Muvico

Went to Arundel Mills last night for the first time. It's this huge "outlet" mall at Rtes. 295 and 100 in Maryland. I got a good deal on a ski jacket at Sun & Ski Sports -- all their ski stuff was on end-of-season clearance. They had a treadmill-like thing that you could "ski" on, but I declined their offer of 15 minutes for $7. Somehow, it just didn't seem the same.

Then we went to Chevy's for dinner. The fact that they didn't have a table ready was annoying until we went into the bar and discovered that they had trivia. I ended up playing a pretty decent game of Spotlight, and getting to #1 on the bar's high scores at the game. Then again, after only being in for 3 questions (out of 15) of the previous game (Triviaoke), I was #9. So it's not a trivia hot spot.



By then it was almost time for the movie. We went to see it at the Muvico Egyptian 24. First of all, Muvico is a pretty silly name for a movie theater chain. It's a Florida company that builds these mega-stadium theaters. Ever since I've started going to theaters with stadium seating, I've gotten to be a bit of a snob about them and am willing to drive further to see movies there as opposed to anywhere else. Somehow I became under the mistaken impression that O, Brother Where Art Thou? was playing there. When we went to buy tickets, we were disabused of that notion. So, we got tickets for Down to Earth, a movie starring Sam Neill about the Apollo moon landings and the attempt to get an Australian satellite dish to help televise it.

At this point, you may be saying, "Jon, don't you mean The Dish? Isn't Down to Earth that lame Chris Rock remake of Heaven Can Wait?" Well, smarty-pants, you're a step ahead of me, as we discovered when the opening credits started to roll. Oops. Not wanting to subject ourselves to what we were fairly sure was going to be a not-so-thrilling movie, we slunk out.



And changed theaters to Chocolat, which was just starting. Thank goodness. All in all an enjoyable movie about a woman who opens a chocolate store in a small village in France in 1960 and upsets the town's existing social order. I guess the one thing that bothered me about the film is that it seemed to be proselytizing the transformative power of chocolate -- which is really silly, if you stop and think too long. (So don't.) The movie grasps for profoundness, but in the end is really just...sweet. Which is fine with me.

Why I Don't Watch Baseball Much Anymore

"There's no sense in rooting for a total loser, so let's cross the Twins right off the list. If you already are a Twins fan, well, that's your cross to bear, and you can't expect the rest of us to join your lonely crusade."
--Hugo Lindgren, "The Free-Agent Fan", Slate.

Greenville, South Carolina

I just got back from a weekend at the SERMON conference in Greenville, South Carolina. (SERMON = SouthEastern Regional Meeting On Numbers) This is my 8th straight SERMON; I'd have to rate it 3rd in terms of location behind the two in Charleston.

I wasn't expecting to enjoy the town that much. I had been in Columbia, South Carolina the previous weekend, and didn't expect Greenville to be an improvement. (Columbia ranks #5 in terms of SERMON locations -- it hosted in '98.) For some reason, I flew in Friday morning, even though the first talk wasn't until 4. I hopped into my rental car (a Mitsubishi Galant -- this Avis Preferred thing is paying off) and drove off in search of adventure.

In truth, I expected to end up at the mall watching a movie to kill a couple of hours. But as I drove around, I followed the signs to the art museum. Well, I thought, this might be mildly amusing. What are they going to have here, that I can't see much better back home in DC? Well, as it turns out, 24 watercolors by Andrew Wyeth. This was a much more impressive museum than I expected. I also enjoyed the Casselli exhibit. Other than that, they mostly had Southern works, mostly realist. I also looked at an exhibit by Nancy Grossman. "Grossman is best known for her sensual and often brutal wooden sculptures of heads, wrapped in black leather skins and adorned with spikes, guns, zippers, and masks." Uh huh.

Then I drove downtown for lunch. It has a really nice downtown. Main Street is lined with a lot of nice restaurants and vaguely interesting shops (perhaps more interesting to those who shop more than I do). Later that evening someone described it as what Athens (GA) would be like if inhabited by adults. I check into my hotel, the Hyatt Greenville and relaxed for an hour before heading out to Furman.

Things I learned about Furman this weekend:

• Their sports teams are the "Paladins". To a D&D fan like myself, this was pretty cool. I tried to go to the bookstore on Saturday to find some nerdwear, but it was closed.
• One of their cheers is "FU once, FU twice, FU three times, FU all the time!"
• They provide rides to get students safely around campus, to local drugstores and other places. They chose to label the flyer giving the times for this as "Escort Services Schedule". If it hadn't been for my respect for public safety, I would have taken it.

