A View From the Beach

A Visit to the Annenberg Space for Photography

2009-12-18T20:05:00.000-08:00

For several months I have been hearing about the new photography gallery called The Annenberg Space for Photography. I’d also heard that there was an exhibit up of the works of Walter Iooss and Neil Leifer, two veteran Sports Illustrated sports photographers. I’m not big on sports photography anymore, since I don’t follow organized sports, but I do know how to do sports photography and more importantly I know greatness. And these guys are great. Of course “great” in photography often goes according to the “f/8 and be there!” rule. Neil Leifer may fit into that category with his persistence, work ethic and willingness to shoot anything and everything, but Walter Iooss has a more artistic attitude and bent. And I think both of them communicate this well in the video interviews that accompany the several hundred photos.

One does not have to be a sports fan to appreciate the unique beauty and appeal in these photos, but for those who are sports fans and not photography aficionados, they too will appreciate the talent and vision expressed here.

I would guess that there are probably about 100 photos by each photographer in the entire exhibit. Many of these photos are prints on the walls, or video stills on the many monitors that are also on the walls, but most of the photos are best seen on the giant screen video monitor in the central Digital Gallery. This display intersperses the photographs with a long interview with the photographers and several of their many subjects.

For example, we see several photos of Jackie Joyner-Kersee including a series Walter shot with her, and these are interspersed with JJK talking about being an athlete and working with the photographer, and what the photos mean to her both as an observer of them as well as the subject that was being observed by the photographs, and by us the viewer. She is the most expressive of the people interviewed, which includes other athletes as well as colleagues and editors at SI. One thing I learned was that Walter Iooss was the guy who started the “tradition” of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition when, in the sports doldrums of late winter he suggested shooting some models in swimsuits in the tropics. That idea would certainly come from Walter - one can tell just from watching and hearing him that he enjoys life.

Both Leifer and Iooss started with SI as teenagers in the late 50s. I was pleased to hear both Walter and one of the older editors give credit to the photographers who preceded them and taught them, and helped them along. One of these was John Zimmerman, who I had the honor and pleasure to work with a few times as he was transitioning from semi-retirement to fully retired. I am not of the caliber of Walter Iooss - or John Zimmerman - but it was nice to hear a photographer of the stature of WI give credit to JZ. One night on location with John he talked about his experience shooting for SI, especially in the tropics and the wilds of Africa, and what it was like to work with Walter and Julie and many of the people he worked for. It would be nice to someday find an exhibition of JZ’s work.

I took the small camera with me and though I didn’t take any pictures of the photos on exhibit, I took a couple of exterior shots of the gallery’s sign, and one interior shot of the back wall of Wally’s Cafe. This is a small space inside the gallery that really looks like a modern kitchen, though in the photo you can see that the back wall has a nice collection of books and wine.

The rest of the gallery is essentially wide hallway spaces with prints and monitors, and a room with a large monitor, all arrayed around the main digital gallery. The whole space is smaller than you might think given the name of Annenberg and the location in Century City, but the smallish size keeps the feel of the place intimate. There is some cutting edge technology (for mid 2009), including the main display in the main gallery and a small promo space with a pair of Microsoft table computers. (These aren’t tablet computers, but the coffee tables that are actually computer monitors with touch screens that allow you to move the 10 or so display photos around on the monitor, to orient them and to resize them. (You’ll get the full effect within about two minutes.) One other piece of great technology is the programming that leads the main show, the interview and photo show on the main screen. I don’t know what program the designers used, but the show is very good and whoever put together the animation and production was obviously professional.

The photo at the top is the best picture I got of the exterior sign, and the interior space of Wally’s cafe is on my Flickr page. I also took some pictures of the big buildings that make up the Culver Plaza, and some of these are interesting too with the reflections of the late afternoon three days before winter solstice. Take a look at them.

Update: I forgot to mention that, in addition to the main exhibit of Iooss and Leifer, there was a small video exhibit running in the Workshop Area that included The Art of Surf Photography, which featured Brewer, and The Science of Hitting, which featured a former journeyman major league catcher (that I’d never heard of). The piece on Brewer and surf photography was kind of interesting, especially since he has been doing surf photography since before the short board renaissance, and has pictures that cover the timeline since then, with action surf and studio shots of the people.

PC company economics, July 2009

2009-08-09T17:36:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago the announcements of quarterly (and some annual) quants came out for public companies, including the major software and PC companies.

This report cycle was significant because it was the first year in which Microsoft reported a loss. And this loss was significant at $1 billion. From the Financial Times:

The world’s biggest software company said revenues had declined 17 per cent amid falling global demand for new PCs and servers. The news follows a spate of more positive earnings news from Apple, Intel and IBM.

Microsoft also sounded a far more cautious note about the prospects for a recovery in the second half of 2009.

“It’s going to be difficult for the rest of the year,” said Chris Liddell, chief financial officer. “We’re really still not sure we’re out of the woods.”

While the software company had been expected to suffer more than other leading tech companies, given its heavier exposure to cyclically volatile PC and server sales, the extent of the decline was unexpected and its shares fell by nearly 8 per cent in after-market trading and were off by 10 per cent in early trading on Friday.

The setback in the fourth quarter of Microsoft’s fiscal year caps the worst year in its 23-year history as a public company, and the first in which it has seen a revenue decline.

Broader trends in the technology markets have also hurt the company. Netbooks, the small, low-cost laptops that have been the one bright spot this year, now account for 11 per cent of all PC sales, according to Microsoft.

However, it receives much less for the version of the Windows operating system shipped with these machines.

In spite of the latest signs of weakness, Microsoft’s shares are still up nearly 60 per cent since their low point in April on hopes that new product launches, including the Windows 7 operating system, will revive its fortunes next year.

Mr Liddell said that Microsoft was not anticipating any further big declines from current levels of spending by its customers, and sees “the potential for improvement” in 2010.

A 29 per cent plunge in revenues from Microsoft’s core Windows PC division, to $3.11bn, aggravated the decline in the latest quarter. Microsoft was also affected by an upgrade guarantee that allows PC buyers to switch to Windows 7 when it goes on sale in October.

Heavy cost-cutting made up for some of the shortfall, with Microsoft slicing 10 per cent from its operating expenses compared with a year before. But net income fell 29 per cent to $3.045bn, or 34 cents a share.

There are some odd factors in here.

Intel - which makes processors for nearly all the PC manufacturers - did well.
IBM did well, though many - and perhaps most - of the servers it sells run linux.
Apple, which is a direct competitor of Microsoft, did very well.

In fact Apple had their best non-holiday quarter ever, making $1.3 billion on profit.

So Microsoft’s financial and market experts say that the whole industry is down due to the recession, but in fact it is Microsoft’s business that is down, and forecast to be negative for some period in the future.

This is starting to look like those years in the auto industry when the American car makers said things were bad, but the Japanese car makers did well continuously.

In both cases, the problem is not consumer or corporate sales as much as it is management ignorance. Microsoft has a problem, but management wants to lay the blame somewhere else rather than actually examine the problem analytically.

Twilight Dance Series 2009

2009-08-02T12:25:00.000-07:00

When I finally restarted swim workout in earnest (every Tuesday and Thursday 7:30-8:30) it meant I had to give up some evenings. I’ve been well disciplined in going to workout every time for about a month now - and that means that I’ve missed the entire Twilight Dance Series on the Santa Monica Pier thusfar this summer.

That means that I’ve missed Joan Baez, Sgt. Garcia, the Squirrel Nut Zippers and Thomas Mapfumo. (I’ve heard music of three of these four and like what I’ve heard. The description of Sgt. Garcia made them sound good too.)

But this coming Thursday I’ll be skipping swim practice to go see Dave Alvin and his group The Guilty Women playing live.

And three weeks from that event I’ll be skipping swim practice again to see Lila Downs.

Mmm, these will be fun. :-)

The Spectacle of Religions

2009-08-02T11:17:00.000-07:00

I was walking back from the beach (morning surfcheck) and nearly got run over by the annual Festival of Chariots, or as we local residents call it - the Krishna parade.

Well okay, I wasn’t really “nearly run over” because the people and the carriages move at a slow walking pace, but the parade was about to start at Pico and Main St., less than 100 yards from where I crossed Main. So I decided to wait a few minutes and watch the spectacle as it passed by.

This was the third time I’ve seen the parade, and at least the fifth time that I was aware of it as it went by. (I live close enough to Main St. that it’s easy to hear the amplified chanting and music.) It’s interesting to see the collection of people who are part of this religious celebration. There were several hundred people walking, dancing and chanting as they preceded and accompanied alongside the three “chariots” ((more like giant carriages). There are a few people riding along on the carriages: some are the transport workers who 1) pull on the traces to provide propulsion, 2) man the tiller or steering wheel, 3) operate the brakes. These workers ride on the bottom deck. There are also a number of people riding on the second deck with the avatar of the god that particular carriage is carrying.These appear to be the priests and priestesses who have literally achieved a higher plane and are allowed to approach the symbol of the god(dess).

The whole spectacle is quite entertaining due to its colorful clothing and decoration, the aforementioned walking, dancing and chanting, and especially the happiness and apparent peacefulness of the participants. A number of them, let’s call them the outwalkers, hand out little pamphlets and lollipops to bystanders. (I graciously declined taking any of these offered “gifts”.)

Unfortunately I hadn’t carried my camera with me on this surfcheck (small waves, but good for beginners) so I can’t show any original photos. (I remember taking pictures in the last year or two, but cannot find those photos.) However here are some other’s photos:

ChezLuna’s picture of the Santa Monica Festival’s three chariots
Flickr photos of all FoVs worldwide
Picasa photos of the Santa Monica FoV

Here is Wikipedia on the “International Society for Krishna Consciousness” or as they call themself, ISKCON.
Here is the city of Santa Monica’s listing of the Festival of Chariots, as well as other events on 2 August 2009.

Sadly, the main reason I really missed having my camera was the pathetic trailer following the whole parade. This guy, in his mid-50s and dressed like a Bubba with the ball cap, salt-and-pepper beard, and t-shirt stretched over a distended beer belly, was carrying a large banner for his own god. The beer belly supported a harness with a leather pocket that help up this ten foot tall banner that proclaimed “there’s only one god and that is JHC”, and a similar slogan on the flip side. This guy followed carefully about 20 feet behind the rest of the parade. When it slowed or stopped, he stopped. When he was stopped he would occasionally rotate his message so anybody watching could see the flip side’s slogan. When the happy paraders started up again, this somber sad man would also start again. He never took his eyes off what he was following, never looked around to see if anybody was watching him or his message. I don’t know if this was due to drilled-in parade ground discipline or because he didn’t want to let the heathen devils out of his sight. (Lest they sneak up on him and steal his soul, perhaps?)

Art Center Car Classic 2009

2009-07-25T18:54:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday (18 July 2009) I went up to Art Center in Pasadena for the annual Car Classic (2009). The theme this year was “Land, Sea, Air“ and the show included not only cars but also some boats and planes. The planes on the ground were a Rutan Vari-Eze and a hang glider with a rigid wing and a propane powered jet. Actually, it wasn’t quite a jet but it wasn’t quite a rocket either. I did not get a photo - just didn’t think of it. There was a flyover by some Ezes, and about 5 flyovers by some Yaks.

I don’t take nearly as many car photos these days as I once did, but there are about 50 pictures from the show. It’s surprising how much photographic situational awareness I have lost since I was a pro. I didn’t take many photos, and didn’t get many placards for identifying the cars that I did shoot.

That being said, I’m moving forward (albeit slowly) on my project to digitize many of my photos from when I was a pro photographer. I have recovered my light box so I’ll be able to review and choose transparencies to digitize, and more importantly I’ve committed some money to a digitizing service. A few weeks ago I signed up with Scan Cafe, and when I get a few hundred pictures chosen I’ll be sending this selection to the company for my first batch scan. This will be a test to see how good the service is and whether they return all my pictures in good condition. Timeliness is not a major factor as I evaluate the company and its service. However, I sure hope it is good. This could be the opportunity to digitize several thousand photos, including transparencies of all sizes from 35mm to 4x5, and eventually a smaller selection of B&W negatives.

All this won’t happen until I get a new computer though. The computer I am writing this on is only 4 years old, but it is so unable to handle the workload I subject it to that it really needs to be moved down to second tier service, as the laptop I occasionally use when I’m on the road. I’m planning on getting a new Mac Pro tower in September, when Apple releases the new OSX 10.6 operating system and possibly (hopefully!) some new Mac Pro models. But that is a topic for another post.

A Bad Week for Goldman Sachs

2009-07-06T20:46:00.000-07:00

Just a few days after GS announces the biggest-ever bonuses to their staff, they get the following...

Matt Taibbi attacks in inimitable Taibbi style. (IMHO Taibbi is the new Hunter Thompson, because he is such a scourge to the corrupt powers that be.)

Then Frank Rich piles on in his smooth j'accuse way by equating Goldman with Bernie Madoff but worse, and explaining why John Dillinger the bank robber was such a hero to the American public during a major economic depression - then and now. (Hint: GS had a somewhat-invisible hand in both. And not a small invisible hand, but a big one.)

And then Goldman is forced to publicly admit through their attorney in the NY district attorney's office that their secret computer trading code was not only stolen and released to the open internet, but is used to "unfairly" "manipulate" the markets! Of course it’s unfair manipulation when somebody other than Goldman does it - but if they do it, well, that’s different.

I love this!

PS: Matt Taibbi is this generation's Hunter Thompson.

Big Brother

2009-06-08T19:31:00.000-07:00

"Big Brother is watching." Today (8 June 2009) marks sixty years since Nineteen Eighty Four was published.

Thanks Mr. Orwell for the warning. Too bad we haven't done much about it.

