hot dogs, bikes, and hotness

I'm back home in Mountain View. A few more memories from Chile:


Completo, which is the Chilean version of a hot dog.


Embarking on a bicycle tour of Santiago.


View from the top of San Cristobal hill, in the middle of the city.


My tour guide took me to a local establishment called "cafe con pierna", which means "coffee with legs". You go there to drink coffee, while pretty waitresses in bikinis flirt with you.

There is no dancing. You go to drink coffee and confide your troubles to an attractive woman who will listen intently to you.


Inside of the cafe. (I asked permission to take photos.)

---

On the way back, I stopped in Miami. My friend Lily came out to join me. On Saturday night, we ran into James Franco! He was standing outside the entrance for a party.



This is now a good opportunity to show some photos of James Franco.

Chile

Today is my last day in Chile, before returning to the US. As described in an earlier post, I came to Chile as a last-minute substitute after my Antarctica tour suffered a boat engine failure. Chile has turned out to be great!

I'm staying with a friend's cousin. He runs a shop in Santiago selling Taiwanese gift items. It's a refreshing novelty talking to an entrepeneur who owns a physical shop with tangible goods.

Speaking Mandarin for many days has also been nice.


Daily special in the Santiago fruit market. This only cost two US dollars.

One thing I've found disappointing is the restaurant service in South America. The waitstaff don't bring the bill until you ask. Even after you flag them down, it takes half an hour to complete the process of getting the bill, collecting your money, and bringing change. The average restaurant service here is on par with the worst service I've ever received in the US.


Impressive sand castle on the beach, at Viña del Mar.


This Chilean drink is called terremoto, which means "earthquake". It's a slightly sour alcohol, mixed with pineapple ice cream.


The inside of the main cathedral.

I went on three tours with the Santiago tour company La Bicicleta Verde (more photos later). My tour guide Glenn is one of the co-founders of the company. They started the company with eight bikes at the start of 2008, and have grown to 40 bikes within two years.

I was fascinated with his business tale. I spent a good part of the tour asking him questions about how he handled marketing and bootstrapping.

imagine a 24-year secret relationship

Recently my Taiwanese friend told me that Andy Lau has gotten married.


Andy Lau is the biggest movie star / pop singer in Asia. He is 48. He is the equivalent of Brad Pitt combined with Justin Timberlake. Millions of women have crushes on him. I had a crush on him.

Teen girls vowed to commit suicide if he ever married. So, he promised his fans that he would never marry. He lived up to this by never appearing with a woman. Throughout all the decades of singing love ballads, he was never spotted with a woman by all the paparazzi dogging him, until last year.


In 2008, he was finally photographed with a Malaysian woman Carol Chu. She turns out to have been his girlfriend for 24 years.



They registered to get married in Las Vegas last year. The reason was to go for artificial insemination, which is only legal for married couples in Hong Kong. She is 43, and is now pregnant.

I wonder what it is like for them, having a secret relationship for 24 years. He's followed constantly by fans and paparazzi, so they must have practiced extreme secrecy to dodge publicity. Interviewers would ask whether he had a girlfriend, whether he was gay, whether he has secretly gotten married. He would always say that he is unattached. I wonder if she minded watching that.

Recently he took her to a movie in public for the first time. He rented out the theatre. There were a bunch of tabloid articles about it. This must mean that in these 24 years, they have not gone to a restaurant together. They don't go to parties. They don't go to the grocery store together. They don't go outside in the yard or balcony of their house.

This may be the only relationship she's had, since they started dating when she was 19. Imagine living your entire adult life in this way.

Sep 11 text messages

Some of these alleged leaked September 11 text messages are chilling:

"I know you have a new relationship and do not care about me. But just in case anything happens know I love you hon. Missed Ya good bye."

"I want to hold you now."

"if i do not hear from you by high noon, i am going to pick laura up at school and tell her her father is dead."

"Honey wanted to tell you how much i love you. I was a little worried. I Don't want to lose you now that I got you back. You mean everything to me. You have my whole heart and life. I love you so much."

