems with Quicken for some time. Tonight I was feeling "lucky" and decided to contact their 24 hour chat support and see if I could get it to work. The short story is that it's now working again! The longer story is that it took almost 30 minutes and I was the one that actually found the solution to the problem (as a variation to a step that the support person kept asking me to repeat in different contexts). The program even crashed once while we were going through the steps. But the important thing is that it's working now and I would never have been able to get it to work if it had one of the "classic" support systems that would only be open during business hours. I'm rarely in front of my home computer during business hours!

Now it's done and I can drop again Mint.com and Microsoft Money.

Adding things

So I finally decided to try and understand Blogger's plugins and make my blog a little more of a destination for people to see what is going on with me. So I've added a feed view of FriendFeed. So now people can see every time I post on this blog by looking on the right side of the blog, instead of having to look at the main column. Brilliant, isn't it?

Actually my FriendFeed contains much more than this blog. It contains my Twitter, delicious, Google Reader (which I don't use any more), LibraryThing (which I also don't use - I use Shelfari and I've just added a widget to show what I'm reading), LinkedIn, Facebook and Netflix (which I also don't use any more). So you can see what I'm doing in many different angles, isn't it weird?

Distracted

Today was getting poor day and after that I was working from home (not to have to take a bus downtown and waste an hour commuting, as I didn't have any meetings scheduled today). But it wasn't a very productive day. The whole day I was thinking about what happened and the plans for the next few days (my father is arriving tomorrow evening and staying until Saturday morning) and next few months in the new house. So... No in-depth shoe size analysis for me. Just a lot of random thoughts and observation about the most important concept of all statistical analyzes: if you don't have a model, you can't analyze anything meaningful. I can look at things and calculate averages, do general clustering and find patterns, but without a model I can't tell if what I'm looking at is meaningful.

It all goes back to my inability to assert things to people in a way that they will accept and act on it. I trust people too much and I don't trust myself enough. So, when multiple people ask for something, even when I know it shouldn't work, I decide to go ahead with it and get to the same conclusion the practical way.

So, that's where I am. The rest of the week is going to be mostly dead with my father's visit and some meetings (Wednesday and Thursday are my days full of meetings - it's great that they are concentrated this way, unless I hope to get anything accomplished those two days in particular, and Friday is my closing date and key collection). But we keep on moving forward. I have started working on a model (which is now on a paper that was invaded by information on the contractor that is fixing the roof at the new house) and that's what I'll have to make sure to settle on before I move back to analysis. Then I'll do the thing that I got at Amazon to do: analyze the Amazon catalog for patterns. In this case, figure out how to train my model and validate that it correctly represents shoe sizing.

Can't quite explain what my thoughts are, but I'll say that it's a very interesting problem. What makes it very complex is the fact that there are multiple ways of explaining to a user the size of a shoe. There are multiple size standards (including some that are very similar, like US Men's and US Women's, which are off by 1.5 or 2, depending on who you ask), with sometimes non-fully-deterministic translations between the sizes. There are also shoe width information, with multiple standards. And these "standards" are not exact. Some brands or product lines run smaller or larger than the actual number that they say, which is technically another size feature.

So, with all those features, how can you make sense of the size? That's the question that I'm trying to answer in the next couple of weeks.

Huh, Microsoft Money, what do you mean?

I've been using Quicken for about 4 years to organize my finances. I chose Quicken because I had no choice, as I had a Mac and all online options were kind of ugly. I was happy with it until last year when it decided to be unable to sync with my WaMu checking account (note that it was able to synchronize with my WaMu savings account that uses the same user name and password). I kept using it for some time until I decided to plan better my finances in preparation to buy a house. Then I got really annoyed by it and decided to try other options.

Oh, I have to note before I continue that I have since moved my Quicken to the Windows version because it had way more features, looked nicer and was the same price.

I haven't had that much time to try around, but I've tried the famous Mint.com, which was pleasant, but certainly had less features and was slower to edit than Quicken. However, it was able to sync with my WaMu without a problem. I tried Quicken Online too, which had even less features than Mint.com and also was able to sync with WaMu.

Then, this evening, I decided to just accept it and install a trial version of Microsoft Money. The installation was very quick and setting up the accounts (except for my Charles Schwab account, which requires calling their support service, apparently) was very easy. But then, when it takes me to the account home page I see that I have one huge expense type: transfers/credit card payments! Huh? If the credit card is listed on their system, isn't counting credit card payments causing all my expenses to be counted twice (one month apart from each other)?