WGA seminar: Movies That Matter

2009-06-05T21:29:00.000-07:00

I went to this WGAw inspirational seminar today. It was useful in that it helped inspire me again and a bit, and was entertaining to watch and listen to a couple of the writers who appeared and spoke, i.e. Paul Haggis and Billy Ray. However, there was not much new material for me other than Billy Ray’s Venn diagram of screenwriters and studios, which is mostly self-evident but was humorous nonetheless. Anyway, my notes…

I attended the opening session, then sessions 3 and 1, and skipped the final session. (By then I had a headache that was bad enough to massively distract me from the discussion, and I can always watch it later on DVD in the WGA library.)

The theme of the seminar was “Theme”, finding it and expressing it. The day started with this but these professional writers generally agreed it was too difficult and too dangerous to establish a theme and then write around it. By “difficult” they universally acknowledged that if they had a theme going into a writing project then it was rearranged or redefined by the end of the project. By “dangerous” they all meant that it is impossible to state the literal theme to the studio at the beginning, and it must be slipped covertly into the story so the studio doesn’t recognize it. Also, overtly stating the theme was too heavy handed, and would be too obvious and amateurish.

Jane Anderson: Humor and objectivity will save you (when you get in a spot from which you can’t get out).
Billy Ray: Don’t think of it as art, think of it as work.
Billy Ray: If you do a great job in storytelling, THEN you will make a statement.
Billy Ray: The story’s scenes and dialogue should be loaded with subtext. This is what the actors use to act with, and it is communicated to the audience.
Billy Ray on “notes”: When people read your story and give notes, listen to their questions and their problems but not to their solutions. The solution they tell you is probably the solution to/in/from another movie.
Billy Ray: Start with a story idea, a character idea, or a theme idea.
Billy Ray and all the others: The stories you have in your head that you want to write are a much larger number and span of subjects than the studios want to make. The studios look at what is in the market right now (profitable or not) and want to make those. So currently, in Summer 2009, they only want comedies and some action movies and anything with Will Smith or written by Judd Apatow, and anything that is an existing franchise, preferably with capes. (Update: A look to McG’s wikipedia entry shows that he is currently making an update to 20,000 Leagues under the sea, with Will Smith.)
Billy Ray: They are saying they’ll never make dramas. But the business cycles, and dramas will come back.
Paul Haggis: Talked about how much research he did to construct the characters for Crash.
Paul Haggis: Also wrote the Bond movies Casino Royale, and the first draft of Quantum of Solace - but then the strike happened. He turned over the draft to the producers and they went into production. When the movie came out he hardly recognized anything in it. Robert Nelson Jacobs asked him “So who rewrote it?” and his reply was a shrug of the shoulders and they both looked at each other knowingly.

WRITING MOVIES THAT MATTER: Finding and Expressing Your Theme
Saturday June 6, 2009
Writers Guild of America, 7000 W. Third Street, Los Angeles, CA 90048

+ Paul Haggis (Million Dollar Baby, Crash)
- Winnie Holzman (TV – My So-Called Life, Once and Again)
+ Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry, Stop Loss)
~ Robert Nelson Jacobs (Chocolat, Waterhorse: Legend of the Deep)
~ Bruce Joel Rubin (Ghost, The Last Mimzy)
~ Robin Schiff (TV – Ten Things I Hate About You)
+ Tom Schulman (Dead Poets Society)
+ Robin Swicord (Little Women, The Jane Austen Book Club)
~ Dan Jinks (Producer -- American Beauty, Big Fish, Milk etc.)
- Jane Anderson (It Could Happen to You, The Baby Dance, Normal, The Prize Winner of Defiance Ohio)
+ Billy Ray (Shattered Glass, Breach, State of Play)
~ James Uhls (Fight Club, Jumper)
+ Nick Kazan (Frances, Reversal of Fortune, Fallen, Bicentennial Man)
~ Stanley Weiser (Wall Street, W.)
- John Sacret Young (China Beach, Thanks of a Grateful Nation)
~ Albert Berger (producer - Election, Little Miss Sunshine, Little Children)
~ Nathan Kahane (producer - Juno, Stranger Than Fiction)

9:00 am: Registration, continental breakfast
10:00 am: WRITING MOVIES THAT MATTER
A panel of experienced, produced writers will discuss in depth the stories that matter to them, and how they view their job as storytellers. Is it possible for movies to change the culture or do they just reflect it?

Jane Anderson, Dan Jinks, Nick Kazan, Billy Ray, James Uhls Moderator: Bruce Joel Rubin

11:30 am Coffee break
12:00 noon: FINDING YOUR THEME: BREAKOUT GROUPS
Three break-out groups, each led by two or more experienced writers: Choose ONE group. Panelists will engage in a more intimate discussion with smaller groups. You have two precious hours to talk to the world. What are you going to say? What matters to you? How do you allow your deeper self to break through into your writing? Explore strategies for discovering what you really want to say.

(1) Bruce Joel Rubin, James Uhls, Robert Nelson Jacobs
(2) Jane Anderson, Nick Kazan, John Sacret Young
(3) Winnie Holzman, Tom Schulman, Billy Ray

1:30 pm Lunch Break
2:30 pm EXPRESSING YOUR THEME: BREAKOUT GROUPS
Three break-out groups, each led by two or more experienced writers: Choose ONE group. Panelists will engage in a more intimate discussion with smaller groups. What’s the difference between ideas, concepts and themes? How do you layer themes into your scripts? How do you get the audience to feel your theme without having to state it overtly? What makes an audience care?

(1) Robert Nelson Jacobs, Paul Haggis, Albert Berger
(2) Winnie Holzman, Kimberly Peirce, Tom Schulman
(3) Robin Swicord, Stanley Weiser, John Sacret Young

4:00 pm Coffee Break
4:30 pm PANEL: GETTING MOVIES THAT MATTER MADE
Identifying studio execs or production companies who share your passion. How does one navigate the system while holding on to why you wanted to write the movie in the first place? Can a movie that matters still make money? Can you make a tentpole that matters? How do you get what matters to you made?

Albert Berger, Paul Haggis, Nathan Kahane, Kimberly Peirce, Robin Swicord, Stanley Weiser Moderator: Winnie Holzman

6:00 pm – 7:30 pm Wine and Cheese Reception in the Shavelson-Webb Library

NPR stories and a poem

2009-05-29T06:23:00.000-07:00

In honor of this morning’s NPR stories on cybersecurity, a monster software company spending huge money on a third rate search site nobody uses, and poetry about economic meltdowns, a haiku:

OS insecure
a hundred mil spent on hype
loser search engine

Surf today

2009-04-05T13:13:00.000-07:00

I have to admit this is my first day in the water since coming back from Costa Rica - nearly three months ago. Of course the January-February-March-April part of the year is about the worst in California for surf - not to mention that the water is cold... and I had just returned from warm water! ☺

But I’ve been antsy to get into the water lately, and with warm Santa Ana winds blowing offshore and a 1’ - 3’ west swell coming through (see below), there’s no better time than the present. High tide was about 6:50 am and I should have gone out about then or soon thereafter, but instead I got some work done on the computer (organizing TODO list, planning tasks, etc.). I didn’t actually get into the water until about 11:30 am, about an hour before low tide.

It was kind of closed out, and with the tide being low these close-out waves were breaking in hip-deep water, but I got a few waves anyway. I also fell off a few times because I’m so out of shape. I stayed out for about :45 minutes, and had a good time.

Some observations and events:

There were a zillion ladybugs on the beach, flying around, sitting on the sand, landing on boards and other items. They weren’t swarming as I’ve seen at Ladybug Camp in the Los Padres National Forest, but there were more than I’ve seen at any other time and place.

Also, I met a woman in the water who was congenial and a fairly good surfer for a beginner. It turns out she started a local woman’s surf group, and has turned that into a MeetUp group, so I’m going to pass the info on to a female colleague who may be interested.

5 Stages of Grief

2009-03-23T21:54:00.000-07:00

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote a thesis that humans deal with death and dying in five stages - the fourth being depression and the last being acceptance.

Paul Krugman has read the plan by the Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to reinflate the bubble and writes that he is in despair. I will equate his despair to depression, but I have to disagree with him. I am now in the acceptance phase.

It is over - the patient is officially terminally ill. In fact, the officials have made the patient terminally ill, now we are only awaiting the death.

By putting thousands of billions more dollars into the “toxic assets” (read: mortgages on millions of overpriced homes) the Secretary and his advisors and minions seem to think they can reinflate the bubble that just recently burst, and restore everything to the way it was. They’ve even said that their goal is to attempt to restore those “toxic assets” to their “true market value”. But what if, just maybe, those TAs were already falling back down to their true market values, and this massive infusion of cash will go in the inflator part of the balloon and flow just as fast right out the rupture in the balloon that caused the whole thing to collapse in the first place.

However, it looks certain that Wall St. will be able to profit from this. So it will be another massive transfer of money from the taxpayer to the banker.

How Do You Remember Someone When They Have Been Erased?

2009-03-21T21:02:00.000-07:00

I went to the weblog to do* a little clean up and organization, particularly of the blogroll.

There are a few I’ve decided to remove, and I want to add a few. While there I checked on the link to a close friend of mine who died exactly two years ago today. I wanted to read some of his words, and remember him a bit. When he died so young (49) it was a sad day for his family, and certainly it was worse for them than for me. But more sadly, it appears that the presence he had left behind on the Web has been completely erased. He had a weblog that he wrote to, including poetry, musings, observations and the glimmerings of beginnings of stories he wanted to write. Those are now all gone, and don’t even appear in the Wayback Machine. He’s also gone from LinkedIn. A google search of him turns up nothing. This is sad too. The man wanted to write and was good at it, but was always so busy with life and taking care of his family that he never really got the time to write much more than what he left behind on the web, but now that too is gone.

*(No posts lately, though many items have built up to post about. More pleasant posts to come later.)

Musical Entertainment at McCabe's Guitar Shop

2009-02-16T20:59:00.000-08:00

I’ve been living in or near LA now for 20 years. This is a great city for entertainment, especially for music - but I always forget to check the venues I like for acts that I like.

Recently I subscribed to the email announcement list for McCabe’s Guitar Shop, an institution in Santa Monica that’s been around for 50 years. I’ve seen bands like The Cowboy Junkies (acoustic) and Al Stewart.

Last night I finally got to see an outstanding guitar player that I’ve wanted to see for decades (literally), David Lindley. And I was not disappointed. I’m not literate enough in musicology to be able to adequately describe what a virtuoso he is on stringed instruments, or how funny he is both in song and spoken word. His repertoire extends from LA folk-rock (or rock-folk) to bluegrass, to blues (John Lee Hooker style, and he does a mean imitation of JLH) to Pakistani traditional and even to atonal classical. I’m sure much it’s broader than that too. He played for us for only 90 minutes - enough for one show but probably not enough to show his various styles and influences. He played guitars, an oudh (sp?), a bazuki (sp?), a mandolin, and a long-necked mandolin-looking instrument that might have been a sitar. The room was full (about 150 people) and we all had a great time.

Surf Camp, Costa Rica

2009-01-24T19:16:00.000-08:00

I got back from surf camp in Tamarindo, Costa Rica, exactly one week ago, and finally have my photos edited and tagged. The pictures are up in a Flickr set called Witch’s Rock Surf Camp. These are only the pictures - the text descriptions will follow in a few more days.

I spoke with a friend and former colleague at one of the big tv networks (I worked there for five years) and he’s going to help me put together a mashup of photos and videos contributed by all the guys on the trip. I’ll have that done in a couple of months and will post news of it here too.

From L to R (above): Dayton M., Fernando U., Tim D., Dan O’D, Andy L.

Give me stars, planets and a moon

2008-12-30T19:22:00.000-08:00

Last night just after sunset we had an uncommon celestial event - the moon was just past new, Venus was just above it, Neptune was just below it, Jupiter was nearby and Mercury was low in the sky nearby. With the naked eye I could see four of the above, and with my 7x50 binoculars I could also see Neptune. Four planets and the moon all in sight all at the same time! I didn’t get a photo, but here is a good illustration from the website Earth & Sky. (Click the picture for a bigger version.)

Surf Costa Rica

2008-12-28T10:33:00.000-08:00

I have wanted to go to Costa Rica (and other places in Central America) for more than 30 years. I want to see the places, but I also want to dive and surf. I made it to Venezuela once, but was with other people and only got to swim once in the Caribbean for a little while. (I had even taken my mask, fins, snorkel and regulator. It was a bitch to carry all that bulky and heavy stuff around for 3.5 weeks and not get to use them once.)

There has always been a small industry for dive tourism at numerous locations throughout the Caribbean, including the Caribbean side of Central America. In recent years ago an even smaller industry for surf tourism has sprung up at a few locations on the Pacific side of Central America (and Mexico).

A few years ago I found out about a then-new destination resort called Witch’s Rock Surf Camp. A neighbor here went there once and really enjoyed it. I made a reservation in 2005 but was unable to get down. Then a few months ago I got an email from WRSC saying they were having a 25% discount for one week only. The discount week happened to be the week immediately after Macworld, and a few weeks after the xmas holidays. It’s a convenient time for me to be away from work, and I could spend a little less money. (Having enough money to go has been my problem for the past 3 decades.) Coincidentally, American Airlines had a 67% discount flight to Liberia, the nearest airport, for exactly that week.

So, finally I get to go to Central America and especially to Costa Rica for a surf trip. It’s only a week, but this is much better than no time at all. And instead of spending about $2,000 (air + hotel), I’ll only be spending about $1,400. (Not including all the various taxes, fees, meals and other costs of course.)

Here is what Joe Walsh, the owner and resident big kahuna at WRSC, says about the surf spots in the area.

TAMARINDO - multiple surf spots in town. The beachbreak in front of WRSC is great for beginners/intermediates, has a sand bottom, best on mid-to-high tide. The rivermouth has lefts and rights and can be good on any tide. There are multiple reefs in Tamarindo, some are rarely surfed. There are many good peaks on the north side of the rivermouth as well, best on mid-to-high tide
WITCH'S ROCK - beachbreak with strong offshore winds making for big barrels, lefts and rights. This spot is always good unless the wind is onshore
OLLIE'S POINT - right pointbreak, sand bottom, can get quite hollow and really fun. Only accessible by boat, breaks on low tide
PLAYA GRANDE - beachbreak that is more exposed to south swells, fun rippable waves, best on mid to high tide
AVELLANAS - multiple breaks that work on low to high tide, sand bottom beachbreak, a rivermouth with some reef, Little Hawaii which is a heavier reef right, plus a couple more spots if you know where to look
MARBELLA - sand bottom break that throws big barrels, definitely the heaviest wave along this stretch of coast. Good tube rides if you know how to ride them, can get bigger than you'd think.