Buenos Aires

I've been in Buenos Aires for the past few days, with my dad. A few photos:


Mechanical flower statue. The flower sometimes opens. It's unclear what criteria causes it to open: solar power?

I felt a strong desire to sit in the park with my laptop, watching for the flower to open. It is like the Deer Hunter game where the user sits for many minutes waiting for a deer to appear. Top-selling PC game in 1999!


There are a lot of beef dishes in Argentina. This was a particularly good one.


Bought an empanada on the street during the Sunday fair. I chose pumpkin, corn, and cheese stuffing. Turns out it doesn't taste very good to have a starchy dough stuffed with numerous other starches.


My dad and I went to watch a soccer game. This is a photo from an hour prior to the match. 90% of the seats were filled during the actual match.

There were at least 100 policemen outside. We saw several streets where a dozen policemen stood in a line next to one another, each holding a heavy glass shield. There were policemen on horses, policemen in cars, policemen in armored vehicles. All this for a regular Sunday soccer match between two local leagues!

"Why do they have horses?" I said.

"To chase you if you cause trouble," said my dad.

"But why horses, when they already have cars and armored vehicles?"

"To chase you using every available method."

We passed mobs of fans wearing the local team's colors: yellow and dark blue. Fortunately I happened to be wearing a dark blue Google shirt. My dad lamented that China will never get into the World Cup again. "Look at these fans," he said. "China has to get this serious to stand a chance! It's not going to happen."

During the game, everyone around us stood for the entire match, singing songs in unison for three hours.

agreement on thankfulness

Talking to my dad over breakfast.

Me: 爸，你感谢什么？ [Dad, what are you thankful for?]

Dad: 什么感谢？对谁感谢？ 感谢神？ [What? Thankful to whom? God?]

Me: 今天美国过感恩节。 有个传统是讨论一下你感谢什么。 [It's Thanksgiving in the US today. A normal tradition is to discuss what you're thankful for.]

Dad: 我感谢苏明给我生了一个女儿和一个儿子。 否则一辈子光倒霉了。 这件事太重要了。 [I'm thankful to your mom for giving me a daughter and a son. Otherwise my life would just be full of unlucky events. This item was extremely important.]

Me: 哦，对我也很重要。 [It was very important to me too.]

gladwell parody

I'm amused by this Vanity Fair parody of Malcolm Gladwell:

Why baby Jesus? Research confirms there were upwards of 157 hotel-cum-stables in Bethlehem that night, with estimated 97 percent occupancy levels. So why did that star shine so brightly over his?

...

The results—codified and analyzed on a specially devised and integrated grid system known as blsht—were astonishing. All 323 volunteers experienced a quiet night in. In other words, they waited up all night, but no one—specifically, 0.0000 percent of a total world population of 6,783,940,189 human beings—bothered to come by.

So what does this blsht metric tell you about your appeal, compared with the appeal of the baby Jesus?

It tells you this: he was special.

And—here’s another thing—you are not.

I am gratified at the upwelling of backlash against Gladwell. For a long time, I've objected to the way that he uses jargon to sound authoritative and convince the masses that his ideas are scientifically accurate when they are not. He has been spreading misinformation on matters that I value, such as discrimination against minorities, and sexism.

gi(f)t

Me: "What's a good gift for a guy, around $100? I've never met him -- it's my friend's cousin."

LG: "I'm probably the wrong person to ask."

Me: "Why, what would you suggest?"

LG: "A github membership."

Me: "You're right. You were the wrong person to ask."

slashdot taking a lesson from Fox News

It irks me to see clearly biased journalism presented as fair articles. Take a look at this slashdot article:

Headline: "Bing Gains 10% Marketshare"

Wow, you might think, Bing gained a delta of 10% market share? That's quite a lot!

The article reveals that Bing gained market share for a final total of 10%. That is very misleading. If I say "Tom gains 150 pounds", what would you intrepret that to mean? By this usage, it would mean he gained a few pounds to reach a total of 150.

Here's another example from the slashdot blurb:

That's a gain of two large points in five months.

Oh, these are "large" percentage points? That must be a lot more impressive than two "small" percentage points. What about the five months -- are they large or small?

