state fair midway 2006

After the nebraska fish exhibit and the fake tattoo, we took a ride on the Skywheel, which was quite a thrill. After the pic was taken the ride kicked into high gear and I immediately regretted having taken the camera-phone out of my pocket. I so badly wanted to be able to hold on to the bar with two hands.

the back patio

After the bus drops me off at work, I often go through the cafeteria to get a second morning coffee, and take that out to the back patio, which looks over the mighty Missouri river.

The view downstream is where they are building a new Pedestrian Bridge to connect Nebraska and Iowa.

It will be fun to pedal over that at least once.

I'm told that eventually this will connect some paths in a way that breaks some distance records. The article above mentions 150 miles. Is that a record? Post details if you know them.

one book, one lincoln

I'm going to do something out of the ordinary here, and ask that you email a link to this story to anyone you know who lives in Lincoln and likes to read. Please, copy this link and paste it into an email so that they can become aware of this year's One Book, One Lincoln.

(If you want, make the subject line something like "get a load of this pretentious, self-promoting wanker!")

Although One Book, One Lincoln (an annual community-building idea intended to give the entire city something in common to read and discuss) does not officially start until October, the book for this year has been selected.

Fortunately, it happens to be one that I've already read, marking the first year ever that I'll "be on the same page", as it were. I'll only get to enjoy this through the end of December when the program will be officially over -- but it's only August now (at the time of this writing) so you have the chance to get the jump on everybody else too.

I did by random chance. Like most things I do, I decided to deliberately exercise some underdeveloped parts of myself (in this case: exposure to literature and social interaction) by joining a local book club. As luck would have it, the first month that I participated was the reading of The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson, and I had a blast.

Warning: The two links in the next paragraph, or your own historical knowledge, may contain spoilers.

I do plenty of reading, but usually general non-fiction and technical articles. (A lot of stuff about music and computer science, in particular.) What I had been missing, and was wanting to expose myself to, is story and descriptive language. The Devil in the White City was a great way for me to make the transition, since it serves as an accurate (though beautiful) account of two tangential, historical moments in Chicago in the late 1800's: the 1893 World's Fair, and an evil, modern serial killer by the name of Henry H. Holmes.

The former is "The White City" in the title of the book, and the latter is, of course, the Devil.

The story line for the White City centers around the inventive, hard-working architects that bring the 1893 World's Fair together. This project is enormous in its conception because nobody wants to see America's pride hurt by failing to outclass the French -- their 1889 World's Fair having introduced the architectural masterpiece, the Eiffel Tower. The tension runs high as Chicago's effort to captivate world attention seems perpetually behind schedule and doomed to failure. The book does give the reader plenty of reward for suffering this tension by unveiling myriad things that were introduced at the fair but that we take for granted today.

With this as a backdrop, Larson also unfolds the story of the equally-inventive and industrious Holmes, the central villain, who is working on a twisted architectural creation of his own. You may know someone who you have thought of as being morally bankrupt, but Holmes will be a forgiving yardstick to put them up against. He is pure, unadulterated, methodical evil: luring innocent women who are drawn to Chicago by the exposition to their grim fate -- all of whom think he's quite the charmer.

In terms of the concept of alignment in role playing games, the World's Fair architects serve as lawful good, and Holmes serves as a vivid portait of lawful evil. Behind these two story lines, there is a third subtle thread of Patrick Eugene Joseph Prendergast, whose development begins as an almost-comical chaotic good, but becomes chaotic evil by the book's climax. Through this, Erik Larson shows that his appreciation of architecture is not just limited to the traditional sense when applied to buildings -- it is also embodied within the structure of his own book.

Finally, I can't post this without mentioning bicycles: it just so happens that this book takes place during their golden age -- a time when the greatest urban pollution problem was horse dung -- and they do make more than a couple cameo appearances.

Dung does too. As does Lincoln, Nebraska.

