I Like Turtles

I scream, you scream, we all scream for... unit tests?

2012-01-23T20:17:00.000-05:00

(crossposted in the more technically-oriented mattspitz.me)

I'm going to go out and say it. I love unit tests. Hopefully, by the end of this post, you will, too. I'm not going to cover the pros and cons of various frameworks in each language, the best way to mock out data dependencies, or even the secret to writing impeccable unit tests. There are enough resources, and I hope that you're inspired to seek them out. In case you aren't convinced that unit tests aren't the best thing since sliced bread, I've brought my old friends from Office 97, the Screen Beans people, to help me.

What's a unit test, anyway?
A unit test is a little snippet of code that one writes to verify that some functionality one just implemented works as expected. This test is never run in production, just when you want to confirm that some code you wrote before still works.

As an example, say you wrote this awesome function in Python.

def isAnApple(thing):
return isinstance(thing, Apple)

You could write a corresponding test for that function (using Python's unittest module).

def testAppleChecker(self):
myApple = Apple()
myOrange = Orange()
self.assertTrue(isAnApple(myApple))
self.assertFalse(isAnApple(myOrange))

If your isAnApple() function works, testAppleChecker() passes. If it's broken, testAppleChecker() fails. Easy peasey, lemon squeezey. You can even write a nice little script that runs all of your unit tests. Or even a build rule that won't deploy your code unless all unit tests pass! But I get ahead of myself.

But I just wrote all this code. Why do I need to write a stupid test for it? It's such a waste of time.

Whoa there, buddy. Calm down. You're right. In my example above, I used 4 lines of testing code for the 1 line of actual code I wrote. And what if I decide I don't actually want isAnApple() anymore? Or if I refactor it away? Not only did I just waste all that time writing my unit test, and I'm going to waste even more time getting rid of it!

The truth is that the extra few minutes you spend keeping your unit tests up-to-date aren't going to impact your productivity all that much. As it turns out, for most developers, the majority of their time is spent thinking about the problem and designing a solution, not actually typing it out. In general, writing tests for a chunk of code requires less thought than writing the code in the first place, and you should know how that code is meant to behave, so the tests should almost write themselves. But in case you still think that your time is better spent on Reddit, I'll list the Six Awesome Benefits of Unit Testing.

Benefit #1: Forcing yourself to write testable code

Decomposition, breaking your problem into small pieces, is one of the first lessons in an introductory programming course. Incidentally, it's one of the first lessons forgotten. You write a function, and, as it needs to do more, you keep bolting on functionality to it until it gets unwieldy. For example (again in Python), you start with something like this:

def f(parameters):
do something great

And before too long, it ends up like this:

def f():
cfg = getConfig()
if cfg.setting:
do something awesome
elif cfg.othersetting:
do something else
return
else:
ok one last thing
if cfg.shouldcleanup:
clean up

Your unit test, covering all possible execution paths of f(), gets even more noodly, and you can't quite be sure if it even covers all the cases it needs to. But because you're Captain Unit Test, you break up f() into more manageable, testable pieces. Your code is more readable and easier to test for correctness. Everybody wins.

Benefit #2: Faster development iteration

Without unit tests, a typical development flow on a web application might go something like this:

1) Work on some piece of your application.
2) Fire up the server with a new build.
3) Try to access the application in some way that uses the code you just wrote.
4) Lather, rinse, repeat as desired.

Depending on the extent of your application, compiling and running your code may take some time, and it's not always easy to prod your application in just the right way to be sure that it's correct. In some cases, testing each use case may involve restarting your server to give it a clean slate.

In contrast, you can write a unit test or two to cover each use case. Instead of running the whole server, you can just run those tests and be guaranteed that it's tested exactly as you specified. And even better, when you write a new feature, you don't have to go back and test every previous feature. Assuming you write good unit tests, you can save time and just run the test suite. So, all that extra time you spend writing tests in fact pays off as you iterate on your application!

Benefit #3: Built-in examples

So, you have a new developer on your team. Or someone else wants to use that hot new library you just wrote. Either way, you need to find some way to explain your code. Your unit tests are simple examples of using the code you've written and are a great place to start for those who're getting to know your codebase. While you still may need to help out your new admirers, you've lowered the grade of the learning curve.

Benefit #4: Once-and-for-all bugfixes

OK, so a bug slipped through your unit tests. Or perhaps it wasn't a bug, but "unexpected behavior". Assuming it's not bringing down your entire site this instant, don't fix it yet. Instead, write a unit test that exposes the bug. Make sure that the unit test fails. Then, fix the bug and ensure that the unit test passes. This idea, borrowed from the process of Test-driven development, is awesome for a few reasons.

First, that specific bug isn't going to happen again. You wrote a unit test that fails when that bug occurs and passes when it doesn't. Donezo.

Second, writing a unit test to expose the bug has taught you exactly what triggers it, perhaps revealing a better solution to the underlying problem. For example, if the program chokes on the input "Gruß Gott!", instead of simply disallowing unicode (which may bother your international users), you might instead find out the proper way to handle unicode. You'll have a long-term fix and be done with the bug for good!

Benefit #5: Developing good internal APIs

One true downside of having a comprehensive test suite is that a new parameter to the critical path can have you updating a lot of your tests. This is, indeed, a huge pain. But once you have to do it the first time, you're much more careful about having well-designed internal interactions among the components of your application. Ideally, your application is decomposed to the point where rewriting the interface to a particular component doesn't have a cascading effect on the codebase. Investing in writing thorough unit tests for each component ensures that you'll design it to minimize changes to its interface.

Benefit #6: Comprehensive regression tests

Sometimes, you have to make that sweeping change to rearrange the components of your application. Perhaps your codebase represents many developer-months of work, and you're not sure if you just re-introduced all of those weird corner cases you've fixed and forgotten. If you've been diligent about covering every nook and cranny of your application with unit tests, you can be reasonably confident that when those unit tests pass, your application is as correct as it was before the change.

That doesn't just go for large changes. Every incremental change can affect other pieces of the application, no matter how well-decomposed it is. Particularly when working with a team, having a complete regression test to run with every new feature is a great comfort. Even better, if the entire suite is run automatically before allowing every code checkin, you can rest assured that whatever's in the repository is clean and ready for release.

Beware!

Don't get too cocky. Your unit tests are only as good as their author. If your tests aren't written correctly or don't cover all possible execution paths, you can still have bugs in your code. Unit tests are not a replacement for end-to-end tests or your QA team. Weird things can happen when all the pieces of your application are running together with production data, and you can't write a unit test for everything. But you, and the long-term development of your application, much better off for it!

Preservation Hall Jazz Band's 50th birthday: everyone's invited!

2012-01-15T16:13:00.005-05:00

Last weekend, Lori and I went to the 50th birthday party for Preservation Hall Jazz Band at Carnegie Hall. It was basically like going to the circus. PHJB served as the house band that night, and group after group came up either to speak about the significance of the group in the history of New Orleans or to play a number with the band. Or both.

There was an interesting contrast between the venue and the show/audience. As at any schmaltzy concert venue, Carnegie Hall disallows things like singing along, taking photos, and playing with your cell phone, and the ushers, for the most part, did their best to enforce those rules. The crowd, though, was really into it, and it's hard not to want to move when you're listening to a brass band. One lady was even making a point of dancing more than everyone else combined. Fortunately, she was in the back row of her section, mostly so we could watch her.

One thing that really bothered me was that some people were noodling around on their cellphones during the performance. A couple in front of us, perhaps on the worst date of all time, were both using them for most of the show, until I told them how distracting it was. Maybe it's that the show didn't fit the venue, but I hope that my generation (the most-represented that evening) doesn't grow up to be annoying concertgoers. I've definitely been the annoying fan who's way too into the show, but the people who obviously don't care are just wasting everyone's time.

Friday electronics

2012-01-09T20:17:00.000-05:00

This past Friday, Lori and I had a low-key evening. After weeks of awesome travelling, we decided to take it easy.

For my first trick as an awesome date idea, I decided to set up this new toy that I got in the mail this past week. I took apart my pedalboard and gave it a long-overdue cleaning. After putting everything back together and rewiring it with the new power supply, it sounds awesome and looks great! They all fit!

But not all was well in the world. A couple of months ago, I bought a new guitar, and I haven't had enough time to play with it, but I've had this awful feeling that the sound doesn't feel as full as it did when I was playing with my very same amplifier in the store. I've been pretty disappointed. So, when I plugged in my "new" pedalboard, I was still disappointed when the sound, though much better than it was when I was daisy-chaining pedals, still lacked something.

Upon further review, and I'm embarrassed to say this, I realized that the reverb switch on my amp was broken. Reverb is an echo effect that makes you sound like you're in a large room. And not having it is likely the main reason why I was disappointed with the sound of my new guitar.

I've had issues with the reverb before, and I just took the amp in and had it serviced. This time, I decided to enlist a teammate (Miss Lori) to poke around a bit and see what was wrong. I found a fantastic post on fixing exactly this problem. After fooling around with Lori's old multimeter (and then having it run out of batteries), we resorted to the ol' plug-in-various-pieces-to-see-what-works. The amp itself was fine, and it looks like the faulty wiring problem that's typical in reverb problems was fixed by the guy who serviced the amp a few years ago.

But look at the tank itself!

This side has a nice little plastic connector.

This side has a mess of plastic with two disconnected wires.

Voila! According to the post I read, you can actually get a better reverb tank than the stock one (I opted for the Belton). Lori and I spent some time trying to guess what might have melted the plastic connector, and I commented on the post with my findings. BillM (my newest hero and author of the post) replied to my comment and mentioned that it probably wasn't plastic at all. The wires had just been glued together! Blast!

I love how the internet enables me to find someone who can exactly solve my problem and is willing to help me out. I also have a newfound confidence in opening up my electronics.

All Fiesta, No Siesta

2012-01-05T01:13:00.000-05:00

The big advantage of booking our New Zealand trip as a roundtrip from Los Angeles was that we were able to save our New York to Los Angeles flights until after bowl selection. When Stanford finished ranked 4th in the country and headed to the Fiesta Bowl in Phoenix, we could go!

It was a quick trip (just 48 hours), but we saw all the people and did all the things at an enormous tailgate organized by a few amazing folks.

I love that football brings us together each year and hope that that trend continues. Though, we are losing the best quarterback possibly ever in college football, Andrew Luck, to the NFL this year. So we'll see. Incidentally, we lost the game, 41-38, because we let the clock expire to set up the game-winning field goal (missed), and then failed to kick a field goal in overtime. I feel terrible for the kicker.

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T11:00:00.000-05:00

I don't recall if I made this clear earlier, but Queenstown is a bro-haven. It's like the annual conference of the bros, inviting such esteemed emissaries as the dumb chick and the slutty girl. Absolutely hilarious. I wish I had a picture of the fist-pumping, tan guys in Abercrombie tank tops, or the couple of bros still puking this morning, but suffice it to say that we were not the sloppy ones.

We started the evening with a marvelous lamb dinner at a pub before making camp at a gem of a place tucked in an alleyway. Not wanting to limit our experience to a single place, we ventured out to find two ticketed events, a sweaty pile of bros, and a bar that was about to be swamped by forty people on an organized pub crawl. Fortunately, we fled before they arrived for their shot of Bailey's. Yikes.

Close to midnight, we went around the bay to watch a spectacular fireworks display. Happy New Year, indeed!

Down the West Coast!

2011-12-31T17:00:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, we left Franz Josef, heading back towards Queenstown. We stopped both at the Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers along the way, walking out to see each of them.

It's crazy to see how much they've receded in the last 100 years or so. Perhaps more amazing is the river of water from the active melt of the glaciers. I suppose, though, that the glaciers themselves go much further back up and over the ridge than we can see, so there's more surface area to melt.

One thing I learned on the glacier, and on this trip in general, is to give your camera to someone carrying one that looks like yours when you'd like a photo to be taken of you. I have an entry-level DSLR and have come to appreciate composing photos to capture exactly what I'd like, avoiding the extra fluff. I'm far from a good photographer, but I can at least try to appreciate what goes into it. Anyway, when I give my camera to people who also have DSLRs, I get great photos like this one:

When I give it to folks with a point-and-shoot, I get a party photo:

I can't believe that glacier was so drunk! Did you hear that it puked in the punchbowl? OMG!

After the glacier parties, we strolled back down the highway to Haast, stopping at some of the places we missed the day before. Overestimating how developed the West Coast is, we nearly ran out of gas, and misreading my email, we made a 30km detour to the wrong hotel. My bad.

As part of our underestimation, we went to the "supermarket" in Haast to get supplies for dinner, but it was more of a gas station with a box of onions and potatoes as the "fresh produce" department. We almost settled for hot dogs before a freezer visit uncovered some sausages, way past the "best by" date, hopefully frozen before it reached that point. Surprisingly, it turned out marvelously, and we even made the gingerbread cookies that we'd bought a week before!

My cookies were less tasteful, so I'll spare you the photo.

Today, we headed back to Queenstown via Wanaka, a lake town on, well, Lake Wanaka. We grabbed lunch at the supermarket, including delicious Otago cherries, and went out to kayak on the lake.

Afterwards, we went for a short swim and were quickly reminded that snowmelt is cold.

Sick of our rental car surprise CD, we meandered through radio stations, happening on an awesome trombone quartet, BonaNZa, to slide us back to Queenstown.

Up the West Coast!

2011-12-29T21:26:00.000-05:00

We left Queenstown this morning in a rental car, bound for the Franz Josef Glacier. It took about six hours to get up here, plus all the neat little side trips we found along the way. We found some "blue pools", full of glacier water.

And a waterfall!

And Ship's Creek!

And Knight's Point!

And Fox Glacier!

The environment up here on the West Cost looks a lot like Jurassic Park. I keep waiting for a velociraptor to pop out and open a kitchen door or something.

Oh, there it is. Perhaps the greatest serendipity on the drive has been discovering someone else's mix CD abandoned in the rental car. Fortunately, the first half is the Drive-By Truckers. Unfortunately, the second half is some soft-voiced, vapid-lyricked guy named Ron Sexsmith. We've listened through twice already. We'll see how much longer we can stand it.

Routeburn Track, Day Three

2011-12-28T20:12:00.000-05:00

Today was relatively easy. Back up onto the ridge and all the way down to The Divide. It rained a bit, so we hung out at the Howden Hut for awhile on the way down. Since it usually rains two out of three days in the Fiordland, I guess today was "typical".

Man, we've been lucky. We skipped an optional side trip because it was too cloudy. It's the first side trip we've skipped; it feels like we've been finding all the secret areas, a la Quake or Doom. In other news, there was a crazy rock slide that knocked out part of the track yesterday. I'd take photos, but we were told not to stop in the affected area. That makes sense.

Our bus was at 3:15pm, but we arrived at the sandfly-filled shelter at The Divide around 1pm. Apparently, the rumored 1:30pm bus existed, and there was room for us! We still had to wait a couple of hours in Te Anu to get back to Queenstown, but Te Anau has fewer sandflies and more victory beer. Too bad, though. We were just getting good at the game where you catch sandflies, throw them into a spiderweb, and then watch the spider eat them up.

My seven-year-old self would have been enthralled.

Routeburn Track, Day Two

2011-12-27T19:56:00.000-05:00

Up and over the Harris Saddle and down to Lake Mackenzie for another fine evening in the Fiordland! Today was mostly alpine, above the trees. In the morning, we strolled passed Harris Basin just before reaching the saddle.

We did a small side trip up to the top of Conical Hill, from which we saw all the way down the Hollyford Valley to the ocean!

It was cold and windy, and there was even snow on the way up!

We traversed the ridge on the other side of the saddle for awhile before descending to Lake Mackenzie. The water is so clear. It's ridiculous.

We arrived in time to secure bunk beds. About half of the 20-something beds in the hut are all on one large plank, "cuddle puddle" style. We attempted to make a two-course spam musubi and red beans & rice dinner, but the spam didn't go so well, so we had red beans, rice, & spam with a dash of seaweed on top. Still, quite good. I'd like to start a TV show, Backpacker Chef, somewhat like Iron Chef, but you get one crappy pot over a small flame and can only use non-perishables smaller than a softball. We've had some good meals, certainly better than the "Back Country Cuisine" flavored slop that everyone else seems to chomp down.

Check that price, the ingredients, and best of all, the "serving suggestion"! Of course it'd taste good if you served it with all of those fresh vegetables, readily available on a mountain near you. Ew.

Routeburn Track, Day One

2011-12-26T20:30:00.000-05:00

Despite last night's excitement, we're generally no worse for the wear today. The only potential disaster was that a wheel nearly fell off the trailer behind our bus to the trailhead, fortunately spotted by a fellow driver at a vista stop along the way. And apparently, that trailer had been inspected a week prior and deemed road-safe in New Zealand! Yikes.

We arrived at the start of the track around 10am. The trail has been straight up a hill, through a forest so far. Every now and again, a clearing (due to erosion) appears and offers some stellar views.

We stopped for lunch at Routeburn Flats. So pretty!

After another 90 minutes up, we ended our day at the Routeburn Falls Hut. This place is unbelievable. Nestled in the mountainside, it has sweeping views of surrounding peaks, fantastic facilities, and best of all, no bugs! We made a killer chicken and vegetable soup for dinner with fresh ingredients chopped this morning by yours truly. And we've been enjoying the hut's deck, reading books all afternoon. We're so cool.

The contrast between our fellow trampers on this track versus those on the Milford Track is interesting. The "independent" trampers (as opposed to guided) on the Milford Track are mostly from various parts of New Zealand. I assumed this was because the foreigners, minus a few of us, were all in the guided huts, not knowing any better or wanting to lug camping gear across the world. On this track, though, the Kiwis are a minority, and there seem to be a large number of Germans, though their volume may increase the apparent size of their group. The Milford Track is easily the more popular of the two, so perhaps the Kiwis have their acts together further in advance to secure a booking. I don't know.

Tomorrow, we're up and over the Harris Saddle, back into the Fiordland!

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-25T23:27:00.000-05:00

Santas on the move! We've spent the last two days recovering from our hike and celebrating Christmas! Yesterday, we left Milford Sound for Queenstown. I snagged a few photos on the way out, including the one that's on all the postcards.

On the bus ride back, we discovered how sore we were. Very. It's a bit better now, but we'll see how tomorrow goes, when we start our next hike! But I'm getting ahead of myself.

We got back to Queenstown around 2pm yesterday and ran a bunch of errands, the first being stuffing our mouths with Fergburger for the second time. Yum. It's amazing how much your metabolism increases when you're exercising. We downed those burgers and were hungry again immediately.

That night, Christmas Eve, we tried our best to get ourselves into trouble, but we ran out of time. We cooked beef and veggie skewers, went to the 10pm caroling mass, and then tried to go out, but every bar closed at midnight. Silly ordinances. So instead, we had some beer and watched the stars at the community rugby field.

Today, we had a fish and chips breakfast (the only place open) and called our families on Skype. This being my first Christmas away from home, it was really great to talk to them! My mother enjoyed her Christmas gift, too. Win, win, win. Afterwards, we lazed around and packed for our hike tomorrow, the Routeburn Track. Again, we're sore, but I think it'll be fine.

Tonight, we had a fabulous dinner up on Bob's Peak. We took a gondola ride up the hill to a complex with sweeping panoramic views of Queenstown. Included in the Christmas package were a few luge rides, of which we obviously took advantage.

The dinner itself was amazing. As the sun went down, we stuffed ourselves with plate after plate of buffet dinner. Santa was even there! Sadly, I had to feel fine afterwards, but it was still totally worth it.

The true test will be how we feel tomorrow. Beaten but not broken, Routeburn here we come! Merry Christmas!

Milford Track, Day Four

2011-12-23T18:22:00.000-05:00

Well, we made it. 18km of mostly-flat cruising from Dumpling Hut to Sandfly Point along the Arthur River Valley. Fortunately, only today did my knees start hurting. It was a nice walk, and we saw some neat views along the way, but the 2pm boat departure add a time pressure that made us feel as if we were rushing.

But we made it! On arriving to Milford Sound, we decided to delay our showers and go on a cruise.

Totally worth it, smelly and sore as we were.

Afterwards, we had our mandatory celebratory beer and made our way to the Milford Sound Lodge.

In a bit, we'll head back to the Blue Duck Cafe for dinner and a weird Lord-of-the-Rings-themed party. I guess you can do that if you're the only bar and restaurant in town.

Tomorrow, back to Queenstown!

Milford Track, Day Three

2011-12-22T21:38:00.000-05:00

My everything hurts. Fortunately, as of the last few weeks, I've had a scale with which to measure this pain. Everyone at eBay got Fitbits, and I bought one for Lori as a Christmas gift. It's a little device that you clip to your belt to measure steps taken or strap to your arm to measure how well you're sleeping. Before this trip, the most steps I'd taken was 25,000 in a day. "Yesterday" from 6pm (due to the time change; my FitBit is still on EST), I walked 30,000, and "today", with the hike last night and the grueling climb today, I hit 49,000. I thought about sticking it out for 50,000, but I passed out at the hut.

Today, we went up the Mackinnon Pass (much harder with a pack on) and then all the way over and down to the river valley on the other side. To start, the pass was even more beautiful during the day, as the sun illuminated most of the valley.

The best part of the pass, though, is the shelter at the top. In case the weather is poor, people can hide out. Or, if you're guided on the track, you get to see what's behind door #1!

The outhouse behind the hut is awesome. It opens and has a window to the Clinton Valley, which we'd just walked through.

After the pass, we meandered back into the forest for a longggggg time. We finally reached Quintin Lodge (for the guided folks, it has a private airstrip!) and dumped our packs for a bit to explore Sutherland Falls, 580m in total. Even being near the falls, you can feel the wind as the water comes crushing down off the cliff. It was wet.