Ridiculous.

sha-mayn visit

Sha-mayn was in town last week, visiting from Beijing. I hesitate to write this, because at least one of you will email her, "Why didn't you tell me you were in the Bay Area?"

Anyway, we had dinner at Calafia, the restaurant of chef Charlie from Google. The salmon was very good.


Afterwards we talked at my house for a couple hours. I played with bubble wrap from a package Sha-mayn received. It was even better than the iPhone bubble-wrap application.

Talking to Sha-mayn in person was like eating at Fuki Sushi after a long break. I was struck by how awesome it was.

Sha-mayn was much more cheerful than the current Bay Area vibe. She's naturally positive in general, but I wonder if also Beijing is more optimistic than California right now. Ever since the market crash a year ago, the entire SF area has shifted from Tigger toward Eeyore. I wonder if this is on par with the rest of the US, or if the Bay Area has been hit especially hard with people stressing about personal finances, raising their next round of funding, etc.

self poking

Tonight Lily, Charles, and I cooked.


Afterwards Charles was washing dishes in the kitchen, while Lily and I were in the living room.

Charles: "These forks are sharp!"

[small delay]

Lily: "Did you poke yourself?"

Me: [puzzled for a few seconds] "Oh, I thought you meant on Facebook. I was going to say, I didn't know that was possible."

ice & errors

My Antarctica tour is canceled. The boat engine crankshaft broke. I received an email notifying me of this on Monday. I was supposed to fly down to Argentina next week, and make my way down to the southernmost tip to board the boat at the end of the month.

I should be singing "I'm on a boat" Antarctica-style in a couple weeks! Instead now I am scrambling to figure out alternate travel arrangements in South America.


Right now, it looks like I will be spending a week in Buenos Aires with my dad, and then a week in Santiago, Chile.

I am changing the plane tickets right now. The change fee is $200, which causes me stress. I want to make sure to research flight prices thoroughly. If I make a mistake and need to call in again, I would have to pay another change fee.

My dad likes to say that my brother and I are suited for a job where mistakes can be tolerated, like computer science. If your program doesn't compile the first time, fix the error and try again. In fact, it's rare to have a non-trivial program run perfectly the first time.

Most things in computer software are fault-tolerant. Accidentally push out bad code to your web server? Just roll it back. Faulty client code can be auto-updated (provided you did not hose the auto-updater).

An example of a job that Tom and I would do poorly at, according to my dad, would be performing arts, where it is important to deliver an impeccable performance on stage. Another example is being an athlete.

Recently I learned that being a lawyer would fall into the same category! Lawyers have deadlines by which they must file certain motions. If they miss the deadline, their client could lose the case by default. Also, if your case goes to trial, you cannot undo mistakes at the trial. If the trial ends and you discover another precedent you could've cited, it's too late.

I never appreciated how difficult it is to be a lawyer! Also there is so much guilt, if your client loses the case and goes to jail, but you believed them to be innocent. It is a tough profession.

Halloween photos

On Halloween, after attending a wedding, I went to a pub crawl for an hour. It was in the Mission district of San Francisco.


I saw this couple across the room. He's wearing a penguin hat. She's wearing an insect hat. I walked across the pub to ask if their costume is "linux bug". They confirmed that it is.


This girl came as Mike Tyson. We all agreed this was a well-executed costume.


This guy had 16 remote controls strapped to him. His costume is "control freak".


Omar as a box of wine. He wore a five-pound bag inside the box, and hooked it up to a spigot. You could actualy serve yourself wine from his costume. The pub wasn't too thrilled about him doing this.

---

C3 and I also visited my friend Kevin Fox's haunted house in Sunnyvale. It was stunning.


Mad scientist room. There is a robotic laughing-scientist, as well as a live actor. Guess which one is which.


The "biohazard" hallway, with a live actor halfway down.


Pirate room. There was appropriate pirate music.


Spider lair.

I was awed that Kevin, his wife Rachel, and their neighbors were able to construct a professional-quality haunted house in their spare time. In this world of commercialism, it's inspiring to see people create art just for the enjoyment of making it.

funny "emasculating your spouse"

From here.

Halloween! With Tom

My brother is in town for two days, visiting me and his college friends.