And to add yet one more coincidence, the Costa Rican national surf championship is happening there at WRSC on the first weekend I am in country. Actually, the surf championship happens Friday, Saturday and Sunday and I arrive late afternoon on Saturday. So I may see some of the semi-finals, and next day will definitely get to see the finals. Also, there will be the inevitable big party that Saturday night. (It will probably be really loud near my room, but oh well - I’ll have a few days to recover after it’s over.) From Joe Walsh's weblog:

The Costa Rican surf circuit, known here simply as the CNS, is hosting the Witch's Rock Surf Contest here at Witch's Rock Surf Camp January 10th and 11th, 2009. Inscriptions will be at the camp the night of Friday January 9th. I f#ck%d up and told Sebastian, the owner of Babylon, that we would host the contest party at his club on Saturday night. I did this because I was planning on leaving town on the 10th on surf tour. Then I found out that Red Bull had already purchased the advertising rights to the party directly from the CNS before the season started. I guess I didn't get that memo, probably because Larry forgot to put a cover on the TPS Report. So, as to eliminate confusion, here are the facts:
- Friday January 9th, 5pm-7pm - Surf contest inscriptions @ WRSC
- Saturday and Sunday January 10th and 11th - surf contest, Playa Tamarindo
- Saturday night - 911 La Radio, Red Bull and Witch's Rock Surf Camp present the Torneo Witch's Rock Party at Witch's Rock Surf Camp.

With a week on a good surf beach in a tropical beach town with a national contest and me with no computers to distract me, I’ll probably have a lot of pictures to upload to Flickr when I return. Departure countdown: 12 days from today 28 December.

(And right now I am coming down with a cold or flu, that I picked up from work.)

What Is the Plural of Prius?

2008-12-19T19:54:00.000-08:00

It’s a serious question. When a made-up word for the English-speaking market sounds Greek or Latin, how does one pluralize it?

Okay, it’s not a serious question. I think we have at least a few possibilities:

Priuses (for English-only speakers)

Prii

Priae

This came to my mind earlier this evening as I was walking down to La Bodega Estrella for a bottle of chardonnay. In front of my building was a Prius about to turn left into its building, while oncoming was another Prius. Both were in electric drive on a residential street so they were totally and completely silent. Except for the headlights you wouldn’t have known there were there. It was eerie. Two cars passing in the night and they were totally silent, not unlike two ships in the night - and the non-metaphorial version of same.

Quantum of Despair

2008-11-16T16:26:00.000-08:00

We went to see Quantum of Solace yesterday afternoon. I don’t check reviews - either written or podcast - but do watch the headlines of same just to get a general sense of what the professional critics think of a given movie. In this case more critics had panned the movie than had liked it, but there seemed to be votes in both directions.

I went in hoping for solace from the critics, but came out desolate, disappointed, in despair.

This movie was chase, fight, chase, character interaction, fight, chase, fight, chase, chase, character interaction, explosion... Roughly in that order, and with the character interaction approximating about 3 minutes of the first 30.

While it is certainly true that we always expect a Bond movie to be filled with action, in this movie it just went on and on. There was little in the way of story or character development, or perhaps the story and character development were just in the way of the chases, fights and explosions. It’s further true that in a Bond movie we don’t expect Bond, M, or the Bond girl to show much if any character arc, but in this movie they just didn’t show any. The villain didn’t show any either.

There can actually be some story and character development even in Bond movies. This is part of why we like the series. Casino Royale had that - a mix of story and character shaken in amongst the fights and chases, and it helped us learn about the new Bond and helped us learn about the other characters in his universe. There was story that kept us watching to see what was going to happen and where it was going.

In this movie though, within 7 minutes we knew all we would ever learn about the characters, and we knew where the story was going. Late in the movie it even got to the point where - though some of the audio was garbled and we couldn’t make out the exact dialogue - it didn’t matter because we knew the characters’ motivations and could read the telegraphy of their next actions.

As in any Bond movie there was a lot of money up there on the screen, and there were some expensive above the line people too, so this movie obviously cost a lot to make. (I don’t have the interest to look up what it cost.) So if you go to these solely for action and explosions, this is your movie.

In addition to my complaints of too much vapid action, let me also register a complaint about how the action is shot and edited. In all the fights, chases and explosions throughout the movie most of the shots were too tight and the edits too damn quick. We liked that in the first two Bourne movies, but it wore out its welcome by Bourne 3 and it’s tired now. Appeal to the producers: please ask your directors use a few more middle shots and let us watch them for a few seconds. In Slate’s review of the movie - snarkily titled 000 (read Double-Oh Zero) Dana Stevens notes that the likely problem with this movie was that the director has made mainly tearjerkers, which is not a job requirement for a Bond movie director.

And my final rant: Why use a Ukrainian actress to play a Bolivian? Were there simply no South American actresses available for that movie? Her accent in English was funky, and they couldn’t have her speak any Spanish (or at least very little).

And my last (only?) kudo? They used my All Time Favorite airplane, a Siai Marchetti SF-260 - and it was even done up with military hard points and gun pods.

(The picture linked above was the best example I could find of the airplane with gun pods. Even so, you can just barely see the barrels of the .30 cal pods peeking out from under the leading edge of the port wing. This site has a history of the SF-260, and the SF-260W or the “Warrior” variant of the basic SF-260.)

Restart

2008-11-16T16:18:00.000-08:00

I've been working on reorganizing and reducing distractions so I can start writing again, both here and items as yet unpublished. Consider this the first in the restart.

Bailout Balls

2008-09-23T19:42:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking lately about how these latest government bailouts of private industry compare to some in recent history. Fortunately we have the internet, and for every original thought dozens of other people have thought it at the same time.

So I ganked the graphic from Kevin Drum's blog. He ganked it and the idea from the originator, ProPublica. Isn't it amazing how much ~~welfare~~ money Big Business has received from Big Government when the former has had bad ideas go south? Despite their railing against Big Government that they need to be left alone...

Rockstar Scientist

2008-09-17T21:48:00.000-07:00

Yesterday work had a guest speaker at the Haskins Lecture - Ralph Cicerone. Dr. Cicerone is the president of the National Academy of Science and shared in the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He has at least a dozen other awards, but that goes with the territory.

He came to talk about Global Warming and Energy Economics. It was attended by several hundred people, and was very interesting. (It's not every day one gets to see a Nobel prizewinner*.) I'll write more about it later when I have a bit more time.

Greenland wants to increase whaling

2008-09-13T16:52:00.000-07:00

Greenland wants to increase its whaling quota and the International Whaling Commission refused. So now Greenland wants to quit its membership in the IWC, and it’s asked its sponsor (Greenland, former colonial master) to communicate that to the Commission. Link is to the BBC report. It’s not like they need the meat or need to kill a lot more whales to satisfy some deep cultural tradition. So who are they selling to?

DOE Supports Research on GCC

2008-09-08T22:09:00.000-07:00

While I was looking around on the DOE site for the Yucca Mountain permitting announcement I found another piece that should get the anti-science types worked up...

The DOE has announced it is giving massive amounts of computing time (10 megahours) on three of its most powerful supercomputers to:

“[...] the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to explore advanced climate change models at three of DOE’s national laboratories as part of a three-year memorandum of understanding on collaborative climate research signed today by the two agencies.”

“NOAA will work with climate change models as well as perform near real-time high-impact (non-production) weather prediction research using computing time on DOE Office of Science resources including two of the world’s top five most powerful computers – the Argonne National Laboratory’s 557 TF IBM Blue Gene/P and Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s 263 TF Cray XT4. NOAA researchers will also receive time on DOE’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.”

Despite what the top executives in the executive branch might say (and what the Republican candidates for those top slots profess) it looks like management at the Department of Energy have actually looked at the science and understand it, and understand that long term global climate science needs the kind of massive computing power that comes with designing big, spherical, highly dynamic and highly energetic systems that have the potential to change the world as we know it.

Update: NOAA has a press release for this too.

Nuclear News

2008-09-08T21:43:00.000-07:00

Finally there is some movement on the Yucca Mountain project. The Department of Energy announced that it has submitted its application for a license to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the construction and operation plan. The news reports speculate that the licensing process will take up to four years, and that construction will take another 8 years after that. Whatever. So long as they finally get the thing built and operational and get all that high level waste and spent fuel out of the backyards of the places that generated it and into a secure facility.

And in fact that’s not the only good news in nuclear this week. Scientific American has published an announcement that Oak Ridge National Laboratory has finished construction of a new depot for highly enriched uranium. Having all that hot stuff in one place will make it easier to secure and control.

By the way, the project used 92,000 cubic yards of concrete. To get an idea of that volume, it would be a square 643 ft. on a side, and as tall as a 6 ft. man.

Blame It On the Democrats

2008-08-26T20:39:00.000-07:00

Quote of the day (from Kevin Drum):

"Look, I owe the American people an apology. If I had beaten the old man you'd of never heard of the kid and you wouldn't be in this mess. So it's all my fault and I feel that very, very strongly. So this is an important election for us. Let me tell 'ya."

Who said this? Who else - Michael Dukakis. I never thought about it quite that way before. And of course in a deeply sadly ironic way, he’s right.

Cool Summer

2008-08-21T07:55:00.000-07:00

It has seemed to me that this has been a particularly cool summer, and I’m pretty sure we’re in a La Niña year. Here in the Santa Monica Bay we’ve had spring fogs all summer long, even into late September. Also, the water never warmed up much and we haven’t gotten any good south swells. So the cool summer is here in Santa Monica, but the climate effect that causes it is probably stretching across the Pacific and probably to the southern hemisphere and maybe even to SE Asia.

Summer of Euros

2008-08-16T07:30:00.000-07:00

In walking around Santa Monica this summer - up and down the 3rd St. Promenade, the streets around that, and the streets up to and around the beach - I’ve noticed more Europeans (both by sight and by hearing the languages) this summer than ever before. This isn’t a scientific survey of course, but I think this is true. Must be the effect of the dollar-euro exchange rate.

Scouting surf spots

2008-07-27T19:16:00.000-07:00

I’ve been wanting to start surfing point breaks again for at least, well, since I moved here over five years ago. But it’s so convenient to just walk three blocks down and go out at the local beach break that I haven’t been sufficiently motivated to check Topanga, Sunset and Malibu.

Actually, that’s not quite true. On July 4 of last year one of the people from the Cambridge office was in the middle of his 6-week posting to the Santa Monica office. As I’ve become the unofficial surf instructor for the Cambridge office, he looked me up and I started taking him out. He caught on to surfing faster than anybody I’ve ever seen - it probably helps that he’s 27 and a very good athlete already. Because he was getting good fast I put him on the 7’0“ David Pu’u funboard and he was doing well with it. Unfortunately he didn’t heed my advice to be aware of the board’s presence and position if you get pitched off it. It ended up hitting him hard on the arm - with the sharp pointy end of the skeg and cut him open. We went to the ER and they put about 15 stitches in to close him up and told him to stay out of the water until the wound closed. (Picture will go up on Flickr shortly.) That dry spell happened to overlap 4 July - at which time we also happened to get a fantastic south swell. I decided it would be good to take him to see Malibu, which just happened to be my first time too.

Yes, despite growing up, living and surfing in SoCal nearly all my life I’d never actually been to Malibu. (Reason: Ventura County has a good point break as well as all other types of surf breaks, and frankly I just didn’t want to hassle with the crowds at the ‘Bu in the summer.) We went - and the waves were incredible. (Pictures to follow.) They were consistently 4-6’ set waves and just rolled through all the points. However, there were zillions of people out. But I digress...

This morning I left early and drove out to Sunset to check that point break. I’ve seen Topanga and it’s just not very good - bottom looks not very well-shaped and the put-in is rocky. Sunset has a rocky put-in too, but there was a south swell running today and it handled the sets and waves fairly well. (Pictures here.) There were nearly 100 people out at a place that doesn’t seem to have a lot of takeoff spots, but that won’t matter much if I dawn patrol and go out when few people are there.

Thick lips, good juice

2008-07-26T19:05:00.000-07:00

A small south swell came through today and I got waves. I hadn’t been out in weeks - maybe two months - so I went out on the boogie board. Turns out that was probably a better choice than the stand up board because the waves had some juice, so they were fast and walled up. I saw one guy getting rides, but most of the stand-up surfers were getting creamed or just not making the takeoff.

I made 4 waves in :16 minutes, and got punished by each. On the first, I didn’t have a sense of how strong the lips were. I stayed high on the wall after the takeoff and turn, and got hit in the back of the head by the lip. It tore my hat off and I think I got a mild concussion. On the second wave I pulled into the barrel a bit lower on the face, but then the descending lip hit the nose of my board and pearled it so fast that I literally flipped, fins over my head. The water was pretty shallow and I got scared that I was being pushed down so fast that it was going to break my neck, but I didn’t hit the bottom after all. This one overpressurized my ears too. In the third wave I got el rolloed, but by then I was prepared. I got a good view looking down the barrel, which was fun - for about .5 sec.

After the first :17 minutes I didn’t get anything else for another :15, so I got out. Water temp was 68F according to LA County Lifeguards.

Batman, again

2008-06-29T11:34:00.000-07:00

I saw the first Chris Nolan interpretation of Batman when it came out on the big screen, and again some later on DVD video. It was a fantastic story. (For those people who dismiss it by saying “it’s a comic book character”, consider that it is another portrayal of a conflicted archetypal hero character. Look at the story in that context.)

I also saw Nolan’s Memento not long after it came out and it was fantastic. It was cryptic too, but at the end one could sort of put the story together.