We stumbled down to the Dumpling Hut, where we should have cooked potstickers, as per the theme. Instead, we made pasta. The noodles were shaped with dinosaurs. The highlight of the evening has been the efforts of the anti-storing coalition to deport one of the first night's principal offenders from our cabin this evening. Leading the charge has been the mother of the family we bunked with last night. All three of them (Kiwis from Auckland) are wonderful, and apparently, she's a mediator in real life. The man in question is very nice, but his snoring can be described as "creative" and "boisterous". And he's been relocated to a room off the kitchen, safely out of earshot! Shrewd diplomacy at its finest. Incidentally, the man resembles Santa Claus.

You'd better watch out, you'd better watch out,

You'd better watch out, you'd better watch out.

Santa Claus is coming to town.

He snores when you are sleeping.

He snores when you're awake.

He snores when you've been bad or good,

So be good for goodness' sake!

You'd better watch out, you'd better watch out,
You'd better watch out, you'd better watch out.
Santa Claus is coming to town.

Milford Track, Day Two

2011-12-21T17:34:00.000-05:00

Today, we tramped 16.5km, mostly flat, from Clinton Hut to Mintaro Hut. We wove along the Clinton River for a bit before climbing up into "The Prairie", finally getting up into the woods on the way up to the Mackinnon Pass. The hike itself wasn't particularly strenuous, but we've found that we've overpacked quite a bit, so we've had a lot to carry. The views down the valley today were stunning, particularly as we got into the open segments. Despite the scenery, all we wanted to do was jump.

Lori missed the memo the first time, so we had to do it again.

Upon arriving to Mintaro Hut, we went out to the nearby lake of the same name and took a dip in the recently-glacial water. It was cold... but very refreshing! Our masochism was rewarded by the sighting of a blue duck, very endangered and only present in the Fiordland of New Zealand. Very cool.

Last night, in our 20-person cabin, I experienced a cacophonous symphony of snoring. Lori opted out almost immediately, but I stuck around for the punishment. It made for several mid-night wakeups and some odd dreams. Fortunately, tonight, we're in a smaller room of 8 with a mutual non-snoring pact. Violators will be thrown to the blue ducks.

UPDATE: We climbed up to the Mackinnon Pass, tomorrow's summit, to see the sun go down. We didn't actually see the sun go down; it got late, and we didn't want to walk down in the dark. We saw some incredible views and got to visit the pass in peace. Also, a little kea bird (described as "curious and destructive") came up for a visit, perhaps to steal a snack. He posed for a nice photo instead.

Milford Track, Day One

2011-12-20T18:24:00.000-05:00

After a not-so-harrowing 5km stroll, we've reached the Clinton Hut. We ended up walking further yesterday afternoon, kiling time in Te Anau before cooking up some fabulous lamb sausages for dinner. Today, we took the bus to Te Anau Downs and hopped on a boat bound for Glade Wharf. From there, it was just a short, albeit scenic, walk to the Hut.

We arrived just in time for a nature walk given by the hut warden in which we learned a bit about the history, flora, and fauna of the Clinton Valley. The hut warden is at least 6'6", which doesn't explain why my feet off the end of the bed. You'd think he'd have that under control. Still, it's a bed, and this hut-to-hut camping thing is something I can get used to. Flush toilets, running water, stove burners, and beds! Oh, my! The guided hikers have it even more cushy. They stay in lodges with beds and meals made for them and, as far as we saw today, a Christmas tree in the window!

Even on our short walk, the views have been incredible. And tonight, we're going to find some glow worms!

UPDATE: Glow worms found! It rained a bit this evening, which was discouraging at first, but when it cleared up, we were the only ones to venture down the path a bit and see them! They glow at night, presumably to attract insects. Awesome. Mission accomplished.

Queenstown

2011-12-19T12:16:00.000-05:00

Two days ago, Lori and I arrived in Queenstown, though we almost didn't make it. Months ago, we booked roundtrip tickets from Los Angeles to Queenstown (via Auckland). My flight to LA got in 8 hours before the flight to Auckland, but Lori's, supposed to arrive 6 hours before, was diverted to Ontario, CA (California, not Canada). Eventually, it arrived an hour before our flight, and with the help of a nice lady at the Air New Zealand desk and a bit of a dash across the airport, we arrived at the gate as the flight was boarding. Whew! After a couple of flights and a free beer at the Star Alliance lounge in Auckland, we rolled into Queenstown around noon.

Queenstown is beautiful. It's a small town, set on Lake Wakatipu and surrounded by enormous mountains. It reminds me of Tahoe but less-developed. Queenstown is also the adventure capital of New Zealand, and there are a ton of ways to get a thrill, from skiing to mountain biking to ziplining to skydiving to high-speed boating to skeet shooting to bungy jumping. I'm sure there are more. Perhaps because of this, there's a very fratty air about this town. Tons of bars with all sorts of specials line the streets, and most of them are pretty trashy. It's like a perpetual bachelor party, and everyone's invited.

Our hostel, recommended by Abel, is awesome. It's situated slightly away from the center of town (and its frat party) but close enough to get anywhere very quickly. It's got a full kitchen with a working grill, a spa, and free vegetable soup each night. And, Lori has postulated that it's called "Southern Laughter" because the walls are all lined with comics (mostly The Far Side) and jokes.

On arrival, we dropped off our stuff and went grocery shopping for our first hike, the Milford Track. Once we'd collected our pasta and boil-in-a-bag treats (and Tim-Tams for Lori), we ate dinner, watched the sun set, and passed out for twelve hours.

The next day, we jumped off the Kawarau bridge. Lori required some convincing once she looked down to the river below (141 feet), but the guy talked her down, and down she went! I should ask him his secret...

To reward our courage, we went to the highly-acclaimed Fergburger, which makes delicious, enormous burgers. Jam-packed with lettuce and with a giant burger patty in a large, crusty bun, the Fergburgers are easily the size of your head. In Ferg we trust, indeed.

That afternoon, we had separate fun. I rented a bike and marvelled at the views around the edge of the lake and Lori went... shopping! She got herself a new fleece and a Christmas present for me! Cheese-making for all! We went on a nice walk with a beer (no open container laws!), packed up for our hike, and had some fantastic Indian food.

Today, we left Queenstown on a bus for Te Anau, the jumping off point for the Milford Track. The countryside isbeautiful, and there's not a cloud in the sky. This is shaping up to be a good trip!

A Spitz/Karns Thanksgiving

2011-12-12T12:01:00.003-05:00

For the third year in a row, my parents came out to New York for Thanksgiving, and Lori and I hosted dinner. This time around was even better in that Liesl now lives here and Lori's parents came out, too! Fun times, indeed. The whole week was a blast, from dinners to Ebbets Field, shows and walks. It's awesome to have such amazing families all in town at once.

On the value of recommendations

2011-12-09T17:44:00.001-05:00

(crossposted in the more-technically-oriented mattspitz.me)

Recommendations have been all the rage for the last couple of years now, and since I've been working for Hunch (now eBay), I've been thinking about why they've become necessary and the value good recommendations bring to the piles of content on the Internet. Searching for information we're looking for is basically a solved problem, and it's relatively easy to carve up existing datasets such that they're easily consumed. Surfacing interesting content proves to be a problem, though. Take Yelp, for example. If I want to find out when Wildwood BBQ (a fine watering hole, if I do say so myself) is open, I search for Wildwood BBQ, and it's the first result. I learn not only when they're open, but what kind of parking is available, whether they are wheelchair accessible, the nearest subways, and all sorts of wonderful things. A+. If I didn't know about Wildwood BBQ but instead were interested in all of the places near Union Square in the $$ price range that served beer and had a TV, Wildwood BBQ would show up. But here comes the kicker. This is New York. There are a ton of relatively cheap places to drink and watch TV.

Now the problem becomes deciding among the available options, and for the most part, this task is up to me. Yelp is a very popular service, but unfortunately, this means that all kinds of people leave reviews, many of whom I probably disagree with. So, the average Yelp rating isn't all that helpful. At this point, if I really care about where I go, I have to dig through the reviews for each place, deciding, based on the user's photo, name, and review text, whether I trust that person and his/her rating for each venue. It's rather tiring and has greatly reduced the value of Yelp for me. In reality, most of these places would serve my needs just fine, so I probably could safely choose a bar at random, but on the off-chance that it doesn't work out, I have only myself to blame. I don't mean to pick on Yelp, as they see this issue and have the beginnings of a decision-making feature, but it's a pretty good illustration of the need for recommendations.

There are basically two ways to surface interesting content for users, by subscription and algorithmically.

Subscription-based content has been around for awhile, and there are basically two ways to go about it. Social services like Facebook and Twitter allow me to subscribe to content posted by certain people. The Yelp analogy would be subscribing to restaurant reviews by a particular person, which exists in the form of user profiles. This assumes that I trust everything a particular user likes. To continue the Yelp analogy, while I may enjoy the sushi recommendations for a particular user, I may not be interested in their Indian food adventures in Murray Hill or their recommendations outside of New York City. Such is the story of my Twitter feed.

The other subscription-based approach is what sites like Reddit utilize. Rather than subscribing to people, I subscribe to particular topics. When articles are posted to the "programming" subreddit, fellow users curate them by voting them up and down, and the "good" articles bubble up to the top. This puts the burden on the user to specify what they like. An analogy on Yelp would be subscribing to reviews for all sushi restaurants in the New York City area. This is a good start, but we now have a problem of specificity. The more specific the interest, the better the recommendations are, but the fewer people there are that have that particular interest. For example, if I'm interested only in sushi restaurants that serve Sapporo on draft in the West Village, either I find myself in a very small group of people with no recommendations, or I find myself in a more general group, filtering out all the restaurants I'm not interested in by hand. Still, not ideal.

The new hotness in the last few years has been algorithmic recommendations, as evidenced by the number of companies actively implementing them. This approach uses implicitly-expressed preferences (in the form of article views, item purchases, reviews written, etc) to predict my specific interests. Amazon, for example, will recommend similar or complimentary items based on other users' purchases. The users themselves don't explicitly tell Amazon what they like. Instead, their actions dictate what Amazon thinks about them. Consider that the next time you purchase the new Miley Cyrus album "for your niece". Amazon isn't alone here. Nearly every company with data is trying to do this with their data to surface good products, articles, advertisements, etc.

Even with algorithmic recommendations, there are two ways to go about it. Amazon, it appears, focuses primarily on the item similarities. That is, if I'm looking at a camera, they might recommend lenses because the people who've bought that camera tend to buy lenses. Users who are new to Amazon get the same value out of these recommendations as those who've actively used the service for years. The alternative is to use personalized recommendations, which I don't believe Amazon focuses on to the same extent. For example, if I'm looking at a particular camera, Amazon may show me red cases with little pictures of guitars on the sides because I buy red things and guitar accessories.

To me, the biggest value-add of algorithmic recommendations is that they minimize the amount of work that I have to do to make a decision. Deciding among bars in Union Square is something that Yelp compels me to do, but it isn't necessarily the best use of my time or brain space, particularly for such a low-importance adventure. Similarly, I don't necessarily care what brand or thickness of socks that I wear, so I'm not likely to second-guess a recommendation given to me. It's not always the "best for me", but sometimes, not having to think makes it all worth it.

The flipside of algorithmic recommendations is that it's often hard to explain why certain things are recommended. For example, Amazon may recommend a certain pair of headphones over another because people from New York who also browse Amazon on Thursday evenings and have similar click-streams to me have bought them, but that's particularly difficult to explain, and depending on the algorithm Amazon is using, it may not even be able to do so. In contrast, if I pick whose recommendations I follow or the interest groups to which I've subscribed, why I see a particular recommendation is obvious.

So, as with many things in life, there are a ton of options when it comes to recommendations, and each has its own advantages and disadvantages. But the value of recommendations is very clear, given how much companies are invested in producing quality recommendations. Where search defined Web 1.0 and social has defined Web 2.0, discovery is likely to be remembered as the next focus of the Internet. I'd call it Web 3.0, but that's hackneyed, to say the least.

Niagara Falls

2011-10-26T00:53:00.000-04:00

Each week, Lori flies somewhere, Monday to Thursday. She's home almost every weekend, but it's a lot of travel. This past weekend, I flew out and spent the weekend with her in Buffalo, where she's been working these days. Upon my arrival, we went to the Anchor Bar, the (somewhat disputed) home of the Buffalo wing. Yum.

The highlight of the trip was definitely Niagara Falls. We drove up to the Canadian side on Saturday (can't you tell from our hats?) and saw both falls from pretty much every angle. We even got an EXTREME CLOSEUP on the Maid of the Mist. The ponchos were necessary, as it was rather wet.

We wandered across the Rainbow Bridge to the American side and saw so many weddings. Apparently, it's the most popular place to get hitched! See that orb-shaped tower in that cluster of buildings on the right? Just to the left of that was our hotel. Lori spent the balance of her Marriott points to get us a room on the top floor overlooking the falls, with a fireplace and jacuzzi in the room. Awesome.

Here's the view from the hotel room! We spent the evening watching Stanford destroy UW in football and the pretty lights shine on Niagara Falls.

The next day, we had lunch with Devi, Lori's friend from her travels abroad. At sunset on the way back, we ran into this rusted wreck. How artsy!

We stopped by the falls one more time to see the light show close up. Hooray for prolonged shutter speeds and time-delay photography! The falls look like lava! And now, we know what it feels like to have our photo taken in the 19th century. Don't blink and try to stay in the exact same pose for as long as possible...

On the way back to Buffalo, we scored some awesome Thai food from a random strip mall. I woke up the next morning at 5am and went back to New York, the opposite of Lori's weekly commute. I don't think I could do it, but I hope she has as much fun coming home as I did going to Buffalo!

Hunch's switch to git

2011-09-28T16:44:00.000-04:00

Over the last few weeks at Hunch, we've switched our version control system from Subversion to git. I'm not an expert on git by any means, and in fact, I only recently started using it. But, since I had more knowledge than most and an interest in making the switch, I ended up with the responsibility of getting us across the divide with as few showstoppers as possible. A number of development teams seem to be doing the switch these days, so I figured I'd share my experience and lessons learned to ease the transition for others.

Existing Workflow

Hunch has a small development team (~15 active committers) with only a few (~20) production servers, so our deployment just involves syncing out the trunk of the repository. Easy peasy. What ends up in production is ultimately determined by the developers, which is fine with a small, trusted team. I imagine that as we have more people and projects, we'll use a packaging system and automate deployment, but that level of complexity isn't necessary at this point.

When it came to making the switch, my primary goal was to disrupt this workflow as little as possible. Using git allows you to use any number of arbitrarily complicated workflows, but changing too much at once can be really frustrating to developers. Now that we're on git, we have the same workflow as we had before, but we have the option to add complexity as the team and project scope grow.

The Switch

Switching to git is best split into two components, development and production. The former involves changing how code is pushed to the repository, and the latter involves changing how that code is sent to production. On both ends, the true hero was git-svn.

To begin, the team was encouraged to learn the basics of git (if they hadn't already) and to start using git-svn, a git interface to Subversion. It allows developers to make commits to a local git repository and rearrange them as if the entire system were using git, but the local git checkout actually pushes the commits to a Subversion repository. Using git-svn allows developers to get familiar with git independently, without affecting everyone else's workflow.

Production

While everyone began to wrap their head around git, I worked on creating a centralized git repository. We looked at a number of hosted git options and ended up using github:fi. It's basically github, a few months behind. It's installed on a machine in our development network so we don't have to send all of our code out to github. Getting it set up was challenging since it seems like github just threw its stack (and all associated components) over the wall. Support has been somewhat responsive, but if they're charging $5,000/year for something, I'd expect it to be more solid than it is. That said, it does eventually work, and a huge advantage of github:fi is that the interface is github's, which many people have used already. Having a familiar repository browser removes a hurdle for developers in switching to git.

Once github:fi was set up, converting the repository from Subversion to git was quite easy. To begin, I created an authors file to map Subversion usernames to their github:fi accounts. Then, I just checked out the Subversion repository with git-svn using this authors-file, added a new remote (our github:fi repository), and pushed the master branch to this new remote. I kept the repository read-only for everyone except myself, and all I did was to push updates to the Subversion repository to our git repository to keep them in sync.

Once we had a git repository, I worked on converting our deployment scripts. We've got a few scripts in production that pull from the repository, and I just changed them to read from git rather than Subversion. Since everything on that end is read-only, it was pretty straightforward. One major gotcha was that git doesn't track empty folders. In Subversion, you can create an empty folder and add it to the repository, and wherever the repository is checked out, the empty folder(s) will be created. In git, you can't check in an empty directory, so subsequent repository clones won't create empty directories. There a couple of ways around this, but the first time we made a deployment using the new scripts, part of the site exploded for a few minutes. Lesson learned!

After the deployment scripts were good to go, I converted our other ancillary repository features. We have a little script that polls for commits and reads them to the entire office, which, thanks to the github API, was a piece of cake to convert. Setting up commit emails was more difficult. For whatever reason, the post-receive emails in github:fi just don't work. Perhaps that'll be fixed in a later version, but they're definitely broken in our setup. We get emails from other parts of the site, and other post-receive hooks work, but for whatever reason, post-receive emails don't. As a workaround, I wrote a service to poll for new commits (similar to the commit-reader). Not a big deal, but I wish the email hooks were implemented.

Development

With the production side of things flipped over to use git, all that remained was the developer side. We decided that a particular Monday at noon would be "G-Day", where we'd shut down the subversion repository and open up the git repository. Doing a clean switch meant that we didn't have to merge changes that were committed to Subversion but not git (and vice versa). Setting a date and time meant that people knew to check in whatever they were working on or create patches to commit to the new repository. No surprises.

The switch went something like this:

Shut down the Subversion repository (no reads/writes allowed)
Do one final synchronization from Subversion to the new git repository using git-svn.
Give the development team read/write access to the new repository.
Have everyone blow away their old Subversion checkout and replace it with a git clone.

Since we did it at noon on a Monday, everyone was in the office, and we had all day to clean up any unexpected surprises. Amazingly, though, we had no snafus at all. As we eased into the new version control system, we all had questions, but for the most part, everything went very smoothly! It's been a week, and for the most part, everything just works. Nothing unexpected has failed miserably (yet), and the development workflow has been largely unaffected. And now, we're using a much more powerful version control system that'll allow us to use more intricate workflows as we grow with minimal friction. Yahtzee!

We also have a few non-developers who occasionally commit code to the repository, and their workflows have remained largely unaffected, as well. For simple code changes, all that's required is learning to use the git commands (commit, push, pull) instead of their Subversion equivalents (commit, update). For the more graphically-inclined, GitX is a fine replacement for Versions as far as we use it, but you're best off with Brotherbard's GitX fork, which allows the user to push/pull through the GUI.

Keepin' It Clean

Regarding workflow, we had to make a couple of decisions as to how to handle our repository. Mimicking Subversion, we created just a single centralized repository that everyone reads from and writes to. But since we're pushing around groups of commits and merging repository states, not individual commits, we need to do a little more work to keep our repository history clean. Github allows you to fork repositories and push changesets. In many collaborative environments, users fork a central repository, push to their own repository in github, and then make a "pull request" to merge their changes into the main repository. While this is powerful, it's an added step to the workflow, so we decided to put off using forking and pull requests until we have enough projects and need gatekeepers to keep the repositories in good order.

Keeping our centralized repository clean has been a bit of a challenge and has definitely been the biggest pain point in switching to git. By default, git uses "merge" to coalesce changes to a repository. Long story short, this creates nasty "merge commits" in the repository because it merges remote changes into your existing local changes. Instead, we all use rebase, which pulls remote changes before applying your patches, which keeps the repository nice and clean. There's a really easy way to avoid rebase hell by editing your .gitconfig, and since we have commit emails, it's easy to tell who's being naughty and get them to fix it. That said, it's a pain to keep everyone's commits in good order, a problem we didn't have with Subversion.

Conclusion

Overall, Hunch's switch to git has been excellent. I'm actually rather surprised as to how seamless the transition has been, though much credit goes to the development team for doing their homework and not being helpless when we finally pulled the trigger. I encourage everyone still on Subversion to make the move to git sooner rather than later. The more a team grows, the more of a pain switching becomes. Do you have any experience with switching your development team to git? How did it go?

Tribute in Light

2011-09-12T23:53:00.000-04:00

Given that yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, there've been a lot of tributes, "where I was on 9/11" stories, and "in the last ten years, here's how I've changed" testimonials. While I can't really say that my life has profoundly changed after 9/11/2001, at least not directly, I figure that there's no time like the present to reflect.

I was a sophomore in high school with no relatives or even really friends in New York in September of 2001. Like everyone else, I walked home and watched the planes hit the towers until my eyes glazed over. Over the next few years, I watched America transform into a nation fueled by fear, and I opined angrily as that fear was used to do some awful things (including starting two wars, at least one of which was entirely unjustified). But I digress.

It took until a trip to New York in the summer of 2005 to begin to understand the impact of 9/11. I went to Ground Zero and saw just a humongous hole in the ground. That's it. Just a really big hole. For a few minutes, I understood America's reaction to 9/11.

Upon moving to New York in 2009, I'm further understanding how New York has changed as a city, and it's rather moving. I see ads and hear stories about life in the city before and after the attacks, and while I still have no direct, personal connection to those affected by terrorism, I get why things are as they are.

Last night, as the city has done every year since 9/11, a Tribute in Light shone through the night sky. Having access to the rooftop of a tall building in Brooklyn, I went up and snapped a couple of photos. Once again, I felt that strange feeling of understanding as New York (and America) moves on. I'm glad that this is the last year of the Tribute. While it's good to remember, it's best not to dwell.

Hammers and nails: selecting a datastore

2011-08-30T00:58:00.000-04:00

For many years, particularly for web applications, the only real option was the ol' RDBMS. Their primary query language, SQL, is possibly taught more than any other language (except maybe Java). The M in a LAMP stack, stands for MySQL, perhaps the most widely-deployed database in the world. I'll stop making a lot of conjectures without real numbers. Suffice it to say that the tried and true RDBMS has been ubiquitous for a long time. Recently, a number of alternatives to the traditional RDBMS, collectively termed NoSQL, have become rather popular. Boasting horizontal scalability and incredible speed, open-source databases like MongoDB, CouchDB, Cassandra, Riak, etc, have attracted much curiosity within the development community, and more and more projects are started with a NoSQL backend rather than a traditional RDBMS like MySQL.

