wjr

STS-129 Ascent Video Highlights

Just in case anyone was wondering if Google had stopped being a neat place to work... it still is.  Here's a shot of a special guest we had at the regular weekly TGIF.  Yes, that is Natalie Portman in a propeller beanie... sorry for the blurriness as it was hand-held with no flash from a few feet away.

Iain has just (as in 10 minutes ago) lost his first tooth - one of the lower front ones.  What is the going rate for the tooth fairy these days?

I saw this in the local Asian grocery store's snack aisle, near the Pocky and Pretz.

This is from the English side of the instruction manual of a small electronic kitchen scale we just bought.

I inspect this product before shipment for the last time by all means.  But I am poor at a shock, and the out-of-order thing is thought about for a precision instrument in the process to the home of the visitor by a factory by any chance.  I am sorry, but please use it after operation check on use.

Of the hand of the infant is going to arrive, and please do not put it.

If a battery disappears, please trade with a new battery.

When a battery mark is displayed, please trade with a new battery because there are few battery residual quantities.

Today at lunch I had a marvelous dessert that the chefs in my building's cafe cooked up.  It was a cinnamon roll, but rolled up with the pastry was a strip of bacon.  It was FANTASTIC.

This has probably been around for a while, but I only noticed it last week.

Make sure you're using a browser or toolbar with "Google suggest" enabled.  This is the feature that brings up suggested searches as you type.  For example, if you type "king cr" it drops down a box showing (among others) "king crimson" and "king crab".

Now type "123+456" and wait a moment for the suggestions to arrive.  It will show a single suggestion, containing "=579".  Your search box is now a calculator... no need to hit return or anything.

For the math geeks: type "e^(pi*i)".

This is going to be a quick rundown of the vacation we took in July: we went to England for two weeks, visiting lots of family and friends.

The kids managed the flights (direct flights - 10-11 hours each way) quite well: they were bored but never got upset.  They didn't sleep much, unfortunately, so they arrived quite jetlagged at our first stop, my uncle Miles and aunt Margaret's place in Lancaster.  Their house is set up wonderfully for kids, due to the presence of local grandchildren, and Iain and Ria had a great time playing with all the toys.  It's just as well, as it rained for several days, so there wan't much to do but play with the toys.  Alastair, Bev and Rowan showed up, along with Cherry (a cousin) and my dad who was passing through England on his way to Spitzbergen.  Ria just fell in love with Margaret, and was happily snuggling with her every chance she got.  The first few nights of sleep were a bit disturbed for the kids (and so for us as well), but they were both happy.

Next we went to Alastair and Bev's place - we got to learn how Rowan is doing (very well!  What a sweet little boy...) and see some of the sights in their area: Salt Mills, the local canals, Harewood House (well, its adventure playground - oh, and the penguins), and the local parks.  Then we drove cross-country to Mum's where we enjoyed her back-yard, the toys that her next-door neighbour (who runs a daycare) kindly lent us, and the excitement of Bourton-on-the-water.

Finally, we were off to London, and after a rather stressful episode returning the rental car (next time, we're planning it differently) we arrived at the rather nice Highgate house of my old friend David, his wife Delphine, and their son Adrien (six months older than Ria, and quite bilingual in English and French).  There we explored the local hills (straight up and straight down, and quite frequent), and I got to hobnob with various celebrities: Douglas Adams (in Highgate Cemetery - an unremarkable headstone), Karl Marx (also in Highgate Cemetery - a large monument, surrounded by the graves of assorted Communists who managed to arrange to be buried near their idol), and Terry Jones of Monty Python (quite alive; he walked past us outside the restaurant where we'd just eaten).  Our last night we spent at a hotel near Paddington, where we got together with Uncle Tom and Sarah for a nice walk and dinner.  Another flight, and we were home!  Then we had a few nights more of disturbed sleep, but everyone is back to normal now.

We took the kids up to Tahoe last weekend so that they could learn how much fun snow is.  Ria was... not enthusiastic ("what's this cold stuff?  My hands are COLD and WET!  WAAAAAAAAAAH!") but Iain had a great time.  He loved sledding (especially on the saucers) and had a good time in the kids ski class we put him in.  He managed to go all the way down the tiny little slope they were using (really tiny - basically a fenced-off area near the lodge, with a conveyer belt to get them up the slope, such as it was).  He wanted to be outside as much as possible, playing on the mountains of snow at the edge of the condo parking lot.