If you go to the reports section, it's the same thing. And you have to turn on "advanced reports" to be able to hide this class of expenses, which is very puzzling. There is probably some sort of configuration that I have to enter to make this stop showing, but it's odd that this seems to be the default behavior for this popular financial management software. I'll dig a little more into it and find out if maybe I'm missing something quite obvious. Until then... Huh?

Driving to the gym

I always thought it was funny to drive to the gym. You are "lazy" to go exercise. But now I see how it would make more sense:

Gym Car Concept Sounds Both Healthy and Extremely Dangerous

Now they just need to add a shower inside the car and it would make it perfect! :-)

Great spam

I received a great spam message today:

from: Yahoo/Msn Lottery Incoporation
reply-to: eventmanager_verificationboard@live.com
to: undisclosed-recipients
date: Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 9:19 AM
subject: Windows Live Lottery Have Chosen You Has A Winner

And it came to my gmail account, which makes the mix even more interesting. And, yes, gmail did recognize it a Spam. Gmail is generally pretty good at identifying spam. It's just too aggressive sometimes. About one "non-spam" email a week ends up in my spam folder. It's been a long time I haven't seen any spam in my inbox.

Friends, old games and gmail

This is a post done by request from my best friend, who went through a great ordeal to send me one of the games we used to play a lot a long time ago: X-COM UFO Defense. Great turn-based strategy game! So it's time to take a step back in time and remember the games that "defined my computer gamer experience". The list below is not in any particular order. And it could be much longer than this, but I decided to keep it simple, so that I might still be able to get some sleep tonight:

• X-COM series
• Maniac Mansion
• Indiana Jones The Last Crusade & Fate of Atlantis
• Monkey Island series
• Leisure Suit Larry series (well, I think I've only started playing pretty late in the series, something like 5 or 6)
• Loom
• Myst
• Test Drive series
• Planetfall (I really disliked that game because I was never able to get very far on it, but it was probably one of the first games that I've played on my 8086)
• SimCity
• SimEarth
• SimAnt
  
• Flight Simulator
• Lakers versus Celtics
• Battle Chess
• Lemmings series
• Prince of Persia (they just come out with a new of this series, amazing!)
• Sam and Max
• Space Quest (also didn't play too many of the series)
• The Adventures of Willy Beamish
• Elvira & Elvira 2
• Budokan
• Indy 500
• Vette!
• Stunts
• Syndicate
• Out of this world
• Wolfenstein 3D
• Doom
• Dune
  

Writing this list made me realize how much free time I used to have... And there are tons of games that I remember playing them, but couldn't figure out the name any more. And these are all computer games. I could try to list old game boy, NES, SNES, SEGA Master System... Oh, so much time... I'm so old!

And what about gmail? Well, it's the second day in a row that I receive a message from somebody saying that they tried to send me something on my gmail and it bounced. So the ended up sending it to my yahoo account and it all worked. Go figure how evil Google wants to be.

Ok! enough about forcing my memory and time to go to sleep. It's been a very busy week so far and it's just the beginning. I'm looking forward to the weekend when it's supposed to be below freezing and snowing. The joys of winter.

A day of crazy news

I really should be going to bed, so I'll keep it quick.

Today, I mean, yesterday, was a day with lots of odd news happening at once. None of them completely surprising, but all of them quite big in different ways. The two highlights are:

1. The house purchase is decided. It's still not complete - things close on the 19th - but I really can't back out out it without paying for the consequences (on the order of US$11K, which is not an amount of money that I should be throwing away).
2. I received a letter saying that I should be receiving my green card in about 3 weeks. Interesting that I won't be in this house in 3 weeks. I hope it gets forwarded correctly. The full process took only 1.5 years! It's amazing how time flies with those things.

So that's it. Now it's time to really go to bed. This morning I have to wake up early to see if I can decide on the color of the roof for the house. So exciting!

Why are news readers so buggy?

Well, I know that the answer is: because they try to use too much JavaScript and AJAX and all the minor differences between how to do stuff and reference objects in the browsers make them very prone to being buggy. Also, sometimes it's not only how buggy it is, but what you have to do to get around some flawed design decisions, which makes the experience even worse. But let's get to some examples, shall we?

