GregP's Profundity

GTA4: Little Things Done Well

2008-11-25T18:59:00.000-08:00

Grand Theft Auto IV has me conflicted. After years of ogling the Xbox 360, and missing out on big game releases like Halo 2 and Gears of War (all the while righteously proclaiming that PC gaming was where it's at), I finally caved and got one when GTA4 was released back in April. I'd never played any of the GTA games -- never really had much interest in shooting hookers and running down pedestrians. But the mammoth hype machine sucked me in and I joined the consoling masses that I'd derided for oh so long.

The bottom line is, the hype was ... well, hype. GTA4 is not the game to end all games. Reviewers who probably put 10-15 hours into it before making their judgment were understandably wooed by the open-world freeform sprawl of Liberty City, the interesting and well-done main story propelled by believable characters and excellent voice acting, and, of course, the massive PR campaign.

Once you get past the newness of it all, though, you see that the gameplay is fundamentally very repetitive: drive here, shoot this guy, steal this money. Drive there, take this guy out, call this guy. To their credit, the devs do sometimes get creative with this GTA equivalent of the standard RPG FedEx quest (i.e. take X package to Y guy for Z reward). But in the end, when you step back from the details, there's really not much variety here.

Still, though, somehow this game has a way of sucking you in. From what I can tell, it's the sheer amount of 'little things' that come together to make Liberty City so compelling: traffic, while not the smartest, is everywhere; pedestrians are on every sidewalk, yell things when you honk at them, answer their cell phones, get angry at drivers that hit them, and have conversations among themselves. In 27 hours of game time, I think I have yet to hear a single repeated conversation or comment from any one of them. Ambulances come to the scene of big accidents; cops chase bad guys; food vendors hawk hot dogs on street corners. Day changes to night changes to morning. Sunny skies turn to downpours, soaking the streets, forcing pedestrians to open umbrellas or run for cover. In short, the city really does feel alive, and its sheer size is such that you can't help but feel like it dwarfs you and would just keep on going even after you stop playing.

Seven months after its release, I'm only 37% of the way through the game, according to the in-game stats tracker. I'm not in any particular hurry, and I don't play that often. I pick it up every now and then, maybe once every two weeks for an hour. Right now I'm stuck on a frustrating-as-hell mission called "Waste Not Want Knots". I'm supposed to go with Packie McRreary and his brothers to a waste management plant run by the mob to steal a stash of cash. We have to hop the fence, take out the bad guys standing around outside, get into the plant, fight the baddies inside, I have to run up the stairs to the office and grab the cash, then we have to fight our way outside to the rear of the plant, where a 'getaway boat' is waiting for us. I've tried this mission, oh, probably thirty times. There are just too many bad guys. Making it that much harder is that if any of your guys dies, the mission's a failure. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but I just can't beat it.

Anyway, on the ride over to the waste management plant, Packie and his brothers have a conversation about the mob and about their own family. I was getting so, so tired of hearing this story every single time I had to drive them back over to the plant for one more try. Then, a few nights ago, on my 4th try of the night, I notice that Packie doesn't start talking - he's quiet. All I hear is the radio ... and then he says, "is it OK if we just listen to the radio on this one?" I couldn't believe it! The game knows I'm really damn tired of hearing this same stupid conversation and had some pity on me! Freakin' awesome!

So yeah, that seems to sum up the appeal of GTA4 for me. It does a lot of little things really well, and in combination, it adds up to a very well done game. The hype was way overblown, but it's a damn fun game.

Nitpicking Fallout 3

2008-11-04T18:16:00.000-08:00

Whether gamers took Bethesda's advice to Prepare For The Future or not, the long-awaited Fallout 3 was released on October 28 to much fanfare, including midnight openings at hundreds of Best Buy and Gamestop stores around the country. Having never played the first two Fallout games, and being turned off by all the "it's just Oblivion - with guns" preview clamoring by game sites, I decided many months ago that I wouldn't buy it right when it came out, instead waiting until it'd gone on sale and I had no other new games to play. Besides, I was deep into STALKER: Clear Sky, and didn't see myself siphoning off much time for another game.

But, I'll admit it, the awesome ads plastered all over Metro Center for the game got me interested again, and I scooped it up on release day. Rushing home that night to install it and give it a try, I reflected on how much I hoped it wasn't just Oblivion with guns, because although I'd loved Morrowind (possibly due to its being the first real RPG I'd ever played), Oblivion just didn't "do it" for me: sure, it was gorgeous, and huge, and open-world-ish to the max, but there were enough annoyances and lack of originality that my enthusiasm for it eventually waned and made me stop playing (though admittedly only after many months).

Now that I'm five hours into Fallout 3, by my standards (i.e. bitching can be justified with even only a very minimal amount of actual relevant knowledge) I'm more than qualified to point out some criticisms that I have of the game. Here goes:

Floating objects: this is not a bug, but rather a perpetual artifact of the Havok physics engine which also showed itself in Oblivion. All objects that should be touching, like a plate on a table, are in fact levitating a small distance apart. My guess is that the engine can't handle having two objects touching without forcing some reaction to occur between them; i.e. it is contact between objects that triggers the physics reactions to be applied. In most cases the devs have been careful to minimize this separation distance between objects, but there are times when it is blatantly noticeable and just looks ridiculous. Can it really be that in 2008 we can't design a physics engine to get around this problem?

When the player's view is moved over a box, crate, desk, closet, or any other object which can be searched, if it is empty, the world "EMPTY" appears over it. Now, I too grew tired of clicking on searchable items in Morrowind and Oblivion only to find them empty, but couldn't the devs have come up with some sort of happy medium between wasting my time and leading me around by the nose only to items that aren't empty? I feel like this is a concession to short-attention-span consolers, which always bugs me.

Immersion-breaking NPC behavior: for a game that relies so heavily on interactions with NPCs, it boggles my mind at how unrealistic they can behave. I've watched two NPCs stand face to face, trying to walk through each other, for more than 10 seconds before one gets pushed to the side and is able to walk around the other. I've also heard about occasions where a conversation with one NPC gets triggered by the player's proximity regardless of what the player is currently doing - including fighting another NPC, which gets put on hold while the crucially important conversation with the first NPC occurs. C'mon Bethesda - is it that difficult to prevent such immersion breakers?

While I think the Pip-Boy UI is a cool approach to presenting the player's inventory, stats, and map, I cannot understand why the actual screen area is so small. Taking up the rest of the screen are all the non-functional graphical details of the Pip-Boy: the knobs, dials, and metal frame. As a result, a ton of scrolling through menu items must constantly be done, which gets old fast. Sure, the Pip-Boy looks cool, but how about letting me see more than a handful of items in the lists at a time? Hopefully some enterprising modders will get around this soon.

Another leading-consolers-by-the-nose element: every NPC in your vicinity is indicated on your compass by a marker showing their orientation toward you: friendly or hostile. This takes some of the 'exploration' impetus out of the game, as you always know when a baddie is around the corner.

I can't see my body when I look down! While probably a legacy limitation of the Oblivion engine, it's disappointing to not be able to see my torso, legs, and feet when I look down. Most games these days show the rest of your body, adding an element of embodiment of the player into the game, so not having a body noticeably detracts from the experience.

Wonky animations: while switching to third-person view and zooming out is convenient for running around and exploring - when a wider field-of-view is preferable - the animations are so basic and untailored to the actual player movement that they become distracting. For example if you run forward and then additionally press sidestep, the animation doesn't change at all; rather, your player just slides diagonally. I know, sounds like a minor issue, but when your player's movement over the ground doesn't look right, you notice. Again, seems like an issue not that hard to fix - couldn't more animations simply have been created for the player?

Having to scroll through dialogue options: again probably a console concession. When talking to an NPC, the possible player responses are listed, but if there's more than about 3, you have to scroll through them to see the rest, even though there's plenty of screen space (at higher resolutions, which most PC gamers would be playing at) to have extended the dialogue box in order to fit them all in. Again, hopefully modders will get around this one by either making the box bigger or the font smaller.

Whew! That's what I've come up with so far. Sure, none of them sound terribly serious, but when you come into the game hoping that none of Oblivion's shortcomings bled over into this one, you can't help but notice how they mostly did. That leads to a game experience that, for all intents and purposes, could conceivably be seen as nothing more than a high-quality total conversion for Oblivion, which for the most part, is a bit of a disappointment.

However, all that aside - and I fully admit this might sound contradictory - I'm really enjoying Fallout 3 so far! That's because, well, all faults aside, an Oblivion total conversion putting the player in a post-apocalyptic world set in and around Washington, DC would have been pretty frickin' cool - and it is. As I get more into it, I'm sure I'll have more to complain about, but this is only because I'm paying such close attention to the game and continue to have such high hopes for it.

Back in the days when I was a teen-ager ...

2008-11-02T18:00:00.000-08:00

before I had status and before I had a pager
you could find The Abstract listening to hip-hop
my pops used to say it reminded him of be-bop
I said 'well daddy, don't you know that things go in cycles?'

So begins the opening track "Excursions" from A Tribe Called Quest's classic 1991 sophomore album The Low End Theory. I clearly remember listening to the cassette for the first time after getting it as part of BMG Music Club's 'buy 1, get 10 free' initial offer way back in 1992. At the time, I was heavily into hip-hop already, but with a very narrow focus on Ice-T, NWA, PE, X-Clan, Eazy-E and the like - the more 'confrontational' stuff. Aware that there was a whole 'nother world of hip-hop out of New York that I knew little about, I used the BMG 10-free deal to get up to speed on it - Brand Nubian, BDP, Tribe, Big Daddy Kane, etc.

I remember being blown away by The Low End Theory, in particular. It was unlike anything I'd heard: creative, positive, headnodic (yes that's a word), jazzy. I listened to it constantly for months, and it's been one of my favorite albums ever since that first listen.

Pondering recently the state of hip-hop (again), it occurred to me that my enthusiasm for new music has waned considerably these days. I look forward to new game releases much more so than hip-hop albums, whereas it used to be the opposite by a long shot. A big part of it is that I still haven't found a convenient way to keep up with and find new material (yup, still mourning the loss of college radio at WMUC since leaving College Park seven years ago). I try to catch The Soul Controllers on Decipher on Thursday nights, but since they moved from 11 to 10 PM, I haven't actually caught the show live in months. In the past few months I haven't been checking out local shows in DC either, for various reasons. And so my only source of information is various websites like Sandbox, which, while regularly updated, don't make it easy to actually listen to and discover new stuff.

Not that I haven't been finding anything new; in the past few months I've really enjoyed Atmosphere's When Life Gives You Lemons, J-Live's Then What Happened?, The Package's New Golden Era, and The Roots' Rising Down; and I did recently pick up People Under The Stairs' FUN DMC (nice as usual, although not quite as addictive as some earlier efforts) and The Mighty Underdogs' Droppin' Science Fiction (just today, and the first listen was pretty positive, although with Lateef and Gab how can you go wrong?). I've also ordered Panacea's new one, A Mind on a Ship Through Time, which is in the mail and is presumably just as good as everything else they've done.

But nothing's really amazed me in a long time. I feel like back in those 'golden era' years that was a regular occurrence. And so, feeling a little hip-hop malaise tonight, "Excursions" popped into my head and I just had to hear it ... but then I couldn't stop at Buggin' Out, then Rap Promoter, and before I knew it Scenario was ending; an hour had passed without my having even realised it, hip-hop nirvana having sucked me blissfully in.

*sigh*

Man, I miss those days.

Rebirth

2008-11-02T17:53:00.000-08:00

Yup, this is it - the rebirth of GregP's Profundity. After an absence of almost 14 months, I'm back. Some things a few months ago actually stirred my interest in reviving the blog, but it didn't feel prudent at the time. Just today, though, it finally felt like it was time to do so. While there has been a few things of note to talk about from my absence, I'm going to skip it all for now to address the specific subject that made me post again, and that is ... The Low End Theory (see above).

Goin' Back To ... D.C.

2007-09-18T20:57:00.000-07:00

Today I filled up my gas tank for the last time in California. I paid $2.87 per gallon. My next fillup will be either in Maryland or Washington, D.C.

Next Friday is my last day at work and that evening, I fly to D.C. Saturday, Ladan and I fly to Iran for vacation. By October 19 we'll be back, I start looking for a place, she flies back to Phoenix, and on November 5, I begin my new job.

Everything has happened pretty quickly in the past few weeks, and it's hard to believe that in ten days I'll be leaving here for good. I've gotten very comfortable here - too comfortable, in fact, bordering on apathetic - and so it's been tough preparing mentally for 'the end'. In recent months I've made some good friends at work, and I'll be sad to see them go. The work environment is just ... different in D.C.; it'll be a much smaller office, very small group, more formal.

Just as happened to me at the end of 2004 when I was preparing to leave Maryland, when I really started to notice and appreciate D.C., I'm loving these last few days. I'm enjoying every minute, the weather, the food, the stores, the people. This past weekend, I took some time to go around and snap photos of some of my favorite spots out here, most of which, sadly, have no equal on the east coast.

What will it be like when I can't spend a Saturday hitting Fry's Electronics, Tower Records (R.I.P.) or Rasputin Music, Lozano's Car Wash, Annapoorna for some chole bhatura, the Sunnyvale park to soak up some sun and read a book, Santana Row to people-watch and read some more?

What will it be like to get up in the morning and be cold? Or drive to work and not have it be sunny?

These things are gonna tough. The biggies are going to be Fry's and the cold. Fry's, because these days I wouldn't even dream of setting foot in a Best Buy or Circuit City, in all their plastic-y slick-marketed trendiness. Fry's has everything you could possibly want, and cheaper than everybody else. Returns are zero hassle, no questions asked, no matter what. Their PC games section, as far as I can tell, is the last remaining healthy bastion in the entire US retail market. I can't even remember the last time I bought a game at Gamestop or Best Buy. Fry's has them earlier, and cheaper. I've been on a minimum once-a-week visit schedule there for two years now. Most of the time it's just to gawk, which is fun enough on its own.

The cold's gonna hurt because after a year of living in the south bay, and the temperature never dropping below 50 degrees, my body has thoroughly adjusted to comfort. Last winter when I went home to Albany for Christmas, it was a bitter reminder of what real cold is like. D.C. doesn't get as cold as Albany, but there's still most definitely a fall and winter, and man it's gonna be weird having to bundle all up to keep the cold and wind out. After moving out of San Francisco last July, I haven't worn anything heavier than a very light jacket even once down here.

Ah well ... sounds like I'm complaining, but I'm also excited to get back to D.C., live in the city, walk and Metro everywhere, start applying to grad schools, get involved with international organizations, etc. I'm sure I'll look happily back on this time and miss it, but I know that D.C. is where it's at for me now, and I can't wait to finally get started down that path. But I'll probably still impulsively check the Fry's ads online first thing in the morning every day.

Book Review: Atlas Shrugged

2007-09-13T19:32:00.000-07:00

Years ago a friend recommended Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, but I never got around to reading it. A few months ago, while reading a Bioshock preview, I came across a mention by executive producer Ken Levine that Rand's Atlas Shrugged had been a clear influence on the game's backstory. This piqued my interest and a few days later I bought the book, planning to finish it coincident with the game's release on August 21.

The book is lonnng - my paperback has 1076 pages. Published in 1957, the story centers around the experiences of Dagny Taggart (I presume that the odd spelling of the author's name led her to take it out on the main character by choosing a similarly strange spelling), a railroad executive who slowly watches the government strip away all the incentive and capability of her company and others to conduct business, in the name of helping "the people". Seeking profit is deemed evil, giving handouts to others is deemed righteous, and therefore big business becomes demonized to the point that industrialists start throwing in the towel on their own, refusing to be slaves to a system that asks for everything from them but entirely takes away their ability to do so. The character of John Galt turns out to be secretly whisking away the top businessmen of the country to his hideout, where they begin their own community in which the only proper relation is business, selfishness is encouraged, and altruism is abhorred.

That's a necessarily curt summary of a much fuller, more detailed story, as should be expected for a novel of damn near eleven hundred pages, but that's the gist of it. Rand uses the book to develop and present her philosophy that she calls objectivism. The main tenets are probably best described in terms of what they reject: any belief in the supernatural, or any claim that individuals or groups create their own reality, mysticism (any acceptance of faith or feeling as a means of knowledge), skepticism (the claim that certainty or knowledge is impossible), determinism (the belief that man is a victim of forces beyond his control), altruism (the claim that morality consists in living for others or for society), collectivism, and the "mixed economy" notion that government should regulate the economy and redistribute wealth. In four phrases, she has described it as objective reality, reason, self-interest, and capitalism.

Of course, given my atheism, I found much appeal in her views on religion, although I don't entirely agree with them. While I do thoroughly reject the idea of a god watching over humanity, and that any knowledge can be claimed through faith, I definitely believe there are things we do not and cannot understand, and that there are other realities about which we are clueless. Ruling out all of these things seems to me to be a much too simplistic and narrow-minded approach.

The rest of her views, though, mostly disagreed with me. Given the context and time period - the US in the late 40's and early 50's - it seems reasonable that people could have been concerned with the growing influence of socialist and communist ideas around the world and the perceived threat they presented to the notion of a free, democratic, capitalistic society. But it's harder to keep in mind that the period of the collapse of overt Western colonialism throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin and South America that came in the 60's and 70's, and therefore much of the theory and discourse about sustainable economic systems and relations between countries that lead to many indigineous independence movements, had not yet come to the fore. Speaking of the US alone, at the time the book was published, the civil rights and feminist movements had not even begun; the focus on the disparate power relations between different groups in society, and how the economic system reinforced and solidified those relations, had not yet come about. Given the gravity of these subsequent events, it's indeed difficult to avoid discounting Rand's views.

Still, I found some merit in her idea that men (the term she used to refer to all) are naturally programmed to pursue their own interests and nothing else, and that a man must never be held back in his achievements as he engages in purposeful motion toward a goal. Implicit in the story is her view that men are indeed unequal in ability, but that hard work and persistence can overcome all adversity, and that government should not intervene to attempt to enforce equality in any way whatsoever. It's an argument that's been beaten to death by many others, certainly, and will probably forever be a point of disagreement between the free market types and the socialist types. Personally, I find it to be too idealistic and ignoring of the reality of the actual implementation of the economic system in this country. Fact is, owners and producers do not always earn their profits through hard work, potential is not unlimited for everyone, and the system has a lot of inertia that is almost impossible to overcome when attempting to move up the economic ladder, so to speak. Combine this with government that panders to corporate interests to the point of enacting legislation that provides tax and regulatory loopholes for corporations, and orienting the country's foreign policy toward guaranteeing raw materials and markets for goods around the world, and you've got an international system of relations that is indeed quite unequal and extremely difficult to change.

Undoubtedly, though, the story is a good one, and worth reading. Rand manages to develop her characters enough to truly draw the reader in and identify with them, although at times their believability suffers when she has them launch into multiple-page diatribes that are little more than thin-veiled soapbox performances by Rand herself. This phenomenon is taken to an absurd extreme by Galt in his last, and the book's climactic, speech that drags on for FIFTY-SEVEN pages. Yes, FIFTY-SEVEN.

The bottom line is, the story and Rand's philosophy serve as food for thought, even if the presentation is at times heavy-handed and overwrought. I usually shy away from books, especially novels, that take up so much time - it did in fact take me two months to get through - when I have a continually-growing stack of other books waiting to be read. But I think this one was worth it, not least because the backstory of Bioshock (with main character Andrew Ryan, a name that's hard not to mentally rearrange into Ayn Rand, as intended) makes much more sense that it would otherwise, and in fact often borrows heavily from Atlas Shrugged.

Game Review: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

2007-08-04T21:23:00.000-07:00

One of the downsides to having easy retail access to new games as soon as they come out, combined with our desire for immediate gratification, is that gaming websites and magazines are under such pressure to produce reviews immediately after a game is released that they only ever judge the game in it's initial retail state (and in fact, many succumb to reviewing late beta versions in order to get a jump start on the competition). While this is generally reasonable for the gamer - nobody should pay full price on the first day for a game that is simply broken - it means that any improvements the developer makes through patches, and the fan community makes through mods, will probably do little to create new customers in the months following the initial release.

And a game like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (ugh, I abhor the meaningless initialism!) is a perfect example of this situation. This was a game under development for more than five years by Russia's GSC Game World, a company known for it's underwhelming 2001 FPS Codename: Outbreak and the more popular Cossacks RTS series. The story is set around the Chernobyl area, in the future, after a second meltdown had caused the formation of "the Zone", an area in which strange "anomalies" sprang up randomly and mutated animals had free reign. So-called "stalkers" were people who wandered into the Zone in search of artifacts - essentially power-ups created by the strange phenomena associated with the Zone. For years we were treated to amazing trailers featuring a gloomy, decaying, downright spooky world where the inhabitants roamed freely in search of whatever they wanted at the time - artifacts, food, weapons, etc. A revolutionary artificial intelligence system dubbed A-Life had been designed that promised to produce a vibrant, convincing game world populated with life-like characters. I've got videos dating from 2003 showing these features in action, and I waited in excited suspense for years just like everybody else.

But as development dragged on, and the A-Life system required more and more time to tweak, and the graphics needed to be continually updated, at some point, the primary revolutionary feature of the game - the promise of a seamless, totally free game world - was quietly scrapped (or rather, put aside) in favor of a more traditional storyline-based, quest-driven game experience.

And so when the game was released four months ago, the inevitable reaction from most was disappointment. The open-ended game environment we'd been promised for years was gone, replaced with fairly standard shooter/RPG elements. Add on top of that the only slightly above-average graphics, especially relative to the recent eye-candy-heavy Prey, F.E.A.R. and Half-Life 2, the hints of lack of polish and poor language translation, and you got a mostly lukewarm response from the gaming press and fans who'd years ago already according the game 'instant classic' status. To be fair, some websites saw through these surface blemishes to appreciate the full game experience and gave it high scores, but overall the reception was mixed at best.

When I started the game, there were a number of minor rough elements that immediately caught my attention: the inexplicably goofy 'switching weapons' and 'opening inventory' sounds; the poor dialogue translation, with long paragraphs that sounded both unnatural and pointless; the way the sound of human voices and animals howling was not properly attenuated by distance, making it impossible to tell if that mutant dog was right behind you or so far away as to not even be rendered; and the unconventional quest-giving and -tracking system that took some time to adjust to. Compared to the level of presentation professionalism and polish we've gotten used to (ignoring the increasingly serious problem of actual gameplay bugs being left in shipping games that require subsequent patches), it felt slightly amateurish.

But then I started to notice the good things: the way groups of stalkers would sit around a fire, talking and telling jokes (in Russian) and laughing, sometimes even playing guitars; the way the combination of all the sounds - animals howling, random gunshots and cries of pain, wind blowing - and the artistic style of the game really made you feel like you were walking around a mostly-deserted, hostile environment where nature had been severely disrupted.