I wish I could remember the exact quote, but my friend Kevin once said something along the lines of, "every time I go to a hammer conference, everything looks like a nail project." With all the neat new datastores out there, it's easy to find a reason to use one. Indeed, some NoSQL fanboys take it a bit too far. So, what datastore should you use for your project? Below is a series of musings I've gleaned from a number of conversations in the past few months. As a disclaimer, I'm not a database expert, so most of these musings are anecdotal.

1) RDBMSes are a huge pain to scale. One of the core bits of a relational model is a join, and scaling a join beyond a single machine just doesn't work. NoSQL databases, by definition, don't do joins, so they don't have this problem. Scaling a NoSQL database is just a matter of sharding the keyspace, which is relatively-natural given the structure of NoSQL databases, and some already manage the keyspace for you (e.g. Cassandra).

2) RDBMSes are incredibly stable. These things have been around for many years, and consequently, their performance has been well-studied and optimized. For the most part, assuming you're good about defining your data models and not trying to do too much (like a complicated replication scheme), they just work. A lot of NoSQL projects, on the other hand, particularly newer ones, can be unstable or at least inconsistent. Why is it that 999 writes happen in <= 20ms, but the 1000th takes 4 seconds? Another potential issue is the fact these projects aren't as mature as many SQL-based databases. Bugs exist, and there's nothing more frustrating than realizing that a particular problem is not your fault but your underlying datastore's.

3) NoSQL databases are fantastic for new projects. My favorite bit about CouchDB (my NoSQL database of choice) is that you don't have to define a schema before you can start adding data. One of the most annoying things about a SQL database is setting up the tables you'd like to use and the relationships among them. I don't care if the identification numbers are BIGINTs or INTs. I don't care if my unique key is less than a certain number of bytes. I'm just making a silly little webapp. I want to figure that stuff out later, if at all! CouchDB just stores arbitrary JSON, so I can just add little blobs of data and push off deciding on a schema. Such a model allows incredibly fast iteration, particularly on new projects where you haven't quite figured out what you want yet.

4) NoSQL databases require an expert. As I mentioned earlier, many NoSQL projects are not very mature. Consequently, if you're going to deploy one in production, you need someone who knows the project and its history top to bottom. With patches and new features often come breaking changes and potential data corruption, and you need someone full-time thinking about your datastores and how to maintain them. Typically, these experts are few and far between, and if they leave, you're hosed. In contrast, operations folks who can manage MySQL databases are plentiful, and if one quits, you can find another without much trouble. There are also only so many unique RDBMS deployments, whereas a NoSQL deployment is naturally going to be unique to your particular situation.

Obviously, there are caveats and counterexamples to everything I've said, and I'm fairly certain that given the right audience, I will have sparked a flamewar and offended everyone. Again, these are musings, not proofs, and this is a blogpost, not a research paper. Long story short, and this is going to sound like a cop out, but if your project is a screw, use a screwdriver. If it's a nail, use a hammer. If convenience and ease-of-use is a priority (at the potential cost of consistency and/or data loss), then go ahead and use a NoSQL datastore. If you don't want to think too hard about maintaining your datastore or worry about data corruption, go with an RDBMS. In general, I'd say that unless your data model really, really, really fits one of the NoSQL models, you won't be utilizing the efficiency benefits of such a database, and you're better of just going with a SQL database and avoiding the extra pain of maintaining NoSQL.

Companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are big enough that they require particular datastores to meet their scalability and capacity needs. They've invested a lot of time and money into building and maintaining databases that work. Many of these data models have been open-sourced, but just because you have the code doesn't mean you're capable of maintaining it in a 99% uptime production environment. As these new datastores mature, so will the discussion about which data store to use, but for now, I'll likely err on the side of MySQL for anything where long-term reliability is critical.

Flamewar, commence!

DCI Tour of Champions: Grand Finale

2011-08-08T19:30:00.001-04:00

Growing up, I never really had an opportunity to participate in a marching band. I didn't go to band camp or play at high school football games or anything like that. When I got to college and joined the Stanford Band, I was still pretty ignorant of what a real marching band does, much less what a good marching band does.

Last Sunday, Ted, his dad, his friend Laura, Amy, and I saw the best of the best in Drum Corps International's Tour of Champions at the New Meadlowlands Stadium.

It.

Was.

Absurd.

I haven't seen so many people running around, perfectly precise in every step and every note, since Fantasia. And these guys aren't even animated. The drum line was incredible, and the flag dancers had their catches and throws synced exactly on the beat. The brass double-tongued all sorts of crazy-high stuff without cracking a note. And the pitched percussionists (xylophones, marimbas, glockenspiels, etc) were hitting 32nd note runs together. Oh, my.

Here's the show that won the event, the Northeast's own Cadets:

Also performing were the Santa Clara Vanguard, for which Ted used to be a drum major back in college. From what he says, it's an incredible experience to be in a good drum corps. They work their kids incredibly hard. First, you have to be between 16 and 21. Once you can drink, you're out. Probably because if you stand in the sun all day long for the entire summer, you'd pass out after a single Bud Light.

It was really amazing, especially since I'd never really experienced such intricate pageantry before. It's definitely something to check out when the tour's in town next summer.

A TGIFunk reunion

2011-07-07T17:19:00.006-04:00

Last month, my sister graduated from college. Wow, I'm old. Six months before that, my freshman year roommate and awesome friend Jimmy decided that our band should have a reunion and play at a party celebrating my sister's and his brother's graduations. TGIFunk organized a barbecue for our friends and family over our graduation weekend, and it was a blast. My mother said it was the craziest party she'd ever been to, which probably equates to a mildly-rowdy Wednesday evening in college.

Jimmy and I asked our siblings, "hey, want to have a party and have your older brothers' band play for it?" They both curtly replied, "no." Not to be deterred, Jimmy pushed to make it happen. And boy, did it happen. We got nearly the entire crew together from Portland, Cleveland, New York, Washington D.C., and of course, the Bay Area, to play two shows on the Friday and Saturday nights of graduation weekend. Wow.

The weekend was absolutely nuts for me. Playing into the wee hours of the night and waking up at the break of dawn to go to Liesl's graduation events was a struggle. But it was totally worth it, and I'm glad I did it all.

A six-hour Thursday rehearsal was all we had to practice together, and I have to say that I wasn't particularly confident that we'd sound good at our show on Friday. But by some miraculous combination of the entire band being sober and paying attention to the music, we sounded better than an average TGIFunk show 3 years ago. And we had a hell of a crowd to play for, too.

The first night was at Kimo's, a bar on fratty Polk St. in San Francisco. Between TGIFunk and the HBC Brass Band (with whom we'd scheduled the show), we brought 150 people, the new attendance record at Kimo's, which curiously has a maximum occupancy of 123. It was a disgustingly small, hot room, and I sweat so much that I was hung over the next day from dehydration, even though I was sober. Gross? Gross.

The next night, we played at familiar Ireland's 32 up on Geary in San Francisco, opening for our friends Sinister Dexter. The previous night having gone so well, we got a little cocky, and a couple of beers before going onstage put us in our more-comfortable-but-less-good-sounding shoes. But we still sounded fine and the packed house loved it. As always, SinDex was incredible.

Liesl's graduation the next morning went tiredly, but it was great! She got all sorts of department awards! And Felipe Calderon didn't get assassinated!

The weekend was a blast. Getting to see Liesl graduate, play music, and see so many friends in so few days was amazing. We have to do it again? New York next time? Yes.

Hot dog! It's the 4th of July!

2011-07-06T08:02:00.015-04:00

This past Monday, I celebrated my first 4th of July in the United States (and without my sister, for that matter) in quite awhile. Two years ago, Liesl and I were in Peru with Michael and his girlfriend-at-the-time Alison. Last year, I was visiting Liesl in South Africa.

To make up for my severe lack-of-patriotism in the last couple of years, I decided to have an all-American day, and what's more American than an eating contest? I started by patriotically bargaining my wardrobe with Lori. "Fine", I conceded, "I won't wear the flag bandana or the face paint. Just the stars and stripes tie and the I <3 NY T-shirt." And we were off to Coney Island!

Coney Island itself is a delightful opportunity to see what the rest of America is up to, particularly on a warm summer day. You get a taste of the best music, the finest fashion, and the clever ways in which people conceal beer in paper bags. On Fourth of July, though, you get to witness another of the seven deadly sins, gluttony! Yes, friends. I'm talking about the annual Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest.

Lori, Ted, and I arrived about 90 minutes before the grand event, just in time to secure a spot on the sidewalk across the street from the festivities. With a long wait for but a ten minute event, the organizers had to find something for us to do… but what? What do a couple thousand people who're sitting around waiting for people to eat a disgusting number of hot dogs have in common? Absolutely nothing. So, we had to settle with lowest-common-denominator entertainment. There were ribbon dancers, dancing hot dogs, midgets, rappers (NB: If you're rapping onstage with a midget and two hot dogs, your career probably isn't going anywhere), and an announcer who wanted to do his grand entrance twice to ensure that ESPN caught it. The second time, when the banner fell off the cherry picker he was sitting in, he mentioned that the entire event had "the production value of a high school play." Such confidence! For me, the highlight of the event was when the head of the Food Bank came up on stage. She said, well, nothing. What's she supposed to say in the face of such waste? It was pretty funny.

In any event, the hot dog eating contest went as expected. Joey Chestnut, the reigning champion of the world, kept his crown by consuming 62 all-American franks. With an American on top of the Major League Eating leaderboards, I can sleep well until next year.

A weekend in the Catskills

2011-06-10T20:19:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, Lori and I had a nice little weekend to ourselves up in the Catskills mountains in upstate New York. We took the train all the way up to Poughkeepsie and drove from there. At the beginning of our drive, I took this really artsy photo. No Instagr.am needed!

We stayed up at the Roxbury Motel, basically the cutest place ever. Really nice rooms, nice staff, and good food within walking distance! Victory!

On the first day, we did a nice little hike to Diamond Notch, which would have a killer view... if it weren't raining and foggy. Oh well.

The next day, we hiked Kaaterskill Falls on a recommendation from our friend Jonathan. You'd recognize the falls if you were cultured and new all about the Hudson River School. I, however, am not. But lok at this pretty view from above the falls! So high up!

And then we drove down and hiked up to the falls. Camera two!

Here we are in our outdoor wear. Very rugged.

Kentucky Derby

2011-05-11T09:08:00.075-04:00

Well, that was an amazing weekend. Lori and I joined our friends at Ted's parents' friends' house in Kentucky for the Derby. Ted's parents have been going to the Derby for years, and they've picked up a number of friends along the way. And these friends were willing to let another 10 people crash at their house! Wow!

So, anyway, I bought a bunch of white suits in New York ($50 each!) and we invaded the Derby. On our first day, we went on a couple of bourbon tours around Louisville while people trickled into town. Here, Mumford and Sons visited the Jim Beam distillery.

Jim Beam was pretty uninteresting. It was mostly just a big ad. But then we went to the Maker's Mark tour, and it was awesome! We even got to dip our own little bottles in the red wax at the gift shop. Ripoff? Yes. Fun? Absolutely. Lori took 280MB of photos in "continuous" mode while four bottles got dipped.

On Derby Day, we all dressed up in our Derby best and took this marvelous photo. We all look so good!

The Derby itself was incredible. With our white suits and Lori's dress, they thought we were a wedding party, which, given recent news, isn't terribly far off. There were a lot of people wanting to take pictures of our group, and especially Lori. I mean, who wouldn't?

Our white suits got us a lot of attention, most of it in an unexpected sort of way. Mr. Monroe was carrying a box of powdered donuts and was repeatedly asked in a furtive way by the folks we passed how much the donuts cost and whether he had anything else to sell. We had a chance to be on NBC, but Adam wouldn't insinuate that he was selling cocaine. Probably a good career move.

We did get a little attention in a local blog. Since newspapers are going by the wayside, here's the text before they kill the webpage:

"They stood out like, well, like five guys wearing spotless white suits in an Infield that was starting to get slick and muddy. Exactly how long did the Stanford alums expect to keep these pristine suits looking white as mud, beer, blood, rain and other debris began swirling around them?

Not long. And they really don’t care. "I’m not planning on keeping anything I brought this week," said Matt Spitz, a 25-year-old from New York.

Turns out the guys were able to buy the suits in New York for $50 each. "We figured we are coming to Kentucky and white suits are the appropriate thing to wear," said Spitz.

Keeping the suits is another matter."

The crowd at the Derby was both much, much classier and much, much trashier than what I'm used to. On one hand, you have the celebrity entrance with snapping photos, and on the other, you have a carport over a row of port-a-potties so drunk people wouldn't race on top of them. But juleps for all! On Stu's advice, I bet on Soldat and Archarcharch and swiftly lost $10. Drat.

Oh, and then, since Lori couldn't get a plane ticket back to New York, we just drove the rental car 780 miles from Louisville to Newark, New Jersey.

Big Changes: Engagement!

2011-05-05T00:07:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned in my last post, Monday, May 2nd, was a big day. Figuring out my next career step was pretty big, but this is even bigger!

Lori, my girlfriend of six years, is now my fiancée! Everyone's looking for an engagement story, so here it is, complete with pictures.

Lori lives in a really tall building in Brooklyn from which you can see the entirety of the Manhattan skyline and all the way up the East River. It's incredible.

So, we went to the roof and sat on a picnic table. We watched the sun go down, cheese and crackers go into our mouths, and finally the lights of the skyline come on, one by one. Lori's a big fan of fireworks, and this was pretty close. When the Empire State Building came on, I proposed, and she accepted!

I promise there's a better photo of the two of us, but here's the "just after" photo:

And then we had champagne!

And then we made a ton of phone calls... But what a wonderful celebration to begin the rest of our lives together!

Step one of the rest of our lives: BASEBALL. The Giants beat the Mets on Wednesday! Lady Luck is definitely on my side this week! Here's your promised better photo:

Big Changes: A New Job!

2011-05-04T09:26:00.000-04:00

Monday, May 2nd, was a really big day, complete with two life changes. I'm going to write separate blog posts, and I'll start with the much-less-exciting-though-still-pretty-exciting news so the much-more-exciting news stays on the front page longer.

Anyway, I have a new job! Starting May 16th, I'll be joining up with Hunch as a software engineer. You can read all about the company here and here. It's a bunch of really smart folks, mostly from MIT, using some pretty hardcore machine learning to generate recommendations of anything to anyone. Based on the likes and dislikes you've given them (as well as the likes and dislikes of everyone else), they'll recommend new things for you to try. I'm really excited about joining the team.

Since leaving meebo, I've had a couple of really awesome projects that I've been working on. My friend Daniel is LevelPlay, a company that does fraud detection for its clients. I've been helping him to move some of his data processing jobs further into the cloud. It's a good chance to get my hands dirty with Amazon Web Services as well as help out a friend.

I'm also working on a project with my friends Chloe and Yuriy, whose system is exploding in popularity right now. I had an idea a long time ago about doing a "That's What She Said" Twitter robot, and Chloe (who's getting a PhD in Natural Language Processing, which is basically teaching computers to interpret human language) took it on as a class project. It's since blown up, and I'm working using her research to get my original dream up and running.

Anyway, stay tuned for another post soon about even-bigger news!

Kräftskiva!

2011-04-30T13:43:00.001-04:00

Many years ago, at a Theta Chi special dinner, my dear friend Erik Nygren taught us all a Swedish drinking song, Helan går. We didn't know what it meant, but it was fun to sing, and that was that.

I've since learned that this is the first song sung in a Swedish crayfish party (kräftskiva), and until this last weekend, was intent on experiencing such an event. Three of Erik's best friends were in town and staying at our apartment this past week, so it seemed like the ideal opportunity.

Our menu consisted of crayfish soaked in a dill/onion liquid served with toasted bread, cheese, and cheese-and-onion pies. Jenny Craig would have been proud.

Erik and Claes make meat pies!

Akvavit, cheese, and crackers! The perfect appetizer!

Erik invited basically the entirety of Northern Europe in New York City, and we all had a blast. Not having a dining room table (much less one big enough for 20 people), we sat on the floor and stuffed our faces. I learned how to eat crayfish, which was convenient. Just the tail, the rest is pretty yucky.

Throughout the meal, the Swedes would lead us in song, obviously starting with Helan går but moving on to other rousing tunes that I never really quite understood.

Eventually, we sang a number of traditional pieces from the American catalog as well, including Home on the Range, The California Drinking Song, and The Hukilau Song, as presented by Ted and Lori.

Naturally, in traditional European style, the feast turned into a dance party.

Testing New York State's tax processing center

2011-04-29T14:31:00.000-04:00

Well, I hope that my calls have been recorded for training purposes. Filing taxes has been a rather large pain, first because my employer neglected to withhold my New York City tax for 2010, so I have to pay taxes in the first place. But actually getting my hard-earned cash into the city's grubby hands has been a chore, though I admit that it's entirely my own fault. So, without further ado, here's a list of things to do to confuse New York State:

1) On your return, when you put in a bank account number from which they can take your pieces of eight, don't actually enter your bank account number. Pick something else and write it in there instead.
2) When you get two pieces of mail, several days apart, one which says "hey, you didn't pay your taxes" and one which says "hey, your payment got all screwed up", don't read them very closely. Don't think that you can do this all electronically just by entering your bank account number again. Mail them a check instead.
3) When you write said check, make sure that the number you write in the box is different from the text description you write on the next line. In my case, if the last two digits you need to pay are "--99", write "--90" in the number box and "-- and ninety nine dollars exactly". That'll get'em.
4) When it takes them two weeks to cash your check and you're fast approaching the payment deadline (naturally, the late payment deadline because you already screwed it up), you realize your mistake and give them a call.
5) During your conversation, make sure to laugh with them as they laugh at you. It is pretty funny, after all. You kinda screwed up a few times. Make sure to go back and forth a couple of times between different departments to talk to everyone.

Bottom line: I'm an idiot. They did a great job, though, and so far, the IRS hasn't come a'knockin' for the $9 I owed them for a day. Oops.

Subsonic vs. Ampache

2011-04-20T21:13:00.000-04:00

Last February, I wrote about how awesome Ampache is. And yeah, it is. The concept of streaming your music from your home computer is awesome. If wishes were fishes, I'd upload my audio to an EC2 instance and just stream everything from the cloud. A little bit more brute-force than subscription-based services like Rhapsody, but whatever.

Anyway, a year ago, I did a look around, and according to the blog posts I'd read, Ampache was definitely the way to go to stream your music. Since, I haven't used it too much beyond streaming stuff from my phone, and it's worked all right, I suppose. The Ampache Android client (Amdroid) is pretty lame, and when it has problems, I just assume that it's the fault of the crappy internet connection at my apartment.

Today, I tried out Subsonic, another streaming backend service like Ampache. In pretty much every way, it's better than Ampache. It's easier to set up (no manual MySQL backend setup or Apache config changes), it's much faster to use, the web interface is cleaner, and the folks who wrote the backend bit also wrote the Android app, so they're really smoothly-integrated. Also, the Android app downloads songs in advance and caches them, which makes it unbelievably snappy and smooth.

Subsonic looks like it's in a bit more active development than Ampache. Subsonic's had a release every few months since it started in 2005, whereas Ampache hasn't had a release in over a year. So, there's a better chance that bugs will be fixed and that I'll end up with new features if I go forward with Subsonic.

I haven't played with Subsonic for long, but I'm confident enough that it's better to rid my system of Ampache. Begone!

Oh, hello, 2011!

2011-04-16T19:59:00.000-04:00

Well, I've been living under a rock for the last few years, apparently. Who knew that using good tools can make you a better engineer?

When I was a sophomore in college, I was introduced to the notion of version control. "Wait a minute, I can save multiple copies of the same file and go back to old versions? What?" CVS is what we used, and boy, was it not my favorite. I started using subversion (SVN) the next year, and it was just so much better. In fact, everyone and their mother used subversion in 2005. Well, maybe not my mother.

Anyway, I've been using subversion for the last 6 years, and for the most part, it's a pretty neat tool. It's a pain that you can't commit changes when you're disconnected from the main repository, and it's kinda silly to have a single point of failure, but it's simple, it's straightforward, and it just works. Boomshakala. For class projects, personal projects, and even at meebo, subversion subversion subversion, all the livelong day.

There are a few meebo projects that use git, another type of version control for the non-engineers in the audience. Git is different from SVN in that you don't necessarily have the notion of a canonical, central repository. Everyone has their own little private repositories to which they commit changes, and when it's time to send code upstream, all the commits go in one big batch. Decentralized Version Control Systems have been all the rage in the past few years, and so much of the development community is hosted on github and similar sites.

When I was really heavily using subversion, trying git was a total pain because it's hard to context switch between the two ways of thinking about version control. Today, I took a big dive into git, and I have to say that I'm quite pleased. Like, what was I thinking? Seriously. Git is awesome, it's fast, and it makes sense. I'm not quite a wizard yet, as I'm still working on the basics. But I spent some time today porting over a couple of personal projects, NaughtyNouns and Zeitlist, a little script I wrote to generate a playlist based on a given date range and a user's Last.fm profile. Assuming you've been diligent about scrobbling, you can just type in a date range and boom, instant nostalgia.

Anyway, not flipping over to git as my primary means of source control until just recently was just silly, but I do a lot of silly things. Speaking of which, I'm going to take off this tie dye shirt and put on some real clothes.

Being a grownup

2011-03-28T18:40:00.000-04:00

The nesting instinct is strong in us humans, and as I've settled down in the same place for almost two years (for the first time since high school), I've had a little more opportunity to figure out my living arrangement and decorate accordingly. And now, readers, I'll give you a short tour of the things I've collected. For some definition of "art", they might even be considered art.

