electric relaxation

This was the first serious novel I’ve read in what must have been at least a few months if not longer. I’ve been reading mostly non-fiction, with a Sci-Fi binge here and there. And a lot of superhero comics.

Anyway, what the fuck this book was incredible. There’s something unbelievably, indescribably satisfying about the feeling you get when you know that no one else appreciates a creative work in quite the way you do. I guess that that’s actually dangerously close to stalker talk. But so be it. I’m in love with Aravind Adiga, and he will never know. I’m also embarassingly in love with M.I.A. because of the Paper Planes remix. Though that case is even more personal, since she had nothing to do with the remix, so I actually got much more out of the track than any individual put into it.

Anyway. Read the book. But know this, you sister-fuckers - you will never like it, or appreciate it, quite as much as I did.

So Paul Newman died last week. For some reason, as I was reading an obituary I was struck by this strange thought that it’s a particularly weird, or at least, annoying, time to die right now. I think we’re living through one of the most truly interesting six months of the past 20 years or so, what with Obama and the collapse of Capitalism. Seems like some shit might change, which is to say that the world might rearrange itself in some noticeable and perceptible way, and I think it might actually be… refreshing.

At least, if Obama wins. If not, then fuck y’all and I’m out for mine - I officially renounce any lingering positive sentiment toward my fellow man, like for real this time.

My friend Tony P. pointed out that if you were on your deathbed it’s highly likely that you simply wouldn’t give a shit about any of this stuff. I dunno; I think I’d actually be fairly annoyed at the thought of disappearing into oblivion without knowing whether God really does gives a shit about black people.

Do advances in computing technology tend to show up in the consumer space first, or in a corporate environment? Or is there simply no correlation? I guess there are probably all sorts of measurement/range bias issues that render this an academically uninteresting line of inquiry, and perhaps even my bilateral classification system is naive and unrealistic (for example, perhaps I should be considering academia as a third distinct grouping).

I find it intriguing - and somewhat unsettling, since perhaps it indicates a personal rather than a communal shortcoming - that when I try to categorize a few big trends, I can’t definitively state or really even recall where some of them showed up first:

• Web Access - did more people first start browsing regularly at home, or in their offices?
• E-mail - Ok I’m fairly certain that this was much more prevalent in the workplace before making it into the home.
• Mobile messaging and Push E-mail - Were BlackBerry devices already prevalent in the enterprise before the SMS explosion? I would have guessed the former, but according to Wikipedia the average mobile user was sending 35 messages a month in 2000, while the first BlackBerry smartphone was released only in 2002 (though their original device was released in 1997. The NPT lawsuit debacle originated in 2000, which gels with my reollection, in that I’d heard of BlackBerry before graduating college, so I believe the pre-smartphone devices were already quite popular. Wikipedia does confirm that BlackBerry was the first major push e-mail service in the U.S. and it seems quite reasonable to use the BlackBerry as the barometer for the advent of this era in the corporate sector.
• Online video - I’m very uninformed about the use of digital video in business; I feel like it’s increasingly commonplace but I have no idea how mainstream it is - and I’m guessing that my work environment is quite atypical and therefore not a useful indicator. Nonetheless, I’m reasonably certain that movie piracy was the leading-edge of the trend, and that by and large, unidirectional streaming video is still largely a consumer-driven thing. Video conferencing meanwhile seems to be more evenly distributed, though it feels like it’s still a year or two away from being truly widespread.

Ok, so the reason I’m rambling about this is because it occurs to me that even assuming that the centralized SaaS-form of VDI makes any kind of sense as a way of doing computing, it’s still a toss-up as to whether it takes off at home or in the workplace first. Will VDI become mainstream before this Midori Cloud Computing platform from Microsoft shows up on a Dell machine?

I suppose an alternative outcome might be the emergence of a stable partition between consumer and business computing models, reflecting a fundamentally distinct ordering of priorities and acceptable tradeoffs between user experience, security, reliability and flexibility in these two domains - but I wouldn’t bet on it.

Lisa and I completed the Half Dome hike in Yosemite this weekend. We drove up to Yosemite after work on Friday, stopping by the Oakland airport to pick up Allen, and then in Stockton to grab Ryan and his friend Meena. We made it to our camp grounds in Hogden Meadows at around 1:30 AM, and then proceeded to stumble around in the dark trying to find our campsite, disturbing all those with the misfortune to actually arrive in time for a good night’s sleep. By the time we got the tents up and the sleeping bags out, it was 2:00 AM.

We got a grand total of three and a half hours of sleep. Just to make things more interesting, I decided to forget my brand new Thermarest at home, and so I had a great time tossing and turning around on the ground. We woke up at 5:20 with the ludicrous intention of starting our hike by 6:00 AM. By the time we ate breakfast (bagels and cream cheese), made sandwiches and packed all our crap, it was about 6:30. It’s about a 45 minute drive from Hogden over to Curry Village, and from the parking lot there to the trail head took another half hour or so, so we didn’t actually start the hike until around 8:15 AM.