Check it out, and spread the word.

end of an era

The old ride is gone. Its replacement is in its second week of operation. So far I have ridden it once: yesterday, my return to work after a one-week hiatus.

The new bus is clean and modern. There are overhead luggage compartments, and each seat has vectorable air nozzles and reading lights, just like those you see on passenger aircraft.

Every seat faces forward, so now I can sit anywhere on the bus without succumbing to motion sickness.

The tradeoff is that now there is only a single bus, so if one misses the early one there is no second opportunity. Some of my associates have started using a "buddy system", designating a particular person to watch out for them, so that the bus does not pull away before they are aboard.

This is in contrast to the mighty fleet of three that shuttled back & forth between Lincoln and Omaha when the organization first moved.

I am going to miss the old bus. I loved to ride it, especially in the far rear, my instrument in hand and headphones on. While the ride was rough and bouncy back there, I figured that if I could learn to control my instrument under adverse conditions then I could easily control it under conditions more tame. When I look back at the progress I've made over the last three years, I think that notion may have had some merit.

In some sense, the appeal of the old bus was only superficial. Its appearance, both inside and out, provided enough suspension of disbelief to allow me to become immersed in the fantasy world of being a road-weary musician: letting the tour miles slip by while dedicating myself to the betterment of my instrumental facility.

The bus itself was tempermental and prone to frequent trouble, often leading to unexpected delays. I could see the frustration in the faces of my associates on the days when their efficient commute was thwarted by mechanical failure. This never bothered me, for it merely gave me more time to sink into the dream.

And, while I never even rose to the level of musicians that I consider bad, I loved that my life could afford me the opportunity to slip into it.

At journey's end, twice each day, I would pop up the stack to the equally-evanescent worlds of being the slayer-of-software-dragons, and bringer-of-bacon-home.

opportunity to learn

I took a long morning ride exploring the trails that Lincoln has to offer. I have an overdeveloped tendency to always follow the same path, so today my rule was to turn down every branch of trail that I had never seen before. Many of them were dendrites feeding the main system, but one path took me to the World Trail, which is beautiful. Sections of it looked like Dagobah -- so lush, green, and dense.

When I got home, there were some educational opportunities in the mail.

taking sente

There are not many games that appeal to me. Of course this was different in the past, but over time my interest in each one diminished or disappeared entirely. Go was an exception.

This game has appeal on many levels. There is a simplicity of design both to the equipment and the rules. The stones are cool to the touch, and (depending on the quality of the board) make a satisfying twack or thunk when decisively deployed. These sounds give a musical component to play when the opponents are responding to each other quickly and automatically, much like the rhythm of moves seen when two people are sparring in some martial art.

The central struggle in the game is between death and life, and the principle concern for ensuring that one ends up on the favorable side of that struggle is to be mindful of one's liberties.

There is room in the game for slow, careful analysis. However, game play is often better when one intuits the next move instead. Learning to intuit is accomplished through lots of time in the saddle. Experience is often the only way one can learn to recognize the value of a move, because the vast majority of the game is intractible to analysis. This has a lot of appeal to someone burdened with a propensity for overdoing that.

The culture of go players, at least locally, was alluring. If one were to make a dreadful mistake, it was common for your adversary to consent to rewinding the entire state of the board, as many moves as could be accurately remembered, allowing you to take a different course of action and thereby explore a different possible game. This is in stark contrast to chess players, who are prone to throwing tantrums if you have taken your finger off the piece you moved, and you regret your decision.

Part of this may be explained by the game of go being less "brittle" than the game of chess. In go, all games must lead to the entire territory of the board being either claimed by one of the opponents, or being demonstrably unclaimable. In chess, one can find that a short sequence of mistakes, possibly one mistake or two, can cause the game to come to a sudden, surprising end.

The last serious game of go that I remember attempting was back in 1995. That game was brought to a sudden end -- the pieces forcibly scrambled by the hands of a girl who was trying to gain my attention.