To start, above my bed, we have some playful pandas. I don't really know what they are or what they're doing. When I was a kid, my parents put this up in my room, perhaps because they didn't want it. When I left the Bay Area, they were going to get rid of it unless I took it. And off to New York it went! We've also got rally towels from the NLCS game I attended in which the Giants tromped the Phillies and from the Orange Bowl where Stanford slayed Virginia Tech (and I won a bottle of bourbon, but that's another story). And an incredibly overpriced cloth from Tanzania! And a picture of a little boy playing trombone from my parents!

Above the bed, we have Leftylamp and Rightylamp, who, combined, form the best purchase I've ever made. $7 each from the IKEA children's department clearance bin. And they have two modes, normal and flicker. The former is a nice healthy orange glow, and the latter is a nice healthy orange glow that flickers as if it were a flaming torch. YES. The ol' triumvirate in the middle is a pillowcase from Peru, a copper plate from Egypt, and an incredibly underpriced wood carving from Tanzania. You win some, you lose some, I guess.

Moving on! Above ye olde desk, I've got some nice photos from Egypt and Alaska. Truly, a very cost effective way to cover one's wall with nice memories. $8 frame, $20 printing, and I done took the photos! Win.

But what's that thing in the middle? There's a framing store down the street from my apartment that features art by this guy, and every day, I'd walk by and look at this piece in particular. So cute! I expressed this numerous times to Lori, and this past Christmas, she got it for me! They are cartoon people, and they have little hearts on their chests! I like it.

To the living room! More photos on the wall! This is four seals on the beach in the Galapagos (just like the four gentlemen in the apartment!) and a view down the California coastline from my bike trip to Los Angeles.

Egad, a lion in the Serengeti! And a Peruvian mountain farm!

The light is doing some tricksy things on my cheap plastic frames, but it's a sunset at Burning Man! And an autumn view from the side of Mt. Madison in New Hampshire!

And what's this? That's right! The Giants won the World Series in 2010! My mother was nice enough to save the newspaper articles, and I took them back to New York and had them mounted and framed. Totally worth it.

And that's your tour, friends! Thanks for visiting my nest! Also thanks to my roommates, who're fine with my putting up photos of my adventures all over the living room.

PyCon 2011

2011-03-14T19:32:00.000-04:00

I just got back from PyCon, which was perhaps one of the most valuable weekends, professionally, that I've ever had. I went because I was invited to speak, but I probably should have gone even if I hadn't been.

PyCon is an opportunity for Python developers, contributors, and enthusiasts to gather for tutorials, talks, development sprints, and just generally being able to hang out with the Python community. I've been to a couple of Hadoop World conferences, but those were just one day and in New York, so they didn't have the same feel of hundreds of participants descending on a city for a few days and totally committed to the conference. For the last four days in Atlanta, the majority of my thoughts were around Python and its community, and I had some great conversations with fellow attendees.

Perhaps one of the defining traits of the conference this year was the absence of Django-wielding hipsters, who were all instead at SXSW. As a result, the talks were much less-flashy and refreshingly hardcore-technical in nature, for the most part.

The cool things this year appeared to be coroutines and PyPy. The former is mostly manifested in the form of libraries that allow you to run your synchronous code asynchronously (like gevent). The latter received $10,000 from the Python Software Foundation to continue working on an optimizing VM that's much faster in many cases than CPython, which Python ships with. Interestingly, both of these tools provide incredible performance improvements at the cost of a less-deterministic execution trace. For example, applications written in the gevent paradigm are harder to debug because the execution is converted automatically.

One of the awesome things I got to do was to spend some quality time both with friends and with new folks. Randall and Dan M came with me from meebo, and Dan B was there with Google. We all had dinner on Saturday, which was probably the most exciting night, socially. After hours of dinner/drinks, Randall and I were headed back to our hotel room and decided to stop at a corner store on the way. While grabbing a beer to drink back at the hotel, we ran into some nice folks from Olark who convinced us that we should instead play cards with them. Fast-forward to 3am, we were playing Durak in the basement of the Days Inn with cans of beer littered around the table. Great times, great folks. What an experience.

I also ran into Aaron Staley, with whom I took CIS 118 at CSM in the summer of 2002. I hadn't really spent any quality time with him until this past weekend. He had given a tutorial on Thursday, and I spoke on Saturday. My, a long way we've come. His company looks really neat, too.

My talk was awesome. I spoke about comparing various web application hosting options in python and the advantages/disadvantages of each. Specifically, I brought up that gevent workers running in a gunicorn server were incredibly efficient and comparable in terms of complexity to mod_wsgi applications.

Despite how empty the photo below, I think I had about 150 people in the end. The talk went really, really well, and I'm happy I did it. I got some good reviews at the end, too, so that's always a plus.

But don't take my word for it... Check out the video:

I had a lot of great support and feedback from fellow meebo folks in the days leading up to my talk, and I really appreciated that. Overall, I think it went fantastically, and I look forward to doing more (hopefully)! And even if I'm not speaking, I definitely see more conferences in my future.

And of course, on Sunday, we had to get chicken and waffles. They were delicious, unsurprisingly.

Shredding the gnar!

2011-03-10T17:10:00.001-05:00

I spent the last week in California for work, and during my second weekend there, I decided to invite myself to the ski house rented by a number of my coworkers. The house is just a couple of miles from Squaw Valley, where I learned to ski many moons ago.

To say the least, I had an incredible time. I almost forgot what it was like to ski on a real mountain. Don't get me wrong, the skiing I've done on the East Coast has been fun, but the slopes are just garbage. At Squaw, the vertical elevation is much, much larger than 700 total feet.

We drove up on Friday night, and the next morning, Shaun, Randall, Vera, Shelly, and I were greeted with one of the most beautiful days of skiing I've ever had. Not a cloud in the sky, bright shiny sun, and reasonably-fresh powder on the ground. We also happened to be greeted by most of the state of California, it seemed. We found some really nice runs, but for the most part, the mountain was crowded, and the lift lines were really long.

At the end of the day, I skied into the village at the base of Squaw to find, well, Burning Man. The Spacecowboys had brought the UNIMOG and set up some speakers and were blasting chill music to a bunch of noodle-dancing hippies on one of the patios. It was as if I'd walked out of the snow and into a hookah bar in Mumbai. It brought back some welcome, excellent Burning Man memories.

That night, I cooked chili, and we watched the movie about the game of G.N.A.R., a story about the hilariously jock skiers at Squaw Valley. We learned about pole whacking, cooking breakfast in the lift lines, and jumping off cornices while naked and on the phone with one's mother.

Shaun's a pretty intense skier (also an intense biker) who's all over that kind of stuff, and Vera and Randall do a really good job keeping up with him. I don't have a helmet, so I'm reluctant to do anything near trees or rocks, but I'm happy to do some mogul runs nearby and watch them do the crazy stuff.

For our second day, we woke up to a small snowstorm. The mountain was basically empty, and there was some fresh but heavy powder on the ground. We did a bunch of really good runs, but especially after the previous day, my body was pretty beat. We called it quits relatively early and headed back to the house to clean up and avoid the traffic.

And as we drove back in the dark, full of Auburn's In-n-Out, thinking about how broken and sore I would feel the next day, I remembered just how boring the middle of California is. Except for the big, glowing Budweiser factory and that weird oil refinery by Hercules. Those are pretty neat.

A high gravity post

2011-02-19T14:11:00.002-05:00

For the last few years, my friends and I have celebrated High Gravity Day. HGD, celebrated on 2/11 each year (happy birthday, Grandma!), is very simple. Step 1: acquire Steel Reserve, step 2: gather friends, and step 3: see what happens. Last year, we had an incredible time rather unexpectedly. I invited a smattering of folks who didn't all know each other, and everyone came and had a blast.

This year was different. 2/11/2011 is none other than the golden birthday of High Gravity day. We had 8 people fly or bus into town for the holiday. Eight! And it was the all-star team, too! Abel, Jimmy, Zach, Claudia, Goldman, Sureel, Mal, and Bateman. Wow.

Wow! An exceptionally smooth evening, indeed. So many of my favorite people were in town to celebrate this... peculiar... holiday. I love it.

The next day, some of us headed off to Top of the Rock, an observation deck at the, well, top of the Rockefellar Center.

And then we were on the top! So high up!

I find it amazing that I have such incredible friends. Jimmy, for example, was my freshman year roommate and fellow funkateer in TGIFunk. I moved to New York, he moved to DC and then eventually Cleveland. And yet I still get to see Funky Kong every few months or so.

Despite being in New York, which is excellent for brunch, we ended up cooking two huge egg-themed meals at my house. Lori even made eggs benedict!

Yum! What a great weekend! Gravity has returned to normal, and calendars have been marked for HGD 2012, location TBD.

"Skiing" in New York

2011-01-19T19:31:00.026-05:00

Last weekend, a group of us went skiing, for some definition of "skiing". True, there was snow (and it wasn't half-bad), and we put on skis and rode that snow, but it wasn't quite what I was used to. The resort was called Thunder Ridge, and it was super-convenient to get to. You just take the Metro North up about 90 miles, and a shuttle bus comes to pick you up.

Now, you might wonder, "wow, how can a train go all the way up to a ski mountain?", which is a valid question until you realize that nowhere in the name "Thunder Ridge" does anybody mention anything about a mountain. It's a ridge, after all. The elevation at the highest point is about 600 towering feet.

Look at this terrifying black diamond (terrifyingly named "Blackberry Pass"):

After several such harrowing descents, we had what Steve described as an "aggressive" lunch:

The day wasn't particularly challenging, but it's always fun to ski with friends, particularly if Cost(train ticket) + Cost(lift ticket) comes out to a whopping $60. Compare that to >= $100 at a real ski resort.

Hey, there's all this snow on the ground. We might as well enjoy it, right?

I'm in Miami, Beach.

2011-01-10T19:47:00.063-05:00

Wow, what a trip. In a stunning twist of fate, Stanford went 11-1 in the regular season and got to go to a BCS Bowl. If you had told this to my 2006 self, I would have laughed at you. In any event, the chance to see Stanford in the Orange Bowl was far too good to pass up.

Lori, in her infinite wisdom, decided it would be a good idea to rent a condo/house on the beach. It was. We got a spot about 2 miles from downtown that sleeps 6 and put anywhere from 5 to 12 people in it. Amazing. Stuffing too many people in a condo brings back fond memories of college ski trips. Except there was no snow. It was, in fact, very warm.

Some of us arrived in time for New Year's Eve, which was wonderful. Miami is rather famous for its clubs, and its clubs have expensive, open-bar events on New Year's Eve. Adam M, in charge of our NYE plans, found a spot downtown that offered $50 for dinner and a cash bar. It turned out to be a relatively-new restaurant, so we got to know everyone well! Five of our party ended up exchanging numbers platonically with the waitress (who was dating the waiter), only to realize the next day that this was, indeed, a mistake. So many text messages.

There were a bunch of Stanford events surrounding the game, including a young alumni gathering at a downtown club. It turned out to be just like senior formal, chatting with all the folks you haven't seen in three years, some of whom for a reason. Oh, and really expensive drinks and loud music. Fun times...?

When Monday rolled around, we were all ready for gametime. Steve planned an excellent, 10-hour tailgate before the 8pm game. We spent the day having beers, talking to folks, eating slow-cooked pork (thanks Adam C), and generally enjoying the atmosphere of the Sun Life stadium parking lot. We met some Virginia Tech fans, and it was amusing to hear them try to explain why turkies are fearsome. All in all, they were a good group of folks.

Lori, Adam M, and I sat with Ted's family for the game. We had incredible seats! It was super-generous of them to include us. Needless to say, we won! 40-12, and the appropriate amount of good game (1st half) and blowout (2nd half). We stayed after the game to watch the ceremony and cheer on the band, but then we were back out to the parking lot...

...for more beers, oranges, and victory cigars! Team Sands is above, showing off our oranges.

And the whole tailgate crew, sitting on top of a rented convertible. Who said we were private-school prissies? Note the VT fan on the left, showing his appreciation for Stanford.

Andrew Luck, QB-phenom, is returning next season, but we're losing the coach that turned the program around. Next year might be our best shot at a BCS championship game, but I'll take the Orange Bowl for now! What an incredible start to 2011.

Happy Holidaze!

2010-12-27T14:49:00.000-05:00

I'm not going to start this post by saying how terrible I've been at updating this blog because that's what I did last time...

The holiday season started early this year with SantaCon. SantaCon is a marvelous, marvelous event/flashmob in which thousands of folks dressed in Santa outfits or other Christmas attire get together and flood the city. I unfortunately managed to lose my camera during the festivities, but Anne got a great one of all of us on a stoop outside Dave and Noah's apartment, where we prepared ourselves for the big day.

What an absurd, delightful day!

That Monday, I headed back to San Francisco and have been there since. It's truly convenient that I can work out of the Mountain View office more or less whenever I want and for as long as I want. We had another great holiday party, this year at Gordon Biersch in Palo Alto. It's amazing how much my company's grown since I joined full-time last year and especially since I started as an intern way back in June '08. Wow.

When I haven't been working, my family's been hosting guests (including my aunt and cousins, back from Abu Dhabi for the holidays!), and I've been getting together with middle school, high school, and college friends. We had so many folks over for a poker night that we had to use the ping pong table!

Look at how well we're using the coasters! I'm impressed. And then Joanna took our money.

It's been great to be back, spending lazy days around the house and hanging out with the family, just like winter breaks of old. It's been awhile since I've done basically nothing all day, and I love it. Unfortunately, Lori couldn't make it out for the holidays, and I've missed her a lot! I've had a bit more company around the house, though, as the Tree has come out to stay with us a bit.

Speaking of which, this Thursday, we're headed down to Miami for the Orange Bowl! And New Year's Eve, which will likely prove to be a hilarious event. If anyone knows me, I'm ALL about the clubs!

Maybe we'll party in the city where the heat is on all night on the beach 'til the break of dawn. Who knows?

1 Huge Turkey, 2 Guests, 3 Dinners, and ...4 Loko?

2010-12-03T00:31:00.000-05:00

Last week (especially if you count a couple of days on either end) was incredible. I've been pretty bad at updating this recently, so to stay true to form, I'll cover some highlights from the week in sufficiently-inadequate form.

Friday was the Lost Dogs' first 2-hour gig. We were at Bar East in the Upper East Side. 50 people came out for us (wow! thanks!), and we played a really good pair of sets. For however long Megaupload decides that it wants to keep this file, the recording is here.

Saturday was Big Game.

We won, and Ryan brought muchos Lokos.

Monday my family came into town, and we had a roommate dinner at Zum Schneider. Yum, goulash.

Tuesday we saw A Little Night Music on Broadway. Wow. It was incredible. I had "Miller's Son" stuck in my head for a few days.

Wednesday we went to Fette Sau with Jonathan and Beatrice Priest. Liesl had been hecka sick all week and I hadn't seen her at all!

Thursday was a delicious Thanksgiving. Liesl was alive, and Steve and Adam even came over!

Friday I went shopping with Mom and we had dinner with Alex and Natalie!

Saturday we saw a photography exhibit on the Cuban Revolution and failed to get Cuban food. Whoops.

And since, I've been recuperating. It's a long, awesome journey.

More/better updates next time!

Beware the leaf peepers

2010-11-10T17:07:00.000-05:00

Last month, my apartment did a backpacking-plus-girlfriends trip to the White Mountains in New Hampshire. Sean, Michael, Karen, Lori, and I (no Erik) had the lofty goal of summiting Mt. Washington, the tallest peak in the Northeast.

We started on Friday afternoon with a train ride to Stamford (much cheaper to rent a car) and an 8 hour drive to New Hampsire! The Giants were playing the Braves in the second game of the NLDS, and we kept going out of reach of the various radio stations that were playing the game. In the end, the Giants blew it, so I suppose I'm pretty glad that I didn't have to hear it.

We got a bit of sleep, and the next morning we were off! The plan was to go up and over Mt. Madison (the 5th tallest peak in the Northeast), camp below the treeline, and then summit Washington and get back to our car the next day.

So apparently, a thing to do in New England in the fall is "leaf peeping", where you go and look at the leaves as they turn various colors. Well, I'd never heard of it, but these people have the right idea. The leaves were, indeed, incredible.

Now wait a minute, why are those evergreens in the foreground covered in frost? Oh, that's because it's about 12 degrees near the top of Mt. Madison. Good thing we came prepared! Well, sort of. It was still miserably cold and windy.

One thing we weren't prepared for was the miserable terrain. I grew up on dirt trails in Tahoe and around the Bay Area. At least in the White Mountains, it's a lot of large rocks that you're walking on, and there's this soft little voice in your head saying "when am I going to break my ankle"? It certainly took awhile to get used to. That coupled with the wind at the top of Mt. Madison made for a perilous hike at times.

Wow, no kidding. This sign would have been nice to see on our way up, rather than our way down, Mt. Madison. Anyway, we stumbled down to our campsite rather broken, cold, and tired. We gobbled down some boil-in-a-bag Indian food and passed out.

The next morning, we decided that summitting Mt. Washington wouldn't be prudent, considering that it'd be more of the same painful, freezing, windy hiking that we'd done the previous day. So, we just went down the mountain, and Sean hitched a ride back to our car.

On the way out, we had to pause for a second...

Wait, what? We climbed that? Yep, the rightmost peak is Mt. Madison. Wow. In retrospect, 5,367ft isn't really all that high, especially relative to some of the stuff I've done in Yosemite and around Lake Tahoe, but the hiking was really difficult and cold. It was definitely one of the hardest days I've ever gone.

The drive back to New York was rather long (particularly due to a couple of leaf peeper parades; they're everywhere!), but we got to stop at Sean's house to meet his parents and eat dinner! Fortunately, we made it back to Stamford just in time for the late train to New York... with victory beers, of course.

The best weekend ever

2010-10-31T17:47:00.002-04:00

Last weekend was definitely one of the best five-day stretches I've ever had. I don't think I could have planned for it to be better than it was.

Wednesday

I took the early-early flight and got into SFO around 10:30am, and got myself and 40 delicious New York bagels I'd brought for my coworkers down to Mountain View in time to eat them. I wasn't at work for long before I left for... Game 4 of the NLCS!

Now that I'm not living in the Bay Area, I didn't realize how much I'd miss having the Giants on KNBR pretty much every day through the spring and summer. The Giants were in town for a weekend in May, but I couldn't see them, so besides the game I caught over the summer, this was my only chance! Fortunately, my folks were able to snag some tickets from a family friend, and we all got to go together. Also fortunately, it was an incredible game, and the Giants won on a walk-off sacrifice fly from Juan Uribe. Further fortunately, I got to take home all the plastic NLCS cups from the beers that we drank!

Thursday

Meebo celebrated its 5th birthday at a party in San Francisco! I actually went to this same party in New York the previous week, and both were amazing. Our party-planning folks did a really good job, especially with the whole "open bar" thing.

Friday

After a long, slow day at work (see Thursday), Stanford's Homecoming Weekend kicked into full swing. It was a band reunion, too, so tons of my friends from school were back from all corners of the world. Friday night was the Bandquet, where we all ate, drank (again, open bar), cheered for a slideshow, and generally got excited about seeing everyone again. We definitely didn't go to bed in time for...

Saturday

...field rehearsal! 7am ATS, naturally. Tons of bandies, old and new, all thinking a little slowly (see Friday), on the practice field getting ready for the game. As an ex-drum major, I got to participate in the football costume and conduct on the field. We did a Point Break costume. The current drum major dressed as Johnny Utah, we had a Bodhi surfer, and the rest of us were the ex-presidents.

The field show, as expected, was a blast. I couldn't move my arm until the next Thursday, but it was totally worth it. After the game, which wasn't particularly interesting, we played for the fans a bit. My dad and I were interested in something, but I'm not quite sure what it was.

After the game, we had another meal, and all the old managers and drum majors got to conduct a song. We were all super-tired, but some of us weren't too tired to find a tailgate with a TV and watch the Giants clinch the pennant! Shortly thereafter, I went back to the city with my friend Marie, who was awesome enough to drive me back once my parents had left.

Sunday

At this point, my body was curious as to what I was doing to it. Four consecutive days of eating, drinking, destroying my arm, and general merriment left my body somewhat confused. Fortunately for me, this caught the poor thing off-guard as I went and sat in the cold rain for a few hours at the TOTALLY AMAZING Bridge School Benefit Concert.

The concert is organized and put on by Neil Young and his wife, Peggy, to raise money for the Bridge School. The lineup is always incredible, and I've always wanted to go, so finally, I sacked up and bought tickets. My brave compatriots were Chris, Taylor, and my dad, and we were not disappointed.

I have a list of bands to see before I die (or, more likely, they die), and I definitely got to check a few of them off on Sunday. Among the performers were:

Grizzly Bear
Modest Mouse
Elton John & Leon Russell
Jeff Bridges (yes, the dude; actually a good singer!)
Elvis Costello
Neil Young (in Buffalo Springfield!)
Ralph Stanley (who is truly a Man of Constant Sorrow)
Marc Ribot, leading T-Bone Burnett's Speaking Clock Revue
...and of course, Pearl Jam

It was cold, it was wet, but we were in good company and saw some great music. Awesome.

Monday
Man, it was so great to sleep in and finally get in a day of rest! Or not. I went to work and took the redeye. Back in New York just in time for a dentist appointment on Tuesday. My bad on scheduling that one...

Anyway, it was really the best few days I could have planned, and this is going to sound sappy, but the only thing that could have made it better was if Lori were there, too! The bad news was that she was in Australia for her cousin's wedding. The good news is that the wedding went wonderfully! Congrats to Andrea and Pete!

I fixed the internet!

2010-10-08T09:41:00.000-04:00

Nerd alert. Might wanna read something else if you ever wanted to think that I was cool...

Last year, I moved into my apartment and promptly purchased one of these for us to use to connect to the internet. Time Warner Cable provided us with a wireless router / cable modem, but they didn't allow me to configure port forwarding (among other things), so, I switched us to the typical wired cable modem and bought my own dang wireless router. Port forwarding set up, remote SSH activated, and BOOM! Donezo.