As usual, immediately the mod community kicked into action. A user-friendly automated mod manager was developed; before an official patch fixed it, a mod made the field of view adjustable according to the aspect ratio of the resolution being used (thus expanding the FOV properly for widescreen users such as myself); and the amazing Float32 shader mod went through countless iterations to radically improve lighting quality while also speeding up performance. There were also a handful of increased-resolution texture mods, especially for the weapons, animals, and NPCs; a replacement of some sound files (thankfully fixing the two sounds mentioned above); new and more varied sky and cloud textures; and perhaps most importantly for me, the Redux mod, which aimed to add realism to some of the game features: for example, bandages changed from restoring health to simply stopping bleeding, as they should; firefights became much more intense as a result of shot lethality being increased; the UI was simplified and minimalized; the frequency with which food needed to be consumed increased; anomalies became invisible, requiring an equipped detector to avoid them; and a host of other minor touches that improved the feel of the game.

And so after the official patches and numerous mods, I had a fully-tweaked, high-resolution, beautifully-lit game with minimal annoyances, a marked difference from the game that comes in the box. While even mods couldn't change the absence of the A-Life system we'd heard so much about (although modders have tried, with some success), all of these changes did add enough to the game to make a huge difference. I hadn't played a game with an environment that elicited such a response of cautious, curious fear in me since The Two Greatest Games Of All Time: System Shock 2 and Deus Ex. Often I would just stop and gape in amazement at the beauty of my surroundings and the enveloping feel of the sounds; of course, it helps (in fact should be required) to play at night, in the dark, with ear-covering headphones.

Tonight, after four months of irregular playing, I finished the game. While no single element of the gameplay was brilliantly innovative in the ways we originally thought they would be, and the story felt disjointed in places, and the ending(s - there are three) were cool but average, overall I just loved this game. All the parts came together to produce a fun, challenging, convincingly creepy game, and I loved every minute of it. Sure, many things could have been done better; but the absolutely perfect game has yet to be created, and probably never will be. In the meantime, I hope to be playing more games like this one.

On to Bioshock! (Which, oh, by the way - will be the perfect game.)

The Other Side of the Shah

2007-07-27T14:02:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I came across a YouTube video of an interview with the former Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. I watched it, then another, and then another, and before I knew it I'd spent an hour watching videos. From my years of reading about the country, mainly through "left" or "liberal" books discussing the sordid history of American interventionism, I had developed a view of the Shah as an American-controlled puppet dictator; certainly better than his successors turned out to be, but objectionable nonetheless. Contrary to that, most Iranians I've talked to regarded him as an educated, righteous leader, but since they all came from the same small, relatively well-off north Tehran community, I was always more inclined to believe what I read about him in books. But from watching these videos - the first time I'd actually seen him speak - I developed a keen interest in him, and found that even though he seemed a bit snobbish, there was something about him that fascinated me; I suddenly wanted to learn more about this man.

I started reading more about him online and found that he'd written a book in 1980 called Answer To History (Pasukh bih Tarikh in Farsi). The book detailed his time as Shah, starting with his coronation in 1941 when his father, Reza Shah, stepped down soon after the British and Russians invaded the country during World War II, all the way to the 1979 revolution and ending with his brief period in exile. His failing health lead to his death just a few months after completing the book but it wasn't published until 1982.

The next day I located the book in a library (it apparently only had one printing in 1982 and is difficult to find new in any retail or online stores) and picked it up. While there I also got his twin sister Ashraf Pahlavi's book Faces In A Mirror, published in 1980.

In short, I found the Shah's book fascinating. As time goes on, I'm starting to increasingly find that many of the books I've chosen to read in the past have been very consistently one-sided. Hearing the story in his own words, it was undeniably clear that the Shah was an intelligent, educated man, who truly desired to see his country progress and become a world power through modernization and education. The reasons for his downfall are many and varied and complex, but in essence, he seemed to believe - and subsequent history seems to have confirmed - that the reforms he was trying to make were simultaneously too slow for his American and British allies and too fast for his citizens. With the wrath of both groups against him, increasing pressure from both outside and within the country, it was only a matter of time until something had to give.

He gives example after example of reforms he initiated, or industries he built, or education he improved, and on numbers alone it's obvious that his governance did wonders for the overall state of the country. His detractors, especially toward the end, usually focused on human rights violations, especially by SAVAK, the Shah's secret police; although he denies claims of their excesses, I did get the feeling that either he was leaving something unsaid or he just didn't know what had actually been going on, having possibly been insulated from such vulgar details by his loyal court. Either way, his refutation of those criticisms seemed weak, especially relative to the solid defense he made of everything else he'd accomplished over his 37-year reign.

When I finished the book, I felt I had an entirely new perspective on the Shah and the revolution. What a stark contrast to the Iran that my generation knows, which starts with Khomeini and the hostage crisis, and completely overlooks the preceding fifty-plus years when the country was mostly a strong ally, where US presidents would routinely visit, and tens of thousands of American university students would study! It was like an entirely unexpected second side to a long-familiar story had been revealed to me, and I was fascinated. In particular, his detailing of the pathetically flip-flopping support by the US government was frustrating in light of later events, and his predictions of how the revolution would alter both the strategic balance between the Soviet Union and the US, and the West's relationship with the Middle East, were uncannily accurate.

I quickly moved on to Ashraf's book and found it a great companion to the Shah's narrative of the same time period, if quite a bit more personal and slightly less historical. Again, she painted an impressive picture of a country whose government was struggling against all odds to drag it into the modern era.

Having finished that book last night, I then read a chapter on Iran from The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, which shed additional light on this period, especially regarding the KGB's destablization campaigns against the Shah, including support for the Tudeh Communist Party in Iran. Among other interesting facts I was able to glean by comparing these texts, it seems that Fereydoun Hoveyda, the brother of the Shah's former prime minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda and who served as Iranian Ambassador to the UN (and who, at first, turned against the Shah after the revolution, blaming him for his brother's execution by Khomeini) was on the payroll of the KGB and passed falsified intelligent reports on to the Shah multiple times. This was the first and only reference I've ever seen to this, possibly due to the relatively recent release of this book only nine months ago. Another surprise was an explanation of how the KGB paid someone to introduce Farah Diba, the Shah's third and final wife, for the first time to the Shah, hoping that her leftist leanings developed while a student in Paris would clear the way for greater Soviet influence over the Shah.

Taken together, these videos and books have whetted my appetite to learn more about this period, and about all the forces that came together to create the revolution. As agreed on by just about everyone, but told particularly eloquently and personally by the Shah, the revolution was a profoundly disruptive and regressive event that not only destroyed the progress made by a growing country over many decades, but undeniably changed the world political landscape for the worse and helped set the stage for many of the most pressing problems of the recent past, today, and probably well into the future.

Once again I'm amazed at how random, mostly aimless wandering around the internet can lead a person down a path of knowledge that they never expected to find; this has happened to me numerous times and is one of the reasons I so love the internet. Many people complain that we've become too reliant on it and don't often enough question it's accuracy, which is a valid complaint, but the fact is that much, if not most of what's out there is quite factual and useful, especially if it leads to exploration of other, less accessible forms of media too.

Why Keep Going?

2007-07-11T20:49:00.000-07:00

There's a homeless man who "lives" a few blocks from my apartment. I've been seeing him for months, almost every time I drive down the main road outside my complex. He's usually lying on the ground, propped up against a wall or fence, accompanied by an overflowing shopping cart full of everything he owns: clothes, blankets, and what appears to be thousands of paper and plastic bags. He alternates between either side of the street, preferring either the bus stop shelter on one side or the open spot of sidewalk between two parking lot entrances on the other side, and never strays very far. I sometimes wonder if police or mean kids ever bother him. I've seen plenty of people sidestep him and his cart, but I've never seen anyone talk to him.

His age is indecipherable, but I'd guess late forties. He's tall, with a long beard and hair. He's filthy; sometimes I drive by and he looks like he's been rolling around in mud, just covered with dirt. I've often seen him engaged in animated discussions with no one, but I've also seen him reading newspapers, so he must have some degree of sanity left.

I see this man every day, and every day I wonder, what keeps him going? What reason does he have to continue living? What is it in the human spirit that makes him choose life over death? I've pondered this for a long time, discussed it with friends, and never come to a satisfying answer.

I suppose the answer depends completely upon the assumptions underlying the question. This man has no access to the material possessions and personal relationships that most of us take for granted and help define our experience of the world: he has no books, no TV, no movies, no music, no art, no internet, no radio, no phone, no hobbies, no creative outlet, no family, no friends, no one to talk to. He does, as I mentioned above, read newspapers sometimes. But for the most part, his experience of the world consists entirely of that which he can observe with his own eyes, and extends no further. There's no reason to assume that he's completely ignorant of the wider world, but it certainly appears that he has limited possibilities for experiencing any of it.

A first attempt at imagining what would keep him going must necessarily refer to what keeps me going. It sounds goofily lofty, but I live for knowledge - for the perpetual possibility of learning something new. I am insatiably curious. I'm always baffled by people who appear to have no real interests, who can't entertain themselves when alone. How can you not have tons of books that you want to read, movies you want to see, places you want to visit, subjects to learn about, relationships you'd like to start and develop over time? I could spend years reading on the internet alone. But that can't be this guy's motivation: he has none of those things.

How about hope for the future? I look forward to new experiences, adventures, careers, vacations, prosperity, family, friends, [computer games! Bioshock on August 21 is a huge day for me]. I'm optimistic about the future; I'm confident in my ability to continue to achieve my goals and make a better life for myself and those I care about. But again, I cannot imagine that this guy has any of this. What reason could he possibly have to be hopeful for the future? Is there any chance he'll ever get off the streets?

I think of these things, tabulating my own desires, and I see that none of them apply to this man. I can't help but think that were I in his position, I would prefer to end my life rather than continue along that path.

But perhaps my measuring stick is wholly unsuited to him. Perhaps it really is as simple as stubborn human insistence on pure survival. Given that none of the concerns which motivate me even remotely apply to him, maybe that makes them irrelevant to him.

My inability to arrive at a satisfactory answer bothers me. Somehow, in this seemingly illogical situation, I sense the revelation of, or at least a hint of, a flaw in the way I think about my own existence, and about the things that motivate me to continue to get up every day.

But as of yet I'm unable to grasp it. I just continue to ponder it and wonder about it every day, every time that I see him lying on the sidewalk as I drive by.

Books, Books, and More Books

2007-07-10T21:05:00.000-07:00

This job of mine is really taking up too much of my time. It's not that I put in long hours, because I don't; it's just that there are so many other more enjoyable, productive things I could be doing with that time. For example, reading books. I am a book fiend. The weekly Borders Rewards coupon has turned me into a dangerously regular book buyer, and over time I'm accumulating a stack of books-to-be-read that, at this point, will take me probably two years to go through.

Here's the breakdown of my recent, current, and future reading:

I recently read Sam Harris' excellent End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, both of which blew me away and about which I plan to blog when I can collect my thoughts properly.

I'm currently reading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and Robert Tucker's The Marx-Engels Reader.

For a how-can-I-say-no mere five bucks, yesterday I bought a book called Forever Remembered: The Fliers of WWII, a compilation of interviews with pilots from the war.

Last week in the Borders Bargain Book section I found Stephen Hawking's The Illustrated Brief History of Time and The Universe in a Nutshell.

Friends have lent me C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity and William Goldman's The Princess Bride.

My next round of books will be Daniel Dennett's Breaking The Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon and Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers. After that, in no particular order, the lineup consists of:

The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB And The Battle For The Third World, by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokin

The Emotion Machine and The Society of Mind, by MIT AI guru Marvin Minsky

The Labyrinth of Solitude, by renowned Mexican writer Octavio Paz

The Twentieth Century, by lefty historian Howard Zinn

Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson (read it years ago, absolutely loved it, and have been telling myself to read it again since then)

Duel of Eagles, by Peter Townsend, about the Battle of Britain

Essential Buddhism, by Jacky Sach

Margins of Reality, by Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunn

Fighter Combat, by Robert Shaw (got to improve those flight sim dogfighting skills)

And somewhere in there are the entire Castaneda series (have read the first three so far), The Essence of Rumi by John Baldock, The Way of the Bodhisattva, and The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Mythology.

On top of all that, for the past few months I've been trying to read as many international relations journals as possible, sampling at least one of each, before deciding on which ones I'd like to subscribe to. Some of these bi-annual journals are quite big, up to 300 pages.

And so, that's the list. Of course, I've got a handful of books on my Amazon wishlist too, and surely another irresistible 30% off Borders coupon will come along soon, so I expect the waiting list to continue growing.

One of these days I'm going to need to just quit my job and sit somewhere - preferably warm and sunny - with my wheelbarrow's worth of books waiting to be read and just plow through the whole load.

Weekend Recap

2007-07-02T19:14:00.000-07:00

Thursday night I flew out to Phoenix for the weekend. When my plane landed a little after 10PM, the pilot told us it was 103 degrees outside. Walking out of the terminal, a blast of scorching air hit me like a giant blowdryer.

We had a single task this weekend: to finish moving all of our belongings out of our apartment and into a friend's second bedroom. Luckily she lives in the same complex, so the distance is short, but in 110+ degree heat and direct sun, you break a sweat just breathing. Ladan had moved the majority of our stuff already, over the course of a few weeks, and she'd sold most of our furniture. That made us the most lean-and-mean we've ever been, in terms of material possessions. Thursday night I wanted to take advantage of the sun being down and so I jumped right into it, moving a carload of heavy boxes of mostly books from 1-2AM.

Friday we continued moving things, and by Saturday morning we'd finished ... the moving part. We still had to clean the whole apartment - again, Ladan had done a lot of this already - and then dig our friend's apartment out of the bombardment of boxes that we'd dropped on it over the past two days. Luckily she was out of town for the weekend so we had no real need to organize as we dropped things off. But that meant that by Saturday evening, we had a whole lot of cleaning up to do.

By Sunday afternoon, the job was done. It got up to 115 on Saturday, and oh man is that hot. You start to appreciate ice-cold drinks like you've never done before. I was constantly chugging sodas and water.

So the move's done and as I've said in the past, it's a very strange to feeling to end a chapter in our lives that never really started: Ladan lived there for a year without me, and our original plan to both move to Arizona never materialized. Over the course of my many trips out there, the area has grown on me and I feel truly relaxed while there. I think we could have been happy there, at least for a few years. Even though the middle of the summer is unbearable, the rest of the year makes up for it.

But in the end, Phoenix just doesn't have what we want: a real city, real culture, and new career opportunities for both of us. That's why DC is so appealing. Frustratingly, though, most of our friends have moved out of the DC area and closer to the west coast, so this move will push us further away from them. And I'm still dreading the cold weather after being spoiled by so much sun the past two years.

I still feel like it's the right thing to do, though. I'm increasingly wary of being comfortable to the point of becoming lazy, in terms of changing careers, and that's not good. I don't want to live in DC forever, and heck the Japan trip again proved to me that I don't even want to live in the US forever, but for now, I think we need to do this.

Japan Days 3 & 4: Kyoto

2007-06-26T23:51:00.000-07:00

Kyoto is revered as one of the few remaining examples of traditional Japanese culture, in that there are a huge number of shrines, temples, palaces, and gardens that date back to at least the 9th century. The city served as the capital of Japan for more than a thousand years, ending in the mid-19th century when the title was transferred to Tokyo. There's so much to see in this city, and the history of the country so complex, and the Buddhist and Shinto sects represented by the temples and shrines so numerous, that I quickly gave up trying to tie everything together into one big coherent picture. Instead, I just tried to understand and appreciate each individual site for what it was.

The plethora of Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples is overwhelming; there are more than 2000 of them in Kyoto alone. While the architecture is largely the same, the contrast of the aesthetics of Japanese Buddhist temples with those of Korea is stark: whereas the former are almost exclusively made of muted white, brown, or black painted wood or tiles, the latter tend to be much more colorful and vibrant. Buddhist temples in general mesmerize me; their entire being seems to encapsulate and exude calm and tranquility, which seems ironic (or essential?) considering the intensely jarring potential of truly understanding Buddhist teachings. The more of them I see, and observe, and soak in, the more I feel that there is a definite place for this kind of environment in my future. I've been well aware for some time that I could - and should? - benefit immensely from the kind of disciplined introspection and self-realization that Buddhist teachings strive to impart and attain. For now, though, the question is simply - when?

Anyway, Kyoto is packed with far too many amazing sights to describe with any degree of justice, so I won't even bother trying. It's a big city, and we only had time to see the city center and north- and southwest areas. Aside from temples and shrines, highlights included the introspection-inducing, closed-to-traffic, kilometer-long Tetsugaku-no-michi (Path of Philosophy), which winds along a canal among cherry trees; the Gion district, known for geisha sightings and associated closed-to-outsiders entertainment establishments; Nishiki Market, a huge food market where you can find everything from fresh fish to doughnuts to green-tea-everything; the multiple arcades full of shops; and Ponto-cho, the ritzy but beautiful area along a waterway, full of restaurants that generally "prefer Japanese customers" by not bothering to translate any of their menus or signs outside.

I feel as if I'm only appreciating Kyoto properly now, in retrospect. While there, we were trying to get up early and see as many sites as possible before our curfew of 11PM - set by the nice old lady who ran the ryokan (traditional Japanese inn) where we were staying. Because Ladan had the Lonely Planet Japan book with her, and she was in Japan a week before I arrived, I didn't have much chance to study up on what we'd be seeing ahead of time. At the end of each day, we'd come back and look through the book, deciding what to see the next day.

Now that I'm back, though, and looking through the pictures, and projecting myself back into how I felt while there - well, aside from the sweat and aching feet - I'm fully realizing how much fun it all was. Having so many amazing things to see no matter which way you turn, or which metro stop you get off at, is just blissfully enjoyable. I suppose it's not hard to feel that way in contrast to my average uninspired working day back here in the US; but it's more than that. Now I have time to research some of the places we went on the internet, and it's been fascinating to read more of the background behind the cities, towns, shrines, and temples that we visited.

Kyoto, although being a large, modern, busy city, has an enormous number of areas that really do feel as if they haven't changed in a thousand years. You can almost forget that Tokyo or Osaka even exists, and convince yourself that this is the Imperial Japan of long ago. It's an incredible experience.

Japan Days 1 & 2: Nagoya

2007-06-24T21:20:00.000-07:00

On the 13th I flew into Nagoya's Central Japan International Airport, which is 35km away from the city itself and is built on a man-made island. As we were landing, just as I feel when coming into San Francisco, I was looking out the window and wondering whether land was going to show up at some point or whether the plane was going to ditch in the water. Luckily for my non-swimming self, the runway eventually appeared below us.

Ladan met me at the airport and we took a commuter train back to Nagoya. It was a hot, humid, rainy day, and the weather reports said the entire next week would be rainy - aww, man! As it turned out, though, it only rained for part of one more day.

After arriving at the very cool 52-story Marriott Associa Nagoya twin towers, and dropping my stuff off in our 44th-floor room (thanks, Intel!), Ladan had to return to work for the rest of the afternoon while I went out to explore the city.

The first thing I notice is that people are driving on the wrong side of the road. Not only that, but their steering wheels have been put on the wrong side, too. How odd. Next thing I notice is how clean everything is; the streets and sidewalks are smoothly paved and bare of litter. Then I notice how everything looks relatively new - and this is because much of Japan was bombed flat during World War II, Nagoya included. Thus everything in sight is, by definition, not more than 60 years old.

As I walk around, I'm amazed at how courteous drivers are to pedestrians and bikers. It makes sense, because there are just so many of them that is impossible to speed wrecklessly down any street. In the cities, it seems as if most people get to work by means other than personal cars, aided by public transportation that's fast and clean. What a novel idea!

On that first day, I checked out Nagoya-jo, a large castle complex originally built in 1612 but rebuilt in 1959 after being destroyed during the war. As I walked the grounds, groups of schoolchildren enthusiastically shouted "harro!" at me, and some even asked "how are you?" It's not that they never see tourists - because they're actually relatively common - but rather that they seem eager to test out their English. I felt pretty popular after a few hours, as successive groups of children watched me and excitedly waited until I got close enough for them to greet me.

Ladan and I later went to see the park-life Atsuta Jingu, a huge area containing a Shinto shrine that was originally founded 1900 years ago. It's been destroyed multiple times since then (including, of course, burning completely to the ground during WWII) and rebuilt every time. It supposedly once enshrined a sacred sword, an important Imperial symbol. As we walked around near the main shrine and tried to guess what the Japanese signs meant, a security guard approached us with two brochures, handing them to us: "English", he offered. Ah, thanks!

All in all, it was a good introduction to Japan: good sized city, with some interesting sights, but more importantly, it gave me time to just walk among the people, watch them and try to observe everyday life. Lots of little things caught my attention: the extreme rarity of people talking on cell phones; the absolute lack of people talking loudly on cellphones; the prevalence of people typing text messages or surfing the net on cellphones; the efficient use of vertical space evident in so many building designs; the lack of newspaper vending machines; the prevalence of drink (not just soda) vending machines; the lack of billboards shoving ads in your face every second (although the ad-plastered walls of trains, buses, and some buildings pick up some of the slack); the busyness of main streets in the city at every hour of the day; I could go on for hours. These are the things that fascinate me the most about visiting other countries.

After spending Thursday and Friday nights in Nagoya, on Saturday morning we checked out and took a train to Kyoto, where we were based for the remainder of our trip. Those stories coming up. In the meantime, I've posted some pictures from Nagoya.

Do Unto Others ...

2007-06-22T19:32:00.000-07:00

I took out a bunch of cash from an ATM before leaving for Japan. I used hardly any of it while there, and brought it back with me, so today I went by Bank of America to deposit it again. I walk up to the machine, the guy in front of me leaves, I count my money and put it in an envelope, go to put my card in - and the screen is asking me "Another transaction, or exit?" Oh nice, the tool left his card in the machine. I turn around and see he's nowhere to be found, and anyway I didn't get a look at him so couldn't find him regardless.

I spit his card out, do my deposit, and my receipt pushes his receipt out, which he also forgot. Dude took out 300 bucks and has $8616 left in his account! Maaaaan! I was thinking about it, what if I'd just taken a cool grand out to teach him to value personal responsibility a little more? Woulda been a fair trade, right? I mean life is hard.

Alas, being the good guy that I am - and realizing that multiple cameras had already got me - I took the guy's card inside and gave it to an Authorized Bank Employee.

But damn ... I coulda had some FUN with a thousand bucks in cash. Hookers, blow, and video cards, baby! Well - maybe just the videocards: two of 'em. So, er - change that to: SLI, baby!

Time Travel

2007-06-20T22:04:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago a co-worker asked me if I believe in time travel; he'd been reading about black holes and the time-space continuum. Outside of the theory-of-relativity sense (which my gut still tells me is a load of crap), I told him no, I don't believe in it.