His new movie “The Dark Knight” opens in three weeks, on July 19. I’d seen trailers and read the description of the making of the movie included in an interview of Nolan in a story in Wired magazine. Rolling Stone has a review that is hugely laudatory as well.

The movie was shot in 70mm for IMAX, and fortunately there is an IMAX theater not far away. Nolan also eschewed digital effects almost completely, instead going with real principal photography and stunts for the spectacular scenes.

So I bought a ticket for the 12:15 (noon) show, and reserved a front and center seat. This isn’t the first showing - it actually shows at midnight:15 early the night before. When I bought the reserved ticket, the theater was already half full with reservations. So the marketing - viral and overt - has worked. But I think people are going because Chris Nolan is such a good writer and director, and Christian Bale, Heath Ledger and Gary Oldman are such good actors.

PS: I’m seriously considering buying another ticket for the showing immediately after!

Movie - Up the Yangtze

2008-06-07T15:20:00.000-07:00

I went to a showing of a new documentary movie “Up the Yangtze” about the effects of the creation of China's Three Gorges Dam. The movie is by a Canadian-Chinese filmmaker, and was financed by the National Film Board of Canada. It is about a peasant farm family who live near the banks of the Yangtze, and are being forced to move off their tiny farm and into a town as the river turns into a lake and the water rises. The oldest daughter in the family, who seems to be about 13 or 14 years old, wants to go to high school but instead has to go to work on one of the luxury cruise ships on the river that carries Western tourists who want to get a glimpse of the "old" China. We also follow a young Chinese youth (who is more metropolitan than) as he starts his first job as a greeter and host on the cruise ship. There are no grand vistas in the cinematography, but we get to see huge apartment buildings that have been emptied of their occupants as the residents were forced to move to higher ground.

The movie gives an excellent portrayal of the family, which lives in a candle-lit hut that they co-occupy with their chickens, a pet dog and a kitten. Neither of the parents can read - they are farmers - but they are sending all their three children (an interesting situation that is alluded to obliquely in the movie) to (at least) primary and middle school. The eldest daughter wants to continue school and has a goal of becoming a scientist, but has to go to work to earn money. The youth on the other hand, is an only child. The man who hires these children to work on the ship characterizes them as young and self-centered, and that seems to be a characterization shared by other adults and even lived up to by some of the youths working on the ship. (These kids' attitudes wouldn't be out of place at all in an American high school or college though.) The young girl from the peasant family is a notable exception, and is easily the most sympathetic character in the movie.

And that is what's curious. Even though this is a documentary, it seems almost like a feature movie. Except that we are deeply touched by the effect the dam is having on the lives of so many people. It is sad and touching.

Apparently the film is showing in the US only at the Laemmle's Santa Monica, but it seems to be available through Netflix.

Screenwriter's Blues

2008-06-04T06:33:00.000-07:00

It’s 6:30 AM and I’ve been up for an hour or more. I almost always wake at least :30 minutes before first light, and have done so for decades. Usually I just lay in bed and daydream, or think about what I have to do in the coming day, or think about problems in life I have to solve. But I don’t usually get out of bed until I have to, or maybe even until the very last moment so I’ll be a little late getting to work unless I really hustle.

But my foray up to Malibu last Sunday morning at 6 AM has become somewhat of a model for what I’d like to do and can do if I just get out of bed.

So I got up at 5:30 this morning to check the surf and maybe go out. But the surf is non-existent.

I did actually check it last night shortly before dusk. It was blown out then, but even so I could still see that there was nothing underneath the miniscule wind swell. And the CDIP showed it still small this morning, so I didn’t even walk down to check. (Surfline says a small southern hemisphere swell may begin to start up late this week and into the weekend. So I may start dawn patrolling soon anyhow.)

But back to the morning.

After not going out, I got onto the computer and didn’t the normal start up chores - check email and check a few random websites. For the past couple of days I’ve been enrolled in UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program free “Open Cyberhouse“ (sic). It’s a forum where the various teachers of the various writing classes promote their classes and answer questions to interested prospective students.

Like me.

Or like me if I had any questions.

And most of the questions in the forums are frankly not very useful to anybody but the original questioner. So I watch and pick out the tidbits or quips or references that are useful.

Thus far I’ve found about two, one of which prompted this post. And that was a reference to a weblog by one of the writer/teachers, Scott Myers, who has Go Into the Story, a Blogspot blog with his own domain name. Myers apparently is a well regarded teacher of character development, and in one of his recent blog posts he refers to WGA’s podcast interviews of well known screenwriters and TV writers. This sounds interesting. And so I bookmarked both Myers’ site and the WGA site, and found my collection of bookmarks of writers’ sites and started visiting them (e.g. Kung Fu Monkey, by John August). This is inspirational, or perhaps simply catalytic for my current spate of inspiration to start writing again.

Anyway, I avoided (yet again) reading the NIST Guide to Computer Security Log Management. And now it’s 7:20 and time to get ready and then leave for work.

FileVault test

2008-06-01T07:44:00.000-07:00

I got a new computer at work, finally*. Now I have to transfer my account on the current machine to the new machine.

However, the account on the current machine is encrypted with FileVault, and is fairly large. (Possibly larger than the remaining free space on the machine, but I’m not sure about that.)

The question is whether deleting a file vaulted account results in an encrypted disk image of the user’s home folder? I decided to test this at home. (I’m a professional, I can do this.)

I created a new account on the home machine and FileVaulted it. It turned out that I had not set a master password for the machine, and creating an FV account requires that. Who knew…

I created the account and added a few things into Documents, iTunes library, and iPhoto library. I then attempted to turn on FV for the account, but the machine warned me that I couldn’t do this with other accounts open. I switched to my main working account and logged out, then back to the test account and turned on FV. It started the process by effectively logging me out, then encrypting the account by (presumably) creating a new encypted sparse image and copying the test user data into that. It then securely deleted the test user account’s files, and dumped me back into the login screen.

I logged in and checked it (all okay) and logged out. Went back into my main user account and deleted the test account through the Accounts preference pane. This took about :90 seconds, which wasn’t a problem.

Unencrypted, the data volume for the test account’s ~/ was about 142MB. Encypted, the data volume for the test user’s encrypted sparse image was almost 190MB. Apparently there is some overhead.

Next test is to create another test account and then move the orphaned files from the first test into the second test, and see if they properly inherit permissions. Given how the encrypted home was deleted into an unencrypted sparse image I anticipate no problems.

Follow up: I was wrong. There is a problem.

I attempted to open the FileVault Test sparse image with Disk Utility but it failed, both in /Users/Deleted Users and when I moved it to my own Desktop.

So I’ll have to look to the user forums and the books in hope for a solution.

Cape Horn of the Pacific

2008-05-23T19:59:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine in Silicon Valley has a cousin who has a boat. ("It's better to have a friend who has a boat than to have a boat.")

The cousin wants to drive the boat (a 34' Boston Whaler) from San Francisco to Santa Barbara. I guess he wants to do it for the adventure of it, because he's going to have somebody drive it back. And he certainly doesn't need to deliver anything.

Anyway, since I have sea experience in that part of the Pacific Ocean, my buddy asked what I thought about him going on the trip. (He has no sea experience other than a few boat trips out of Half Moon Bay to go salmon fishing, and a trip to Anacapa Island from Ventura Harbor.)

I pointed out that they will have to cross two long and wild stretches where, even close to the coast, the ocean is likely to be rough and there will be no place to land if they get in trouble. In fact, one of those stretches, the trip from about Morro Bay south around Point Concepcion to Santa Barbara is a particularly rough and nasty piece of ocean, with no place to come ashore.

In fact the region around and offshore of Pt. Concepcíon is known by sailors as Cape Horn of the Pacific. (See the story here from 2006 about a sail from Avila Beach around the Point. Or see Richard Henry Dana's 1840 book Two Years Before the Mast.) You can see that sailors have recognized this as a wild and formidable crossing for centuries.

This afternoon I was checking the local surf report for a possible surfing go-out in the morning. I checked the CDIP (SEE-dip) to see the surf and swell report and discovered that the prediction (based on measurements from offshore buoys and oil platforms) showed about 1'-2' swells along the Southern California until Pt. Concepíon, where the surf suddenly jumps to 15'-18'.

Yeesh! Even when I was working on that ocean, spending countless hours driving back and forth across the Channel, if the surf or the groundswell got that big we simply wouldn't go out. And we were running in bigger boats than 34' Whalers. (Well, most of us were anyway.) I wish him well, and hope that he doesn't easily get seasick.

Surf reports - today and yesterday

2008-05-18T12:19:00.000-07:00

The weather has turned warm, unseasonably warm even, and the water has warmed up. The air temps yesterday and today here, 600 meters from the water’s edge, are in the low-mid 80s (Fahrenheit), sunny and balmy. There is barely an onshore breeze - the palm fronds are just moving a tiny bit and the trees themselves are not moving. There is not a trace of the June gloom which would be more normal this time of year. The water is up to the low 60s (Fahrenheit) and basically the conditions are perfect. (!)

There is not much swell though, but the surf is still there (a bit) and a lot of fun. It’s actually perfect for me since I haven’t been in the water for at least two months due to my surgical wounds. But I got in the water in the morning, around high tide, both Saturday and Sunday.

On Saturday I took the funboard out and got a few waves in about :25 minutes. Today (Sunday) I decided I wanted more waves so I took the bodyboard out and did get many more waves. I also got a much better workout. Curiously, there were at least three sets that came through with one or two 5’ waves in each of these sets. These weren’t frequent enough of the lineup to move out to meet these waves, and in fact nobody got them. But they were beautiful to see from 20 yards away as they were rising and coming in.

I still haven’t prepped my camera to take it out in the water. (Truth be told I’d forgotten about the housing over these past few weeks.) So I don’t have pictures of these two good days. But I got the images from Scripps’ CDIP (Coastal Data Information Project), and here they are.

Adventures - Then and Now

2008-05-11T21:10:00.000-07:00

Bruce Sterling has a post at his blog on Wired about an upcoming Long Now event "Mechanicrawl" celebrating “steampunk”. Now, I’m not too into steampunk - it’s fun to examine for its ingenuity and mechanical complexity, but I’ve worked around enough old machinery that I’m not infatuated or fascinated by such things* - but I am into Long Now events. I may go up for this for another reason too.

This event is going to be centered on and around the rebuilding of the torpedo targeting computer on the WW2-era diesel-electric submarine USS Pampanito. The computer is in the sail, also known as the conning tower, which is where the Combat Information Center (CIC) is located. Apparently the event is going to allow people into the conn to see the computer and the other things in the CIC. This is rare because normally access to the conn and the CIC is extremely limited.

Heh.

One day at least 25 years ago, not long after I’d graduated from college and was living with a friend in South San Francisco and was still into doing wild and crazy things, we went down to the Pampanito late one weekday when it was late dusk. We bought our tickets and went onto the boat, down into the crew spaces on the main deck. We looked around there and then came up. We looked at the person in the booth, and took a chance and shot up onto the sail and down into the CIC. It was much more interesting in there, and not only because it was forbidden and we had beaten the rules. It’s also the most interesting part of the boat, because that is where all the important business took place. After all, this was a weapon in a shooting war, and that space was where the shooting was planned and took place. (It would have been cool to get into the torpedo room too, but we didn’t get there.) We spent a few minutes there, and I can still remember a big red (lit) plotting board. We also looked through the telescope, but I don’t remember if we were in the main compartment or in the CIC on the conn when we did that. I’m pretty certain we looked through the scope while in the CIC, because I was concerned that turning the periscope would be seen by the ticket-taker/authority and thought we better escape soon. One more thing - the view of San Francisco from the periscope was really great - it was bright and clear with great optics!

Anyway, Long Now is having an event and maybe I’ll go up for that.

*Okay, I’m into machinery just like any guy and this stuff will be cool!

En Guarde!

2008-05-11T20:45:00.000-07:00

A long-time friend invited me to go to the Pasadena Convention Center for the Pacific Coast Fencing Championships. This was a "super-regional" competition, meaning anybody inside or outside the Pacific Coast region could attend and compete. He went with his son, and they both competed, singly and with the club (team) they're in.

The picture isn't very good, but still pictures don't do justice to the speed and dynamics of fencing. I also shot a lot of video, but haven't edited that down yet. Will post an update to links when the video is done.

Celebrity Spotting

2008-03-09T21:19:00.000-07:00

Some people at work sponsored a workshop (or conference) that brought together artists and media people from the Middle East to get them to discuss how to solve the problems in that region.

Near the end, one of the attendees (an entertainment celebrity in Damascus) wanted to buy a Macintosh to take home to her sister who owns an advertising agency in Damascus. At the same time one of the organizers also wanted advice on what new Mac she - as a life-long Windows user - should buy. I volunteered to go with them to the Apple store and help them decide.

The next day, as a way of thanking me for helping her with entertaining some of her guests and helping on the Macintosh decision she invited me along to a dinner with another of her guests, the Syrian film and TV writer/director/producer Najdat Anzour.He looks rather like a Middle Eastern John Huston, in his 50s, and has at least as much urbaneness. Najdat is well known in the Middle East as the director of some famous tv soap operas which air during Ramadan, the time of the year when the biggest tv audiences occur (due to the fasting during the day and eating after sunset).

He was here in LA to go to the conference, but also to pitch a movie project to Hollywood. He's got a story, a script, a budget ($50M) and even a big name star, but he couldn't get mainstream Hollywood interested. We spent a good part of the evening talking about the culture of Hollywood, and simply talking about movies. His english was very good, and he has a huge knowledge of film. It's obvious he is well traveled in Europe, and I advised him that getting it into the US might require that he first get it well played in Europe, and get some recognition for it there (e.g. Cannes, Berlin, London, Rome, etc.)

Near the end of the evening we participated in the ritual Exchanging of the Business Cards, and he promised he would send me the script for reading and analysis. And so very unlike Hollywood, he held to his promise. He sent me the script that very evening.

I was supposed to read it this weekend, but was so busy reading other things that I didn't do it. Will have to do it tonight, tomorrow (day) and tomorrow night.

