Key in the cognition

Live stream of the ceremony

2009-01-20T16:59:39Z

http://inaugural.senate.gov/history/video/video-2009-obama.cfm

I saw a guy sawing through a u-lock today!

2008-12-21T02:34:35Z

I was briefly appalled before I realized that I knew him and he was on the SF Bike Coalition board. It turned out that he'd had his jacket containing his keys stolen and was trying to rescue his bike. As luck would have it, the hacksaw couldn't even put a dent in the u-lock so he had to go back for bolt-cutters.

Posted via email from Quik Thinking

End of an era

2008-10-25T16:55:05Z

In case you hadn't figured it out already, I've switched to Posterous as my blogging platform.

Hato Bus tour: bonsai, courtesans & a boat cruise

2008-08-10T22:14:25Z

On Saturday, after picking up an SD card for my camera, Chris and I met up with his neighbour and coworker Dennis to go on a bus tour of Tokyo along with a couple of other tourists who were visiting from Perth. Our first stop was a bonsai museum run by a man who has been collecting the little trees for the past three decades and now teaches foreigners the art of growing bonsai. He showed us some of his prized specimen and answered our many questions about the art form, after which we partook in a green tea ceremony.

The next stop was a special event to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Kyoto's only geisha house. We were treated to a lovely performance by a troupe of dancers keeping alive the ancient art of the Japanese courtesans (who weren't geisha). The tradition of the courtesan dance is that every year these women would parade through the street and then select a suitor to join them for a tea ceremony. First the suitor would drink from the tea bowl and then, if she chose to do so, the courtesan would signify her acceptance of his love by finishing the bowl.

Our tour concluded with a dinner of tempura and sushi aboard a little boat where we were watched the sunset amongst the skyscrapers of Tokyo and learnt a great about Japanese history.

[cross-posted from my new blog at Posterous.]

Choosing a new digital camera

2008-07-10T15:18:15Z

Dear LazyWeb,

I'm trying to decide upon a new digital camera to take with me when I go to Japan in August. My criteria are that it be an ultra-compact point'n'shoot, use SDHC memory, have at least a 2.7 inch LCD, offer image stabilization, and support USB 2.0 but having an orientation sensor would be really nice too. After some research I have narrowed the playing field down to 3 cameras:

For reasons I can no longer recall I decided not to get the Canon but I am deadlocked between the other two so I made a comparison chart containing the attributes that matter to me and how each of the cameras does on them.

Trait	CoolPix s700	DMC-FX500
Speed	mediocre	good
Image quality	great	mediocre
Weight	130 (+17) g	155 (+20) g
Optical zoom	3.8 X	5 X
LCD screen	2.7"	3" touch-sensitive
Battery life	150 shots	280 shots
Price	$265	$322

Apple customer service at the Genius Bar

2008-07-09T14:22:24Z

I have a general policy of not buying insurance on things I buy. I've also rather carelessly dropped my iPhone onto concrete sidewalks a few times over a past year, decorating it with rather nasty dents. Consequently, when part of its screen stopped responding to touch scarcely a month before the warranty expires, I was a trifle nervous about taking it in to be fixed.

My fears, however, were unfounded. The "Genius Bar" tech merely verified that the screen really had the problem I described, suggested I buy a $10 protective case and handed me a shiny new replacement iPhone on the spot. Best customer service experience ever!

The dollar value of a human life

2008-07-02T14:41:49Z

This BizWeek article about preemies brings up the issue of how much money it is worth spending to save a human life. A popular knee-jerk reaction is to claim that you cannot put a price on the life of a person. It's easy to demonstrate that this is not true. All I need do is point out the large number of people who die every day from causes are trivially preventable at pretty low costs, often in the double-digit range per person. If we are to make sweeping generalizations about the value of a human life then we need to be consistent about it. A 22 week old foetus in the USA should not have a higher value than an 11 year old child in an impoverished developing country.

