Hate Life, Will Travel

Host swap

2007-02-09T21:47:00.000-08:00

Hey, Hate Life, Will Travel is on the move, and should be up (and on a new, quite lovely Wordpress setup) soon.

Wow, blogger bites

2007-02-06T22:47:00.000-08:00

I cranked up the Cheater's Guide Blog this week, after switching back from the Movable Type disaster and.. now I want to break something.

I couldn't figure out how to get labels dynamically listed in a chunk on the side, even though that feature seems like it'd be pretty obvious to implement. But couldn't be done. Even a way to generate a link to archives by label... Nope. For whatever reason, if I want to use a particular template, I don't get to have a list of labels on the side. Why? No good reason.

It's not even about the drag-and-drop template feature! It's about the widget. If the archive widget works, and all these other widgets, why not labels?

I guess I'm going to have to go find a cheap outside host after all. AWESOME.

Sam Adam's Light

2007-02-04T00:09:00.000-08:00

First, I'm a huge beer drinker. There's a good chance that if a bar has fifty taps I'll have tried them all, and if not, I'm going to start down the list.

Second, I'm not a beer snob. When I had money, I loved my Deschutes beers, and Anchor Steam is my favorite beer, but I'm happy to crack open a can of Budweiser at a barbecue or have an MGD with my father-in-law, who only buys Miller.

This is a valuable trait: I've been unemployed since July to write the book. I've been shopping off the right-hand side of the beer aisle for a long time. If I could only buy the most expensive beers, I'd have gone insane.

Anyway. I always used to make fun of Samuel Adams, because:
- they pretend to be a microbrew but really, they're brewed by the same regional breweries turning out Mickey's and all the other huge brands
- they advertise like crazy, and I distrust brands with huge marketing budgets
- their advertising annoys me

But at a really great party, they had Sam Adams Light handy, and a sucker for trying new beers, I tried it. It's easily the best light beer I've ever had. It's tasty, balanced, drinkable, and if I hadn't looked at the label, I wouldn't have suspected it was a light beer at all. I liked it.

Which meant that all of their advertising for it, which I hate, was totally, entirely, correct.

Crow, as it turns out, tastes pretty good paired with Sam Adams Light.

Wii

2007-02-01T18:53:00.000-08:00

I finally got to play one of these, and I have a couple things to say:
- the control is a lot finer than I'd been led to expect from coverage
- Wii Sports is great fun to play
- I haven't been that giddy playing a game in ages
- Playing games I felt more responsible for the results than ever
- Going back to my PS2 felt boring, like I wasn't really doing anything

I loved it, and for the first time I really felt like I understood the schism people've been talking about: playing on the Wii is casual, easy to pick up, it's fun and funny, in a way that I've never seen before. I don't know if the novelty will wear off, or if developers will exploit it, but I'm unemployed and ever since I picked up the controller and swung a bat in Wii baseball, I've been even more obsessed with finding one. It's so much fun.

Why eBay sucks for buyers, too

2007-02-01T12:28:00.000-08:00

I've read some posts recently on why it sucks to sell on eBay (short version: high-ticket items are scam magnets, etc etc). But let's say you're a buyer, like me, and you're interested purchasing a Nintendo Wii.

Here are the top listings in the Nintendo Wii system category as I write this:
1-4 are Wiis in various states/bundles/misleading "5 games included" when all it has is the free Wii Sports disk
5 is a Wii accessory
6 is a gambling/lotto scam
7-10 are more Wiis
10 is a PS3 with spammy keywords

Scanning the first couple pages of listings, about 30% are clearly prohibited. There are many listings for ways to get the Wii for "free" and "information"on where to find them and whatever else. In a high-traffic category where you should only see listings involving the system itself, where you'd think eBay would be pretty active in policing, since they're spending a lot of money driving visitors off Google (etc) there, it's tooth-grindingly annoying to actually shop for one.

What makes matters worse is that, while it'd be nice if they'd police their listings better, they make the process for reporting a bad listing confusing and difficult. Say you want to report that guy at #6 who is running many, many different scam lottery listings. First you hunt the report link, which is all the way at the bottom after page after page of scammy disclaimers and pleas in horrible colored HTML text on why their particular lottery isn't really a lottery or... whatever.

On the "Report this listing" page, you've got two choices that seem obvious: one is "prohibited (banned items)" and the other is "listing policy violations".

Logically, you might go

Listing violation -> "Misleading title" or "keyword spamming" even, but what you might really want is "other..." and then there's an option for "Miscategorized items" (or, at that point, since they're selling tickets or whatever, "Listing more than fifteen identical items")

Whichever way you wind your way through their difficult complaint form, you reach this page, which I think should win some kind of award for deceptive dead-ending.

Things that are wrong with this page, a non-definitive list
1. The 1-2-3 metaphor breaks on the first page, when you start at 2
2. The "Review Help and Email Us" makes no sense as a navigation pointer or an instruction
3. The yellow-highlighted page is confusing. Is it a post-complaint suggested reading? Am I being diverted?
4. The "Contact Customer Support" link shows no indication that this is what you need to select to proceed with your complaint.
5. Moreover, it looks just like other generic "email us" links and is separated from the rest of the page by a horizontal divider, which says "unrelated" to the user. There's no "Email us your complaint about item xxxxx" though the page is passed that information.

The result is that if you stumble on the report link, manage to find a complaint category/subcategory/subsubsubcategory that's vaguely related, you wind up dumped here, without an obvious way to proceed down the path.

As a result, in trying to shop for an item, you pretty quickly see that eBay's listings don't reflect that they're able to enforce their listing policies. Attempting to complain about a particular listing is made difficult to navigate, so eBay either intentionally wants to reduce email volume by frustrating you or they don't care enough to make the system work.

Then what? Once you've complained, you wait. And nothing happens. I've been idly shopping eBay on and off for a couple years, and I have never seen them take any kind of action against serial offenders I've complained about. De-listing a specific auction is about as bad as it gets. The guy I was complaining about at item #6 in the list I pulled up has a decent feedback rating (somehow, you can speculate whether he got that legitimately or not) despite doing this kind of crap all the time.

It's clear that the company places raw transaction volume at the top of its priority list - customer service and maintaining any kind of community are things they do only as they must, because doing them well costs money and reduces transactions they can take their cut of.

And yet I have to wonder how this is sustainable. I wouldn't use eBay to sell a laptop, because I've heard too many horror stories, and I'm extremely reluctant to buy anything worth more than $50 on a site where they take their public-facing policies so lightly and treat complainers so poorly. If they're not willing to listen to and respond to someone pointing out scammers running about, why would I reasonably expect that they would attempt to resolve disputes fairly?

It's also a market opportunity: eBay's explosive growth early was fueled in large part by a strong community they've exploited and destroyed. It seems like user reputation done better, with more vigorous site (or user-based) listing policing, would attract hordes of people eager to shop and sell there. Even with eBay's massive initial advantage in having the most sellers for buyers and the most buyers for sellers, if someone offered me a market with far fewer buyers but a much better chance at an honest one, much cleaner listings to shop from, and fewer sellers but more reliable ones, I'd certainly go there, and I can't be alone.

First review for Cheater's Guide

2007-01-25T21:16:00.000-08:00

Library Journal. And they loved it! Woooooo! No link yet.

On recruiting and publishing

2007-01-25T19:53:00.000-08:00

I've been collecting rejections as I've tried to sell some fiction in this fiercely competitive market. It requires you to be able to not take it personally, which I couldn't manage often ten years ago. It's hard for the publishers, I understand, because they get more submissions than they can shake a stick at: I have this vision of the mail carrier coming in with a huge duffel bag of mail and dumping it down on the editor's desk, which snaps. So they use form letters, and the form letters rub people the wrong way too often. And on the other side, the writers invest so much in their stories that it's hard not to take rejection personally.

I thought about this today when I saw a job listing on Craigslist. Once, there was a startup I really, really wanted to go work for and thought I would be a rock star for. We flirted for a while, I went in to interview, I didn't get it (reason given: I didn't have enough GUI experience and they were all-GUI then). But I got the feeling that it was really close, and they said "hey, keep in touch". So I did, and when I left Expedia, they called to see if I was interested in contracting for them, which I thought might be a way for the pro-Derek faction to get me in and prove I rocked... they seemed really happy that I might be available. But the timing was bad, because I had to finish the book and go to Europe, so they said "look, call us when you're ready to go back to work.

I did. Even when I was at Expedia, I thought "if there was somewhere I would quit to go work at, this would be it." And they've been cool through this whole on/off thing, so I dropped them a line and said "hey, the book's done, I'm considering getting back to having a day job, what's up?"

They said "Sorry, no program manager jobs, but stay in touch."

I was cool with that - the timing's always been weird. Since then, I've had an RSS feed from Craigslist for 'program manager' to see if there's anything cool out there, since I figure if there are other startups out there not recruiting through word of mouth, that's where they'd post.

Today, as you no doubt expect at this point, was a listing for the job I wanted.

And I thought "faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahk."

I don't know if I would have gone for it if they'd called me instead of posting: I'm juggling book projects, all kinds of good stuff's afoot, and if I'm going anywhere, my first choice is going to be rejoining my friends at Expedia, because they're a great bunch. I don't know what the scoop is, if there's recruiter A and recruiter B, or teams, or whatever.

It's the first time I think I've wished for a rejection, because I held out hope for so long, and now I wonder why. I feel somewhat silly, like I've found out my girlfriend dumped me by reading her blog and seeing the "Status: Single" on her profile.

And we're up

2007-01-25T18:04:00.000-08:00

I'm off Movable Type. I moved off blogger because it was terrible about publishing remotely... we'll see how that goes with the new version. Having problems publishing remotely is better than not being able to publish.

Movable Type was nice, the interface is slick, and I liked the build-once serve-many-times model, but I can't tolerate software that breaks once you get it up and running. Really, if I use the generic template and it breaks after nine days of posting, isn't it reasonable to expect life's going to get harder as things get more complicated?

I'll be moving posts/comments over as I have the chance.

I find it funny that this post sits on the temporary page just ahead of the "Die Blogger Die post".

Die blogger die

2006-12-07T17:45:00.000-08:00

That's it. I can't take this any more. I'm moving.

Update: so of course, that's the first post in days that is run out successfully. WHEEE

Bonus update update: and my installation of Movable Type fails because of a host configuration issue. WOO

The good deed undone

2006-12-07T14:15:00.000-08:00

Soooo yesterday, I'm at the last of this series of scifi-writing workshops, and we were talking about whether we'd be returning for the next one. And there's a 17-yr old girl there who is just an awesome writer, and she might not go because they're evening classes and she can't get there if she doesn't get a ride.

And I'm local, have a car, I'm a fan, and I didn't say anything.

Because, obviously, I'm a 30+ guy. Even married, I can't make that offer. I can't even say "I'd love to offer, but you see how bad this looks." Or "I'd love to apologize, but..." which is in its way even worse.

I didn't even really have the chance to be selfish, or consider if it was possible, or even think it through at all. All I could do is let the statement hang out there, and do nothing.

I felt bad then, and I feel worse today. It was a chance for me - or really, any of us - to do her a good turn, and I didn't.

It's always sad when we have our instincts for charity drummed out of us, often by people preying on them. But people did favors like this for me once, and now I can't pass that on, and so today instead of feeling good about at least offering, I'm frustrated and a little depressed.

Flash entropy story

2006-12-05T13:57:00.000-08:00

barely over 500 words
--

Tom wake up more dumb than other day bang head on dresser.
“Ow,” Tom say. “I know not to do that.”
Then Tom not know where to go to work. Or how to get there.
“I get less smart last night,” Tom say. “Much way less smart.” Tom try to scratch head. Tom put hand in eye.
“Owwwww,” Tom say. “This day start bad.” Tom think. “I think too hard. My head hurt. Time for walk.”
Sun shine. Sky blue. Each day sun shine sky blue. Tom smile. Nice town. Young girl point at Tom, laugh at Tom.
“Why you laugh at me?”
“No pants!” girl say.
“Stop!” Tom say. Tom go back to house. Tom take dish rag, tuck dish rag in front of shorts. Tom go back out.
“Ha!” Tom say. Girl not laugh.
Tom walk to school. “Work!” Tom cry. Tom keep not think find lab down then down. Room hot. Many box whirr on many rack. Much wire. Man with giant head.
“I know you,” giant brain man say.
“I know you,” Tom say.
“I look for you.”
“What you do!” Tom yell.
“Box work last night.”
“Box that think?”
Brain smile. “Real large comp crunch crunch crunch.”
Tom frown. “Box that talk to void?”
Brain smile. “Yes!”
“No! That not work!”
“Work,” brain said. “You wrong.”
“Box work, yes, but box work is bad! All things break! I think, I break, I break. Chaos up, up up. No free idea!” Tom jump up and down. Dish rag fall off.
“Oooooooooooh,” brain say. “What?”
“Smart box make us dumb.”
“All work out. Black holes. Stuff like that. I write, you read?”
“I read! I say you write wrong.”
Brain shrug.
“It not work like that,” Tom say. “Can be near then go out! Here more than there!”
“That you,” brain say. “You wrong.” Brain stick out tongue. “Nyah!”
“Look!” Tom shout. Tom wave arms. “More here now! More more!” Tom look. Tom point. “Walk in rack hurt nose.” Tom point. “What three plus four?”
“Errr,” young guy say.
“See?” Tom ask.
“So?”
“Here! I fly plane vwoosh vwoosh vwoosh me go see mom now crash plane!”
“Oh.”
“No no here!” Tom yell. “What in this glass thing? Me take home, ask wife to smell! Cough cough die. Die die die.”
“Oooooh. Bad,” brain say.
Tom look for big grey box.
“Box write down, or box...” Tom grind teeth. “Box keep in head?”
Brain grin. “In head. Think much faster.”
Tom open big grey box pull switch. Room go dark, quiet. In the faint red glow of the emergency exit lights, Tom read the labels on the breakers and swapped the lights back on.
“Well, that should be better,” Professor Van Landingham said. looked around to see the assembled crowd staring back at him. “Let me be the first to propose that as dangerous this phenomenon was, there’s going to be some outstanding papers in it and there’s no reason we can’t all have our names attached to them if we cooperate.” No one responded. He looked down. “Oh. Before we continue, can anyone loan me a spare pair of pants?”

