cat /dev/random > blog.html

Bike to Work Month 2011

2011-04-30T17:38:00.000-07:00

May is here again, that means bike to work month and bike to work day, May 12th.

For the last two years I have participated in the Bay Area Bicycle Coalition's Team Bike Challenge, a friendly contest to see what teams and companies can log the most bike commutes. In 2010 I challenged myself to bike to work for every commute and did it. This year I'm planning repeat that, with the added challenge of getting 1000+ ft of climbing each day. On average at least, because some routes don't have any hills.

Blekko is going to be well represented in the company competition (Blekko Team Standings), with almost 50% of the employees planning to participate. I think we have a good shot at placing in the small company (less than 50 employees) competition.

Last year Blekko was co-winner of Strava's own bike to work challenge taking the distance per member competition (admittedly skewed by only having two team members: Bob and me). The overall winners were our "nemesis" Google's SF2G (San Francisco to Google) club.

The Team Bike Challenge played a big part in converting me from a casual cyclist, who sometimes biked to work, into a die-hard cycle commuter. I avoid driving if at all possible. I have purchased lights for my bike (a big shout out to Light & Motion bike lights, great products) so I can commute in the dark winter months. I upgraded to an Ergon backpack to haul clothes to and from work in comfort. I have been experimenting with various waterproof shoe covers and fenders in an effort to ride even on the wettest of days. Why? because I like it, it's a habit, and I just feel better on the days that I ride. The Team Bike Challenge made this possible because, in the interest of competition, I pushed myself to bike commute more than I might have otherwise. Creating a habit that will last a lifetime.

Bike To Work Month

2009-05-29T11:13:00.000-07:00

May is Bike to Work month, with May 14th being Bike to Work Day.

The local Bay Area Bicycle Coalition ran a bike to work challenge. Whereby local companies signed up teams of bike commuters, who accumulated points for every day they bike commute in May. I signed up Blekko and drafted 4 other coworkers to complete the team roster.

Blekko did alright in the standings, despite most of the team having a 24+ mile one-way commute! Where we really did well was total miles bike, over 1240, of which 498 were mine. Sadly miles have no impact on final score, or else we would have been 3rd in San Mateo County.

Here are some observations from a month of bike commuting:

Fewer trips by car means fewer visits to the gas station.
I keep leaving the house withoug my car keys, several "doh!" moments this month.
Eating more and sill losing weight is very cool.
Great training for the Death Ride in July.
Redwood Shores has the worst stop light sensors. Almost none detect bikes.
I am super impressed by Krishna, still very new to cycling, who rode to work from the East Bay across the Dumbarton bridge. Dude!
Clearly the way to win the Bike Commute Challenge is to have lots of "Novice" riders (scoring maximum points), have multiple teams (for the company stadings), and bike every day. :)

It has been a great month of biking, and the experience has established the habit of biking to work for the rest of the summer.

Date with Death

2008-12-12T20:28:00.000-08:00

In a fit of madness, I've signed up for the 2009 Tour of the California Alpes, AKA the Death Ride. I've also enlisted biking partners Keith and Bob to join me on this mad quest.

The Death Ride is a 129 mile, 15k feet of climbing, monster of a ride. This is as hard, if not harder, than any single Tour de France mountain stage. Total madness.

Registration was a disaster. They opened registration at 10am on Dec 11. At 9:45 the registration site Active.com was already returning Java server errors and "too busy" pages. It took 30 minutes of the three of us clicking reload to get though. No Linux browser support apparently.

Today I spent some time doing research on the route. The 2009 route has about 56 miles of climbing, 52 miles of descents, and 19 miles of "flats." I figure if we can average 8mph on the climbs, 18mph on the flats, and 25mph on the descents, and with about 50 minutes of stops that is 11 hours total. Ouch. Those averages are aggressive, but doable. Faster would be better of course, fewer hours in the saddle. The best way to make up time is climb faster. Simple eh? :)

I'm using the Motion Based site to research previous years routes. Good for looking at the ride profile, speed on the climbs and descents.

Needless to say, training is going to be tough. I'll need to loose some weight, work on endurance, and most importantly get my climbing legs. I'm looking forward to it.

Oh Deer!

2008-07-16T14:52:00.000-07:00

On July 5th I hit a deer, a baby deer to be precise, while out riding in the Los Altos Hills. It would as my (un)luck would have it, happen at the fasted point of my ride. I was traveling at 36mph at the time as the ride data from my Garmin 305 can attest.

Below is the Google street view of the accident scene:

View Larger Map

The deer ran out from behind the tree on the left. I had little time to react, I only managed to swerve left and clip it in the rear. the impact from the handlebars broke my scaphoid bone in my wrist and the subsequent impact with the pavement cracked the radius head in my elbow. I rolled over my left side, over my head, destroying my helmet, and then managed to land on my feet facing up the hill. I managed to run backwards and avoid falling down again. Really wish I have video.