But after just returning from Japan for a week's vacation, I'm starting to reconsider. There's something undeniably novel while unavoidably jarring about flying halfway around the world. I left San Francisco last Wednesday at 11AM; after a 10-hour flight, I arrived in Nagoya, Japan, at 3PM on Thursday. Going to bed at midnight Japan time made it a 24-hour day for me. Yesterday - today? - I left Japan at 4PM Wednesday, had a 10-hour flight, and made it to San Francisco at 9AM. So after already having half of a day in Japan, I spent 10 hours working toward starting yet another day back in the US, an almost full work day. By the time I go to bed in two hours, I will have been up for 35 hours. I've had two breakfasts and two lunches and almost no sleep. Right now I'm just mentally thrown off; in a day or two will come the like-running-into-a-brick-wall physical side of the jetlag.

Getting to the point, the trip was awesome. In six and a half days we saw Nagoya (flew in there and spent a day exploring the city), Kyoto (home to hundreds of historic temples, shrines, and most of the remaining population of real-life geishas), Himeji (site of Japan's most famous original castle), Hiroshima (horribly heart-wrenching museum and monuments to the atomic bomb - I stood at ground zero), Nara (seven UN World Heritage Sites packed into one town), and Osaka (second largest city after Tokyo with 2.4 million people). The extensive train system, especially the high-speed shinkansen bullet trains (which are waaay cool), made getting around easy.

It certainly helped that on my flights, I got bumped up to Business Class not once, but twice - both on the way there and back, and man is that the way to travel: enough legroom to stretch out completely, a fully-reclining seat with footrest, great (both in quantity and quality) food, and bottomless drink supply. I also, uncharacteristically for me, watched some movies with audio: The Number 23 (pretty good; I really like Jim Carrey in serious roles), I Think I Love My Wife (moments of classic hilarity; I was in tears) and Breach (great true story). I also got completely sucked into Ayn Rand's 1957 classic Atlas Shrugged. She was recommended to me years ago by friends, but I never found the time to read the book until I recently learned that it served as partial inspiration for Bioshock's storyline. It's an 1100-page behemoth, but I can't put it down.

As usual when I visit other countries, I was enthralled with their un-American-ness. I feel so much more relaxed and at peace when I'm away from here. This trip was one more rung in the ladder that I hope to eventually use to climb out of here.

Wanting to avoid the pitfall of promising lofty and extensive commentary on the trip, as I naively did after Nicaragua, suffice it to say that there'll be a brief flurry of activity in the coming week as I recount some of the things I observed while there, as well as post links to pictures.

Yankee Lost In The South

2007-05-16T18:59:00.000-07:00

I'm surrounded by bamas. No, seriously: I'm in Huntsville, Alabama for three days for a users' workshop on a simulation code I use at work. And, all true stereotypes aside, there's nothing but bamas here. "Bama", of course, being what many Alabamans shorten their state's name to, and even often refer to themselves as. And also like any good self-imposed name, it's been picked up and run with by other groups in other regions to label someone who is a fool, or dumb, or goofy, or slow-witted. Well, OK, for all I know it's just a DC thing, but it's a "thing" no less, and to my mind, "bama" conjures up an image that all too well fits many of the people I'm running into down here.

The part of Huntsville where I am ain't no slouch technologically: the University Drive/Research Park area is home to the US Army's massive Redstone Arsenal, NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, the US Space & Rocket Center museum, the famous Space Camp, the DIA's Missile and Space Intelligence Center, and a large section of the ballistic missile defense industry outside of the metro DC area (thus explaining my time here).

Problem is, you'd have absolutely no idea that there are actually any mildly intelligent people here if you walked the streets and watched and listened to the people. At least, that's how I see it through my Yankee eyes. Listening to people here talk is an exercise in frustration: they either insist on adding lots of extra long-vowel syllables where they just aren't needed (the white folk) or they intentionally slur their speech so much that you're sometimes unsure if they're even speaking English (the black folk). It's also apparently a state law that you either drive a pickup truck or any vehicle with impossibly huge rims. Oh and, it seems you're definitely frowned upon if you can't shake all the cars around you with the bass coming from your car stereo, a phenomenon everyone everywhere is by now all too familiar with, but the difference here being that you must -- you simply must -- be blasting a rap song (sorry, but it ain't hip-hop, fellas) whose entire musical complexity involves no more than three notes on a cheap keyboard as well as some stupid chant for the chorus.

At the very least, I thought I could get some good barbeque while here. And that I did, although even that experience was marred when I asked for iced tea and the confused waitress replied, "You may-een suh-weight teigh?" Ugh ... yes -- sweet tea.

Well there's always book stores, right? I searched for the closest Borders online, and to my disappointment (but not surprise) the nearest one is more than 50 miles away. (OK, OK, there's a Barnes & Noble and a Books-a-Million just down the road, but I've always considered Borders the "classy" book joint, and I checked out B&N and it was deserted).

By far the creepiest experience I've had so far, though, was when I went to the local Waffle House tonight for breakfast-dinner. Craving waffles and eggs and bacon, and feeling that the Denny's right next door would not be a satisfying-enough outing, I headed for the Waffle House. When I got there, there was one waitress, one cook, and four patrons, and damn if it didn't look exactly like a scene from a Tales From The Crypt episode or a corny B-grade horror movie. As I sat down at the counter, I was trying desperately to remember if anything bad ever happened to the good-looking Yankee ain't-from-around-here guy.

Surveying the crowd, each one separately confirmed that I had in fact stepped into a Twilight Zone of sorts: the lone black guy, an older, skinny man apparently holding a low-key conversation with the counter in front of him; an overweight, over-made-up old southern belle with giant rings on each and every finger; a relatively normal-looking older white guy reading a Tom Clancy novel; and a second older white guy sitting in a corner, staring intensely out the window at what I could only assume where the aliens that were waiting for him to emerge in order to resume their enthusiastic orifice probing.

After I ordered my chocolate chip waffle, side of bacon, and side of eggs, I tried hard not to openly stare at this stifling collection of oddballs. Instead I focused on the bacon cooking, watching the fat sizzle up and away. As I watched my food being made, I was tempted to estimate exactly how much time I had left before the dude with the John Deere hat walked in with a shotgun and mowed everybody down, you know, just for livin'.

Soon my food was ready and I wolfed it down in about five minutes. It was OK, not great, but satisfied my craving. The bill was $9.43, but Calee, honey, you're a wreck, and you earned every penny of the $2.57 I tipped you, and nevermind that I just wanted to make it an even twelve for the minor novelty of exactly matching my lunch bill.

Thus ended my day "out", and I returned to my hotel room, to await another (but thankfully final) day in Huntsville tomorrow. I'm positively giddy with ek-sahht-mayent.

Vanilla-Flavored Milk Is The Devil's Drink

2007-05-14T20:24:00.000-07:00

Whoever came up with the wholly unholy idea of vanilla-flavored milk ought to be hunted down and mercilessly tortured to death in public for unleashing this abominable creation upon an undeserving world.

Why do I feel such passionate hatred for a seemingly harmless consumer drink, you ask? Well, the explanation involves a completely reasonable and rational expectation of proper liquid accompaniment to a big chocolate chip cookie, and how that expectation was thoroughly trampled upon with the utmost offense. It goes like this:

Today I flew from Phoenix to Huntsville, with a layover in Dallas. On the flight out of Phoenix, I fell asleep and missed the drink service. When I woke up, I found myself extremely thirsty, possibly due to the loss of large amounts of drool that usually accompany my involuntarily open-mouthed style of sleeping on airplanes.

When I got off the plane, I quickly headed for the nearest food place, and found a Starbucks right near my gate (not only are they on every corner in every town in every city in every state in this country, they're also multiplying throughout airport terminals). I was in the mood for a big chocolate chip cookie, and Starbucks admittedly makes damn good ones - perfect size and perfect soft chewiness. As I looked around for a drink (I'm not a coffee drinker), among the few choices was milk. Oh nice! I thought. What better way to wash down a big chocolate chip cookie than some cold milk? It was even organic milk made by Horizon, to boot.

Paying for my cookie and milk, I hurried back to my gate, sat down and pulled off a corner of the cookie. Mmmm, nice and soft. After a few more bites, I opened the milk, inserted the straw, and took a long sip. Er ... what the ... ? Something ain't right; this is too sweet; did I get chocolate milk by mistake? How did I not notice that? Taking a close look at the box, I see, to my surprise and confusion, that this is in fact "vanilla-flavored milk". Come again? What the hell is vanilla-flavored milk? I take another sip; oh my god this is awful. It's as if somebody took a perfectly good cup of milk and added a sickeningly-sweet vanilla syrup to it. Just to make sure my mouth isn't deceiving me, another sip: oh yeah, there's no denying it, this is just terrible. It's so bad that we're now dangerously close to this milk ruining my entire cookie experience.

I put the milk down, continue to try to enjoy my cookie, and decide I'm not taking another sip until I'm done with the cookie and just need something quick to wash it down. Once the cookie's gone, I wince as I reach for the milk. Slowly raising it to my mouth, knowing that it's going to be bad, I quickly take a sip and swallow, so that the foul taste will spend as little time on my taste buds as possible. Again the syrupy-sweet taste assaults me, and at that point I decide to just throw the damn thing away rather than suffer through any more of it.

My chocolate chip cookie enjoyment had effectively been ruined.

As my plane was boarding, I didn't have time to get another drink, and to add insult to injury, my plane sat at the gate for a half hour due to bad weather before leaving, thus delaying the drink service even longer.

I just don't get why anyone would want vanilla-flavored milk. If you don't like the taste of either normal milk or chocolate milk, I'd suggest that maybe you shouldn't drink milk at all. At the very least, don't impose your disgusting made-up flavors onto an already perfectly acceptable product, and most definitely, do not, under any circumstances, ruin my chocolate cookie experience, or else When I Start Runnin' Things, there will be hell to pay.

Emptying Boxes

2007-05-12T00:43:00.000-07:00

Well, the DC Project is real now. I sent resumes to two contacts in DC last week and received positive responses from both, and Ladan has begun selling furniture in Phoenix in preparation for our eventual move. I flew back to Arizona Thursday night and I'm here until Monday when I fly to Huntsville.

There's something palpably sad about seeing our apartment here with furniture missing. This part of our lives, when we were supposed to both live here in Phoenix for a year or two, is now over without ever having really happened.

I spent a good chunk of the day going through boxes of my accumulated stuff and trying to let go of as much of it as possible - so that I don't turn into one of those old packrats whose stuff eventually gets unloaded on antiques stores or simply trashed. Since graduating college, I've kept the vast majority of my textbooks, notes, exams, and projects. Even though I've known for years now that I would not be making a lifelong career out of aerospace engineering - I discovered too late that my love for aircraft didn't translate very well into love for the actual engineering underlying it all - I kept all my papers around for two reasons: one, just in case I ever somehow needed some of that information, and two, because I felt that after all that effort (and money) invested, throwing it all away would be like ... well, throwing it all away.

When we moved out of San Francisco, we paid a lot of money to have most of our possessions shipped to Phoenix. After the move, with more time on our hands, I went through all of it and realized that there were many boxes full of mostly papers that I just didn't need. One day I tossed out a stack of papers more than waist-high that had filled three heavy boxes. At that point I resolved to strive to significantly decrease the amount of random unnecessary stuff that I allowed myself to collect.

But until today, I hadn't had much impetus to actually start the trimming. Now that we're starting to think of the logistics of moving to DC, though, I was determined to rid myself of as much stuff as possible. I started with my college class notes and although it was painful, I threw out about 99% of it - hundreds, maybe thousands, of pages of printed and hand-written notes, class handouts, exams, and labs, dating back to around 1996. What a strange feeling it was to wade through these papers again; it was like fast-forwarding through five or six years of my college career, bringing back so many memories of those times. I can't believe I knew all those equations back then! It's amazing how little of what you learn actually gets used in the real world. Sure, it all lays the theoretical groundwork for doing the real thing, but man ... I could've learned the entirety of the engineering knowledge required for my current job in a single intensive semester.

Also getting the axe were about ten textbooks that I've now listed on Amazon; an entire box of spare computer parts: cables, connectors, fans, power cords, floppy and IDE cables, empty CD cases, and phone cords; a stack of old game manuals (about a third of my total collection, ones that I finally admitted to myself don't need to be held onto any longer); almost half of the papers in my apparently poorly-regulated Really Important Papers box; another box (the second) full of newly-emptied binders; a pile of old airplane pictures and posters that haven't been touched in years; and, in a stunning example of material liberation, all the many heavy wood panels that comprise my cludged-together computer desk/cockpit which has since been replaced by a single high desk from Ikea and a deck lounge chair.

Robert DeNiro's line in Heat advising to "never have anything in your life that you can't walk out on in 30 seconds" has always appealed to me, although I usually interpret it in a different context, in terms of material possessions. Those who know me would probably find that ironic, considering that I, for example, have held onto every computer game box that I've acquired since about 1998. But I like the idea of having few critical possessions - more accurately, I like the idea of being comfortable with having few critical possessions. It would seem wonderfully liberating to pack all my most important items into just a few boxes if I decided to say, move to another country tomorrow.

In reality, though, I know that things actually do mean a great deal to me, primarily music albums, books, and tangible links to the past like pictures. Their worth comes not from my mere ownership of them, but because of the enjoyment I derive from them over time. And while I feel that I'm getting better at not accumulating too many things, I've still got a long way to go to reach my ideal of just a few boxes' worth.

Antiques Ain't So Bad

2007-05-10T14:24:00.000-07:00

When my friend B and I did a cross-country road trip last summer, we were amused by the incomprehensibly large number of "antiques" stores that adorn the otherwise barren stretches of our most boring-to-drive-through states. We never stopped to check any out, but I assumed they were full of items that could probably be best characterized as the accumulated trash of packrats whose death finally allowed it all to be cleared out of their basements.

While I couldn't care less about old silverware, furniture, or mugs, old printed volumes - books and magazines - have always caught my attention. Two years ago in San Francisco, a house around the corner from ours was having an estate sale, and I had a blast sifting through the mounds of pictures, pamphlets, and magazines. I felt triumphant when I paid two bucks for an immaculate hand-drawn map of San Francisco that was produced and given away free by a bank to its customers in I think 1942.

Last weekend when Ladan and I were in Bisbee, Arizona, we stopped into an antiques store in the small downtown area out of curiousity. Most of the store had the typical items that I imagined they would, but upstairs was a section for books, and I made a beeline for it. Once up there, I found a handful of books about airplanes, all previously owned by one man whose name he had written on the inside cover, as well as the year he'd acquired the book. I finally settled on two books: Strategic Air Command, published in 1961, and A History of the United States Air Force, 1907-1957, published in 1957. Aside from their worn covers, both books were in perfect condition. For $6.50, they were mine.

The books are classic Cold War texts: all black and white, very official looking. You'd almost think they were movie props or museum replicas until you realize they're real.

To me, the coolest thing about these books is that if I live to 2061 these books will be 104 and 100 years old, respectively, and will most likely chronicle a time that is radically different from the [future] present. At that time, looking through these books will shine a light on a distant past that very few living people will still remember, as opposed to what they are now, which is simply histories of places and events that our parents lived through when they were young.

Of course, unless I find a worthy successor to pass them onto, they might just end up back in the dusty book section of another antiques store.

Dude Was A Wizard!

2007-05-09T17:51:00.003-07:00

Last week as I was returning from Atlanta to Phoenix, I had a layover in Dallas. While walking through the terminal, I passed a guy sitting on the ground, and out of the corner of my eye something that he was doing with his hands caught my attention. I turned to look at him and what I saw was so strange that I stopped dead in my tracks. Imagine that there was an invisible sphere in his lap; his hands were slowly moving around the outside of the sphere, and in the middle, there was a pen levitating.

Yes, levitating.

I was no more than three feet from the guy and there was clearly nothing visibly connecting his hands to the pen. The movement of his hands seemed to be coaxing the pen to stand upright, almost as if he was pushing and pulling its energy to keep it stable. After a few seconds he looked up at me and the awkwardness of it made me start walking again. Rounding a corner, I turned around and continued watching the guy.

Impossibly, nobody else seemed to notice for a good two or three minutes. Eventually, a few other people started staring too, but as this was just a normal guy in an airport terminal and not a street performer, rather than a crowd gathering around, people tried to watch while simultaneously trying to hide the fact that they were watching.

After a few more minutes, the guy put the pen away and pulled out his boarding pass. This he placed in one hand while holding the other hand above the first, slowly "lifting" the boarding pass up until it was standing vertically on his hand and then off of his hand, again just floating in front of him.

It was at this point that I finally remembered that my phone has a camera, and I quickly but stealthily snapped a few pics right as my plane was boarding. Because of the poor resolution and distance, the pictures came out predictably crappy, but you can still clearly see the boarding pass in his hands, and I can tell you from seeing it with my own eyes, it really was floating between his hands.

The guy got on my plane after me and passed me as he moved toward the back. In retrospect, I really wish I'd talked to him, as everyone I've told the story to is convinced that it was some sort of trick. I, too, would be sure it was a trick if I'd only heard the story and not actually seen it. But the fact that I walked within a few feet of this guy and got a very close look at the whole thing makes it much harder to brush off as an optical illusion or a cheap trick. I have no idea how he did it ... but I know what I saw.

Leaving Empty-Handed, Again

2007-05-08T22:42:00.000-07:00

I've just returned from the AMD/Microsoft Tech Tour 2007, an annual PR event intended for system builders that showcases the latest from AMD and Microsoft. For the past three years, I've attended the tour's stop at AMD headquarters in Sunnyvale, since I work just a few minutes away. This tour got really popular when hardware geeks discovered that they were giving away prizes - processors, motherboards, video cards, software, etc. - at the end of each event by drawing attendees' names out of a hat. It is still laughably easy to sign up; you just fill out a form online, claim you're a system builder, and you're in.

Before the Tech Tour existed, AMD put on another event called the XP Performance tour. I attended two of these while still living in Maryland. At the first, Ladan came along and she was the first person to win a processor. Later that evening, I won a second processor. They were Athlon XP 2200s, clocked at 1.8GHz, and I built a new overclocked system around one of them and gave the other to a friend.

Since then, however, I've left each Tech Tour empty-handed aside from the free hot dog or hamburger dinner, and T-shirt and flash drive (512MB this time, not too shabby) they give to everyone at the end in exchange for handing in an event survey. Since just a few months ago I built an entirely new Intel system around the Core2Duo E6700 (the stock 2.6GHz chip is currently happily running at 3.6GHz) that Ladan acquired as a free "evaluation chip" through working for Intel, I wouldn't have had any use for much hardware. A few copies of Windows Vista Ultimate were given out though, and those I definitely could have used, if for nothing else than to continue my run of not having paid for a Microsoft operating system since getting Windows 98 on a Compaq pre-built I bought in 1999.

The first Tech Tour I attended was in 2005, again at AMD HQ. They set up a big tent on a grassy area next to a parking lot, and the first thing I noticed this year, as before, was the pleasant smell of freshly-cut grass. Also as usual, I first walked around and checked out the vendor booths before settling into a chair and watching the mostly canned presentations. In past years, the talks about current and upcoming processor designs fascinated me. This year that topic was reserved for the last presentation, and was a bit low-key compared to previous years, partly, I think, because of the near-universal critical acclaim for Intel's impressive Core2Duo. But the somewhat muted enthusiasm on their part for the processor lineup actually meshed well with my own. What a difference a year makes: last year at this time, Ladan had already accepted her position at Intel in Arizona, and the plan was that I would soon get a job there too. I was putting a lot of time into learning about processor architectures and design, and so I found the Tech Tour both directly relevant and excitingly motivating.

As it turned out, as the Intel hiring freeze dragged on, we abandoned our plans to move permanently to Arizona. I stopped looking for jobs out there and we set our sights on DC. And that's where we are now. For me, the world of processors is now firmly relegated to a personal interest, rather than a potential career-change path. Additionally, it feels weird knowing that this will be my last Tech Tour in Sunnyvale. Sure, I'll attend the DC event next year, but it just won't be the same. I'm going to miss that tent with its freshly-cut grass.

The Month of May

2007-05-07T05:11:00.000-07:00

It's been a (typically) busy week. Last Wednesday I flew to Atlanta to attend a day-and-a-half class for work. Friday night I flew to Phoenix, then Saturday morning Ladan and I drove to Bisbee, a small former mining town hidden in a canyon just a few miles north of the Mexico border. We spent the night there, then came back on Sunday. On the drive down there, we checked out the tiny town of Tombstone, home of the famous gunfight at O.K. Corral in 1881, and subject of the movie of the same name.

This morning, I fly back to San Jose (as usual, I'm loving the extremely rare free wireless that Sky Harbor provides). Tuesday night I'll hopefully be at AMD's Tech Tour in Sunnyvale, an event I always look forward to, although this year I'll need to skip my macroeconomics class in order to attend. Wednesday night I have microeconomics; Thursday night I fly back to Phoenix for the weekend. The following Monday, I fly from Phoenix to Huntsville, Alabama, to attend a 3-day class through Thursday. That night, I fly back to San Jose. The next day, Friday, Bharath comes up for the weekend. Two days after he leaves, I have my macroeconomics and then microeconomics final exams.

That takes me to May 23. In the first week of June, Ladan probably will have a work trip to Japan for a week. If she does, she may go about a week early - the last week of May - so that I can tag along and we can explore the country together.

So basically, I've got pretty much all my days planned right up through the first week of June. And somewhere in there, I need to find time to continue moving on The DC Project.

Although in some sense I am a homebody, and very much enjoy so-called downtime periodically, I'm not bothered by this continuing hectic schedule. I'm wracking up the frequent flyer miles, and essentially got two free one-way tickets to Phoenix because of my conveniently overlapping work trips.

But still, every time I leave here, I wonder at how much easier and just frankly better things would have been had I been able to get a job with Intel last year soon after Ladan moved here. All this time and money and frustration that has gone into living apart would have been saved. Although I love the Bay Area and it's weather, living in Phoenix wouldn't have been so bad. I can't argue with mid-60's at 4:30AM and 11PM. And although the area lacks any sort of real city life, it is relatively close to the Grand Canyon, Sedona, San Diego, Los Angeles, etc., which is where most of our trips have been to.

It's both easy and tough to look forward to DC. Easy because we'll finally be back together after more than a year apart, easy because of not having to pay for two separate sets of expenses, easy because we'll be living in a city and working towards entering careers that we both feel excited about. But tough because, man, as I've said so many times, weather is just so damn important to my mood. Consider that I haven't woken up to uncomfortably cold temperatures even once since leaving San Francisco almost a year ago. And also tough because DC will be so damn expensive relative to where we are now. In that regard I'm caught in a Catch-22: I'm moving to DC so that I get escape the defense industry, but in order to live in DC, I need to stay in the defense industry in order to make enough money to live there. As a result, at this point I'm leaning toward staying in the same line of work as long as I can find a company that will pay for school.