Her move succeeded, permanently turning my head away from the game, keeping me happily playing in gote within a beautiful, rewarding relationship for over a decade -- and foreshadowing its dénouement.

i ate this today

Gravy Day, as mentioned before, happens every Thursday. The meal on this day of the week always includes gravy -- even the breakfast menu, which features biscuits drenched in sausage gravy. I can only think of one occasion in the last three years where gravy appeared on some other day of the week, and it caused quite a buzz among my associates. Did someone make a mistake? Are heads gonna roll for this?

There have been many Thursdays where the presence of Gravy Day was the only thing that got me up in the morning. Yes, that sounds pathetic. No, it is pathetic, but if you spend three years leaving the house at 6:30am, getting back home at 6:30pm, and spending the intervening time in near captivity you'll experience a low ebb or two.

Speaking of walking a mile in my shoes: there was a time when I got no exercise. Most of my life, actually. All of my pursuits and interests were solitary, sedentary, and cerebral. I thought of my body as a mere vehicle for my brain, and my brain thought it was being carried about adequately so it always gave the body an easy time of it. The brain never considered anything about athleticism or sports to be terribly interesting, and most things to be down-right tedious, so the idea was dismissed and rarely thought of, aside from those occasional interventions attempted by worried friends and family.

I've already mentioned how recalcitrant I can be. My capacity for it seems boundless at times. Fortunately there was one last intervention in mid March, and the brain had been prepared for it by a long series of nastygrams from the body, which had begun to suffer various ill effects of muscular atrophy. For example, poor posture.

Poor posture wasn't just a bad habit, it was a result of my weakened muscles being unable to support good posture without considerable conscious effort. This, combined with lots of miles on the bus, eventually led to lower back pain. Worse still, I developed a constant sensation of hotness down my left leg. I recognized this as a symptom of problems with the sciatic nerve only because one of my musical friends had just been through a marginally-successful surgery to correct the same problem.

Still, the lightbulb hadn't fully come on. But it was on enough such that when my wife tried one last time to clue me in, it stuck. Of course it helps that the message was delivered dramatically, but I was prepared to recieve the message.

I started walking. Day after day. I jogged a bit, and quickly integrated an aerobic workout into my routine. I started doing situps and pushups to support my body on the bike better. I became interested in one or two effects of having increased muscle mass. Or three. I now regularly work with freeweights.

Moreover, these things became very interesting to me. In the past, the only variable that I would tweak (in the system that is my body) was caloric intake. Now that I know that I can also tweak my metabolic rate, it's much easier to run my body at a caloric deficit.

And that, my friends, made my old pants obsolete.

mis pantalones son pequeños

So as not to miss a chance to extol the virtues of bicycle commuting, I have to announce the arrival of the second (and final) wave of downsizing.

Here are three pairs of 32-inch waist Dickies pour moi. They're cell-phone-pocket pants again, but I figure I've already learned my lesson.

Not since my first semester at college have such things made it around my midsection. That would be autumn 1986.

Ride your bike, as they say.

Grisha Perelman, where are you?

Mathematicians are awesome.

How cool is it to pop up out of nowhere, offer a proof of the Poincaré conjecture, then duck out of sight while everybody else slowly comes to realize that your proof is valid? Read about this disappearing genius here in the New York Times.

(And I thought the proof from Andrew Wiles of Fermat's Last Theorem had a dramatic story behind it.)

Note: the illustration with the rabbit must be a chocolate easter bunny, since obviously a real rabbit (heck, anything with a mouth, digestive tract, and anus) is topologically equivalent to a donut, not a sphere. Duh.

malpractice makes malperfect

I've been concentrating my attention on my use of clipless pedals when I'm riding. It has been difficult but fun to unlearn the pedaling habits that I had established from riding flat pedals for a long time.