Look at you, h-h-hacker

2006-11-30T11:49:00.000-08:00

I've had System Shock 2 kicking around, just the disc in jewel case, for ages. Probably since it was released in 1999, when it played it after release. This last month I've been playing through it again, and it's still mostly a great game that falls apart towards the end (games in general, though, have terrible problems with endings). And a lot of the game mechanics started to reaaaally annoy me (cybermodules as carrots, the excesseive weapon degredation and ammo scarcity, among others). Also, there's no way a real ship is laid out like that.

But there were a couple of things that still amazed me:

SHODAN scares the shit out of me. Seven years later, hearing the voice in the demo freaked me out. Every time she'd contact me it would grate on my nerves and raise the hair on my neck. That's an amazing feat.

I remembered a ridiculous amount of the game. Where stuff was, what goals could be skipped, that while I was in location X I should pick up some foo, because otherwise I'd be heading back. It was like having a subliminal walkthrough, but it didn't give away so much that it was ever boring. It was strange, having chunks of knowledge fall out of the long-term memory archive like that.

System Shock 2 is so great at creating an atmosphere of isolation and horror that when you start to cheer for people you only know through audio logs, and when I hit the rec deck and - for the first time since the start of the game - saw another living person, I flipped a little. "I gotta help that guy," I said, and started to rush. Even though I played it before and knew there wasn't going to be any human contact in my future.

Anyway. It was really hard to get it running (especially with dual CPUs, ugh) and often it was a pain in the ass to run, but SS2 (and certainly the first two-thirds or so) are one of the greatest arguments for games-as-art and that there needs to be a better way to preserve old games. If I put the CD away, what are the chances it runs in another seven years?

(actually, it's probably not so bad - I'll be running some crazed super-Linux variant and there'll be some awesome WINE configurator I can use as a wrapper...)

29! 29!

2006-11-23T11:09:00.000-08:00

I went to Amazon today at 11 to see if I could snag an Xbox 360 for $100.

I saw the "get this deal" button. I clicked it. I got the verification page, which asked me "what is 15 plus 14?"

I put "29" clicked the "I agree..." to the T&C, and submitted.

REJECTED! That answer was invalid. I got the second one, and...

When I got the "no longer available" message, under a minute had passed.

Now, I don't know if that messed up rejection notice cost me my chance, but... ARRGGHHH. I blame our public school system.

"Buy this product and all women will be yours"

2006-11-23T08:25:00.000-08:00

Really?

As satisfying to the Genghis Khan deep selfish gene part of my brain that might be, do you have any idea what a hassle that would be? It sounds like it wouldn't even be much of a choice. I buy the product and bam, I'm in charge of at least 1.5b women. And it wouldn't

Of course "be yours" might not mean they're mine. It might mean they're loyal to me, or, given the context, that they're receptive to amorous advances, which from a practical standpoint would be more manageable - I wouldn't have to come up with any kind of political system, or hierarchy. There's no additional context in the message, though.

But what if I don't buy it? If they're marketing a product that gives the purchaser ownership of all women, my marriage is in trouble. I have to buy it, for my wife's sake. What to do? Stupid spam, with your strange moral quandries!

You kids get off my memory

2006-11-22T11:45:00.000-08:00

And out of my system tray and quick-launch bar.

I know this is going to date me, but I spent a ton of time early in my gaming career optimizing "low" memory, trying to get as close to 640k free as possible, because games were horrible about it. I'd use experimental mouse drivers, all kinds of bizarre loadsys parameteres, whatever it took to get Wing Commander running.

So today, I looked at the running processes on my box, because I'm having weird mouse issues. What's in there?

A bunch of corporations running things without my permission. I can't decide what's worse, that they think it's cool to run all the time, or how amazingly bloated these things are.

OrderReminder.exe: HP wants to use 2 megs of memory forever so once in a while it can remind me to check my toner and order more from them. Ancient Art of War didn't take 2 megs of space. And you couldn't just run at startup, notice I didn't need toner, and then go away?

qttask.exe: I hate Quicktime. Apple is the worst about this kind of hidden bloatware. I'm spending 3 megs on the off chance I'll come across and want to run Quicktime. SIGN ME UP!!! And by the way, could you throw a Quicktime icon I'll never use in the system notification area, where it totally does not belong, and the quick-launch part of the taskbar, even though I'd really prefer you didn't? Outstanding.

Thanks Apple. Design is king, and consideration is the boy who stands by the table so nobles can wipe their greasy fingers on his hair.

My whole freaking process list is like this! It's ridiculous!

How do I fight them? Well, let's crack open MSCONFIG shall we?

What are those blank ones? That "Location" might be... helpful. Maybe I can expand or otherwise scroll... no, of course not. That would be something I'd want to do. Is there a way to get more information on an item? No, of course not. Awesome.

It's part of this whole anti-consumer attitude expressed in EULAs as well: your computer is ours to fuck around with. Buy a printer? We're going to bug the shit out of you. Install a program? Why would we ask you if you want shortcuts - our software's so awesome we'll just go ahead and put them everywhere.

Would you like us to somehow reimburse you for using a chunk of your memory all the time, for no reason? Don't be silly, why would we do that?

Mainstream vendors are now spyware vendors with better PR departments. What a great development.

On another pointless MNF interview

2006-11-20T20:27:00.000-08:00

"As you know many kids enjoy watching Monday Night Football. We have one of those kids here now. Little Billy of New York. Hey Billy, how are you tonight?
"Okay, I guess."
"Billy, can you tell me why you're here in the booth?"
"Uh, my dad is the President of ABC? Duhhhhh."
"That's right, and his name is stamped on our paychecks. How are you enjoying the game?"
"It's okay, I guess."
"Which team do you like?"
"I don't know. I'd rather be playing Gears of War on my Xbox. Oh, can I say something to my friend?"
"Sure, why not? You obviously could buy and sell us all."
"Hey Jimmy, you suck, you're a fag, you didn't beat me my controller died, you never could beat me if it was fair and you know that you fag."
"Uh, and it looks like the Giants will be punting."
"Gaaayyyyyyy."

Power of suggestion

2006-11-19T13:05:00.000-08:00

I've been looking into buying a nicer coffee grinder (I've got a $10 cheap-o special) now that I'm making a cup or two a day, and in trying to find a good one to buy, I found myself in a world as silly as the planet of audiophiles.

Here's the problem with audio freaks, if I may: up to a certain point, I believe you can hear improvements in equipment, and beyond that, I'm perfectly willing to believe that people can hear differences. I'm extremely picky about doing MP3 rips of my CDs, so I can buy that people are similarly particular about speakers.

But at a certain point, they're making shit up. They want (they have) to believe that they're making progress, that there's something to the superconducting interconnectors or whatever that makes obsession worthwhile, or that obsession makes worthwhile.

Anyway. I came across this in an article on the KitchenAid ProLine Grinder comparing cups of coffee made from it and the Solis Maestro Pro:

I asked one of my regular testers to sample, and they did notice a subtle difference, but only after I pointed out a specific flavour (apricot in the finish, which was not apparent from the Solis cup.

It's a leading question, the reviewing equivalent of the push poll. Of course once you've suggested a particular hint of flavor someone's more likely to taste it. This isn't even worth writing up.

Ember

2006-11-17T18:32:00.000-08:00

Free fiction! New short story!

Ember

It's got aliens! Cloning! Crime! Music! Street fighting! It's sci-fi! Woo-hoo!

In Ember, a week in the struggle of the hero and the greatest flamenco singer in a Barcelona turned into a tourist attraction for aliens who enjoy the Spanish Civil War.

This hasn't gone out for publication yet, and there are two sections I'd like to improve/remove/rework (feel free to guess what they are and send me thoughts).

New short tomorrow

2006-11-16T18:38:00.000-08:00

This is a "teaser"

Ah, rejection

2006-11-15T14:02:00.000-08:00

[edit - after some consideration and consultation with others, I've decided that there's really not enough information to engage in this much soul-flogging]

Two new stories up today

2006-11-13T11:31:00.000-08:00

Yay! Unless you don't want free short stories.

"Conversations with and about my electric toothbrush" An electronic toothbrush longs for more. Hijinks ensue.

"The Failure and Success of Collaborative Dating" - our hero takes his newly-single support group along on an important date, with horrible and wonderful consequences. It's a little bit inspired by Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom".

Sometimes I wonder

2006-11-03T16:53:00.000-08:00

Behind the scenes of USSM, I've been having deep doubts this year about writing about baseball at all. I like writing about baseball, certainly, and I love it when people tell us that we're the reason they're educated baseball fans, but if I had to make a list of the most important things to people in Seattle's actual lives and our city's long-term future, they'd be
- global warming
- transit
- policing/zoning/music/etc

It's far more important that next Tuesday Darcy Burner get elected than it is that the Mariners bid on Daisuke Matsuzaka, because Dave Reichert's done a horrible job as a Congressman, and I'm particularly ticked because I thought he'd be a better choice than Dave Ross but he went on to support the Republican leadership over and over on things like "Should we suspend ethics rules that would force DeLay to step down when indicted?" and "Can the president do whatever he wants, regardless of constitutionality?"

I wrote him a couple of times, and I know he probably gets a ton of email, but here's my experience writing to my different Congresspeople about things like domestic surveillance.

Patty Murray: Well-written (probably form) response to exactly the thing I was worried about, including her position (etc). I don't know if they're assembling these from parts or they've just got a million templates, but Murray's responses were quite complete. Maybe I've just been lucky.
Maria Cantwell: General form response
Dave Reichert: Flat form letter that he's concerned too about the issue and supports hearings but also supports the president's war on terror, and ignores whatever points I raised or concerns were in the mail that might not be covered by "terrorism response 1-a"

Even more than that, the thing is, while he said he was concerned, and supported hearings, he didn't. He didn't do anything. He didn't call for hearings, he didn't support calls for hearings, he didn't do anything but lie to me. It's like his supposed stance against ANWAR drilling, where he'll tell you how he's against it, but when it comes time to vote on something that actually contains ANWAR drilling, he'll go right ahead and do it. If I tell people I'm against puppy killing and then I go around helping people kill puppies, it's pretty clear that my opposition, if it really exists at all, is pretty weak.

After a couple of tries, I stopped writing. At least someone at Murray's office was reading emails and working to get her position clearly stated and out there.

But my Congressman, who represents little more than my district, lied to me when he responded to me at all about supporting my civil rights, or the rule of law.

Enough about Dave Reichert, though. I'm a little shocked to see how much I just ranted about him lying to me. That really ticks me off.

At USSM we've made a conscious attempt to keep our politics off the blog as much as we can manage. The best argument for doing this (to me) was reading other people's team blogs, where the posts would go
- Why Derek Jeter's limited range to his left requires infield adjustments
- Hilary Clinton is the bride of the anti-Christ
- Odd waiver transaction of the day

As a result, I try not to fly the black flag on USSM, and sometimes that means a bit of tongue-biting. It's probably for the best, in terms of our baseball readership and influence. If you reveal you're a Democrat or Republican in these dark times, there's a good chance you lose at least 30% of your audience, and I'd rather talk to them all.

Anyway, during the outage we've received a lot of email from people about taking ads, or thoughts about how we could make money, and so forth. Today I got one that suggested an ad layout that wasn't too intrusive, so I checked it out, and it was one of those Drudge Report-like sites that has little log lines of things to read, and they were all... lies. I don't know how else to put it. Links to things Rush Limbaugh had said that were provably false, the worst kind of strangeness and alternate reality conservative stuff where the terrorists want Democrats to regain control of the House.

I never know what to think when I come across this kind of thing, and I feel like in a larger sense, it means that USSM is failing in a wider way. We may be trying to educate people to think critically about baseball, and to read baseball coverage carefully, because the Times is in the team's pocket and so on, but for at least some of our readers, they're reading us and then not applying the same tools anywhere else. They're reading the sports page thinking "okay, Steve, you think David Bell should have stayed, but there's no evidence for that and you're full of it" and then reading a different story that makes a far more ludicrous assertion and, because it fits their worldview or comes from a source that's endorsed by their side, nodding and welcoming it in.

That's really depressing. I don't know what's to be done about it.

Copy editing Cheater's Guide

2006-10-28T18:03:00.000-07:00

I'm deep into the copy edits for "The Cheater's Guide to Baseball" now. Since people seem to be interested in the process of getting this thing to press, I have scanned the first marked up page for your amusement.

Check it out now, before I have to take it down. The spots that are marked "AQ001" are where it diverges into the editor's comments at the back of the chapter.

There are approximately... four hundred pages of copy edits just like that one to get through. I have a week. Plus a bunch of inserts/updates/etc.