Regarding the weather, though, I have to say that I absolutely loved the humidity of Atlanta. I hadn't felt real humidity in many months; Phoenix is of course bone-dry, and the Bay Area's pretty dry too. As soon as I stepped off the plane in Atlanta, and felt the air envelope me, I was in heaven. I'm one of the extremely rare freaks who really loves humidity. I tried to spend as much time as possible outside while I was there, just to soak in the moisture. And it's funny: whereas had I still been living in Maryland I would have felt how relatively different Atlanta was from the DC area, I instead simply noticed how East Coast mid-atlantic it felt. Compared to the West Coast, all I noticed was that I was clearly back in the East. Had I not known better, I might've even thought it was Maryland. And happily for me, I really liked it and didn't miss California at all.

Rumors of PC Gaming's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

2007-04-21T15:03:00.000-07:00

I'm a gamer. To be specific, a PC gamer. To be very specific, a non-MMO PC gamer, which places me in about the 98th percentile of the entire gaming population.

The Commodore 64 from my youth got me hooked on games, primarily flight simulators. I never had an Atari or Nintendo, and I don't have or plan to ever have an Xbox, Wii, or Playstation. The two greatest games I've ever played - Deus Ex and System Shock 2 - were PC-only titles. All through college, and for years afterward, I regularly played PC games either online or at LAN parties with friends who were just as enthusiastic about it as I was. For me, the PC is where it's at: the combination of the most advanced technology with being the system upon which the vast majority of the games I'm interested in appear makes the choice of platform a non-issue.

Partly this is because I partake enthusiastically in the tired PC-vs-console debate, which, like all good completely subjective disputes, is endlessly unproductive. Unless you consider the apparently ever-shrinking and less-profitable PC gaming market, which may render the platform obsolete by sheer economics alone, thereby handing the victory to the console.

When I was growing up, the "serious" games - like flight sims, RPGs, and turned-based strategy games - were all found on the PC, while the "kiddie" games - platformers, side-scrollers, and arcade titles, not to mention the games specifically intended for children - were on the console.
The partitioning has since become much less strict, but the fact remains that the most technologically advanced, highest resolution, most complex titles are better suited to the PC.

Sadly, the direction that gaming has taken in general reflects, in my opinion, the increasingly short attention spans and juvenile tastes of the general population. It's my strong conviction that usually when something is embraced by the masses, it gets corrupted and has its soul sucked out. Sounds snobbishly elitist, I know, but look at the games that have been bestsellers the past few years: Grand Theft Auto, The Sims, and a million MMOs. To me, the first two reflect a desire for people to now play games that mimic the over-dramatic garbage they've been watching on TV since the advent of the awful 'reality' show. The popularity of MMOs seems less ill-inspired, but still derives much of its appeal from those who simply want to play 'house' or 'tea time' with others in a digital world.

The apparent imminent demise of PC gaming stems from three issues: 1) the increasing difficulty of coding a game that works across such wide variations in hardware and drivers, compared to the fixed box of parts that a console is; 2) the continuing inability to effectively fight software piracy, which is extremely rampant for PC games, thus diminishing sales; and 3) the popularity of consoles, especially as they continue to improve technologically and take on other features, such as playing DVDs. All three of these have no real solution, from the point of view of wanting to save PC gaming.

Evidence for the demise is everywhere; stores like Best Buy and Gamestop that used to have huge, current PC gaming sections have now relegated their dwindling stock to the back of the store to make room for console games. After a 10-year run, Computer Games Magazine, one of the better non-glossy publications, and the one gaming magazine that I subscribed to for the past four years, and which I fondly remember introducing me to The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, was suddenly shut down last month with no warning. Most of my friends, if they have time to game at all, have shifted most or all of their gaming over to consoles, both because of their limited patience and budget for keeping up with the latest PC hardware, as well as the increasing appeal of the console as a multi-tasking companion to the TV in the living room.

However, I strongly feel that the demise of PC gaming is over-hyped. Here's why: look at a genre like combat flight simulators. For years, industry observers have been announcing "the death of flight sims", when in fact, the recent past and near-term future have been chock full of quality titles: the ultra-hardcore 'study sim' Falcon 4.0 (which was picked up by Lead Pursuit two years ago, improved, and re-published as Falcon 4.0: Allied Force), the IL-2 Sturmovik series (which had four major expansion packs released, and whose successor, Battle of Britain: Storm of War, is coming along nicely), the Lock On: Modern Air Combat series (which has had one successful expansion, with another on the way), and Third Wire's Strike Fighters series (plus two expansions). All of these series also have extremely active and productive mod communities that are in some cases solely responsible for keeping the games alive and attracting commercial interest in publishing expansions.

Likewise, look at any genre you like, and you'll find quality PC games that are neither ports of console games nor tired license-tie-in titles. Take shooters, for example: we have STALKER, Far Cry, Half-Life 2, FEAR, Prey, Bioshock, and Crysis, to name a few.

Ironically, it may be the genres of PC games that I generally disdain - MMOs, Sims-type games, and GTA-type games - that help keep the market profitable and the industry afloat. If this led to publishers abandoning less profitable genres, however, then of course from my perspective the ends would have most certainly not justified the means. But luckily I don't see that happening. For now, it appears to me that any successful PC games help the entire range of genres for the platform. And the existence of vibrant user-made mod communities - a phenomenon unique to the PC - has proven time and again to help invigorate and extend the life of many a title.

I've always been a PC gamer and I always will be. I'll never be able to attach my flight stick, throttle, rudder pedals and headtracking device to a console, nor will I be able to run my favorite games at 1920x1200 resolution at 60 frames per second on a console, and so for me, the PC is here to stay. But there is something inescapably dismal about seeing your hobby get squeezed out of both the retail market and your friend's lives. I have a lot of great memories, but I really wish they didn't have to be just memories.

I Miss My Ferrari

2007-03-31T22:39:00.000-07:00

The other day in Scottsdale, as I passed the Ferrari/Maserati dealership, I saw a beautiful yellow Ferrari F430 on the lot. Today as we drove around San Diego, I saw another yellow F430, this time a convertible Spider model. After driving Ladan's Golf and then a friend's Jeep Cherokee for a week now, the sightings made me ache to get back behind the wheel of my own yellow F430.

I bought this 8-cylinder, 490hp behemoth early in my Test Drive Unlimited career two weeks ago, and it's an absolute dream to drive [read: control using my PC-compatible Xbox360 gamepad]. No racing game has held my attention for more than a few minutes since 2000's Need For Speed: Porsche Unleashed. This game, however, has sucked me in like only a handful of games in my entire gaming, uh, "career", have done. Every night I find myself thinking, "maybe I'll just do one more race", and then suddenly it's 1:30 AM and I have to force myself to go to bed.

And so, having been away from my gamepad for over a week now, I'm positively fiending to strap back into my F430 and start tearing up the streets of Hawaii once again. And seeing all these real-life F430s makes the separation all the more painful.

Absence Explanation

2007-03-30T23:33:00.000-07:00

Whenever I'm away from the blog for too long, I feel I owe my reader(s?) an explanation. Here goes:

On Thursday the 22nd I flew out to Phoenix for the weekend. My plan was to fly back to San Jose on Monday morning, but then return to Phoenix on Wednesday the 28th because Ladan's parents were flying back to Iran on Monday April 2nd - but out of LA, which meant we'd have to drive there over the weekend, return to Phoenix Monday night, then I'd fly back to San Jose Tuesday morning.

On Saturday the 24th, Ladan, her sister and parents and I drove north first to Sedona (where I managed to rip off the driver's side mirror on Ladan's Golf while backing out of a tight parking spot past a tree) and then on to the Grand Canyon, where we spent the night at the El Tovar Hotel. Sunday we toured the South Rim, then headed back south, stopping first at an interesting former mining town called Jerome, built into the hills about 80 miles north of Phoenix.

Ladan's parents had bought two laptop computers the previous weekend, and as I began my usual cleanup job on them (removing all the trial anti-virus programs and other pre-installed crap), I discovered what a memory hog Windows Vista is. After removing everything I could, on bootup Vista was still sucking up 340MB of the machines' paltry 512MB, making them sluggish at best. I decided to shift both 512MB sticks to one machine and buy a single 1GB stick for the other machine, but ran into a roadblock when no matter what I tried, I just could not get the screw holding the memory slot cover to come off one of the machines.

By Sunday night I'd decided that taking care of the computers, car repairs, and preparing for the trip to LA (which we'd planned for Thursday the 29th) required my presence in Phoenix more than my work in San Jose required me back there. So Monday morning I called my boss and let him know that I wouldn't be back until Tuesday April 3, a solid six work days out of the office. He was OK with it, but we'll see if my cube's been cleared out when I get back.

On Monday I spent almost the entire day working on the laptops - I ended up completely stripping the head of the screw and, after much hassle, finally got Best Buy to remove it for me. I popped the new RAM I'd bought from Fry's into the second machine and the performance significantly improved.

On Wednesday I got the Golf's side mirror replaced, at the cost of suffering through a few more hours at the Scottsdale Tool Shop and being squeezed for $433 - yes, just for a frickin' mirror assembly.

Thursday we piled in a friend's Jeep Cherokee and drove 4 hours west to Palm Desert, CA. That night we met my father and his wife for dinner, as they own a timeshare out there - 'twas the first meeting between my father and Ladan's parents, and went well.

This morning we drove to San Diego, where we'll be staying at a friend's place for the weekend. On Sunday we plan to drive up to LA/OC, and hopefully meet Bharath for Iranian kebabs at some point. Monday afternoon we drop Ladan's parents at LAX, drive back to Phoenix, and then I fly back to San Jose Tuesday morning.

So it's been a crazy week, as well as a jarring removal from all the things I'd been thinking about the week before - composing various blog posts that I'd been mulling over dealing with current events, politics, economics, and commentaries on recently read books and journal articles, starting to prepare more for The DC Move, all the gaming goodness I'd recently been partaking in with Rainbow Six: Vegas, Test Drive Unlimited, and (for one night, at least) STALKER - and in a way I feel that I really have two separate lives going here: one in Phoenix, with my family, and one in San Jose, doing all the things I do when I'm alone. At some point in the not-too-distant future, I'm looking forward to having these two lives merge again, if for nothing else than to relieve the nagging feeling that I'm always neglecting one or the other.

Mammoth Coughed Up The Dough

2007-03-12T22:23:00.000-07:00

That's right - Mammoth refunded my money last week. I wrote a nasty e-mail to them a few days after it happened but didn't hear anything for two weeks. I then wrote back asking what was going on, and later that day received a very detailed and apologetic e-mail. The woman who responded acknowledged the inadequacy of the website's explanation of driving directions from the Bay area, and said that she would be meeting with the website administrator later in the week to discuss improving it (although I just checked and there's been no change yet). She offered to refund not only my lift ticket, but also the snowboard rental too, so I got back all one-hundred-ten bucks. She did, however, go out of her way to point out that she was offering the refund "because it's the right thing to do", and not because I mentioned complaining to the Better Business Bureau. Heh, whatever!

So I feel much better about the whole thing now. Actually this is not really a victory; I just got what I rightfully deserved from the beginning, as far as I'm concerned.

While most of my leftover money each week goes to buying plane tickets to Phoenix or paying off credit cards, this little bit o' scrill was burning a hole in my pocket and today I bought myself an Xbox360 controller that works on the PC. Why, you ask? Well, for three reasons:

1) I spent Sunday afternoon at the house of a friend from work, playing on his Xbox360 (GRAW2 and Crackdown, for those in the know) with a bunch of other guys. Just like the last time I was there, after the initial adjustment to the gamepad - cuz I'm really a keyboard-and-mouse kinda guy - I fell in love with the ergonomics of the controller. It's maybe a bit small for my hands, but other than that has just a ton of functionality crammed into it.

2) This purchase put me on the path to maybe, possibly, potentially living out my virgin console gaming fantasy, where I buy an Xbox360. I've wrestled with it since the console came out, and have resisted thus far. But the controller that I bought works on both the Xbox and the PC; so if I were to buy an Xbox in the future, and since I'd most likely get the Core system, which only includes one controller, then the one I bought would complete the near-obligatory pair.

3) Since, uh, obtaining Test Drive Unlimited over the weekend (it's been released as a 'digital download' but doesn't hit retail until next week), I've become almost obsessed with the game, as it's allowed me to reclaim some of my racing glory from the Need For Speed: Porsche Unleashed days. This game claims to model 1000 miles of road in Hawaii, and you compete in various races, car deliveries, timed taxi-type missions, and other assorted tasks to earn money that you can spend on houses, clothes (yes, really) and of course new rides. It's not just a racing game; it's got an RPG angle to it that I really dig. I don't anticipate spending much time with the house and clothes buying, but there are 125 different cars modeled in the game from which to choose. There are dealerships all over the island at which you can do test drives, and you can rent cars too. Anyway, I'm having a blast with it but my current Saitek gamepad just wasn't cutting it for controlling the cars ... and so, enter the slick Xbox360 controller.

It's a good month for PC gaming - next week this game comes out, as does Silent Hunter 4 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the latter being a shooter whose development I've been following for years (I have trailers for it dating back to August 2003) and am really looking forward to.

In Defense of Command Economies

2007-03-11T20:18:00.000-07:00

When my macroeconomics class began a month ago, one of the first topics we covered was Adam Smith, his book The Wealth of Nations, and the concept of the invisible hand. In describing Smith's ideas, our professor contrasted free-market economies with command economies, and, without explaining any of the reasoning behind socialist and communist theory, dismissed the subject by pointing out that the vast majority of the so-called communist states had collapsed in the early 90's. Keeping in mind that most of these students are fresh out of high school, few of them could even talk when the Berlin Wall came down; for them the entire Cold War, communism vs. capitalism, East vs. West, the USA vs. the USSR, NATO vs. the Warsaw Pact, Gorbachev, glasnost, perestroika - all of this had been learned, if at all, through history books. Whereas previous generations were generally familiar with at least the basics of communist theory, and even if opposed to the idea, may have recognized the relevance of at least learning about it, these kids had had no reason to know much about it aside from their history classes. Therefore this professor would be giving them perhaps their first academic exposure to the subject.

Our professor was very enthusiastic about his admiration of Smith's fundamental assumption that people want material wealth and are perhaps even greedy. And that in the face of limited resources and unlimited wants, the incentive to work harder, thereby earning an individual more money, and thereby allowing a person to surround themselves with more material wealth, would generate competition and promote efficiency among workers; this in turn would benefit the society at large. Thus, individuals pursuing their own self-interest would, in the end, be simultaneously pursuing society's collective self-interest.

After pointing out that most so-called communist countries collapsed 15 years ago, he posed the class a question: would we rather live in a free society where each person is allowed to pursue their own self-interest, where hard work would be rewarded with wealth, or would we prefer a society where the government controls the economy and, in accordance with Marx's famous statement of "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs", each person was only guaranteed his most basic needs? He gave no more explanation of the advantages and disadvantages of each system than that.

At this point I had to get involved. I pointed out that it was important to note that Marx clearly stated that communism would develop as an evolution of capitalism; that he theorized that capitalism was not a sustainable economic system because wealth tends to become concentrated, and increasingly so, in the hands of a small minority; and while taking as concrete fact the belief that greed is part of every human's innate psychology is questionable at best, and entirely misleading at worst, Marx was implying that an economic system based on full acceptance and encouragement of this trait was not, in the long run, sustainable as a system that could meet the needs of an entire world population; in stark contrast to Smith's assertion that limited resources necessitated individuals acting in their own self-interest and fostering competition, Marx's logic leads to the conclusion that the reality of limited resources instead encourages active cooperation and planning so that an equitable, sustainable allocation can be made of those resources. I stopped there, not even continuing on about the reality that the globalization of the world capitalist economy is continually accelerating the polarization of global wealth: the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and not only is it getting worse as time goes on, it's getting worse faster and faster.

Without addressing much of my question, the professor instead insisted that greed is an undeniable human trait. I could not disagree more with this assertion. I believe the vast majority of human behavior patterns are learned, and greed is no different. Self-preservation - the survival instinct - is of course innate. But equating self-preservation with greed is inaccurate because the latter behavior is a manifestation of the former's motivating factors taken to the very extreme. We don't have to be greedy; we often are simply because our society rewards it.

Another student asked, "I don't know much about communism, but given what you've said about it here, it seems pretty bad. Why, then, are a handful of South American countries' governments moving toward more socialist economic systems? What benefit are they expecting?" To which the professor replied, "Well, that's a good question. I think these countries' governments have been so corrupt and inefficient, and a result poverty levels are so high, that the idea of socialism appeals to them, as it typically does to poorer sections of a society." Absolutely no mention of the history of exploitation and manipulation of these countries' governments, industries, and natural resources by Western countries, and how that has encouraged poverty and corruption. No mention of the fact that wealth is continuing to flow out of these countries, toward already-wealthy Western countries. No mention of the fact that World Bank and IMF loan terms have often included Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) that force them to cut back on essential social programs and open their industries to foreign investment and ownership. No mention that most of these countries are clearly not benefiting from the global capitalist economy, and that therefore it should be expected that their leaders would consider moving along a nationalist course.

By the end of the class I was thoroughly frustrated with the professor's one-sided presentation of the material, and on the way out I asked the guy who had asked the question about South American countries if he had some idea of what the actual answer was, and was trying to see if the professor could address it, or if he really was looking for an answer. He said his reason was both; on the way to the parking lot, we talked about it and the points I made were entirely new to him.

Clearly the examples the modern world has seen of communist countries have not been always encouraging. There are a variety of reasons for this - faulty implementations of Marx's ideas, the pressures of dealing with a world capitalistic economy, and relentless hostility from capitalist states, among others - but what bothers me is that lost in this reality is the value in the underlying ideas themselves. How can anyone possibly argue that the massively state-supported capitalism that has accelerated the process of globalization and thereby also accelerated the polarization of wealth, not only between regions and countries but also between classes, is sustainable and efficient? Communism doesn't have all the answers, but capitalism sure isn't coming up with much either.

The Morning Routine

2007-03-07T10:34:00.000-08:00

I've got a fairly consistent morning routine when I get to work: turn on my computer, check work e-mail, then start surfing the web. I spend a good 45 minutes checking out various websites, sometimes longer, before beginning any real work. Sometimes when my reading reaches a full hour, I chuckle at how funny it would be actually count the websites I check every day. Today I realized that additionally, maybe it would be funny to actually list them all here. And so I now bring you a complete, chronological list of the sites that I habitually check out every single morning:

Bank of America
Blue's News
Gamespy PC Games
Gamespot PC Games
PlanetUnreal
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
SimHQ
LockOnFiles
LockOn.ru Forums
SimHQ LockOn Forum
Shockwave Battle of Britain 2 Forum
SimHQ Battle of Britain 2 Forum
SimHQ IL-2 Forum
Frugalsworld Falcon4 Forum
FreeFalcon Red Viper Forum
GlobalFalcon OpenFalcon Forum
Subsim Silent Hunter 3 Mods Forum
Subsim Silent Hunter 4 Forum
PlanetHalfLife
HardOCP
TechReport
DailyTech
San Jose Mercury News Fry's Electronics Ads
CNN
BBC World News
B's House
Embracing Mediocrity
GregP's Profundity
Sepia Mutiny
English Russia

Yup, that's my morning routine: 30 websites. You'll notice the pathetic abundance of gaming sites; it's an addiction, plain and simple. The first step is admitting the problem, right?

Over the course of the rest of the day, in addition to revisiting many of those sites, there are probably 20 others that I regularly browse.

As I'm sure many other people have similarly experienced, I've gotten so attached to keeping up with events in all of these little communities that I truly feel out of the loop and a bit off balance if I have to skip my morning routine and forgo my surfing.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen to me if I had a job that required me to actually, you know, work, within the first hour of arriving at the office. Yeah, that would suck.

Vegas, baby!

2007-03-05T05:00:00.000-08:00

I've never been a "Vegas guy", in that I don't drink that much, don't smoke, don't know how to play any card games (and don't have enough interest to learn any), and don't find much appeal in gambling. Various groups of my friends have done "the Vegas trip" with their friends over the years, but I've never joined. My first visit there was about two years ago when Ladan's mother was here visiting us, and she really wanted to see the city. None of us were gamblers, but we had fun nonetheless, as Las Vegas is most definitely, if nothing else, a sight to behold.

This trip included Ladan, her sister, both her parents and myself for three nights; I flew out to Phoenix Wednesday night (after only being back in CA for three days), then Thursday we drove to Las Vegas. Yesterday evening we returned (and this morning I'm in the airport, about to head back to San Jose). The drive from Phoenix to Las Vegas is pretty boring except for passing over the Hoover Dam, which is an engineering marvel of obvious historical significance. They're building another highway through the area and the giant bridge that they've started building across the wide river, where each side is lined with almost sheer cliffsides, is incredible.

I didn't actually do any gambling until Saturday night, and it was limited to 25-cent slot machines at that. Only willing to part with twenty bucks, I got as high as $33 before losing it all. Slot machines are interesting to me; there's absolutely no strategy or logic that has any bearing whatsoever on the outcome of each spin. And the longer I sat there, drinking beer, watching the people around me, many of whom resembled zombies with their robotic repeated movements and blank stares, it struck me how convoluted the appeal of the slot machine is; isn't it true that the mathematics that determine exactly what you end up with cannot possibly be that difficult to decipher (and note that I'm only talking here about the mechanical slot machines, not the computer-based ones; how much easier could it get to make money than to use a completely-determined computer program to represent seemingly random results to the player? It's just such a farce!)? And therefore, could not the machine be easily set up to allow wins only a minority of the time?

Taking that idea further, why do some people become so obsessed with a game that all logic would dictate will cause them to lose the majority of the time? Clearly, casinos wouldn't exist if they couldn't make money. Based on the elaborate designs of most casino resorts on the strip, they're obviously raking in giant fistfuls of money, all the time. To make money, the casino must win more than the player; thus it's logical to assume that casinos only offer games that can be fixed (or at least can be statistically proven) to ensure this outcome. The reels have a finite number of known-ordered pictures, and so any given spin time, with a known start location, will yield a known end location on the reel. All that needs to be determined, therefore, is how often you must let the player win in order to keep their interest and prolong their playing, and thus, the amount of money that they lose. As a cognitive psychology problem, frankly it seems fascinating to me. It almost made me want to research the topic and see what's been written about it. How much effort would the average casino patron need to exert to discover all of the science behind the gambling industry? It just cannot possibly be that complicated.

Saturday night we also attended a performance of Jubilee, which was an entertainingly gaudy typical Vegas show with lots and lots of toplessness (somewhat to our surprise) thrown in for good Vegas measure. I felt like I was watching a movie about Vegas; there were rows and rows of high-heeled dancing topless showgirls, with elaborate feather plumes flailing about, on the stage during the entire show. Not that I'm complaining, of course.