The cast stays on for another 3 weeks, then a removable splint.

Laguna Seca June 4, 2008

2008-06-05T10:50:00.001-07:00

I attended another BMWCCA driving school, this time mid-week at Laguna Seca. The A/B group (I got promoted back to the A group, yeah!) was uncrowded and I had many traffic free laps.

Just prior to this event I switched to more narrow tires. From 255s front and 275s rear, to 235 s front and 255s rear. The numbers are the approximate width of the tire in millimeters. That translates to about an 0.8 inches of rubber per corner. I did this because the larger tires were rubbing against the wheel wells and suspension under heavy cornering. While I was quite happy with the setup, the overall stress of monitoring the wheels during events was annoying.

The smaller tires had me running almost 4 seconds slower at Laguna Seca yesterday. Some of that time is was the fact that the tires were not shaved and brand-sticker-new. Turn in was a bit squirmy and slow to take a set. I had to completely rewire my turn-in style. With the fatter, mature RA1s I could do a very aggressive turn in and then gas it through/out of the corner. The new, skinnier RA1s needed a more gradual turn in to take a set, and a more gradual addition of throttle.

As a result of the smaller tires, I found the car responded best to slowly dialing in steering and throttle on the way to the apex, then unwinding the steering slowly on exit. Adding throttle and steering at the same time violates the general rule of never adding throttle (or braking) at the same time as steering input. And if I got the mix wrong the car would understeer, but if I got it right the extra throttle kept the car balanced and turning.

The smaller tires are definitely forcing me to be a better driver. The fatter tires were masking some bad habits, so yesterday was full of learning better and smoother steering.

M Coupe @ Laguna Seca from B Dole on Vimeo.

I saw a couple M Coupes at Laguna Seca: Bill, Julian, and Sweet. Nice meeting you all. Most pledged to attend Dorkfest this year. Mark you calendar: July 13, 2008. Bryn

Random Fail

2008-05-21T22:19:00.000-07:00

I must be out of the security loop. I first learned about the latest random number bug via a cartoon. Schneier has a short summary of the problem.

This is very disturbing because it went unnoticed since September of 2006 in a number of Linux distributions. Both SSL certificates and SSH keys generated on these systems are affected.

This reminds me of a paper I wrote on a similarly weak RNG in Kerberos, with Steve Lodin and Gene Spafford 11 years ago. In the case of Kerberos Version 4, it used a RNG that depended only about 20 bits of entropy. The maintainers of Kerberos knew it was weak and implemented a much stronger one for Kerberos Version 5 and backported the new RNG to Version 4. However, the old RNG code was left in the source tree and due to a somewhat convoluted Makefile and source code, the new RNG was never called. The failure was masked by the existence of the old, weaker RNG code.

While working at Sun Microsystems, on the groundbreaking, but commercially unsuccessful SPF-100, I did more work on RNGs. These experiences confirmed to me the difficulty in writing a good, cryptographically strong, RNG.

The RNG that our group at Sun used was based on the RNG for PGP (the gold standard of crypto at the time). The seeding and generation of random numbers were fine, except the developer had gotten too clever. The algorithm used md5 to generate random bits based on a entropy pool. If you requested fewer bytes than were generated by the md5 block, those bits would be wasted. So instead, the algorithm saved the extra random bits for later. This was where the bug was, it wouldn't make any more random bits unless you asked for more than one md5 block worth of randomness. Session keys just happened to be short enough to never trigger new randomness. So while the Diffie-Hellman key exchange was secure, the underlying session keys were very weak.

Thankfully someone was debugging and noticed that the session keys stayed the same, even after they were renegotiated. Maybe it was Rich, I can't remember now.

The moral is: be very careful building your RNG and don't forget to test the randomness of the output. The Dieharder test suit is a good start. Make sure you test the right way too. Generate the random test data exactly like the RNG will get called in the code. Same number of bits, same pattern of calls. Then don't forget to retest before you ship. :)

Good luck, and stay random.

Write

Twitter

2008-04-22T13:30:00.000-07:00

I'm trying twitter. After one day, I think I see why its popular. It makes you more self aware of noteworthy and joyous events in your every day life. Events that otherwise would just be forgotten.

The down side is there is now a permanent record for every dumb, narcissistic, and trite thing you can thumb into your phone.

Sears Point March 8-9, 2008

2008-03-12T23:06:00.000-07:00

The M Coupe is back in working order after this little incident at Laguna Seca last December. The coupe was mostly ok, except for a bent SSR comp rim and a bent frame.

Fast forward to March 8 and 9th with the Golden Gate BMW Car Club of America. I had two great instructors and made some solid improvements to my line. I think I now have a solid handle on the esses (turns 8 and 8a, 9), one of the hardest combinations I've driven. It is much easier with the new suspension on the M coupe (the new bigger anti-sway bars make a big difference).

