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Nov. 24th, 2007
10:13 pm - Airline 2.0: my first experience flying on Virgin America
Virgin Airlines has a reputation for being innovative and customer-focused so, when they began operating in the US (as Virgin America) with direct flights between SFO and JFK, I decided to give them a whirl. They have an online flight booking system that's quite good and, like every other airline I've used, let me check in online. The flight I took yesterday afternoon was only half full, presumably because of Thanksgiving, so boarding was the fastest I've ever experienced.
The seats on the aeroplane were all new and shiny. They were also surprisingly comfortable for an economy cabin. And I was pleasantly surprised to be offered a choice between two different styles of complementary headsets (the traditional kind with a band that goes around the head as well as ear-buds, which I prefer). As it turned out, their ear-buds were awful and made a loud buzzing sound. Fortunately the audio port on the seat is a standard one so I was able to plug my Apple ear-buds in and enjoy their far superior sound instead. Virgin's safety instructions are the best I've ever seen. They have created a very captivating animated guide to the aeroplane's safety features and procedures that I enjoyed watching despite normally tuning that information out entirely.
But the key difference between Virgin and the other US airlines is their in-flight entertainment system called Red. It's apparently based on Linux, although the only passenger-visible evidence of this is that one of the games available on it has the word Linux in its title. I played around with the system extensively during my 5 hour flight and was impressed by its design, although they seem to have adopted the open-source mantra of "release early, release often" and it's still in beta so several of the features have not yet ben implemented. That said, the parts that were available for use did work quite well.
Virgin's approach to music, as you might expect from a company with experience in the music industry, is well thought-out. In addition to a diverse selection of channels playing preselected music, passengers can create their own playlist by browsing through an extensive list of songs organized by genre and artist. Removing the currently-playing song from the playlist did not cause it to immediately skip to the next song as I was expecting but instead it simply continued playing the song! A few times it also skipped to the next song before completely finishing the current one. Those were, however, the only bugs I encountered in the entire system during my flight.
On the video side, Red offers a few music videos and several live TV feeds sporting popular shows. While all of those are free, the selection of several new movies costs $8 a pop, which seems a tad steep. For those who chose to cough up, payment is very convenient via the swipe of a major credit card. In fact, you can also use a credit card to pay for food by ordering it through Red. The interface for doing this is simple and intuitive, although my experiences with it suggest that the staff are still getting used to it. I tried ordering a free drink of tomato juice but only ended up having it delivered when the stewardess came by in person to ask if we wanted anything to drink. Later I requested a bottle of water using the system and it got marked as having been delivered without me actually ending up with one. Slightly irked, I placed another order about half an hour later and this time was immediately rewarded with the delivery of three bottles! Personally, I'd prefer low latency over high throughput when ordering beverages.
Disappointingly, the email, e-zine and inter-passenger chat features were not available, although the stewardess did not seem to be aware of this as she encouraged us to use the chat. The flight status system is excellent, however. It is powered by Google Maps and allows passengers to interactively pan and zoom while the plane's current position and direction is displayed via a little icon. Being able to see the flight path would have been a nice touch but that wasn't an option.
Overall, I give Virgin America an A for design, an A for effort, a B for quality but a C for functionality. I hope to try them out again with better results in the future when Red is out of beta.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/happy.gif)
impressed
Sep. 26th, 2007
08:10 pm - Messing with Texas
People had been telling me for several months that I should visit Austin because it's an oasis of liberalism in Texas. This week I finally had a chance to spend a few days in Austin by virtue of staffing the VMware booth at a career fair and delivering an info session on the UT Austin campus.
Several people encouraged us to try the Texan BBQ but I was not particularly impressed by it. What did impress me about the cuisine in Austin were a couple of restaurants, one Thai and the other Korean. Although I'm not usually a huge fan of Thai food, Madam Mam's had me the moment I tasted their spring rolls (wrapped in soft rice-paper, not the thicker hard wheat-based things that are commonly mistaken for spring rolls but are actually egg rolls). Koriente is a small but delightful place run by a couple of the nicest people I've ever met.
