Black Coffee (Deprecated)

Mister's refuge

Periodically Mister runs away from Mona, rests under the car, and then once he's got his strength, dashes back out on another attack sortie.

Wish I could understand Japanese, this looks like a very nice, active blog with lots of good photos of a Japanese Beagle who looks a lot like Mister and Mister's parents..

Mona v. Mister

These two tirelessly spend the majority of their free time wrestling each other. Mona's moves have improved lately and she mostly has the upper hand. Mister's tenacity is unabated, however, and in six months he's going to be a stocky, strong dog and then I fear, for Mona, the tide may turn.

Can someone explain why Sri Lanka detests Israel?

From Debka: Sri Lanka refused to accept Israeli relief team of 150 doctors, nurses, medicines and equipment ready early Tuesday to fly complete field hospital to stricken country. Colombo which has no diplomatic relations with Israel would only accept supplies. Israeli planes took off with medical equipment, tents and other supplies - without desperately needed medical personnel

It's not a muslim country. The Sinhalese are Buddhist and the Tamils are Hindu.

It's probably not being bribed by Arab countries to not recognize Israel similar to how China and Taiwan try to bribe tiny countries for recognition/non-recognition of Taiwan's diplomatic status.

So why does Sri Lanka (vigorously) not have diplomatic relations with Israel ?

Well, let me spoil some of the fun, and see what I find on google...

It's somewhat puzzling, because a number of articles suggested that around May 2000 Israel and Sri Lanka had agreed to resume diplomatic relations.

(from May 2000) The Sri Lankan government has also decided to resume diplomatic relations with Israel to boost the military. Sri Lanka broke off ties with Israel in 1970. An Israeli Interests Section functioning in Colombo since May 1984 was later upgraded. Government ally, the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) said that it will not oppose diplomatic links with Israel at a moment of national crisis, but reminded about the role allegedly played by Israeli intelligence services in driving a wedge between the Muslim and Tamil communities in the Eastern Province in the 1980s.

So I guess my knowledge of Sri Lanka's politics is too simplistic. There is a muslim presence in Sri Lanka and apparently it has some political sway:

Full diplomatic relations were broken between the two countries in the early 1970s in common with many other Third World nations in protest at Israel's continued occupation of Arab land seized in the 1967 Middle East war. According to diplomats, Sri Lanka has been trying to re-establish ties with Israel since 1995 but has been prevented from doing so by Muslim ministers. An Israeli interests section was opened under the auspices of the US embassy in 1985 but was closed by the Sri Lankan authorities five years later. But as pointed out by latest reports, despite the absence of official links, Israel has trained and armed Sri Lanka's security forces fighting against the Tigers.

So the remaining question is what happened between May 2000 and now that relations were stopped again or in fact never resumed?

NuMorse Pro

I paid $55 for a copy of NuMorse Pro. There are a shocking number of bad morse-code training programs online. This seemed like the most updated, maintained software in the category.

Initial impressions? The author is in love with 'docking' windows similar to Photoshop's screen-of-a-thousand-tiny-widget-panes approach. I am not a fan of this. My bigger complaint, however, is its error checking.

When I listen to broadcasts, I write everything in a notebook in black ink, then I go through the answers, and where I make mistakes I put the correct letter, in red ink, above the error letter. When I skim through the notebooks I can see patterns like, "oh, I regularly mistake P's for B's" etc. etc.

There seems to be no functionality to do this in NuMorse. Since it's a computer, it ought to be even more clever, spotting error patterns that span pairs of letters, like "you frequently mishear the combination 'dw'", for example.

It wasn't THAT bad...

Its existing error catching behavior isn't very good. If during the 3rd character of a 10 character transmission I get a buffer overrun and drop one character, even if I get all the subsequent characters right, it still marks them all as wrong since they are shifted one to the left. Come on, it's not that hard to write a more sophisticated scoring algorithmn that catches these kinds of errors, right?

So far I rate the program as serviceable, but not ideal. So far I've just been copying random strings, I have no tested the QSO or callsign functionality yet.

Irritating Steve Jobs and his weak arguments

Driving into work this morning I had to put up with a very irritating segment with Steve Jobs on BBC.