Google Reader

I was very happy with Google Reader until one day that I think Google was having some problems with their servers and opening any links was very painful. That's when I realized that it was painful because all links are actually links to their tracking page that redirect you to the site you want to get (and, by the way, Gmail does the same thing, but let's not talk about Google's evil ways today) and their tracking service was apparently having a slow day. I don't really mind people tracking what I'm doing, because I know that in the end it actually will help other people find things. What I mind is that it was interrupting my reading experience. So I stopped using Google Reader.

But today I went back to see the changes that they made and started just clearing all the lists marking everything as read when I saw an interesting bug: when I read all posts on one feed that was inside a folder the count in the feed went to zero but the folder was still showing that I had unread posts. I wished I took a screenshot of it, but after some time there seems to be some "refresh" task that cleaned it up.

Bloglines Beta

I decided on using the Bloglines Beta because I was too used to the Google Reader model in which things are marked as read only when you scroll to them. The classic Bloglines marks everything as read automatically as you select the feeds to read.

More than just bugs, Bloglines Beta had a very simple annoyance: it wouldn't refresh the feed you are reading. You had to navigate out and back into the feed. That took a lot of time, considering that I read my feeds once a day or once every two days and I usually have on the order of 500 entries to read. When I get to part of them, there are new waiting.

A very well known bug of Bloglines though, and what made me move away from it, was the fact that it just didn't refresh some of my feeds. The blog itself had new messages, Google Reader would show them, but Bloglines wouldn't. It's something that has been observed by other people, but it was time to move on...

NewsGator

My latest trial is NewsGator. It's a pretty simple system that does not try all the fancy AJAX things that the previous two had: it does not try to see what you are reading to auto mark them as read. You have to go to the end of a page and click on "mark all posts on this page as read". It took me some time to get used to it, but in the end it made it ok to set waypoints on reading entries instead of one at a time. It was way lighter-weight, so it made me happy.

But not everything is great in this world here. NewsGator seems to have a very odd bug on the counts of unread emails on the summary on the left. Sometimes I mark things as read, but it does not get in sync with the list on the left. At least in this case there is a button "Refresh Feed List" that fixes it. The only problem with it is that it takes you to a "feed discovery" page, instead of keeping you in the context of where you were. Quite annoying.

The conclusion is that there seems to be no online RSS reader that doesn't annoy me in one way or another. I'll keep using NewsGator for a little longer, but let's see what happens.

Oh, all tests above were done on my Mac using Firefox 3. I haven't really tried other browsers.

And music

Lots of very stressful things are going on right now. But that's not what I want to write about today. I'm about to do what psychologists say you shouldn't do: write about what is good and not what is bad. Writing what is bad makes you understand it better and find ways out of it. Writing what is good just helps banalizing it and then it's not as good any more. But, well, even after all this understanding, I'll still do it. I don't want to make any of my readers decide to remove my blog from their trial list.

So I've joined a choir again. It's a Jewish choir, so no more large amounts of church songs to sing. Not that I'm against singing good choral music. What I'm against is people deliberately choosing Christian church music because that's what they are more comfortable with and never really branching out to anything else equally interesting, and less sung.

Back to the current choir: it's been an interesting ride. In many ways it reminds me of one Jewish choir I was part of in Brazil. It started out with something like 50 people. Now, a little over a month after the first rehearsal, it's already down to something like 35 people. Out of these, maybe 15 actually know how to sing, while the rest are in a varying grade of followers. I think the choir experience should be fun, so, as long as the conductor doesn't feel like we don't really need to learn things to perform, we are still good.

Our first concert is tonight, actually. At Bellevue Square Mall. Yes, a shopping mall! That is doing a special "holidays" celebration and decided to invite us even though we haven't been around for very long. It will likely still work out, but it won't be exciting enough for me to advertise it out for my friends for them to check it out. We'll be singing something like 7 pieces for about 15 minutes total. So, it's not that worth people's time yet. Parking at a mall at this time of the year is torture. Listening to a choir that hasn't been rehearsing for very long is not much of a relief.

But I'm enjoying it. It's doing something that I was not expecting: It's making me appreciate music again. I've been going through a phase where my mind can't abstract itself any more to appreciate music the same way I did before. I stopped being able to compose (although I was not never very good at it anyway - so it might have been a good thing) and even just sit in my corner in my office and listen to things like Beethoven's late string quartets. But it's all coming back to me now! I find myself spending time just playing intervals, short melodies and quick harmony exercises on my keyboard almost every day now. Odd that it's not a place to leave stuff on any more.

I guess that's it. If you didn't come here to read about me rambling about my life, I'll leave you with something funny:

Uh