Things I actually did right:

• Water. I had four liters in my bag. I drank all that I could, but since I was the only one who didn’t think the website was joking, I had to share. I was mildly dehydrated and a little light-headed for most of the hike, but that’s pretty much how I feel every day anyway.
• Food. I packed two huge sandwiches and ate them both, along with two Pria bars, an apple, two oranges, a couple of bananas, a packet of jerky, a bag of mini carrots, some cookies, and trail mix that Lisa made (which was delicious - it had yogurt raisins!). And that’s not counting breakfast.
• Not being a pussy. The cables were almost the easiest thing on the whole hike, coming in a close second to lunch. What the fuck is wrong with people. Learn how to walk. Then, do that diagonally, while holding a rope. You don’t need to train for this thing. Growing a pair might help.

Alright, I’m done. Back to Googling for people who document their three month training regimes and then making fun of them in my head. Lisa will put up some pictures at some point, and then I will steal them.

Jai’s shoulder has healed to the point where he can play basketball again, so we’ve resumed our morning workout + games of 21 at the UCSF Mission Bay gym.

We cleared the record. After the first day, Jai was up a half game. He then followed up an exhausting stream of trash talking with an inexplicably poor showing resulting in back-to-back defeats (21-10, 21-15) and allowing me to recapture the lead.

However, Jai did snag the day’s highlight with a monstrous block on a left-side drive. His elation was exceeded only by my own shame.

Jai: 1 Ramesh: 2.5

I watched several good movies recently. A few of these were picked off of IMDB’s “Best Sci-Fi” titles list (sorted by popular vote).

• The Day The Earth Stood Still
  This is a classic Science Fiction movie (black and white, 1951), about an alien visitor who comes to Earth to warn humanity of the fact that aliens are closely watching their behavior. It’s aged remarkably well. Apparently they’re releasing a remake of it this year with Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly.
• The Prestige
  On the surface, this one seemed like it had a lot in common with Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but it’s a fairly different concept and story arc. I enjoyed it, though I don’t think it deserves the #10 spot on IMDB’s list.
• Persepolis
  An animated film that was nominated for an Oscar in the animated category (where it was defeated by Ratatouille). Pretty good, though I feel like it didn’t have the impact on me that it was supposed to… Perhaps I’m just being lame. At any rate the Eye of the Tiger sequence did not do anything for me, but other than that it was definitely very engaging.
• Some Kind of Monster
  A documentary about Metallica. It follows the band through the two-plus years leading up to the release of the St. Anger album in 2003. This one was recommended to me ages ago by John Haggerty, a former colleague of mine at VMware. I have had it lying around for years and I finally got around to watching it. Very worthwhile though ultimately I was a bit underwhelmed by the band’s drama and disorder compared to like a Queen or The Beatles or someone of that nature.
• The Iron Giant
  I’ve been intrigued by the visual style of this animated movie and I loved the book so this is another one that I’ve been meaning to watch forever. The story was pretty cheesy but the visuals were nice (side question: have these guys drawn other films? Their style seems similar to Fox studio work like Anastasia or I dunno, maybe it’s just the coloring or something).

I wish I had found this years ago:

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/rss/best_new_music

When I get bored or motivated enough I’m planning on writing a little RSS transformer that transforms this feed into one that sources Mininova. Actually I think that’s exactly what Yahoo! Pipes is supposed to be for…

Update: Holy fuck, that was easy. I’m impressed. This link works in uTorrent.

I had a slow leak in the rear of my bike which I managed to fix today. I knew that this was supposed to be really easy to do but a dangerous combination of laziness and unfounded intimidation almost lead me to bring it in to the shop down the street where I bought the thing.

Anyway, it took all of fifteen minutes to do. I simply followed the first guide I found on the internet, though I skipped the tire levers since I didn’t find them necessary.

I had no idea that Automobile was such a Z32 fan. They named it one of the 25 most beautiful cars in history, and one of the 20 best cars of the past 20 years.

I just got my car back from the shop (I took it in for what turned out to be an issue with the starter motor). While I was there I finally took the plunge and got a new exhaust, down pipes and tail pipes and new ECU. It’s now hitting 300HP at the wheel, with over 300 lb-ft. of torque.

Yes I’m retarded. Bring on the ridicule.

I spent this past weekend at the Schweizer ski resort in Idaho with Lisa, Matt and Vanessa. It was incredible. The resort is massive; it felt twice as big as Tahoe and half as crowded.

My personal on-board highlights included nailing a couple of real jumps -  I think I got close to thirty inches of air on the biggest one I landed, which isn’t much but it’s a start - and for extra bonus points, I tried my first rail slide. It was a fat pipe, maybe seven or eight inches in diameter, and there was no need to jump onto it, so it was definitely beginner friendly. I stayed on it for maybe three quarters of a second at most. But it felt pretty good. I also got a lot more comfortable with black and double black diamond runs, though I think a lot of that was mostly taking advantage of the fact that the snow was soft and plentiful.

Matt Ginzton and his folks generously accomodated us for the duration of the trip, so we had very comfy beds in their beautiful new house in Matt’s home town of Sandpoint, Idaho. Turns out Sandpoint is basically right at the bottom of Schweitzer. You can basically see the resort from Matt’s house, which goes a long way towards explaining why Matt’s a fucking ninja scientist on his board.

Almost forgot - Matt also tried to teach me how to do a 180. His method of instruction pretty much consisted of him busting effortless 180s in my face and then insisting that I follow suite. Surprisingly, it eventually worked. I was able to nail a frontside 180 off a small hop.