I love this book, I really do, but there's no denying that I traded two years of my life for it. I hope everyone thinks it's worth it.

I've bought a lot of coffee beans for the coming week (btw, if anyone knows of a good place on the eastside I can buy freshly-roasted high-quality beans, please, please let me know).

Red-hot update: I got through 40 pages today. This made me want to:
- scream
- shoot myself
- rewrite the whole book from scratch
- drink heavily

Sales rank

2006-10-26T01:18:00.000-07:00

Sooo like all authors with books due out or already released, it took me about two seconds to become addicted to watching my sales rank, which is kind of ridiculous since we're at least three months from release.

And yet... I sat down just now to check for the first time all day, and I found I was at 7,975 - and the book had been as high as 6,379 today (!) which would make it the tenth-best-selling baseball book on the market.

Boggle. It's weird, I spent years working on the book, the whole time not willing to let myself believe that it was certainly going to come to anything, and though until it releases we won't know how it's going to do, I'm heartened that it's hovered at about ~100,000, which is a pretty good sales rank for a book with a skeleton page that doesn't have any description, a cover, a table of contents... anything.

I'm entirely ready to see it drop for the next three months, as USSMers willing to pre-order all pre-order, but it's been great to see the numbers bounce around and know that behind them, there are people willing to plunk down money because they have faith that it'll be worth it. That's awesome, and it makes me want to go through the whole thing one more time, looking for anything I can possibly improve at this late stage.

I've seen the cover

2006-10-19T00:04:00.000-07:00

I got the draft cover design for my book. It's nice. How strange, though, to see my name on a cover mock-up. Feels good.

This where I depart the train

2006-10-16T22:25:00.000-07:00

I've used Microsoft operating systems for most of my computing life. It goes
CPM
IBM PC-DOS
(Dos flavors)
Windows --> etc

Oh, I've flirted with Linux boxes, but the desktop I do my writing on has always been some Microsoft product. That's ending.

In recent versions, I've been willing to tolerate some distressing functionality because I really like Win XP compared to all the past versions. But the creeping DRM's been annoying me. It's a whole other rant.

Anyway, I've followed Vista's development for a while as an interested guy, and the news that it'll let you install it only once after the initial installation

I already own a set of matched Win XP discs because of authentication/serial number issues. I've spent hundreds of dollars on this. And that's on top of the wrangling I've had to do when XP's decided that my latest upgrade is one too many and I have to call in again. There is no fucking way I'm rolling over for this. Maybe I'll stay with XP, and maybe I'll move back into rolling some Linux distributions in the world of minimal usability, and maybe I'm going to use my beautiful MacBook Pro as my box until Apple forces the issue on their own.

But that's it. From a News.com article:

[Shanen Boettcher, a general manager in Microsoft's Windows Vista unit] said that Microsoft has heard some concerns regarding virtual machine issues, but doesn't think the license changes represent a threat to Vista sales. "It hasn't come up as any kind of a blocker for adoption," he said.

Well, here's one. I can't believe there aren't others, but mark me up as the first if no one else has come forward.

And don't tell me that if I'm all anti-DRM I shouldn't buy an HDTV, or an X-Box 360, or whatever else has crippleware built in: I'm not buying them either. Either years down the road kids are going to point at me and laugh at the lame guy who only reads books that don't self-ignite after reading and doesn't have a Holoplayer or whatever, or this thing's going to turn around and consumers are going to start getting devices that work like they want them to work.

Either way, I won't have upgraded to the newest and greatest Microsoft operating system for the first time I can remember.

"Transcript" now online

2006-10-15T22:02:00.000-07:00

If you didn't dig the podcast, or wanted to read it yourself, I've posted an HTML version for your enjoyment.

Anyone with suggestions on how to easily create well-formatted XML/HTML pages out of RTF or Word docs should please, please drop me a line, because this stuff is really horrible.

Aftermath

2006-10-12T18:32:00.000-07:00

I just tallied up how much we spent while in Europe. Hooooooooooly mackeral.

It's a good argument to make our next vacation to somewhere extremely cheap. Like, uh, our backyard. Or Vietnam, which I hear is nice.

I can't do it

2006-10-12T13:14:00.000-07:00

I was in my workshop yesterday night, joking about how the way to get published for sure was to write vampire fiction, especially raunchy vampire fiction, and I took up the gauntlet. I intended to write a really horrible, break-every-rule-of-writing short, but my problem is I keep making it turn funny, or philosophical, so it's this bizarre mix of horrible vampire parody with occasional scenes of my standard writing, so it kind of succeeds on neither level - it doesn't fail in the way it's supposed to fail.

Rejection

2006-10-11T08:12:00.000-07:00

Got my first rejection letter in my new career as a fiction writer yesterday, a quite nice personal note on letterhead from an editor. It's easily the most encouraging rejection notice I've ever received, but I'd rather have been accepted.

To the drawing board!

The Norm Cash Double

2006-10-09T20:48:00.000-07:00

or, Derek's Cheater's Guide Drinking Guide

When I was working almost 16-hour days during the home stretch (July-August) I used to make these when I was taking a break. I don't recommend this at all, as it seems likely it has the same horrible side-effects that alcohol-with-energy-drinks do. Except that there's no taurine.

Anyway, I used to drink this at 9, 10, when I was running out of steam and also really stressed out, and it did the trick for the last half-shift of writing.

The Norm Cash Double
--
- Using your Aerobie Aeropress or the method of your choice, make two espresso shots with a nice Sumatran bean. Don't skimp on the quality of the coffee. Pour into glass.
- Pour in equal measure of good-quality Irish cream liquor.
- Drink warm.

Really nice taste, mellowing effects, plus it'll keep the eyelids peeled.

Zumsteg.net

2006-10-06T21:40:00.000-07:00

Gonna be doing a lot of work on this beast this weekend. Proceed with, uh, caution?

In the meantime, free fiction!

(bump)(bump)

First ever podcast! Free fiction!

2006-10-06T14:28:00.000-07:00

I've been writing science fiction shorts for a workshop I'm doing, trying to get back into fiction writing, and I thought it might be cool if I put some readings up.

Here's me reading my short story "Transcript of the Best, Most Powerful Symposium Presentation That Is Strong, Funny, and Promises To Respect You In The Morning"

I hope this turns out okay - this is my first time doing anything like this, soooo... let me know. Troubleshooting if you find anything would be good, too.

If this goes well, I'll start putting others up, maybe early versions of stuff I'm working on, and so forth.

I hate copyright

2006-10-03T16:43:00.000-07:00

And I'm an author.

Here's the problem: copyright doesn't serve any of the semi-noble purposes it was intended to.

I'm writing a book and I wanted to use some great old photos I found. But the magazine they were in had long gone out of business and the photographer, as best I could determine, was dead. None of the big archivers (Corbis, Getty, etc) had bought up an archive that owned the photos.

So we had two choices: skip using them or scan them from the printed material and run them ourselves, and if someone came forward and claimed the rights, we'd have to either pay them off or go to court. We skipped.

These are fifty-year old photos with no locatable owner. And that's one example - I have a whole folder here with photos I can't figure out how to clear. It's crazy. No one's helped by this situation.

Why? So Disney can keep Mickey Mouse out of the public domain. The public domain is great! Everyone wins with public domain! I'm seriously thinking about releasing all my short stories (and anything else I can pull this off for) under a Creative Commons license just to avoid inflicting anything like this on future generations.

Parisians

2006-09-30T22:40:00.000-07:00

Here's why I loved Paris: I went there with some almost-entirely forgotten French and a phrasebook (which I read constantly while we were there). In almost every case, when we were out somewhere, the people at the shops and wherever else were happy to meet me halfway. If I was struggling with something, they'd try to figure out what it was in English. It was so great to try and go as far with French as possible and have them willing to give me the assist when it didn't get there.

And really, almost everyone we met was like that: kind, happy to talk to us, and I think a little amused that I was trying so hard to speak French.

I went to Paris expecting to not like the French at all, and out of all the people I dealt with, only a couple weren't great.

That said, here's how Parisians are dicks:
- Making fun of your pronunceation. It's a little power trip, where they make a big deal about how you're not saying words correctly - repeating the thing you said, acting confused, the whole deal. I was in a bakery and asked for two pain aux raissons (these cool pastries with raisins in them) while making the thumb-and-finger "two" and pointing at the pastries I wanted in the display, and the young woman behind the counter made a huge deal about how I wasn't saying it right. "Poisson?" she asked, which would be fish. She protested that they didn't have any fish pasteries. Which then would make it really strange for me to ask for fish pasteries, right? And since I'm pointing to something that sounds pretty close to what I asked for, it's probably a pretty good bet that that's what I want.

There were people behind me in line and this was embarassing. I did my request again, asking for the pastries, the sign for two, pointing, and she repeated my words with the same confused look. She drew this out for a while.

This is distinct from conversations I had with people who wanted to talk to me about improving my French, which was sometimes pointed but done in a friendly way.

- The indignity of work. This happens everywhere - there were a couple times where I'd walk up to a counter to buy something and the clerk would make a big deal with the body language, huffing as they stood to walk over, sighing as they opened the register. They only work 35 hours a week - come on.

I spent almost almost two weeks in Paris, working my ass off to speak to people, and by the time we left I could have reasonable conversations with shop keepers (including asking them to please speak a little more slowly). I felt really good about it, and it helped make my time in Paris much more fun.

Train travel in the UK

2006-09-24T18:50:00.000-07:00

I'm a huge fan of trains.

They're cool.
They're environmentally responsible, far more so than air travel.

There's also a much more complicated argument for redundant systems I want to make here, which is essentially that if you're overly reliant on any single means of transportation that system becomes an extremely lucrative target, and it makes recovering from any attack dramatically harder. But I'll skip that.

We took trains from London to Edinburgh, Edinburgh to York, York to Bath, and Bath to Paris by way of London.

London to Edinburgh was great. Looking out on the sea, all the little towns, the English countryside -- totally worth it. The only weird thing was because of the bank holiday (they went crazy for the bank holiday, it was bizarre), everyone headed out of London headed out one station, where they caught trains elsewhere. We had a bunch of shorts-wearing jersey-clad guys on the way up, who stood between cars, occasionally making offensive comments to women, and drank beer continuously.

The strange thing, at least to me, was that they were the only group of tattooed people I'd seen in London, and they weren't young, they were older, middle-aged ways.

Edinburgh-York was fine, except that it was a Virgin train which (seemingly) meant that "quiet car" (no cell phones/needless noise/etc) was entirely ignored, but whatever, you don't really expect things like that to mean anything, much as you might hope. York-Bath though...

We're traveling along, minding our own business, when we smell something that smells like loaded baby diaper. It gets worse. People on the train start looking at each other, around at people who just got on, the babies... and it gets worse.

And worse.
And worse.

Later, my wife and I argued over how bad it got - she argued it was the worst smell ever, and I argued that while it wasn't the worst ever, it was the worst smell I'd ever been exposed to for any length of time.

What was amazing was the response of the people in the car. There was a great reluctance to say anything, much less react visibly, but the smell was so bad people found pretexts to touch their mouth, bring handkerchiefs or other articles of clothing up to cover their noses, until finally many people were openly pinching their noses closed.

This was the great British stiff-upper-lip reserve.

I was, weirdly, reminded of an X-Files episode (weirdly because I didn't watch the show that often).
Cop: "They say it cuts the smell if you don't breathe through your mouth."
Mulder: "They lie."

I ended up leaving the car, which you're not really supposed to do because the seat assignment is regimented and standing is as enforced as having a seat (weirdly) so it's hard to give up a seat even if you're nauseated by a smell and about to be sick.

I ended up between the cars, unable to take it as almost all the rest of the British endured without complaint. A conductor came by and said to the refugees (and I don't know how to punctuate this to convey the humor he managed) "There was an accident with a dog. (beat) Allegedly."

He went through and sprayed something in the car that either
a) removed the smell or
b) deadened the smell sense of car riders

I went back to my seat, now weirdly less smelly than between cars where the stink cloud had moved. A cleaner came on two stations later, and whatever he did, the situation got even better.

Then London-Paris... the thing about trains, if I may, is that being far more economical than air transport, it makes sense to make the seats at least somewhat more spacious. Especially if you're me and really tall, it seems like an obvious conclusion, trains = more space. But the train through the Chunnell was really cramped and annoying, and its only redeeming value was that it didn't have the horrible security and general hassle of flying from London to Paris.

Edinburgh, York, Bath

2006-09-24T18:18:00.000-07:00

Edinburgh was much friendlier than London, though of course it wasn't nearly as cool. We arrived at the end of the Fringe festival, which meant there were uncountable things going on, shows and street performers and all kinds of stuff. We went and saw "Watson and Oliver" which was really funny, but was also essentially put on in a cargo container with two performers in front of 40 people. It was also strange to sit around and have the performers, their friends, and random assorted hangers-on come by, ask you if you would be around at showtime, or "looking for a show tonight?"

I wanted to stop some of them ("Hey, you're going on stage in a couple of hours, you should take a break here...")

I have a criteria for seeing comedy. It must be funny. The whole genre of applause comedy bores me. Whee, politics are so stupid! Clap clap clap clap! The furthest I'll go in this direction is Lewis Black, who gets a lot of applause but is also really quite sharply funny and willing to make fun of himself.

York was great. It's also an excellent demonstration of the problem with trying to preserve old cities today. Narrow streets designed to admit one horse carriage, if that, can't handle car traffic and pedestrians. Trying to build roads through them is a fool's task, but businesses will demand them (like Nordstrom and Westlake Center!).