No, the truth is that human lives are worth different things to different people. To your immediate family that value may be infinite or priceless but to random strangers (the majority of the worlds population unless you are extremely famous) that value is going to be very low, possibly even zero. It's interesting to think about about the value we place as individuals on the lives of complete strangers. If you haven't already seen the infomercials, I'll enlighten you now that it is indeed possible to keep alive perfectly healthy children for as low as a dollar/day. If you aren't doing that already then you've established the value that you personally place upon the lives of strangers. And it's not very high.

So what are the factors that determine how much society values a human life? For people to whom we don't have an emotional attachment that value is influenced primarily by utility and scarcity just like most other things. If the human race were in danger of extinction then every life would be treasured. With more than 6 billion people alive, there is no scarcity, driving down the value of a life. That leaves utility. It's difficult to calculate the utility of a person because that value is different for every beholder, which is why we probably have slightly different values for the lives of strangers. The labour market is a crude approximation of this value but it has enough problems that we certainly shouldn't rely on it to determine how much people's lives are worth.

Of course, in the absence of a way to measure what we want, humans tend to instead measure they closest approximation we can get. Cory Doctorow described a better system that sounds intriguing, although I'm not sure if it would work in a scarcity-based economy.

A week in NOLA

2008-06-22T14:24:09Z

NOLA stands for New Orleans, Louisiana. On the 14th of June I went there as part of an 18 person group from Cornerstone to spend a week helping Mercy Response restore some of the houses that were damaged by hurricane Katrina and the and flooding it caused. Mercy Response is based out of the Vineyard church grounds in a suburb of New Orleans called Kenner and is working on 30 houses at the moment. They have a big "tent" for the volunteers to live in. The tent has both wifi and air-conditioning. The AC is important because Southern Louisiana is extremely hot and humid. Although the tent is pretty close to airtight, no food is allowed into it just in case. Food is stored in a nearby kitchen and there are bathrooms in a nearby trailer.

We spent our first full day in New Orleans itself, exploring the city as regular tourists; we even had lunch at the NOLA equivalent of Fisherman's Wharf (with the quality and price that implies). Wandering around downtown, I was amazed by how much fun the area seemed to be, what with bars that sold hand-grenades and the like. When we were tired from walking for hours, we piled into a street car and headed uptown to the Garden District, where we played in a lovely park that moonlights as the official mosquito breeding grounds for NOLA. After having our our fill of the park, we headed back to the waterfront to explore some more and fill the hunger pangs gnawing at us from the inside. We had dinner at a restaurant where one member of our group (Tania) used to work when she lived in New Orleans some years ago. That place was much better, although the culinary fiasco of lunch hadn't exactly set a very high bar. Tania left dinner early, supposedly to buy coffee, but no sooner had we walked out of the restaurant than she descended upon us bearing gifts of beignets, which are vaguely like beavertails or funnel-cakes. Not being one for copious amounts of powdered sugar, I blew most of it off my beignet, prompting shocked responses from the others.

On Monday we started working on houses. The 18 of us were split into 4 crews, each assigned to a different house. Since I had a little experience with mudding and painting, I volunteered to lead a crew of 4 to work on a house belonging to a man called Joe, where we would be assisting a contractor who was already working for Joe. All the supplies we would need were supposed to be on-site but when we got there, the contractor informed us that there was no paint so we ended up just caulking and spackling the window and door frames as well as the trimmings.

Consequently, we finished up early and decided to visit a man whose house had been worked on by 2 of my crewmembers last Fall. His name is Anthony and he served as a firefighter for New Orleans for 21 years but is retired now (not surprising since he's 87 years old) and teaches French. He was asleep when we arrived but my loud knocking woke him up and he instantly recognized the 2 women who had worked on his house last year, inviting us in to chat. Anthony regaled us with tales of his adventures as a hurricane survivor, punctuated by frequent trips down memory lane into his colourful past. My favourite story was his decision to paint the inside of his entire house bright pink after it was restored, despite having lived with dull grey walls for decades before the flooding. Fortunately, he was convinced to go with a more subdued peach colour instead. Although Anthony is very funny, it's hard to get a word in edgewise when he's talking so it was a bit of an effort to extricate ourselves from the conversation when it came time to depart.