A big shout out to Paul, who hustled his stock '99 M coupe around Infineon. I never mastered the esses with the stock suspension, but he just nails it. I could car never get settled before the next turn. Way to go Paul.

Also, props to my friend Hakan, who after just one track event, got bumped up to driving the the C group. I have not doubt he'll be promoted again soon. :)

Now for some video:

Year 2038 Bug

2008-01-28T15:11:00.000-08:00

I was working at Sun Microsystems when the whole Y2K scare approached like an impending apocalypse. When the lights didn't go out as the big ball dropped, it was quickly forgotten. The real boogy man amongst UNIX programmers was the Y2038 bug. That is when UNIX time, a 32 bit number representing the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970, would wrap back to zero.

At the time I took solace in knowing I would have long since retired from programming by 2038. No worries.

I was wrong, so wrong.

Fast forward to Jan 19, 2008. Bottlecount.com logins stop working while I'm on a two week vacation in Costa Rica. I am blissfully ignorant of any problem and don't learn about it until I'm home again plowing though my unread emails. As it happens I was setting the login cookies to expire in 30 years, no need to annoy users with constant logins (are you listening Yahoo!?). However as of Jan 19, Perl's CGI::Cookies module thinks that +30 years is 1901. All of Bottlecount.com's cookies being expired by the browser, and all logins fail. Epoch fail. Sigh.

Two hours of debugging and two characters changed in my code, I won't have this problem again for another 25 years. By then I'll be retired. (insert sounds of knocking on wood)

Lagnua Seca 10/1/07

2007-10-21T00:02:00.000-07:00

I ran another one day, HPDE only, event with NASAproracing at Laguna Seca Raceway. I am in love with these events. There are just three run groups, with no novice group, so you know everyone there has at least a few events under their belts. More importantly, there are no races (and therefore fewer racers) crowding the sessions. With seven 20 minute sessions, and only 40 minutes in between to debrief, cool the car, grab something to drink, check out some of the other cars, pee, and maybe change the tape in the video camera, it is quickly time to grid again. It all makes for a Legend.... (wait for it) ... ARY day at the track.

I started the day on the wrong foot by driving off into the gravel trap during the first session at turn 11. I almost managed to drive out the other side, but ended up sinking the rear wheels deep into the gravel. Lewis Hamilton and I now have something in common. I missed the next session while I scooped and poked gravel out of every nook and cranny of my rear suspension and brakes. I determined the problem my next time out. I was catching my heel on the gas pedal under heavy braking. No wonder the car didn't want to stop. A quick software upgrade (to my brain) and everything was good for the rest of the day.

This was the M Coupe's first outing with its new rollcage, race seats, and full 6-point belts. The car is much easier and more relaxed to control now that I'm not sliding around in the seat. Kudos to TC Design for their great work.

I had one of the best single sessions of my life. I spent part of that session six chasing after a Ferrari 430. There was no keeping up with him on the straights, but I kept him in site for a few laps. I logged a new personal best for Laguna Seca (1:50.8), which came one lap after I stopped trying so hard to keep up with the 430. According to my Traqmate my theoretical best time is about .85 seconds faster, and I already have a two good ideas where I can pick up some time. I'm looking forward to breaking the 1:50 mark the next time back to Laguna.

Now for the obligatory photos and video...

iDrive You Crazy

2007-09-05T11:52:00.000-07:00

Here is a list of BMW iDrive design failures:

zoom for map is backwards: clockwise should zoom in, not out. (mentioned this previously)
clicking to Navigation dumps you into the menu (the last one you used) and not the map by default.
No way to full screen the map. Selecting the same map on the"helper" screen on the right gives you two maps (one twice as big as the other) that twist and turn *almost* in synchronisity. This is very distracting and dumb.
The maps leave out most street names. WTF? A map without street names? All three map schemes: North is always up, direction of travel, and prespective all suffer from this.
The navigation direction arrows are ambiguous and frequently lack street names. Just try to figure out if you're making a right, hard right, or second right off a highway off-ramp. All they end up doing is obscuring the (somewhat) useful map on the secondary screen.
Menus are slow. Response time to control clicks is slow enough to cause frequent multi-clicks. This compounds the driving distraction, because everytime you glance at the menu its one click behind causing more double clicks/jogs. Which in turn puts on in the wrong menu, which takes time to navigate back out.
Why can't I just jump between the ipod and radio input directly? I never, ever, want to listen to 2 seconds of the weather radio, then 2 seconds of the demo satellite radio on my way through the options.
I just can't figure out the custom climate control menu. The override button/knobs are intuitive and useful, but what's up with the menu that pops up? I'm tried all possible inputs and nothing changes. I guess I need to re-read the manual. Sigh.
Bookmark/memory buttons are worthless. You can program a phone number or address to them but nothing else useful. Lets say you want to bookmark the map, (because it takes a varying number of clicks to get back to it depending on what you were doing last) you can't. Want to book mark "Now playing" for your ipod? Nope. The speed alarm (chime when you hit 70mph for instance) no. I have yet to find anything useful that can be programmed to these buttons.
Bookmark/memory buttons are dumb. (So much so this deserves two bullet points) They don't know what can and cannot be programmed to them. They gleefully ask you to push them again to program them, then after a wait they inform you that the function you want cannot be programmed. With the helpful comment "---" displayed on the page. WTF?