My main focus has been on ensuring that I'm applying smooth muscular pressure at every point around the arc, with specific attention to the back half of the circle: pulling back, pulling up, and pushing forward. I've been doing it long enough that it's automatic now, even in times of extreme fatigue when it was easy to forget and slide back into mashing down as if I were on flat pedals.

I enjoy deliberate practice. Through practice I can make difficult things possible, possible things easy, and easy things automatic. It is this last stage, where things become automatic, that I value the most. Conscious attention is a scarce resource, so offloading work through automation allows that resource to be spent elsewhere. Hopefully, with enough practice, one can just be in the zone.

The problem with practice is that, despite its reputation, it does not make perfect. Rather, practice makes permanent. Whatever you repeat becomes automatic, even if you're repeating bad form or mistakes. This is especially challenging on the guitar, where there is great temptation to play fast. I'm constantly reminding myself to play no faster than I can play perfectly. Well, not constantly. I should remind myself a lot more.

On my way to the bus this morning I tried to attend to something new with the clipless pedals: clipping my free foot in the first time around, at the top of the rotation, after taking off from a stoplight. It clicked in perfectly in two out of two attempts.

This was very satisfying, but it reminded me of a very unsatisfying mishap I had a while ago (far enough back that the memory is more funny than painful) when comming unclipped.

Here's what happened: I released my left foot and tried to put my weight down on my right foot...down in the Haymarket...in front of a restaurant...with a crowded outdoor seating section.

Yeah, that wasn't satisfying at all.

One's own brain is a funny, frustrating thing. After that mishap, my brain tried to do the same maneuver again on me -- about half a dozen more times.

Fortunately I was on to it, but the strange thing is that this phenomenon of unclipping the left foot and putting my weight nown on the right had never happened before. I thought I had completely mastered the foot release already.

That single mistake somehow laid down a new pattern that I had to unlearn, just from one repetition. I was able to re-master the foot release with renewed conscious effort, but it was irksome to have to. It's good that I groove on that sort of thing.

wwdc 2006

I've never been to WWDC, but I've looked forward to the news that comes out of it ever since 1996, when NeXT bought Apple for a negative four hundred million dollars, thereby obtaining a suitable replacement for the computer hardware production unit that NeXT sold back in 1993 and a loyal customer base for future versions of the NeXTStep operating system: re-skinned, re-branded, and greatly-enhanced.

I loved NeXTStep, and had the pleasure of using it on various machines prior to the acquisition: a beige i486 machine, a SPARC laptop (really), and one of the HP "Gecko" PA-RISC workstations. It's hard for people who don't remember the state of the computer industry back then to appreciate how far ahead this operating system was, in terms of striking a great balance between user interface design and API design, among other things.

It's good to see it back and kicking ass under the name Mac OS X. The next version, Leopard, is shaping up to be pretty cool yet again. Some of the most exciting features appear to be those that were not discussed at WWDC.

For a fun blast from the past, check out this video from 1992 on YouTube of Steve Jobs giving a demonstration of version 3. Today we take for granted the features he touts.

Now to grab some snacks and watch this year's keynote, one of the few marketing messages that I willingly subject myself to.

yellow door

When the bus drops me off at work in the morning, the driver always fails to hand over the keys. This leaves me in the building until the bus returns in the afternoon.

For lunch there is a cafeteria at work, which would be great for anybody who relished school lunches as a child. There is a regimented schedule of dishes that cycles like clockwork. For example, Thursday is "gravy day", where the main entree is something smothered in gravy, of course. Chicken fried steak, meatloaf, turkey & stuffing, etc.

Gravy Day used to be the high point of most weeks, back before awakening to healthy eating. I still enjoy it on occasion, now that my body can burn calories a lot better.

The best days, though, are those days where someone can be persuaded to hit Bangkok Cuisine, affectionately known as "yellow door".

Pictured above is my good friend Praveen, heading inside to pick up some carry-out. He's the best software engineer I know. Monday he starts work at Google.

life of pi

Yesterday my big accomplishments were...