The climate in Austin took me by surprise, however, despite having grown up in a pretty hot and humid part of the world and hearing about the Texan summer beforehand. Despite the stupefying heat and humidity, I was able to walk around downtown Austin without sweating too much as long as I mostly stayed in the shade of buildings. Wandering around gave me a feel for the city's vibe, which I quite liked. There are plenty of sidewalks and bike lanes in active use and only one person tried to run us over while we crossed the street. I even passed by a church whose banner read "deliberately diverse and fully inclusive". There's also just enough urban sketchiness to keep it feeling real but not enough to feel unsafe. The street hooligans are definitely more polite than those in SF but I guess they never know who might be bearing firearms ;-) All things considered, aside from the oppressive heat and humidity, Austin meets the Tony standard for liveable cities. In fact, the only thing that disappointed me was the noticeable lack of outdoor art.
Speaking to throngs of CS and ECE students at the career fair was interesting. Both those fields seem to be dominated by people of South Asian descent in Texas, although most of those at the undergrad level are US citizens who speak English fluently and whose parents probably migrated to Texas decades ago. We encouraged just about everybody who handed in a resume at the booth to attend our info session at the end of the fair. Consequently, it was extremely well-attended with probably over 90 students showing up to pack the room. I think they enjoyed my presentation because they laughed at my jokes and asked a lot of questions afterwards, mostly about how to get jobs at VMware.
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: some trancy stuff that I can hear through the walls of my hotel-room
Sep. 18th, 2007
07:43 am - New Pornographers concert
Unlike the last time I was at the Warfield, this time we were on the floor instead of up in the balcony. There were also twice as many opening bands. The first one was actually fronted by one of the guitarists from New Pornographers itself: Todd Fancey. His band was alright but not memorable. Next up were Lavender Diamond, who were pretty funny onstage with their overly patronizing remarks directed towards San Francisco's hippie legacy. Lead singer Becky Stark has a mesmerizingly beautiful voice that generates a trance-like aura.
The New Pornographers ended up playing a lot of music from their newest album, which I only picked up before the concert but they did manage to get their most popular numbers in. A random girl at the concert was so taken by my Vibram Five Fingers that she had me email her their website so she could get a pair for herself. Some dumb-ass in the audience kept yelling at them to play more songs; apparently that was not something they'd ever been told in the middle of a concert before. Thereafter, when they paused between songs to talk to us, they made cracks about how they could have played an entire song during that time.
Current Mood: calm
Current Music: Stable Song - Death Cab for Cutie
Jul. 14th, 2007
03:35 pm - iPhone
After waiting a week for a free crackberry that never materialized, I bought an 8-gig iPhone today. It refuses to sync my non-subscription calendar & lacks the wonderful opportunistic playlist synching featured by the Shuffle but otherwise largely meets (high) expectations. Typing on it is definitely much harder than on the crackberry but I'm willing to give it a few days as others have suggested.
Update: I created a new calendar, moved the few upcoming events from my old calendar to it and am able now to sync the new calendar with the iPhone :-)
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/sad.gif)
hungry
Current Music: Revolution 1 - The Beatles
Jun. 9th, 2007
10:41 am - Ubuntu Feisty on the Thinkpad X60
VMware recently bought me one of the new Core 2 Duo revisions of the X60 with 2 gigs of RAM. Although it came with XP installed, that wasn't of very much use to me as a Linux developer so I installed the latest version of Ubuntu Linux on it instead. To ensure the security of any source code on the machine, I am storing it inside a TryeCrypt disk.
Unlike the last time I tried running Linux on a Thinkpad (Fedora Core on a T42p over 2 years ago) or Ubuntu on a laptop (Dapper on an Aluminium Powerbook about a year ago), this time both power management (suspend-to-RAM and hibernate) and wireless networking actually work. The UI for connecting to a wireless network isn't as intuitive as that of OS X but no worse than that of Windows XP. Then again, OS X Tiger doesn't allow explicit hibernation.
The relatively low XVGA screen resolution (1024x768) on the 12 inch LCD has been frustrating after getting used to the high res displays I have on my desktop systems at home (1920x1200) and work (1600x1200x2) but I suppose that's the price of portability - the X60 is incredibly light at barely over 3 lbs - and a long battery life (nearly 5 hours on a regular battery). I can even deal with the lack of a touchpad. My only real gripe is that I can't adjust the screen brightness without crashing X11.
Update: I was able to get the screen brightness adjustment buttons on the keyboard to work (by unloading a kernel module that was causing the problem) but have discovered that the ethernet card drivers don't seem to like it when I suspend the system.
Current Mood: satisfied
Current Music: So Beautiful - Dashboard Confessional
10:00 am - Roomba
The Roomba I ordered arrived yesterday and I set it to work today after an overnight charging session. Although it can't quite get dirt in corners because of its circular shape and it sometimes gets stuck on wires, it did a pretty impressive job of vacuuming the floor.