All in all though it was a very interesting event.

Sneak Preview!

2008-03-05T23:01:00.000-08:00

One of the local art house theaters (The Aero, part of American Cinematheque) is running 5 days of "heist films", starting with the new movie "The Bank Job" by Roger Donaldson about a famous bank heist in London in 1970. The movie opened last week in the UK (top of the charts there) but doesn't open here in the US until Friday. We not only got to see the movie, but there was a Q&A with director Donaldson ("No Way Out", "The World's Fastest Indian") afterwards too.

Geez I like living here in LA...

BCC-less, or, Scratch One BCC

2008-03-02T19:31:00.000-08:00

The BCC was removed on the afternoon of Friday, 22 February 2008. The doc took out a lot more than I expected, leaving an incision nearly 2 inches (5 cm.) wide in the skin that he closed with 8 stitches. (He said eight, but I only count four. Maybe I count wrong.)

Curiously, he did not start working on the melanoma that afternoon. This may be because I asked him if the wounds would be healed in time for me to go diving while in Hawai'i at the end of March. He described the Mohs procedure (see the wikipedia article) and apparently they take successive concentric rings of skin over a period of several days, until the dermopathology shows that only good cells are being taken away. So the process could go on for several days and even though face skin heals fast I could possibly still have an open wound in the tropics. (Not a good idea.)

The wound was somewhat uncomfortable for the first 48 hours when I would move my arm or shoulder outside of a fairly limited range, but once it closed up the discomfort was largely gone. As you can see it's still a little red, so I guess there is some WBC activity going on...(?)

The Onion as Prognosticator

2008-02-03T18:49:00.000-08:00

Very infrequently I read The Onion as a source of humor and comedic insight about current events, but I actually remember reading this article seven years ago about the Bush speech proclaiming "Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over." (Reference to a speech made while Bush was still Prez-elect, about to move in after Clinton.

What is amazing is how many of the "predictions" they made actually have come true.

Sadly.

*noma

2008-02-01T07:46:00.000-08:00

Ten days ago I (finally) saw the dermatologist to get some anomalies on my skin checked out. One is a spot on my left cheek, sort of diamond shaped, about 10mm wide by 6mm tall. The other is an object that looks like a kidney-shaped blister on my right shoulder just above the clavicle.

The derm took samples and sent them in for biopsy. Lucky me - I’ve got two different skin cancers. The first one is a melanoma (in situ) and the second is a basal cell carcinoma (BCC).

According to wikipedia melanoma is not very common but is nasty if not caught early. This melanoma is still Stage 0, so is survivable. It is a fast growing type of cancer, but this one has not yet spread fast or penetrated deeply - still in the epidermis - so this particular specimen should cause me no problem. (Other than being a harbinger of things to come.) It will have to be surgically removed. It is only in the surface layer of skin, so healing should be fast with no remaining blemish or mark.

BCC is common enough, but slow growing and not usually metastatic. This one will have to be removed either surgically or chemically, probably with liquid nitrogen. The healing will take a little longer because it’s deeper on not on the face, and particularly if it is removed surgically, but the prognosis is excellent.

I may contact a buddy to try and get some good pictures of the things while they’re still present and intact (prior to removal). Will update this entry with pictures when that’s done. Will also update when the things are gone.

U2 movie

2008-01-26T19:31:00.000-08:00

I found that a concert movie of U2 on their Vertigo tour was playing. Even better was that it was in 3D. Even better still, it was at the IMAX theatre in Culver City. U2 in 3D - woohoo! We went to see it. The theatre was packed. We should have got tickets beforehand, but were able to buy some of the few remaining tickets in the very front row. (Of course I’m happy with tickets in the front row. Marianne was a little bit hesitant, but by now she’s sat close enough times - and in front a few times - that she was a good sport and went along. It was great.

That is, this was one of the best concert films I’ve seen. The directors had great camera placement, with multiple cameras, and had multiple angles and tracking shots. Basically, the shots and angles did not get boring. Not that a U2 concert could be boring, but it was not a simple documentary with one or two cameras in static positions.

In fact the shots were taken not from one or two concerts, but from several - maybe 6 to 8 - across much of South America. The really good scenes or best songs from each concert were edited together so skillfully that we the viewer could not tell that there were several concerts over several days or even weeks. We simply could not tell that this wasn’t one single concert from beginning to end.

So. This was a really good concert film.

But it was then made even better by being shot and shown in 3D. Apparently all the shots were done with two cameras for each shot, and shot in cross polarization. We had to wear polarized glasses to see the film in 3D as well. (I peeked over the glasses a couple of times just to see what the pictures looked like without, and they were definitely not red/blue.) The 3D picture quite realistic, though not totally. More particularly, it was not gimmicky. The 3D effect was not there for the sake of itself but really added a subtle effect to the pictures of the band and the crowds, and it was good and not intrusive. Sitting up front we were able to see that there was a flatness to the images of Bono, so that he looked a little bit like an animation of a picture of Bono on a lifesize cardboard cutout. On the other hand, we were in the front row in an IMAX theater so he appeared so close that we felt as though we could reach out and touch him.

I’ve never been to a U2 concert though. So it was interesting to see Bono up close and to listen to him in such great sound. He’s not actually a very good singer - though I’ll admit that he is seriously emotional and committed to the lyrics. Which is great too. He is so committed that he is sweating like he just came out of a shower, and sometimes he’s so fatigued and out of breath that he has to stop, lean over and catch his breath. Edge, on the other hand, is the epitome of cool. Adam Clayton is like “fashion boy”, even though he’s the bass player and is supposed to be the calm cool disinterested one. (Think John Entwistle.)

I’ve seen some people speculate (in Salon letters) about 3D being too gimmicky and they “don’t like it”. But they’d never seen it. This movie was really great. Sure, the theater was full of fans so they’d like the movie already, but we really were impressed by the movie, its content and the skill with which is was directed and edited, and the musicianship and showmanship, and it was simply enhanced by the 3D. So if you get a chance to see it - and you’re even just a little bit of a U2 fan - then go see it.

Computing Systems Security

2008-01-10T20:34:00.000-08:00

I was scheduled to start a class at UCLA Extension this evening in Vulnerability Assessment and Auditing, but it was cancelled (only three people signed up). Too bad, as it sounded very relevant to my new job:

Security professionals, auditors, and IT management must evaluate the security of their systems, both to ensure protection of critical business information and to meet an increasing array of regulatory requirements. This course provides an overview of security assessment methods and introduces technical tools for conducting security assessments. Key distinctions between information security audits, vulnerability assessments, and penetration testing are clarified. Assessment methodologies covered include audit general control reviews, Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard, National Security Agency (NSA) INFOSEC Assessment Methodology, and NIST SP 800-30 risk assessment methods. Technical assessments of Windows and Unix environments are discussed, and open-source evaluation tools (such as nmap and nessus) are demonstrated.

Somewhat ironically, tomorrow morning I'm off to MacWorld Expo in San Francisco to be a speaker on auditing, actually - Using Common Criteria Tools Under Mac OS X - How To Audit Systems for Compliance with Business and Government Standards. This is the second year I'll be giving this presentation topic (I gave it in Jan 2007 also). Last year was successful, so along with repeating this presentation I also pitched the MWSF technical chief on doing a BOF session for Federal Systems Administration and Integration. They liked that idea, so I'm leading the discussion in that also (assuming anybody shows up at 6:30 PM). It is supposed to include the following, but as a BOF I think we can be flexible.

Configuring Macs for Federal Use
Auditing
CAC Cards
Problems and Solutions
Differences in Inspection Requirements

It will be interesting to see how this goes.

I'll be giving largely the same presentation this year that I gave last year, with only a few additions or changes. This is even though Apple has gone completely to Intel CPUs, and to OS X 10.5. I point this out because they haven't actually released the BSM installers for Intel (they can be got by special request), and they don't have BSM ready for OSX 10.5 either (not available by special request!).

Most of the people in the audience will understand though that I am not an Apple employee, or even a messenger from Apple.

Will be fun. (And I hope the swag bag is just as goody-laden as last year!)

A little less talk, a little more action

2007-12-26T20:01:00.000-08:00

Trying to wean myself from the constant scanning of political blogs and newssites, and focus on the science and tech.

Am also going to try to use my del.icio.us bookmarks a little more. I've got the account and the space, might as well put something there.

Getting to the tropics

2007-12-02T21:17:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to get to the tropics for more than three decades, but now it looks like the tropics are coming to me. It turns out that climate zones that characterize the tropics are expanding, both north and south. (Which actually isn't good news, but it's not like we can do anything. Check the last line in the quote.) The link below is to the website of Nature. The blockquote below is the Associated Press summary report published on Salon.com.

Earth's Tropics Belt Expands

By SETH BORENSTEIN Associated Press Writer

Dec 2nd, 2007 | WASHINGTON -- Earth's tropical belt seems to have expanded a couple hundred miles over the past quarter century, which could mean more arid weather for some already dry subtropical regions, new climate research shows.

Geographically, the tropical region is a wide swath around Earth's middle stretching from the Tropic of Cancer, just south of Miami, to the Tropic of Capricorn, which cuts Australia almost in half. It's about one-quarter of the globe and generally thought of as hot, steamy and damp, but it also has areas of brutal desert.

To meteorologists, however, the tropics region is defined by long-term climate and what's happening in the atmosphere. Recent studies show changes that indicate an expansion of the tropical atmosphere.

The newest study, published Sunday in the new scientific journal Nature Geoscience, shows that by using the weather definition, the tropics are expanding toward Earth's poles more than predicted. And that means more dry weather is moving to the edges of the tropics in places like the U.S. Southwest.

Independent teams using four different meteorological measurements found that the tropical atmospheric belt has grown by anywhere between 2 and 4.8 degrees latitude since 1979. That translates to a total north and south expansion of 140 to 330 miles.

One key determination of the tropical belt is called the Hadley circulation, which is essentially prevailing rivers of wind that move vertically as well as horizontally, carrying lots of moisture to rainy areas while drying out arid regions on the edges of the tropics. That wind is circulating over a larger area than a couple decades ago.

But that's not the only type of change meteorologists have found that shows an expansion of the tropics. They've seen more tropical conditions by measuring the amount of ozone in the atmosphere, measuring the depth of the lower atmosphere, and the level of dryness in the atmosphere at the edges of the tropics.

Climate scientists have long predicted a growing tropical belt toward the end of the 21st century because of man-made global warming. But what has happened in the past quarter century is larger and more puzzling than initially predicted, said Dian Seidel, a research meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lab in Silver Spring, Md. She is the author of the newest study.

"They are big changes," she said. "It's a little puzzling."

She said this expansion may only be temporary, but there's no way of knowing yet.

Seidel said she has not determined the cause of this tropical belt widening. While a leading suspect is global warming, other suspects include depletion in the ozone layer and changes in El Nino, the periodic weather phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean.

Other climate scientists are split on the meaning of the research because it shows such a dramatic change — beyond climate model predictions. Some scientists, such as Richard Seager at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, say changes in El Nino since the 1970s probably are a big factor and could make it hard to conclude there's a dramatic expansion of the tropical belt.

But climate scientists Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria and Richard Somerville of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography said Seidel's work makes sense and that computer models have consistently been underestimating the ill effects of global warming.

"Every time you look at what the world is doing it's always far more dramatic than what climate models predict," Weaver said.

Both Weaver and Seidel said the big concern is that dry areas on the edge of the tropics — such as the U.S. Southwest, parts of the Mediterranean and southern Australia — could get drier because of this.

"You're not expanding the tropical jungles, what you're expanding is the area of desertification," Weaver said.

Network Model of Biological Interactions in Human Aging

2007-11-25T20:40:00.000-08:00

I was reading Bruce Sterling’s Beyond the Beyond blog and found a graphic of a network map about the metabolic pathways involved in human aging. It looked cool, but was small and had no text info with it. A quick google search turned up a poster from the 2007 Aging Symposium in Edmonton, Alberta Canada, with a good summary description of the science. This also had a link to the home website of the group and organization, which has more info and the network map.

Here is the chart in full size on the organization's site. This version will be updated, the small copy posted at the top of this post won't be updated..

Presenter: John D. Furber, Legendary Pharmaceuticals
Title: 2007 Network Model of Biological Interactions In Human Aging

(I have modified the abstract below to make it more readable and to emphasize the points in the article.)

The many observable signs of human senescence have been hypothesized by various researchers to result from several primary causes. Close inspection of the biochemical and physiological pathways associated with age-related diseases and with the hypothesized causes reveals several parallel cascades of events that involve multiple interactions and feedback loops. We have constructed a network diagram to aid in visualizing the many processes and interactions among them, including promising intervention points for therapy development.

This network diagram refers to both intracellular and extracellular processes, and it ranges in scale from the molecular to the whole-body level. Important pathways include:

• Glycation, oxidation, and crosslinking damage extracellular proteins.
• Aggregates clog proteasomes and lysosomes.
• Repair and turnover of macromolecules and organelles is impaired.
• Reactive, crosslinked material accumulates in lysosomes and leaks into cytoplasm.
• Oxidized aggregates in cytoplasm crosslink and increase redox poise.
• Increased redox poise alters signaling and enzyme activities, and erodes telomeres.
• Stem cells stop dividing or die.
• Chromatin alterations and DNA methylation change gene expression.
• Stiffer blood vessels promote stroke and heart disease.
• Cell death leads to tissue wasting, neurodegeneration, and organ malfunction.
• Damaged molecules and sick cells promote inflammatory cascades which further damage tissues.
• Mitochondrial DNA mutates.
• Neuroendocrine and immune systems degrade.

This diagram is continuously maintained on the Web as a reference for researchers, with the content updated as new information comes to light. (See this site: www.LegendaryPharma.com/senescence.html.) In addition, we are formalizing the network diagram's contents into first-order logic and using model checking techniques from artificial intelligence to evaluate the completeness and consistency of this diagram.