The navigation has caused me to go astray even when it is right, becuase I'm so busy second guessing the crap direction and crap map that I've missed turns. I'm about to give up and never invoke it again. Ipod integration in particular:

no way to navigate to the now playing. You have to navigate to the "entertainment" menu and then ..... wait. Eventually the current song information comes up.
No speed sensitivity for scrolling. Forget about playing U2. Ever. It will take you a few minutes to scroll that far down in you play list, and if you're driving you'll probably discover that the menu times out and pops you out to the main ipod menu. Oh, and when you nav back, you're back at the top of the list.

Despite the iDrive headaches, I love the car. :)

BMW 550i: Iron Fist in a Velvet Glove

2007-08-14T21:08:00.000-07:00

Well my BMW 550i finally arrived a few weeks back. I'm still in the 1200 mile break-in period, so I'm still babying the car: keeping the revs and speed down. The car just wants to go, go, go. The car is well suited for the autobahn, and it takes a light touch on the gas pedal to keep it reigned in around town. First gear is very short, launching from 2nd gear is the automatic's default unless you engage sport mode, or manually kick it down into first.

Ah, the V8 is a thing of beauty. Even keeping it under 4500 rpm and less than full throttle, there is gobs of power.

The sport automatic gear shifters on the steering wheel are awesome. I find myself naturally pre-selecting the next gear when braking for a turns. Shifts are super smooth and very fast. Supposedly shifts are even faster with sport mode engaged, but its way too easy to rev to redline in sport mode, and I'm still keeping the revs down for the break-in period. In sport mode the gearbox shifts for you, even in manual shift mode.

I'm feeling better about BMW's choice to make each "paddle" shifter symmetric, i.e. pushing forward sifts down and pulling back shifts up for both left and right paddles. This is contrary to what I consider the logical left for down, right for up as it is for paddle shifting in F1 cars, the Ferrari 430, and video games. The Acura I test drove had it right. The other issue with the BMW paddles is they are mounted to the wheel and not the steering column, which makes shifting while the wheel is turned a confusing proposition. At least with the 550i its usually easy to find the up-shift with the wheel turned, but shifting down is problematic. You're much more likely to be accelerating out of the corning and up-shifting anyway.

I though hard about getting the (very rare) manual option and I have zero regret about getting the automatic.

I did not get the dynamic steering assist option that changes the steering rate depending on how fast you are going. The steering is a bit heavy. That said, it feels spot on for highway driving and for spirited back road driving was very exact, ie point the wheel and the car follows.

Here is my take on the various options:

Premium Sound: I ended up with the premium "L7" sound option. (I didn't get a custom option package, but found something very close.) I'm not a huge car audio fanatic, but its by far the best car audio I've experienced.
iPod integration: OK, I'm a Luddite, I never owned an iPod until I got this car. I'm still in the "Holy crap! I have every song I own in my car." phase. The iPod is completely controlled via the iDrive controller. One issue is that qith several hundred artists on my iPod, it can take a very long time to scroll through to the whole list to U2, for instance. I gave up somewhere around Billy Bragg. The ipod must have some speed scroll mode that doesn't translate to the iDrive. My Sonos system at home has a "power scroll" mode that allows you to jump to any letter in the list, the iPod interface needs this badly.
Heads up Display (HUD) : I didn't get this. I kinda wish I had now. I just cannot tell the difference between driving 60 and 90, so I spend a lot of time glancing down at the speed. With time, I'll get a better feel for speed/gear/revs but until then I set the speed limit alarm to chime every time I exceed 77mph. :)
Comfort Access: This is BMW's new keyless entry system. There is no need to take the key out of your pocket to enter, start, drive, or lock the car. This is something that sounded lame when I read about it, but is just super cool. I find myself annoyed that I have to get my key out to get into my house.
iDrive: I'm still getting used to it, but after just a few days its much easier. I still jog (push left/right/up/down) instead of rotate the controller occasionally, but less and less with practice. As a computer programmer, I consider it a point of honor to master it.
Bluetooth: Rocks. My phone is paired to the car, and besides having to reboot my phone once, is perfect. I can answer inbound calls hands free from the steering wheel and even make calls using the voice recognition: push a button and say: "Dial Susan Home." No special programming, it just scans the cell phone's address book.
Navigation: Its not as good as the Navigation in Susan's Honda Odyssey. The BMW system is not as intuitive, and the Honda Nav adds a touch screen. For instance, you rotate the iDrive controller clockwise to zoom out on the map, this is the logical opposite to me. Also, I can't figure out how to move the cursor on the BMW map. The Honda nav allows this and it is crazy useful for scanning ahead on the map to see your next turn or to find a nearby park for the kids to play in.
Real Time Traffic Updates: The nav system can use the real time traffic data to route around slow traffic. Which sounds cool, but in practice in the San Francisco Bay Area is useless. Having the nav system decide that the 101 is slow during rush hour and re-routing me to the El Camino Real is a cruel joke. Thankfully the option can be turned off