Anyway, critical psychological analyses aside, the trip was fun. With all the lights, sounds, crowds, incredibly huge resorts with indoor winding themed malls, as well as the wide variety of people, that you see in Vegas, it's well worth visiting at least once in a lifetime just for the sheer spectacle of it all.

The Scourge of Triviality

2007-02-24T00:39:00.000-08:00

Ever have an experience where you're just so disgusted with humanity's obsession with triviality that you wanna hop on a rocket and go personally lead the search for intelligent life in space? Yeah, I had one of those today.

Ladan's car needed some service done so I took it to the Volkswagen dealership in the sickeningly affluent Scottsdale area. VW shares the complex with BMW, so as I arrive, the service entrance is overflowing with trendy suburbanites dropping off their $100,000 cars.

I spent the next three-and-a-half hours in the BMW waiting room, sharing the space with assorted tools and toolettes. All of them were glued to the TV, which was on MSNBC. The entire time I was there, I kid you not, they only presented three news stories:

1. The Anna Nicole Smith trial, and the controversy surrounding who the real father is;
2. The 13-yr-old boy abducted in Florida and then found safe by himself a few hours later, and the subsequent manhunt for the abductor;
3. Live coverage of a construction worker trapped in a trench collapse at a new house being built north of Atlanta.

And at least half of the commercials, I might add, were either terribly corny weight-loss ads or depressingly sad and surprisingly alarmist ads for LifeLine, an emergency phone service for elderly people who live alone.

At one point the woman next to me, who gave one of the dealership employees such an unnecessary attitude that I wanted to slap her, called her girlfriend and spent 20 minutes talking about the Smith baby's father issue and then this season's American Idol contestants.

Meanwhile, I sat reading Stephen Kinzer's Blood of Brothers, a book he wrote fifteen years ago about his experiences over a number of years as the Nicaragua bureau chief for The New York Times during the '80's, trying desperately to block out all the pointless drivel around me.

Once in a while I would take a stroll around the showroom, checking out cars, just to stretch my legs, and I was continually dumbfounded by what could possibly make a car be worth $130,000. What kind of person needs such a car? Isn't it clear that a person with such a car is making too much money? How many people could that money feed, or give medical treatment to, or provide housing for?

So by the time I was allowed to escape at 1:30, I had pretty much had my fill of this race of idiots called humans. It's times like these where I want to just move away into the jungle, or a cave, or a mountaintop, and just be done with it.

The Pot And Kettle Game

2007-02-23T00:40:00.000-08:00

Oh now this is really something: as protesters demonstrate against his even being there, Dick Cheney gave a speech yesterday in Australia voicing concerns about China's growing military threatening stability. It's amazing to me that this guy is given any legitimacy at all; his words are about as reliable as those of Pat Robertson. The article doesn't mention any specifics other than Washington's displeasure with the recent anti-satellite missile test China conducted, so let's compile the evidence ourselves, shall we?

- China said it spent $36 billion on its military in 2006. We spent that amount in a month - and that doesn't even include any of the money spent on the wars (yes wars, we're still fighting in Afghanistan). According to the CIA World Factbook, both of our military budgets comprise roughly 4% of GDP.

- Since 2001, we've invaded two sovereign nations, the first time with much world support, but ended up botching the planning both before and after the actual invasion, letting the main bad guys get away; the second time with hardly any real international support, against the ruling of the UN, and with evidence that turned out to be 100% incorrect or just plain fabricated, resulting in a post-invasion situation that is many times worse than what it was beforehand. And now we are starting to cast an aggressive glance toward Iran. In that time China has ... made a few intimidating comments about Taiwan.

Hmmm, yes, yes ... definitely, China is becoming a threat again, is acting aggressively, and needs to be put in check. Yes, it's all clear now, thank you, Dick.

First Intelligent Design, Now This

2007-02-22T11:49:00.000-08:00

About a year and a half ago I discovered The Flying Spaghetti Monster and immediately became a believer. Ladan and I even preached to the heathen masses in San Francisco's Castro section on Halloween two years ago, distributing flyers and informing people that the FSM loved them.

I found the entire intelligent design debate ridiculous, because as an atheist, I just don't understand embracing faith over science, especially when taking it to the point of insisting that the principles of Darwin's evolution cannot sufficiently explain the development of life on this planet. Lots of people confuse atheism with an absolute rejection of everything spiritual or so-called supernatural - which is just not true; the two are not equivalent. I definitely believe in realities beyond our own and the existence of things that cannot be explained in normal terms; I just firmly reject the notion that there is a single or multiple god(s) who created and now watch over all of humanity, and I reject all of the religious belief and lore that ensues.

The intelligent design debate, to me, was an embarassing testament to the state of our educational system. However, last night, in a sociology class that Ladan is taking, a new low standard was set, making intelligent design seem trivial.

Her professor, who has a master's degree in sociology, was attempting to make the point that the population of the United States uses a disproportionate amount of the world's resources. When beginning the discussion, she made the comment that the population of the US comprises 25% of the world population yet uses approximately 75% of the total resources.

Twenty-five percent of the world's population.

Now, it was my impression that most people of at least average mental ability and experience over the age of say 10 would intuitively know, even if they don't know the actual population numbers, that the US's percentage of world population could not possibly be 25%, a full quarter of the total. However, clearly this was a blindly optimistic assumption on my part, because not only did the professor believe this, but no one in the class objected to the statement.

Seeing this, Ladan raised her hand and pointed out that the world population is roughly 6 billion, and that the US does not contain even close to a quarter of that. The professor's response? "Well, there's been a lot of immigration in the recent past, and it's significantly increased the total population."

WHAT? Are you kidding me?! Surely you are joking, right?

As Ladan continued to debate this, it was clear that the professor was just not going to get it. She ended the discussion by saying that "I'll have to track down the references I came across years ago that gave that figure." This is a sociology professor - aren't they supposed to know about, uh, percentages, and populations and stuff? At least rough numbers? Instead, she went on with the example, using 25% as the percentage.

When Ladan got home, she found the US Census Bureau's World Population Clock and e-mailed her professor the link, including an explanation of how the US population of 301 million represents only a mere 4.5% of the world's 6.578 billion. Surely, seeing this, the professor would understand that her figures were wrong and that getting this number correct, the US population as a percentage of world population, was critical to the point she was making, right?

Wrong. Her response: "let's not dwell on the number alone", and instead focus on the point she was trying to make, as [paraphrasing] "even if that number is correct, you'll probably see that it still provides evidence of my point." Um, that number is absolutely essential to the point you're trying to make! Clearly, she has no idea what's going on here. If the real percentage of population is five times lower than what you're saying it is, then is there any doubt about whether that will reinforce or repudiate your point? And why do you not immediately understand that 3 out of 65 is not 25%? I mean really, come on!

Incredulous, Ladan told me this story last night and I've been disturbed by it since. I've observed some amazing lack of elementary knowledge and logic in my fellow economics students so far (the topic of a future post) but I can't say I've ever seen such awe-inspiring ignorance in an academic environment, especially on the part of a professor, in my entire life.

Is evidence of shocking and almost unchallenged ignorance being promulgated in our educational system a sign of The Apocalypse? If not .... maybe it oughta be. Who do I talk to about that?

Warmth Is Good

2007-02-20T22:31:00.000-08:00

I've always loved heat, even extreme heat, and abhorred cold. Tonight as I was leaving my macroeconomics class at 10, it was frigid as I stepped outside. The always-optimistic thermometer on my car read 55 degrees. I realize all you non-Californians scoff at complaining about such temperatures, what with the snow and severe cold you've seen this winter (I'll admit it though, I'm jealous and would love to see some snow). But having adjusted to the year-round moderate temperatures in Northern California, I find my tolerance for cold has gone way down.

And that's exactly what worries me as I contemplate moving back to DC. It gets damn cold there! Over the past two years I've gotten used to never, ever wearing a heavy jacket (been wearing a light windbreaker all winter, if anything). This past Saturday, after my Mammoth fiasco, I spent the afternoon hiking - it was 80 degrees outside! I love the weather here - if it's cool outside, it's a comfortable crisp cool, not the biting cold I endured in upstate New York and then Maryland (although, again, I really miss the hot humid summers). And the air here has a certain smell - a clean scent of Douglas fir trees, among others, that are so common here. And it seems like the sun is always shining here; none of those long, dreary winter months of cloudiness. A quick online search turned up that San Jose has 257 days of sun and 62 of precipitation, compared to DC's 203 and 114, respectively.

So I just don't know how I'm going to react to being back in a place that gets really cold in the winter. Sure I'd like the greater variation in seasons that living in such a place would bring, but I've found that my mood and energy levels vary in direct proportion to the amount of warmth and sun I get, and in a way I feel I've become 'soft' out here. Not to mention the time I've spent in Arizona, where, when it dips below 70 you feel cold.

It's not enough of an issue to change my immediate plans, but somewhere down the road, I definitely see never living in a cold place again. At least until I answer my life's calling and become a bodhisattva at the Potala Palace in Lhasa.

Well That Was Fun

2007-02-18T13:58:00.000-08:00

I had planned to join Bharath and some of his friends at Mammoth Mountain yesterday for snowboarding, my second outing, and I was looking forward to it. They were driving up from Orange County, and I east from San Jose. According to Google Maps, the directions were really simple - after going north up to Dublin, just go east for 200 miles. Near the end of the route was a 40-mile stretch straight across Yosemite National Park.

Leaving my house around 6:30 Friday evening, I get stuck in two whole hours of rush hour traffic and make about 50 miles of progress. Once I clear Tracy, traffic lightens up. It's dark now and I start to pass through lots of small, quiet towns, and for some reason it's getting creepy. At one point I pass a bar called The Whiskey River Saloon, and if you have an idea in your head about what such a place would look like, let me tell you, you're exactly right - that's what it looked like. I start seeing signs that say "Yosemite National Park - Tioga Pass Closed". I don't know what the Tioga Pass is, I just know that I need to take State Route 120 across the park.

As I get closer to the park, I'm seeing more signs. Suddenly it dawns on me, if there are this many signs, it must be a popular route. Taking a close look at my map (for the first time, thanks to my blind allegiance to Google Maps), I see the fine print on SR-120: "Tioga Pass - Closed During Winter". D'oh! Now what do I do? The map seems to show that if I just head south, I can circle around the bottom of the park and come back up the other side to Mammoth - but I have to go all the way down to Fresno, which is 60 miles further south. Unbelievable! So south I go.

The road that I'm on gets narrower and narrower and really quiet. For 45 minutes I don't see a single other car. The road narrows to one lane in each direction and it's on the side of a mountain, twisting and turning as it follows the canyon. It's pitch black out here, no lights anywhere, and I can't tell what's just a few feet away on my right: could be a thousand foot drop down to a lake, could be a five foot drop down to grass and trees, could be an abyss the size of the Grand Canyon - I don't know. What I do know is that the edge of the road has a steep rolloff, and there are no guardrails.

After about two hours of this, I emerge roughly at the bottom of the park and get back onto a straight, level road that heads toward Fresno. A few miles outside of the city, I take a look at the map to figure out which road I can take to loop back up around to Mammoth. It's at that point that I realize, oh my god, there is no road that goes from Fresno to Mammoth, because the Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks cut off access to the east. To reach Mammoth, my only choice is to drive another hundred miles south to Bakersfield (which would now put me only a hundred miles north of LA - keep in mind that Mammoth is 250 miles due east of where I live, which itself is 350 miles north of LA; I shouldn't be anywhere the hell near LA!) then reverse direction and go another 270 miles north! At this point it's already 1 AM - hell no I ain't drivin' another 400 miles!

Tired and angry, and realizing that San Jose is only 150 miles away, I give up and decide to just go home. By 3:15 AM, I'm in bed. After 400 miles and almost 9 hours of driving, I've accomplished exactly nothing. It was all a complete waste.

I still thought that maybe going north around the park might work, so I planned to check that out when I woke up Saturday morning. But when I woke up and checked the California highways website, I found that all the highways that cross the Sierra Nevada mountains in that area are closed during the winter, so there is no way to reach Mammoth without going north 200 miles to Lake Tahoe, then reversing direction and going another 140 miles to Mammoth. At that point, the idea of driving 350 miles up there on Saturday and 350 miles back on Sunday after a day of snowboarding did not appeal to me - to put it mildly - and I gave the idea up.

To top it all off, the bastards at Mammoth refuse to refund any money without 2 days advance notice, so, for the moment, I'm out $110 for the lift ticket and rental that I reserved. After all this, let me tell you, I'm not letting that one go easily and plan to fight it.

All in all, it was one hell of a great time, and it left me in a really great mood. One of these days I'ma Fall Down, Michael Douglas-style ...

Happy Birthday To Me

2007-01-17T16:10:00.000-08:00

No, that's not a pathetic cry for acknowledgement, but rather just a statement of fact. I'm 31 today, a number much more palatable than 30 was, as the transition out of the entirely-youthful 20's seemed painful a year ago. By this year, though, it's just another number. Since Ladan's in Phoenix and I'm going to Orange County this weekend to go snowboarding for the first time with Bharath (a birthday present from Ladan), I don't have any real plans for tonight. I may try to earn a dinner at a local Indian restaurant that apparently gives free entrees on birthdays, but that's about it.

I did, however, do something today that will hopefully have significance for the future: I applied online for three local colleges for the Spring 2007 semester. It seems that all the schools in DC that have international relations programs require both macro and micro economics classes as prerequisites to even submit an application, as well as a testable foreign language proficiency. Since I've only ever taken one economics class - a Syracuse University course taught at my high school when I was a junior - and that was oh, 14 years ago, I decided to just take it again rather than try to figure out how to get credit for it.

The local colleges I applied to all offer night classes for both courses, meeting once a week each for about three hours. If I could bang out both economics classes this semester, I could then spend the summer studying Spanish, in order to meet the language requirement by the time I (hopefully) start applying around the end of the summer for Spring 2008 admission. Also at some point in there I have to take the GRE again, because results are only good for five years and I took it back in 1998. (D'oh!)

It's sort of strange considering spending two nights a week in a classroom again after always having my nights free since finishing grad school six years ago. But luckily these colleges are dirt cheap - each course costs less than a hundred bucks - so that's not an issue. And if taking these classes starts to give me some peace of mind in regards to feeling like I'm finally on a career/life path that I can feel excited about, then that's immensely more valuable than any money I may have to spend up front.

An Unwelcome Message From The Mailman

2007-01-10T11:57:00.000-08:00

Occasionally I get prank phone calls, or more specifically, prank phone messages, on both my cell and office phones. Strangely, the calls always show a caller ID number that matches that of a certain friend of mine whose real identity I'll protect and innocence I'll presume by simply referring to him as "Richard C". But I'm certain that such a friendly, considerate, kind-hearted person such as he could not possibly be harassing me in this manner. There must be some mixup.

Anyway, on New Year's Day I received a message apparently from that most well-known of all wack Bay Area rappers, E-40, AKA The Mailman, AKA Charlie Hustle, AKA The Ballatician, AKA Captain Save-A-Ho, AKA 40 Fonzarelli, AKA 40 Water (you can see his website here, where I think the street signs speak for themselves):

"Hey wassup Greg, this is E-fawdee, I'm just calling all my weeples out there to wish you a nappy new year. Alright, later!"

Disturbingly, this is the fourth or fifth message I've received from this bama, whose music and style I loathe with a passion. E popularized the goofy "ghost ride the whip" anthem, as well as the "hyphy" phenomenon, and has helped wreak incalculable damage to the Bay Area's hip-hop identity. E has made a style out of rapping in a high-pitched, erratic, annoyingly sharply-enunciated voice that is like nails on a chalkboard to my hip-hop sensibility. It must be that my vocal distaste for the guy has come to his attention and now he's trying to win me over with niceties.

Well, I got news for ya - it ain't gonna happen, E, it just ain't. I'm still upset about that time in '95 when I unsuspectingly bought your album "In A Major Way" because you had 2Pac on the "Dusted N Disgusted" track, and how shocked I was with what utter crap your material actually was. And to think that you hailed from the same area that produced Solesides/Quannum and Hieroglyphics! I felt violated. Violated!

So make sure ya heard, E, I ain't no fan and never will be. You and all your wack hyphy associates can just step off!

Blind and Crying in the Mall

2007-01-08T13:40:00.000-08:00

For well over a year now I've been wearing glasses that have a number of cracks in the lenses, including one particularly annoying one directly in the line of sight of my left eye. I'd put off getting new lenses mostly because I didn't want to shell out the hundred bucks or so that it'd cost to replace them. But while in Arizona with Ladan over the New Year weekend, I realized that I should use any eye care health insurance benefits I had before the year ended. We went to the mall and I got an eye exam - my right eye had deteriorated a significant amount, while the left just a little - but then they told me that they'd have to order my lenses and it would take up to a week to receive them. Thus I'd have to wait until I returned to California to get the lenses - which meant that I'd lose the use of the benefits for 2006, since I wouldn't be back there until January 2. Damn!

This past Saturday I went to the mall and to my surprise they had my lenses in stock. I wanted to keep my current frames, so they took my glasses and told me to come back in two hours. Not having expected them to be able to do it the same day, I hadn't brought anything to read with me to pass the time. Nor was I able to drive home, or anywhere else for that matter, since I now couldn't see very well.

I had no choice but to just walk around the mall. As soon as I left the store and entered the rest of the mall, I was hit with the realization of just how terrible my eyes had become - I felt nearly blind! Faces and signs were fuzzy until I was within about five feet of them. Finally I located a mall directory and looked for a book store, assuming that in a mall this size, there had to be a Borders or Barnes & Noble, some place that I could sit and pass the time reading - nope, just a Borders Express, d'oh!

As I hadn't eaten anything all day, I decided to go to the food court. Another challenge: how am I going to read the menus? I stumbled around, trying to find something I could read. I settled on Sarku Japan, mostly because I was familiar with their menu and knew that Chicken Teriyaki was an option. I got my food, sat and ate it as lots of shapes buzzed around me, then finished and found that I still had an hour to kill.

Again walking around the mall, my eyes started to irritate me; I kept blinking and then noticed that they were watering, and little "tears" even started dripping out! What the hell? Did my feelings get hurt or something? Am I menopausal? What am I crying about?! As I walked and wiped my eyes clear, I figured it out: I've gotten so accustomed to walking with my eyes shielded by glasses that when I don't have them, the wind hitting my eyes makes them water! It's completely ridiculous, but true; I noticed that I could very clearly feel the air ramming into my eyes, and it was uncomfortable.

OK, so I can't see where I'm going, and now I can't even walk. I'm about as close to being helpless as I've been since my senior year of high school when I fractured both my elbows playing basketball. And it's not a good feeling.

Resigned to defeat, I chose a comfortable chair next to the glasses store and just waited it out. Few things annoy me more than having to kill time, especially when I could be reading instead. After about 45 minutes of this torture, I returned to the store and they went to fetch my glasses.

To add insult to injury, I'm still not sure that these new lenses are entirely correct; I've got weird halos around bright objects, especially at night. Seems like I'll need to make another trip back to the mall this week.

This time though, I'll be sure to bring a book.

Finishing A Most Suitable Book

2007-01-05T15:58:00.000-08:00

Last night I finally finished Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy. This 1474-page behemoth was the longest novel ever published in English back in 1993 when it came out. The book is absolutely adored by a friend of a friend of mine, and the intensity of the reverence for it piqued my curiosity to the point where I decided I had to read it. It was over two months ago that I began, and it took me longer to finish than I expected it to.

Carrying the book around for so long was certainly an attention-getter: a mid-40's Indian woman at an airport told me she quit reading it because it was "much too detailed", while a grandmotherly white woman asked me on an airplane, "What on earth is that book you're reading? I've never seen such a huge book!", and lots of other people have commented on how unbelievably long and seemingly insurmountable the book appears to be. Seth even pokes fun at himself, when he has a woman ask Amit, an author:

"Why, then, is it rumoured that your forthcoming novel ... is to be so long? More than a thousand pages!" she exclaimed reproachfully, as if he were personally responsible for the nervous exhaustion of some future dissertationist.

"Oh, I don't know how it grew to be so long," said Amit. "I'm very undisciplined. But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they're bad, they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends."

In short, I absolutely loved this book. The book chronicles the lives of four Indian families in the early 1950's who are related by marriage and friendship. It's an extremely engrossing, detailed, moving story that attempts (and succeeds) to address the enormous issues of religion, caste, politics, and marriage in Indian society a few years after independence. Seth creates a ficticious state called Purva Pradesh in which the story mostly takes place, and populates it with a huge cast of characters, all of whom are given sufficient time to develop their own personalities and go through unique but often inter-related experiences. It sounds cliche, but I was genuinely moved to sadness, surprise, disgust, regret, and out-loud laughter at different times by the characters.

Having spent over two months with this book, I had begun to feel that I was part of these peoples' lives - or them of mine. I met the members of the Kapoor, Mehra, Khan and Chatterji clans - Pran, Savita, Maan, Varun, Veena, Kedernath, Bhaskar, Mr. & Mrs. Mahesh Kapoor, Rupa, Lata, Arun, Meenakshi, Aparna, Dr. Kishen Chand Seth, Kakoli, Tapan, Dipankar, Amit, the Nawab Sahib, Firoz, Imtiaz, Saeeda Bai, Tasneem, Bibbo - and an equal number of other characters who played pivotal roles: Jawaharlal Nehru, S.S. Sharma, L.N. Agarwal, Rasheed, Baba, Sunil, Haresh, Malati, Kalpana, and Kabir among others.

I found the book absolutely fascinating and very well written, and am genuinely sad to be done with it. The ending left a bit to be desired though, as it seemed that all the loose ends were neatly tied up within a few short pages. And the last page was a disappointment to me, as it seemed anti-climactic and irrelevant. But these minor flaws did not detract from the other 1450 (!) pages that kept me continually wondering what would happen next.

Surprisingly, other than the physical pain from holding such a heavy book for long periods of time, the actual length of the book didn't ever feel overdone, or excessively wordy. Every passage had it's place, and I can't think of a single section that seemed unnecessary.

After hearing such profuse praise for the book, I think I understand what all the affection and fondness is about and why it has such deep meaning for some people, and to the extent that I can empathize with a culture that I am pretty familiar with but is not my own, I feel it now too. It's definitely one of the best novels I've ever read.

Questioning Team Loyalty

2007-01-02T06:47:00.000-08:00

As I often do, I started writing this from Phoenix Sky Harbor airport, care of the free wireless internet service available throughout the airport. I arrived at 7 for a flight at 8, forgetting that in addition to the increased traffic due to the holiday, Phoenix also hosted the Fiesta Bowl over the weekend and the city was overrun with football fans, many of whom waited until this morning to return home. When I walked into the airport, I was greeted by the longest check-in line I've ever seen, and immediately I was sure I wouldn't make it out of there for a few hours at best. Surprisingly, however, the line moved very quickly and I actually made it to my gate with 20 minutes to spare.