This is a very useful and potentially very important use of network diagramming. I’ve been studying this technique sporadically for the past year (as I find time). Will write in another post where this began and some of the other things I’ve learned with it. (And why it is so important.)

Malibu Fire, 21 October 2007

2007-10-21T16:38:00.000-07:00

Google Map of the Malibu Fire.
Web site of the fire.
LA Observed’s Here In Malibu.

I’m going to look up the Santa Monica Airport (SMO) frequencies and see if I can get info on the air freqs the water birds are using.

swim

2007-10-21T15:39:00.000-07:00

Swam 1,000 yards today, the first in a long time that I’ve swum that far in a workout. It wasn’t too hard and I wasn’t too tired when I finished. I could have done more, but arms and shoulders were a little tired and my blood CO2 was fairly high. The distance was good, so I called the workout a success and called it a day.

Telecommuting with robotics

2007-10-21T15:22:00.000-07:00

In the middle of September I took a day off work and went downtown to the LA Convention Center to see the Wired NextFest. (I haven't written about NextFest yet, but I will soon.)

But what I wanted to write about is the link to the robot used as a telepresence avatar. With my program at work about to incorporate and envelope (and probably be consumed) by telecommuting, this could be a useful thing to propose as a virtual presence for people who are remoting in to meetings.

Shrinking icepack

2007-10-21T12:06:00.001-07:00

An even better representation of the shrinking ice pack.

Defrosting the icebox, warming the planet

2007-10-21T11:43:00.000-07:00

I've been following the saga of climate change since I was an undergraduate and studied both global warming (IR absorption by CO2, CH4, NOx, etc) and ozone depletion. I find it a sad irony that most people are just now discovering the problem when the scientists have known about the imminent problems for decades. In fact, Al Gore's book came out long before he became VP in the Clinton Administration, but to the degree that anybody was paying attention it was the whacko right wing who screeched that he is a psychopath.

(I am not making this up. I have a friend who while supposedly being an environmental scientist and engineer, he is much more strongly a radical neoconservative Republican and far right conservative. He ranted wildly about Gore before that election, and to this day 15 years later still rants wildly about Gore as a "psychopath". He's not the only rational person I know who gets wildly irrational when attempting to confront Gore and the scientific fact of Global Warming Climate Change, GWCC.)

NASA has recently released their mid-September satellite imagery of the minimum extent of the Arctic sea ice. The pictures are scribed with the extent of the ice pack for 1979-2000, for 2005, and then for 2007. The shrinking of the ice is shocking to see, but it is simply the end result of what we have known and expected for decades.

It is worth reading the entire description of the picture (see the link), but here is the final sentence.

In 2007, all Arctic sea ice records were broken by August, more than a month before the end of melt season.

Note that in the (approx.) six months of melt season from spring to autumn, the ice had melted back to its previous minimum more than a month before solar insolation fell past a seasonal level where melting begins to reverse. So there was another whole month of melting, thus setting a new record. We can expect 2008 to be worse.

NASA working with Google Earth

2007-10-21T09:56:00.000-07:00

I subscribe (by email) to NASA's Natural Hazards Updates, part of the NASA Earth Observatory. This sends daily notifications of satellite pictures of significant events - storms, floods, volcanoes - essentially any natural event that is best seen from low earth orbit. They use several satellites to provide the images, and include a one-sentence description with a URL of each event. There are usually two events listed everyday.

I just opened Friday's email and found a description and link to an erupting volcano in the Red Sea. I found it interesting because I didn't know that the area was active, but what was very interesting in the message was a link to a Google Earth KMZ file. NASA - the 900 pound gorilla of space imagery - is working with Google Earth!

It's pretty cool to see a government working with common commercial tools and adopting them so quickly.

xkcd

2007-10-18T19:12:00.001-07:00

Hilarious. A riot.
Total geek humor, but too funny everytime.
Every time I look at it I get a new ATF.
I am too geeked out.
My favorite today.
Okay, the next one is great too...
Yet again!

See what I mean?

Writing for Attribution (and satire)

2007-10-15T19:40:00.000-07:00

I just checked my "scorecard" of letters to Salon and I've got 9 "Editor's Choice" out of 17 total letters! Woohoo! I don't always try to write for score, but I nearly always try to make it witty, or pithy, or satirical.

I haven't mentioned that I'm taking a class at UCLA Extension in Political Satire, but I am. It's not exactly what I expected it to be; that is, it's not at all a class on how to write satire. But it is a good overview of American satire and satirists of the past century (with a few other token eras and cultures thrown in for contrast and comparison). Now that I'm in the class it's fun to look back at a collection and see where it stands. For an amateur, it seems to hold its own.

Not that I'm patting myself on the back you know, I'm just sayin' ...

swim

2007-10-14T19:03:00.000-07:00

I got in the water for 500 yards yesterday. It was easier than the 500 yds I did last weekend (which I did not write about). I should have stayed longer, but... boooring.

Mapping Dimona

2007-10-14T18:51:00.000-07:00

For a long time the satellites that map the earth have been fuzzing out the Israeli nuc site at Dimona. Now, for some reason, Google Earth shows it clearly. Thanks to Arms Control Wonk for pointing this out. (KMZ file on the site.)

Wes Anderson retrospective at the Aero

2007-10-04T21:54:00.000-07:00

There is a Wes Anderson retrospective at American Cinematheque's Aero theatre this week. I went to see The Royal Tenenbaums this evening. It's a quirky (Hollywood technical term) story of a dysfunctional family, and boy could I relate to it. I'm sorry I didn't see it before my dad died, but I'm glad I didn't see it when it came out. That is, I don't think I could have handled seeing it before last Thanksgiving, but I wish I'd seen it between then and when he died.

Mod Blog, or modding the blog

2007-10-02T18:59:00.000-07:00

Woohoo!

I used the Blogger Help Link (in the link below, named "Link") to figure out how to modify this blog's template so as to add the Link button that you (hopefully) can see.

As I slowly learn html, this is a small but pleasing step in the process. (And I did make a copy of the original template before modifying it.)

EOL

2007-10-02T18:13:00.000-07:00

One of these days I will write about my father's death.

One good Marine; or how the ethnic media doesn't know its own stories

2007-09-24T18:42:00.000-07:00

Twice today I've heard stories on National Public Radio criticizing the lack of mention of Latino soldiers in the new Ken Burns documentary about WWII. The first was on Morning Edition by Richard Gonzales, and the second was by Adolfo Guzman Lopez on KPCC (local Pasadena college radio).

The interview some living WW2 latino vets, talk about some guys who died both in Europe and the Pacific, and then talk about the contribution made by the ethnic group, with the strong implication being that their ethnic group is being slighted by being left out of the movie. Which is fair enough. Burns ought to have mentioned them, if only to mention the one guy that neither Gonzales nor Guzman Lopez mentioned, and who is arguably the biggest hero of the PTO - Guy Gabaldon.

I think that there is some irony in that in neither reporter appears to know the history. Gabaldon was personally responsible for taking over 1,000 Japanese prisoners on Saipan, many of them soldiers but some also women and children. Which means he saved all those lives, as well as the (literally) uncountable lives of US Marines who would have had to fight against those Japanese soldiers if they had not been persuaded by Gabaldon to surrender.

To add a little bitterness to the irony of these Latino trying to build a little racism into a scenario where it was part of the circumstance of the time, Gabaldon's case was one of pure racism. Here is a guy who rescues himself from a very bad situation, and uses his own skills of language and social engineering to save at least a thousand people. And he does this against the orders of his commanders, but with his buddies who also go against orders because they see the benefit to everybody. And then when a higher officer nominated Gabaldon for the MoH, an officer above him refused - and that refusal was purely out of racism.

That is the story that Ken Burns should have told to include a Latino; and that is the story that Gonzales and Guzman Lopez should have told also.

Solar Power Conference 2007

2007-09-23T13:17:00.000-07:00

Going to Solar Power Conference 2007 in Long Beach on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of next week. My hoped-for itinerary is here. Am trying to see talks that are relevant to managing a business in the solar industry.

Serious Back Pain

2007-08-10T18:47:00.000-07:00

I have had chronic but intermittent bad to serious to severe back pain for thirty years now. It returned last Sunday night. I was sitting in the easy chair (known to be dangerous for my back) for much of the day. A little after 10 PM I got up to put the laptop back on the desk and got a flash of server pain in the same place I always get the pain. It almost dropped me to the floor. In fact I would have gone down but for the expensive equipment in my hands.

I had a very difficult night, and was barely able to get out of bed in the morning. There was no way I could go to work. In fact, I was not able to go to work any day this week.

Web 2.0 and stock watching

2007-08-10T18:08:00.001-07:00

When my dad died I received a small inheritance from his IRA. It had been all invested in (bad) index funds (see below). I let those ride for 90 days and then sold them. While I had them though, I tracked them manually with Yahoo Finance and Google Docs, by setting up a spreadsheet which calculated the net change month to month of each, and the annualized change. I had to enter the monthly prices of each for the spreadsheet to do the calculation though.

I just discovered Google's Finance blog, which appears to have code that will automate that process (and probably more). It's Web 2.0 also. So it's an opportunity for me to play with one technique to help me track and learn something else. (Not that I've replaced the sold index funds with anything else at this point.)

Better Living Through Chemistry

2007-08-05T15:03:00.000-07:00

Last night I was able to help Chuck Goolsbee with a little advice about his home chemistry program for converting waste vegetable oil to usable oil for diesel engines. Thanks for the nice compliment!

OmniGraffle Extras

2007-08-05T13:57:00.000-07:00

Was reading Global Guerrillas this morning and JR wrote a post saying that he thinks Omni Graffle is

...the best drawing and diagramming tool ever...

Good for the OmniCrew to get the recognition, and it's interesting to observe the ongoing development of somebody else who is discovering how much more useful OSX and its associated tools are than Windows.

But that's not my story here. I thought I'd write a comment about OG Pro and hopped over to the site to get the info. While there I saw a link to Omni Graffle Extras and realized that I've never looked for the extras for OmniGraffle. I dropped into that and found some cool stencils and scripts. Downloaded a bunch of interesting sounding extras (Maps, WorldMaps, AddressBookChart, CashFlow, Periodic Table, Walkthroughs, Origami, etc) and now have to start experimenting with them.

In fact, the first experimenting I have to do is with one of the extras that is a tutorial for how to best use and implement OG and OGP. This could be really helpful and useful, especially for this graphically-impaired word person...

Addition: Graffletopia

Surf report Saturday

2007-08-05T13:43:00.000-07:00

Writing on Sunday about surfing Saturday morning. A colleague is here in Santa Monica from
Cambridge and wants to learn how to surf. He dropped into cubicleland on Friday and I showed him some of the important websites (e.g. CDIP) to refer to when prepping for going out. Being an analyst, I also described to him how to analyze the data - tides, swell, time of day, wind - to have a good idea of what to expect. Much of it went over his head, but at least he's not completely in the dark.

On Saturday we went out, 8 AM. He did not have a wetsuit, but the water is warm and so I took him out sans wetsuit. Also, I put him on a boogie board for his first go-out, so I could watch him handle himself in the water and start to teach him a bit about reading the incoming swell. Also, having a first-timer go out on a boogie is easier for them to feel the incoming energy and learn how to adjust to it without the extra problem of going from prone to standing up while the board is accelerating and changing angle of attack.

At about :30 minutes out I switched him over to my long board, and by the end of an hour (he was cold by then) he'd already caught and stood up on two waves. Woohoo!

From there we went back home and showered off, then down to Horizons West where we bought him a spring suit. Since he's here for the next two months on an exchange program, I decided to show him around town a bit. We walked south on Main from H.W. to Finn MacCool's Irish Pub, a block past Ocean Park Blvd., and back. I think he enjoyed the walk and the tour.

I decided to lend him my longboard for a few days while we look for a board for him to buy. (I was not able to go out Sunday morning and he wanted to.) Back to my place and we loaded up the longboard into my car and returned him to his place north of Wilshire.

Being Dutch he is also looking for a bicycle to get around town with, and I've introduced him to the Big Blue Bus as well.

So many movies, so little time...

2007-08-03T07:45:00.000-07:00

The new Jason Bourne movie, The Bourne Ultimatum, opened at 12 AM last night locally and is playing locally. That's a must-see for me (Salon review). I plan to see the new Harry Potter movie in 3D at the local IMAX theater in Culver City. Also in the "want to see" category...

The Simpsons Movie
Transformers
La Vie en Rose (fr)
Goya's Ghosts
Knocked Up
El Cantante
Once
My Best Friend (fr)
Moliere (fr)
The Long Goodbye
Paris, je t'aime (fr)
Pirates of the Caribbean

Some of the above are high priority and some are low, but even the high priority titles are a long list.

Flat City

2007-08-02T09:03:00.000-07:00

Surf check this morning and the surf is so small that it was like a lake. I was going to post a picture from the CDIP, but it seems to be down. Waah.

Summer surf

2007-07-28T23:36:00.000-07:00

Saturday morning went surfing with Stephane. He was supposed to arrive at 8:30, but I called him at 7:30 and "appealed" to him to get down here. He arrived at 8 and we were in the water by 8:30. Stayed in the water until 10:30, by which time the meager but fun waves were few and far between. It was still great conditions, but the high tide had the waves pushed up to the beach so they were essentially shorebreak, and I was getting bored.

Lots of people out though, probably more than I've been in the water with in decades. But the crowd was having fun, and there was a camaraderie that I just don't expect. Crash was out (I don't know his real name, just know him as Crash.) And he was getting rides even in the small waves. He had several students with him, mostly advanced beginners.

The water was so warm that many people were in trunks. I wore my spring suit and actually had to splash water on my back several times to cool off. There were quite a few femmes out in the water too, which was nice. It helped that they were having fun, and generally joined in the camaraderie. (It also helped that they were good looking!)

The south swell expected from Tropical Storm Dalila hasn't yet shown up, and as the storm is degrading it's quite possible that the swell will never materialize. Oh well.