The router's been giving somewhat lackluster performance, though. Sometimes it cuts out, sometimes it's slow, and the latency is really high. It comes and goes, so I always assumed it had something to do with the fact that it's sitting under the TV (interference), that we have 40 something wireless networks in range, or the fact that our walls are made of three different kinds of material.

The other night, however, was the last straw.

(again, I'm going to issue a nerd alert)

Erik, Sean, and I tried to play a little roommate StarCraft, and unfortunately, the computers just destroyed us. In the game, yes, but also trying to get the game set up. For one, even on the local network (not the WAN), you have to set up port forwarding to be able to host a game. But once we got a game set up, the latency was incredible! Even when we brought out the Ethernet cables and sat around the router, the latency was too high to play. Unbelievable.

So, I did what any self-respecting person with a master's concentration in systems would do. I blamed router firmware and installed an open source version.

I've been thinking about custom router firmware ever since reading about the upside-down-ternet. How awesome would it be to let people steal "free" wireless and then do amusing things with their traffic? Anyway, I pulled the trigger and installed DD-WRT, and I haven't looked back.

True, I bricked the router once and had to do a (not-)fancy 30/30/30 reset, but otherwise, it's been just splendid. Setting up everything as it was before was a snap. Port forwarding is automatic because the router now allows uPnP (why it didn't before was a mystery to me). The internet connection in my room is now snappy. I can transfer up to 1 MB/s on the local network (up from 300KB/s before). And most importantly, we can all play StarCraft on the LAN without noticeable lag.

I think I just scored a point. The total lifetime score now sits at:

Matt: 1
The Internet: 823,421,948

I want to keep playing with it, but if I screw it up, my roommates and I won't have internet access. Then, we'd have to go outside. Or make friends. Frightening thought...

Apple picking

2010-10-01T20:40:00.000-04:00

This past weekend, Lori and I decided to visit "nature." Nature is this weird thing that doesn't really occur in New York City. Every now and again, you walk amongst the gigantic concrete structures and think, "Huh, I wonder what's missing..." before you see a little bit of moss growing between the cracks in the pavement and realize, "Aha! I knew it. Nature."

So we headed up to Outhouse Orchards, about two hours north of New York City by rail. Apple picker in one hand and a beautiful lady in the other, I had a great time.

You know you've got a keeper when she doesn't run away from a moustache like that. I had a full beard for most of the summer, and once it got annoying to trim, I parted with almost all of it. But I couldn't get rid of the whole thing. Annnnyway, apple picking.

We picked so many apples. Wanting to invest them, we tried to take them to the Apple Bank, but for some reason, they wouldn't take our apples. Given this experience, I'm now fully behind any financial reform, particularly that which supports fruit as currency.

Naturally, we made pork chops with applesauce, apple crisp, and two apple pies. And we still have too many apples...

Burning Man Reprise

2010-09-22T20:08:00.000-04:00

Two years ago, I went to Burning Man. This time around, I had a completely different experience, which I suppose was to be expected. But, I'll get to that later. First, I must talk of the amazing Team NYC. Team NYC was Zach, Adam, Ted, Erik, Lori, and myself. We all flew into Reno together (though not all from New York), bought our supplies (see photo below), and psyched ourselves up for an awesome week. Lori took care of most of organization, including booking an amazing hotel room with free breakfast!

These are truly some of my best, best friends, and there's no group I'd rather spend a weekend (and then a week, and then another weekend) with. Here's an awesome photo of us, once we'd bought everything, sung some karaoke at The Flowing Tide, piled into Ted's camper, waited in line for hours, and rolled into camp.

Right when we got to the playa, it started raining, which is unheard of. Rain? In the desert? I prepared for miserable heat, and it rains? Anyway, we stayed dry under the camper shade for about an hour before the rain subsided and revealed a double rainbow. Yes, a double rainbow. And as it became visible to different groups of people, you could hear, "what does it mean!?" rolling across the desert, much like The Wave at a sporting event. It was really amazing.

We camped with the same group I camped with two years ago. We were Cougar Melon Camp then (for the American Dream theme), last year was Spider Melon Camp (for the Evolution theme), and this year, we were Brave New Melon camp (for the Metropolis theme). Yes, we had a 50-foot illuminated T in the middle of our camp, the chief symbol for civilized society in Huxley's Brave New World. And that sign in front was made by Lori and me, mostly Lori.

The week itself was certainly different. Two years ago, I think I experienced Burning Man in a more traditional way, if you can even use that word. I explored various camps during the day, met new and interesting people, and invested myself a bit more in the community. This time was different. I camped with a ton of my friends, many of whom I don't get to see on a regular basis since we've scattered ourselves across the country. Also, our camp was very centrally-located, so people came to us (for melons!). These two factors meant that I hung around camp much more than I expected I would, opting to spend time with my friends at the expense of exploring the community.

At first, this was really bothersome. I felt that I wasn't getting a true Burning Man experience, and it bummed me out. A couple days in, though, I realized that every Burning Man is likely to be totally different. Also, on a very absolute scale, hanging out with my friends all day drinking beer and meandering around at night is a marvelous time, even if it wasn't what I expected. And I don't know why I avoided the Golden Cafe for the first couple of days. Their specialties are quality drinks (in clean glassware) and having an open jam band right next door. Cocktails and jamming? Sounds like an afternoon to me.

And of course, when else do I get to spend so much time with Lovely Lori? She loves going to Burning Man, especially since she gets to make costumes and do projects. Here we are on the night of the burn, lit up and hoping that the dust storm blows over.

The dust storm indeed blew over, and once again, I saw the best fireworks of my life.

The next day, Team NYC headed back to Reno. Driving back to Reno is much more tolerable than going all the way to the Bay Area, for future reference. We scarfed down some In-n-Out, spent the afternoon cleaning ourselves up, and had a quiet evening before Ted drove his camper back to Placerville and the rest of us flew back to real life.

All in all, it was a marvelous week. I'm going to take at least a year off, but I imagine that the playa is in my future again at some point.

The Lost Dogs, gigging and giggling...

2010-09-15T17:19:00.048-04:00

I know, I've been delinquent at this. My Burning Man post is coming soon, once I go through all the photos.

As I mentioned in a prior post, I'm playing in a Pearl Jam cover band. It. is. awesome. We had our first gig last month, and fortunately, someone recorded it! The whole show is up as a YouTube playlist, but here are some samples:

Look at those leg kicks... Go, John!

The gig went really, really well, which somewhat surprised me. I'd practiced with these guys a bunch, but we'd never played in front of people before, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. Some people are really bad at being onstage-- noodling between songs, getting flustered because there are other people, hesitating if someone messes up. But my concerns were unwarranted!

I'll have some videos from the second gig soon, but I'll assure you that we did indeed play "Yellow Ledbetter", and I got to play the lead!

)'(

2010-08-27T01:57:00.001-04:00

T minus 16 hours before I touch down in Reno before heading off to Burning Man for the second time.

Most folks in our camp are based in the Bay Area, and while Lori and I have been helpful with designing and building a sign for our camp, we would be much less useless if we weren't in New York.

Am I ready? Am I packed? I hope so...

Putting that degree to good use

2010-08-17T20:17:00.021-04:00

Since I watched The Wire, am current on Friday Night Lights, have read the entire Youth in Revolt series, and beat Civilization II with bloodlust (rather than cheating and launching a spaceship), I've been looking for new things to pour too-many-hours into.

Fortunately, I've decided to put the hard-earned dollars my parents spent sending me to college to more good use. True, my job has me writing software for most of my waking hours, and the work I do is quite satisfying, but some projects you just can't pass up. Naturally, there's a "good" project and an "evil" project.

The Good Project: K(no)wInfection
My friend Jess is getting her Master's in Public Health this year, primarily focusing on sexual health. She's had this idea for a long time of a website that serves both as a database for STIs (the new way to refer to STDs) and as a means by which to email people who may be infected. So, if you've got a funny itch, you can go and see what that might entail and find out where you can get tested. Also, if you get diagnosed with herpes and can't really bring yourself to tell your former partner that they should also get tested, you can anonymously email them. I'm not sure how many people would know how to get in contact with their former partners (or random hookups) but not be able to tell those people directly, but the service will result in more people being tested, so it's definitely a worthwhile venture.

It's been fun for me, too. I've been playing with Django, a templating framework in Python that makes developing database-backed websites pretty easy. I've been writing websites for a long time (anyone remember the AtomicMatt.com?), but those were all pure HTML. No JavaScript, much less CSS. I've done a bit of JavaScript through jobs and such, but never for customer-facing applications, so appearance has always taken a backseat.

It's also been good to work with Jess in a designer-developer sort of relationship. She knows what she wants, but she doesn't have a spec, so some of the design decisions (particularly visual) are up in the air a bit. It's been good practice to develop the site in such a way that she has something concrete to look at and get feedback on but still flexible enough to change the design in a pinch. It also needs to be flexible because I imagine I'll be passing this project off at some point, and it'd be a shame if my code were so messy that whoever takes it over would have to rewrite the whole thing.

At this point, you may think, "wow, you're really putting your skills to good work!" If you think that, you are wrong.

The Evil Project: NaughtyNouns
I can't remember why, but in my senior year of college, I wrote a little program that takes a random dirty word, concatenates it with a random clean word, and emails the result to my friend Rebecca once a day. So, every morning in her inbox, she'd get a nice little email with something like "ButtplugLint".

A couple of weeks ago, I was reminded of this awesome little treat, and I set out to recreate it. Fortunately, with the power of the Twitter API and Princeton's WordNet, it wasn't particularly difficult! It started with doing the same thing I did for dear Rebecca, just spewing a Naughty Noun (hence the Twitter name) every few hours or so. If you followed @NaughtyNouns on Twitter, you'd get a little nugget of joy on your screen every now and again.

Now, it's even better than that. If you tweet a madlib @NaughtyNouns, it'll fill in the madlib for you and tweet it back.

For example,
"@NaughtyNouns Man, I'm totally <v>ing this <n> for my <adv> <adj> blog post." comes back as "@mattspitz Man, I'm totally CumRaveling this PrickSousa for my SkankSobbingly TittyCaesarian blog post."

<n>: noun
<v>: verb
<adv>: adverb
<adj>: adjective

Note to my family: I'm sorry. You tried your best to raise me well. You really did. Technology makes it too easy to automate putting people's minds into the gutter, and some of these words are just too hilarious...

Phaal Curry Monsters

2010-08-02T20:12:00.000-04:00

As of yesterday, I am a certified Phaal Curry Monster.

Six of us ventured to the Brick Lane Curry House, four attempted the phaal curry challenge, and all four (Katie, Sean, Michael, and myself) completed the challenge to receive our certificates and free beers. Here's a rough transcription of how it went:

... plates arrive ...

CHLOE: That looks exactly the color I was expecting.

MATT: Well, it doesn't smell too spicy.

SEAN: Don't let it touch your lips.

KATIE: (says nothing because she's just been plowing face-down, no-rice, no-holds-barred through the curry like it's no one's business)

MICHAEL: I think I'll start with the cheese.

... 2 minutes later ...

MATT/SEAN/KATIE/MICHAEL: ANOTHER BEER! PLEASE!

MICHAEL: (in tears)

KATIE: What, I'm finished? And probably hallucinating.

SEAN: My body has never felt this awful.

MATT: Strange, my mouth feels fine. And how'd I get the meat sweats?

... 10 minutes later ...

KATIE: What? I'm still done.

MATT: Boom, count it!

SEAN: Only. Three. Bites. Left.

MICHAEL: I can't do it. I think I need to go vomit.

JOE: Dude, vomiting is just going to make it worse.

KATIE: Yeah, Michael. Stop being such a wuss.

MATT: So, given that I've had now two pints of beer in about 15 minutes, I think I'm feeling kinda drunk. And my stomach still hurts a lot.

KATIE: Stop being such a wuss.

... 15 minutes later ...

MICHAEL: I can't believe I ate 6 bites in 10 seconds.

EVERYBODY ELSE: Nor can we.

Victory!

Up close:

As of this morning, all systems (particularly digestive) were undamaged and functioning well. No unfortunate fires this morning. Heart remains proud. Mouth, stomach, and general sense of well-being still relentlessly unforgiving. I haven't heard from the other folks, so I hope they're all right.

And no, I'm never doing that again. I'm already in the Phaal of Phaame.

Back onstage again!

2010-07-30T19:30:00.001-04:00

Wow, it feels great to be playing music again. It took a long time to find people to play with here in New York (mostly my fault), but I'm back!

Let me start by explaining the contrast in my musical opportunities in the Bay Area and New York. I started playing music when I was 13, and between then until I left last year, I made a ton of musical relationships, from jazz trios to jazz camps to high school jazz bands to Outbound to Wootah to TGIFunk to Sinister Dexter, and even, yes, The Brits and Pieces. I knew people to call to sub in for gigs, and I subbed in on plenty of gigs. It was grand!

Here in New York, the scene is ridiculous. Jazz jam sessions until 4am all over the city and music all around! But I don't really know anyone, which makes life difficult. Having a full-time job that expects me to show up at some point during the day makes going to jazz jams at 2am during the week a little difficult, and living in a four-floor walkup without a car makes transporting gear somewhat difficult. But I'm happy to say that I'm now playing in two groups and slowly building out my music network!

The Revelation Gospel Praise Team
You read that correctly. And no, I didn't pick the name. I've been going to church in Brooklyn for the past year. Why Brooklyn? Well, my friend Jonathan (who was the vicar at my church at home waaaay back in the day) is the Pastor, and I like him, so here we are. One day, Jonathan said, "hey, you know that praise band that plays once a month? They need a bass player, badly." Sound familiar? I hate getting roped into playing bass, but this has actually been pretty fun. St. John's is in an African-American neighborhood (which the church mirrors, as it should), so the group takes the "gospel" in the name pretty seriously. I'm also fairly certain that anyone who wants to play with the group is allowed to, so we're actually pretty big. Drums, bass (me), keys, guitar, tenor sax, trumpet, euphonium (occasionally), and four sisters on the vocals. I love it. We play a couple of times a month and have even gone to other churches to play for their special services.

At one of churches, there was a little gospel-band showcase, which was quite an experience. To start, we were fed fried chicken and coleslaw (naturally). An informal service followed where we were the house band, possibly because we were the only group there when the service started. So, when whoever was up front decided to start singing a song, we had to pick it up and run with it. Whoo, church-improv! Then, as more people trickled in, there were a few bands that showcased a couple of the songs they'd been working on. Most were low-key (like us), but there was a ridiculous professional group that came in. Their bass player, in particular, was just killer. Wow. The last bit of the service, was probably the most interesting, particularly to the only white kid in the room. I grew up in a pretty straight-liturgical church, no hands-waving or testifying or anything like that. So when we heard a couple of testimonies (from just normal people, not clergymen), I was taken a bit aback. When done well, they're really compelling and emotional. No wonder they're on public access so much...

Anyway, that's the RGPT. It's great fun, good improv/ear-training practice, and not much of a commitment. Yes!

The Lost Dogs
OK, here's where you're going to laugh at me. I started fishing around on Craigslist for musical groups to play with this past March and found it trickier than you'd think. There seem to be two musical groups in New York, the people who are trying to make it big (and probably don't have strenuous work weeks), and the flakes who're maybe-kinda-not-really trying to get something together. It's hard to find that nice balance (which I believe SinDex embodied) of we're-doing-this-and-we-care-but-there's-no-way-we're-going-to-be-professional-musicians-so-let's-just-have-fun. So when I found a band that has that attitude and is geared up to be a tribute to my favorite musical act, Pearl Jam, I jumped at the opportunity.

In the Lost Dogs, my part is a hybrid between Mike McCready (lead guitar) and Stone Gossard (rhythm guitar), but in practice, I take more of the solos. We've been practicing for a few months, maybe 2 or 3 times a month, but next Friday, we have our first gig. FIRST GIG! We're playing from 8pm to 9pm at a bar in midtown, which will be, if not glorious, then at least a welcome return to playing in front of other people.

So, I'll have another post after the gig. Forgive my lack-of-writing recently. After South Africa, I had just enough time to put my life back together before going to California for a week for work (and of course hanging out with family and friends). Life's rough, isn't it?

Cape Town, Parte Deux

2010-07-05T18:30:00.055-04:00

I'm just one flight away from completing another day of travel. The past nine days have been a perfect example the passage of time's dichotomy in travel. On one hand, the days went by so quickly, but at the same time, I've done a complete context switch from my normal life in New York, so it feels like I've been gone forever. In short, we've had a lot of fun.

On Thursday, we left Buchu Bushcamp outside De Hoop and drove back to Cape Town on the rolling, rural highways. The scenery reminds me of driving through wine country in California. Very few cars on the road, majestic hills, and green all around.

Liesl and I played a variant on "Hey, Cow!" while we drove. "Hey, Cow!" is a simple game. If you pass a pasture of cows on the right side of the road, the person sitting on that side rolls down the window and yells "Hey, Cow!". The number of cows that turn their heads is the number of points that person gets. Simple, huh? There weren't really a lot of cows, but we saw some ostriches, so we decided to play "Hey, Ostrich!" instead. Turns out, ostriches are much more skittish creatures than cows, so when you yell "Hey, Ostrich!" at a group of 40 of them, they don't turn their heads. Rather, they turn around and run as fast as they can away from the road. Oops.

On the way back, we stopped at Cape Agulhas, the southernmost tip of Africa. It's the only spot from which you can pee in two oceans at once!

Anyway, on Friday, we took a trip down to Simon's Town, where penguins hang out. Oh, right. We're near enough to Antarctica for there to be penguins. Cute little things, they are.

That evening, we took a sunset climb up Lion's Head with the rest of her house. Lion's Head is the big peak in the "bowl" created by Table Mountain. The views were incredible, to say the least. Hello, Cape Town!

We walked back in the dark. Good thing we brought our headlamps...

On Saturday, we went to Old Biscuit Mill, which is a white-people convention that happens every Saturday morning. It was almost eerie to see the color shift walking in and out of there. We had some delicious food and looked at some of the local crafts and art that people had. And we even ran into my high school friend, Lexie! Crazy.

That afternoon, Liesl and I met up with one of her friends and his friend and watched the Germany/Argentina game at a bar. Wow. Germany just smoked Argentina.

Speaking of eating and drinking on Saturday, that's exactly what we did on Sunday. We took a minibus out to Gugulethu, a colored township outside of Cape Town. There, we feasted at Mzoli's, a mecca for meat and beer. The concept is simple. You go to the counter, pick your raw meat, pay for it, give it to the folks who're barbecuing, and pick up a bowl a couple hours later. In the meanwhile, you drink beer. Before, during, and after eating, you're rocking out to a DJ in a packed, covered, outdoor space.

Meat + beer + siblings = exactly how the 4th of July should be spent

So, that's pretty much it! It's been an incredible trip, and Liesl was the perfect person to spend it with. We travel really well together, and her knowledge of where to go and how to get there was indispensable, making the trip really low-stress. I wonder where we'll be for the next 4th of July...

Cape Town, Part the First

2010-06-30T18:23:00.018-04:00

Ho, dang. I'm in South Africa visiting Liesl. I wasn't totally sure what to expect with coming to South Africa, but whatever I expected, this isn't it. I guess the primary thing is that my impression of "Africa" (which is a huge continent with a large diversity of cultures; I know, I know) was formed last summer in Tanzania. Crappy roads, not a lot of English being spoken, all the signs being somehow sponsored by Coca Cola, can't drink the water, etc. I've found a few stores with Coca Cola logos on their labels, but otherwise, Cape Town is a positively Western city. Nice roads, houses with plumbing and electricity, everyone speaks English... But oh, wait. What are those shantytowns in the outskirts of the city? One can't consider South Africa without looking at all sides of the story, and these "townships", remenants of apartheid but still indicative of the very present and real separation by race, are glaring reminders that South Africa is still a pretty messed up place. But I can't claim to be a historian, anthropologist, or authoritative social commentator, so I'll stick to telling stories of what Liesl and I have done and leave the discussion to a couple of cold glasses of beer in person.

I flew out of New York on Friday morning and arrived in Johannesburg on Saturday morning. Sadly, no sleep, but I did read the South Africa Wikipedia article and the 14-page special in The Economist on South Africa (thanks Lori), and I watched four movies. (NB: It's Compliated was kinda cute, Invictus was a good warmup to South Africa, Crazy Heart was nice but Jeff Bridges probably didn't deserve best actor for it, and Sherlock Holmes was totally different and way more action-y than the books) After another quick jaunt to Cape Town, I arrived in Observatory, Liesl's neighborhood. Liesl studied abroad spring quarter in Cape Town through Stanford and has stayed on for the summer to work at the Magnet Theatre. I think she's had some fun. We walked around the neighborhood a bit, visited the Magnet, and came back to the house, where I promptly passed out (remember, no sleep ['til Cape Town]). I woke up to a wonderful pasta dinner (thanks Liesl) and then we donned some face paint.

The United States and Ghana played in the round of 16 of the World Cup the first night I was there, and I came prepared. Luckily, New York is a place where you can buy a ton of cheap USA swag (and face paint, of course). We dressed up and put face paint on ourselves and Liesl's housemates, and we headed downtown to watch the game at a bar. We were unfortunately disappointed by the result, but the South Africans there were quite pleased with Ghana's win, since it's the last African country left.

The next day, we tried to visit penguins and failed, so we ended up climbing Table Mountain, which provides the ridiculously-beautiful backdrop for the Cape Town skyline. Small world: we met a group of folks from San Francisco who went to St. Ignatius.