That's all for now. I will write a follow up once I've gotten a chance to play with the sport mode and with DSC turned off.

RIP San Jose Mercury News

2007-07-05T23:30:00.000-07:00

I've decided to let my subscription to the Mercury News laps. The paper has the stench of death all over it.

I really feel for all the people at the Merc. Those that are still there must be in hell, they've gone through a change in owners, relocation, and massive layoffs. I got to see AOL/TW do the same thing to Netscape first hand.

The business section sucks now. This was the most noteworthy part of the paper. The Merc used to have the best coverage of Silicon Valley business, VCs, Web2.0, and Startups. The reporters had intimate knowledge of players, companies and culture. Now it looks like a crapy blog on newsprint. Christ guys, if you're going to imitate a blog in print, use some color.

The final nail in the coffin was reading a Wall Street Journal one day and seeing more relevant Silicon Valley business stories than the Merc's own business section.

Luxury Sedan Shootout

2007-06-19T14:40:00.000-07:00

For father's day weekend Susan gave me all of Saturday to go car shopping. (Best wife ever!) So I took my father-in-law with me and together we had a lot of fun kicking tires and test driving.

Here is how they stacked up:

1. BMW 550i w/ sport package - I drove the steptronic transmission in sport mode, and manual shift mode. Both were excellent. Shifts were fast (almost aggressive) but completely smooth. In manual shift mode it will up-shift at redline, so making fast starts a no-brainer: just mash the gas pedal to the floor and take off. I hate automatics, but I LOVE this automatic transmission, it is a joy to drive. The brakes are firm and have an intimidate and strong bite. Lots of backseat space. Super comfortable seats and nice leather interior. The best seats and interior of the bunch. The front sport aero package looks like the current M5, which is to say it has a lot more character than the the standard 5er. I love the look of the sport wheels too.

Pros: Awesome V8 power. sport package aero kits looks good. Ipod integration. great handling with sport suspension. Nose bleed inducing brakes.
Cons: turn signal ( WTF?! I could not figure out how to turn it off. I really don't think I should have to read the manual to work the turn signals.) Otherwise perfect.

2. BMW 535i w/ sport package - yes, second place was the same car, but with the "smaller" engine. The new BMW twin turbo had all the other cars beat.

Pros: The engine. feels lighter than the 550i (because it is)
Cons: turn signal. Feels so plain after driving the 550i.

3. Mercedes E350 - This was the best and most comfortable ride. Not sporty. The engine is reigned in by the very sedate 7-speed automatic gear box. Extreme inputs from the gas and/or brake pedal are needed to wake up the beast.

Pros: SOLID feel. smooth boulevard ride. Nice, understated interior. classic looks.
Cons: not sporty.

4. Infinity M45 - This car makes a great first impression when you get in. Great, conformable seats. The most elegant dash and clean/sharp instrument cluster of the group. The control knob for the stereo and navigation was very iDrive like, but in a bad way, a worse way. It looked beautiful though. :) Very pleasing and powerful engine, rivaling the BMW 3.5l turbo. Great space and quality thoughout. Where the car fell down was on its electronic drivers aids: the computer is much too intrusive during driving. Even light throttle steering is rendered impossible without the computer kicking in to "save" you. It can be turned off, but with it on, anything but traveling in a straight line delivers a numb driving experience. It very sad that such a great car has been so completely castrated.

Pros: Mercedes should steal the M45s interior.
Cons: handling castrated by the stability control computer

5. Audi A6 - This car probably suffers a bit much in this review because it was driven immediately after the BMW 550i. Interior was the worst of the log. Very clean looking, but with inferior leather and by far the least comfortable. The the 3.2l engine, while sporting good stats, in reality didn't come close to the BMW 3.5l turbo. Under-steer was very pronounce, worst of the bunch. Even the M45 with its numb feeling did better. I really expected much more from this car. In its favor, it had the largest trunk of the group, by a large margin.

Pros: Lots of junk in the trunk
Cons: under-steer. Average engine power. below par interior.