Loser stocks, loser stockbroker

2007-07-25T07:38:00.000-07:00

Yesterday marked the end of Month 3 since the broker at Wachovia (Santa Barbara branch) informed me of the contents of the investment account I was to inherit after my father's death. I tracked the 4 funds and 1 stock for these three months to see how they performed.

Of the 5, one was flat (less than 0.1% increase in three months) and all the others had lost money. In fact, all the others had lost money at an annualized rate of more than 12%. To add insult (and further injury) to injury, they were all items that had high management fees attached. And in fact these had been losers for the entire three months that I tracked them, while the stock market itself had been on a wild increase for the same time.

It is unbelievable to me that a professional investment adviser would have initially chosen and continued to stay with things such as this. It's unconscionable and in my opinion professionally negligent. My further opinion is that the guy is incompetent, but my father stayed with him because he has a nice Irish-sounding name.

I called the guy's assistant Naomi on the exact 3-month "anniversary" day and told her to tell Brian to sell everything. That day. She asked (courteously, which is more than I can say for him) why, and I told her "Because they are all losers". I think she is his assistant because she is in training to become a broker. I hope I have illustrated for her a bit of what happens to an incompetent when a no-BS person comes along.

I got the account statement first thing the next week, and took it to my guy. He seems better, but he also seems spread far too thin by his company. So I'll have to make most of my own assessments and decisions, and just tell him what to do and when to do it. I'm still playing the unsophisticated and semi-ignorant investor-dude for all of them, just to see how I get treated. But at least I got out from under the Wachovia loser.

Beer Goggles

2007-07-25T07:34:00.000-07:00

El Borracho sunglasses by Bolle, from REI.

Why would anybody call a product "The Drunkard" is beyond me. But for some adolescent reason I still find it quite humorous.

(Link is liable to rot at any time.)

Alienated? Who, me?

2007-07-24T20:19:00.000-07:00

I was reading Kathryn Cramer's weblog and came across a mention of the Alienation Index, a site that purports to calculate one's level of alienation from things social. My scores:

Meaninglessness = 9
Cultural Estrangement = 21
Powerlessness = 18
Normlessness = 12
Estrangement from Work = 11
Social Isolation = 14

And the key:

Scores should range between 5 and 25.
Scores from 5 to 11 could be considered "low,"
from 12 to 18 "moderate,"
and from 19 to 25 "high."

It's odd, because I don't feel alienated.

(No) surf report

2007-07-22T18:06:00.000-07:00

These days I have a nearly desperate need to get some waves, but there has been no surf in a couple of weeks. Went down to the beach this morning and it was so small that it was simply not worth going out even to get wet.

Argh.

Pray for surf... ;-)

real estate and living: LA vs. Paris

2007-07-14T17:00:00.000-07:00

I found a very interesting article in the NY Times about an LA woman who has a pied-a-terre in Paris. It's not very big and not well placed in the building (lousy views) but it was affordable, is an income property (rentable to short-term expat Americans) and provides a place to land in the times she goes to Paris from LA to stay for awhile.

I look at it also as a hedge against the outrageous and out of control real estate market here in L.A. That is, LA's RE market is still vastly overpriced, and quite unstable. And the US - both the real estate market and as a place to live - is (I believe) increasingly untenable. That's not something I ever would have told my dad when he was here, but I'll say it here. (Since nobody reads this but the bots anyway, it doesn't matter. )

When M. goes back this September I'm going to have her check the prices and we'll consider buying something there as a place to go to in case we might have to go back for any reason. I'd certainly miss the climate and the geography here, but it's weird to think that Paris is a more affordable city to live than the huge city of Los Angeles.

I feel safer already

2007-06-23T20:29:00.001-07:00

Two weeks ago I flew to San Francisco to undergo* training on the new Microsoft SharePoint 2007 (MOSS). I got into SFO, collected my luggage and took a shuttle to the hotel. When I opened my bag, I instantly noticed that things were amiss. And the "Items may shift during flight..." warning was not to blame.

As I slowly took things out of the suitcase I noticed more and more amiss, for instance the toiletries bag is a small internal bag that snaps into the top of the case, and it was detached and buried in the other stuff.

I wasn't worried about anything being stolen as I hadn't taken anything valuable. Though I was genuinely puzzled it occurred to me that maybe the cargo monkeys had chosen my bag to rifle in a search for valuables to steal.

But finally at the bottom of all the stuff, and apparently tossed in after the stuff had been extracted but before it was replaced, was this charming little card from My Government.

*If it seems like I'm unhappy about this Microsoft bundle of bits, it's because I am. Learning a Microsoft program is like getting brain surgery to rewire one's neurons so as to not think so logically or brilliantly.

hot summer, cool music

2007-06-22T17:03:00.000-07:00

One reason I like living in Santa Monica is the free summer concerts on the Pier, the Twilight Dance Series. This summer we get some acts that I know and like: David Lindley, Queen Ida and Los Lobos (!). Also playing for the 10 night spread are some names I don't know, but the genres look fun. Every Thursday evening starting 7:30 PM.

Thou Shalt Keep Right...

2007-06-19T08:06:00.001-07:00

The Vatican has issued the 10 Commandments for Drivers. Personally, I think it should start:
1. Thou shalt keep right except for passing.

Surf

2007-06-13T07:56:00.000-07:00

Finally got back in the ocean yesterday after a couple of months. A colleague from the European office is here for induction training, and another mutual colleague recommended she contact me to get some surfing lessons.

No problem! It's much easier to motivate myself to go out when I'm helping someone learn to surf.

Surf was about 2-3 foot windswell, even though the CDIP shows a substantial NW swell offshore. The wind was about 5 kts. from the NW which bumped up the sea surface a bit but not too badly.

We got into the water about 5:15 PM, and there was nobody else out. This was good, as it gave me some time to teach P. some of the techniques of using a bodyboard. Within half an hour there were about 5 guys out on standup boards, but I was getting more and better rides. (The advantage of a body board in small sloppy waves...)

We'll probably go out again this afternoon, and are planning to go out again tomorrow afternoon.

Fast Food = Bad News

2007-06-10T19:04:00.000-07:00

Following on Morgan Spurlock's movie "Super Size Me!", recent scientific research provides more evidence that fast food is bad for mammals. Report in Science News.

Polynesian chickens

2007-06-10T18:33:00.000-07:00

Science News has an article reporting that recent research seems to show that chicken bones dug up in a Latin American site have the same DNA print as chicken DNA from Polynesia. This seems might be significant evidence that the Polynesians travelled to Latin America between 600 and 2,000 years ago.

There are some dissenting archaeologists, but this is pretty interesting if it is eventually confirmed.

Road Trip for SharePoint

2007-06-10T17:59:00.000-07:00

I spent the past week (Sunday night 3 June to Friday night 8 June) in San Francisco doing a one-week training class in the new SharePoint 2007. I learned a fair amount, but I'm certainly not overwhelmed. Whelmed is more like it.

It is useful, but Microsoft has made it too complex for most people so I don't see it getting the kind of use they hope for. Furthermore, they've made significant parts of it compatible only with Windows and Internet Explorer. More specifically, they've built wiki and weblog functionality into it, but to use the formatting options you have to have Win/IE. It won't work with Firefox or Macintosh, unless one types in raw html.

I guess its MS' way of putting the world on notice that we are still expected to use only Windows and only Internet Explorer.

Back in the water

2007-06-10T17:37:00.000-07:00

I think the last time I was in the water was about 6 weeks ago when I went in the SMC pool and swam about 350 yards. I've been down to the beach virtually every weekend day morning, but the surf has been small and sloppy windswell - typical for late spring. (Check the CDIP for SoCal.) It's currently about 1-2' from the NW with a 10sec interval; in other words it's slop.

It's hard to get out when the surf is like this, but then I don't get any workout. If I'm going to get back into diving and surfing condition for the trip to Central America though, I've got to get some serious water time.

So today it was back into the pool at SMC. I got in about 500 yards (pathetic!) before my shoulders were seriously tired and I was noticeably out of breath. No problem though, it's the first day back and tomorrow I'll do a little more.

A Day at the LA Concours

2007-06-03T23:58:00.000-07:00

I went to the LA Concours d'Elegance today with M. It was fun and entertaining for awhile, though I'm not as dedicated to the cars as I was a decade or two ago when I was trying to eke out a living as a photographer (shooting cars, amongst many other subjects).

This time I took some car pictures, but wasn't trying so hard to get really good pictures of the cars. And I didn't even attempt any detail shots. Nowadays I'm just looking to get people pictures, and I may have gotten one or two this time.

I shot a number of photos of M. as she was pretty excited getting car pictures. But I also saw one or two interesting people that I photographed. I can't add the pictures just yet though, as the camera is at home and I am 500 miles away in San Francisco, getting ready to go to SharePoint Administrator training early in the morning.

Much else happened today that I may write about tomorrow evening (if I remember). It's midnight now though, and I've got a 6 AM call.

Web 2.0 and JPL (Part 1)

2007-05-31T21:43:00.000-07:00

Today at work we had a 3 hour presentation by JPL's CIO, CIO (emeritus) and a system architect talking about JPL's current and future plans for Web 2.0 implementation. It was pretty cool inasmuch as I knew 99% of what they were talking about, and the 1% thing I didn't know (a children's social networking site) I was able to add an observation* to that was very insightful and he hadn't thought of before (despite its tremendous significance).

It will take a few days to write th full summary, and then some more time to condense that into an executive summary. And I may not be able to post it here (for obvious reasons).

*He briefed us on the children's social networking sites Club Penguin and Webkinz. I hadn't heard of either, but neither had anybody else in the room. It turns out that these sites get much more usage per person-visit than such sites as MySpace or Second Life. After everybody absorbed that information I commented that "When these get mashed up with One Laptop Per Child, then things will really begin to happen".

from Microsoft to Google?

2007-05-30T20:21:00.000-07:00

My first real, good, and real good, PIM was Claris Organizer. I bought it at 1.0 and upgraded every time I could. It was - then and now - a very good piece of software for tracking personal information, and especially for linking calendar events and contacts. When Steve Jobs rejoined Apple one of the things that happened was Claris was killed as an independent company: Filemaker was spun off as an independent and Organizer was left to die. It was shortly sold to Palm, who halfheartedly supported it. It was still Palm Organizer, and was okay but getting old and in need of update. That was at least 6 years ago. Palm made one minor update to bring it up to OS X compatibility, but it was essentially abandoned. I stuck with it as long as I could, but eventually it just didn't work well anymore with the OSX operating system.

At that point I had to move all the information out of Organizer and into something else. I had worked with Now Contact, with Chronos, and with the various Apple software solutions. Nothing was as good, even though Organizer was no longer sufficiently functional.

But in 2004 Microsoft finally revised Entourage enough that it became a very good personal information manager, in addition to being a very functional email client. (Note that it is also a useful news client, so long as you restrict your usenet use to nntp://microsoft.public.*)

There are a few problems with Entourage though. First is that its database is fragile and can break so severely that one can lose a substantial amount of data. Microsoft does not provide any tool to fix or diagnose the database. (In typical Microsoft fashion, they maintain that it is a proprietary and so the customers cannot have any tools to work with on the broken part.) Another problem with Entourage is that it works best as a standalone, almost completely ignorant of anything else on one's computer. Granted it has extensive AppleScripting capabiltiy and there are some fairly capable scripters out there, but the scripts simply don't provide sufficient bridging to the rest of the operating system. (This analysis ignores the pluses and minuses of Entourage when it links to Exchange server.)

Don't get me wrong - Entourage has more data fields than anything I've worked with aside from a custom database. But it is a challenge to get anything in or out, and it is especially difficult to use with anything else (other email, GTD, calendaring, contacts, etc. programs).

Fortunately, it is fairly easy to work with. So when the time came to finally extract my information out of Organizer I chose to move the resulting dirty data into Entourage for cleaning up. I made a project out of all the contact data and laboriously went through all the contacts to eliminate duplicates (would have been nice to do that programmatically!) and fix the data that was broken in the transfer. As I had over 750 entries, this took awhile. I finally finished it a few weeks ago (down to 610 items), and now it's time to make another decision.

I want the information to be available to any of my computers - preferably from the net but at least from my HAN. Entourage simply doesn't recognize that. So I have to move the data either to my gmail account or to Apple's Address Book and then build and configure a server.

Getting the data out will be easy, but getting it out in some form that is easily transferrable will be difficult. I'll have to look for some tool to ease a move to Google. Alternatively I could move all the data to Address Book and iCal, but frankly those two are just too simple. Even Sbook is better than Address Book, and that was built by one guy on his own time.

Also, the latter means I'll have to manage a server. I can do that - and it will provide some other useful services - but I've got better things to do with my time.

I'll study the problem and practice it a bit and see where the study leads me. More later.

Work Stories: Web 2.0 and an Internet Titan

2007-04-10T20:28:00.000-07:00

I was scheduled this morning to show Steven W. (in the Cambridge office) how to use Adobe Connect for collaboration and screen sharing. Duck meets water. Sheesh. After less than five minutes he diverted me from the script and we took off in all sorts of directions. First diversion was "let's put down the phone and try the audio conferencing". I hadn't used it before so we sort of stumbled around a bit, but shortly got it working and didn't use the phone for the following hour and a half. The audio cut out a few times - predictably when we switched layouts - but we figured out how to restore it. He's probably the best user in the company now besides me and Chris, and I'll have to continue practicing with him to keep up.

In the mid-afternoon I had to give a presentation on collaboration and associated techniques technologies, and social implications and ramifications, i.e. Web 2.0. I based it on Tapscott's business theory of wikinomics and included many of my own observations. It was a success inasmuch as we (Chris and I) didn't get thrown out of the room. We didn't get a go-ahead either, but at least we planted a seed.