We had a quiet dinner at a traditional South African spot and called it an early night. On Monday, we woke up early and visited the Stanford Centre, where Liesl's been spending a fair amount of time, y'know, studying and such. After a quick meet and greet with some bigwig in the Overseas Program, we headed downtown with some of her friends for lunch in the Company Gardens; it was awesome to hear about the adventurous service projects the Stanford kids are doing. Afterwards, we wandered down to Bo Kaap (a Cape Malay neighborhood) for some more food. Seriously, I'm going to eat my way through this country. We then headed to Sea Point and walked along the ocean towards the Waterfront, a very posh and fancy spot that reminds me a bit of an upscale Pier 39. There, we had dinner with some family friends at the Cape Grace Hotel, which was ridiculous, to say the least. It started with a wine tasting and ended with springbok (a type of gazelle) in my stomach, with wonderful conversation and catchup the whole way.

On Tuesday, we drove (yes, on the right side of the car on the left side of the road) to Hermanus, a beach town famous for whale watching. We went along the Cliff Path and sadly saw no whales, but the views more than made up for it. Afterwards, we went to a winery nearby called Southern Right (which is different from the Southern Right you might think of in the US). Liesl had her first schmooze and taste, and she didn't particularly enjoy talking about the full-bodiedness, the fruity-ness, or the spiciness of wines, so we went back and cooked some delicious soup instead. Yum.

We spent today in De Hoop (pronounced deh-WHUP, as in "de-WHUP, there it is..."), a nature reserve on the Indian Ocean side of the Cape (previously, we were on the Atlantic side). We took a walk by the lake in the park and saw some gazelles and ostriches, but the highlight of the day was the sand dunes on the other side of the park. It took us awhile to drive over there in our small 2WD rental car on the gravel roads (probably not recommended), but we were rewarded by instantly seeing five or six whales right by the shore. After gawking at them for a bit, we took a walk on the sand dunes.

Now, if you leave two kids together on a sand dune, they're likely to have some fun. We wrote things in the sand and took pictures of them, ran around, and I even almost ended up in the ocean. Whoops. De whoops?

Now it's time to grab some dinner. Tomorrow, we're headed back to Cape Town!

Weekend guest post

2010-06-21T23:52:00.003-04:00

And now, from the perspective of Matt, it's guest writer Lori!
===
Hey there, readers! It's me, Matt, ready to tell you more about my adventures in the big city! For this week's post, I thought I'd compile a top ten list of amazing things about New York!

1.There are tons of cool people here.
On Friday, I went to my friend Victor's bachelor party. He has a ton of fun friends, and we met even more on our adventure, though not all of their English was fantastic.

2. New York has lots of meat.
Brazilian meat, yeah! To kick off the party, we went to this awesome restaurant and ate lots of meat. It was very good. That's really all I have to say about that.

3. New York has great bars.
After some wandering around, we went to Grassroots, which I'm sure you know by now is my FAV BAR, OMG! I can't really remember specifics as to why I like it, perhaps but let me assure you that it is AWESOME! LOL!

4. People leave interesting trash on the curb.
At the end of the night, (we stayed until Grassroots closed, a first for me) I sat with Ted and we talked about man stuff until the sun came up. We sat on a random discarded couch in StuyTown just kickin' it in the middle of the city, like the hipsters we are. Then Ted went home, showered, and caught a bus to Atlantic City for Victor's fiancé's bachelorette. Ted is many things, and now you can add ROCK STAR to the list, as personally, I ended up sleeping until 1pm. Then I took a nap until 3pm.

5. New York has Coney Island.
And Coney Island has the Brooklyn Cyclones.

6. New York has Staten Island.
And Staten Island has the Staten Island Yankees, who are officially the worst baseball team of all time, even worse than my fantasy team this week. To back up a little bit, after I finished taking my super long nap, we decided to go to see the Cyclones play the (SI) Yankees in what was both a season opener, and a world record attempt for "least efficient concession stand line operation". To give you some idea of the baseball quality, at one point in the game, the Cyclones had more runs than hits, while simultaneously the Yankees had more errors than hits. CYCLONES WIN! FIREWORKS AFTER THE GAME!

7. Hotdogs
Nathan's hotdogs is a Coney Island landmark, where you can get all types of hotdogs and carnival food, but also frog legs if you're feeling saucy. Now that New York City requires the calorie count to be listed for menu items at certain restaurants, we were unable to justify the chili double cheese fries with onions and sauerkraut (1575 calories), so we went with the plain old hot dog with sauerkraut (325 calories). Wow, definitely great food.

8. Surprises!!!
Just when you though you had escaped the rougher type of people who enjoy visiting Coney Island on a Saturday night, there's a yelling fest in the subway car on the way home. And SURPRISE it's on the longest stretch of the express so you can't change cars until Manhattan. Nothing serious, though.

9. Air-conditioning
Actually, only I have air conditioning. Take THAT, global warming!

10. Weeknights
I'd never get any sleep otherwise.

IT'S OVER!!!! (and now it's time to give the caps lock key a break)

"They only want to go to Phoenix..."

2010-06-09T16:44:00.001-04:00

"...to find the start of wind..." First off, no one ever gets that reference, so here it is. Start listening at 2:14 if you're impatient.

Anyway, for Memorial Day, Lori and I went to Phoenix to visit the esteemed Adam Monroe, who's getting a PhD at ASU. There's not a ton of stuff to do in Phoenix, but we certainly managed to have a good time.

The first day, we went tubing down the Salt River with Adam's chemistry friends. What's tubing? It's very simple. You rent an inner tube and you float for a few hours to a stopping point, where you get picked up and driven back to your car. I'd done it before with my family on the American River when I was young, and while it was enjoyable, I didn't really appreciate it to the fullest extent. Specifically, I didn't have a cooler of Bud Light floating in the center of the tubes down the river with me.

Now, you're probably aware that ASU is known as the "hot school" in the Pac-10. This is a true statement. It's also a really fratty school, and between that and Memorial Day weekend, we were basically floating in the middle of a huge frat party. Very comical, to say the least. We all had a grand time, though not everyone was as lucky. Don't be stupid, kids.

The next day, Lori and I went for a hike on the Wind Cave Trail. It was the real desert! With cacti! And almost no trees! And no clouds! And look at that "voice of God" reflection up in the top right of that photo... You know, the kind that you'd see in a postcard with a "I am the LORD" Bible verse on it?

Afterwards, we met Adam and his friend for some clay shooting. I've shot shotguns before, but never at moving targets. Dang. It is FUN. Shotguns are very pleasant weapons. You point roughly in the direction you want obliterated and pull the trigger. Very, very simple.

Look at that shaggy Schmoopy-mane. Anyway, we had a grand time, and I'm definitely going back before too long.

I spent the next week in San Francisco for work, and that was also rad. I went to a Giants game with Chris, Stu, and my dad, and Stu took this post-game gem:

Thanks, Stu.

Oh, my. Weekends.

2010-05-27T02:18:00.000-04:00

I'm updating now because tomorrow, I'm going away for more adventures, but if I don't stop and write stuff now, I'm never going to. This won't be a clever post, and I don't have any photos. Sorry.

Washington DC
Lori and I have two really great friends who're leaving DC in less than a month (Bryan and Jimmy), so naturally, we had to see them before they head out. And we did. We toured the EU embassies during their open house and had a party/BBQ at Bryan's afterward. All the other folks we know in DC came, and we had a blast. Thanks to Ted's recipe, we fell off the porch. Sadly, Lori had to leave the next day, but I hung out with Andrew for the afternoon and then all the folks in town saw some jazz. Great, great weekend.

Boston
And then... we went to Boston. Cynthia and Will, two of Lori's friends from business school, were getting married, so we bussed our way up there for their wedding. I hung out with a ton of folk that I either had never met or had briefly when visiting Lori in school. But, we all had a grand time, and no one ran away from the altar. Hooray!

Pearl Jam
Yes, Pearl Jam. Yes. Pearl. Jam. I found out a few months ago that they were closing out their US tour at Madison Square Garden and immediately bought two tickets to both shows. On Thursday, I went with my friend from a summer internship a few years ago, Michael. It was the best show that I've ever seen in my entire life (including the other two times I've seen Pearl Jam). Excellent setlist, great flow, and just the best damn performance I've ever seen. Wow. The second night, I went with Lori, and it was equally a blast. I heard songs I'd never ever thought I'd hear (Push Me, Pull Me? What?), and they brought down the house again. I love it. I also love that I live in a city where every band comes through on a US tour. Maybe the best part of the weekend, though, was waking up in my own bed (for the first weekend in awhile) and going on a totally awesome bike ride around Central Park with Lori on Saturday.

OK, I'm off to Phoenix tomorrow (to hang out with eventually-Dr. Monroe) and then to California for work. Whoohoo! Keep it comin'!

Five Boros, 45 Miles, 32,000 People

2010-05-05T19:08:00.083-04:00

Oh, my. This past weekend, I did the Five Boro Bike Tour here in New York City. It's the biggest annual bike event in New York. They close down a bunch of the roads, and tons and tons of people bike around through all five boros. It was quite an experience.

In writing this, I tried to come up with a simple way to describe the experience, and I ended up with two. The first one I thought of was commuting down 101 from San Francisco to Mountain View. I really mind driving to work (though one of the reasons for moving to New York was explicitly to avoid it), but traffic really bothers me because you can't just zone out and listen to the radio. You actually have to pay attention, dodge the morons, and figure out who the next morons will be so you can avoid them and not get in a wreck. With so many people on the streets (and the widths and inclines of the streets changing quickly), slowdowns are sudden and swerves are common. So, I had to be quick on the break (and on the acceleration), ready to hop off the bike and walk, and vigilant to avoid getting my bike ruined. My friend Anne (and her friend Michelle) both did part of the tour with me before we got separated, and both of them ended up getting fallen on by some other silly biker.

"If you're happy and you know it, walk your bike!"

The constant stop and go actually made the ride pretty difficult. I'm no stranger to 40+ mile rides, but really, anyone could have done this one. It was mostly-flat and -paved (minus some paved-for-cars-but-not-for-bikes-roads) and the weather was quite agreeable. That said, it's nice to have a consistent speed, and stopping and starting all the time puts quite a bit more strain on one's legs. Especially when you stop on an uphill to avoid folks who sway from side to side as they go uphill.

The second analogy I thought of was the first day of classes each year at Stanford. Stanford's mostly flat and fairly large, so the preferred means of getting around is typically a bicycle. Now, the hilarious part about all of this is that most Stanford kids haven't ridden a bike in about 10 years before arriving with their new, shiny cruiser, and they're probably more likely to be thinking about college classes or the pretty girl they met (I was definitely thinking more of the latter). Anyway, come 9:45am when everyone's biking to their 10am class, disaster strikes, and it was always a joy to sit and watch the awkward, near-crashes across campus. It was also somewhat nerve-racking as non-freshmen were forced to dodge wide-eyed 18-year-olds as they careened across the paths. I felt even more sorry for the poor pedestrians.

Anyway, I can't imagine that more than 15% of the people who did the bike tour had actually ridden a bike in the last 5 years, and I'd be surprised if 30% of the people had ridden a bike since they were teenagers. This, paired with relative difficulty of avoiding everyone, exponentially made it worse for the rest of us. I actually saw a fair amount of people who'd wiped out or pulled over to get water and/or medical attention. Folks, if you can't do it, you shouldn't be out there, no matter how much of a "New York tradition" it is.

The most amusing (and possibly the least safe) thing I saw was this:

Yep, that's Dad on the front, a ~16 year old on the other half of the tandem bicycle, a ~10 year old on a half bike (attached to the tandem) also pedaling, a ~12 year old attached to that, also pedaling, and a ~3 year old in the little kids' trailer. My guess is that Dad isn't a mechanic (or he just isn't really aware of potential hazards to his children's lives) because that's just about the highest risk-to-structural-integrity ratio I've ever seen. Wow. At least one of them is wearing a unicorn helmet.

Anyway, the ride was just fine in the end, and (brilliant me), I decided to roll up my sleeves to "even out my bike tan". This was a mistake.

Glove tan + bike tan + not-putting-sunscreen-on-the-part-above-the-bike-tan = ouch.

That's not what I meant.

2010-04-28T22:59:00.000-04:00

A good chunk of my day is spent in front of a Linux terminal. Like, all the live-long day.

mspitz@forte ~]$ echo "hello!"
hello!

There's a ton of commands I use with relative frequency to do things that, well, I need to do. 'less' lets me read a file, line by line, 'emacs' is my text editor (not going to start an emacs/vi holy war; frankly, I don't care), 'cd' lets me change directories, 'mplayer' lets me play music files, 'vlc' is a movie player, 'chromium' is my browser (or 'firefox', whenever chromium breaks), 'rsync' lets me synchronize two directories, etc. etc.

There're a ton of commands, and they have all sorts of weird command line inputs. When I use 'grep', the utility to search text files for certain chunks of text, I have to remember to call it like this:

mspitz@forte ~]$ grep -inIRs sometext somefile(s)

-inIRs are the options I used to ensure that I allow for case insensitivity, print line numbers, skip binary files, do a recursive search, and suppress any error messages.

How do I remember all of these commands and their options? Fortunately, there's another tool, 'man'. All I have to do is type 'man [command]' and I can get information on how to use [command]. 'man grep' tells me all the options I can use, which is awesome.

Also awesome is that in case I don't want to read the man(ual) page in my terminal, I can just Google 'man [command]', and life is great!

Not always.

Here is a short list of commands for which you probably shouldn't type "man ____" into Google. If you're lucky, you'll get something crazy that you didn't want. If you're unlucky, well...

date (hot singles in your area!)
head (may be NSFW, depending on Google's interpretation of your previous searches)
tail (also perhaps NSFW)
sleep (I wonder how Google does with euphemisms....)
cat (cute video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0ffwDYo00Q)
curl (Ginormous biceps?)
tar ('MAN TARRR!!!' sounds like a Cro Magnon's warcry)

And, quite possibly the worst, fsck. Be careful what you search for.

Wow, scratch another one off the list.

2010-04-20T15:57:00.000-04:00

Last night, I saw Snoop Dogg play at the Brooklyn Bowl. Before you ask about Brooklyn Bowl, I'll say that it's a bowling alley, but they have a nice stage setup for shows, too.

Yes, Snoop Dogg. Needless to say it was an incredible experience and it's another artist to check off the "artists to see before I die" list. In fact, I can even check "gangster rap" off the "genres to see before I die" list.

Cultural and Historical Bike Tourism: Brooklyn

2010-04-17T12:00:00.003-04:00

A couple weeks ago, I did a Brooklyn loop that included Coney Island. The route description is here: http://www.bikely.com/maps/bike-path/Coney-Loop-23-5-mi

Aside from a couple of blocks going the wrong way down one-way streets, it was a pretty good route, and I saw a ton of interesting things. Brooklyn is a great place to see a lot of the United States's cultural past (and some current stereotypes).

I started at my apartment and biked across the Brooklyn Bridge. This is not a great idea, for future reference. It's covered with stupid tourists that don't understand what a bike lane is. D'oh.

I met the route on Jay St., just outside Brooklyn Heights, by Borough Hall. That's downtown Brooklyn, as I understand it (neighborhoods are tricky), and it doesn't differ too much from "typical" New York. Places to eat and lots of subway access abound!

I meandered down Atlantic Ave to 3rd Ave and headed south. This area reminded me of the Bayview area in San Francisco. Very flat. Lots of places where contractors would shop. Lots of auto repair. Eventually, I was following the west coast of Brooklyn, down by the old industry yards. In the past, ships would unload into trains or huge warehouses, but now, it's totally empty, and there's a bunch of busted railway tracks everywhere. Very spooky. This road dead-ended at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, an old military supply base gone light-industrial park.

Eventually, I got dumped out at a beautiful pier at the beginning of a path along the water. Owl's Head Pier, which looked relatively new, offered a great view of the bike path along the Brooklyn shoreline as well as a stunning view of Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. Home, I could see, was pretty far away...

I biked along the coast for quite awhile, and it got foggy fast. The route took me right under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which was really cool in the fog, especially as a cargo ship was blasting its fog horn as it travelled underneath. Very cool.

Finally, I got to the place that the 1950s left behind, Coney Island. It reminded me of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. Equally forgotten and hence equally depressing. As I biked past Nathan's hot dog stand (famous and delicious), I heard the announcements of the various amusement park games that were being played.

At the end of the strip, I reached the Cyclone, a marvelous wooden rollercoaster that I've been on before.

Amazing that three years ago was allegedly Coney Island's last before some hotel/condo initiative was scrapped when someone complained about their business being evicted.

From there, I turned north up Ocean Parkway, the oldest dedicated bike lane in the United States (I think). It's not particularly well-maintained, so it was a bit of a bumpy ride, but it's always pleasant to avoid cars whenever possible.

Now, the area around Coney Island is filled with Russians, and as I went north on Ocean Parkway, I noticed a gradient of Russians to Russian-Jews to very orthodox Jews. Now, I didn't really know any Jewish kids until high school (I missed out on the Bar/Bat Mitzvah train), so I didn't have much of a sense of Jewish culture growing up. Since, I have many Jewish friends, and whatever caricatures I had in my mind due to typical American cultural indoctrination have been tempered by all the reasonable people I met. I'm not sure what those caricatures would have been, but I imagine they resembled the people I saw biking north through Brooklyn. Wow. Granted, it was Passover and the Sabbath, but everyone I saw was in very orthodox attire. All the men had hats, from yarmulkas to those with wide-brimmed. Some had the Hasidic curls above the (nonexistent) sideburns. The women were all very well-covered, and everyone was wearing black. I actually felt bad biking through there on the Sabbath, as I think that's not really allowed for them. It was certainly an experience.

At the end of the Parkway, I got dumped out at Prospect Park, a smaller version of Central Park with, as I could see, fewer small dogs.

I was out of the fog at that point, which was quite welcome. I continued north up to the old navy yard (again, since abandoned/forgotten) and then across the Manhattan Bridge and home.

Between the old shipping yards, the army terminal, Coney Island, and the Navy Yards, I got a good slice of history just biking through Brooklyn. It's amazing how "current" Manhattan seems in comparison, though I wonder if that's because the various roles the other boroughs have served in the past. I wish I knew more about the history of New York to make really insightful comments, but I'm afraid I don't, and I'll have to settle for biking by in awe of America's (mostly recent) history that seems to be forgotten on the Brooklyn shoreline.

Spring has sprung!

2010-03-26T15:20:00.000-04:00

This past weekend, we had 65-degree weather here in New York, and that says only one thing-- bike ride. I had to put biking on a little hiatus over the winter, and the whole time, my bad experience last year was bugging me. So, I set out to conquer my demons, and it went very, very well.

The Hudson greenway, where the biggest danger is the errant pedestrian, makes for a great ride all the way up the west side of Manhattan.

And once you get across the GW Bridge (on the top deck, where there's a wonderful bike path and phenomenal views), there's a long, wide, and scenic road north in New Jersey!

There's even a lighthouse in a little park near the base of the bridge. How quaint!

This weekend, Lori's going to be back after a month of out New York, so hopefully the weather will be good enough to have some outdoor-adventures! It's predicted to be about 50, though, so we'll see.

Today, I'm doing nothing. Absolutely nothing.

2010-03-13T17:46:00.000-05:00

And it's wonderful. The last two weekends, Lori and I have been out of town, and while we had a great, great time, it's nice to be back in New York.

Boston
Continuing our short-haul journeys around the East Coast, Lori and I went to Boston a couple of weeks ago. Her favorite band is Flogging Molly, so for Christmas, I bought her two tickets. The first present was her ticket, and the second present was my going with her. They're not... my favorite. Anyway, we bussed up on Saturday morning, had lunch with my friends Vio and Elaine (neither whom I'd seen for a long, long time), hung out with her friends Will and Cynthia, and then went to the show! Seeing an Irish punk band (for lack of a better description) play in Boston was an experience for sure, and a good live band. We had a blast, for sure.

San Francisco
The next weekend, we flew out to San Francisco to hang out with my dear sister before she goes abroad (to Cape Town of all places). On Friday, we celebrated her birthday at the Nuthouse. Lori, in her awesomeness, managed to secure a three-alarm fire on a cupcake.

Isn't she attractive?

Saturday, we had brunch with Tina and Marie, and that night, we hung out with Zeitgeist with a ton of awesome people who came to hang out. Great fun!

This weekend
Last night, we had a delicious potluck. Pulled pork, salad, sweet potatoes, cheese, crackers, broccoli, and beer. Delicious!

Needless to say, it's been pretty busy, so today, I'm proud to say that I'm doing pretty much nothing. Good thing, because it's raining cats and dogs.

Ahoy, I'm back on the web!

2010-03-02T13:10:00.001-05:00

I've had a bunch of little spots on the web, from hosting on Angelfire and Freespeech.org, to rigging my own little webserver on an old Windows 98 machine running vqServer, a Java based webserver whose website doesn't seem to exist anymore. My solution for Windows memory leaks? Automatic nightly restart at 3am. Awesome.

Anyway, I've just registered http://www.mattspitz.net/, which will just redirect here for now, until I have time to make a website, decide what to put on said website, figure out hosting solutions (since Comcast probably won't like me hosting it on my own computer).

Why not http://www.mattspitz.com/, you ask? When that becomes available, I'll buy it, but until then, we'll have to settle for .net.

Just consider yourself lucky that I don't post tons of ugly-girlfriend pictures and have post-1996 web skills. That said, he got there first.

An old gem

2010-02-23T01:30:00.001-05:00

Recently, my friend from high school, Jess, came to stay at my apartment. Ray and Evan (who also live in the city) joined us, and we got to talking about (surprise surprise) high school. As it turns out, Evan and I had done a chemistry project together on the scientifically-complex concept of alchemy. I remember that we did it during the first semester of senior year, which was rather filled with college applications, so we didn't really take it seriously. How could we? It was about alchemy! They tried to turn lead (and cats, among other things) into gold!

Our project was in two parts. The first part was a product of my finely-tuned Flash skills. Watch and learn with your eyes, your ears, and possibly even... your heart.

Time to learn about alchemy!

The second part of the project channeled our inner artist (pronounced 'ar-TEEST'). We took fantastic songs from the 90s, rewrote the words to be about alchemy, and threw in recorder and kazoo solos.