It was part of a recap of 2004 technology news. The interview had (apparently) been conducted around the time iTunes was released in Britain. Jobs, in an enormously irritating nasally voice (the only more awful american male voice I have ever heard is that of myself on video) is explaining why it makes much more sense to buy music from iTunes than to download it for free. Over and over he emphasized that it was only 98p (pronounced as ninety-eight pee, slang for pence). He kept saying 98p as if he was actually a Cockney taxi driver so much that it got to the point it was making me nuts. neener neener neener.

But really the point was his arguments were just dumb...

You're going to get higher recording quality with the music from iTunes. A song you download for free is probably ripped by a 10 year old and is missing the last four seconds
Huh? The quality of an MP3 is absolutely fine for my tastes. If I really care, there are some other free formats floating around that I am seeing more often on emule. I can't tell you the last time I had an improperly clipped MP3 download, but if I did, I'd presumably just re-download it from a different source. It's free, so it doesn't matter."

It takes about fifteen minutes to download a a single (free) song, that's an hour to just get four songs. You could have that music much faster for just 98p (there he goes again). Downloading music so slowly, you're selling yourself too cheap
Huh? (again) It's not like I am spending my own hour downloading that music... I've got an enormous queue of downloads running at any one time (unattended) and once the flow gets established, I'm regularly receiving completed tracks. If it's free, I don't mind waiting -- most of the time I'm not gagging to hear the music in the next fifty seconds anyway.

Whatever... He probably is right that in the next decade most/all music distribution will be done via the internet, and Apple very well may be the leader of that, but his arguments for dropping free mp3s from emule in favor of 98p iTunes were just lame lame lame.

First it was Frank Sinatra declaring Bing Crosby his mortal enemy...

...but I just discovered another bizarre professional jealousy. My good friend gave me "Francis Spufford's Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin" for Christmas. It's a warm history of British engineering since the end of World War II. The first part of the book covers rocketry (yes, apparently Britain launched a rocket into orbit!). In it Spufford recounts a totally bizarre anecdote that you have to read twice because at first it seems like the author couldn't possibly be serious that this actually happened:

Arthur C. Clarke, by now a well-established science-fiction writer as well as author of the pioneering paper on satellite communications, had been growing increasingly irritated by the theological science fiction of C.S. Lewis, who saw space travel as a sinful attempt by fallen humanity to overstep its God-given place. In Reflections on the Psalms (1958), for exaample, Lewis had described it as learning' (which God forbid) to ... distribute upon new worlds the vomit of our own corruption'. Clarke contacted Lewis and they arranged to meet in the Eastgate Tavern, Oxford. Clarke brought Val Cleaver as his second; Lewis brought along J.R.R. Tolkien. They saw the world so differently that even argument was scarcely possible. As Orwell said about something completely different, their beliefs were as impossible to compare as a sausage and a rose. Clarke and Cleavers could not see any darkness in technology, while Lews and Tolkien could not see the ways in which a new tool genuinely transforms the possibilities of human awareness. For them, machines at very best were a purely instrumental source of pipe tobacco and transport ot the Bodleian. So what could they do? They all got drunk. 'I'm sure you are very wicked people,' said Lewis cheerfully as he staggered away, 'but how dull it would be if everyone was good.'

Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race

Why can't the Sydney Hobart Race have an RSS feed?. Once again points to the need for an RSS harvester-bot to parse interesting sites into RSS feeds for me.

Ok, so it doesn't have an RSS feed, but it does have a really snazzy Yacht Tracker that works suprisingly well.

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Update 12/28/04
You should have heeded my advice to follow the race. The two super-maxis that were in the lead both blew up overnight. The hydraulically-levered keel fell off the Skandia after hitting a giant sunfish earlier in the day and the Konica Minolta bent in half after launching off the face of a massive wave during the night.

ps. If you think this race sounds scary, don't even dare look at the Vendee Globe... A solo race around the world through the worst ocean conditions on the planet.

Aunt Mary

Aunt Mary turned down my offer of an all-expense-paid trip to watch eagles hunt foxes in the frozen wastes of Western Mongolia, so she had to settle to receiving her very own blog for Christmas. Mother might say you made the right decision, Mary.

Mona and Mister

Mona and Mister calmly lounge in my office. (for ten seconds)

Eagle-eyed readers may note that the beagle shown ('Mister') is not the original beagle we planned on taking ('Waingro'). We took Waingro for two days and realized he truly was a holy terror, dominant, yet also strangely needy following Ling step-for-step and relentlessly whining, snorting, barking, howling as he got used to being separated from Mother Beagle.