In the evening we watched a couple of short documentaries about the hurricanes and their effects on people's lives, which motivated us to work hard all week. I learnt that the first people to respond to the flooding from Katrina were the Mounties. That's pretty impressive, considering how far they would have had to travel!

On Tuesday we showed up at Joe's house again but this time the contractor was not around and the door was locked. There was supposed to be a key waiting for us at a secret drop-off spot but it was nary to be found. One of the contractor's other crewmen showed up and assured us that somebody would swing by with a key so we sat around in the grass and talked while we waited for it to arrive. While waiting, one of my crewmembers (Karen) and I needed to use a washroom so we walked a block to the nearest one. On the way there Karen remarked that she didn't want to use the washroom at a fast-food joint because she wasn't buying anything so she would use the one at the gas station beside it instead. I pointed out that she wasn't buying anything there either but she insisted that this was somehow different. When I explained that this distinction was merely one she had been socially conditioned to accept, she realized that this was true. As it happened, there was no toilet paper in the men's washroom and I didn't feel it was fair to ask for some when I wasn't buying anything so I just bought some TP and then proceeded to restock the washroom with it before using it. Karen found this greatly amusing.

After 2 hours had passed and no key had materialized, we gave up on it and fell in with another crew who were working on a house belonging to a woman named Joyce, who had grown up in that house and was very attached to the 4 foot long bathtub she had once used a a child! Several other people working on her place had offered to replace it but she would have none of it. Joyce also has exquisite taste in chandeliers, much to the consternation of the electrician on whom it had fallen to install them. Upon my arrival I was assigned the task of installing a set of drawers into a bathroom cabinet for which there were no instructions. After carefully analyzing the components, I was able to determine how they needed to fit together for the drawers to work properly. The actual installation was straightforward by comparison. I spent the remainder of the workday helping install window blinds and attaching hooks to doors before we cleaned up the place and left.

After dinner we headed downtown to serve food at the New Orleans Mission (a homeless shelter/food bank type place). I don't think they were used to having so many volunteers at once because there was far less work for us to do than we were capable of. Every time they gave us a task, we swarmed it and were done in a few minutes. The only other volunteer present was a local museum curator who had been ordered to perform community service by a court after a DUI indictment. She'd spent a night in the slammer as well and has no desire for an encore.

On Wednesday morning we went back to Joe's place armed with the knowledge that his wife would be around with a key for us. We were looking forward to finally getting started with painting. Once more, it was not to be. No sooner had we arrived at the site when we were greeted by a plumber who insisted that his insurance wouldn't let him work at a site where there were any volunteers present. Sounded pretty daft to me but Joe politely asked us to yield to the plumber because he really needed the plumbing done. Respecting his wishes, we headed back to camp yet again, extinguishing any last hopes we may have had for painting those trimmings. Perhaps God is saving them up for next week's group.

Meanwhile, Mercy Response had been preparing to assist victims of flooding in Iowa by sending some of their tools and staff there from New Orleans. They had a bunch of us inspecting the gear to make sure it worked, cleaning it, branding it and packing it up for loading onto the trailer. It's amazing how much gunk a powerful jet of water can knock off something! After a long day of working in the blazing sun, we took advantage of the heat by playing on a slippy-slide. After dinner some of us built a 2nd floor for a borrowed 20-foot truck so that it could hold all the gear that needed to go up to Iowa. Well, I'm being a tad liberal by including myself there, since I mostly just watched.

The plan for Thursday had been to load up the trucks and trailers with gear and supplies in the morning and then head over to a house where we were to install wood for the floor. That might have happened if the Bobcat hadn't decided to take a sick day, forcing us to rely on good old bone and muscle for lifting several heavy palettes of supplies onto the truck. Although we did get everything loaded in the end and sent off the first response team to Iowa, the resulting delay and fatigue caused us to end the workday earlier than usual. A few of us took advantage of this unexpected spare time to hit Wal-mart for some fresh fruits and vegetables, for which we'd developed a craving over the previous few days. I hadn't realized until this trip just how spoiled we are in California when it comes to healthy food!