"Breakfast with Roger Bacon" (to the tune of "Breakfast at Tiffany's")

Verse 1:
You say we started in China
In China near the Yangzte
But you, my friend, are wrong
I say we started in Egypt
In Alexandria, Egypt
In nineteen hundred B.C.

Chorus:
And I said, "what about alchemy in Europe?"
She said, "I think that Bacon did it first"
But I said, "No! The Moors brought it over"
And I said, "No! They started it all..."

Verse 2:
Well you see, the Moors attacked Spain from Africa
And they brought the concept of alchemy
She realizes she was wrong...
So what now? Bacon's still important
Transmuting metals into gold
Or at least Roger thought so...

Chorus Again

Verse 1

Chorus (with kazoos)

Throw shirts to crowd

"Third Eye Alchemy" (to the tune of "Jumper")

I wish you would get me the elixir, man
You could live long, sing the song, and have the world at your hand
And if you do not want to get the philosopher's stone
I wouldn't understand
Alex is the man.

The alchemist a bit too insane, playing his alchemy games
He knows he don't belong
He's the biggest fake, he hasn't a clue
He takes the cake, I'm telling you
I know something's wrong
Cuz everyone I know has got a reason to say
Put the magic away

I wish you would get me the elixir, man
You could live long, sing the song, and have the world at your hand
And if you do not want to get the philosopher's stone
I wouldn't understand
Alex is the man.

Well it's on the table, it's turnin' to gold
And I do believe that everyone knows that's just fake...
So your friends will leave you, you'll be dismissed
And everyone's gonna be pissed
And we want you to know
Everyone's got to face down the demons
Maybe today, we could put the magic away

I wish you would get me the elixir, man
You could live long, sing the song, and have the world at your hand
And if you do not want to get the philosopher's stone
I wouldn't understand
Alex is the man.

(I wouldn't understand)
(I wouldn't understand)
(Understand )
Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah !

Can you put the magic away ?
I wish you would get me the elixir, man
(I wouldn't understand)
I wish you would get me the elixir, man
(I wouldn't understand)
I wish you would get me the elixir, man
And I wouldn't understand
I wouldn't understand
I wouldn't understand

"Particle Accelerator" (to the tune of "Time of Your Life"; note that you can tell we basically gave up here, as "Particle Accelerator" doesn't really parse as nicely as "I hope you have the time of your life", though the rhythms line up well...)

Another barrier
For alchemists today
Can't make an element
Things aren't goin' their way
They try to make elements
One at a time
If they were gettin' paid
They wouldn't make a dime

It's something just impossible
But we can still try
Particle accelerator

So take the elements
Like sulfur, tin, and lead
Shoot protons at them
Until you think they're dead
Everybody's telling us
"It's just a waste of cash"
You'd better watch yourself
When the protons start to smash

It's something just impossible
But we can still try
Particle accelerator

It's something just impossible
But we can still try
Particle accelerator

It's something just impossible
But we can still try
Particle accelerator

======

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you should hold onto everything forever. I remember being promised in high school a copy of the recording of our wonderful musical performance, but I doubt that ever materialized. If it had, I'd've kept it.

Put the magic away!

Five Against One

2010-02-22T11:26:00.000-05:00

Now is one of those times where another path of my musical life that diverged years ago has crossed again. Last March, I wrote a post talking about my early musical influences, primarily Bill Withers and Pearl Jam. I talked about how those two artists provided the base for a lot of music I listen to and play. At the time, I was playing with Sinister Dexter, and the music we played (funk/soul) was much closer to Bill Withers, but just recently, I found an ad on Craigslist titled "Pearl Jam Tribute Band needs 2nd Guitarist (Midtown)".

Oh, my.

When I was just starting to play guitar, Pearl Jam tunes (specifically, the rhythm tracks since I couldn't play the lead parts) provided a lot of my learning fodder. Especially if you dumb the songs down to just power chords, they're pretty easy to play. Soon enough, though, I stopped fiddling around with Pearl Jam songs because I had songs I actually had to practice for whatever groups I played in.

But now, I have the chops to cover the rhythm parts and a good chunk of the lead material, and I certainly know all the songs from listening to them so much. The stars have aligned! My audition's on Thursday. Wish me luck.

If you think of something awesome, then it probably already exists.

2010-02-09T23:12:00.001-05:00

First off, sorry for being so lame about updating this thing. I've been pretty busy at work (though I've been doing some really neat stuff that I'm not going to talk about).

So, for Christmas, I got a Motorola Droid. Yep, I've gotten out of the dumbphone doldrums. I love the thing, but one thing that bothers me is that it has a 16 GB SD card (huge as SD cards go), but it doesn't fit all of my music. My music collection is about 70 gigs, so that's not surprising, but it leaves the question: "if you can't fit everything, what do you put on the device?" It's a real bugger of a question, too.

I find that there are basically two schools of thought on this:

Hand pick a selection of albums/tracks, and update it every now and again. I used to do this on my iRiver, and it's always frustrating. More frequently than you'd like, you'll try to listen to something that's not on your device, and then you get salty.
Do what my friend Mike Krieger does and write a script that selects a few gigs of albums you like (based on rating or access frequency or whatever) and a few gigs of albums that you don't listen to very frequently. This is a brilliant idea, but the downside is that you never know what's on your device. It's cool if you're fine with random play, box-of-chocolates style (now there's an innuendo if I've ever heard one), but there are times when I want to play something specific, and having a bunch of random stuff on your device isn't going to cut it.

So, my requirements are being able to have a good mix of stuff that I like but always somehow be able to play a song that I want to hear. Fortunately, YouTube and Last.fm make the latter possible most of the time, but it's never guaranteed.

For a little while, I SFTP'd into my machine at home, download the audio file, and played it there. The problem is that 3G isn't particularly fast, and it'd take 20 minutes to download a tune. By that point, the "I need to show this to you!" vibe has kinda worn off.

I thought to myself, "dang, remember that crazy Internet-radio thing that I played with 10 years ago, Shoutcast? Wouldn't it be cool if you could set one of those up but you could pick the music that you played?" I thought about setting something like that up, having a permanent stream but controlling what came out of it via a browser or whatever, and then I stumbled on Ampache, which does exactly that and more.

Here's the gig. You install Ampache with your Apache web server, you add a catalog, and then you can stream your songs. It'll even downsample for you (such that you can play it streaming over 3G and not worry about the audio quality because your phone's speaker isn't that hot anyway). And there's a native Android app, Amdroid!

Holy crap! That's EXACTLY what I wanted! And I don't even have to directly interface with mod_mp3!

Now, such awesomeness comes with a price. Fortunately, it is not measured in dollars. With open-source software, 95% of the time, it works just great out of the box, no questions asked. But that 5% of the time, you have to sit-there-and-figure-it-out for as-long-as-it-takes. In my case, the Ampache was one of the latter. For some reason, the initialization script was busted, so I had to set up the databases and even create a user account (hashed password in the same way their php files do it and everything) on my own. Not particularly user-friendly.

But that's the beauty of open-source software. Someone can have a great idea (like mine, though it was already taken), and if enough people think it's great, they won't mind iterating on that idea, making it nicer and more user-friendly for the next person who comes by.

And it's all about how much you care, too. I wasn't about to pay $100 to have a streaming music server. Free is fine, even if it's not 100% reliable and takes some elbow grease to get going. If I had a business need that depended on it, I'd either spend a lot of time making it more reliable or pay someone for a more-reliable product. Often, though, open-source solutions are better than their pay-for counterparts (Apache vs. IIS, anyone?).

On that note, I'm gonna listen to "Apache"... streaming.

Google Chrome + Extensions = Goodbye, Firefox

2010-01-24T21:14:00.001-05:00

I've been playing around with Google Chrome both on Linux and on Mac OSX for the last couple of months, and wow. It is FAST. Just unbelievably fast. Chrome on Linux and Mac is still very much in beta (as you can tell by the conspicuous lack of certain features and occasional crashes), but I'll more than tolerate that if the alternative is Firefox. I'm not quite sure what's happened to Firefox since releasing 3.0, but it's gotten very sluggish. I've also been increasingly disappointed with Firebug. It seems more and more buggy and just... broken.

Enter Chrome, which, for all of its quirks (some pages don't render 100% correctly, some just plain crash), is faster than Speedy Gonzales on cocaine. It's not necessarily faster in loading pages, but the snappiness of the program itself is just really refreshing. You want a new tab? You have it, immediately. The tab-per-process thing is really sweet, too, particularly on Linux where the Flash support is questionable. In Firefox, a misbehaving webpage or plugin crashes the whole browser. In Chrome, you lose that tab (as expected), but your Gmail, Calendar, and your ICanHazCheeseburger tabs survive. Whew.

The real selling point for me is the extensions in Chrome. Particularly Xmarks, a phenomenal plugin that synchronizes your bookmarks across browsers. Extensions aren't really available on the stable Mac builds, but I'm still sold.

That said, my love affair with Firefox may not be over. Firefox 3.6 is significantly faster, and 4.0 should have single-process tabs. In the next round, we'll see who wins my heart, but Chrome has it for now.

Tinges of wanderlust

2010-01-17T16:40:00.002-05:00

It's been six months, but I've finally finished uploading all of my photos from the summer. It was a little bit overdue, I think.

Going through my photos again, I remember what a wonderful time I had this summer. I saw some really incredible things, took a lot of great photos, tried a bunch of tasty foods, experienced a lot of different cultures, and spent some quality time with fantastic travelling companions. I'm getting a little bit of wanderlust just thinking about it. Here're some places I'd love to go (in no particular order):

New Zealand- My buddy Abel just came back from a few weeks of hiking and biking around New Zealand. It seems like a place that has opportunities for both in spades.
Thailand- I think everyone my age has the desire to ride a motorcycle through the jungles of Thailand. That's what everyone seems to do, anyway.
India- Food + culture = awesome
Brazil- I went to a Brazilian food restaurant last night and remembered how much I love Brazilian music. And now, I'm in love with Brazilian food.
Cuba- Music, food, music, food, music, food.
Grand Canyon- I can't believe I haven't been here yet.
Germany- I'm so much closer to the homeland here in New York, and I think I no longer have an excuse.

Anyway, the big difference now is that now I have to use my vacation time wisely. No more of this six-months-off-with-no-responsibility thing anymore. Alas...

A Tale of Two Evenings

2010-01-10T17:00:00.001-05:00

Last night, I went to the NYC Winter Jazzfest with Lori, Michael, Sureel, and Ruchi. It was a wholly-classy affair. Tons of jazz artists playing in several clubs on Bleeker street. We saw Lionel Loueke (incredible guitar player), Vijay Iyer (in the same vein as The Bad Plus), Bitches Brew Revisited (holycraptheyplayedBitchesBrewandittookanhouranditwasamazing), and Rudresh Mahanthappa's Indo-Pak Coalition (jazz guitar + alto sax + tabla = delicious).

All in all, it was a very, very classy evening, and the five of us returned to my apartment around 2am. Wonderful, huh?

And that's when the second evening started. We had drinks, and then we built a fort in the living room. That's really the best summary. We had five construction-engineers-for-the-evening collecting materials, filling up mattresses, discussing orientation, and designing all of the totally rad features of our fort (including a "cocktail window").

Around 4, we started our quest for food. Unfortunately (and you know it was late when...) all the food places were closed, and our kitchen was lacking necessary dilla ingredients. Frozen pizza it is! Sureel made a bet with me. If I could return in 15 minutes with frozen pizza, he'd pay for it. So, I donned my running shoes and set off at 4:16. Sadly, the Walgreens nearby had only pizza-flavored hot pockets (not the same), so I dashed to Duane Reade to find not only pizza rolls, but frozen pizza! Egad! Victory!

I arrived at 4:26 to receive my $12.65, and we ate delicious, delicious frozen treats, capping off our second evening.

A Pyramid Scheme!

2010-01-08T02:38:00.000-05:00

Chain letters. We've all done them, some of us by the old-school way (via a real letter), and the rest of us by email (reply to the person who sent it to you, but send it to 10 friends). It's the perfect example of a pyramid scheme, right? If you get in early enough and those 10 people you emailed actually get down to business, you reap the reward of your friends of friends' innermost secrets. But, if you happen to be at the leaf of the tree, you send your secrets for nothing, and maybe a "mailbox not found" error for your best friend from middle school.

But, given the way things are going with social networking, chain letters are going by the wayside. Why send an email to 10 friends (especially after copy-pasting and replacing a bunch of text) when you can fill out a silly survey on facebook and have all of your friends read your answer?

Nay, the best example of a pyramid scheme in today's world is your friend's birthday party. If you're the second person there, you buy a pitcher. You drink half of it, your friend drinks half of it. If a third person arrives, you drink a third of it, the new arrival drinks a third of it, and your friend drinks a third of it... Each new person fuels all of the previous people's evenings, yet gets a continually smaller portion of what the previous person got.

Now, we can get into all sorts of disagreements about timing. What if the second person showed up literally seconds before the third person and the bartender was busy hum-drumming around while both folk waited with their shoulders pressed against the bar, Andrew Jacksons flapping in the air? Then that's their problem. In general, the pyramid scheme holds.

And that's why, I say, you show up early to your friends' birthday parties, buy them a pitcher of their favorite beer, and ride the tide for the rest of the evening... unless, of course, you're their only friend.

In that case, YOU GOT SERVED (or more importantly, they got served).

NYE in SD!

2010-01-04T21:29:00.000-05:00

I spent New Year's Eve in sunny Deadwood, South Dakota. Yes, same as the one that has that TV show and Wild Bill Hickok's "Dead Man's Hand." It's a real place. Why? Lori's dad grew up in Deadwood, and so her whole family, her cousins and their family, and the associated boyfriends / friends joined up at the family compound just north of Deadwood.

We did a surprising amount of stuff, considering we were in Deadwood in the... dead... of winter. We went snowmobiling, played a lot of shuffleboard and pool in the family's awesome game room, and drank a wide variety of light beer (Coors, Miller, Bud, you name it).

Possibly the most exciting part of the journey, though, was when a car drove off the road, over the snowbank, and into the ditch in the front yard. Fortunately, everyone was all right, but the car was all kinds of messed up.

Wow. The girl who was driving and her mother came by a couple of days later to say thanks for the help. Unfortunately, they were driving a rental...

Now I'm back in New York and hitting the grindstone like whoa.

Home again, home again

2009-12-19T20:09:00.000-05:00

After a delightful SantaCon in New York last Saturday, I headed back to San Francisco for work. SantaCon, if you're unfamiliar, is a wonderful excuse to get dressed up like Santa (or any other Christmas-related noun) and roam the streets with many other Santas, stopping in bars and singing carols along the way. Bryan came up again from DC, and he, Lori, and I tramped around Brooklyn and Manhattan. They even brought a euphonium and a baritone (for TubaChristmas, the next day) and played Christmas carols!

This week has been crazy. Work was pretty busy, especially so with all of the awesome social events (offsites, hangouts, and a holiday party [oh, my]). My cousin, Danielle, her adorable daughter Raegan, and my Uncle Steve were also in town, so we had some family time with my family and my grandparents on Tuesday. Boris's birthday was last night, and I got to see a ton of Stanford friends. I saw my friend Clare in Les Contes d'Hoffman (all four hours) via simulcast at a movie theater today, and to wrap it all up, my five-year high school reunion is tonight. I think I'm just going to sleep through tomorrow until Monday. Yikes.

To all a safe return and a wonderful holiday season!

I just installed the meebo bar!

2009-12-17T17:54:00.001-05:00

Check it out at the bottom of the page!

Whoohoohoohoohoohoo!

Hoo!

Adventures in NYC Cycling, Third Time's the Charm

2009-12-05T14:48:00.000-05:00

After two miserable failures when trying to ride my bike in New York, I finally succeeded. I made my way up the east side of Manhattan (which took forever with the traffic and sketchy roads) to Central Park where I did four glorious laps around the park. The roads were smooth and beautiful, and there was some good hill-climbing in there, too. It was my first long ride in months and incredibly refreshing. The ride in the park was much better than getting up there and back, so I think the key is to take the subway up there, do some laps, and take the subway back. Sadly, the weather's getting colder/rainier, so I may have to put some of these adventures on hold until the spring.

That said, it's good to end the season on a positive note. Positive in that I didn't nearly get killed.

Phish on a whim

2009-12-03T10:05:00.000-05:00

Scratch another one off my "see before I die" list. That's two in a week!

Last night, my friend, Anne, was going to see Phish with a bunch of co-workers whom she didn't really know and asked a couple of friends to join her. Unfortunately, the extra ticket was snapped up before I could get it, but I easily scalped one at the door for less than face value. Score!

The concert was a trip. Certainly moreso for other people there, I believe. If Phish's music weren't really-really loud in my ear, I'd've sworn that I was in a rave in some really big (Madison-Square-Garden-sized) warehouse. The lights were incredible, certainly enough to cause seizures; I'm sure there were a few acid flashbacks, too.

The music, as expected, was incredible. I paid the most attention to Trey, who's got an incredible sense of melody. I knew this from the recordings, but anyone who can play that well under intense visual (and probably chemical) stimulation has my awe.

The biggest takeaway is the difference between San Francisco and New York hippies. Now, there was a coast-transcendent Grateful Dead- / Phish- diehard contingent as well, but that's an entirely different beast. I guess the most significant difference is that the folks at the concert last night looked ready to shuck their tie-dye and bandanas the second the concert was over, as if it were a costume party. I'm not saying that SF Hippies (a great name for a band) are more sincere, but they hold onto it a bit longer than the duration of a Phish concert. But then again, there was a pretty big bridge-and-tunnel crowd there, too, so I can't say that I really saw sufficient sample size to make such a sweeping generalization.

And on that note, I'll crawl back into my statistics textbook.

Thanksgiving and Zero 7

2009-11-28T13:12:00.001-05:00

This week, my family came out for Thanksgiving in New York. We had a great time, dining out each night at some of my new favorite restaurants. They did touristy stuff (or work, in my sister's case) during the day while I worked, and then we hung out in the evenings. On Tuesday, we went to South Pacific, which I hadn't seen. It was performed at the Lincoln Center, and we had great seats. On Thanksgiving Day, Lori and I went with Clare to the Macy's Day Parade. We got there around 45 minutes before it started, but we managed to get a front-row spot about 100 yards before the start of the parade. It was nice being so close because we could hear the announcer, and we got to see all the floats and balloons, anyway! That night, Lori and I cooked our first Thanksgiving, which went really well. It certainly helped that parents brought wine and cheese, and our friend Clare brought two scrumptious pies. And, per Lori's request, we have tons and tons of leftovers.

After sending my family off, Lori and I joined her friends Steve and Erica to see Zero 7 at Terminal 5 in New York. The show was incredible. Zero 7 is just two guys, but they have a healthy rotation of collaborators on their studio albums, so we didn't quite know what to expect. There ended up being seven people on stage playing a ton of different instruments from what looked like a stationary accordion (edit: it was a harmonium) to a cello to a glockenspiel to guitar, bass, drums, keys, and whatever awesome DJ equipment was in the back. The singers they had were simply amazing. One was on her first tour with Zero 7 (and her third show, actually). Their sound has certainly evolved. They certainly play their old stuff, which is mostly female-vocals heavy, and they've revamped some of their old stuff, too (check out this incredible version of "In the Waiting Line"), but it seems like they're trying to do some live electronica / jam band sound, which wasn't as captivating compared to when there was a vocalist. It seemed like we were listening to two different shows. Two really, really good (albeit somewhat disjoint) shows.

A warm house

2009-11-22T23:46:00.000-05:00

Last week, we had our housewarming party, and it was the perfect end to a great, great day. Stanford crushed U$C. Not just beat, crushed. They gave up more points than they ever have at home, 55. Wow.

That night, we probably had about 50-60 people at our apartment, but no more than about 35 at a time. We bought 20 12-packs of PBR (not ideal, but certainly cheap, and the $4 delivery charge [total] certainly scales well) and had only a few left by the end of the evening. The best part is that the housewarming really pushed us to clean up the apartment and take care of some things that we hadn't dealt with since moving in. We cleaned up the DVDs that were spread all over the floor, we got some shelves for our extra glassware, some photos on the walls, and random stuff out of the kitchen.
My room, previously undiscussed, is positively huge. Since every room designated as a bedroom in Manhattan has to have a window, and since my room is offset from the street by about 14 feet, I have a little "bowling alley" in my room, perfect for storing all of my stuff.
All I need is some little pins... Maybe those extra PBR cans could help out.

East Coast Gusto

2009-11-11T13:27:00.000-05:00

Possibly my favorite part of college (of course with the exception of the quality education I received and my philosophically-enlightened peers) was Gusto. What is Gusto, may you say? Well, it's when a group of otherwise-unaffiliated individuals comes together once a quarter to play a great, game. The game is similar to softball, but not quite. The key differences are as follows:

a) No strikeouts. You have to put the ball in play to get out.

b) No bunts. You have to swing the bat.

c) Any number of people can play the field.

oh, and...

d) Every beer your team drinks counts as a run.

Needless to say, this meant wonderful memories playing softball (my sport of choice) and drinking lots of beer. Sadly, this only really worked because we were on Stanford's campus, which fortunately has no open container laws. For the uninformed, this means you can walk down campus drive with two 40s in your hands wearing backpack leaking hard liquor and the cops can't do anything to stop you (as long as you're 21).

Now that I'm done with college and part of the "real world", playing Gusto is a little bit more challenging. Some folks have tried a Golden Gate Gusto with success, but that doesn't help as much with my being in New York. But several weeks ago, a few of us adventerous souls (Lori, Bryan, and myself) decided to make one happen in Central Park. And what success! We rallied up all previous Gustoers on the eastern seaboard, some folks who were visiting from out of town, and even some local ringers. People bussed in from Boston, New Haven, and even Washington DC for the game.

The biggest disappointment was that we couldn't play softball. We were indeed standing on a softball diamond, but there was a bunch of little kids playing soccer around us, and one of the park folks told us flat-out that softball was not allowed at all. But, due to Andy Rosen's heroics, we managed to acquire a volleyball and a soccer ball, and Gusto was on. Kickball-style.