The conference was nice. The talks weren't as interesting as they were last weekend, but it was good to see friends from grad school (as well as various profs).

Sunday, after the conference was over, I broke out my skates for the first time this year and skated around the Furman campus for a while. I was a bit unsteady. I'm not sure about the transference of any physical skills from skiing, but I think mentally the skiing has helped -- I know better how to identify areas for improvement, take appropriate risks -- and of course, I re-learned the fact that when I'm not paying attention, I end up on my butt.

A good weekend, but I'm looking forward to being home for the next month.

More Travel

I've also updated my travel page with maps showing where I've been in North America and Europe.

The maps come from the CIA World Factbook, so I know they're in the public domain. I used an editor to add blue dots where I've been. As with the travel page, the maps are a work in progress.

Stats

I found out that my web hosting company provides me with stats on things such as which pages of mine are getting the most hits. Teddy's page is getting more than twice the hits as mine! I hope he doesn't let it go to his head. So I cleaned up the page, updated Teddy's age, and shrunk the file size on some of the pictures so it'll load faster.

The most popular back issue of this weblog is Viewer Mail, presumably because it contains the phrase "Lisa Bangert", which gets searched for a lot from the UK. Hmm, I guess this issue will now soar in popularity.

It's gratifying to see that my math pages are getting a number of hits.

Korea Pics

I now have 20 pictures from my trip to Korea on-line here. Enjoy.

Travel

I've started a travel page. It still needs a lot of work, but right now it contains a list of most of the trips I've taken in the past 8 years. Boy -- I get around. I think I may be missing a trip to Wisconsin in there somewhere. I'm linking to write-ups of recent trips -- maybe this will inspire me to go back and write about trips of yore.

Goldener Adler

I just got my hotel information for my May trip to Innsbruck. I'll be staying at the Goldener Adler hotel. I was impressed that the place I stayed in Korea had hosted Clinton and Gorbachev. The Goldener Adler has hosted Mozart and Goethe. Advantage, Austria.

March Madness Update

I'm tied for 2nd in Ben's pool, one point behind Ben (hmm). I'm in the 97th percentile overall on Yahoo!, which is pretty darn good. My main concerns in the next round are the fact that I've picked Wake Forest and North Carolina to advance, and they're both already out. Darn that ACC. Fortunately, all my Final Four teams are still alive.

Free Tacos for Everybody

This is hilarious.

"Taco Bell is offering a free taco to everyone in the United States if the core of the Mir space station hits a floating Taco Bell target placed in the South Pacific."

March Madness

Well, so far so good. Take a look at my brackets. I got 11 of 16 right last night, but more importantly, the only second "winner" to go down was Ohio State. And I picked them to lose to Duke. That puts me in a 4-way tie for 3rd (out of 13) in Ben's pick set.

Afton Alps

Last night I went skiing at Afton Alps. It was an interesting experience, different from other ski places I had been to, and a great deal of fun.

I drove less than an hour east of the Twin Cities to Afton Alps, which is right on the Minnesota-Wisconsin border. The first thing that was "different" was that instead of parking and buying a lift ticket at a ticket window, I bought it at a kiosk as I drove in -- like I was entering a park. I drove around until I found a rental shop -- as it turned out I drove right by the nearest rental shop, a mistake that I would come to regret.

I went into the "Meadows" rental shop and marveled at the fact that I was the only one in there. I leisurely picked out a spot to fill out my rental form. When I was done, I looked up and noticed that about 50 middle schools students (completely unsupervised) had entered the shop, pushing, yelling and giggling like middle school students do. I quickly moved towards the front of the line with my completed rental form, but about ten kids (savvier than I) were already there, filling out their forms while waiting in line. (To be sure, it made no sense for me to do the same when I thought myself the only one in the shop. Eventually I made it to the front and went over the counter to get my boots.

I told the guy I wore size 11, and he handed me some boots which I tried on. Well, I tried to try on. My feet wouldn't even fit in the boot. Maybe he was so overwhelmed he automatically grabbed boys' 11 shoes; I don't know. So it was back into the boot line to get boots from a woman who apparently was more careful selecting boots. Then I picked out my skis -- 170s again. Upon reflection, I think I may have gotten type II skis. Oh, well. Then ended up working. I then picked up my poles and waited in line to check out. And waited and waited.