After watching the herds of Idaho and Texas fans file through the security checkpoint line, I was again reminded that what boggles my mind is the impression I get that so many people believe that vocal and visible allegiance to an athletic team is some sort of defining personality trait of which a person should be proud. To my mind, pledging allegiance to a sports franchise is the ultimate in sheep mentality, in effect no different from religious fundamentalists who kill in the name of their prophet or god. Yeah, I realize that's a harsh comparison, but I'll let it stand just to irritate certain people (Rich? Bharath?).

The whole idea of feeling loyalty to a team is just foreign to me. What does it actually mean? I could understand if the actual players and coaches stayed with the team during their entire careers; but only in very rare circumstances do athletes choose to do that these days. The people change and the strategies change over time. How can someone say they've been a fan of a particular team all of their lives? What do they feel allegiance to, the mascot? The colors? Some people meakly give answers like "the tradition", "the aura", etc., intangibles that they themselves don't even really understand. Instead of finding players they like and supporting them regardless of the team they happen to be on, serious sports fans actually abhor such logic, instead valuing being loyal to the abstract "team", especially when said team is doing poorly!

My other beefs with sports fans will await a later posting. For now, please, crazed sports fans, please someone present a rational explanation of why being loyal to a team is defensible and logical, because I just don't get it.

New Year's Resolutions

2007-01-01T22:24:00.000-08:00

How appropriate that I came across this passage on page 1240 of A Suitable Boy today (234 pages left, baby!):

"1952: The fresh and brilliant digits impressed themselves upon Pran's eye as he opened the morning newspaper. All the past grew veiled by the first of January, and all the future glistened ahead of him, emerging mysteriously from its grubby chrysalis. He thought about ... the mixed gifts of the previous year. And he wondered [what] the coming year would bring him."

For the past few years I've sat down and written out New Year's Resolutions; admittedly, most have gone unfulfilled for one reason or another, but I still indulge in making an annual list, inspired by a sense of a new beginning, along the lines of the passage above.

This year is no different; I've been thinking about what my most important resolutions should be for a few weeks now. Frustratingly, they haven't changed much from previous years, but this time I've decided to focus on a small number of really important ones instead of a long list of desires. That way I feel that I have a better chance of actually making progress toward finally reaching them.

So in order of importance, here are my four resolutions for 2007:

1) Get in and stay in shape. I'm thin, so lots of people assume I'm physically fit, but the truth is five years of cubicle life have atrophied my body to a pathetic state. I've got terrible endurance for any type of physical activity and my overall strength remains pretty poor. I get aches in different parts of my body now that never concerned me 10 years ago. Last summer I worked out for a few months, but then a trip to South Korea derailed my progress. Similarly, I worked out for about two months recently but then the trip to Nicaragua again brought an end to the program. The problem for me is that I just genuinely dislike being in the gym, lifting weights, running, etc. But this year I found that with an MP3 player I can at least escape from the soulless pop radio that blares into every gym, and motivate myself with some aggressive metal instead. So this year I vow to start and maintain an exercise program that includes eating better.

2) Learn Farsi. Because it's just downright embarassing now. After six years with Ladan, my knowledge of Farsi has not progressed beyond the very basics. I've started and stopped learning from a number of books. I've heard the Rosetta Stone series of language learning tools are really good, so somehow I'm going to acquire one soon. Additional motivation comes from the fact that Ladan's parents arrive in three weeks for a two-and-a-half-month visit, and even though their English is almost sufficient, I really want to be able to converse with them more fluidly.

3) Make a solid move toward bettering my career and life plans. I've been bitching about my job and career for years now, and finally this year it looks like I've got a game plan. Ladan and I are tentatively planning to move back to DC (not the DC metro area - but rather DC itself) over the summer, and also start grad school programs part-time while we work. During my last visit I checked out GW, Georgetown, JHU and American University, looking into their International Relations (IR) programs. It finally dawned on me that all three of my concerns - feeling resistant to further technical or engineering coursework, wanting to "join the fight" and start working for or against issues that matter to me, and the desperate need to leave the defense industry altogether - would be addressed by an international relations program. Why not make a career out of an area of interest that I feel passionately about and actively read about in my free time? More on this in a few days.

4) Become a better flight sim pilot. Yeah, really. It sounds silly, but it's true. I've been playing flight simulators for what, 18 years now? Damn ... and I still just suck. For the past five or six years I've put minimal time into flight sims, instead shifting the vast majority of my gaming time to shooters and RPGs. But my inexcusably poor virtual combat piloting skills are starting to bother me. I need to begin a serious program of study and practice in my two favorite sims - Lock On and IL-2 - and gain enough proficiency to feel confident in my ability to finally join the world of online flight simming. Common sense dictates that flying and fighting against other people ought to be the best sim experience, and it's about damn time that I man up and just do it. I've put a lot of money into building computers and buying peripherals that are intended primarily for flight sims; I need to start getting a return on those investments.

So those are my resolutions for this new year. Sure, I've got lots of other smaller goals, but these four are my most important ones. Check back in exactly a year and prepare to be blown away by the fit, Farsi-speaking and IR-studying Maverick I've become.

My New Favorite Awful Movie

2006-12-31T17:44:00.000-08:00

Last night I saw a movie that was so bad it was good. A movie so inexcusably, indescribably, inexplicably horrible that I actually ended up loving it. This movie, this film abomination, was called A History of Violence. It stars Aragorn, er, Viggo Mortensen as Tom Stall, the owner of a diner in a small town in Indiana. One night two thugs try to rob the place and Tom reacts like a trained assassin, killing both men in a few short seconds. He becomes a local hero and has his face splashed all over local TV and radio stations. Shortly thereafter, he is paid a visit by the pathetically corny scarfaced mobster Carl Fogarty (played by Ed Harris) from Philadelphia. Fogarty insists that Tom's real name and identity are in fact Joey Cusack, a fellow mobster also from Philly. Tom at first denies the accusation, but as the movie progresses and the mob starts threatening Tom, Joey slowly emerges as the true identity, taking out mobsters left and right.

What makes the movie so awful is, well, everything. Fogarty and his thugs are just laughable. The strange pauses in dialogue that occur often enough to be irritating. The feeling that so many of the lines are just so close to being classic, but in the end never measure up. The downright stupid and contrived tension between Tom's son and the high school bully. The totally unnecessary gore, with plenty of scenes of people getting shot or spurting blood from mashed-up faces. The dumb humor typical of this type of movie (although I have to admit, the scene near the end where Joey escapes from his brother Richie's house after taking out all his inept guards is pretty funny).

And so even though the story is halfway interesting and there seems to be some sort of moral or message buried in there somewhere, those qualities are completely overshadowed by everything else being so painfully awful in every single way - and in so being, the movie actually grew on me as it progressed and made me thoroughly enjoy the stupidity and corniness of it all. So if you're in the mood for a good bad, bad movie, I would happily recommend A History of Violence.

Holiday Recap

2006-12-30T09:38:00.000-08:00

Well my friend The Mediocre Blogger abhors blogs that serve simply as diaries, and even though I wanted to avoid this myself, my absence for two weeks I think warrants an explanation for where I've been.

Two weeks ago I was preoccupied with building a new computer, which is an exercise I undertake less often these days but still thoroughly enjoy. The occasion? A free processor from Intel, care of Ladan, who got one as part of a "loaner" program for employees. They sent around a list of processors available - a Core 2 Duo E6700, a Core Duo, a Pentium 4, and a Pentium D. I assumed that anyone who knew anything about computers would choose the E6700 (it's by far the fastest of the lot, and currently retails for $500) and therefore the supply might be exhausted quickly, but within a few days of requesting it, Ladan got an e-mail informing her that her E6700 was ready for pickup. Within a week, I'd ordered all the new parts I needed online, and Ladan had sent me the processor, and so I was ready to build. Astute readers might question the necessity of building a new computer when my current machine was of sufficient power to run all my games acceptably. My answer is a question: how could I possibly pass over the chance to build a new machine with a free processor that is so much faster than my current processor? Sure, I have to sink a few hundred dollars into it, and I'll need to buy a replacement processor when (if) Intel asks for the original back (almost a certainty when she leaves the company in about six months), but it's just .... SO MUCH FASTER! Wouldn't I be crazy not to do it? Right, so you understand too. Heh heh.

So building that machine took a few days, and installing and updating Windows and then all my programs and games takes considerable time. Before I could fully finish the job, I had to leave to fly to Boston on the 21st, where I was planning to meet Ladan and then drive to Albany to spend a week with my family for Christmas. Unfortunately, her flight was supposed to stop in Denver, and the airport was closed that day. They couldn't guarantee her a ticket until Christmas day at midnight; alternatively, she could try to get a standby seat first to Chicago and then to Boston, with no idea of how long that might take. I was already flying to Boston when this happened, and right when it appeared that I might be spending the week in Albany alone, Ladan found a JetBlue overnight flight to Boston. I ended up staying with friends in Boston on Thursday night and then driving back to the airport at 5AM to pick her up. After a few more hours of sleep, we drove to Albany.

The next day we drove to Ottawa to visit some of Ladan's relatives. We stayed there one night, returning the next afternoon. Then from Sunday night to Thursday morning we stayed with my family in Albany. On Thursday morning we drove back to Boston and flew out in the afternoon, both of us returning to Phoenix to spend the New Year weekend together.

Christmas itself went well, and it was great seeing my parents and sisters again. Even though I'm clearly not enthralled with the holiday in general, we hadn't been home for Christmas since 2003 and I'd missed being with my family. There's been some serious friction between my father and my sisters over the past few months, and I'd like to think that those few days together somehow will help move all of us closer toward a resolution.

Our rental car was a nice surprise: I'd reserved the cheapest car possible, an economy car for $18 per day. When I walked to the designated spot in the Hertz lot in Boston, I had to laugh: it was a 2-door Chrysler Crossfire, a little hatchback sports car that looks similar to an Audi TT or a Porsche Carrera. Red leather interior, nice tight suspension, and a surprisingly powerful V6 215hp engine that can throw the car's weight around with ease. I had a blast driving it, and we put 1200 miles on it during the week as we drove from Boston to Albany to Ottawa to Albany to Boston. I even got stopped for speeding in Massachusetts - 85 in a 65 - but the cop thankfully let me off with a warning.

So now I'm in Phoenix for the weekend, and return to San Jose on Tuesday morning. I realize I'm pathetically behind in blog posts - I haven't even begun writing up the Nicaragua trip yet - but expect my New Year's Resolutions to appear here very soon.

Even The Airports ...

2006-12-13T08:56:00.000-08:00

... are infected with nonstop Christmas music. Good grief! This Holiday Madness is (as always) just outta control. From Kam's classic track:

Every year I hear "Happy Holiday"
What's my religion? "I do what the dollar say"
That's why I celebrate Christmas
Cuz this overweight redneck devil is big business

This morning I'm sitting in San Jose airport awaiting my flight to first Dallas and then Washington, D.C. Thankfully I don't have many people to buy presents for, and have therefore not had to spend any time in malls. But somehow, the Evil Ghost of all Christmases has found me in the airport, and I'm being subjected to a barrage of cheerful Christmas tunes that I can't escape.

Christmas was always a big event in my house growing up, and as a kid, I of course loved it more than any other holiday. Very soon after Thanksgiving each year, my mom puts up the tree and starts decorating the house and playing the music. She still has almost the same enthusiasm for the holiday that she did when my sisters and I were kids, even though we're all adults now. I can understand her enjoyment of it simply based on the memories she has of working so hard to create wonderful Christmas mornings for us for 20 years; her continued attachment to the day is entirely understandable.

However, I myself have zero excitement for Christmas, and in fact, I even have quite a bit of scorn for it. Being atheist, I attach no relevance to the season in terms of it's religious significance. Beyond that aspect, I additionally am completely and totally against the entire over-commercialization of the holiday, the way all potential tangible meaning the season could have has been sucked out by the omnipresent commercials, songs, decorations, and encouragements to BUY, BUY, BUY that bombard you from every angle, all day long. I groan every year when I first walk into a store and see Christmas decorations: "already? Are you kidding me?"

I think most people would agree that the commercialization of Christmas has gotten way out of control. The difference for me is that I don't just say it - I act on it. I only buy presents for my immediate family, never play Christmas music, don't send cards, don't have a tree, don't decorate. If I ever have kids, I'm determined to just skip the holiday altogether, and when they're old enough to realize that, carefully explain to them why we don't participate. I'm not a grinch - maybe I'd buy them some presents anyway - but there would be no Christmas symbolism attached to it whatsoever.

Joining The Fight

2006-12-11T05:50:00.000-08:00

One of the few good things about Phoenix is that the airport has free Wi-Fi, which I'm currently making good use of as I wait for my flight this morning back to San Jose. I had a fun weekend here with Ladan, and, as usual, am saddened to return home alone again.

Over the weekend I found out that I'm to go to DC on Wednesday for a meeting on Thursday. As I've done the past few times, I'll extend the trip through the weekend and thereby have time to catch up with friends in the area. When I return next Sunday, I'll have three days to prepare for a Christmas trip to Albany with Ladan. We'll be flying into Boston, driving to Albany, staying for five days, then driving back to Boston and returning home on the 28th. Then on January 25th, Ladan's parents arrive from Iran for a two-and-a-half month stay with her in Phoenix, which I'm excited about but frustrated that I won't be able to see them as much as I'd like.

The past few months have been just insane; I've been traveling about 75% of the weekends in the past three months: DC, Phoenix, Santa Fe, Denver, Nicaragua. I love traveling, and I'm racking up the air miles, but I feel like I've had little time to focus on The Main Issue - what I'm doing with my life.

Whereas over the past few weeks I was thinking I was headed more in the AI direction, I'm now back to the International Relations-ish line of thinking: one of the options I've been considering is getting a degree in that field when we move back to DC in about six months, as there are a plethora of good schools to choose from in the area. Ladan and I went to see Blood Diamond last night, an intensely disturbing film about the human cost underlying the diamond industry. I'd read about the industry before - the strife in the African countries where the diamonds are mined, the artificial short supply created by the diamond companies hoarding the available supply, the ridiculous overpricing of retail diamonds, the entire sickening culture of diamond obsession. If the numbers in the movie were accurate, it's tough to pinpoint the extent of the problem: two-thirds of the buyers come from the US, but only 15% of the diamond supply are estimated to be "conflict diamonds" - originating from countries or regions that are in "conflict" over the diamond mines. But clearly, this is a huge issue that needs to be addressed.

After seeing that movie - as seeing that type of movie always does - I felt determined to somehow "get involved", i.e. fight the bad guys, so to speak. It's one thing to be ignorant of what's going on the world outside your window; it's entirely another to be aware of it and decide to do nothing. There are so many things worth fighting for - how can I possibly be content to not fight for any?

Of course, the fact that I'm even considering getting somehow involved immediately makes me an outcast in places like Phoenix. Looking around my gate waiting area here at the airport, the fact that I'm not reading the Sports section of the paper, talking about yesterday's Big Games, doing a Sudoku puzzle or watching the drivel offered on the Fox News / CNN showing on all the big TVs - I clearly don't fit in here.

And thank for the FSM for that.

I Left My Heart In ...

2006-12-06T00:36:00.000-08:00

10PM December 3, 2004
28th & Castro Streets
Noe Valley

I've just arrived from Maryland, having landed at SFO, gotten a rental car, and driven to this corner for the first time. Our new apartment is on this corner. Ladan is on her way from downtown, having attended a wedding that evening for a labmate. She's been living in Berkeley and I've been in Bethesda since May, when she moved out here. Finally I found a job and just today, I've moved out to San Francisco, and here I am. I'm standing at the top of a huge hill, overlooking a series of steep streets down toward the Mission. The lights and hills of the southern part of the bay are bright against a very clear night sky. Literally, my mouth is open and I'm speechless. All I can do is laugh, and I have to ask out loud, "Oh my god -- I live here?!?"

11:30PM December 5, 2006
23rd & De Haro Streets
Potrero Hill

I'm leaving a going-away party for a Dutch friend who's married to an Iranian woman. They've decided to move back to Holland. She's leaving tomorrow, along with their 10-month old baby girl. My friend is here for two more weeks. This is the first time I've been to San Francisco in months; since I moved to Sunnyvale in June, I rarely come back up this way. I'm standing at the top of a huge hill, overlooking a series of steep streets down toward downtown. The lights and hills of the entire downtown area are bright against a very clear night sky. Literally, my mouth is open and I'm speechless. All I can do is sigh, and I have to ask out loud, "My god -- why did I leave this place?!?"

And I wonder if I wasted the year-and-a-half that I lived here. I should have been more active, going out every night, every weekend, exploring, experiencing everything the city has to offer. Why on earth did I spend so much time at home? Behind that damn computer? As a visitor now, it's so easy to forget about the tedious hour-and-a-half commute to Sunnyvale (and same back) each day; the cold, cloudy, windy summer weather; the annoying no-left-turn laws downtown. But even remembering all those things, I still miss this city terribly, and head back to my car with the sinking feeling that I didn't take advantage of all this when I could have, and now it's too late.

*sigh*

The Cyc Project

2006-12-04T22:21:00.000-08:00

I finally started reading a book I got from the library a few weeks ago called "Understanding Artificial Intelligence". The book is a compilation of articles about AI published in Scientific American over the past ten or so years. One of the articles I read last night was by a guy named Doug Lenat, who talked about an AI system developed at Stanford in 1984 called Cyc (as in en-cyc-lopedia). Lenat's basic premise is that a fundamental requirement for a computer program that is designed to exhibit human-like reasoning is that the program have a solid understanding of everything that humans would loosely group under the term "common sense". Otherwise, the program will not be able to make realistic, believable decisions. Cyc, therefore, is designed to be a vast knowledge base of concepts and relations that humans generally take to be common sense.

In the mid-90's the Cyc project was spun off into a private company called Cycorp. Lenat has continued to oversee the development and expansion of Cyc; the knowledge base now contains about 300,000 concepts and over 3 million "assertions", or relations between concepts. I found a ton of information about Lenat and Cyc by googling their names, including an hour-long Google Tech Talk that Lenat presented a few months ago where he drew parallels between Cyc and the Google search engine, showing how despite Google's power, it cannot interpret simple phrases or provide answers to questions. Combining the technology behind Google with the knowledge base behind Cyc, however, could lead to a radically more powerful organization, utility, and accessibility of information in the future. It sounds like this capability could both complement, and in some cases surpass, the advantages of the Semantic Web, assuming the latter ever actually materializes.

Cycorp has an open source version of the knowledge base available, as well as an expanded version specifically for use by research institutions. The company is currently working a number of national security-related contracts, an area where this kind of system could be put to effective use, culling through millions of pieces of information and trying to estimate probabilities of future events based on a common sense understanding of the world.

I think this approach to creating an intelligent system that can exhibit believable reasoning is fascinating, if a bit over-ambitious (after 20 years of work, the developers believe that it only contains about 2% of the total information it would need to operate with human-level intelligence) and narrowly focused. Having a working system like Cyc, even with the limitations it currently has in terms of comprehensiveness, helping control the responses of non-player characters in games could revolutionize the way players interact with them. Combined with a stab at natural language processing, I could see the days of static dialogue tree conversations coming to an end, with the player being given the ability to query NPCs on subjects of interest and receiving realistic answers. Imagine a Half-Life where you could hound Barney about that beer he owes you? Or a Deus Ex where you could coax more tips out of Tracer Tong? This kind of interactivity would completely change the way we even play games, throwing all the interactive game mechanics conventions right out the window.

5 O'Clock

2006-12-01T16:42:00.000-08:00

If you ain't doin' what you love doin', you're losin'
Security's illusion created by institutions
To keep us movin' to the job, bank, and the store
A commonly accepted thus perpetuated war
And if what you're waiting for is opportunity to knock at your door
Then step it up, cuz it ain't like that no more
Sure, you can sit at home, rottin' away
But in your heart I know you feel there's something missing every day

That's me, summarized perfectly, care of The Perceptionists' "5 O'Clock" from their Black Dialogue album, one of a handful of CDs that have recently joined my collection care of Tower Records' going out of business sale and "70% Off Rap CDs" special. It's a great album, one I somehow overlooked last year when it was released.

This struggle to figure out in which direction I want to take my life has now grown to be an oppressive, omnipresent weight on my mind. I begin and end every day feeling frustrated. I sit in my office, all day long, annoyed at what a colossal waste each passing minute is. I don't hate my job, but have zero interest or enthusiasm for it. And it scares me to imagine what it would be like to spend the rest of my life like this. Last week in Nicaragua (yes, I know I've been slacking on the writeup) was so much fun, made me feel so alive - and this week I'm just back to the soul-crushing grind.

The question is, what do I do? If I want to switch careers, that most likely means getting another degree. If I want to do that in a reasonable time, I'd have to go back to school full-time. But the thought of attending classes, studying again, having no nights or weekends free anymore, not to mention the question of where the money to pay for it would come from, as well as getting used to having no extra money anymore, makes me cringe.

But what alternative do I have? I really don't see any. An example: one area I'd like to get involved in is artificial intelligence. Originally it was computer games' use of AI that sparked my interest, but now I'm additionally fascinated by the meshing of AI with deeper brain modeling concepts like consciousness, perception, and emotion. How can I get involved with this? Well, with no relevant programming experience, nor much knowledge of the foundations of traditional AI, and no relevant industry experience, what are the chances that any company or research organization would hire me even if I learned a language and some AI basics? Almost nil. A degree, and some academic research experience, seems to be the only way in.

I'm tired of not knowing what to do. I can't stand every day that passes and I'm still stuck in the same damn job, same damn environment, same damn waste of time. At this point I can't even imagine what it would be like to have a job I felt passionate about and actually looked forward to doing; the concept seems entirely alien to me.

And I'm Back

2006-11-26T21:45:00.000-08:00

Twenty-two hours ago, I awoke in Leon, Nicaragua after a restless three hours of sleep, took a cold shower (warm water is extremely rare, although at least slightly more tolerable given the year-round hot weather), and headed to the airport. In two hours, I'll go to sleep at home, in California. I always find it jarring to wake up in one country and fall asleep in another. The psychological distance between Nicaragua and California is infinitely greater than the actual relatively short 2500 miles flying distance.

I left for Nicaragua a week ago after having immersed myself in reading about the country's history in the preceding two weeks. Having previously been only minimally familiar with events leading up to, including, and following the Sandinista revolution in 1979, I felt that I had arrived at a reasonably accurate expectation of what I'd find. In the end, I wasn't completely wrong, but the story painted by books and internet sources turned out to do a dismal job of describing the much more intangible feeling of this amazing country. It took a week of travelling and talking with Nicaraguans to gain the most basic understanding of what drives the average Nicaraguan psyche, how they view themselves and the rest of the world, and what their hopes and fears are.