There are some folding chairs stacked against the living-room wall for use at the house concerts and, at one point, it knocked one of them over onto itself and got trapped inside it. I felt bad watching the poor little thing struggling to escape.
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Scentless Apprentice - Nirvana
Jun. 3rd, 2007
08:06 am - Arcade Fire
Went to see The Arcade Fire in Berkeley last night at the Greek Theatre, which is an outdoor amphitheatre with concrete steps arranged in a giant semi-circle around the mosh pit. We weren't really sure hot to get there from the BART station but, as I had expected, we were able to follow the throng of people walking over there.
The Arcade Fire have an amazing stage presence that indicates their comfort with being stage to perform live for thousands of people. This was the last show on their tour so they pulled some stunts that they hadn't tried the previous night; part-way through their set, one of the many band members chased another one up the scaffolding and then they both began beating drumsticks on the metal in time to the song.
Although I've loved their music for well over a year now, I was pleasantly surprised to discover the wide array of instruments they employed onstage, ranging from the traditional drum kit, keyboard and 2 guitars to classical strings, horns and a pipe organ. Their exceptionally high number of musicians - I counted 10 - allowed them to mic and match this eclectic ensemble of instruments as the songs dictated.
I was also impressed by the way they synchronized the lights with the music. They had a series of rods sticking vertically up from the stage front and sometimes had these light up in time with the music. At other times they flashed the spotlight onto the mosh pit to the beat instead. Despite the temporary blindness, it was a neat effect.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/awake.gif)
awake
Current Music: A Man I'll Never Be - Boston
May. 27th, 2007
09:48 am - The Jumping Drums by Circus Baobab
Yesterday afternoon ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
morethanreal and I saw Circus Baobab performing The Jumping Drums. They're a lot like Cirque du Soleil, incorporating elements of live music (centred around drums and a xylophone), dance, acrobatics, juggling and a little theatre. Some of the highlights of the show (for me) were the jugglers, contortionists and trapeze artists.
There were 5 jugglers who kept tossing their batons at each other while walking around on stage so it looked like a flurry of 15 batons in the air that somehow never touched the ground. At one point one of them stood atop the shoulders of another and managed to jump off while continuing to juggle!
The main contortionist, who initially reminded Yvonne of andukar, was able to arch his spine backwards until his feet were on his own shoulders. Not content with this, he then proceeded to life his coiled body of the stage using his hands and walk around on them in this position!
The trapeze artists started out with simple tricks like flipping between swings and gradually upped the ante until they were doing summersaults while flying between swings! Watching them made me miss my days in circus school.
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Red Is The New Black - Funeral For A Friend
Apr. 27th, 2007
06:55 am - The Decemberists
I went to the Decemberists concert last night. They rocked out, effortlessly cycling through contemporary (electric guitar, drum kit, organ/keyboard) classical (bassoon, viola, accordion) and obscure (banjo, tambourine, mandolin) instruments. At one point the lead singer took a camera from somebody in the mosh-pit and walked around the stage taking close-ups of each band member. They ended with The Mariner's Revenge, enhanced by a giant whale costume.
Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Captain Wedderburn - Great Big Sea
Apr. 23rd, 2007
09:11 am - Small-world syndrome and nerdcore
What are the odds that, in a city of nearly 800,000 people that I've lived in for only a few months, I would randomly run into 2 different people from the 5-person Linux-UI team, in 2 different restaurants in completely different parts of the city, in 2 subsequent days...? And yet that's just what happened this weekend!
Last night I went to a nerdcore show featuring MC Lars (a Stanford alumnus), MC Frontalot (the godfather of nerdcore) and Optimus Rhyme. Lars accompanied his set with a video projection that depicted, at one point, his own songs being bittorrented! He had some satirical jabs for mainstream hip-hop's materialism and the music industry's general suckiness. Frontalot actually rolled a 20-sided die to decide which songs he would play for his set!
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/angry.gif)
rushed
Current Music: Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey - The Beatles
Feb. 18th, 2007
12:54 pm - Tea at the Ritz
Yesterday a few of us had tea at the Ritz to celebrate my friend Heather's birthday. I'd never had proper English tea at a fancy hotel before so it was an interesting experience. We began with champagne, after which they brought us a triple-decker tray containing hors-de-oeuvres with the tea itself. When we had eaten the hors-de-oeuvres, they replaced the trays with identical ones containing scones, biscuits and pastries. They also refilled any empty cups on our table. Finally, they brought out one last tray with a tart for each person.