The middle school students were taking a lot of time getting out of there. I was reminded of what the world looked like through middle school eyes. "Snowboarding is better than skiing. Skiing sucks. I've never been downhill skiing a day in my life." Fortunately, that was met by a perceptive, "Then how do you know you wouldn't like skiing?" which stunned the other party into silence and, one can hope, a bit of reflection.

When I was 3 or 4 munchkins from the front, a rental shop employee took pity on me and pulled me out of the teeming masses of prepubescence to check me out. Escape! It was 5:00, and I was hitting the ski slopes.

If you look at Afton Alps' trail map, you'll see it's fairly large -- at least compared to the other places I'd been. That meant that I had to figure out how to get from where I was to other parts of the hill. I started out in the lower left in the Meadows area and skied "Susie's Meadow", "Daisy's Meadow" and "Maggie's Meadow". My confusion was amplified by the fact that "Mary's Meadow" has been replaced by a half-pipe -- a fact not reflected on the ski maps. After a few of these runs, I was ready to head somewhere else -- but how?

I overheard a father asking his kids if they wanted to ski on another part of the mountain. I listened closely to hear how they were planning to ski there. Nope -- Dad was bringing the car around. Well, that wouldn't do. I tried again; this time I skied on the other side of the half-pipe and picked up "Mickey's Meadow" -- a blue slope. Gasp. Well, I made it down by skiing fairly slowly. The worst part of it was the ice patches that had developed in the middle.

I was away from the area I started in, and a few more trips down I tried skiing over to the next lift. That brought me "Polly's Powder" and "Ruthie's Meadow" -- more green (beginner) slopes, if the names didn't give that away. Eventually I made it to "Paula's Pass" (or was that "Patti's Pass") -- a blue, which I took down to the other base lodge. I was running into trouble because I didn't have much cash in my pockets and the food courts didn't take charge cards. I'd have to head back to the Meadows to my locker -- but not before skiing down "Christina's Trail" and "Nancy's Nursery" (again, more greens). The big lift to "Lisa's Lane" went over an interesting variety of terrain. Apparently during the summer they have golf there; it was somewhat disconcerting to see a ball washer sticking out of the snow.

After a little refreshment, I headed back out and tried out most of the same slopes again. Still, I hadn't made it to the "Highlands" area, and I wanted to try more blue (intermediate) slopes before I was done. I cut across to "Renee's Ridge" and then was on "Dawn's Highlands". Uh-oh. It was late (almost 9), I was getting tired, the slopes were icing up, it was dark and this was a steeper pitch than I was used to. So I skied very slowly down to a lift at the bottom. Thankfully I made it without getting clocked by one of the skiers and boarders whizzing down "Bernadine's Highlands".

Then the question was...what would I do when I got to the top? The trail map was confusing. (At one point, I was looking at it, and a member of the ski patrol came over to give me directions. "What are you looking for?" "What's that slope there?" "Hmm; I don't know. Let me see your map.") I decided I would definitely head back to the Meadows by going left. I did so and got to the top of what I later figured out was "Britta's Run". The slope was fairly dark, the chair lift there wasn't running, and there wasn't another person around. But heck, there was no "trail closed" sign, so it was down the hill. I eventually found my way back to the top of "Renee's Ridge" and by keeping left of that made it back to the Meadows. Whew.

It was definitely exciting. I skied almost all of the green trails there and worked a handful of blues into my day. I worked on controlling my speed and started getting better at completing my turns. I definitely improved at being able to come to a stop on an incline. The size and variety of terrain whet my appetite. I'd like to go to one of the bigger ski areas. But it's getting late in the season, and my travel plans lean towards South Carolina, so we'll see...

Some of these are disturbing...

I'm #5 on Yahoo! for "Egyptian Rat Screw".

...and #6 on Google for "rat screw".

I'm #3 on Google for "dali autumnal cannibalism".

I'm #34 on Yahoo! for "dungeon women".

I'm #7 on Yahoo! for "convention freaks".

I'm #10 on Yahoo! for "sling bikinis".

I'm #34 on Yahoo! for "NUDISM MISS".

Disturbing Search Requests

This article at the Village Voice points to a site called Disturbing Search Requests.

So I'm not the only one who gets people looking for Katie Couric Soles (though what's disturbing about this is the same search turns up someone with a Katie Couric obsession and a foot fetish) or Cthulu pictures (which helpfully makes me realize I've misspelled Cthulhu).

Buck Hill

I went skiing at Buck Hill last night with my co-worker F. (Digression. I decided to start using initials -- following West Coast Girl -- to represent recurring co-workers. F was represented in earlier entries as the vegetarian who ended up renting the Rover Seventy-Five in England.)