Although I wanted an assertive, active dog, we decided we should reconsider so we went back and ran a battery of behavorial tests on the puppy as described by the famous Monks of New Skete. Then we had a personality profile of each dog. It wasn't quite as empirical and clear cut as would have liked, but it did enable us to exclude two of the dogs immediately, leaving us to choose between Waingro and the then-known-as 'Blue'. The deciding factor was that Mister nee Blue was actually cuddle-able and didn't continually fight back. (if you roll Waingro on his back he will literally fight forever; Blue was the only dog of the litter that was content and relaxed on his back). Furthermore it became obvious that Mister nee Blue would be more compatible with little boys than Waingro.

So that's who we took back. He's been well socialized with other dogs and humans so he is a very normal Beagle. Whether that is good or bad is another matter. He's very active, greedy, and intelligent. I think he and Mona haven't established the pecking order yet. They're still working on that. Ling's project is toilet training the dog. Seeing that she'll be in Malaysia for three days over Christmas it's suddenly become my project. See those little piles of white powder in the photo? That's not cocaine, that's baking soda over Mister's "mistakes." Every night for the past three nights I've taken it over for a piss, it doesn't, I come back, a broker calls, I turn away for a split second, and when i look back he's sprung a leak. If I'm lucky, it's on the newspaper in the corner. If I'm not, it's on the rug.

Peter Carey: Wrong About Japan

Peter Carey is a great writer. Tokyo is a terrific city. In June I'm going to have a son. So you'd think all those things would conspire to make his memoir about taking his shy, manga-infatuated son on a tour of Tokyo a great story.

Except, it doesn't.

His thesis is that it's impossible to have a deep understanding of Japan from a short visit. Ok, well, does that suprise you? Is that possible in any country? If that's your disappointed thesis is, why didn't you take a different tack to the story in the first place? If you cannot understand, at least you can observe and report.

The other potential for the story, his relation with his son, never really got anywhere either. They barely seemed to have any fun together, let alone have some sort of deep-bonding experience.

I finished the book thinking, "hmmph.. a quickly-written article of a whirlwind trip through Tokyo. Not much meat." Of course, when you read this excerpt from the beginning of it, you'll think, "this sounds pretty good." It's the same thing I thought, too.

I rode a segway

One of our friends owns a Segway Scooter. I rode it this weekend.

When I first saw it strapped into the back of a goods van, it looked much more like my mom's old self-driving Hoover upright vacuum than the machine that would change the world.

After hearing so much about its design, I was quite shocked by the fit and finish of the Segway. I was expecting something like an iPod, but it was much more like the dashboard of a 1997 Buick Century. It's covered in cheap gray molded plastic. The dashboard is spartan. Perhaps that's the idea -- the Segway is supposed to be so intuitive and connected with the driver that there is no need for an auto-like array of controls and information display.

There are only three controls and one information display. There's a kill switch on the left handlebar. Near the center is a magnetic sensor which reads color-coded keys you swipe to control the performance of the scooter. Black is for beginners -- a low top speed and a slow turning rate. Yellow turns faster and has higher top speed. Red is the fastest and the most responsive. The left handgrip rotates back like a bi-directional motorcycle throttle for turning left/right. As far as I can tell the information display is totally worthless. A small round lcd screen the size of a milk jug lid, it doesn't appear to display much more than remaining battery charge and a smiling face if the machine is on, or a sad, sleepy face when it's off. I didn't notice any mention of current speed, or even what performance color you're currently using.

I managed to hop on and tentatively wheel around without doing a George Bush tumble. The first ten minutes I was fairly stiff and not really in tune with it, but it wasn't long before I dialed it up to the 'red key' and was squealing forwards and backwards. Probably the most fun maneuver with it is it run it as fast as it will go and then lay back hard with all your might and bring it to a screechy halt. I was driving it on a giant wooden porch so I'd actually get a millisecond of satisfying tire squeak. The inflatable Michelin tires seem high quality, so perhaps on a better surface you wouldn't be able to.