After drinking several cups of tea, I had to dispose of some excess fluid so I paid a visit to the washroom. Unlike any other washroom I've ever seen, instead of paper towel dispensers, they actually had a tray of hand-folded cloth hand-towels and a box in which to drop them after use. It was a delightfully decadent afternoon.
Current Mood: chipper
Current Music: The Beautiful Ones - Mariah Carey
Nov. 22nd, 2006
07:52 am - Mates of State in concert, washed down by a random encounter with some customers
I went to the Mates of State concert in the city last night with a co-worker. We got to the venue an hour early and ended up with insanely good balcony seats looking directly onto the stage. One of their two opening acts had 14 people on stage, including a guy whose sole job was to engage in rock'n'roll theatrics! It was past 11 by the time the Mates of State took the stage and, sadly, we had to leave at a quarter to midnight to catch the last Caltrain home so we didn't get to hear their entire set. What we did hear, however, was great. While both opening acts made the classical amateur mistake of drowning out the vocals with their instruments (despite the 1st one having 6 people on mic), the Mates of State noticed this problem early in their set and corrected it.
On the train home I was explaining the 2nd law of thermodynamics to my co-worker and some random people sitting in front of us took that as a cue to begin a conversation with us. When I told them we were software engineers working on virtualization, they asked, "Virtualization? You mean, like VMware?" Upon informing them that we did, in fact, work at VMware, they actually thanked us for making Workstation. I took the opportunity to conduct some impromptu guerrilla market research by asking them about the specifics of their usage. It turned out that they might be a use-case for the feature on which I've been working: the ability to build an application in your IDE, have it automatically launch inside an arbitrary VM and then let you step through the code in your IDE's visual debugger without ever leaving the host system, all at the touch of a single button.
Current Mood: cold
Nov. 20th, 2006
07:41 am - Opera meets Bollywood
Yesterday I saw the final production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Sorcerer done in Bollywood style at Stanford. While the costumes and dances were excellent, a couple of the leading characters couldn't sing. The climax was also lame and they left one of the issues completely unresolved at the end. It was a daring attempt to blend the style of one culture's theatre with the plotline and dialogue of another but it looks like they were stymied from a lack of good performers. While the sopranos were lending their voices to songs, everything sounds lovely but one of the tenors was losing his voice and another simply couldn't carry a tune to save his life.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/okay.gif)
apathetic
Current Music: The Perilous Night: No. 1 - Boris Berman
Oct. 22nd, 2006
09:53 pm - The Scottish Play
Macbeth has long been my favourite Shakespearean play but I'd never had a chance to see it performed live. However, since the West bay Opera is performing an operatic adaptation of Macbeth, I figured it would be the next best thing so morethanreal and I saw it today afternoon.
Although I've been to a few operas before, I'm still not entirely sold on the notion of singing in a language incomprehensible to the audience. Besides, I couldn't see much good emerging from any attempts to improve upon Shakespeare. Nevertheless, the set design was fabulous and the inclusion of an orchestra and chorus went a long way towards making up for the loss of that beautiful dialogue from the original script.
My favourite component of the set design was a thin sheet of black cloth that dropped down at the front of the stage to obscure it from view. By manipulating the intensity of the stage lighting behind this veil, the stage technicians were able to cause the entire scene to fade in and out of view. This was used to great effect in the scenes involving Macbeth and the weird sisters.
There were a few noticeable departures from Shakespeare's plot but the one that confused me was Lady Macbeth's ghost appearing at the end to the caress Malcolm and hand him a dagger after he is crowned king of Scotland. I mean, I know she was supposed to have a power-fetish but that's a bit much.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/working.gif)
working
Current Music: Freshman - Jill Sobule
Aug. 20th, 2006
09:05 am - Don Juan & human nature
Stanford Theatre is trying something new this summer: pay-what-want productions. Last week ayanosuke and I tried to attend one. All seats had been reserved by the time we called them (an hour before the performance began) but they start handing out unclaimed tickets to people on the wait-list a few minutes before the play starts. We added ourselves to the wait-list and hung around as tickets were dished out. Many people who were on the wait-list had not actually stuck around to claim their tickets so we were hoping that we would be able to get in. Most annoyingly, they ran out immediately before our turns came up.