Over the next week, I'm going to attempt to relate my experiences there, hopefully not defaulting to rote recitations of my day-to-day schedule, but instead focusing more on capturing the most important elements and, above all, the essence of this simultaneously breathtakingly beautiful and depressingly ugly country.

For now though, suffice it to say that I had an absolutely incredible time and didn't feel ready to return home this morning. However, I am going to love the long, hot shower I plan to take tomorrow morning.

Oh yeah, and, god bless fast internet access.

And I'm Off

2006-11-18T23:04:00.000-08:00

... to Nicaragua.

Everything fell into place, and in ten hours, I'll be boarding a plane first bound for Houston, where I'll meet up with Ladan, and then on to Managua. By 7PM local time (5PM here), I'll be in Nicaragua.

I remember watching the Iran-Contra scandal hearings in 1986 on TV; I remember watching Oliver North, looking as if he had been poured into his immaculate Marine uniform, hold up his right hand and swear to tell the truth; I remember hearing Reagan say, over and over, "I don't recall."

At that time, I couldn't imagine I'd ever visit this country. As a teenager I consumed books about the CIA by the truckload. I read about covert operations in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia. I recall reading about the Sandinistas, the FSLN. Back then I had no real political leanings, but I was feeling more and more disgusted with the hand the CIA had had in so many countries, so many democracies, so much death. It feels ... ironic? or is 'just' (as in 'righteous') a better word? that I've been to Iran and am now going to Nicaragua. In a way it's made the show-trial aura of the Iran-Contra hearings unexpectedly personal for me.

In preparing for this trip, I'd been reading about the country online. Conveniently, this month's presidential election provided an opportunity to catch up on recent developments. Hoping to find some travel books (we've bought the new 2006 Lonely Planet guide, the first year they've had a book specifically for Nicaragua, presumably an indication of the relatively small, but growing, tourist industry there; but it's with Ladan in Phoenix) I went to the SJSU library the other day, which, I have to say again, is just the coolest damn library I've ever seen. Unfortunately their travel section is small and had very little about Latin America. However, I did find two non-travel books about Nicaragua, one written by Salman Rushdie called "The Jaguar Smile". This was a surprise to me, as I hadn't heard of it before. Turns out Rushdie's donations to an aid organization in the 80's helped to set him up for a visit there in the summer of 1986. He spent about two months traveling around the country, interviewing FSLN officials, including President Daniel Ortega, as well as average citizens. He relates a very even-handed view of the Sandinistas and what they were trying to do; he doesn't hesitate to criticize their mistakes, but nonetheless finds reason to admire and genuinely hope for the success of their government, a sensation that he openly professes to have no precedent for, given his background as a dissident journalist. The book is short, only 170 pages, but presents a fascinating range of short stories about events he witnessed and people he interviewed while there. I finished the book in a few hours and felt extremely contented; this was exactly what I needed to provide a more down-to-earth view of the dry encyclopedic history lessons about the country I'd been soaking up in the past few weeks.

The majority of the countries I've traveled to - Italy, Iran, India, South Korea, and Mexico - have been places that, years ago, I'd never have thought I'd ever visit. And they've all turned out to be incredibly eye-opening and moving experiences for me. I'm looking forward to this week in Nicaragua to spark that same feeling of exploration and discovery; the overwhelming feeling that living in one country for an entire lifetime feels so depressingly stifling. There's so much world out there! Trips to other countries always make me feel so alive.

I'll be back in one week, but hope to get another post up here before then, depending on the frequency and quality of my internet access while there. Regardless, I'll have plenty of pictures to share when I get back.

Calm in Colorado

2006-11-14T19:21:00.000-08:00

This past weekend Ladan and I flew to Denver, Colorado, and then drove north to Loveland to visit Duncan and Ellen. I've been out to see them twice before, and both times I've come back refreshed and energized, partly because of the peaceful aura their house exudes, and partly because of the beauty of the Rockies where we go to hike. This was the first time that Ladan was free to come too, so she joined me.

As usual, the three days I spent there were very relaxing. The schedule at their house is completely fluid. Sometimes we all just go off and do our own thing for a while; sometimes we all occupy ourselves while Duncan spends 45 minutes on the toilet; sometimes some, or all of us, just sit and stare into nothingness. Sometimes we talk about life. Duncan and Ellen both have had incredibly amazing experiences and have fascinating insights into the sort of deep issues that I think lots of people never even think about - or purposely avoid thinking about. When I leave their house, I inevitably have a few things to ponder and process for a while. Always, there's lots of face-muscle-paralyzing, chest-splitting, tear-inducing laughter. I always look forward to, and thoroughly enjoy, the feeling that nothing is rushing us in any way, and that anything goes. (Well, I could do without Duncan's incessant farting, but clearly his system is destroyed beyond repair and I should just accept it.)

One of the things Duncan and I were excited to do was skate together for the first time. We both bought boards at the same time a few months ago, he a longboard and me a regular board. Both of us initially skated regularly but then it tapered off as time went on. On Sunday, about an hour before Ladan and I were planning to leave, we hadn't had any skate time yet and so we headed out right after our very late breakfast.

It was a great feeling to walk out the front door, lay the board down, and start skating; on my own, I always drive to where I want to skate. That simple act took me back 15 years to when I skated daily, and planted a big smile on my face. We skated for about 15 minutes until reaching a school, and headed toward the tennis courts, with their enticingly smooth green surface. For about a half hour we skated around the courts, me showing Duncan my ollie problems, Duncan making a half-hearted attempt at his first ollie ever, then me trying out his longboard for the first time. He made the comment that I was thinking - "man it'd be cool if you lived here, we could skate all the time!" Both of us were having a blast.

And then our time was up and we headed home. Ladan came out and took some pictures of us, and got some great shots of me in midair. I then packed up my board, loaded the car, and we were off back to Denver to fly back home.

I don't have a large number of friends, but the ones I do have, I value highly. One of the toughest realities of growing up, i.e. of leaving college and joining the "real world", was that I ended up moving away from most of my friends. While I don't regret seeing and living in new areas, and know that I wouldn't want to stay in the same area my whole life, I really, really miss my friends, and man does it feel good to just hang out for a few days and relax.

[I've put up pictures of the trip here.]

Does Doctrine Determine Belief?

2006-11-05T21:50:00.000-08:00

On road trips I usually drive, and Ladan often reads aloud from the latest issue of Time magazine, which she subscribes to. Today we were driving to LA - we're still trying to rescue this Nicaragua trip by showing up on the consulate's doorstep Monday morning - and she read me an article called "In Touch With Jesus." The sub-title was "Sugar-coated, MTV-style youth ministry is so over. Bible-based worship is packing teens in pews now."

Barely a week before his downfall, this quote caught my attention:

"Some experts point out that young people typically drift from organized religion in early adulthood, but others say the high attrition is a sign that churches need to change the way they try to engage the next generation of the faithful. 'This dip should serve as an exhortation for everyone to be about the business of discipleship, missions and a higher calling than popcorn-and-peanuts youth culture,' says Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals. [Take that statement with a grain of salt, as apparently being about the business of discipleship involves leading a secret life of gay sex trysts and occasionally buying meth.] Scholars who have looked at young Christians say their spiritual drift is in part the result of a lack of knowledge about their faith. 'The vast majority of teens who call themselves Christians haven't been well educated in religious doctrine and therefore don't really know what they believe,' says Christian Smith, a University of Notre Dame sociologist and the author of Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers."

Did he really just say that? I read that as, these kids haven't been brainwashed sufficiently, so they don't know how to define what they believe. WTF? Are you kidding me? Isn't that completely backward? Shouldn't you decide what you believe first, and then see how that fits into a religious framework? Your beliefs should determine what religious doctrine you accept; doctrine should not determine what you believe. Kids who don't know what makes a Christian should be urged to not call themselves Christian until they do know and then only if they agree with the beliefs; they should not be told what they believe. Telling people what they believe is mind control, plain and simple.

Manufacturing Consent

2006-11-04T23:31:00.000-08:00

My first encounter with Noam Chomsky was an article forwarded to me immediately after Sept. 11. In it he argues the importance of asking why the attacks occurred, in full anticipation that this question would be all but ignored by the mainstream media in the aftermath of the attacks, as the flags starting waving and the war drums started beating. While not completely ignorant to Chomsky's subject matter - I had read quite a bit about the CIA's activities around the world during the past few decades as a teenager - the article was definitely an eye-opener for me, as I had remained mostly apathetic toward politics and world affairs the entire time I was in college. [I'm unable to find the article anymore, but this short piece on his website sums up the main points.]

After that article I read his "Rogue States", an excellent critique of this most misused term. I then went on to read "Necessary Illusions", "Understanding Power", and "The Chomsky Reader". Although I haven't read it, Chomsky makes many references to his earlier "Manufacturing Consent" in his later books, when he needs to refer to examples of willful media manipulation.

Inspired by a Nicaraguan roommate of a friend of Ladan's, we've decided to visit Nicaragua during Thanksgiving this year. After having bought plane tickets a month ago, we're having some trouble getting Ladan's visa processed and are considering canceling the trip if it doesn't work out. Today the friend mentioned that if Sandinista leader "El Comandante" Daniel Ortega wins the presidential election tomorrow, there is a slight chance that her family, who is apparently part of the very small elite business class who are vehemently against him, could face some "difficulties" in the near future. The bottom line is that we may be able to convince the airline to let us cancel the tickets due to "political unrest", which supposedly prevents them from penalizing us.

The irony here is that, based on what I've read about Ortega in the past, and on my general world outlook, I wholeheartedly support him becoming president. How can I not be behind a guy who proclaims, "The poor cannot wait and on November 5, they will bury savage capitalism in Nicaragua." When we first starting considering the trip, although I was excited about the prospect of staying with a family there, I was suspicious of their place within the society and whether, as their guests, we might be presented with a view of the country distorted by the proverbial rose-tinted glasses. And so it seems my misgivings were well-founded.

Curious about the international view on the elections (admittedly, this was the first I'd heard about them), I checked out both CNN and BBC for articles covering it. As usual, BBC has a whole series of pretty impartial articles about the elections and the country in general. CNN has one news story and one extremely anti-Ortega piece that should qualify more as op-ed than news.

The BBC's Duncan Kennedy, talking with Ortega's conservative opponent Eduardo Montealegre, quotes him as follows:

"Ortega hasn't changed," he says. "He still has the same friends like Castro, Gaddafi, Chavez and Bin Laden."
"Osama Bin Laden?" I ask.
"Yes," comes the unflinching reply. "Everyone knows it".

Now check this out. CNN's Aneesh Raman writes:

As one of his opponents told me, "Ortega hasn't changed, same man with the same politics. His friends haven't changed. He's friends of Castro, he's friends of Chavez, of the president of Iran."

Wait, what the ... ? Surely Raman is talking about Montealegre here, right? What are the chances that this guy would feed the same few lines to two different reporters, apparently at different times, but say "the president of Iran" instead of "bin Laden" to the latter?

Or could it be ... that Raman ganked the quote from somewhere else, and somebody at CNN decided that trying to link bin Laden with Ortega was a little too ridiculous to be taken seriously, but, hmmm, what other bad guy can we use? Ooo, ooo, I know, how about Ahmadinejad? And just like that, the name gets changed. And rather than risk anyone, maybe even Montealegre himself, from protesting the incorrect quote, the speaker is simply referred to as "one of his opponents". Montealegre is the only one of the other four candidates who is believed to have any chance of winning - why wouldn't you mention him by name?

This feels like outright manipulation to me: manufacturing consent. Inserting a little barb that links, rightly or not, the evils of Islamic Iran and Sandinista Nicaragua. History, even very recent history, has shown quite convincingly that if you say something enough, people just start to assume it's true. And the American public has more than proven itself incapable of making informed decisions or paying undue attention to pesky facts, so why not throw that link in there?

Here's another interesting discrepancy. CNN's Raman writes "an estimated 70 percent of Nicaraguans want him nowhere near the presidency." The BBC's Kennedy writes that "Mr Ortega will be hoping for support from the 80% of Nicaraguans who live on at most $2 a day." Everyone agrees that Ortega's support comes overwhelmingly from the poor. So mathematically, how on earth is it possible that 80% of the population lives on $2 a day - the CIA's own World Factbook claims that 50% of the population lives below the poverty line - and yet somehow, 70% of the population is against Ortega? Does that make any sense whatsoever?

If CNN can try to pull this crap off, I shudder to think how Fox is demonizing Ortega right about now.

[By the way, guess who's leading the US's anti-Ortega campaign? None other than convicted felon Oliver North.]

How's That Code Coming?

2006-11-03T11:01:00.000-08:00

Whenever I'm looking for a laugh, I go poking through my e-mail archives. Starting first with my university accounts, then Yahoo when I graduated, and now including my work addresses, I've got ten years worth of hysterical material from my small group of about four or five friends. I've often commented to them how I wish there was some way this material could be published, or gotten out to a wider audience, because invariably when I spend any time in these archives, I emerge gasping for breath and with tears streaming down my cheeks, from laughing so hard.

While I haven't figured out any way to bring these e-mails to light yet, I do want to occasionally post recent noteworthy e-mail content on this blog, and I'm starting that today with an absolute masterpiece typed by Duncan yesterday. The subject was a new-to-him Sun server that he'd just acquired, and the software he was installing on it. I then sarcastically asked what games he was going to put on it, to which he harshly replied that games are silly little things for bitches, and that the real games are writing your own code.

At this point, you must - MUST - go watch this video from Family Guy before reading any further.

Duncan followed up his comment with a perfectly executed attack on my so far entirely baseless claims over the past few years to be interested in artificial intelligence for games, and my supposed plans to first learn a real coding language and then to start taking on AI projects.

"So how's that code comin', huh Greg? Got some code there for us? Gotta a big, uh, big stack of UML diagrams there? Gotta, gotta nice little project you're working on there? Your big AI program you've been working on for 3 years? Huh? Gotta, gotta compelling architecture? Yeah? Gotta aspect-oriented framework setup? Huh? Gotta little simulated sentience brewing there? Working on, working on that for quite some time? Huh? (voice getting higher pitched) Yeah, talking about that 3 years ago. Been working on that the whole time? Nice little library? Beginning, middle, and end? Some work with the gaming industry, some games with the Defense Department? At the end your code benefits from both and is richer for the experience? Yeah? Yeah? (voice returns to normal) No, no, you deserve some time off."

And that, my friends, is a perfect example of how to use humor to thoroughly mock, embarass, crush, send scurrying, and hopefully in the end, motivate someone to get off their ass and start walking the walk.

Until then, I'll be off in the corner, softly whimpering.

Weekend Recap

2006-10-31T06:32:00.000-08:00

This year Halloween fell on a weekend
Me and Geto Boys are trick-or-treatin'
Robbin' little kids for bags

Alright, so that Geto Boys quote is really a stretch, but I had to get Halloween in there somehow.

Here's a recap of my weekend:

Thursday night I flew from San Jose to Phoenix. My plane was delayed by 2 1/2 hours, so I got to sit around the airport for more than 3 hours. This was a real joy since I hadn't brought a book with me, as I thought I was short on time. To add insult to injury, the only food place near my gate that I could stomach did not have the tortilla soup that I wanted, and instead I had to settle for split pea and ham - yuck - I hate peas and don't like ham in soup.

Friday Ladan and I drove to Santa Monica and stayed with friends, a couple who have a 15-month old daughter. I've always liked the SM (B, made it out there yet?) as it has a distinctly southern California laid-back feel to it. We had fun with them and the kid is just incredibly cute. As usual, I enjoyed playing with her but felt zero need to have one of my own any time in the foreseeable future. Thank the almighty FSM, Ladan feels the same way.

Saturday we drove down to San Diego but stopped in Rancho Santa Margarita to see Bharath for a while. We discussed Halloween plans, with B explaining that he'd really hoped to play some sort of prank in his office rather than do the whole traditional costume thing. I helpfully suggested he buy some bloody severed hands and feet from a costume store, put them in a plastic bag, and then place the bag in the office freezer, with the hope that somebody during the day would go for ice and instead be greeted with a terrifying discovery.

We then headed to San Diego and attended a party thrown by a friend's aunt in the posh Rancho Sante Fe area. There were about fifty guests and most were in costume - lots of witches, Greeks/Romans, pirates, the usual, for the most part. I went in a simple Catholic priest garb - a pun of a costume, of sorts, as those who know me are very aware of my extreme distaste for religion in general; but as more than one person has in the past commented on how I actually look like a priest or preacher, the choice of costume was clear. And as I'd expected, it was a hit precisely because of the latter. As I wanted to fully role-play the costume, I made sure to always have a beer in my hand, as well as spend an inordinate amount of time talking to two young boys whose parents were at the party but off talking to other guests.

Sunday we had a late brunch and then got back on the road to drive back to Phoenix. I was supposed to fly back to San Jose Monday, but then felt like staying another day, and so suddenly came down with a vague "sickness" and took the day off. Tuesday morning I finally returned.

Halloween itself, last night, was pretty uneventful, with the notable exception that I finally got some time with Dark Messiah Might and Magic, a game I picked up last week after having followed it's development for the past year or so. I've got some screenshots up here.

Neverwinter Night 2 comes out today, and so between that and Dark Messiah, I foresee an entire blissful weekend of gaming this week, my first in a long, long time.

India Calling

2006-10-19T22:01:00.000-07:00

Months ago, I found a little south Indian restaurant in Sunnyvale that for the first time in a long time, whisked me right back to India: the smell of the food, the heat, the music playing, all combined to trick my senses into believing I was walking around Chennai. The feeling was overwhelmingly powerful, and something very deep inside started to pull me [even harder] back to India.

Since then I've cruised up and down El Camino Real probably twenty times, trying in vain to find this portal to India. The name of the place escaped me, as it was four words long and not a typical restaurant name. It would drive me nuts that I knew the place was right here somewhere, but I just could not find it.

A few weeks ago I found a place called Annapoorna which seemed to be roughly where I remembered the other place being, but this was certainly not the name. I stopped in front of it and it was closed. Not sure it was the same place, the search continued.

Last night I drove down to the incredible King library on the San Jose State University campus. I was there for a few reasons: one, I just needed to get out of my room, which as I mentioned below, has become a de facto cage for me; two, I'm tossing around the idea of finding an apartment in downtown San Jose, if I decide to hold off on the D.C. thing; and three, I wanted to look for a book that a friend of a friend is crazy about, and the curiousity has gotten the better of me to the point that I decided to invest the almost two months I calculated it would take me to read it if I do 25 pages a day - it's a behemoth. After finding the book, I sat on the top floor of the library for two hours and got completely sucked into the story.

Tonight I went to a park close by my house and sat outside for awhile reading, as it was wonderfully warm today, low 80's. The book is set in India, and as I continued reading I started wishing for Indian food ... and within a half hour I was once again prowling Sunnyvale looking for the elusive restaurant. And once again I couldn't find it, but again passed Annapoorna. After one final lap around the area, I decided to give it a try. To my surprise, when I walked in the almost full restaurant, I recognized it immediately - this was indeed the place! but ... different. It had been taken over, changed, cleansed of it's south Indian-ness somehow, and as a result was less nostalgia-inducing for me. That was kinda disappointing, but once I smelled the food cooking, I was all smiles again.

A quick glance around confirmed my feeling that I was the only white guy here - just the way I like it. This has less to do with my enjoying possibly being the center of attention (which I don't enjoy, other than the occasional surprised looks I get when people realize I know what I'm ordering and favor using my right hand over utensils) as my preference to be around Indians when I'm eating Indian food. Throwing a bunch of white people in there always degrades the experience for me.

I giddily ordered onion and chili utthapam and chana masala - oh and a Coke please, as I long ago formed an absolutely necessary relationship between Indian food and Coke. As I sat waiting for my food, I got a few looks from the crowd but nothing incredulous. I couldn't help but smile at the fact that the single waitress and bus boy were both Latino. Yep, that's how even the Indians do in America.

My food arrived, I dug in, savored the ecstasy of flavors, and felt content. Maria walked by with a basket of delicious-smelling steaming bread sprinkled with cilantro - d'oh! I forgot to get garlic naan, my favorite. By that point it was too late, I'd have to live without it.

As I ate, looked around, listened, watched the families and kids and guys and girls my age, I again started to feel the pull of India, at first subtly but eventually raucously calling me back. I've felt this for three years, since I returned from my first trip there for a friend's wedding. I've joked about going back a lot, even looked for aero engineering jobs there at one point.

But this time may be different. I may be on the crest of a major change in my life, one that frees me from a lot of what's keeping me here. It wouldn't be permanent, but the idea of quitting my job, selling off my car, and joining some kind of humanitarian organization for a year or two or so, and just packing up and going to India .... man, that really, really appeals to me.

[Update: heh, Google is god - I just found a blog of a local Tamil guy who reviewed Annapoorna and mentioned the name of the previous restaurant: Madras Sri Krishna Vilas! Thanks man!]

Stress: The Extinction Agenda

2006-10-17T20:13:00.000-07:00

Pain, stress
My brain, can't even rest
It's hard to maintain the pressure on my chest
Excess frustration strikes!

Ever have a day where you just feel like crap, overloaded with stress? Sure, everyone has. Well that was my day today. Again.

I can't identify a single thing, not a single one, in my life that I feel good about right now. I work a job I have no interest in, and which furthermore conflicts deeply with my principles; since moving to Sunnyvale in July I have saved zero, ZERO, money even though I'm paying less than half the rent I was paying in San Francisco; simply for the enjoyment of living in a city, I'm considering a move to D.C. where not only would I do the same job I do now, I'd actually have to work much harder and also be locked into this industry for at least another year; I have no concrete plan, or even real idea, of how to move toward a job/career that I am interested in; I've let my relationships with my entire family continue to be mostly superficial, which has become an even bigger problem as there's currently some drama playing out that I need to get involved in; Ladan and I have been living apart for four months now and our problems are continually exacerbated by the distance; I hate, frickin' hate the room I am prisoner in/renting in a house in Sunnyvale, but can't move right now because I may move to D.C. soon; I had to spend six hundred frickin' dollars on my car last week for service, more than two-thirds of which was for the damn labor; and other similarly frustrating issues that I don't want to delve into here.

My mind is scattered in a hundred directions and as a result I can't concentrate on any single one. I try to read a book, I get distracted. Watch some TV, I feel restless. Play a computer game, lose interest in ten minutes. I sit in this room, and I feel trapped, caged, with nowhere to go.

I need to break out of this house/job/situation/life, and I need to do it like, right now. Each day that goes by with no resolution, I almost feel as if I'm losing a bit of my sanity.

The Disappointment That Was Prey

2006-10-12T16:04:00.000-07:00

Last night I slogged through the remainder of Prey and finished the game. I hadn't played much in the past two months, after completing about three-quarters of it in the few weeks after it was released in July. Overall I have to say I was disappointed by Prey; the long saga of its conception and development built up expectations that were probably too lofty for its actual potential.