I picked him up from SFO in costume, and we had breakfast at Cafe Borrone.



Tom: "What time is the wedding?"

Me: "I need to leave in an hour."

Tom: "Where are you going to change?"

Me: "I brought a dress, but now I'm thinking of just going in costume. This isn't a scary costume."

Tom: "It's not a costume wedding though."

Me: "It probably won't matter that much."

Tom: "No! Don't go in costume. How would you like it if some yahoo came to your wedding in a costume?"

Me: "Oh, that'd be awesome."

Tom: [at the same time] "Yes, okay, you would. But don't do it!"

...

I listened to Tom, and changed beforehand. I was very grateful for this, when I arrived at the wedding. There were eight bridesmaids and eight groomsmen. All the attendees were in very formal wedding attire.

giving an online talk about interviewing

My friend Lily is Director of Marketing at eduFire, an online video-learning web site.

Next Tuesday at 2pm PST, I'm giving an eduFire talk How to Rock Your Next Engineering Interview. Sign up, or pass onto any friends who may be interviewing for a job!

Here is the syllabus:

* Interview format
* The mindset
* Discussing past experience
* Coding questions
* Brainstorming questions
* Brainteasers
* Asking the interviewer about the company
* Following up
* Dress code, preparations

my brother is visiting

Yesterday morning, I got an email out of the blue from Southwest Airlines. It was an itinerary for my brother Tom to come to San Francisco for the weekend. I haven't seen him since two months ago, when he moved to Irvine to work for Blizzard.

niniane: YAY!!!!!!
niniane: OH MY GOD I AM SO EXCITED!!!!!!!!!!!
Tom: haha yes, i'm visiting this weekend =)
niniane: oh, i was excited because Amazon EC2 dropped their prices.
niniane: Are you coming to visit?
Tom: haha what is ec2?
niniane: just kidding, i am excited!

Moments later, we were discussing our plans for the weekend.

niniane: i am at a wedding on saturday from 4pm to 9pm+
Tom: oh okay then i will hang out with someone else during that time
Tom: is it a halloween wedding?
niniane: sadly no
niniane: it is a travesty to hold a wedding on halloween but not have it be a costume wedding
niniane: wtf!
Tom: yes 'wtf' is right
Tom: when they ask if anyone has any objections .. you know what to do
niniane: lol lol lol

eBooks

Barnes & Noble announced the Nook eBook reader.


I am curious about the touchscreen. I bought a Kindle last month, and still sometimes find myself jabbing its screen instead of pushing the buttons on the side.

Being able to lend a virtual book to your friend for 14 days is pretty cool. I would lend and borrow books more frequently, if there wasn't the concern about forgetting to return them. One of my friends actually keeps a library system for her books, with a card she sticks into the book cover.

The B&N advertising claims "over a million titles" whereas Amazon says 350,000. I wonder how B&N can have more titles. Perhaps through the Google Books project?

I've really enjoyed having a Kindle. I carry it in my purse. It is convenient to have a dozen books on hand to read, depending on my mood.

Another unforeseen benefit has been the ability to highlight sections and add notes, and have those saved into a single file.

Eating Contest 2

From the second eating contest, Taco Bell challenge:


I beat my previous time of 2 minutes 32 seconds. This time I ate two soft tacos in 2 minutes 8 seconds.

hehe

Yesterday I had dinner with C3 (my college friend), and two of his friends from high school.

Today, over IM:

C3: It turns out that before yesterday, Bob had thought you were two separate people, 'eggplant' [my college username for the computer cluster] and a guy named 'Gideon' who I initially met in high school. This is what happens when I don't enunciate 'Niniane' precisely enough.

I am trying to imagine the conversation wherein Bob discovers that this guy Gideon is actually me.

Ithaca, NY

Last week I visited my friends Melba and Hod at Cornell University. Ithaca is so beautiful!



People told me how pretty the gorges are, but I thought they were in state parks, cordoned off from the rest of the town. Instead, we walked over a number of gorges from Melba & Hod's house to Cornell campus.



The architecture of the campus is pretty too.



This is on the Cornell campus!