And what about the open container laws, you may ask? Coffee cups! Gotta stay caffeinated.

The final score (keep in mind the adjustments):

Home (New York): 100

Away (non-New York): 90

Victory!

Angler Fish

2009-11-01T21:24:00.000-05:00

Saturday was Halloween, and, as you'd expect for two folks whose job it was to make awesome costumes for a year, Lori and I weren't about to do something typical. Lori's really big on using EL (electroluminescent) wire, so we came up with the idea of being angler fish. You know, those fish at the bottom of the ocean that have little lights in front of their heads to attract smaller fish, and when the little fish come to investigate the light, the angler fish eat 'em? Yeah, those guys. Here's a photo that my apartment-mate Michael took, not realizing that my camera was using a slow exposure. Still turned out really cool, though.
For the evening, we went to the Halloween Parade up 6th avenue.it was raining, and the umbrellas prevented us from seeing much, but it was certainly fun. I'd like to put up a Craigslist ad looking for someone with an apartment along the parade route. Perhaps we could trade beer for a share of the view.
Afterward, we went to a party at my friend (and former roommate, Dave)'s apartment, which is just incredible. They have the whole floor of a building to themselves, perfect for having 50 people over for Halloween.

On another note, I'm completely addicted to The Wire. It's a great TV show, but the big problem is that 1-hour episodes on HBO means actually-1-hour, not 1-hour-minus-commercials. Not good. On that note, I may go watch another episode...

Visits

2009-10-19T21:51:00.000-04:00

New York is certainly sweeping me up. I feel like I'm always off doing something or having someone over. Granted, I'm not complaining, but it's certainly tiring. Last weekend, Lori and I went to Washington D.C. to visit friends and go to the Solar Decathon. We stayed with Bryan and saw Joey, Jimmy, Chase, Amy, Andy, and his girlfriend Kendall. In short, it was awesome. This past weekend, Zach and Boris came to visit, and we spent the whole weekend out and about. With so many people moving in and coming through town, I wonder if I'll ever get a chance to do my laundry. Speaking of which, I should get on that.

Here's another thing. I absolutely detest midtown Manhattan. In New York City, people are pretty good about walking at a decent pace or at least being aware of other people who are walking. Streets are often crowded, but they move at a good clip...

... until you get to about 38th St, particularly near Broadway. Pedestrian traffic comes to a dead halt as wide-eyed tourists stop in the middle of the sidewalk to look at a map, talk about what to do next, or whine to their parents about how hungry they are.

I'm hungry, too! Keep moving!

With this whole jaywalking thing and now disliking tourists, I feel like I'm slowly becoming a New Yorker. At least I still hate the Yankees.

Adventures in NYC Cycling, Take Two

2009-10-01T01:06:00.000-04:00

Last Saturday, I thought I'd wisened up a bit to the dangers of cycling in New York. Not only did I buy new tubes for my bike, but I also bought a hand pump and a patch kit. Once again, I set my sights on Palisades Park in New Jersey.

This time, I popped a flat in midtown, but when I pulled over and investigated, it turns out that the tires were worn down pretty far and had some holes. I patched the tube and kept going, planning to buy new tires soon.

To get to New Jersey, you must cross the George Washington Bridge. To do so, you need to follow the signs towards the bridge. Sadly, in following these signs, there's not a pedestrian/cyclist turnoff (as there are on every other bridge I've ever been on), and by the time it says 'No bicycles', you're already going one-way on the bridge in 40mph traffic. Crap.

I stayed on the far left line (since there were no shoulders), repeating "there's nothing you can do, just keep going straight." And dog gone it, I almost made it.

The most unfortunate part is that there are these grates between the sections of the bridge that have holes that are just wider than my road wheels. Which means you'd best stay on the grate and not fall into the hole. Somewhat the moral of the story, I was not prepared for this. I made it over two of these type of sections before, BAM, my rear wheel fell in, mangling my back wheel and popping the tire.

... but I was still in traffic, so I kept biking on the wheel with no tire on it (read: not good for your bicycle) until I could pull over and get across the median to the other side of traffic. Fortunately, my new best friend Stacey was there, and the traffic was slow enough that she could pick me up and take me all the way back downtown.

Lessons learned:
1) Understand your route better before you go, especially when it involves bridges.

Wow. I got really lucky running into Stacey. She's actually a neat person, though I would have settled for not-a-maniac. If my limited knowledge of her can result in a work address through the magic of Google, she'll have a couple of pounds of tea in the mail soon.

So now, my wheel's fixed, I've got super-strong new tires, and I'm ready to tackle it again. Third time's the charm, right?

Adventures in NYC Cycling, Take One

2009-09-14T15:16:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, I went for my first recreational bike ride in Manhattan. Y'know, the kind that you can do around Stanford for hours on end with all sorts of great hills and trees and such. Not quite the same in New York, but I didn't really make much of an effort to seek it out on this first trip.

Having heard that there were bike paths all the way around Manhattan, I decided to check it out. I left my apartment in the East Village and headed to the East River. The first part of the path was bumpy, but not too crowded. And then I got downtown, by Battery Park, and it was just a mess. There were bike lanes, but they were full of wide-eyed tourists, and I couldn't get above 15 mph, no matter how hard I tried. It was really bad all the way the bottom until I got to Canal St. on the west side, when it opened up a bit. You can really rip on those straightaways, all the way up to about W 135th...

...where I popped a tube. And didn't have a spare. And then sun was going down. I guess I'm glad that I could take the subway home, but carrying your bike for an hour is a royal pain.

Lessons learned:
1) Stay away from tourists
2) Purchase and bring equipment for changing tires

My ride to work, however, was excellent. It's a bit hectic with all of the cars, but it only takes 8 minutes (half of the time on the subway), and it's $4.50/day cheaper to do it, so it may just be my way to work (until it snows).

In other news, I had my first week at meebo this past week, and despite extreme frustration with setting up a development environment, it was quite enjoyable! I'm actually back in Mountain View this week catching up on the scene and going to the company picnic on Thursday, and it looks like I'll be working on some really, really interesting stuff. It's nice looking forward to going to work.

Hello, New York

2009-09-08T00:39:00.001-04:00

Lori and I have almost finished our first week in New York, and so far, it's been great, albeit a bit stressful. The last half of our trip was a lot of fun. After leaving Yellowstone and driving over the Beartooth Pass, we headed to Gillette, WY to visit some of Lori's cousins. The Pass is out of the Northeastern exit of Yellowstone, and it offers some astounding views. Unfortunately, we were going pretty slowly because of the road construction sites all over the highway. I'm glad that Americans have jobs (thanks, stimulus package), but it's rather annoying to stop every 15 minutes.

We had dinner with Lori's cousins, and it was a blast. That night, we drove to Deadwood (where Lori's dad is from) only to find that the keys didn't work in the door to the shop. Fortunately, another key worked and we were able to sleep the night before Lori's uncle came the next morning to let us into the shop. Good thing, too, because that's where all of Lori's stuff was.

The next morning, we headed east, stopping in Sioux Falls (boring) before rolling into Iowa City for a night with Diego. That sounds like a bad movie. "A Night with Diego" starring Jacob Mason-Marshall (and his loyal cat, Scout). I wouldn't rent it.

Next up was Muncie, IN, where my cousin Tiffany is attending Ball State University. We hung out with her and her boyfriend, Robert. Both of them are positively awesome.

And then... (this is starting to sound like a 3rd grader's story) we went to Pittsburgh and hung out with Mike (Huij)on and Martina who recently got married and moved there. They have a neat little house and a nice bed to sleep on.

Finally, we arrived in New York City after being redirected to the Lincoln Tunnel and paying a ton of bridge tolls! Having a moving truck in New York City is a royal pain, but we managed to get all of my stuff up to my four-floor-walkup apartment. Despite the walkup, the apartment is totally awesome. Recently redone with nice hardwood floors, it's reasonably quiet, and my room is massive. I love it. Photos to come. The neighborhood is great, too. We're smack in the middle of the East Village, so there's a ton of places to eat, drink, and shop literally right outside our door.

This past week, I've basically been setting up my room, going shopping, and getting settled. I've hung out a bit with my roommates and some friends in the city, and I'm very certain that I'm going to have a great time in New York. My first day of work is tomorrow, so that should be exciting, as well!

Lori didn't have an apartment coming into New York, but she's decided to live with Alex Mallory and Jill Wurzburg (two of my good friends), and they've all picked out a place on 19th and 2nd (but 10 blocks from my apartment), and it's supposedly good! I'm looking forward to checking it out.

Anyway, things are going quite nicely. More adventures to come, I'm sure.

Goodbye, San Francisco

2009-08-28T03:17:00.000-04:00

We had a few surprises on the way back from Cairo, including a Days-of-Thunderesque cab ride, a prisoner first forced onto our plane to be sent back to the US by the Egyptian government and then refused by our airline, only to have our flight plan mysteriously cancelled, leaving us on the runway for almost two hours and forcing Lori and I to miss our connection at JFK, which ended up with our arriving nine hours later than planned. But, altogether uneventful.

The time in San Francisco was very short (especially since we didn't have Sunday afternoon). In the 36 hours we had, we picked up some boxes that I'm taking cross-country, had breakfast with Abel, Zach, Claudia, and Zach's sister, visited all of my grandparents, had a dentist appointment, packed, played one last jam session with Chris, Taylor, and Josh, got the truck, and left.

Tuesday, we drove to Lovelock, NV (mostly because of the name), Wednesday to Jackson, WY, and today, we drove through Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone National Park to Gardiner, MT. Tomorrow, we swing back through Yellowstone and across Wyoming.

I'd never been to Yellowstone before, and since our 20 foot moving truck is about the size of an RV, I think we're doing it the right way. I'd heard that there'd be a ton of wildlife, but I haven't seen much. I'm not disappointed at all, though. The landscapes and geysers just blow my mind. I can't believe how green the trees and grass are, how clear the lakes and rivers are, and how blue the skies are.
Also amazing are the geysers and hot springs in the park. Apparently, the plate that Yellowstone is on is moving over a hotspot on the Earth, so you get a bunch of, well, hotness under the ground, which generates all of the nasty sulphur and heats the water. In short, you get some really cool pools like Grand Prismatic Spring.
Tomorrow, we're headed to Mammoth Hot Springs on the way out, most likely taking a dip in the Boiling River (a mix of snowmelt and thermally-heated water; awesome).

In just under a week, we'll be in New York City!

Dahab to Cairo

2009-08-22T22:03:00.000-04:00

Our last couple of days in Dahab were positively relaxing. We discovered a great restaurant, titled "King Chicken", where the prices are cheap (even for Dahab) and the food is fantastic! We spent the days snorkeling (diving for Lori) at the Blue Hole (amazing) and lounging around the pool. Life is certainly difficult. On our last night in town, we hit the town's nightlife for drinks and dancing. We shared a large bowl of mojito, which turned out to be a) a great idea and b) not a great idea.

Not surprisingly, we were all very tired the next day and spent the afternoon playing with the feral cats in a restaurant by the beach.
The cats, although quite feral, were very cute and friendly (until they got food, then they walked away in boredom). Lori and I decided that if we were to get a cat, we'd name it "Chairman Meow" (of course, with the associated hats, catwear, and little red catbooks of phrases). It's interesting that in Egypt, particularly in Dahab, the animals wandering around for food were cats, not dogs. In South America and Tanzania (particularly the former), I saw a ton of dogs eating the garbage on the street, but not so in Egypt. Maybe it has something to do with the meat that looks like beef being called "meat" in dishes and not "beef."

That evening, we had a delightful horse ride at sunset, and now I know why Oasis Overland requires us to have travel insurance for the trip. Some of the horses ran (my horse, a psychopath, tried to attack other horses and wouldn't run), and we did the whole thing without helmets and in flip flops. Still, only $7 each for a great hour-long ride.
We took the overnight bus back to Cairo and arrived this morning at 6 am. After a nap, we adventured out to Al-Azhar Park, a neat little public park from which you can see the Citadel of Saladin (among other things). Considering that's where we went when we arrived, it makes a nice pair of bookends to our time in Egypt.
We then tried to see a movie, but the theater only played the film at 9 pm. Someone could have told us that, I bet, before we went there... But we had a nice walk back across the 6th of October bridge over the Nile. And now, we're headed to the great restaurant by the hotel, the Syrian, before catching our 1:30 am flight. And then it's home, sweet, home for two days before driving to New York.

This is a great summer.

My first scuba dive

2009-08-20T19:51:00.000-04:00

Apparently, the Red Sea has some of the best diving in the world (the average visibuilty underwater is about 100 feet!). So, since an introductory scuba dive was only 250 Egyptian pounds (about $50), I had to do it. Lori's already a certified diver, so she and Martin (also certified) went on a guided dive while Martje and I did our intro dive. We were at the same place, though, so we were effectively diving together.
And introductory dive, according to Lori, is like being taken for a walk. A diving instructor taught us the basics- how to clear your mask underwater, what to do if your mouth/regulator fills with water. Then, he had us link arms, held us from above, and took us down. He handled everything, so all we had to do was breathe, not freak out, swim forward, pop our ears when they needed to be popped, and take pictures with the camera they gave us.
In the end, it was a ton of fun. I may try to get certified, but it's a fairly expensive and involved process in the US. We'll see.

Mt. Sinai

2009-08-19T16:06:00.000-04:00

We climbed Mt. Sinai last night / this morning, but alas, no commandments. The climb itself was rather uneventful, but the stars and sunrise were amazing. The Perseid Meteor shower was winding down for the year, so there were a bunch of shooting stars.
I put our climbing-mates, Martin and Martje, to sleep with the Pink Ape story (ask me to tell it to you sometime...) and woke them just in time for sunrise.

I really wanted to get some Ten Commandments trinket or something from one of the many souvenir stands, but no one had anything at all. Amazing! That's a business opportunity for sure. I guess that's what you get in a country that's 80% Muslim. They've got Moses, too, but imagine he's not as important as in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Blah blah blah.

Anyway, I'm really enjoying this summer, but it'll be nice to be back home. I miss biking, burritos, friends, and playing music, and I've got a really neat idea to code up when I get home. But, I'll certainly miss travelling when I do get home. The grass is always greener...

Luxor to Dahab

2009-08-18T21:58:00.000-04:00

On Sunday, we went to the Valley of the Kings, the site of the graves of the New Kingdom. We went into a few tombs (Ramses I, IV, and IX), but all of the discovered tombs have long since been looted of items (the last of which as looted in 1922). Still, a lot of colors in the paintings were still intact, which was rather remarkable. I wasn't allowed to take photographs, as the guards actually checked your camera on the way out. Blast.
Next, we visited the Valley of the Workers and the attached temple of Deir al-Madina. Since the workers knew the secrets of the tombs they built/decorated, it was tradition to kill them when the tombs were completed to keep such details from getting out. Since this isn't particularly cost-effective and leaves for no continuity in the art and design, they were instead sent to live excluded in the valley, with no contact with the outside world. Then, the next generation would continue the work of their fathers.
On the way back to Luxor, we stopped at the Memnon Statues, a pair of, well, statues next to a temple that remains underground. Apparently, it's scheduled to be unearthed in the next few years.
The rest of the day was off, which is just as well because it was so hot. That evening, when the sun had gone down and it was no longer 110 degrees, we took a ferry across the Nile to a restaurant overlooking the city. Very nice.
The next morning (yesterday), we visited the Karnak Temple, the largest temple in the world (not surprising, as it's dedicated to Ancient Egypt's primary god, Amon-Ra). Like the Luxor Temple, each king added pieces to the temple. There's a fantastic set of 134 massive columns on the way from the courtyard to the altar, and shortly after that, there are two neat obelisks.
The Karnak Temple was magnificent, but I wasn't as floored as I had expected to be. Maybe that's because I had such a great time at the Luxor Temple. Maybe it was the scorching heat. Still amazing, though.

That afternoon, we drove to Hurghada, where a guidebook describes the best thing to do is "to sit on the beach and wish you were somewhere else." Conveniently, we were only stopping by.

This morning, we caught a hydrofoil across the Red Sea to Dahab. The ride was very bumpy, but as far as I know, no one got sick. We arrived in Dahab around 2pm. Dahab is a diving, snorkeling, and beach town, and though we haven't been here long, I know I'm going to enjoy it. The prices are very reasonable for food and drink, and no one hassles you to buy thing. What a concept!

We haven't done much yet, just lunch, beach, and shopping for our Mt. Sinai climb this evening (too hot during the day). I'm definitely going to snorkel, and I may also do an introductory scuba dive. We'll see.

Naptime, for we leave at 11pm. I'll let you know if I come down with any commandments.

Aswan to Luxor... slowly

2009-08-16T01:27:00.000-04:00

Abu Simbel, a temple outside of Aswan for which we woke up at 3 am to visit, was amazing. Like the Temple of Philae, it was moved to its present location because it was underwater. The temple was built by Ramses II, who was, incidentally, rather narcissistic, to show the world that he was a god. But, since this was heresy, he built it very far from anything, a 3-hour drive from Aswan.
We took it easy for the rest of the day. Had some delicious Egyptian pizza, but that was it. The next day, we boarded a felucca, a traditional Egyptian ship. For two days, that day and yesterday, we did absolutely nothing but read, drink beer, play cards (more durak, courtesy of Boris), swim in the Nile, and get eaten alive by mosquitos. We sang songs last night, including one we made up to commemorate how slow the boat was.

Float, float, float your felucca
Gently down the Nile
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
We've only gone a mile

The crew of the felucca was very, very chill. Suffice it to say that one guy's nickname was "Mr. Weed."
Today, after being eaten alive last night, we hopped off the felucca and took a bus to Luxor, stopping at two temples along the way. The first was the Temple of Kom Ombo, another Greek-era temple. Since the Greeks wanted to dedicate it to the god of evil (who coincidentally shares a name with a tour company I was with in Ecuador, Sobek) and the Egyptians would have none of that, there are two temples, side by side, one for Sobek and one for Horus. There, you can see the only surviving Egyptian calendar, which details priests' duties on every day of the year. I guess they didn't change very frequently.
Next, we hit the Temple of Edfu, dedicated to Horus's revenge on his uncle, Seth, for killing his father Osiris (twice). Once again, a magnificent temple, huge and covered in hieroglyphics. Like some of the other temples, persecuted Christians hid from the Romans there, so the ceilings are burned from years of fires built inside the temple. Additionally, the Christians, not enjoying the images of the Egyptian gods, took it upon themselves to chip off everyone's faces.
We arrived in Luxor, and and after a quick lunch, took as long a nap as we could. We woke ujp in time to visit the Luxor Temple, which was, in a word, amazing. It was built by Amenhotep in the 14th century BC and augmented by many subsequent kings. It's just incredible. There's a marvelous facade with two of the six original statues and a giant obelisk. The obelisk's counterpart, the tallest ever found, resides in Paris. Apparently, Muslim king Mohammad Ali Pesha saw no value in such things and gifted them to Europeans in the 19th century.
Beyond the facade, there's a large courtyard with a mosque built about 40 feet about the ground. That's because the courtyard was covered in sand when the mosque was built, so they thought they were building on the ground.
Finally, we went through another series of columns before reaching the temple itself. We visited the temple at night, so I had a chance to take some good night photos (as long as I had a steady hand).
One other thing of note is that the 5km road from the Luxor Temple to the Karnak Temple (which we visit on Monday), is lined with sphinxes, and once a year, the images of Amon, Mut, and Khons (sun, sky, and moon gods) were carried from one temple to the other. The Egyptians are actually restoring this road, knocking down all buildings in the way. In fact, in the next decade, all houses will be removed from Luxor, and the city will be just the various ruins. I'd hate to have bought a house here...
Lori and I have really enjoyed the company of our travelling companions. The seven of us travel well together, and Oasis's itinerary of historical sites coupled with healthy amounts of free time suits us well. It's a good final trip to an otherwise-crazy summer. On another note, I'm reading Steinbeck's "East of Eden", courtesy of the book swap at our Cairo hotel. It's excellent. Very good story and some thought-provoking, intelligent digressions. The language reminds me of the short stories I read in high school. I might return it to the book swap when we get back to Cairo, but I accidentally threw it in the Nile while swatting a fly, so it's falling apart a bit. Oops.

Cairo to Aswan

2009-08-12T01:04:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was the first day of our tour. We spent the morning at the Egyptian Museum, which was incredible. I wish we'd had more than three hours there. I'd have loved to see the whole thing. The largest chunk of items the museum has are from Tutankhamun's tomb. King Tut is certainly the most overrated king, and the only reason he's remembered by history is that his was the only unlooted tomb discovered. The contents of his tomb are incredible, especially his burial mask. We couldn't take photos in the museum, so I was restricted to taking a shot of an annoying European sitting on the pedestal of an obelisk outside.
That afternoon, we went to the Giza pyramids. The inside is unremarkable (save the heat), but the outside is just astounding. Considering the magnitude of the project and the lack of tools, it's amazing that they were built.
We then went on a camel ride. I never realized how tall (and bony) they are. I honestly thought I was going to fall off. Not Lori, apparently.
We finished our afternoon at the Valley Temple and the Sphinx, both right below the pyramids. The Sphinx is noseless thanks to Napoleon. Nice guy.
Last night, we took the overnight train to Aswan, and the only saving grace was that they allowed us to bring beer on the train. One car, fun car.

Very tired, we arrived this morning, slept a few hours, and went to the Philae Temple. Absolutely incredible, and thanks to the Aswan Dam (the single worst public works project in history), the temple spent 6 months of the year, every year, underwater for 20 years before being moved block-by-block to its present location.
Tonight, we went to a Nubian village for dinner and to learn about their way of life, mostly preserved for the last 6000 years. They keep crocodiles in the house and eat them on special occasions. One of the crocodiles was particularly ornery and jumped at us a few times. Yikes.
Tomorrow, we wake up at 3 am to see Abu Simbel, another temple near Aswan. I love these ruins, so I don't mind the early start. At least I say that now.