After dinner we sat around in a circle to sing worship songs, lead by the talented (and seemingly clairvoyant) brothers Bjerke. It was like camping, except that the sky was a ceiling and the fire was a single candle. And we had air-conditioning. The Bjerkes ran through their entire set list (plus a request from me) before ending with a repeat of an old favourite. Anthony, who had spent dinner engrossed in conversation with Suzanne (whom he knew from her work on his house last Fall) and then stuck around for the musical fare, thanked us for the work we'd been doing and tried convincing Suzanne she should move to New Orleans.

On Friday a large contingent of us headed over to the house of a man named Jimmy, who needed a Pergo floor installed. I'd never seen a hardwood floor installed before but by the time we let, I felt like an expert and was even teaching my new skills to one of the other volunteers! Jimmy was so happy to see his floor being installed that he bought us delicious gumbo and po-boys for lunch. He also gave us a crash course in New Orleans cultural history. Apparently it is a longstanding tradition to take the family to a local bar, where alcohol may be ordered to go! Jimmy suspects that may have something to do with the high car insurance rates.

That night we finally made it out to Bourbon St in the French Quarter again. Seeing people walking (and occasionally dancing) in the middle of the street at night was really neat and made we wish we had a street like that in San Francisco. We eventually ended up at a jazz bar called Sing Sing that was refreshingly devoid of tourists and drunks. We were mildly dismayed to realize that we'd walked in just as the band was about to go on break but decided to stick around until they came on for their next set because we liked what we heard of their music before they walked offstage. That proved to be a good decision as they played through some good songs when they took the stage again, although we left before the set ended because it was getting pretty late.

The next morning we cleaned up the camp so it would be all minty fresh for the next group and then flew home to San Francisco. This week will live on in my memory long after the aches and pains vanish over the next few days. It's a great feeling to have helped people recover from the ravages of Katrina and to know that the gear we sent off to Iowa will be used to bring relief to those currently in dire straits from flooding there. The only thing better than having a prayer answered is being the answer to somebody else's prayer.

Moral Foundations

2008-06-03T15:02:52Z

Apparently I'm a Liberal. Whoda thunk?

Paintball

2008-05-27T05:11:32Z

Played paintball today for the first time in my life. Indoors. After the first time I got hit in the face, paint splattered through the airholes of my protective mask, under my glasses and into my eye. Not fun. Even after wiping the paint off my eyelid, I couldn't see very well because my goggles had greasy paint smeared all over them. That made the entire experience less enjoyable than it might otherwise have been. It's hard trying to shoot at people when you can barely see them. I accidentally fired at the referee a few times before realizing he wasn't on the opposing team! He didn't say anything then but later on he reprimanded me for taking "blind shots", a term used to describe the tactic of sticking your gun out from behind a barricade and firing into the opposing team's general direction. In my case, it made little difference because I couldn't see even with my face exposed. Maybe if the arena was filled with fog that would even the odds.

Disambiguating roles

2008-05-04T21:05:48Z

The notion of fluid roles than can be resolved to specific items can be applied across a surprisingly broad range of domains. The resolution process generally involves using contextual constraints to pin down the exact item filling a given role. Here are some examples: the role of head-of-state in any democracy can always be resolved to a specific person but usually changes every few years after an election; the 49ers home stadium is currently Candlestick Park (or whatever its being called these days) but if they were to move to another city then that role would start being filled by different stadium; noon is a time of day whose absolute position in time depends upon the timezone in which it is resolved; independence day is a holiday that falls on a different day in every country that celebrates it and doesn't even exist in some;

The process of disambiguating roles seems to involve the application of constraints in a recursive manner. For a given role, we can know in advance the constraints required to resolve it. However, some of those constraints may themselves be defined by other roles, which would have to be resolved first. As long as we can define a dependency tree for this purpose, resolution should be straightforward. Sometimes this may not be possible because a pair of roles may have mutually dependent constraints. Usually this can be avoided when constructing the tree if some of the problem roles have multiple options for their constraint set. Sometimes, however, resolution may have to be performed iteratively.