I got to do a half-day of snowboarding, which was fun, except that about two minutes into the first run, I caught my toe-edge and slammed down HARD chest-first into the snow - said snow being (since this is spring) very dense and somewhat hard.  My right arm was caught between my chest and the snow, and knocked the wind out of me.  I was pretty sore, but kept going.  It's now 5 days later, and I'm pretty sure I cracked a rib - my chest still hurts when I breathe deeply, there are still sore spots, and it hurts at the injury site when I press on my breastbone.  That last sign is indicative of a broken rib, according to the medical information I found on the Internet (and when has that ever steered anyone wrong?  Never, I say!).  Also according to the fine Internet medical textbook (you too can be an instant doctor, able to diagnose any ailment!) the treatment for a cracked rib (as long as it's not actually poking out of your skin or into your lung) is: nothing.  Take some painkillers, if it hurts when you do X then don't do X, and wait 6 weeks.  They don't even tape/bandage your ribs these days.  So that's my plan.

I'm about to send out a book to someone who requested it from me on Bookmooch
The address I'm sending it to (with the actual address obscured):

Hercules Invictus
110 Something Road
Somewhere, 90210
Attn: Thor the Barbarian

I guess it's not a big enough operation for Thor the Barbarian to have his own mailstop number...

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8369296885822803994 - I'm at around 15:35.  Also check out the guy who actually knows what he's doing at 24:15 - I think he was a skydiver practicing a routine.

Edit: And I don't even know Python.

Last night Mona and I took advantage of a visiting grandparent (Mona's mother) and went out to see "Jumper".  The book "Jumper" is one of my favourites, so I was very interested in seeing what they'd done to it - it's impossible to fit a novel into the running time of a movie, so I was expecting some changes.  I have to say that I was quite disappointed in the movie.  I'm not going to comment on the acting, directing, or such-like - just on the script and plot.

The original book had themes of growth and maturation, forgiveness, and self-realisation.  The movie had none of these.  A very telling moment comes early in the movie: David is watching TV in his fancy apartment.  He sees footage of people trapped by a flood, and the announcer saying that "only a miracle will save them now".  He smiles, gathers his jacket and umbrella and... goes out for a night on the town.  By itself, I have no problem with this scene: it shows how David uses his power only for self-gratification.  In any good narrative structure, this would be counterbalanced by a scene where avid shows how he has grown, by using his powers in a more selfless manner.  This never happens - by the end, David has not shown any evidence of the growth that the book was full of.  The movie, in fact, doesn't really end - it just stops, leaving many things unresolved.  The ending feels like a big flashing sign reading "INSERT SEQUEL HERE!".

Another way in which the movie fails to show any kind of character growth is in the relationship of David with his mother.  In the final scene, his mother says "You're a jumper and I'm a paladin"; "I had to leave you or kill you".  This is a false dichotomy - while a jumper is something you are, a paladin is something you do, and something you can choose not to do.  A paladin confronted with a loved one who is a jumper might realise the evil nature of the paladin organisation; David's mother just carves out a little niche for her own son, and otherwise merrily goes on slaughtering innocents.

Basically, the movie felt like the writing was done by committee - a committee in which nobody was able to say "No" (or even splunge) to bad ideas.  The paladins are one-dimensional: it felt as though, early on in the writing process, confronted with the subtle ideas in the original book (David's pursuit by the NSA, and his eventual truce with them), somebody had said "Hey - you know what would be really cool?  What if there was this big secret group of nasties that hunt down jumpers?".  And thus it was - no real backstory (how does one become a paladin?  How have they accumulated the power and money that allow them to operate?  How do the paladins get away with the myriad crimes they commit?  How can a paladin walk into a police station, knock out a police officer, spend a considerable amount of time interrogating a prisoner, and walk out again?), just a fiat: And then there were paladins so there could be cool fight sequences.  Speaking of cool fight sequences, during the fight at Griffin's lair, there was another moment where someone in the writing committee must have said "Hey - you know what would be really cool?  What if Griffin grabs a double-decker bus and jumps it at Roland?".  And thus it was - a nice bit of special effects, with no thought to its meaning... that bus was jumped off the streets of London, so it would be full of passengers, innocents whose bus is suddenly rolling over, leaving them dead, dying or injured in a desert far from home.  There is no thought to them; the bus flipping over looks cool, so that's all that the writers care about; multiple murder committed by one of the "good guys" is airbrushed out.  (And he MISSED.  Argh - before jumping off to London for the bus, he was riding an ATV; get that up to 20mph or so and then jump it to the air just behind Roland's head and you're done, with no chance of failure.  But that doesn't look as cool.)

So yeah, I was disappointed with what the movie was, compared to what it could have been... and I'm glad my job doesn't involve Hollywood screenwriting committees.  Tell me what you think.

I got to do this yesterday.  You get to fly around in a giant vertical wind tunnel.  There will be pictures, but I don't have them yet.  I'll update this when I do.