6. Acura RL - My father-in-law goaded me into driving this one, he's a long time Acura fan. I'm a long time Honda fan, so I gave it an open mind. The car was nice. Least power of the group. The engine only comes alive above 4500 RPM (typical Honda) but then its all over too soon when it redlines at 6800RPM. It had the fewest gears: 5. The smallest trunk. Smallest backseat. To its credit was also the least expensive and the paddle shifters were crazy fun.

Pros: Its a "Honda." Its the cheapest.
Cons: least of everything.

So I ordered the 550i. I'm curious how I will adapt to iDrive. Despite reports of its lameness, I'm confident that I'm tech savvy enough to figure it out. I just hope I figure out that dang turn signal. In iDrive's defense, looking at the extremely cluttered dash of all the other cars it is clear that something like iDrive is absolutely necissary. They just need to get it "right."

Delivery in 6-8 weeks. I can't wait!

It Worked

2007-05-31T19:27:00.000-07:00

I just had to post from the road, (I'm in Elkhart, IN tonight) because I just couldn't let my last post linger at the top of my blog for too long. :)

Turns out the midwest isn't as vile as I remember.

I don't even mind the slow drivers so much anymore. They're a relief when you're trying to navigate a family filled Chevy mini-van along the I-80. Looking out on green trees and fields is a refreshing change from the typical California landscape. That and there is just so much space.

The wedding in Chicago went well. This was our first wedding where we took the kids along: It changes everything. Forget mingling at the reception, you're just trying to keep the kids from knocking over the cake and running into the kitchen.

The A-man got the virtual phone number of the flower girl, just 12 days his senior. He even got a kiss. I gave him a pointer, I told him to compliment her dress. He looked at me a little incredulously, but he tried it. I watched from afar, as the walked onto the dance floor, worked up the nerve and said: "Your dress is very pretty." She blushed and said "Thank you!". At which point he turned and shouted to me: "It WORKED!"

Boogers, Vomit, Poop and Parenting

2007-05-21T11:38:00.000-07:00

The last two weeks have been very eventful on the kid front. I got vomited on, big time. Our precious little E did the duce in the bathtub. The A-man woke up screaming with a nightmare at 3am. Susan got peed on. The whole family got a cold at the same time, requiring an emergency call to the in-laws for more kleenex. And we had a chicken pox scare, that would have upended our next 3 weeks of travel.

All I can think about is: how much fun it is to be a parent.

Did you try Reboot?

2007-05-09T15:19:00.000-07:00

The weather has taken a turn for the warmer here in "God's Country", also know as Sunnyvale, California to the less fortunate who don't live here. Not just warm, down right hot. Thank goodness for air conditioning.

Only our AC is on the blink, literally. The computer thermostat was blinking red-blue-red-blue and displaying "Call for service" and a 1-800 number. I have to admit, my first reaction was "Cool! My thermostat can do a self diagnostic. Star Trek here we come." Then the temperature hit 92 degrees outside. Very un-cool.

So what do I do? I power cycle the AC unit at the circuit breaker. No good. Time to call the repair man.

Two days of record heat later, the repairman arrives, and what does he do? He power cycles the furnace. Problem solved.

Now why didn't I think of that.

Garmin 305 Review

2007-04-09T16:30:00.000-07:00

I'm not really looking to turn my blog into a product review site, but I cannot stay silent about the Garmin Edge 305. I needed a new bike computer and really wanted something with a heart rate monitor. I used to own a very expensive Polar heart rate/cycle computer but it is simply awful, so awful I may have to make a whole post to do it justice.

At any rate, I was leery of buying something that had too many features. I just wanted something to tell me how fast I was going, how far I'd ridden, and maybe my heart rate. Virginia at Palo Alto Bicycles convinced me I really wanted the Garmin Edge 305. She was right: it rocks.

I won't go into the feature list, that's what the web is for. Suffice it to say it is addictive. Once you've started using it, you need more, like a drug. If you forget the heart rate chest strap for a ride, or find your battery dead before a ride it makes you want to drive back home to get your strap, or wait an hour for your computer to charge. You want (dare I say need) it that bad.

If you bike, you owe it to yourself to buy one of these.

Here is a link to a recent ride posted on motionbased.com, and a link to the route on Google Maps.

Laguna Seca 3/21/07

2007-04-02T20:33:00.000-07:00

I spent a beautiful Wednesday at Laguna Seca raceway, with NASA Proracing.
My last track outing in November was mostly an attempt to get my head back into driving fast, and taking some time to share the fun with Ron riding shotgun. As I wrote then, lots of stuff was out of sorts: tires, track, and confidence.

Lagnua Seca is one of my favorite tracks, and I have had more track time here. I've logged the most virtual track time at Laguna as well via the best video game ever: Sega's Ferrari F355 Challenge. That and having taken the Skip Baber 3-day racing class here doesn't hurt. So I felt right at home even on the first lap.