A requirement for graduation is to pass a swim test. My young friend Josh said this is to safeguard students who like to gorge-dive. But later I learned that MIT also has the swim requirement, and they have no gorges.



Treman State Park. This reminds me of "Lord of the Rings" when Frodo hides from the Nazgul.



Apparently one of the drawbacks of Ithaca is that the winter lasts for a long time. Otherwise it would be too perfect.



Melba and her large poodle.

We walked the dogs every day. It was my first time walking a dog. At first, it was hard to know how much leeway to give on the leash. I didn't want to yank the dog around, but I also needed to keep it out of traffic. After I figured out the right balance, I found dog-walking to be surprisingly fulfilling.



Me with Melba's little dog. It was very quiet, and also liked having its belly rubbed. It was warm, and liked to cuddle, and didn't wiggle around very much. If I were designing a dog, I would create the same features.

rainy humor

It's raining heavily outside right now.



Omar reported that the Google shuttle from San Francisco hit massive flooding. After taking a long time to travel a few blocks, he got off the shuttle and is working from San Francisco. On twitter:



Over IM:

Lily: omar said, "misha looked outside and didn't want to go but then remembered he had lunch with niniane so decided to go. big mistake."
Lily: "he's at 1:45 in and still not in mv"
niniane: poor misha
niniane: we could've rescheduled!
niniane: hahaha imagine if i txt him in an hour, "hey misha, it's so rainy outside, let's reschedule." he'd freak!
Lily: omg!!!

caltech logic

Walking along the Palo Alto farmer's market with C3, my friend from Caltech.

Me: "Guess who was on the same flight as me two weeks ago? I'll give you ten yes-or-no questions."

C3: "Is it someone I know from Caltech?"

Me: "Yes."

C3: "Is it someone in your graduating class?"

Me: "Yes."

C3: "Ah, now I must be able to guess it, because there are fewer than 257 people in your graduating class."

:)

---

Later:

C3: "This is going to yield less than one bit of information, but ... is it a guy?"

Me: "No."

C3: "Oh! That was more than 1 bit of information."

...

(He didn't guess it in the end.)

cute sarcastic-looking owl

Today I saw this livejournal entry (courtesy of Sean Hewitt) of a woman who found an owl by the side of the road. The owl was injured, so she took it in her car to an animal rescue organization.


The owl, looking un-amused.


After putting the owl into a cardboard box, so that it wouldn't flap around.

I'm sure that if the owl could talk, it would make the best deadpan jokes! It would be cracking us all up with its dry wit.

Willingham

A few weeks ago, the New Yorker ran a riveting article about a Texas man executed under the death penalty: Trial By Fire. He was accused of burning down his house with his three young daughters inside.



He insisted that he was innocent. As the years went on, many of the prosecution's witnesses were discredited for being sensationalist, and working from urban myths instead of scientific fact. A leading arson expert wrote a scathing report a few months before the scheduled execution, insisting that there was no evidence for arson.

Regardless, the state of Texas refused to re-examined his case. He was killed by lethal injection.

Now, several years later, there is some investigation into whether he was wrongfully executed. Yesterday was a scheduled commission meeting, to hear evidence from arson experts. The evidence points toward an accidental fire.

Two days before the commission hearing, the Texas governor replaced three members of the commission and postponed the hearing indefinitely. He is up for re-election. It would look bad for him if the commission concludes that he refused the appeal of an innocent man on death row.

I don't understand why this isn't given more media coverage. An innocent man may have been executed. The governor seems to be using a shady maneuver to deny the hearing. Why is this getting a tiny blip of coverage compared to the Letterman scandal? It is literally a matter of life and death.

tragic FML

From FMyLife:

Today, I open my front door and saw a covered basket with a card from my girlfriend on it. I picked it up and read, "Hope this cheers you up." I uncovered the basket to find a golden labrador puppy. Its eyes were closed and it wasn't breathing. FML

The comments:

> oh my god... :[ did she give you a dead dog on purpose...?

> either way a dead animal is a pretty evil gift
> unless its a cow
> yum

and

> It sucks that its eyes were closed.