Realizing that reservations were free and that they had a good system for dealing with unclaimed reservations, I decided it would be foolhardy not to make reservations for the next performance, even if I ended up being unable to attend it. So I reserved 4 seats and only ended up claiming 2 of them to watch last night's production of Don Juan. I can't understand why more people don't exploit the system this way!
The play itself, whose plot is roughly explained here, was entertaining for the most part and I quite enjoyed some of Don Juan's witty and eloquent speeches. I thought the costumes and set design were done well too. The acting was variable; while most of the main characters were played extremely well, a couple of the supporting roles stumbled now and then.The only major flaw was the ending, which was decidedly anticlimactic and left me feeling unsatisfied.
Current Mood: artistic
Current Music: The Wanderer - U2
Jul. 17th, 2006
09:09 pm - Mandolins and Thespians
Yesterday afternoon Paul gave me a ride into the city and I tried on my new suit at the Brooks Brothers. They needed to make a few minor adjustments so I didn't pick it up but it should be delivered to me by Thursday.
After that we went to hear one of Paul's friends play in a concert put on by a plucked string orchestra. I'd never heard music dominated by mandolins before and enjoyed their timbre very much. One of the pieces was from an opera called Madame Butterfly, which I'd seen a few years ago in Kitchener.
After the concert we watched a play called A Union of Socialist San Francisco that was written by somebody I know through Magic. It's absolutely hilarious and plays off all the Bay Area stereotypes. I highly recommend watching it if you live around here.
Current Mood: drained
Current Music: Wrapped Around Your Finger - The Police
Jul. 14th, 2006
07:06 pm - Kid Beyond in concert and collections
Just as Jim Carrey was able to make a good living pulling faces, apparently some people have figured out how make funny sounds for a living. It's called beatboxing and one of the big local stars is called Kid Beyond. I saw him performing in SF last night. The opener (Zoe) was a cellist with long dreads tied into a bun and leopard-spotted stockings. Kid Beyond started off beatboxing to record the backbeat for the rest of his show, which he then live-looped. The man is an amazing performance artist and I quite enjoyed the show.
At the team picnic today we were talking about the different things that people collect. My manager and his wife have 10 bicycles between them. Other people collect cameras, books-on-tape, Next cubes, iPods, etc. I guess my collection is t-shirts.
What tangible objects do you collect?
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/opiummmm/foxies/enthralled.gif)
enthralled
Current Music: Old Flame - Arcade Fire
Mar. 21st, 2006
11:10 pm - 24 hours with the Mac Mini
My Mini showed up yesterday afternoon. After dinner I unpacked it and turned it on. There were no problems with my Dell LCD display but I was mildly disappointed that, despite the promises of digital audio support, it did not offer either optical or coax audio ports so I'm still stuck with stereo sound. Upon booting it asked me if I wanted to transfer data from another Mac. I did so I connected the Mini to my Powerbook via a Firewire cable (borrowed from Shawn) and rebooted the Powerbook in Firewire mode. The data transfer tool did an impressive job of migrating everything over. It felt like I was using the same system, only with a lot more memory!
There were a few small problems but the only one that I wasn't able to work around easily is the lack of a universal binary driver for my Blackberry, since PocketMac hasn't been ported over yet. After moving my music over I was informed by iTunes that this machine was not authorized to play the songs I'd purchased from iTMS but providing my Apple account userID and password fixed that in a few seconds. My Flickr export plugin for iPhoto and Cisco VPN client no longer worked but upgrading to the latest versions of both solved that too.
Despite having to go through binary translation layer, using Photoshop is actually faster for me now because I don't have to deal with constantly swapping to disk. That's one sound I'm not going to miss!
Update: FrontRow is freaking awesome! I can control iTunes and browse my photos while sitting on the bed :-)
Current Mood: content
Current Music: They Might Be Giants - We Want A Rock
Mar. 15th, 2006
11:09 pm - Stories for the Dead
Tonight I went to see my friend Nicole perform in a play called Stories for the Dead at Stanford. The stage setup was the inverse of the Shakespearean stage used in The Brothers Karamazov; the audience sat in the middle surrounded by 4 stages. By shifting between stages the actors were able to avoid the need for delays between scenes. The downside was that we had to keep turning around in our seats.
The play itself dealt with issues of familial relationships but had far-eastern lore about the afterlife as the basis of the plot. It combined plot-twists along the lines of 6th Sense with regular punning and I did not notice any flaws in the acting, which was impressive for a non-professional cast.
Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Randy Wood - Rain Bows
Jul. 2nd, 2005
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