The advantage of using fluid roles instead of fixed values is that you don't need to manually update anything when the value assigned to a particular role changes because it can be dynamically resolved as needed. This is the same principle behind the use of DNS to resolve unchanging domain names to potentially volatile IP addresses.

Tony's spicy scrambled omelette

2008-05-04T20:47:08Z

Ingredients:

2 eggs
half of a small onion
4-6 large crimini mushrooms
a tablespoon of sun-dried tomato strips
a handful of shredded cheese
half a teaspoon of paprika powder, cracked black pepper and crushed red pepper
garlic (half a teaspoon if powdered or 2 pressed cloves if fresh)
a teaspoon each of powdered coriander (replace with a tablespoon of finely chopped leaves if freshly available) and cumin
a dash of cayenne pepper and ground sea salt crystals

Instructions:

Slice & dice onion & mushrooms, then sauté them in oil with cracked red & black pepper until the 'shrooms have relinquished most of their water content.
Add a little more oil and reduce heat before pouring in the eggs while stirring contents of pan around.
Add in the spices and mix well.
When egg is no longer liquid, add shredded cheese and sun-dried tomatoes.
Cook on low heat for a few more minutes.

Enjoy with sliced bread or rolled inside a tortilla.

Dear banks, please make your websites stop sucking

2008-05-01T16:08:30Z

Over the past few days I've been using the websites of various financial institutions and have been frustrated by how terrible they are.

While trying to change my 401k investments at Fidelity, I was stymied by an error message that told me my fund choices could not be honoured by the website and I should call them instead. Upon calling them I was informed that one of my selections was no longer available and had not been so since 2004. Since 2004! Why then is it still showing up in my list of available funds!? And why doesn't the website let me know what the problem is so i can alter my selection instead of being forced to wait for business hours and call them?

Today I tried to log into my CitiBank account, only to find myself presented with the login page again. There was no error message provided. After retrying my password - the same one I'd used successfully yesterday - I called them and was told that the website was being updated and I should try again in an hour. Again, why don't they state these things on the website...? Bizarrely, I was then able to login using the current beta version of Opera, although not with Safari 3.1.1.

Even ING isn't that great. The ask you to provide a "Saver ID" but make absolutely no mention of the purpose that it serves. They then send an email thanking you for creating this ID but still neglect to mention where you can use it! Finally, they allow you to link one external account for ACH transfer when you create your account but force you to mail them paper cheques to add subsequent ones. Why!?

I remember when the websites of financial institutions sucked back in the late 90s but I figured that they were still getting the hang of this newfangled Web thing. Well, it's been a bloody decade and they still suck. No wonder so few people use online banking... So I'm offering up my services as a professional UI designer at no charge to financial institutions that want to make their websites suck less. Give me a test account (if I don't already have one) and I will tell you how to improve your customer satisfaction with online financial interaction.

View fom the other side

2008-05-01T01:21:05Z

I hit somebody while biking home today. I was in the bike lane, proceeding at a good clip down a nice flat stretch of road. A large delivery truck was parked along the curb. As I zipped by it, a guy jumped out of the truck and into the bike lane, about 4 feet in front of me. Calling out to warn him, I braked hard and skidded into him pretty hard. Of course, I apologized immediately but not before he swore in surprise at being collided with. The great thing about bicycles, however, is that I didn't even knock him over and he seemed to be fine.

Official VMware Workstation blog

2008-04-02T15:30:39Z

The Workstation team now has an official public-facing blog :-)

You can even read about a major project I've been working on for the past year or so.