I got faster as the sessions progressed, and ended clocking a 1:52. Which is 5 seconds faster than my previous best, from the last time I drove the M Coupe there in 2002. I'm still analyzing the Traqmate data, but two mistakes i was frequently making were turning in a little too late for turn 4 and turn 8. According to the driver of the Cayman S that was lapping behind me for a while, I'm not carrying as much speed as I could though turn 11 either. Needless to say, its important I get back there soon to work on that. :)

The only place I was loosing to the Cayman S was in the braking zones. The brakes just didn't feel very inspiring this outing. Time for some racing brake pads.

Here is a short video including my second fastest lap. Its a tad more interesting: I pass a miata and spend the whole rest of the lap chasing some 911s and keeping ahead of a red Porsche CaymanS.

A Bumpersticker Worth 1,000 Posts

2007-03-20T11:09:00.000-07:00

From BoingBoing via R. Stevens of Dieselsweeties.

eSUCKling

2007-01-03T11:54:00.000-08:00

I, like several of my friends and many other Flickr addicted geeks, was enthralled when I read the specs for the eStarling. A wi-fi enabled LCD picture frame that automatically downloads images via RSS. Specifically Flickr RSS feeds. I pre-ordered mine in November. When it finally arrived late December (just in time for Christmas gifting), excitement quickly turned to disappointment, and then slowly to hate after an hour or more of fiddling. Around midnight on Dec 23, I had decided I could not give the 4 other frames I had purchased as gifts. Thankfully, there were other gifts and I did not have to resort making my own hand drawn self-portrait and decorate the frame with dried macaroni. My 3-year son beat me to that idea anyway.

Here is my eStarling review in eight bullet points:

Flickr RSS feed never worked.
LCD quality very poor. The image would flicker, the color is not vivid , and resolution is poor. Completely the opposite of the Adobe flash demo on the eStarling homepage.
LCD dimensions, a 16:9 ratio, required resizing/cropping every photo to fit on the screen without blank space.
The WiFi range is unusably. I was able to get connectivity, but only less then 10 feet from the WiFi hub.
The actual dimensions of the LCD in pixels is not in the documentation, I had to google for reviews. [The online support has added this info since then.] It is a paltry 480 x 234 pixels.
The documentation is very sparse. It consists of just a postcard sized quickstart guide. It is not made clear that you cannot use the frame at all (ie via a memory card) without the wifi connecting.
Status messages on LCD is uninformative. See the photo above.
Menu navigation on LCD (slide show mode 6sec/10sec/stop) option flickers on the screen for a moment. It takes a few times through before you can read any one of the messages.

Gizmodo has several posts panning the eStarling:
eStarling Hands-On Update: Buyer Beware
eStarling Woes: Digital Picture Frame Shipped with Wrong AC Adapter

The one saving grace has been that ThinkGeek has a very slick customer experience, including making returns. Kudos to ThinkGeek for putting their customers first. Now, if only they vetted the products they carry.

Patented

2006-12-13T22:38:00.000-08:00

Check it out, I have a patent.

US Patent 6,628,786
Distributed state random number generator and method for utilizing same

Thank you Google Patent Search, or else I never would have known.

Happy Birthday to Me

2006-12-06T10:02:00.000-08:00

Just ordered my new bike, it should arrive just in time for my birthday. The bike will look similar to the one pictured above, full Campy Record, with Campy Neutron wheels, and speedplay X-1 pedals (nach).

I test road a BMC Pro Machine SLC 01 on a whim, and didn't really expect to find a bike better than my current custom steel Cherry. I was just looking from something lighter that rode as well. I was supprised at just how well the BMC rode. The BMC felt alive and eager, very eager. I was riding a couple gears higher than I usually do on every part of my test ride. On the decent down Page Mill, I thought I was stuck in the small chainring, but I had in fact spun out my highest gear. Duuuuude!

Confidence

2006-10-20T23:25:00.000-07:00

I finally got some track time again. It has been over a year since the last time I had been on a track. I felt very rusty. For company I had Ron and Heather with my. Always nice to have support at the track. I planned for this to be a super causal track weekend to get reaquanted with driving and give some ride alongs to Ron and Heahter in the process. Heather caught a cold, so most of the passenger time went to Ron.

The first of the two days was spent learning the track again, we were running it counter-clockwise, the opposite direction I was used to. I also spent the day working on passing, and more frequently, letting cars by. I was paranoid of holding cars up, driving my mirrors, not looking up... The list goes on. Long story short, I could only improve. :)

Day two went better. I started to pick up the pace and handle traffic better. I got some good instruction from a pair of fellow M Coupe owners, which helped.