For quite a number of years now, I've been listening to Oysterband - a UK-based folk-rock-or-something group that's been around for over 25 years now, making great music.  They're very, very good, and apparently they put on an amazing live show.  I've never had a chance to see them live - they haven't come to California in a very long time, and it's been a few years since they've even made it to North America.  I've been over to England a few times, and each time I've checked their tour schedule and found that they're either not touring, or are touring Sweden, or Germany, or...

I really, really want to see them play.

They're coming to North America.

Vancouver.

That's not so far away from us, right?  It's only a 2-hour flight...

So Mona and I are going to fly up to see them when they play in Vancouver in April.  We're flying out on Saturday, seeing the show Saturday night, and flying back Sunday.  That's pretty crazy, but it gets crazier: instead of flying the kids up too, and sticking them in a hotel room with a strange babysitter, we're flying a babysitter in.  We've bought a plane ticket so that Mona's mother can fly across the continent and look after the kids while we're gone.  She'll be here a day or two on either side, but it's still pretty crazy.

Whee!

I've been bad about posting some interesting things I've been up to recently, so here come three in a row.

First, the promised info about something I've been doing at Google.  Google, as you might have guessed, runs a lot of very complex large-scale systems - Web search, GMail, YouTube, Google Docs, and many many more.  Things are bound to go wrong, and so there's a group within Google that is in charge of keeping everything running smoothly - when was the last time you were unable to perform a Web search because Google was down?  Can't remember?  Good.

I'm currently on a 6-month internship in that group, learning the best practices so that when I go back to being a regular software developer I'll be able to incorporate those practices into the design of what I build.  I'm on the subgroup that's in charge of Google Video and some parts of YouTube.  There's literally nothing like this in the world outside Google - if YouTube isn't the highest-bandwidth site on the Internet, I don't know what is... and I get to be part of running it.

This week, Google took all its West Coast employees to Disneyland.  Well, you actually had the choice of Disneyland or camping (in the desert, in February... in California, but still...) - I chose Disneyland.  They flew us all down, put us all up in a hotel, gave us a 1-day pass to the park, and we had exclusive access to the park (i.e., they kicked everyone else out) for the entire evening - including free food, open bars, and a private fireworks show.

Yeah, I had a good time.  Disneyland with no lines for any of the rides is a lot of fun.  Disney has two adjacent parks in Anaheim these days - Disneyland and Disney California Adventure.  DCA has more traditional thrill rides.  The top-ticket ride there is the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror: a hotel with a haunted elevator.  It does the kinds of things you'd expect a haunted elevator to do: go up and down erratically.  Emphasis on the "down" - roughly 2 seconds of free fall, repeated a couple of times, with some intervening sharp ups and downs.  It's a good ride, and I got to do it three times - the third time immediately after the second.  About 10 of us were on the ride (which seats about 30) and when we were done, the attendant leaned into the elevator and said there was nobody waiting - did anyone want to go again?  I was the only one who did... so I got to ride it solo.  That was kind of spooky.

The other cool Google thing I did this week was attend a talk by Ed Lu, a relatively new Google employee.  Prior to Google, he worked for NASA - as an astronaut.  He flew on two shuttle missions (both times on Atlantis) and was in the space station for 6 months.  The talk was great, full of anecdotes about life in zero-G, helpful tips ("never get into a vodka drinking contest with a Russian general"), and even a surprise celebrity visitor: partway through the talk, someone came in and said "I'm sorry to interrupt, but I heard Ed was giving a talk" - the interruptor was Charles Simonyi, an early Microsoft employee who also has space station flight time, in his case as a space tourist.  (Apparently, according to Wikipedia, Simonyi has been dating Martha Stewart for 14 years or so.  Just thought I'd mention that.)  Ed Lu and Simonyi chatted for a few minutes; it was an interesting interlude.

[Edit: Oh yeah, for those of you who are programmers and have heard of Hungarian Notation, the use of suffixes to variable names to indicate the types of those variables: Simonyi is the Hungarian in question.]

Oh yeah, and last week I attended a talk by Bob Woodward (of Woodward and Bernstein, "All the President's Men", Watergate and Deep Throat) and got a copy of his latest book ("State of Denial", about how Bush is just plain not connected with reality with respect to Iraq) signed by the man himself.

And there's more interesting cool Google news but it will have to wait for a later post.  It's time for bed.

As I biked home tonight, through the wind and heavy rain, I felt very honourable.  Honourable in my role as a green commuter.  Definitely honourable, not, um, what's that other word - starts with S-T-U... nah, can't think of it.  I didn't mind that my wheel rims were so wet that my brakes didn't work well - after all, if I wanted to slow down, I could just turn into the wind and get blown to a stop.  I felt especially stupi^H^H^H^H^Hhonourable when I found out (just over halfway  home) that the trail was flooded where it passes under 101, and that I'd have to backtrack about half of the distance I'd just come.