The economics of population control

2008-03-28T14:37:53Z

Last weekend I had occasion to speak with an interesting young man who left China several months ago to learn English in Canada. He told me many surprising things about the inner workings of China, although I'm not entirely sure how biased some of his views are. One things that caught my attention in particular was his revelation that, despite all we've heard about China's infamous one-child policy, he had a younger sister. Apparently families are now allowed to have a 2nd child if they pony up a substantial fee and the 2nd child is a girl.

That's fascinating because it reveals that the ostensibly communist government has actually been applying a strange sort of market system to birth-control. In some parts of the world, people lack the knowledge or means to control the number of offspring they produce. In most industrialized nations women have a high degree of control over the number and timing of their children; a free market of sorts. In China, anomalously, the state has a monopoly on the right to give birth, although "the first one is free". Regardless of the frightening impact this implies upon individual freedoms, they can make a reasonable case for resorting to such a measure given their alarming population growth. Of course, cultural artifacts ended up biasing parents in favour of male children to such a degree that China ended up with a huge imbalance (dozens of millions). The effects of this on society are hard to predict accurately but I imagine they are unpleasant.

To solve this problem, the state threw in a deal that tips the balance in favour of female children. Of course, if they simply left it at that, it would unleash a flood of 2nd children and their iron fisted approach to population control would be thwarted. Instead they cleverly employed a market-inspired control: price. This gives them pretty fine-grained, albeit chronologically impaired, throttle on the number of "extra" girls that society produces. They could have tried a queue or a lottery instead but this approach has the appealing side-effect of raising the state's revenue so it's hardly surprising that they opted for it.

Bugzilla needs a talk page

2008-03-24T13:30:36Z

The current incarnation of Bugzilla uses a single page to display both the current state of a bug report as well as the discovery and discussion history that lead to it. For nontrivial bugs that have been around for a while this usually means that somebody who hasn't been following them since the beginning needs to read the entire discussion before grokking the current state. Although some of the current state may be captured in structured form using the fields that appear at the top of the page, that is usually insufficient information to properly understand the nature of the bug.

There is a solution to this problem that has been successfully applied to the domain of wikis: the talk page. This is a means of divorcing the state from the history so that it is easy to glean the currently known information about an issue while still having an avenue to continue investigation/discussion and preserving the history of this discourse. Applying such an approach to an issue tracking system like Bugzilla would eliminate the clutter on bug reports without requiring us to forgo the benefits of revising issue details as new facts come to light and opinions change.

Disenfranchised

2008-03-18T15:08:25Z

Since my official Canadian residence (where my mom lives) is in Toronto Centre, one of the 4 districts that held bye-elections yesterday, I wanted to cast my vote for Chris Tindall, who was representing the Green Party. I faxed in the appropriate form the day before the deadline but only received my ballot on voting day itself, thereby preventing me from participating. I suppose I could have sent the form in earlier but what's the point of having a deadline if it doesn't help get shit done on time...? Anyway, it looks like Chris did quite well even without my help.

Observations on watching a kid use a computer

2008-03-17T15:58:16Z

Yesterday I was helping a kid edit an essay at the Pirate Supply Store - it's a front for a writing clinic - and couldn't help but notice some interesting characteristics of the manner in which he used the computer.

Like many people, he was using webmail as online storage. Surprisingly, he was using his mom's Yahoo/SBC account instead of having one of his own. I've heard that Google was surprised to discover how many people type entire domain names into their search box instead of the browser's address bar but watching this in person is still pretty weird. The kid typed "yahoo.com" into the Safari search box, which brought up Yahoo as the top hit. That's when it got even more bizarre. Google had conveniently provided links to the commonly used subsections of Yahoo in the search result. The first of these was Mail, on which I expected to see the kid click. Instead he just clicked on the main link and went to the yahoo home page before eventually logging in and arriving at his inbox.