• finished reading Crow Lake, one day late
• started reading the next book, Life of Pi
• rallied the young troops to clean house a bit
  
• did my upper-body workout
• made another batch of granola with the tropical flavorings that syd enjoys
• pulled the dishwasher door off its hinges, incurring household costs I fear calculating

I'm trying to get my mind off of that last one. Help me out here.

One of the old family debates is whether a pie can be called a "pie" if it isn't round. I'm always quick to point out the Hostess Fruit Pie, which I recall being somewhat trapezoidal, but for some reason this doesn't ever win the argument. Maybe any debate on the subject is doomed to be irrational. Ba-dump crash!

But today I found the square pie. Ha, in yer face!

Where do y'all fall on this issue?

Granola À gogo

Today I needed to finish Crow Lake for my reading group, which meets tonight. I didn't quite make it to the end, but that won't deter me from going to face the gang. I tried; I really tried. A couple of beers and some engaging conversation will help me feel allright about it.

On the bright side, I did manage to make a double-batch of granola, which should keep my morning routine efficient...while supplies last.

WeAreTheWeb.org

Maybe I'm the last person on the planet who has seen this, but I don't think it matters. This is a far more brilliant PR campaign than I had hoped that those who care about net neutrality could muster. Way to go, folks. Everybody who has a blog should post a story linking to it. Yeah, it's an annoying Flash site, but I got over my bias for this one.

Drive

Yesterday I was told that before I can start my career as a rock star I would have to get at least one visible tattoo. That's probably true. At the tender young age of 38, I still have yet to go through the painful ink-and-needle rite of passage. Not having been ceremonially introduced to manhood in this way, one might think that my adolescent guitar-god fantasies would still be lingering about, but they are not.

That is not what drives me.

I have been tinkering with the guitar since college. I had studied the piano before that, but couldn't fit one in my dorm room. I didn't make much progress on this new instrument, though, because my concept of how to study an instrument came from my childhood experiences studying the piano. Back then my strategy was to pick a piece that I wanted to learn, practice it until memorized, and then continue to refine it until it was performable. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I ended up being unaware of any other way to approach an instrument. I should probably be too embarassed to share the depths of my ignorance here, but it took me years to fully realize what sort of practice one had to engage in to become able to improvise. In retrospect, my piano teachers had tried to guide me in that direction ("practice your scales & arpeggios!"), but the curse of being recalcitrant is to only realize it years after those people are gone.

In September '01 I started thinking about my own mortality, as many did. This was when I decided to become serious about my passion. I did the math: If I live n years longer and learn m songs per year I'll have learned n * m songs by the time I die. Clearly this couldn't be the way that musicians come about who seem to be able to play anything they're thinking.

So I knew I needed to do something different. I started forming a new goal, and refining it over time. At first I thought of this merely in terms of learning to improvise, but that's not sufficiently specific to be useful. I've been fleshing it out, and at the moment it's something like this:

I want to be able to execute any arbitrary melody that I can invent, with any phrasing I desire, along with harmonic support for that melody, at the speed that I can think it. Moreover, my goal is to be able to think interesting musical ideas to play.

I don't think this could be a more ambitious aim without throwing in proving that P=NP or bringing peace to the middle east. It's easily enough to keep me occupied for a lifetime: were I ever to actually be able to play anything that I can think, I need only to think more challenging thoughts.

The challenge is staggering. It presents interesting optimization problems, too: I only have a finite amount of hours that I can play (finite and small, since this is just a hobby) and I need to be able to most efficiently use those hours. Any moment that I practice without having a well-established conceptual model is not being spent to its fullest advantage. Any hour not spent automating something musically useful is not well-spent either. So I've been cramming music theory up-front so that the years in front of me are spent in a state of being informed. I'm also designing exercises that automate musical components according to that model.

I have a lot of work in front of me (and very little of it behind me, it seems), but it's a fun challenge. It's not as sexy as being a star, but at least the tattoo is optional.