So in York, within the walls, there are all these crazy narrow, crooked streets, hordes of people on feet, and annoyed people on cars trying to get around (for some reason), honking their horn.

Just ban the cars from those areas, at least from say 9am-7pm when they can't safely coexist. I'll come back to this in a later post.

Bath was okay. Not a lot to see once you've taken the walking tour, unless you're interested in hanging around at the spa. Weather was also really strange while we were there - gusting wind, rain, cold for much of the time.

This lead to a great British moment. I loved the dry, understated British humor every time I came across it, from the Beefeaters at the Tower of London (who described a medal they got for meritous long service as the "Undetected Crime Medal"). In Bath, I tuned into the BBC for the weather and the report, essentially, was "winds between 0-20 kilometers an hour from the west and north, sunny and cloudy with sprinkles and showers" and for the rest of the week, it would continue to be "inconstant".

I cracked up.

Then we headed to Paris.

Another argument for anonymous browsing

2006-09-22T22:26:00.000-07:00

After I got back, I looked into whether I could have brought back a box of Cuban cigars, as I wanted to do (nope, ). That ended up with me reading some other stuff, wandering around, and finally I checked out the Department of Justice's privacy policy which (to sum up) says "we collect standard webstats like your domain, IP address,

In certain circumstances, however, we may take additional steps to identify you based on this information and we may share this information, including your identity, with other government agencies.

Uhhhh... wow. So if I do research for a short story I'm writing, read the Microgram Bulletin, which is totally fascinating, and otherwise poke around the Customs and DEA information, that might be "certain circumstances" where my excessive interest leads to them seeing if my IP is static and then putting me on the super-search list so I get pulled out of line every time I take a flight?

Dreamcast, MacBook, Art Ramblings

2006-09-22T21:55:00.000-07:00

My plan was to sell my MacBook Pro after the road trip, but now that the time's come, I can't bring myself to do it, and I find myself finding excuses for using it over my extremely souped-up PC with the sweet LCDs.

Yet I don't have money and I haven't decided whether I'm headed back into the job market, so I'm torn. In the last year or so, as I've worked on the book continuously, I've made a pretty huge mess of my office, and now I'm cleaning that up as I hang around waiting for word on my other book proposals/job possiblities. Which means I'm selling off some of my old treasured RPGs and cool games, which, inevitably, meant I hooked the Dreamcast up again and took it for a spin.

I'll skip the rant about how cool the Dreamcast was and get to my point -- some of those games were gorgeous. Popping in a game that's six years old, I don't expect it to look that great, but in some of them - Skies of Arcadia, in particular - the artists did so much with the expressions of the characters, building a style, that it's beautiful.

I look at some of my favorite old games (like Starflight/etc) and I remember the sense of wonder I felt playing them, but I don't ever look at screenshots of the old PC/PC-AT games and think "wow, that's a beautiful CGA game". But the aliens in Space Invaders are weird and cool and recognizable even today, and some of the old sprites still carry meanings.

It's a lot like art history. Cave paintings without perspective can move us, and today

There are two major differences, though:
- computer technology's moved so fast that there's never been little artistic focus at any point. When EGA supplanted CGA, there weren't artists that tried to keep working in CGA, but there were still painters after photography was invented (to be overly simplistic about it).
- the history of the art's quickly destroyed, because incompatibility means you can't study the works of the past, and copy protection contributes as well. I can't run Starflight today for a number of reasons, so I'm reduced to seeing screenshots and trying to remember the gameplay (Uhhh... Statement/Question/Posture?).

Both those differences have wider-ranging consequences than we've really considered as a society. For one, it means that we're in a strange position of moving forward and jumping ahead of our breadcrumbs. If I wanted to teach someone about the history of gaming, I'd be able to find some of the orignal arcade games in decent emulation or otherwise, and then I'm screwed for a while before I can even consider walking into the vast grey area of abandonware, then it's dicey trying to get stuff from then on to run on supported operating systems... so my class would be like
1. The early origins of gaming
2. Games I'd like to show you but can't for various reasons
3. Half-Life 2!

I'm reminded of the gaps in the history of painting created by wide-scale wars or natural disasters, where we're left with a couple pieces by someone who was brilliant and supposedly created others.

Video games are art, I have no doubt that this will eventually be recognized by all reasonable people. But while I can buy a book and look at reproductions of Jean Miro paintings, or travel to see them in person, some of the best games, the most influential classics that created genres and thrilled all that played them, are already essentially lost.

That's horrible, and it's sad that nothing's going to happen about it.

Impressions of London

2006-09-21T17:16:00.000-07:00

London is a great city, and like all great cities, it is amazing and horrible at once. There is a strange sense in visiting London of sifted history. Taking the Underground, even staring at the map of the Underground, there’s an uneasy sense in my chest that London is incomprehensible, that the lines are based on a thousand years of history, and the bump in the diagonal of the Picadilly line is the result of the great fire, or some historical accident that forced a station to be built several blocks away from where one would logically go. I stare at the map and know that in a week, I’m not going to understand the territory, and will be happy when I can read the maps well enough to navigate.

Worse, there was a constant tension trying to get by in London. I have no job right now, and don’t know when, or if, I’ll return to getting a steady paycheck. The prices made me feel uncomfortable everywhere we went. They would look, at first, entirely rational – inexpensive, even, given that we were in one of the world’s largest metropolitan areas. £3 for a beer? Why, that’s entirely reasonable at first glance, except that £3 at $1.90/pound means that beer’s about $5.75. The £12 meal is £23.

It provoked a kind of horror that made me afraid to buy things, and sent us into grocery stores and the food department of Marks & Spencer over the corner noodle store. And the food sucked, generally speaking, even without correcting for cost. Finding a decent meal wasn’t hard, but it cost so much that it discouraged exploration.

It takes some of the fun out of vacation when you worry about money. I know that we’re supposed to say “hey, it’s vacation – don’t worry that a bad plate of fish and chips runs £8.50” but in practice, it’s an accumulated mental weight that makes each night a little harder to justify spending.

It’s part of what made London seem more work than vacation. Everyone in London seemed unhappy to be there, as if they were on their way to or at unpleasant jobs that barely paid the bills. Once we talked to them, they were almost all quite chipper and helpful, but taking a train from one place to another felt like joining a funeral procession. One paper estimated that the average London commuter spent 45m each way. I have no way of evaluating whether that’s true or not, but from the looks of it, it seemed to fit: each day, eight hours and then nearly two in transit is a quick way to knock off another day on your way towards death.

In-flight movie mini-update

2006-09-21T09:25:00.000-07:00

From yesterday:
Simpsons episode I've seen many times > X-Men 3 > Nacho Libre > Two Weeks Notice [sic]

Speak English?

2006-09-13T09:50:00.000-07:00

Walking on the streets of Paris, it’s obvious that people can detect Americans at a distance. I’m not always sure what gives us away (wearing shorts, sure). Often, it means a subtle shift in language that you have to pay attention to: a shopkeeper says “and is that all?” in English instead of the French equivalent.

The most noticeable thing that happens, though, is you attract gypsies. No, really. I was lucky enough to be warned early, but the first time I saw a barefoot girl in a flowing dress, walking around one of the riverside streets asking everyone she saw “Speak English?” I didn’t quite believe it.

The scam is that they ask anyone who looks touristy “Speak English?” and if they acknowledge at all that they do, they deploy a small piece of paper or worn cardboard, where someone’s written
Ladies and Gentlemen, I am from a family from Bosnia […] (so please give me money).

More or less. They are not, in case you are at this point curious, a family from Bosnia or wherever that particular plea claims.

If you read it and don’t refuse them immediately, they start pleading, making little hands-together praying to you gestures, and so on. I think many people give them money at this point to make them go away. Sometimes, if they sense opportunity, they’ll keep at someone who’s already given them money, though I rarely saw this. Once they got money, they walk away, sometimes turning it over in their hand before stuffing it in their moneybelt like the ones worn by people worried about being pickpocketed by gypsies.

What’s not clear is why they ask people if they speak English, and why they themselves don’t speak or pretend not to speak English, and are instead reduced to showing a sign to people, or why they don’t appear anything or dress anything like a standard Bosnian person.

Take a counter-example. Say that I flee the United States ahead of angry mob of rival bloggers, and end up in Mexico. Would I hang around tourist attractions in Mexico, asking everyone if they spoke Icelandic, and then showing them a plea, written in Icelandic, which I can neither speak or write, asking them for money?

The question is quite good. It’s in almost perfect American English, and your natural response is to say “yes” and then they have your attention.

Moreover, wahat the question does is filter out people in continental Europe who either have experience with gypsies or who have heard warnings about them. They’re either going to refuse a response because they don’t speak English (and probably recognize the pitch), or they’re going to refuse a response because they recognize the hustle. Leaving people from the UK who don’t know any better, or American/Canadian tourists who may have little experience with this kind of con.

So answering “yes” is like saying “I’m naïve and don’t understand what’s going on”. This is like slathering yourself in barbeque sauce and then jumping in to the lion exhibit at the zoo.

The thing to do is deny you speak English, even if they walk up to you while you’re talking in English, because it prevents the pitch (most of the time).

I’ve been approached on the streets, near the Louvre, near Notre Dame, but the Eiffel Tower provided the best example of this, because it has a great open square, where tourists enter and exit constantly, and where they move towards predictable queues, and sit along accessible benches.

We watched them work today for a while, and its fascinating. It’s a little like seeing ranchers at work. There were one to five girls, all fairly young (like late teens on) and they would circulate in almost random-seeming patterns, but manage to not approach the same person twice as they worked their way around the square. There was almost always one at the base of pillar as an elevator descended, letting off a pack of known tourists, but they would group and then disperse, staying just out of each other’s earshot, so if you were approached by one you were unlikely to hear the “Speak English?” of another from the same group.

They took breaks, maybe when they were tired or maybe when they felt they needed to let the ecosystem refresh itself, but they’d all find a spot of grass where they could lie down and talk. It’s probably even odds on whether they were talking shop – what wavering tone best worked on mothers with small kids – or trying to talk about anything but how depressing it must be to work crowds every day like that.

They made a lot of money.

They disappeared entirely when the French military guys showed up. The French run patrols around major landmarks seemingly at random, three uniformed, camoflague-clad soldiers with automatic rifles who saunter through, scanning the crowd around any important site. The British seemed to dislike displaying their military – in situations where something was serious enough to protect with uniformed officers (or enlisted personnel) with heavy personal weapons generally served as the second line of defense, ready to respond if something serious happened, but also content to let the London police be the face of security, unarmed though they were. But here in Paris, there they are, closely bunched like an invitation for a suicide bomber, walking along the Champs de Mars, serious as can be, occasionally helping a brave tourist unlose themselves.

I don’t know if this happens every time, or if it was coincidence, but while we were watching the “lost Bosnians” do their bee-dance we saw one of the threesomes of uniformed military walk in from the southeast, and suddenly they were all gone. They disappeared entirely, and we didn’t see any of them for a while.

Now, there are police around France (not many, it seems, but there are). I don’t know if they don’t particularly care, or if they would flee around them, but it seems like a good way not to be hassled on the street is to dress up as if you’re in the French army and carry an FN-FAL automatic rifle.

What I find even more interesting about this is that in a way, it’s like the battle between infection and an immune system. If you’re too gullible, you’re attacked from all sides by con artists of all kinds, who will take you for every cent you have (and can borrow from others). But you can’t counter-attack everyone, because almost everyone is innocent. In this case, it makes me much less likely to help people out while I’m traveling, if only because I’ve been made less willing to listen to their plea – whether they’re asking for a baguette, directions to an embassy, or money – because allowing myself to respond to pleas means I’d waste a lot of time.

Similarly, I’m dramatically less likely to talk to someone who is close to the description of the girl who hassled me repeatedly over a couple of days in different locations – which, in turn, I think reflects why people in France and Germany have such a low opinion of Gypsies in general, and means that if you were a Gypsie, and wanted to make an honest living, it’d be that much harder because no one trusted you.

You might soon be reduced to walking barefoot around tourist-rich areas of Paris, carrying a worn cardboard plea, asking “Speak English?”

Version four in

2006-09-10T05:30:00.000-07:00

No, really. Completed today with church bells tolling, emailed in just now. Hopefully I won't have to touch it again while I'm on vacation.

I get shortchanged on the Île Saint-Louis

2006-09-06T15:12:00.000-07:00

a) T-Mobile (and Starbucks) have no fucking clue what they're doing with wifi points. I'm going to be asking for refunds shortly, because their well-run operation stopped, it seems, at the crossing.
b) I'm hoping this scrolls off before my parents chance to read this, but I had my first infuriating Parisian experience today. Short version -
There's a grocer next to my parents' hotel. Since they stay there often, they know the dude, whatever.
The last few days, we've hiked over to their hotel before we all head out.
Today, we stopped at the grocer to buy water, because it's really hot here. We bought two .65E bottles of water for 1.30E. While I was working out the change in my head, my mom & wife were talking to the grocer, the grocer's joking that I can just give it all to him and he'll work it out. I'm reluctant to do this. I give him 2.30E in a two-euro coin and .30 in other change. He says "You pay big this time, next time you pay small." I stare at him, stand there, wait. He doesn't move. I stand there, hand out, expectent, and nothing. My mom & wife chat about moving on, everyone else in Paris has been nice and helpful, plus he knows my parents-- I figure it's good. Plus, it's my mom's birthday, I don't want to cause some big scene.
I stew about this for some time, in particular his refusal to hand over a euro when clearly I was not into his "wheel of karma" argument. It pisses me off.
Then later, after we've hiked around and whatever, we stop in to buy crackers, more water, etc. This is a perfect opportunity for him to give me that euro he owes me, or even a good faith chunk of it. Nope, exact change.
Bonus incident: I'm stewing some more about this, and complain to my dad while birthday mom is up in her room. He expresses consternation, not because I've been ripped off for 1E by someone he knows and does business with all the time, but in his words "I just can't figure out why he'd do that" which, to translate, is "I don't think that happened, or at least not in the way you describe it" which, to digress, was probably the most infuriating thing about my youth, which - and I freely admit this as much my fault for being delinquent all the time as anything - had any number of incidents where it was my entirely truthful word against someone (generally a teacher or other authority figure) else's story, and they'd totally buy mine. In this case, the essential implication is that I, a former cashier myself and not a s dull knife at this, must somehow be responsible.