When I cam home, there was a PG&E truck on our street.  That soon grew to four trucks of various sizes.  Around 9pm, the power came back on briefly: it came on; 30 seconds later there was a KABOOM from outside; 30 seconds later, it went out again.  It came on for good (so far) around 9:15.  The house is warming up nicely.  There might still be a few houses in our neighbourhood without power - there was a damaged underground cable, and maybe the houses it serves directly are still SOL - but we're OK.  Yay!

since we had power to our house.  There was a big storm on Friday that knocked out power to >1Million people, including us.  We've been in the dark since.  72 hours so far.  Put another way, we've been out of power for nearly half of 2008.

The power went out shortly after 10am on Friday - Mona said there was a bang outside and the lights went out.  She called the PG&E outage reporting line.  You can also call this line to get status updates... which we've done a lot since.  The outage was quite local - our small street and a couple of smaller nearby streets; a total of 30-40 houses.

Friday night, when we went to bed (in the dark), the status line said there would be an update at 6am Saturday.
At 7am Saturday, it said there would be an update at 10am Saturday.
At 10am Saturday, it said that there were crews onsite and power should be restored by 11am.  Mona took Iain out to watch the PG&E crews working, which Iain thoroughly enjoyed - he's been playing "PG&E crew" a lot since then.
The lineman said that a transformer had been damaged, probably by lightning, but simply fixing that transformer hadn't restored power - there was more damage down the circuit.  He was going to isolate some of the subcircuits and try to bring power back.  He told us that in a few minutes, either the lights would go on or we'd hear an explosion.
One explosion later, we were still in the dark.
Sometime Saturday afternoon, about half the houses on our street got power back.  Not us.  The status line now said that power should be restored 4-6pm Sunday.  We heard that there had been 6 transformers damaged in our area, and they'd managed to fix 3 of them.
At 6pm on Sunday, the message changed: it now said that a further update would come at 12am January 8 - i.e., midnight Monday night.  I called the "speak to a human" line and was told that the best guess for our area being cleared of outages was Monday afternoon.  This was from the general bulletin for all PG&E - these estimates are probably based on just dividing the number of remaining outages by the number of crews.  Incidentally, the automated line usually says "if you've been without power for 24 hours, here's the number to speak to a human".   They've changed that to "If you've been without power for 48 hours..."

They're saying that some areas, mostly the mountainous areas with poor access, might not get power back until Thursday.

As of right now, the status line says our power should be restored 4-6pm today.  We'll see.  I'm not pointing fingers at PG&E - their repair crews have been working 16-hours on,  8 hours off shifts since Friday morning, and once you've burned through your supply of replacement transformers you simply have to wait for more.  There was simply too much damage to be fixed quickly.

We've been getting by OK with a little help from our friends.  Some neighbours have a portable generator (we think it's part of their Burning Man kit) which they've been sharing around: hook it up to run your fridge for a few hours, then pass it on.  We've had some takeout food, and our friends Rick and Martha had us over to dinner on Saturday, and brought by a hot quiche on Sunday.  Our friends Becky and Chris let us hang out most of the day Sunday and fed us lunch.

Things I've learned, or already knew but have been reminded of:

• Gas furnace plus electronic lighting plus forced-air blower minus electricity equals no heat.
• Gas stove plus matches equals hot food.
• Gas water heater plus pilot light equals hot water (without this one, we'd have been in a hotel by Saturday night).
• When the outside temperature is in the 5-10C range, our house will stay in the 12-15C range, mostly around 13C.
  
• 13C is not a comfortable indoor temperature.
• The sweaters at the bottom of the drawers still work.
• One candle isn't enough to read by.
• Three candles is.
• A 20-pack of Ikea candles is a very good value.
• A wind-up radio is a good thing to have around.
• A little music lightens everyone's mood.
• Most household fireplaces don't give out much heat to the rest of the house.
• Four-year-old boys love watching fires in the fireplace, whether or not they're giving out heat.
  
• One-year-old girls also love fires.
• One-year-old girls should be watched like hawks lest they become too intimate with their new love.
• We have good friends.

Last year, Iain thought Christmas was nice - he enjoyed opening presents, but after he opened one, he'd play with it.  It took several days to open them all.  It was pretty calm overall.

This year, he's said "I wish it was Christmas already" every day for the last three weeks.  He tore into his presents as fast as we'd let him.  The house looks like a tornado bearing gift-wrap and cardboard boxes has gone through it.  At least he let us sleep in - he woke at his regular time of around 7am (Ria is another matter...) - I figure we'll have the 3am excited wakeup next year.