After that I went straight to a "retirement" party for Bob Anderson. Bob didn't really retire, in that many people of his stature and seniority don't really retire from there, they just go to 1/3 time and move to adjunct status. He'll retain a shared office, a phone line and his email address and will probably continue to do occasional project work, but he won't be in the building regularly anymore.

the toll to date

2007-04-10T20:11:00.000-07:00

Another month has passed since last post. Three weeks after that post (on 30 March) I got word that Tom, a good friend of nearly 35 years, died on 21 March. And I'd also been deeply concerned over another friend who I'd learned in January had had unprecedented brain surgery to remove a cyst. She survived, but barely. The first three months of 2007 have been challenging, thus the dearth of posts.

a terribly bad and sad day

2007-03-10T20:14:00.000-08:00

No posts in a long time. On February 18 my father died. I was with him in the hospital room. I miss him a lot.

SCALE 5x, Day 1+1

2007-02-10T21:49:00.000-08:00

Went to SoCal Linux Expo, Day 1 today. The first thing I noticed - and kept noticing the same thing over and over throughout the day in various presentation sessions as well as on the show floor - was the proliferation of Mac laptops.

In fact, I think there were more Mac laptops than any other single model of laptop. In all there were more non-Apple laptops (HP+IBM+Dell) than Apple, but not by much. And if you consider that those non-Apple machines were running some version of Linux, usually Ubuntu (or, in a few cases, Windows), while most of the Macs were actually running OSX, then there was more OSX in general than any other OS.

I went to SCALE 4x last year, and 2x two years before that. At 2x I think I saw 2 Macs, and one was an old TiBook that was running Debian. Last year at 4x there were a few more, but nothing like this year. And just as significantly as the hardware was the OS. And a number of the people were actually presenters who were presenting to a crowd of (supposedly) Linux people using OSX and Keynote. And there was not a peep from the audience. Not a single word or sound of complaint. The OS was accepted as a "fellow traveler" as it were.

Most interestingly were these two.

Jean T. Anderson, a committer on the Apache Derby project was presenting "How to Particpate at the ASF" from her MBP. Now, she actually flipped from OSX into Parallels where she was running Linux and then presented from Open Office's presenter program. But for the entire :90 minutes of the presentation preceding I watched her working furiously on something, and that was in OSX. She actually went to the podium and attached her machine in OSX, and then flipped over to Parallels. (That got an "ooh, aah!" from some of the crowd.)

Today I saw Patrick McGovern present "Leveraging the IT Community", which was really a presentation about his company's very cool server/network monitoring application. The company and the application are both called Splunk. He presented this server monitoring application (actually it is a server log search application) from his Mac laptop and from Keynote. He used some cool transitions (though the basic template was rather plain, and the content was heavy on words and light on graphic enhancements). But again, the audience didn't even peep.

I've been reading that the *nix IT community has more and more been taking to OSX, but this was the first time I got to see it up close and personal. I guess I have to admit to feeling some personal vindication and validation of my choice of preferred OS. And there's no question that while OSX has been moving more toward the *nix community, it's also true that the community has been expanding to include OSX as a member of the common platform.

More later about Day 1 and Day 1+1 and the presentations and exhibits. Of course tomorrow is Day 2 and I'll be going to that too. Will see how much I can actually get posted up.

New journaling application

2007-01-28T09:53:00.000-08:00

I kept going back to viJournal and trying to make it do what I wanted, or to learn how to work with it to create the results I wanted. Eventually though I just could not do some of the simple things I wanted. (How about two entries on the same day but under different times without a circuitous workaround?)

At the beginning of this month I was in San Francisco at MacWorld 2007. We speakers got a few complimentary gifts, including Mariner Software's MacJournal. I validated the license code last night and have started using it just this morning. Already like it much more, as it is very customizable.

It also publishes directly to Blogger (as does viJournal), so I'll probably use that too in the future and maybe post more to this space.

Dark Cloud for the Silver Lining

2006-11-24T17:12:00.000-08:00

We've been hearing for months and as much as a few years now about how supercharged the economy of China is. Apparently it is not enough to absorb all the college students needing jobs when they exit university.

A tide of more than 30,000 students with polished résumés and high hopes surged into a job fair here [...] After years in which graduates were ensured of a good job in the fast-growing economy, the number of degree-holders has outstripped the number of jobs, and the guarantees have evaporated.

The Rigors of Professional Journalism

2006-10-20T00:24:00.000-07:00

As a long time resident of Los Angeles, I used to be an avid reader of the Los Angeles Times. In fact, I grew up reading it during the period under Otis Chandler when that newspaper became world class. I am grateful to the paper of that era for the education it gave me.

I am sad now for the depths to which the newspaper has sunk.

I could go on at length about the problems in management and content, but let me make just one example now. For many years one of the Times' travel writers has been Susan Spano. Ms. Spano was not one of my favorite writers, but then travel writing doesn't usually have the weight of other sections of the newspaper so her fluffy, poorly crafted pieces that included little to no observational insights about her destinations did not matter much.

A few years she apparently talked her editors into letting her move to and work from Paris. Ah, what a deal. I could be persuaded to write a few blog posts a week and a travel piece once a month or so if I got the opportunity to live in Paris as a writer. One might expect that giving an aspiring writer the chance to work in Paris would produce something - better quality in writing or at least enthusiasm about the place. But one might be wrong.

I long ago stopped reading Ms. Spano. When I saw she had some pieces about France I began following her ramblings again, but her writing had not improved. I suppose I could say I was disappointed, but that wouldn't be right because my expectations of her were already so low that there was no room to disappoint. Or so I thought, until now.

In the few years that she has been living and writing in Paris, her output has seemed to increase in frequency but decrease in quality. Today's blog post though is utterly devoid of redeeming qualities, and is a superlative example of what an absolutely talentless reporter and journalist this person is.

After about three years of living in Paris as a writer, she posts the plaintive question to her readership: "Who is Marianne?"

Actually, let me quote her from http://travelblogs.latimes.com/paris/2006/10/two_people_who_.html

"Does anyone know why France is called as Marianne? Who was she anyway?

It strikes me as perfect that the country is known by that name, while American is Uncle Sam.

Uncle Sam and Marianne should get cozy instead of wrangling over genetically engineered food and how to handle the nuclear threat posed by Iran."

I had to post a reply. I'm not proud of it, but neither am I ashamed of it. I feel a bit disgusted that I am actually wasting thirty minutes of valuable time writing about this, but it is truly a shame that the Los Angeles Times, formerly a great newspaper, continues to keep this person on the payroll when it simultaneously cuts more and better writers from its home offices and bureaus.

Here is my reply.

Is this a serious question? And from a purported reporter who has lived in France for - what is it now - three years? A five second trip to Wikipedia will tell you that Marianne is the symbol of the Revolution, and it will tell you ever so much more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marianne

I find it uttely astonishing that a journalist and reporter has to ask this question of the readership. I doubt that a French reporter would have asked the same question about Uncle Sam after living in this country for three years.

I guess it's not just American schoolchildren who are ignorant and uninquisitive.

And from what I have read elsewhere, this blog does not print comments that are less than favorable, so I guess this comment is likely to die in cyberspace.

Quelle irony, that this should be my fifth post to the Euphoriac blog and it should be such a pathetic thing.

But the truth of the matter is that Spano is known to not post critical comments to her blog, so I wanted to get this comment on the record in a place where she can't sweep it under the rug and I can have some small proof that she has been called on her utter ignorance and lack of reportorial capacity.

First entry in viJournal

2006-09-17T23:04:00.000-07:00

2006

Sunday, September 17

First entry in viJournal is just a test to see how it works. Downloaded and installed v1.7 into /Applications and wrote the author (Jeremy) an email asking about whether to install to /Applications or ~/Applications for best use on multiple machines by a single person but multiple accounts. Will see what happens as I save this (and how he replies).

A nice thing about this application (viJournal) is that it will automatically post to a weblog space on either LiveJournal or Blogger. So I'll test that too.

One curious coincidence... The programmer of this software is a writer in England, and also a techie. Just after sending the email to him I started on my next task - sorting through Science News posts - and looked at a book review by Ivars Peterson about Scarlett Thomas, a writer in England who has just written a book about crypto and therefore incorporating mathematics. Not much of a coincidence, but there it is.

CPSLO takedown

2006-09-03T23:13:00.000-07:00

I have taken down the details of the proposed reconstruction of OSX infrastructure as the client has apparently lost interest.

SPV-Nuc smackdown

2006-04-17T21:12:00.000-07:00

Photovoltaic electrical power generation is not increased by filtering for multiple wavelengths so as to "yield many times the output current of the most sophisticated cells now available". If you look back to your solid state and semiconductor physics you'll remember that holes (electrons) in the n dopant are kicked loose by photons and attracted towards the p dopant causing current. But the energy required to kick loose the electron(s) is a quantum or multiple thereof.

Photons in the lower wavelengths simply don't have the energy (the photoelectric effect is what Einstein got his Nobel prize for), and most wavelengths in the upper bands are not the right frequency. The action requires a specific frequency or multiple thereof. Anything else doesn't qualify. So you can DQ anything below (about) yellow - which means yellow, orange, red and lower (near-IR and IR).

Wavelengths in the green, blue, violet and soft UV are next, and they do the job of sufficiently energizing electrons to allow them to migrate from n to p. Wavelengths shorter and harder than that, the mid- to hard- UV, are blocked by atmospheric absorption so don't even reach the cells. Thus your input is limited to the range of green to soft UV in the mid-500 nanometers to just shorter than 400 nm.

But keep in mind that the wavelengths have to be a multiple of the quantum required. Not just any old photon will do, there has to be a je ne sais quoi between the photon (doing the courting) and the electron (being receptive). If the photon doesn't have the juice then the electron isn't gonna dance.*

Solar photovoltaic cannot and never will approach the power densities that nuclear can produce. In fact it will never even get close. SPV produces a few electron-volts (eV) per event, or a few volts per unit, and nuclear produces a few MeV per event, with a much higher event density, and a few megawatts per plant.

Furthermore, the best efficiencies achieved by the most exotic solar photovoltaic semiconductors are on the order of <20%, and the affordable substrates are about 10% efficient. It would require tens (if not hundreds) of square miles of PV to produce the electrical power that comes out of a nuc reactor. That land then becomes essentially useless for anything else. And the production required to make the cells would be staggering (include the dopants, steel, etc.)

Yes, more energy density can be produced by solar concentrated into thermal driving steam turbines, but these are still only millionths of the capability of nuclear. And neither photovoltaic nor thermal are worth much in the high northern or southern latitudes.

Nuclear waste is a real problem, but it can be dealt with well engineered solution, e.g. Yucca Mountain. (Storing rods in onsite ponds is not a safe or long term solution, btw.)

Nuclear power can be engineered well to be reliable and safe. Many countries do it, and most do it well. Burning petroleum to push millions of people back and forth in single-user vehicles with hundreds of horsepower per person is so ridiculous that words cannot describe. That petroleum they throw away into the atmosphere is too valuable as raw material for production of plastics, or as fuel for vehicles that truly need portable fuel (ships, planes and trucks).

Increasing energy efficiency - especially in building materials and buildings - is a valuable and necessary step, but only part of the solution in that they reduce the demand for new energy manufacturing plants. Bringing new energy plants to society is just as necessary as population grows and energy needs expand.

The reality is that the world has large energy needs in both existing societies (Western world) and emerging markets (China, India). Burning petroleum will heavily increase atmospheric CO2 (and CO and methane) loading and will accelerate global climate change in a manner that is orders of magnitude more damaging and dangerous to the planet (both civilization and nature) than the problem of nuclear waste disposal.

To close, I am deeply aware that the battle lines of this argument are drawn, and that most people on the "green" side are comparable to religious zealots in their commitment to solar and against nuclear. It is unfortunate that they cannot be realistic about both the challenges and the solutions. As we see, there are some (Patrick Moore, Stewart Brand, James Lovelock) who can see the alternatives and make a decision based on realistic alternatives, but there is simply no arguing with those for whom sheer belief is the only illuminating factor.

Back in the saddle

2006-03-03T23:48:00.000-08:00

Whoever it is that keeps banging on the password reset - it's been changed and this apparently abandoned blog is back in service. Thanks for your attention.

A View From the Beach

A Visit to the Annenberg Space for Photography

PC company economics, July 2009

Twilight Dance Series 2009

The Spectacle of Religions

Art Center Car Classic 2009

A Bad Week for Goldman Sachs

Big Brother

WGA seminar: Movies That Matter

NPR stories and a poem

Surf today

5 Stages of Grief

Blogroll Changes

How Do You Remember Someone When They Have Been Erased?

Musical Entertainment at McCabe's Guitar Shop

Surf Camp, Costa Rica

Give me stars, planets and a moon

Surf Costa Rica

What Is the Plural of Prius?

Quantum of Despair

Restart

Bailout Balls

Rockstar Scientist

Greenland wants to increase whaling

DOE Supports Research on GCC

Nuclear News

Blame It On the Democrats

Cool Summer

Summer of Euros

Scouting surf spots

Thick lips, good juice

Batman, again

Movie - Up the Yangtze

Screenwriter's Blues

FileVault test

Cape Horn of the Pacific

Surf reports - today and yesterday

Adventures - Then and Now

En Guarde!

Celebrity Spotting

Sneak Preview!

BCC-less, or, Scratch One BCC

The Onion as Prognosticator

*noma

U2 movie

Computing Systems Security

A little less talk, a little more action

Getting to the tropics

Earth's Tropics Belt Expands

Network Model of Biological Interactions in Human Aging

Malibu Fire, 21 October 2007

swim

Telecommuting with robotics

Shrinking icepack

Defrosting the icebox, warming the planet

NASA working with Google Earth

xkcd

Writing for Attribution (and satire)

swim

Mapping Dimona

Wes Anderson retrospective at the Aero

Mod Blog, or modding the blog

EOL

One good Marine; or how the ethnic media doesn't know its own stories

Solar Power Conference 2007

Serious Back Pain

Web 2.0 and stock watching

Better Living Through Chemistry

OmniGraffle Extras

Surf report Saturday

So many movies, so little time...

Flat City

Summer surf

Loser stocks, loser stockbroker

Beer Goggles

Alienated? Who, me?

(No) surf report

real estate and living: LA vs. Paris

I feel safer already

hot summer, cool music