Anyway. Fuck you, grocer on Île Saint-Louis! This is why visitors get bad impressions. Everyone else is kind and nice, and you fuck it up for them.

I'm not sure what the proper Parisian response is: graffiti or brick-through-window. I'll ask at the hotel front desk tomorrow, see what they say.

CGTB version four

2006-09-01T02:12:00.000-07:00

I hate hate hate working on this thing while I'm on vacation, but I knew what I was signing on for, years ago.

Edits have been pretty light, I'm about ~100 pages through them and they're going pretty fast. Unfortunately my ability to do research from here, where internet access is horrible, price and unreliable even where available, is pretty limited, so I've been unable to answer some re-re-research questions. We'll see what happens.

Al Gore is following me

2006-09-01T02:04:00.000-07:00

I'm in Europe, Expedia launches my cool carbon credit thing (fight global warming!) and Al Gore's hanging around. He was in Edinburgh with me, and he's been running around the UK praising the country for trying to beat its Kyoto obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

I'm a fan. I know Gore's a pretty polarizing guy, but I was a fan back when he was leading nuclear arms reduction pushes from the Senate, and I'm still a fan.

Anyway, while here, I've been trying to read all the papers I can, and I came across a London Times editorial that argued - in print! In the Times! that argued that we couldn't really know if global warming was man-made until NASA got some more satellites up, since it could just be the sun.

This is one of the big myths of the global warming ostrich crowd (part of the "we don't know enough to act yet" bundle), and pretty easily debunked. And yet I had to wonder - Al Gore's in town, the UK's doing good work, and they ran that editorial? Why?

(as an aside, since I can write endless annoying asides on my blog - run a google search for "global warming myth" and you'll get one of the more disturbing sets of results I've ever seen)

Anyway, hi Al! We should chat sometime about creating market-based incentives for greenhouse reduction. I know what I'm talking about, I got something out there (well, sorta, since I wasn't there for the implementation) -- drop me a line.

Or... does anyone know him? Want to give me an intro?

I started a longer post on the carbon credit thing I hope to post today. Later dudes.

Life of a good idea, deployment

2006-08-29T07:17:00.000-07:00

It's out.

Here's the short, complete history of the idea, then:
- I thought about this and a couple ways to do it
- I write up a pitch idea, send it to a short list
- They flip out, give me feedback
- I go to a wider group, they flip out
- I start pushing it upwards, struggle, find allies, struggle
- Repeat that last one for a while
(- I quit)
- It gets picked up
(- I leave)
- A competitor announces a similar idea
- It goes out into the world

I knew I said I'd have longer commentary about this, but
a) Internet's really tough to come by here in Edinburgh
b) I'm finally starting to get into vacation mode and I'm just not quite in the mood

Life of a good idea, horrible moment

2006-08-26T01:35:00.000-07:00

So the whole time I was shopping this thing, one of the points I kept pounding was 'We have to do this if for no other reason that it's cheap and the companies who come second get no benefit'

Travelocity just did a version of it, and I still haven't seen an Expedia press release.

Today, many of us recycle and walk, bike, or take public transportation when we can, but there's still no way to get across the country or ocean in time for that important meeting or family event - or to reach that great vacation spot out of driving distance-- unless we get on a plane. And while air travel is considered a contributor to the carbon dioxide emissions that lead to global warming, now there's something you can do to offset the negative environmental impact of your travel: by contributing to The Conservation Fund's Go Zero program, you can effectively offset the CO2 emissions of your entire trip.

So first-mover advantage is gone... hopefully they can still salvage some good from this.

I'll have somthing more substantial to say later, but my first reaction is (as you'd expect) 'If they'd listened to the good idea immediately and moved on it, they'd have deployed long ahead of the competition.'

It's another point in favor of working somewhere really small or, barring that, really agile. I guess my former employer wasn't it. This sucks.

MacBook Pro, day 2

2006-08-19T22:00:00.000-07:00

I spent today wandering around the web, loading up a bunch of recommended software, and I'm really digging this thing. It's fast, it's elegant, it's hackable.

My only complaint so far is that it runs way hot, to the point of being difficult to actually use on my lap comfortably.

It's weird, I spent time using a PowerBook on and off at Expedia, but I never really got the hang of it. With a new one, I'm using some hotkeys, playing around, and it's far more enjoyable. This thing rocks. I'm going to have a hard time giving it up, if that's what it comes to.

What's next

2006-08-17T22:44:00.000-07:00

Many of you are wondering what happens now that I've turned in RC1. Except that there aren't many of you, and you weren't wondering that.

So I talked to my editor today and here's what it looks like:
- next couple of days-2 weeks: I get the next batch of edits back, which should, hopefully, be all minor polishes. I will be on vacation, working on my hot, hot, hot new MacBook Pro, which I totally don't have the money for and am hoping to sell used if it comes to that on my return.
- hopefully this means I'm not in Toledo, sipping on red wine while I fix things. Plus my ability to do research without my books and boxes on boxes of notes and photocopies is going to be pretty limited.

Side note: holy mackeral is this MacBook beautiful. Apple, to make sure the MacBook meets Apple's exacting standards for items I buy, took special care to make the keys at the top left look a little blistered. $3,000 laptop. One of the things Apple does really well is make opening the computer a pleasure - it's all so easy and each step is obvious, like unwrapping a candy. Design makes a difference.

- then when we've agreed on a version that can go to press, it goes to the manuscript people, who give it a severe series of readings for typos, fragmented sentences, and so on. That should be about 6 weeks from now, which is a good argument for me not to hurry back to work

- I fix everything the manuscript people come up with. I don't know how long that'll take, but typos aren't that tough to do edits on. So let's say it's... first week of October.

Then nothing happens for four months while it gets printed, and then bam! It comes out in February.

Now, whether I try and get another book project together or go back into IT is another thing entirely. We'll see, I guess. If I don't, it seems likely that I'd have to sell off this sweet-looking laptop with the slightly blistered keys.

Mmm.. research

2006-08-17T12:05:00.000-07:00

This is a box of notes, photocopies, printouts, and revisions.

Yes, it's *a* box. There's more. Been a loooong haul.

RC1 RTE

2006-08-17T03:06:00.000-07:00

(Released To Editor)

Version 3's done and submitted.

I think I may get up and get on the bike tomorrow for the first time in ages. Hot cha cha.

two left

2006-08-15T02:53:00.000-07:00

Early days of gambling done. Turned out to be a really easy re-write after I spent some time on the larger issues. I did realize it needs some more Hal Chase, though.

So I've got two fairly easy chapters and a lot of tidying (like the Notes chapter, for instance), some additional tweaking, and it'll be Release Candidate 1. That'll be pretty sweet.

McGraw down

2006-08-14T03:43:00.000-07:00

That dead bastard. ~23 pages. I submitted a draft w/o those touches (and a string of other errata) if my editor wants to look over the completed rewrites. I'd call this another beta version, but a much improved one. If I had those chapters done (maybe tomorrow) I'd call it a Release Candidate.

But they're not, and I'm tired. What I wouldn't do for Lexis-Nexis access. I can't believe how much money they want for that thing. Dammit.

Under 50 left

2006-08-13T02:54:00.000-07:00

Groundskeeping done, 40 to go. Next up is John McGraw, the horrible, no-good, very bad chapter that needs a lot of work. That scanned page was a McGraw.

"You suuuuuuck!"

2006-08-12T23:07:00.000-07:00

Heckling/fan participation/rioting is down. ~60 pages left? Next up, groundskeeping, which I loooove.

Also got a massive list of illustrations/photo requests in Friday.

Then I slept until 3pm today, which kinda messes up my schedule. It's weird, I'm kind of vaguely aware of how stressed out and tired I am, but it doesn't really become obvious until I do something like accidentally sleep for 15 hours.

Proquest sucks, an example

2006-08-12T21:56:00.000-07:00

June 4, 1974, was 10-cent beer night, one of the most notorious riots at a ballgame ever (along with Disco night).

Search Proquest Newspapers for any string, even as simple as "indians" between 6/4/197 and 6/6/1974

No documents found.

Search Proquest's "Historical New York Times" for those specific dates, and you'll turn up the NYT coverage.

The more I have to use search tools, the more I love Google. Type an operator, shit happens.

Life of a good idea: implementation looms

2006-08-10T18:08:00.000-07:00

So my Great Idea, which I lobbied for and shopped, which finally started to move as I was on my way out (and which I almost stuck around for) looks like it's going to go out in a couple weeks, while I'm in Europe.

I understand that if I rejoin Expedia I can get credited in the press release, but otherwise will not be mentioned, which... I don't know, I understand that I'm not there and they're not going to issue a press release that says "thanks for the original idea and detailed implementation plan to Derek Zumsteg, who has since left" but I'd still like credit.

Anyway, I said early on that I didn't care whose name was on it as long as it got done. I meant it, and it looks like that'll happen. When it happens, if I'm around. I'll post a long discussion of what happened and how the idea originated.

Back to the book.

One down, more to go pt 2

2006-08-10T01:56:00.000-07:00

Sign-stealing done. ~94p left, 11 days.

Automatic update nagging

2006-08-09T03:18:00.000-07:00

Windows XP's auto update finds something it wants for you.
It downloads and installs it.
It pops up a dialogue that asks you to restart now, or later. There is a bomb timer on the dialogue, so that no input is considered consent in 4:45.. 44... 43...
Later makes it go away, only to return after a couple minutes.

I've been using PCs since you could buy one. This is one of the most annoying things ever. I've put up with it for a year, but it's entirely broken and for all of the other updates they've done, Microsoft hasn't fixed it.

Downloading a huge backup of your site's databases? Burning a DVD? Doing some massive computational task? Screw you, we're rebooting whether you like it or not. You're only human, you can't stay awake forever (and if you want to hire someone on the other side of the planet and give them remote access to your machine to click the dialogue box for you while you sleep, best of luck to you).

I'm okay with a single nag. But what's the expected behavior for the "restart later" button? It's not "annoy me again in ten minutes". It's certainly not "annoy me again and restart if I don't respond because I'm making lunch."

What you want to happen is to send it away until you're done with whatever it is prevents you from rebooting right then.

Bad design happens, and I can see where update functionality like this probably doesn't go through a quality design phase. But really, a year of people complaining - a year of everyone at Microsoft being subjected to it themselves - and no one's thought to tweak this?

(btw, how to fix this)

Chilling

2006-08-08T22:43:00.000-07:00

If I can go another hour without working on the book, this will be the first day in ages that I haven't spent any time working on the book. I spent this morning gathering ingredients, and then a couple hours cooking and prepping, and then from five on a bunch of people came over for dinner.

So:
- I had no idea how much time it can take to entertain. I understand why people spend so much on catering now
- That felt really good
- My friends are cool
- Now that it's over, I'm about half happy I had a good time and relaxed and half overwhelmed with guilt and dread

One down, more to go

2006-08-07T00:59:00.000-07:00

Bat corking finished.

~125p of rewrites left, and I leave for London on 8/20. Things are going to get worse before they get better.

Proquest is a horrible research tool

2006-08-06T16:52:00.000-07:00

After Paper of Record destroyed itself, denying me access to the Sporting News, I've had to rely a lot on Proquest which I can access through my local library.

It is, without a doubt, the worst system I've ever been forced to use. I remember the bad old days of library systems when you'd have to crazy stuff like
subject:baseball +casey +stengel
hit 'enter' and hope for the best. I would love to have one of those systems lately.

If I had to sum it up, I'd say "Proquest doesn't do what you tell it to and provides radically different results given only slightly different inputs with no feedback as to why."

Here's an example. The opening Proquest "Basic Search" page looks like this:

In the search box, operators like "AND" and "OR" don't work as they're described in the search tips. More frustrating, it will not return results it obviously has.

The date range doesn't work at all. Searching within two dates always returns results outside of the range. There's no message as to why. Did it fail over? Were there no results? No clue.

The "database" dropdown allows me to select the "Proquest Newspaperes" and the New York Times. Once you've selected that, the results sometimes improve. If I search for some strings and don't get any results, narrowing it down to one paper often returns what I'm looking for.

Proquest doesn't have any of that documented or hint at it. Why would it? "Your comprehensive search failed. Would you like to limit it, search each possibility one at a time, and turn up more results?"

Gosh, that'd be great. Or, better yet, why doesn't the comprehensive search work like that?

The date limits, I should note, do sometimes work when searching individual sources. Whether or not they'll work on any given search, even if it's a source that's honored date limits in the past, is randomly determined at time of search submission.