The next observation to surprise me was the difficulty he had selecting text with the mouse. I'd previously assumed that any middle-school kid in San Francisco would be an expert mouse-user and he certainly displayed no other signs of impeded dexterity so I am tempted to attribute this difficulty to unfamiliarity with basic usage of a mouse. My hunch is somewhat supported by his complete surprise at my introduction of the scroll-wheel to his arsenal of mouse-using techniques. Later on I noticed that he tended to backspace his way through multiple words upon realizing that he'd mistyped one instead of just repositioning the cursor. Admittedly, I have seen this behaviour in expert computer users as well.

Made me wonder how much exposure kids really get to computers in school and how many kids in this city lack access to one at home. Maybe desktop computers are just getting old though, since he seemed to have no trouble using his cell-phone. Finally, I can't help but wonder if there's a way to make the enormous number of people currently using webmail as storage to start using the more effective tools we now have available for storing dynamic textual documents on the Web.

A sad ending to an otherwise excellent tale

2008-03-07T05:30:55Z

Last night VMware Workstation was inducted into the Jolt Awards hall of fame. To celebrate, my manager gifted each member of the Workstation UI team with a bottle of now-hard-to-find Jolt cola and then took us out to a pub. I stashed my jolt bottle into the side pocket of my backpack while biking home from the train station in the city. Along the way, one of my shoes managed to come off so I bent down to put it back on. Sudden;y there was a crash and fizzy liquid all over the street below me. My jolt had fallen out.

Approaches to life

2008-02-24T17:18:53Z

There are 6 approaches (that I can think of, anyway - tell me if I missed any) to approaching the problems one encounters in life:

Anticipate and avoid them.
Fix the problems.
Pay others to solve them.
Adapt to the new situations so they stops being problematic.
Run away.
Ignore or accept them.

Different kinds of problems lend themselves to different approaches. They may also be applied in cascading fashion.

Democracy and me: from kites to teabags

2008-02-22T17:47:38Z

My introduction to the notion of democracy dates back to 1988 when General Zia, then then military head of state, was assassinated in an aeroplane explosion. During the weeks and months that followed, the country was engulfed by the competition between various political parties to fill the power vacuum left in Zia's wake. Karachi, as the country's commercial centre, was thrust into the midst of this political maelstrom. Being a naturally curious child, I was fascinated by the fervent political campaigning and have a vivid memory of drawing the flags of various political parties onto kites and trying to fly them from the 3rd story balcony of one of my grandmother's neighbours. At the time, I could not fully appreciate the magnitude of what was going on; I just knew that it was more exciting than the placid existence I had known during Zia's regime.

Nine years and three ousted Prime Ministers later, I had a different taste of democracy when Jean Chrétien, mangling both English and French equally, thundered to a second term as Prime Minister. This election was an order of magnitude less chaotic than any I'd seen before and Chrétien was very popular amongst the people. I even voted for his party to elect him for a third term in 2000. Our faith in him, however, was rewarded by the sort of corruption I thought didn't happen in industrialized nations. A tad disillusioned but unwilling to betray my socially liberal values with a Conservative vote, unable to vote for the Bloc because they didn't run in my riding and uninspired by the NDP, I cast my ballot in favour of the Greens. Thanks to the regionally fractured electoral system, the Greens didn't even win a single seat out the 308 available, despite securing more than 4% of the popular vote (while the Bloc exploited the same systemic defect to grab more than a sixth of the seats with a mere 11% of the popular vote). It was around that time when I decided that democracy ought to be liquid not representative.

Fast forward another eleven years and I find myself living in yet another country and unable to vote (despite being taxed). Reviving an ancient tradition here, I threw some tea into the Boston Harbour when I was there recently.

Introspection on the current dry spell plus a neat idea

2008-02-04T06:26:39Z

I haven't updated this blog much in the past several weeks. In fact, this has been the longest dry spell since I started it 4 years ago. It's not that I don't feel like blogging any more or that I've been too busy to write. It's more that, after more than 2 years at VMware and a year in San Francisco, I've mostly settled into some steady patterns of life and there isn't as much novelty about which to write these days. While I'm not bored, I don't want to write about the minutiae of my life all the time because, quite frankly, it wouldn't be all that interesting.