But really it all came down to confidence, confidence in my car and my ability to drive it. I set my fastest laps in the final session of the second day. A full 3 seconds faster than the previous session. The difference? Confidence. I just didn't lift (as much). Just look at the graph: The red line is the faster lap, and blue the slower (as seen in the video). The big difference was not lifting through the big sweeping turns. To be honest, I didn't think I was pushing any harder.

This event was the first time I used my new Traqmate data logger. So I have GPS, speed, and acceleration data for my laps. Here is a link to a movie of a (slow 2:26) lap of Buttonwillow in the CCW configuration (30M) with the data overlay.

For the record, my fasted lap from the last session was a 2:23. After reviewing the segment times for the last session, that fastest lap didn't have a single fastest segment time. If I could manage to string together my fastest segments, I would have been turning 2:20s. Yikes. Here's hoping my next track post is titled "Consistency."

[edited to add YouTube inline video.]

E-Poopbig

2006-09-13T13:41:00.000-07:00

I've been using Google calendar, and have gotten Susan and several other family members using it as well. It has been a great way to co-ordinate planning, allowing Susan to know when I'm scheduled for work events and for me to know when things are happening with the house and the rest of the family.

Today I noticed Susan is recording my 6 month old daughter's BMs in the calendar. In case you were wondering, September 2nd was an "e-poopbig" day.

Summer is Officially Over

2006-08-31T16:15:00.000-07:00

My son (the "A-man") is staring school today. Pre-school to be precise. He's very excited about it. Every time we have mentioned school, he says "Let's go right now." regardless if it is the middle of lunch or 8pm at night. He is trying to find out as much as possible about this thing called school. He strikes up conversation with his Dad/Mom/Nana by saying: "Can you talk to me some more about school?" His subtle way to have you tell him everything you know about his teacher, activities, anything. I hope his enthusiasm holds after he's actually been to school. :)

His class will consist of playing, drawing, painting, using paste, reading stories, singing, and eating snacks.

Not the school I remember. My earliest memories of school are of my kindergarten teacher berating me for drawing outside the lines and for trying left handed scissors when I'm clearly right handed. In retrospect, it felt like bootcamp for glueing, cutting, and coloring.

Overheard in Palo Alto

2006-08-22T13:52:00.000-07:00

Sister-in-law: How do you post cameraphone photos to flickr?
Wife: Its simple! Just send them to Bryn's phone, and he'll upload them.

I Love (and Hate) the Google Spam Filter

2006-08-14T10:16:00.000-07:00

I love Gmail. It rocks, and is quite simply the best email client ever. I really appreciate that I don't have to run my own spam filter anymore. Spamassassin is the best, and I still run it in series for my own domains that get forwarded to gmail, but I've stopped tweaking the rules long ago.

However, why does it take Gmail 5000 emails with:

****CDPN****CDPN****CDPN****CDPN****CDPN****CDPN****CDPN****CDPN****CDPN****CDPN****CDPN****CDPN****CDPN****CDPN****

In the header to figure out that it is Spam? Sometimes I think Gmail is just using me as a human spam filter to train its gigantic neural net.

P.S. I find it rather ironic that Blogger (AKA Google) spell checker does not have either "Google" or "Gmail" in its dictionary.

Bug or Not?

2006-07-24T13:58:00.000-07:00

If you have ever found a weird looking bug, and wondered WTF it is, this is the web site for you. What's That Bug ( http://www.whatsthatbug.com/ ) You just email them your digital photo of a mystery bug and they find out what it is.

God I love the Internet.

Useless Organs

2006-07-05T20:34:00.000-07:00

Had a odd July 4th . Susan got an appendicitis and had her appendix out on Monday. Everything went smoothly, she was up and walking about hours later. A total of 24 hours in Stanford Hospital from the time she walked in the ER until we wheeled her the next day.

One week later she is A-OK. Hopefully the doctor gives her the OK to start lifting small things, like the baby, tomorrow.

Best Wife Ever

2006-06-22T15:40:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note to gloat. I have the best wife ever.

Tru dat.

Back from Mexico

2006-06-22T15:22:00.000-07:00

Sunset
Originally uploaded by randomstring.

I've been back from Mexico for a few weeks, but I wanted to test posting flickr images to my blog. I tend to photo-blog most of the time anyway, because I don't like typing complete sentences. :)

First Post (again)

2006-06-21T14:34:00.000-07:00

So 360.yahoo.com has been broken for a few days, preventing any new posts. (Awesome blog product Yahoo dudes.) So I'm defecting to a yet another Google service. Even though blogger has a bad rap, it is better than 360 (duh).

Why did I start with 360? because I didn't want to have to think about the bloggin platform, I just wanted to type and be done. I already wasted 2 days trying to set up Typepad, just right, then lost momentum. It was another 6 months before I tried to start a blog. So, in a nutshell: I'm lazy.

So here we are. At some point I will port all my old posts to here.