Here's how bad this is: I've been using other sources to find references to New York Times articles and then gone to Proquest to search only the NYT only that day for that headline, and my success rate is probably 75%.

As an added bonus, at random times it will throw up a login screen which is impassable. Then I get to start over.

I'd love to use Lexis-Nexis, which I understand is far more difficult to use but 90 times as powerful. Let me at it. Except that it costs (I believe) $900,000 for an indvidual license.

Google, would you please smash these guys and hurry? Researchers everywhere are crying out in pain for a search solution that works. I'll write you a spec and everything.

The growing insanity

2006-08-05T19:23:00.000-07:00

After a particularly hard stint of rewrites and reresearch, I had a ton of books out on my desk, and took the opportunity to order my shelves of baseball books by color. It's a pleasing look -- oddly reassuring. However, the fact that I did it makes me wonder if I've finally cracked under the stress.

Today was the Hidden Ball Trick and the nth revision of the Black Sox chapter.

Unemployment

2006-08-04T19:09:00.000-07:00

I went to the grocery store this morning and the cashier asked me if I had the day off and I told her I was unemployed. "Any prospects?" she asked. I laughed. I don't know.

Every day I think the chances I go back into IT drop by a percent, half a percent, and I'm more likely to try and stick it out as a writer. Which would certainly make life spicier.

I got up this morning determined not to let the deadline stress get to me. I made breakfast, finished up some new material on the steroids chapter (turned out nicely), and moved on from there. All in all, I wasn't as productive as some of the other days lately, but I'm a lot happier with the product, and I'm settling in for the evening session with the M's game on, and I feel pretty good.

Surprise endings

2006-08-03T00:55:00.000-07:00

I took on a fairly huge chapter today (it runs 50 printed pages double-spaced) which has been in pretty good shape through the whole process. It was part of the initial proposal, which means in some form I've had years to work on this.

Anyway, I run through it really quickly, happy that it's largely light work with a little tweaking, addition, and subtraction. I get to the end and there's a note that the chapter runs too long (which it does). My editor would like to see 5-7 pages trimmed (and gave some really good advice on how to get there).

I started at the note for a good minute, not really believing I'd just read that. And then I started the second pass, cutting for length.

Ow, ow, ow

2006-07-30T17:34:00.000-07:00

So my editor mentioned in passing that she "really gave it to me" on two of the chapters.

Here's what she means.

Every page in the chapter looks like that. On several, the notes continue onto the back.

That was a long week

2006-07-29T23:40:00.000-07:00

So I got the edits back on the book and USS Mariner went down. Three days later, it came back up today. A brief chronology:
Wednesday:
- Carl Everett is tossed off the team, and then the M's trade for Ben Broussard. USSM sees a huge traffic spike that takes down the shared webserver and the shared database server. Our host shuts the site down.
- We eventually get a temporary page where I can start throwing up straight HTML updates. Good thing I was around back in the old days and know how to write those. You want Ajax and Web 2.0? I offer the h2 tag, and use ordered lists.
- Using parts from my last PC and stuff I've had hanging around, I build a new server

Thursday:
- At about 2 in the morning, I got up and drove to Enumclaw to volunteer for RAMROD
- At about 6:45, I drove home. This took forever.
- I get home, finish up prepping the server, and drive it Tukwilla. On the way down, I see that 405 North is just as bad as it was when I tried to get hom earlier.
- I take I-5 N back from Tukwilla to I-90. I-5 is a crawl.
- At some point, the hosting guys tell me they expect they'll have the box ready later that night. That doesn't happen.
- I go to sleep, exhausted from having slept maybe 2 hours since USSM went down

Friday:
- ETA for the new box is that evening. That turns out to be 8, when I get an email that I should check the box and then call in if it's cool.
- At about 8:20 I call in and get put on hold. I take the "leave us a message" option, but it blips and says "no message to send" and there's no option to re-record or anything.
- I file a support request
- I call back in and sit on hold for 45m, during which I bitch to Jeff Shaw on IM
- I give up and go to sleep

Saturday
- At eleven, having heard nothing, I call in and get someone, who promises to look into it and call me back
- I call back sometime after noon, and they've made no progress. We both work on it while on the phone and bring it up at about 2

I have a lot of mixed emotions about the whole thing. On the one hand, yeah, we're around in large part because of digital forest's largesse, so I understand that we're getting their tech's support as it's available, and got bumped every time a paying customer had any kind of issue. I totally understand.

But from my side, this was three days of troubleshooting, slipped estimates, during which my blood was 90% stress and 10% caffeine. It was three days to getting my box online, and if that hadn't worked, I don't know what I would have done next - I was considering buying a rack server from Dell and having it overnighted, and that would have been a couple thousand dollars, maybe.

Or turning out the lights.

Anyway, it's back to the book revisions. It sucks that I can't celebrate the resurrection of USSM with a rush of joyous content, but I've only got a few weeks before I need this draft turned around, and the book, unfortunately, has to be a priority right now.

It begins agaaaaaaaaaaaain, again

2006-07-26T10:44:00.000-07:00

Cracked open the manuscript to start revisions on version three. Right now, they look thankfully far less massive compared to the last set, though of course you don't really know until you get into it.

This ought to be fun.

The secret of the Aerobee Aeropress

2006-07-25T22:26:00.000-07:00

Tinker with the grind. After some experimentation, I'm getting some really stellar coffee. It really does make a remarkably smooth, sweet cup of coffee, with little of the nasty side effects that come with a french press or other devices.

Check out this review at Dan's Data for a really good overview.

I'm starting to really see the difference in beans, which is something that largely used to escape me (on the other hand, I once voluntarily drank Keystone Light on a regular basis, but in my defense, I was broke).

Sonics bleating falls on deaf ears

2006-07-18T22:07:00.000-07:00

I'm a guy who has been really interested in the economics of baseball teams and their relationships with their communities, I found the cries of the Sonics ownership group familiar and tiring, and I've pretty much tuned them out. It's the same story every city hears about every franchise, but the short version is "waaah, we're not making money, we need further taxpayer subsidies in the form of crazy-low leases/civic improvements/tax concessions/etc".

I didn't believe the Sonics were any different than any other pro franchise that cries poor while making money hand over fist one way or another. A revenue-sharing lease? How horrible for them. Someone find me a suitable hankie at once, so that I may dab at my eyes. I didn't follow it closely enough to really comment, though, so I let it go.

But I won't get particularly fancy here. Take, just for a second, the claim that the Sonics are a horrible, money-losing louse of a team, bound for bankruptcy.

Why would such a team sell for $350m?

The now-former ownership group paid ~$250m for it in 2000, right? So that's 100m in profit for holding the team for five years, a 40% return on their original investment in six years, and that doesn't count any payouts they extracted from the franchise directly, or tax write-offs they enjoyed.

I sometimes think about this like it's owning a classic car you don't drive. You keep it in the garage, you take it out for a spin every once in a while, keep it tuned and maintained, so every year it costs, say, $1,000 to keep in pristine condition. Each year it's in pristine condition, the value of the car goes up 10%. So this year it's worth $50k, next year it's $55k... but every year, you can claim, with a straight face, that you're losing money owning that beautiful Mustang.

Dog bites man. Sports franchise claims to be in horrible financial shape, makes owners huge amount of money on sale.

Moving around the music spectrum

2006-07-18T16:29:00.000-07:00

Sigur Ros sounds a lot like OK Computer-esque Radiohead to me.

Roaring back into fiction

2006-07-16T15:26:00.000-07:00

While on the STP, I also composed* a short, humorous science fiction story I'm now going to try and get published. It's been a long time since I tried to get fiction in a magazine, it'll be interesting to see how this goes.

* yes, in my head, I didn't have a notebook and pen out while pedaling

STP 2006: Walking through Napavine

2006-07-16T09:28:00.000-07:00

~205 miles, about 13 1/2 hours total time. Left Seattle at about five, rolled over the finish line at about six thirty. Average total speed, including stops, of just over 15 miles an hour. It was overcast and cool for about the first half, with almost no wind at all, and then the second half it was sunny and 70-80f with a lovely tailwind of helpfulness.

In Napavine, we ran into the Napavine Fun Times Festival. The road through town was closed, and a cop told us we had to walk through town.

We all got off our bikes, and since we're almost all in clipless pedals and shoes, we have to do that awkward biker click-click walk for half a mile, which is uncomfortable. The Napavine Fun Times festival consisted of people driving things - old cars, logging trucks, giant pickups, and so on - down the main drag of town, and throwing candy out to kids and horribly obese mothers alike ("Throw me some candy!"). And even though the candy was wrapped, if it touched the ground no one touched it, so as we walked through town in a giant string, we had to try not to step on melting mini-Hershey's chocolate bars, mints, Tootsie Rolls.

As we walked down the main drag, we were like a continuous line of annoyed but silent ants next to the giant trucks and pickups, and the residents of Napavine made little jokes, delivered with a kind of flat or derisive tone, which I'll present here as generalized questions along with the answers I bit back.
Q: "Must be nice to get off those bikes for a minute, huh?"
A: No. It's hard to walk around in these shoes, for one, but it's also hard to get back on them after a half-mile of walking.

The announcer for the parade, as a flatbed hauled a race car of some kind around:
Q: "And here's (whoever) and his number one car, (whoever)'s been racing since... he could walk, I guess, and he's doing really well at it. There are some other folks in our parade today. They're probably grateful for the chance to slow down for a minute."
A: No. If you're trying to do Seattle-to-Portland in a day, you're on a pretty brutal schedule. I've done it a couple times and this is the first time I've finished with the sun shining on me. An average total speed, including stops, of 14 miles an hour gets you to Portland at about eight. Stopping, especially non-productive stopping at food stops, is a debt you're going to have to pay on the road.

Q: "Aren't you supposed to ride those things?"
A: Aren't you supposed to have more teeth?

Being forced to walk through town was annoying, but if Napavine wanted to hold their celebration that day, that's fine, and I mean that in total sincerity: I grew up alongside Renton's River Days and Kent's Cornucopia Days. Knock yourself out.

It would have just been annoying. It was the people being dicks about it, like it was funny the bikers were forced to walk alongside logging trucks and the guy on the horse who wanted people to vote for him for some position. They're under no obligation to be civil, really, though STP riders drop an immense amount of money in each town they ride through (at the cost of traffic disruptions and a certain amount of dickishness from a sliver of the rider pool). It was the eat-shit grins and our inability to do much but smile and nod or risk further delays and hassles (and I'm sure that occured to them).

What else? My training regimen was both a wild success and a potential horrible failure, which scares me. As a result of all my hill training, I tore up the hills: I often got frustrated with everyone grinding them out and would pull out and race by everyone else. It was strange, I felt like I really didn't understand why they were all going so slow.

Here's how crazy it was: I didn't notice any significant climbs beyond the legendary Hill in Puyallup, and the bridge over the Columbia was impressive but not tough. I know STP's regarded as pretty flat, but all of the hills that had ever caused me trouble were hardly notable.

The bad part was that the lack of time on the bike started to really hurt late in the ride, not so much in the legs but all the peripherals (if you know what I mean) and particularly my back and shoulders. It was a little miserable. If I hadn't been so fast and there had been another couple of hours ahead of me, well, I'd have taken more time at the rest stops available in the last 50 miles, and that in turn would have really pushed the time back.

So!
First 100 miles: piece of cake (no, really, it was)
Next 50 miles: somewhat tougher piece of cake
Last 50 miles: oooooooooooh man

The other thing that goes on, and I haven't really figured out a way to solve this short of forming my own group, is there are a couple reasons the last 50 sucks:
- much of it is long, unshaded, and boring
- very long uphill stretches that are particularly draining on the rider who has already done 150+ miles
- and a more complicated one

If you're biking, you can save 25% of your energy or more by getting behind someone (ignore wind for a second). So if I can go 18 miles an hour on my own at a normal effort, I could go much faster if someone's in front of me doing 21, say.

If you have a partner or a group of people, you can take turns working hard at the front and then dropping back to save energy, and together your average pace can be a lot higher than what you could do individually.

Early in the ride, it's fairly easy to find those groups to glom onto (and, if you're a courteous rider, take your turn at the front). As the ride goes on, they get harder and harder to find, because as the race goes on, they're ahead of you.

I got to the midway point at Centralia fast, for instance, having been a part of a couple of those groups, and my chance after that were still slim. And very late, when you're dying for someone to draft, almost everyone on the road with you is in the exact same condition, so you're drafting someone at 17 and resting a little but dragging your time down.

I need a posse, clearly. I'm thinking about hiring a team of domestiques. My friend Joel had this idea a couple of years ago, and every year in those last few hours I start to think about what a great thing it would be to be dragged into Portland.

Wow... it's done

2006-07-14T11:38:00.000-07:00

Manuscript, unformatted: 192 pages. 89,385 words in 17 chapters. I added and cut a ton of stuff in this version.

Microsoft Word has, btw, been a huge pain in my ass through this whole thing in a way it's never been before. It's been unable to hold formatting, for instance, which is a ridiculous pain in the ass when I'm breaking chapters out, editing them, and pushing them back into the larger manuscript.

Anyway. Tomorrow's the Seattle-to-Portland. That ought to be fun. And by fun I mean "not really that fun at all".

Ding, order up. Well, sort of. Not really.

2006-07-11T22:26:00.000-07:00

Second draft's revisions are done. Two quick chapters and I'll have this off, and we'll see what they say.