> > "It sucks that its eyes were closed"
> REEAALLY? THAT'S what you got out of the story??? Wow. WOOWWW.

This reminds me of an incident that happened at Google a long time ago. Someone emailed the company-wide mailing list to say "Free cocker spaniel to a loving home." The contents of the email described the puppy.

Chef Charlie did a reply-all, "I have a great recipe for stewed spaniel."

C.S. Lewis discourse on money vs power

This writing by C.S. Lewis about money and power is very interesting:

The difference between us is that the Professor sees the ‘World’ purely in terms of those threats and those allurements which depend on money. I do not. The most ‘worldly’ society I have ever lived in is that of schoolboys: most worldly in the cruelty and arrogance of the strong, the toadyism and mutual treachery of the weak, and the unqualified snobbery of both. Nothing was so base that most members of the school proletariat would not do it, or suffer it, to win the favour of the school aristocracy: hardly any injustice too bad for the aristocracy to practise. But the class system did not in the least depend on the amount of pocket money. Who needs to care about money if most of the things he wants will be offered by cringing servility and the remainder can be taken by force? This lesson has remained with me all my life. That is one of the reasons why I cannot share Professor Haldanes exaltation at the banishment of Mammon from ‘a sixth of our planet’s surface’. I have already lived in a world from which Mammon was banished: it was the most wicked and miserable I have yet known. If Mammon were the only devil, it would be another matter. But where Mammon vacates the throne, how if Moloch takes his place? As Aristotle said, ‘Men do not become tyrants in order to keep warm’. All men, of course, desire pleasure and safety. But all men also desire power and all men desire the mere sense of being ‘in the know’ or the ‘inner ring’, of not being ‘outsiders’: a passion insufficiently studied and the chief theme of my story. When the state of society is such that money is the passport to all these prizes, then of course money will be the prime temptation. But when the passport changes, the desires will remain.

It is from this post which I saw from Wes Bigelow's blog.

wallace and grommit would understand

Misha: "How do you like EC2?"

Me: "It's good so far. It's been reliable, and they're adding features quickly, like auto-scaling."

Misha: "How much is it?"

Me: "It starts at $72 / month."

Misha: "That's a lot!"

Me: "Don't you spend that much per month on many other things?"

Misha: "Like cheese? Well, yes."

it's like the IT Crowd episode with "FriendFace"

Jade: "My dad told me that he joined MyFace."

Me: "Oh, what's that?"

Jade: "He got mixed up between MySpace and Facebook."

space

In the popular article about MIT students launching a camera into space, this segment was striking:

Four hours after the launch, Lee said, the team thought all was lost.

"We were like placing bets on whether we thought it would work or not," the 23-year-old mechanical engineering grad student said. "Early on, we were optimistic that it would work. About 4 hours after, [when] we hadn't heard any news about the device, we had sort of given up hope. We'd thought we'd lost it."

Dejected, the group drove back to Boston to Lee's apartment.

They checked his computer and found an unlikely signal: The camera had landed in a construction zone outside Worcester, Massachusetts, about 25 miles from the launch site.

"We were so excited, we jumped right back into the car, and we drove out to Worcester, and we found it. That was a great moment," Lee said.

They were amazed with the results. The camera was unharmed. The hand warmers were still hot. And the photos were amazing.

I imagine the three students driving out to the construction site. Who was the first to spot the styrofoam container? Were they quivering with anticipation when they pressed the Canon image-preview button?

When they saw the phenomenal photo with the black of space, did they experience an irrationally destructive temptation to press the delete button? Similar to standing by a cliff and repressing an unexplained impulse to jump off, which most of us have felt at one time or another.

uWink++

Two British students, Jade and Dan, just told me about a restaurant in London called Inamo. The tabletop consists of a video screen, which customers use to place their orders.



Jade: "After you order, the screen shows an image of your food in front of you. So you can see what you'll be eating, while it's being cooked."

Dan: "You can play battleship while you wait."

Jade: "The food is really good. It's Oriental fusion."

Dan: "You can watch the cooks on a webcam from your screen."

Jade: "The prices were really reasonable too. My entree with a drink was 15 pounds."