Prey was conceived by well-known game industry guys like Tom Hall and George Broussard at Apogee/3D Realms in 1995. In what would become a 10-year struggle, the game kept switching developers, getting delayed, cancelled, and resurrected until 2005 when Human Head Studios confirmed that they'd picked the game back up and really did intend to finish it.

The majority of the hype surrounding the game in the months before it was released centered around the new gameplay features they were introducing, namely 'portals' and 'local gravity' toggling (and yes, the 'spirit mode' effect too, although this was less innovative). The former involved placing portals into levels which provided passage into an entirely different level, a very cool graphical trick that to my knowledge had only been done before in a user-made Unreal Tournament deathmatch map called Escher a few years back; the latter worked by placing local gravity pathways along walls and the ceiling that, when activated, allowed the player (and bad guys) to walk anywhere. Some rooms also had local gravity 'targets' that when shot would switch the room's gravity to lie along the same direction, causing the room to flip around or over. These two tricks seemed revolutionary when revealed, initially disorienting and then unbearably cool when actually played, and old hat by the end of the game.

While the new technology added innovative new gameplay mechanics, and the environments were absolutely stunningly gorgeous, for me it was the story itself that fell far short of the high standard set by the rest of the game. For a large portion of the game, there is almost zero advancement of the story. You're simply a mouse in a maze, following a thoroughly linear slog through amazing room after amazing room. It just starts to feel pointless. The reason it took me so long to finish the game was because I'd frankly lost interest. Not until the last few levels does any of the story come together, and even then it's a corny letdown.

You definitely get the feeling that, as is so common these days with games that rely far too heavily on new technology alone (Doom 3, anyone?), this game had so much potential, if only the story had been better. Which of course leaves the door open for an improved sequel, or some great mod work, but none of that can change the fact that the original game was a disappointment.

Aw well, I'm still holding on for Bioshock to blow me away, which it gives every indication of doing when it's released next year.

[I've got a bunch of screenshots from Prey here if anyone's interested.]

Metal Therapy

2006-10-11T12:07:00.000-07:00

In the early 90's, before I moved to Maryland for college, I started to get into metal - heavy metal, that is. The local college radio stations around Albany, from RPI and SUNY Albany, played lots of good hip-hop and metal, and it was primarily through these shows that I found new music.

In 1995 I came across a local band called Cutthroat when I heard one of their songs played on WRPI. It was my first contact with "hardcore", a style of metal that typically emphasizes short, brutal guitar riffs over solos, quick (three minutes or less) songs over long, drawn-out, tempo-changing opuses, and pretty consistent lyrical content - anger. Cutthroat was signed to Ruffneck Records, an independent label based out of Clifton Park. One day I went down to a music store deep in Albany and found their first CD called Hatebreedsrage. It was the first non-hip-hop album I'd bought in probably five years, and I loved every second of it: it was creative, fresh, catchy, and just downright brutal. You could sing, err, scream and growl along with the choruses and you felt like you could smash your way through a brick wall.

For years afterward, as my metal album collection grew, I'd periodically try to find out whatever happened to Cutthroat. I'm still searching; it seems like a few years later they just sort of disappeared. Apparently they put out two more albums, one in 1998 and another in 2000, but I've never been able to find them anywhere, nor find out what became of the band itself.

I pulled the album out last night and again, I'm just loving it. It's still one of my favorite metal albums of all time. Metal for me is intensely therapeutic - a better term might be calming though, as it serves to diffuse my pent-up frustration, rather than do anything to actually remove the source. I crank up the volume, bang my head a bit, sometimes try (mostly pathetically poorly) to yell along, get myself into a semi-hyper invincibility mood, look around for somebody to rip to shreds, and by the end of the album I feel better.

It's probably not the heathiest way to deal with anger and frustration, but certainly there are unhealthier ways, and what the hell, it works for me.

Skatepark Debut

2006-10-09T22:47:00.000-07:00

Having brought my bike helmet back from Arizona this weekend, I headed over to the Sunnyvale skatepark for the first time today after work. I hadn't visited the park since buying my skateboard two months ago, determined that I should at least become stable on the board before presenting myself as prime laughing stock to all the kids half my age at the park. In the past few weeks I've got my balance back and been working on my ollie. Frustratingly, my progression has hit a brick wall because for some reason I just cannot land a moving ollie correctly - the back of the board invariably kicks out to the left, forcing the board to land sideways, which doesn't quite jive well with my forward motion.

Today I wanted to go over to the park, check it out, maybe find somebody to ask what it appeared that I was doing wrong, and maybe, just maybe, actually try some skating. From reading online I found that the park's got a nice assortment of bowls, stairs, ramps, railings, etc. Cool.

I got there at 6:45, with about 20 minutes of sun left before the park would be plunged into darkness. Finding helmets were not even required (d'oh!), I strutted hopefully convincingly confident-looking into the park, took a seat on the edge of one of the bowls, as many others were doing, and just checked the scene out.

First observation: yeeeeeah, everybody's pretty much 17 and younger here. Oookay. Old man on deck!

Second observation: holy crap these kids are good! I had expected to see a few guys who knew what they were doing, but this was insane. Most of the 30+ kids were flying around and up and over the lips of these bowls, up sheer vertical walls of full-size quarterpipes, jumping between ramps, popping kickflips off of steps. I was clearly way outclassed here, much more than I'd thought I would be.

Friendly bunch, though: within a minute a kid who looked about 15 came up and asked me what kind of board I had. Embarassed to find I couldn't even remember, I joked "uh, cheap." We talked for a few minutes, he offered to let me try his plastic board, but I decided not to. What am I gonna do, kick/push a few feet then hand it back to him? I think he expected me to try an ollie over something, or a kickflip of some sort.

Intimidated, I sat and watched for about ten full minutes before even getting up. Walking slowly, I crept over to a flat section of concrete above a small ramp, rolled around a bit, tried a few ollies, and that was about it. I couldn't be sure that I wouldn't end up right on my ass just by trying to go down the wimpy little ramp, not to mention possibly going out of control and colliding with somebody else.

And then before I knew it, it was dark and I couldn't see anything clearly anymore. Kids were leaving and it was getting quieter. There was no point in trying to tempt fate by skating in the dark, so I left. And that was my first skatepark experience.

Pretty anti-climactic, huh? What I really need is to find a time when these kids won't be around, so I can relax a bit and feel free to try riding around without worrying about smacking into somebody else whizzing by me. Or being laughed at, of course.

Maybe I could go over one day before work? Or during lunch?

Things Are Changing?

2006-10-04T19:29:00.000-07:00

After discussing with Ladan over the weekend my new infatuation with D.C. since being there two weeks ago, combined with our agreement that Arizona is just most definitely not where we want to live, we agreed to check out jobs in the city and see what it would take to move back there - you know, just out of curiousity. I had one company in mind in Rosslyn, where I know a few people that I see whenever I attend a periodic meeting there, in fact the same meeting that brought me out there two weeks ago.

As luck would have it, I did a quick Monster job search and the first position to pop up was with this company, doing almost exactly the work I do now. Combined with the fact that I'm sure I'd get a recommendation from the people I know who work there, I'm all but completely certain that I could interview for and have this job within a few weeks, if I so choose.

Woah! So, like, just like that, I've already got a way out to D.C.? Ladan would most likely stay in Arizona until around February - gotta work off some of that relocation cash - but it looks like she's found a few positions she feels she could get with consulting companies, also in D.C.

But there's nothing in particular holding me back; concievably, I could move out to D.C. and start this new job by December 1. The speed with which this possibility popped up is almost jarring. I typed an e-mail to the guy I know at the company today, but decided not to send it at the last minute. Somehow I feel like I need to step back and analyze this a bit more before I commit myself to jumping in. As early as tomorrow, though, I could send it off.

Hmmm .... lots to consider here. I had no idea it might be this easy. :)

Don't Feel Right

2006-10-02T21:17:00.000-07:00

My eyes are open cuz I'm really a watchman
And when I'm writin' my thoughts out
Really I'm boxing
My main adversary: any silly concoction

The more I listen to this Roots album, the better I like it. It's nice to have the real Black Thought back, even if he still relies too much on changing word pronunciations to make them rhyme.

Beyond being a hypnotic track musically, this song's been resonating with me over the past few weeks as I've been plowing through some personal issues of my own. This latest round has again left me with the inescapable fact that I just don't feel right. True, undistracted, no-holds-barred introspection is generally pretty painful for me, as I'm often forced to acknowledge things I wish weren't there. The unavoidable question then writes itself: so what am I going to do about it?

And the answer is, I don't know. I don't frickin' know. Today I've felt like I'm a haze. Partially that's due to the fact that I woke up at 2AM this morning to drive from Santa Fe to Albuqerque to catch a 5AM flight back to San Jose. But it's more than that. I spend a lot of time these days just sitting, staring, thinking. Going through all my thoughts, trying to fill in the gaps in my consciousness, wrestling with my wants / desires / needs / motivations. Trying to reconcile often conflicting interests.

Would life be more enjoyable or not worth living, if the 20/20 vision of hindsight could instead be foresight? What if there were no regrets? How can regrets be turned into something positive?

Passin' Me By

2006-09-27T11:32:00.000-07:00

Wait, no ... I did not really pursue my little princess with persistance
And I was so low-key that she was unaware of my existence
From a distance I desired, secretly admired her
Wired her a letter to get her, and it went ...

The first time I heard that track I was blown away, and every time I hear it I still get goosebumps. The whole concept of it summed up my lackluster interactions with the opposite sex throughout high school and the first two years of college. Ironically, that verse was to later end up describing my first real experience, too, years afterward.

As I often do, when I get into a "missing the old school" funk, I pulled out Vinroc's [of the X-ecutioners DJ crew] Reconstruction Volume 1 mixtape (er, CD), by far the best DJ-mixed compilation of classic hip-hop tracks I've ever heard. On the ride to work this morning, I made it through the first five tracks. As always happens, frickin' full-body shivers just ran through me at the start of every track, bringing back so so so many memories of my life back then.

After a beautiful splicing together of about thirty samples from various songs on the intro, Vin starts with "Passin' Me By" (can any true hip-hop fan deny the feeling you get when hearing that opening scratch-and-organ combo?), deftly moves on to Arrested Development's "Everyday People", heads back to New York with The Artifacts' graf anthem "Wrong Side of the Tracks", smoothly flows into the Roots' classic "Distortion to Static", then melts into Common [Sense, back then]'s smooth-as-butter "Resurrection", the title track of what was arguably his best album.

With each new track, I found that the volume wasn't quite high enough, and would turn the dial a bit more. It was thirteen minutes of hip-hop bliss, and the grin I had plastered on my face as I walked into my office must have made my co-workers wonder whether I'd just won the lottery or had actually gone insane.

The State of Hip-Hop

2006-09-26T19:18:00.000-07:00

For those who didn't get the Notorious B.I.G. quote in yesterday's post [well, it was yesterday's post until I screwed it up while mucking with it tonight and had to delete it, then repost it today], it was from, uh, "Things Done Changed" on his classic "Ready To Die" album of 1994. Thinking of that quote made me pull out the CD to listen to on my way to go running last night. And listening to the CD pulled me back to '94 and moved me to comment on The State of Hip-Hop, as I see it.

My exposure to 'rap' began with Public Enemy's "Yo! Bum Rush the Show" and Eazy-E's "Eazy-Duz-It" around 1988; I was 12 and in 6th grade. I used to spend my time after school skating with a few friends, and one of them starting playing these two tapes as we skated. I remember he even got our bus driver to play the PE tape one morning on the way to school over the bus stereo! I had never heard this kind of music; I was familiar with rap, but only along the lines of the Beastie Boys and Run-DMC. This sound was entirely different: these guys were angry! It felt rebellious, and I loved it.

I remember joining BMG Music Service around the same time and suddenly being deluged with tapes of Tribe Called Quest, Brand Nubian, Diamond D, Big Daddy Kane, Eric B. & Rakim. I started reading The Source and watching Yo! MTV Raps, back in the days before they both went to crap. The beats and rhymes resonated with me, in a way that rock had never done. And I was fascinated by the tales of life so different from my own.

By about 1990 I was fully consumed by hip-hop; it was all I listened to. I knew all the local college stations' hip-hop show schedules and would record every one, and I was buying tape after tape after tape of new music. Around this time so-called 'gangsta rap' caught my ear. I'd always been an NWA fan, but now I was checking out groups like Compton's Most Wanted, Ice-T, South Central Cartel, DFC, Spice 1, Kool G Rap, Above The Law. Again it was the gritty [apparent] reality of the music that grabbed me.

The last three years of high school (92-94) brought so much classic major-label hip-hop that I thought it would never end: Black Sheep, Tribe, De La, Nas, GangStarr, Ed OG, OC, Ice Cube, Public Enemy, Brand Nubian, LONS, Naughty By Nature, Kam, BDP, D-Nice, Redman, Wu-Tang, Outkast, Del, Souls of Mischief, Pharcyde ... and a hundred more. You could hear so much good stuff on college stations, and occasionally mainstream stations, and see the videos on MTV, that the impending doom was completely unthinkable.

There had always been garbage out there: particularly from the west coast (E-40, Too Short, DJ Quik) and the south (Eightball & MJG to name one, and anybody else who flaunted shiny rented cars or gold fronts on their album covers). But it wasn't until the coming of Master P that I remember things clearly starting to go downhill. '94 was still a good year - Notorious BIG among others - but it was only going to get worse from here. The next year I instituted what I now jokingly refer to as the iron-fisted "Hip-hop Purity Purge of '95", where I summarily lined up and sold every last CD I owned that didn't quite meet my standards for quality. In retrospect, I was too harsh and I've had to buy back more than a few CDs since then.

Within a few years, lots of the groups I'd grown up listening to, and really respected, had either changed their sound to grab mass appeal or had just gotten lazy and become boring to listen to: Tribe, De La, KRS-ONE, Ice Cube, Ice-T, Wu-Tang, they were all guilty. Eazy-E had died, 2Pac and Biggie had been killed, and Ice Cube and Ice-T were now actors. Things done changed.

It was around this time that I discovered independent labels, thanks to the almighty Soul Controllers Mix Show on WMUC at the University of Maryland (Soul Ceez represent!). Nothing was more important to me than catching the entire show from 6 to 9 on Friday night, and I taped it every week. Van Dan and The J gave way to DJs Stylus, Book, and Mr. Elite, with Bushhead Ed and A-Double (Aaron McGruder, the guy who created The Boondocks) handling the non-DJ duties of the show. The guys used to play all kinds of independent records, and it was through this show that I found my way out of the trainwreck that major-label hip-hop was turning into. As Puffy and Jay-Z led the devolution revolution, I began finding new independent artists on the internet, ordering CDs and records directly from them, and slowly weaning myself off the increasingly commercialized and radio-friendly garbage being pushed by the majors.

Since about 1998, I've pretty much abandoned the major labels. Artists I used to listen to now rarely put out anything I'm interested in. There was a time when I'd buy anything by Nas, Ras Kass, Ice Cube, Wu-Tang, Tribe, Redman, KRS-ONE, etc.; now I don't even bother checking out samples of their albums. Some have sorta lost their way and thankfully come back - Common and The Roots are good examples.

But overall, at this point I'm completely and totally removed from the world of radio/commercial hip-hop. I hear various garbage being played in people's cars occasionally, or a bit on the radio, but that's about it. For me, independent hip-hop is where it's at, and sadly I don't see that ever changing. Luckily, there is a lot of quality material still being released regularly; you just have to look harder for it. These days I listen to Aceyalone, People Under the Stairs, Blackalicious, Lyrics Born, Sage Francis, Aesop Rock, Paris, T-K.A.S.H., stuff that would never get play on commercial radio.

The thing I often wonder is, what brought this on? Is it the record companies' fault? Is it the fault of the buying public? Are the artists themselves to blame? I'd say it's got to be a combination of all three. I think there's been a general lowering of standards on everyone's parts. And what about kids today, starting to listen to hip-hop, do they ever get exposure to quality music? Do they even know there was a history before Jay-Z, Lil' Jon and YinYang Twins?

Things Done Changed

2006-09-26T19:09:00.000-07:00

... on this side
Remember they used to thump
But now they blast, riiight?

It's been an eventful past few weeks and I'm starting to change the way I feel about a lot of things, the way I think, the way I act, on a daily basis.

One realization I've had is that I'm tired of living in the 'burbs. When I moved out of San Francisco three months ago and down to Sunnyvale, the commute shrink from an hour-and-a-half door-to-door down to thirteen minutes, as well as the constant 10-15 degree increase in temperature outside, brought a smile to my face every day. I missed the city, but the south bay grew on me; San Jose, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto all had a comfortable, laid-back feel to them that I enjoyed. And the plethora of great south Indian restaurants - how can you beat having a Saravanaa Bhavan ten minutes from your house? - was awesome. I'd gotten fairly comfortable living here.

But having spent most of three weekends ago back in San Francisco (Sriram and Bharath were visiting), then the past two weekends in D.C., I've realized that I desperately need to be back in a city. Staying at Sriram's awesome new place off of U Street was heaven. It's within easy walking distance of, well, U Street, as well as Adams Morgan and DuPont Circle. The Metro is conveniently just a few blocks away, and I used it to go everywhere I needed to go. There are a million restaurants / pubs / cafes to check out. Every night there's some jazz band to go see, some author's book reading to listen to, some organization's event to attend - there's always something. There's just so much life going on there; the city feels alive 24 hours a day. It was intoxicating.

And it made me realize, this is where I need to be. Not necessarily D.C., but in some city. I need to immerse myself in livelihood; I feed off the energy and it inspires me, motivates me. I'm just now remembering a position that opened up a few months ago in D.C., and my manager was looking for people who were interested. I could've been heading back to D.C. as I type this! At the time, it wasn't meant to be. But if I could do it now, though, ...

Mind your own business

2006-09-24T22:55:00.000-07:00

I returned today from spending the weekend in D.C. My flight back first had a stop in St. Louis, then Orange County, then finally San Jose. The stop in Orange County was only for a half hour, as the same plane was then continuing on to San Jose. Wanting to stretch my legs a bit, I decided to leave the plane and walk around the terminal for a few minutes. I had been seated in the absolute last row, near the window, right next to the loud, pulsating, vibrating engine. (Note to self: don’t fly American Airlines anymore if the flight uses a Super-80.)

Some passengers who were continuing to San Jose were staying on the plane. I passed two people sitting together, an older white guy and a younger Asian woman. From behind, I could see that the woman, who was sitting on the inside, next to the window, was turned about 30 degrees away from the man. She was also hunched over a bit, like she was hiding something. My curiousity was piqued: what’s the deal with these two? What’s she hiding?

As I passed them, I couldn’t resist turning around and investigating the scene. And well, she was hiding something all right.

She was breastfeeding her infant.

Now, it’s not the concept of this that bothers me, but rather the awkwardness of the position in which my curiosity had now put me. Since I was in the last row, I was the last one off the plane; this, combined with my very noticeable turnaround to check them out, drew the attention of both of them, so now mom AND dad and I are staring at each other, locked in a split-second but nonetheless extremely uncomfortable game of visual chicken. And the obvious question in their minds has to be, what is this guy, some kind of sicko?

Luckily, I only saw the actual suckling in my peripheral vision, as I made a conscious effort to not look away from her eyes as soon as I understood what was going on. But I would guess that even the back of my head was beet red as I resumed walking off the plane and made my escape. Once I was in the terminal, though, it occurred to me that I was going to have to walk back past these people when I re-boarded the plane. Oh, that’s just great. When I returned, I purposely stared at the floor until well past their row.

Lesson learned: if you see a woman sorta hunched over and appearing to be hiding something, then, um, just mind yer own damn business.

The Great White Bozo, here?

2006-04-21T14:02:00.000-07:00

That's right: the man himself, the Great White Bozo, the Goofy Wonder Boy, the Godawful Whitehouse Blunder [lemme stop, this game could go on for hours] - Dubya - flew into the Bay area this afternoon aboard Air Force One. I work directly across the street from the runway he landed at, and saw the big blue-and-white 747 coming in as I was returning from lunch. As befits The World's Most Hated Man, security was tight as the local airspace was shut down, cops were posted on every highway off-ramp, and overpasses were temporarily closed off. Apparently he's got appearances in San Francisco and LA to make over the next few days. Schwarzenegger wisely ducked his last visit, citing a 'scheduling conflict' that probably could've been interpreted as 'trying to postpone the time when my approval rating will be as bad as his'. They're both in the low 30's now, so Arnold's going to meet with him this time.

I've always liked the idea of kicking this neanderthal [I could be talking about either one, eh?] out of office, and I support Ramsey Clark's Impeach Bush campaign. But what would this really accomplish? I don't think anyone would posit, with a straight face, that W himself is any significant contributor to the brains behind the whole operation. 'Puppet stooge' seems like a better label. Real change would require getting rid of all these crooks, the whole circus. And that, of course, is much harder, especially since the recent 'shakeup' was limited in significance mostly to the moving on of Scott McClellan, the smug ex-White House spokesman whose job was about an enviable as being Saddam Hussein's lawyer, while others like Rumsfeld were safe even though his own generals have turned on him.

I haven't had any real hope about a serious change since the last 'election', but I suppose as long as the Republicans keep tripping up like they have been recently, maybe, just maybe, there is some light at the end of the tunnel.

Back up in this muh!

2006-04-19T19:51:00.000-07:00

So it's just been just about three months and two weeks since my first post. I only opened an account with Blogspot so that I could post comments on friends' blogs, but, due to the increasing clamor of the many who would like to read my profound commentary (read: Bharath when he's bored), I decided I'm going to start to post stuff once in a while here.

To kick it off, I'll share an episode that occurred today as I sat outside and enjoyed the warm Bay Area sun as I ate lunch. Three early-forties people round a corner and head in my direction, two men and a woman. The woman is saying:

" ... and so halfway through the e-mail, he types 'L - M - A - O'. I was wondering, what the heck does that mean? Well, it turns out it means 'Laughing My Ass Off'!"

To which one of the guys responds:

"Right! And then there's 'L - O - L': 'Laugh Out Loud'! I tell my daughter whenever she types that, 'LOL' to me means 'Little Old Lady'!"

Instinctively, I of course reached for my paintball gun [inside joke]. Finding the holster empty, I mustered a herculean effort to restrain myself from jumping up and applying a full extension, sweeping windup backhand bitch slap to all three of these no doubt dialup-AOLers sequentially, for interrupting the quiet tranquility of my lunch break with such infantile nonsense.

Note to self: think about starting to carry paintball gun to work.

Day 2

2006-01-06T15:16:00.000-08:00

Yeah, right: you expected another post today? Whadiya think I am, some kind of loser who actually has time to add to this thing every day? No way - no time for such silliness.

Oh ... wait ...

2006-01-05T14:36:00.000-08:00

Um, yeah. Is this thing on? First test post here!