284

2006-07-11T01:32:00.000-07:00

Got the sign-stealing stuff revised. A couple of cites to pick up and a possible move of part of it to another chapter that should be easy remain, but right now, the first revision's about 96% done, not including new material. I'm 96% exhausted.

I'm an idiot

2006-07-11T00:00:00.000-07:00

In case you weren't already of that opinion

My resume's got all kinds of impressive, huge stuff, doing anti-fraud measures that saved millions of dollars, building out cryptography systems, whatever.

I can't get my Aeropress to make good coffee. I'm baffled. I think this means I get sent back to coffee from crystals or something.

Seriously, it's
- ground beans
- hot water
- a plunger

And all I've gotten out of it so far is some really weak stuff I wouldn't use to water a plant. I'm ashamed of myself.

The impact of one bug

2006-07-08T21:29:00.000-07:00

I've been using Mozilla/Thunderbird since early versions. I've been through crappy point releases, weird UI, the whole thing. I'm starting to abandon it, though, because there's one serious bug that drives me nuts, and no one seems to care.

Say I'm in a text box, like the one I'm in right now. If I type one of a couple characters - the single quote ', the forward slash /, for instance, it brings up the find dialogue and then my text goes there.

The problem is that this doesn't happen every time (like it's not happening now) but it does happen most of the time, and I type really fast. So if I'm on USSM typing a post out and it happens, before I know it I've typed a whole set of words in there and I'm angry.

You can go search for this bug and find angry references, fixes that don't quite work, but there's no plans to fix it. So I'm drifting off to IE 7 and other browsers.

One bad UI bug, and I'm so frustrated and angry I'm tossing the product. If this was a shrink-wrapped piece of software, or a website issue, the lost sales would get this ripped out in a week, if that.

Bye Firefox. It was fun for a while.

Another chapter down

2006-07-08T00:08:00.000-07:00

Remaining: ~3 chapters (one might get pulled back in)
New chapters: 1? That's going to be interesting.

Or, to put it another way -- 85% done with the revisions for this draft. This is exhausting.

It begins agaaaaaaaaaaaain

2006-07-06T20:29:00.000-07:00

When I was a teenager, working at Target, I drank Coke like crazy. Or Pepsi, if it was on sale. For my lunch break, I'd buy a 2-liter bottle of whatever was on sale and drink it. The whole thing, sometimes. Coke, by the way, is by far the superior for the high-volume cola drinker. Pepsi's faults are much worse over the course of a can, much less a couple of glasses.

In college, I went through soda like crazy. I'd pile up cans on the help desk where I was working, and I kept pallets of the stuff in my room in case I ever decided to drink all six cans in the mini-fridge at once or something. I had trouble sleeping, my skin was pretty bad, and sometimes, after going through a string of Cokes, I'd feel my heart doing a hummingbird impression. So I stopped. I started to sleep well for the first time in years, my skin cleared up, and my heart's been fine. I didn't drink any cola of any kind for years (though I did go through Sprite (and Citra, for a while) like crazy during my time at Wireless). I didn't have anything significantly caffinated until maybe a year ago.

But I love the smell of coffee. I like the taste. So I started drinking it once in a while, not ordering a decaf when having a meeting over coffees with someone at work, and since then, it's been a long slide. Today I bought a grinder and made a drip cup for the first time in almost ten years.

I'll skip the philosophizing. I'm hoping I don't buy a $150 coffee grinder while I'm semi-employed, because I'm not sure a "required author tool" would get by.

Gasoline soaked tissue paper and matches indeed

2006-07-05T22:10:00.000-07:00

My replacement iPod arrived today. It was all new-in-plastic and everything.

Didn't work. Doesn't output anything to the headphones. Wheeeeeeeeeeee!!

Search results

2006-07-05T20:37:00.000-07:00

I do a ridiculous amount of searching, from random internet stuff to combing Proquest (and the totally broken Paper of Record, which has been returning blank results for some time now), and I've noticed something weird lately-- Google kinda sucks.

I don't know when it happened, because I used them exclusively for so long, but on a few things I was dissatisfied with, I threw the same query to MSN, and the results were way better. Yahoo, same deal. I'd heard complaints that Google's last re-indexing pretty dramatically screwed things up, but I'd never really noticed it.

I'm really surprised.

ooooooooooooh crud

2006-07-03T15:07:00.000-07:00

So the good news is that my publisher keeps flipping out over the book. They're just loving it.

The bad news is they want to move the release date up.

I'd hoped that this would be a fairly lazy summer, with me working on the book, doing more research as required, getting some quality biking time in, and spending more time with my wife while I figure out what I want to do next.

That looks like it's not going to happen. I'm not sure how I should feel about this -- overjoyed or depressed. I'm both right now.

Large scale buyer's regret

2006-06-28T22:38:00.000-07:00

I feel good about my decision to quit. This week I've been in a situation where I felt, briefly, like I have most of the last six or so months - a mixture of anger over a situation, dread over the consequences of pointlessly fighting it again, resignation - and when I realized that I didn't need to argue it, didn't even need to get worked up, all the tension left me.

I'm a little scared, obviously, that I'm stepping out on my job without having another lined up, and that I'm walking away from what used to be the best job I ever had, but I've been in good spirits all week, like I was when I was happy at work, and it's felt really good.

I don't know what I'll do if I decide to take another IT job in a couple months, especially how I ensure that I end up somewhere I can be happy for a long time, but I actually wish I'd done this a long time ago, when it was clear that things were bad and weren't going to get better for the forseeable future.

Life of a good idea

2006-06-27T18:31:00.000-07:00

It looks like it's caught fire and things should happen quickly now. It might even happen a week after I'm out, which would be a shame. I wish there was a way I could stake my claim without giving the idea away, but I don't want to get sued into a smoking ruin.

Still -- Expedia, and an opening to take a lead in being green. Here's hoping.

And that clinches it

2006-06-27T18:23:00.000-07:00

My iPod blew up today. What do they make these things out of, matches and gasoline-soaked tissue paper?

Why I quit, a summary

2006-06-26T16:15:00.000-07:00

Generally: I have serious concerns about Expedia's direction as a company, and particularly the increasing view of the tech-side as not a competitive advantage or even a source of innovation, but as a cost to be held down. I come up with a lot of cool ideas, and one of the more depressing things I had happen to me was to email (say) the business owner for a line of business and say "Hey, I know you're trying to do x, and I have a couple ideas for how to do that - can I get half an hour on your schedule or talk to one of your people?" and have them ignore me entirely. Drove me nuts.

I feel like a startup would be a much better place for me like that.

Specific to my work, for the last six-eight months, I've been through a lot:
- I was one of two program managers at the head of a huge Expedia-wide battle over whether we should continue to have program managers or whether our project management functions should be taken over by project managers, our analysis-and-problem-solving functions taken over by product managers on the business side, and our work reduced to nothing. That was a nasty and bitter fight. I'll move on.
- I fought constantly with my business owner, and because I don't want to spike my blood pressure, I'm going to gloss over that except to say... no, I'm not going to say anything. I keep wanting to type things here and I'm happy I'm holding back.
- Over the course of this project, my manager's been a bad fit for me, and with 20 direct reports, he didn't have enough time to try and make it work, or to substantially support me in my constant conflicts with the business side.
- In order to build a more collaborative, team-oriented environment, they threw everyone in my group (of ~70) into two giant rooms with tables lined up, so you get about three, four feet of tablespace, and it's uncomfortable, loud, and generally unpleasant.

I hope that's sufficently informative while still reasonably polite and neutral.

It's left me burned out. People keep asking me where I'm going, and they're surprised that I don't have another job lined up, but I've been unhappy for a long, long time, and the great people I work with have kept me there -- Expedia's work force, with extremely rare exceptions, is made up of extremely bright, fun-to-work-with people from every place in the world, and it makes for a great environment to discuss problems, because there are so many ideas for ways to attack it. So I'm leaving my friends, and we'll see what happens.

Thirty five months in seventeen syllable increments

2006-06-26T09:33:00.000-07:00

Thirty five months in seventeen syllable increments
An Expedia retrospective in approximate chronological order

Part one: Classic Custom Vacations

4662 – Luxury cancellation waiver

For a modest cost
Gary the super-agent
Clears trouble from way

4717 - Hotel preregistration in DaVinci

lines are for suckers
you, preregistered traveler --
go straight to your room

5021 – All-inclusive short term fix for DaVinci

everything paid for
except the really cool stuff
still, free drinks all week

5054 - Better SEM with redirects

our beautiful site
needs more people to visit
enter many many keywords

5276 - Automated competitive analysis for hotel rooms

you’re our favorite
hotels say with fingers crossed
soon we’ll check on that

5358 - Hotel rate investigation

at our fine hotel
cancel fees are one third your stay
except on full moons

5360 - Flexible vacation search

Oahu, sixth room
tired, the last five a blur
jaws drop, we say “wow”

Flexible vacation search is one of my favorite specs. It’s got ambition, a cool idea, humor, quotes, and everything

5403 (Bug 1968) – Same day advising bugfix

no shows or no rooms
the choice of our latest fix
is no choice at all

5436 - AVS checking for CC transactions

shave fractions of cents
the Great Wall is seen from space
built up from small stones

The spec was also prepared for the “but wait—“ reaction with a lengthy digression on whether the Great Wall could indeed be seen from space

5483 – (Citadel) Improve credit card security in the database

demo for net ops:
select star from c cardlog
but first, please sit down

5499- Mach-1 Ticketing and Fufillment

where do tickets sleep
blank and unsold, in drawers
dreaming of travel

5519 - The new luxury waiver

we happily announce
our waiver covers all air
with kids waived for free

5593 - Same day cancellation faxes

happy customers
were our first priority
now, time for money

5881 - Remove barriers to CCV network integration

working on Mainten
my connection slows, stops, dies
I curse Hydra-5

6006 - Move security credentials into database

my iceberg projects
calve off deep blue shards of work
that shatter themselves

6474 - Automated loads for Westin Rio Mar

net rate breaks are sweet
each booking worth more money
Classic makes profits

6519 - Ground system gap analysis

every call is slowed
and the pain of product load
can we please fix this?

6520 - Citadel 1.1

we sigh in relief
but the back door’s still open
also, the windows

Part Two, GPS (“Core”)

6377 - Change Credit Card Encryption to Use a Standard Algorithm
among pizza boxes
black hat frowns, scratches goatee
moves on to Orbitz

6645 - Cryptography Service
secrets passed in
returned as alien words
order is maintained

Part Three, APAC

6930 - Japan Point of Sale trip requirements
a flight, a cruise, a tour
a package, surfing, a car
together, apart

6929 - JPOS Authorization and Permissions
Please enjoy your stay
We’re happy to have you back
Can I see ID?

7174 - Ariadne: Search API
Travelocity
Orbitz, kayak, and priceline --
Eat our dust, suckers

The week in quitting

2006-06-25T13:18:00.000-07:00

I'm a little torn about what to say about this week, since I don't want to slag anyone on my way out, but I've encountered a couple of dramatically different reactions:
- You're quitting, seriously?
- Oh crap, that sucks.
- Where are you going?
- I'd love to leave too, but I don't have another job lined up

I'm a little shocked at how many people came to talk to me about their own discontent. I'd bet in February, after everyone's annual-review stock vests, Expedia's going to see a huge number of resignations

And then from managers
- I just want to make sure you're doing what's best for you (but really I don't care and won't talk about that at all)
- I know there are serious problems here, but I'm not running away (by the way, if you're a manager out there, this is a really crappy thing to say to someone)
- Don't quit, come work for me on my team (several)

I know in some ways that this puts my boss/his boss on the defensive, because walking away without having another job isn't just a loss of a person, it's a pretty dramatic statement about how bad things are... I'll stop whining. Next week should be fun.

Quitting time

2006-06-19T20:58:00.000-07:00

I turned in my notice today and it was an interesting experiment in informal networks. I went in early to prep (I had figured there was about a 25% chance I'd be escorted out) and sent my formal email to
- my boss
- my team leader (well, kind of, as much as Scrum has team leaders)

Then I let three of my friends know. Then I went out to the hall to talk to my scrum master, and *bam* someone a degree away walked by and he knew, despite me being with one of the three people that might have possibly told him.

That was the rest of my day -- ricochets. There's a program manager I used to work for in another group I have an immense amount of respect for (and feel like I owe a lot to) and I wanted to talk to personally after I'd given notice, but that was impossible as being a super program manager and having amazing powers of telepathy, she somehow knew immediately and sent *me* an email. I joked with her that the only way I could have managed to talk to her ahead of the news would have been to discuss it five, ten minutes ahead of turning anything in.

What's interesting, though, is that it reached a certain number of people and then stopped entirely. So a large portion of the people I work with know, and the rest don't, because it hasn't been formally announced yet (and no one reads this).

I wish there was a way I could have mapped the spread of the news. It would have proved interesting.

Training users to be thieves through copy protection

2006-06-19T20:51:00.000-07:00

Really short rant:

When I buy a CD, it should play on my computer. I don't think that's unreasonable. I do most of my music listening on my boxes, often while working.

I haven't decided if I'm going to return these things and raise a stink, but what this really makes me want to do is go on the internet and find decent rips I can listen to. Is that really what they want to train me to do? Figure out how to get music for free to get around their retarded copy protection?

Fast and Furious 3: Tokyo Drift

2006-06-18T22:07:00.000-07:00

I loved and hated this movie, in much the same way I loved and hated the first one.