Dan: "The table computer has maps. You can pull up a London map, and plan where you'll go the rest of the night. It has a tube map too."

I am totally sold. Next time I'm in London, I will be going to Inamo! It sounds like uWink, with much better execution.

MIT charm school

Recently my friend, a MIT graduate student, told me that MIT has a charm school for guys, to learn social skills and how to woo women.

I am skeptical that attendance would be high. (Any MIT people want to confirm or deny?) Most guys I know who would most benefit from this service are also the ones most likely to shun it. Their motivation is lower than their actual skill. The low motivation is probably what led to the undeveloped skills in the first place.)

These guys say things like, "Why should I lend a woman my jacket when we're out at night? She should've thought ahead and brought her own jacket!"

The logic is reasonable, so it is usually useless to argue.

Misha says his retort to all these arguments is, "Dude, do you ever want to get laid?"

That would make a good tagline for the MIT charm school for men.

OMG

amusing faq I just read

My friend posted a personal FAQ in response to his company getting acquired:

It depends how you define rich. If you define rich by the amount of $ you have, someone will always have more $ than you. Conversely, you will always have more $ than someone else, even if you are unemployed. Under this definition, you'll be half inferior/half douchebag - so don't go down this path.

I found this amusing and well-said.

guess where

There's a game on Friendfeed where people guess where a photo was taken. My friend Gary is the reigning expert at this game.

In that vein, guess where this photo of me and my brother Tom was taken. It's from last month:



As a hint, on the same day, we went to a delightful museum where we saw these works:


Islamic vase. The blue used in Islamic art is very eye-catching. I am curious whether Istanbul is as exotic to visit as the sense you get from the art.


Courtyard inside the museum. It's good when museums have natural lighting.


I find it impressive when artists can mold glass into their desired colors and textures.


Vases can be very interesting, because they combine form and function. The shape is basically defined, and yet there are infinite variations.

cute love story

Susan forwarded me this Salon story, which is cute.

Gerd: This is also something that keeps us together, you know, the jokes and laughing all the time. I really have problems to take life seriously. Believe it or not, I'm happy when it's raining. Because if I'm not happy, it's still raining. My whole life is like that, you know? I lost a leg to diabetes, and I'm happy. I never get cold feet anymore. I only need one shoe when I go shopping.

Dina: The last three years was hard time for me. When Gerd had lost ... and then the other leg started ... Then he had bypass, then kidney. He had a lot of problem and I'm only by myself with everything. Was not always easy.

Gerd: This is also big, big, big thing in our marriage, that she takes care of my handicap, without any question whatever. It is just there, every day and every day and every day. If I try to go to the refrigerator with my crutches to pick up a Coke, she's right behind me, "Sit down! I do that. I have two legs, you only have one, I do that!" And this is much more worth than say every five minutes, "I love you," which is mostly just said to say something.

And it's also 100 percent sign that she loves me because I might meet 250 people and I tell them all the same joke and she's still laughing. She doesn't have to yell at me, "I love you. I'll kick your ass, you don't believe it!"

Dina: So we are both a little older and smarter. Much, much happier than before. This was a very different life, and a much, much better life.

Gerd: We thank her ex-husband every day. Actually, every year on the divorce date, we send him a thank-you note.

git

Last month, after a bout of troubles with git (source control system), I wrote this tweet:

git is like a bad boyfriend: problems committing, demands to go over your history constantly, wants to be called "master"

The funniest response was from my friend Ted:

typical. git blame the man.

At a group dinner later in the week, we discussed how useful it would be if you could issue git commands in real life.

If someone makes comments that get on your nerves, just git-ignore them.

More useful is a checkpoint system. Any time that you detect a potential problem coming up in the conversation, you can shout out "checkpoint". Later, you can run a rollback command to restore to the saved state. Here's how it would work:

Girl: "We need to talk."

Guy: "Checkpoint."

Girl: "This isn't working between us. I want to break up."

Guy: "Rollback."

Girl: "This isn't working betw -- "

Guy: "Rollback."

Girl: "Where do you want to go for dinner?"

I think this will be very useful as long as you remember to checkpoint at appropriate moments.