In my hour of riding I never quite succeed in executing a perfect moonshiner's turn -- running backwards at top speed and then seamlessly rotating 180-degrees to continue on at top speed. The steering twister, like a boat, of course works in the opposite effect when going backwards. Being a retard, I continually kept forgetting this and as I'd do the sudden turn, I'd be expecting the wrong side to turn, thus leaning incorrectly. The Segway would come flying up on one wheel and generally I'd have to leap off.

So it was fun for wasting away a Saturday afternoon, but I was right about one thing, it has the same pleasure profile as something like a Jet Ski -- the first hour is thrilling as you get used to the controls and speed, but after that what are you going to do with it? Endless loops around the same flat area? I figured perhaps the Segway enthusiast community had started doing 'agility' or style competitions. All I managed to find was a link for Segway polo. And for practical use? The thing weighs a lot -- probably equivalent to two automobile batteries. It's not like there is an easy way to carry it so if you were going to be transitting through trains or climbing stairs it would probably be a real drag.

I heard two complaints about the machine.

The first complaint was that at high speed the gyroscopes seemed out of tune and tend to drive the handlebars back at you. There's a robotics professor who built a homebrew Segway. He includes a very well written essay on the technology and points out that this behavior is intentional. As you lean forward, the wheels speed up to keep the center-of-gravity under the wheels. So as you lean forward you keep speeding up to catch the CG. At some point you're going to be going too fast. To prevent this, at some point the Segway starts driving the handlebars back up at you so that you can top out at a high speed but not continue accelerating.

The other complaint sounds more serious. When I go in reverse, the gear noise is not nice -- it's not exactly grinding, but it's definitely tortured. It's especially noticeable because Segway apparently bragged about choosing gear mesh ratios which would hum in pleasing harmonics with each other. In reverse the Segway sounded like my 1989 Toyota Corolla, which I assure you had nothing pleasing about it, especially "harmonics."

At any rate, I don't want to come across too harsh. The thing is pretty amusing to ride, and I'd ride it again given the opportunity. It's just that it's doesn't seem especially useful and it is definitely expensive. Perhaps in fifty years this article will be cited in referring to all the nay-saying goats who doubted the world would one day commute by floating around on tiny personal gyro-crafts.

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UPDATE: 31die makes a good point about my article: I don't understand the whole "steering is reversed when you are going in reverse, just like a boat" thing. I mean, the rudder on a boat moves the same way regardless of which way the boat is moving, just the same as the front wheels on a car turn the same way regardless of which direction the car is moving, etc.

He's absolutely right. Turning the steering dial one way keeps the wheels turning to one side whether you're going forward or reverse. I guess the only problem is that I'm an idiot and routinely confuse what direction the dial gives me when going in reverse, and end up being the world's worst sidecar-rider, leaning to the wrong side, trying to flip myself off.

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FURTHER UPDATE: I'm still doing a poor job of explaining my difficulties with steering, so 31die summarizes it nicely, having never even stood on a Segway: I guess the thing is that unlike an intuitive steering wheel, you've actually got a twist grip, right? So you have to internalize "pushing grip forward means right turn, twisting grip backwards means left turn" or whatever. And then when you are in reverse the action is kind of logically reversed? You still push the grip forward to turn right, but it's no longer in the direction of travel, it's counter to the direction of travel.

Ling Teaching Dog School

Ling's been apprenticing as a dog trainer these last few months. She teaches individual lessons during the week and group classes on weekends.

Weiner Detected!

Thanks to the extremely high resolving capabilties our our doctor's GE Voluson 730 Pro ultrasonic imaging system, he's positively identified "the weiner." Futhermore, everything looks healthy so far. I assure you, I am extremely pleased.

Is there any particular reason I am getting a shitflood of empty comment spam today?

I must have received fifty+ spams today... The stupid thing (from their perspective) is that they actually don't have links to any sites. So I don't know what they're benefitting from this. MT-Blacklist misses them because there are no tokens to trigger its immune system. Fortunately I can roughly bulk-delete them through the "no filter" de-spamming option in MT-Blacklist, but it's annoying.

I momentarily tried to use this "close comments on all old entries" script, but it just sat there apparently doing nothing for a long time. I killed it. Who knows what it subtley broke.... Ugh. I briefly looked through the comments and saw that there were lots of complaints and suggestions for changes to it. I think I'll just abandon the idea, I don't really want to turn off comments anyway.