It's got amazing racing scenes, a pretty bad plot and some hoooorrrible dialogue. But seeing the racing on the big screen, it was absolutely worth it. As Roger Ebert wrote in his review:

"The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift" is the third of the F&F movies; it delivers all the races and crashes you could possibly desire, and a little more.

There are some great funny scenes, some jaw-dropping driving scenes, and when it's not dragging through the plot, it's worth it.

The best part was that it was a return to using actual cars for much of the movie. CGI's got better and better, but there's nothing like the weight and impact of actual things: The Train gives me chills because that's a real train getting strafed by a real plane, or derailing.

There's still something plastic and unreal in even the best work, like the new Star Wars movies, that prevents the suspension of disbelief and really buying into the world (unless it's totally animated, and then you either can believe in the form or not). You can't refuse to believe that a train's crashing off the rails if John Frankenheimer crashes a real train and films it.

The benevolent order of bicyclists

2006-06-11T15:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was on a long (and hilly) Cascade Cycling Club ride and I blew a tire. As I was trying to change it, every group that went by -- and I was close to the front, and we'd been up a huge hill, which meant it was spread out -- asked me if I needed help, if I had everything I needed, and so on. It actually got kind of annoying, trying to fix it and acknowledging everyone.

After everyone had gone by, though, I realized that my piece-of-shit Performance CO2 inflator would not puncture the cartridge (short version: when you screw a cartridge in, there's a little fitting in there that punches the metal, releasing the pressurized air for use). I tried, I strained, and I realized that I was in the middle of nowhere with a flat tire and no way to fix it. I had spare cartridges, but no spare inflator (and why would I?).

I spent some more time struggling before I called home and asked for an extraction, even though I couldn't explain where I was. But I was saved! Two guys (not from the ride) came by, asked the question, and I said "do you have a pump I can use?" And soon, I'd given my cartridge to them to use in their non-Performance inflator (fun note: one of the guys had had the exact same problem with his Performance unit).

I then hauled back to the start point before disaster could strike.

I spend a lot of time bitching about stuff, but I love this about serious cyclists. There are cyclists who are jerks, ride inconsiderately, sure. But I'm as anti-social as they come and I ask "You all right?" every time I see someone, and I'd be happy to give whatever I can spare.

And I know too that had I taken a thorn today and had my pump explode, the next biker to come by would have helped. It's like a cool club, where everyone's looking out for each other.

This weekend's tally:
Saturday: ~29 miles, ~2,000 feet of climbing
Today: 95+m, ~3,000 feet of climbing

And I feel really good. If I can keep up this training pace, I may kick STP's one-day ass this year for the first time ever (having survived it twice before).

Open space

2006-06-07T23:01:00.000-07:00

Soooo I don't hate it. Well, I do hate it. I hate some of it.

The hate:
- Can be really loud
- Gets even louder than that at times
- Hard to concentrate
- 3' of desk space means effectively no desk space
- Uncomfortable

The good:
- It is nice to hang out with the team I'm working with all the time. I really like them, and we seem to have a pretty good sense of humor
- It's good to be in on all the team conversations and decisions
- Bonding. Awwww.

Overall, it's really made me wish there was a compromise solution. I wouldn't mind an open space environment for a small team, with some meeting space. But this thing, where we've got... 30, 40 people in a huge room? This just isn't right.

Refactoring writing

2006-05-30T01:34:00.000-07:00

Being so steeped in software development, I tend to see a lot of things in terms of software processes. Sometimes the tools help, and often, they don't.

When I got through with a version two of a chapter for the book, my editor returned it with the most brutal comments to date. The thing had notes all over it, and she gave me longer, more general notes on the backs of the sheets. She wanted a return to something similar to what the first chapter's structure was like, and from there, many comments on the different sub-sections, and then almost infinite bugs on the smaller parts.

I've tried two ways to go through this so far. The first is the "build it from scratch" approach, where you tear up the old one and re-write. This is tough, if only because it requires you to do a lot of research again where you can't re-build off your citation index or whatever. It's time-intensive and wearying.

The next is the bug-fixing. Each comment's a defect in the original, and for each comment, you make a single correction. Typo, possible new wording, suggestion that two paragraphs should be moved up ahead of something else? Do them all, one at a time, and then put a check mark by the comment. This works fine when you're close to the finish, the structure, tone, and other high-level issues are resolved, and the adjustments are all minor, even if they're numerous.

On a chapter like this, that'd be equally disastrous. Moving everything around without fixing the larger structural issues doesn't help.

I've been on products like this. It sucks.

What I've ended up doing on chapters at this stage is refactor in place. I read all the comments and identify that the biggest points are. Structure was the big one. The revised structure for v2 had led to repetition of information, poor connections between subjects, and was responsible for many of the smaller issues as well.

So I fixed that: I built out a skeleton and then took all of the discrete pieces and slowly, in order, worked them in, writing new sections, deleting duplicate chunks as I found them, and as I built the structure and fleshed it out, flow came more easily, and I was able to adapt the things I'd already written to fit. At any point, though, my editor could have called and told me she needed a draft right away, and I'd have been able to turn over a chapter that was x% new, well-flowing writing and the remainder the old version 2, with no duplication between the two. It worked great.

When I was done, I had a dramatically improved chapter, but had only directly addressed the top-level complaint. So I went through and read the second-tier: move this paragraph here, this other paragraph here, and found that they'd all been resolved by the structure work. Then the sentence structure/corrections too -- the rewrite had fixed easily two thirds of those. The only remaining work was the request for new stuff (new features!) like a better description of a particular incident, and so on.

Those I still have to do. But ten years ago, I couldn't have managed it. Given a large number of comments on a short story (say, from a workshop), I would look through for some suggestions I thought would make it a little better and take those. If there were structural problems, or issues with characters, I'd either ignore them or if I agreed, use them as justification to tear the whole thing down and restart.

I used to beat myself up sometimes for not continuing to work as little as possible while continually honing my writing, but it's been interesting to see that the different things I have done, from baseball writing to screenwriting to the being steeped in methodologies of quality software development, have each given me tools to easily solve problems that once blocked me entirely.

It makes me want to go write that novel again.

eBay ignores preferences to spam me

2006-05-27T12:24:00.000-07:00

I received an email from ebay today encouraging me to sell something I'd bought earlier. The email's got information about a prucahse I made, which meant it was unlikely to be a spam, and the headers etc check out as far as I can tell (included below). This kind of thing annoys me, and ebay's known for changing their privacy terms in order to better send you email (opt out? we've changed the categories and opted you into them all). I hunted through the email...

eBay sent this e-mail to you because your Notification Preferences indicate that you want to receive information about Special Events and Promotions. eBay will not request personal data (password, credit card/bank numbers) in an e-mail. You are subscribed as derekecom@speakeasy.net, registered on eBay.

If you do not wish to receive further communications, sign into "My eBay" by clicking on the "My eBay" link found at the top of the eBay home page and change your Notification Preferences. Please note that it may take up to 10 days to process your request.

Craaaaaaaaap, so that's it. I head off to ebay...

Nope. Moreover, I haven't done anything to my user preferences in ages, and certainly haven't done unsubscribed from email promotions in the last ten days.

eBay's not just opting me into emails and forcing choice on me: they're now actively ignoring my preferences so they can send me mail. Is this a violation of CAN-SPAM, in that eBay's not providing a working unsubscribe mechanism? Or does their business relationship with me get them out of that? If nothing else, it's a real annoyance.

I haven't heard from customer support yet. I'll be shocked if I do. For one, there's was no suitable category to submit this under, and the chances of getting a reasonable response are pretty slim even if there was.

Headers:
From - Sat May 27 12:17:00 2006
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From: "eBay"
Reply-to: eBay-US.29843852.63877.0@reply3.ebay.com
To: (me)
Subject: Sell these items you bought on eBay--and get something new!
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Dread and dessert

2006-05-25T20:51:00.000-07:00

I lose my office tomorrow. We're having a knock-down going-away party. I'm baking a nice apple cake. Mmm. And then next week, I'm going to be assigned to work in an open space, which will drive me insane, hopefully to move to cubicles (wait, not cubicles -- the Herman Miller cubicle, the Action Office or the Resolve, maybe) in July.

I gotta say -- and I say this knowing people from work read HLWT -- I don't think I'm going to make it to the part with the fancy cubicles. I can't work in two feet of table space, and I don't understand why someone would make me do so.

My apple cake is really good, though, and it's going to be nice, even if it's the last time, to host an Arpan & Derek Friday Party in the House of Sarcasm 2 and make margaritas for everyone.

Swiftboating climate change and Lincoln-Douglas

2006-05-23T22:55:00.000-07:00

(... since I don't want to further flirt with Expedia-related whining)

It's been strange these last few days to see the counter-attack on Al Gore and the "Inconvenient Truth" documentary that's coming out. There are paid press-releases, unintentionally hilarious commercials, and all kinds of good stuff.

I mean, really, what do we know? Global temperatures are up. This goes along with a massive change in how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases like methane we're putting into the atmosphere (and there are some other things, like jet contrails and stuff, but ignore that for a second). The overwhelming consensus (right or wrong) is that pollution's changing the earth's climate. The rational opposition argues that we don't really know, and there's no point to doing anything if it's all the sun's increased output or whatever (the increase in diet soda consumption since the invention of Tab, it doesn't matter).

But to me, if you're looking at this like a patient, say, and they're about to experience kidney failure because of many factors, some of which you definately control, you don't walk away from treatment because you don't potentially control them all.

Especially since, and I'm digressing, a great deal of pollution is caused by waste. Like incandescent lightbulbs compared to the new flourescents -- they're huge energy hogs, for no real point. Poor car standards, and so on. If we decided to make a huge push in the US to not pollute, not even for green reasons but because it'd help wean us off Mideast oil, the actual cost per-person wouldn't be that great and we'd reap all kinds of great benefits (cleaner air = better health, even if you don't think it'll help global warming).

Anyway. The point's that what frustrates me about this kind of debate isn't that there are people going after Al Gore using somewhat spurious attacks because they're being paid to, but that I feel like as a country, there are a million really good arguments, from climate change to improving our health to improving our national security, to come up with a better way, and this kind of crap-throwing contest keeps everyone from realizing that probably 75% of us could agree on good things to do and start there.

What's interesting is that while this kind of all-fronts media blitz is a relatively new tactic, the whole thing didn't get invented by Karl Rove a couple years ago. The old days of politics are frequently held up as a shining example of how great things used to be, when politicians would debate each other seriously and whatnot.

That's not what happened, though. If you go back to the Lincoln-Douglas campaigns, even, there are all kinds of spurious charges made against the other person, often based on misrepresentations of what their opponent said, conspiracy claims are thrown about, and they're supported by an active political press on both sides eager to attack the other and support their own guy ("Here's what our guy said.... and what the other guy said isn't important."). Lincoln argued in favor of a middle solution against Douglas, arguing that slavery should be contained, and was charged with being a radical abolitionist. Douglas was charged with participating in a conspiracy to turn the nation all-slave (which, in fairness, he wasn't).

I'm sure that had Al Gore toured the country in 1854 giving speeches at any lyceum that would let him on stage, the political parties of the time would have carefully watched him, poked at him with some questions, and then after much back-room discussion, taken strong positions on him and started slinging attacks of the time.

This is both disheartening, in that we haven't come far, and hopeful, in that despite the horror and chaos of political life, things get done, and progress gets made.

Sprint over, sprint starts

2006-05-19T22:21:00.000-07:00

I got the chapters done, they seem really happy with them, which is great. If they'd sent them back for another set of massive revisions I'd have snapped, I think -- I was edgy and stressed all week.

Meanwhile at work, I start working on a scrum team (it's a development methodology, where you try and deliver small chunks in two-week increments) this next week, and at the end of the week I lose my lovely office, which I share with a dude I really like, and go to work in a giant room with tables and no shelves or anything, because... I don't know. I haven't heard a good explanation yet. Essentially, someone made a very early decision that the new project team would have its own space and Expedia's extremely complicated politics related to office space made it unworkable, so they bought space.

At some point, though, as they continue to build out open space, they're making a business decision that

"collaboration" + cost savings > productive employees in private/shared offices

The big issue I have with this (well, besides working in offices with doors that close being a big reason I joined the company) is that it assumes that everyone works the same way: that someone like me, who tends to do really well at things like writing specs quickly, coming up with eight random implementation ideas, research, whatever, all things that require me to sit around and concentrate for a while, is going to be just as well-off as the team leader who loves working in open environments and isn't bothered at all by constant distraction because they're not working on stuff that requires that kind of sustained thinking.

This is all ridiculous to me. The cost of having a tech worker is easily $100,000/year in salary and benefits. Getting more out of your tech worker dramatically improves the return on that investment. Office space is not that much more expensive than raw cube space.

Anyway, this has all been studied and documented and whatever, and companies still do this. I'm not even surprised, though.
"We need to put 80 people in a tiny space."
"Let's make them all stand! Standing takes 20% less space than sitting. We can give each person a 18" wide countertop for their computer and then 18" in depth off the countertop..."
"Perfect!"

Hey, that's great, instead of requiring 8'x 8' for a cube, you're down to 2'x 1.5' !! How outstanding! And I'm sure everyone buys into whatever corporate cultural argument you're making, so morale will go up, too.

Every person who quits over this stuff costs the company a ton of money. Turnover's amazingly expensive. Every person who is 10% less effective costs the company $10k/year at least.

Madness.