I've considered blogging about ideas instead of events but there's no temporal cue to do so, which means that those posts end up languishing in the purgatory of my mind. While there's a small temptation to call it quits, there's no real gain from doing so. Leaving this blog on simmer, however, would allow me to make occasional updates to it when something particularly interesting does happen. That's probably what I'll end up doing.

Just for the sake of old times though, here's a life update ;-)

After years of shying away from TV shows, I've recently made my way through the entire Firefly series. I now understand what all the fuss was about. I've also been watching Nip/Tuck. Despite the outrageous veneer, that shows does tackle some pretty complex and oft-ignored issues. Sadly, the downside of biking to and from work is that I am spending only a 5th as much time reading books as I used to when I took the shuttle to Palo Alto every workday.

There's one other minor problem with biking: it doesn't lend itself to hold an umbrella. We've been having a lot of rain here over the past few weeks. The supposedly quick-dry pants I bought at the local sporting goods co-op don't dry as fast as I'd expected and my shoes sometimes take longer than a day to dry out. I'm sure there's a better solution so I'll keep experimenting. But I'd be happier altogether if it didn't rain again for the rest of the year.

pphaneuf was in town this weekend so I finally got to meet him. I also managed to leave my iPhone at Yvonne's place last night and was without it until she returned it to me at dinner tonight. Although I'd been without it during my 2-week trip to Guatemala in August, it was noticeably harder to get through the day without it today. But I've thought of a way to make smartphones even more indispensable.

My idea is to write an app that runs on the phone and uses data from GPS, NextBus and 511 to provide a total transit solution. Picture this: you're wandering around in a strange part of town and suddenly get a text message from some friends asking you to come join them at a pub to which you've never been before and giving you the street address. The phone automatically recognizes the address as such and lets you click on it for directions. It figures out the optimal route from your current position, adjusts for the actual position of buses/trains, and then tell you where to catch one. You board as usual but instead of having to fish for change, the vehicle communicates with your phone and automatically deducts the fare from your bank account. Your phone keeps track of your position as you move and notifies you when it is time to hop off, then provides walking directions for the last leg of the trip. Most of this could be implemented with existing technology. The payment mechanism might be the trickiest part.

Look at that; I snuck in a post about an idea!

The year begins when we decide it does!

2008-01-03T04:44:04Z

Went camping in Pinnacles national park for the New Year's weekend. What with 2 stoves and a fire-pit, I think we ate better while camping than I had at home the previous day. Spotted some cool animals: woodpeckers, turkeys, deer, various birds of prey, etc. Hiking with a 3-year-old is an interesting experience: mostly fun but slower than usual. Finally went spelunking for real, after hankering to do so for the past few years. Best part about spending New Year's Eve in the wild: once the sun sets, we just waited an arbitrary length of time and decided to bust out the champagne. Update: Although it was so cold at night that our water froze, being able to see the Milky Way band for the first time in my life made this trip well worth it.

On the train home there was a 'Nam war vet who was pretty disconcerted that the soldiers who were sent to iRack multiple times had managed to sue for 130 grand. My sympathy for him was tempered by his blatant racism.

Flying a kite

2007-12-09T06:35:51Z

The last time I tried flying a kite I ended up crashing a $300 kite into a utility pole. So when some of my friends suggested we spend the afternoon flying a kite at the Marina green today, I was adamant that it be a cheap kite. We went to a kite store in Chinatown and I asked for the kite that was easiest to fly. With a knowing look, the proprietress directed us to a selection of kites whose prices ranged from $24 to $30. We ended up with one that looked like a turtle.

Upon reaching the green, we did our best at deciphering the vague assembly instructions and then began trying to get our kite soaring. It wasn't as windy as we would have liked but there was another guy flying a kite with no trouble so we kept at it despite making little progress. After about an hour or so, I guess the guy couldn't bare to watch any more because he came by and informed us that we had a piece of the kite assembled backwards. I've no idea how he could determine that from dozens of feet away but after we spun that piece around, the kite shot into the air and stayed there with minimal effort on our part.