It's getting a bit warm for decent conditions to ski in Maryland in March, so using this trip to Minnesota for some late-season skiing seemed like a good idea. Buck Hill was maybe a 15 minute drive around for us, which also made things easier than making a 2-hour trip to go skiing back home. The facilities were definitely on a smaller scale -- you bought your lift ticket and paid for your rental in the ski shop. Unfortunately, there was no good place to change outside of the men's room -- meaning there was no good place to change.

F. had never really been skiing before, so the first thing we did was head over to the beginner hill. (If you look at the trail map, that's "New Beginner Area".) We used the rope tow -- a new experience for me -- to go partway up the hill so he could practice. He was about as awkward as I remember being my first time out, and he had a harder time standing up. After skiing down the NBA a few times, I left him to practice before his lesson and went to the "Gawn Double Chair".

Buck Hill is in the middle of the suburbs (apparently the suburbs grew up around it), which led to a few interesting things. For one, I could use my cell phone on the lifts -- which I did just for the dorky "guess where I'm calling from" thing. That was a little bit tricky, as the chair lifts didn't have restraining bars. But, I survived. Also, on my way up one time I heard sirens in the distance. When I got to the top, there was a trail of smoke blowing above the ski area, and I could see a house on fire. Too bad for the people involved, but it was otherwise kind of neat.

I then skiied down J.T.'s Half-Pipe (not sure if I was supposed to do that), Jabar, and Teacher's Pet. After getting practice there, and seeing that F was into his lesson, I decided it was time to hit the blue slopes. I headed to the Quad Chair, and rode to the top. This seemed to commit me, as the trail map they posted at the bottom seemed to imply that I couldn't get down via a green slope.

Unfortunately, once I had gotten to the top, there were no clear signs. The clearest sign was the one that said "Easiest Way Down", so I followed that rather than risking ending up on the black diamonds (although the starting gate they had on Milk Run tipped me off). This led me down Meadows, on the other side of the hill. That was slightly annoying, as the Miner Double Chair on that side of the mountain wasn't running. The next time down, I was sure to finish with sufficient momentum to carry me most of the way to the Quad Chair.

After a few runs down Meadows, I went back to check on F's lesson. He was really lucky -- he was the only one who had signed up for the lesson, so he got an individual lesson at the group lesson price. Speaking of prices, this place was pretty inexpensive. It was only $35 for a lift ticket and a rental, and my dinner (which I had about then) consisted of a brat, chips and a bottled water for $5. They were going down Teacher's Pet and the NBA, so I skiied in that area for a while. When they were done, I went over to see how F was doing. He was having a lot of fun, but was still a little intimidated by the chair lift and Teacher's Pet. So he said he'd ski in the NBA for a while. So I decided to head over to Pet's Peeve, a blue trail.

It didn't end up being that bad at all. I skiied across rather than down it, and never quite lost my balance. On the other hand, I now see why people complain about the 300' vertical drop at Buck Hill. On the greens, I didn't really mind, since that leads to slower skiing. Also, many of the greens I'm used to don't go to the top of the slope anyway. But going down Pet's Peeve was very, very quick. I decided to end on that note, and we went back to the hotel.

All in all, I enjoyed Buck Hill. It was slightly less "modern" than the Pennsylvania resorts I've been to, but not in any way I can really complain about. It wasn't crowded at all, and the slopes, while shorter, were pretty nice. The price was cheap, the people were stereotypially Midwestern friendly, and the price and location were right. The magazine First Tracks Online has an interesting article about Buck Hill.

Jensen's Supper Club

Greetings from Minnesota. I had (thankfully) an uneventful trip. A highlight was getting to use my Avis Preferred membership. No going through the rental counter; just walked out to the parking garage, saw my name on an electronic bulletin board, went to the space number indicated, and drove to the exit where I showed ID to the guard. I was on my way.

I checked into my usual hotel, relaxed for a little bit and headed out to dinner. Our "team dinner" was at Jensen's Supper Club. The last time I went there, I came away disappointed. Maybe my expectations were too high; maybe I just shouldn't have ordered the fish. This time, my expectations were pretty low, and I ordered the prime rib. (The fish was the "house speciality", but the prime rib is the "house favorite" -- or was it the other way around?) It was very enjoyable, and dessert was Booker's Bourbon. I've started ordering small batch bourbon as dessert; it's been fairly enjoyable. So far I've had Knob Creek, Sam Houston and now Booker's. I'm not sure which is my favorite -- they've all been fairly good.

Anyway, this morning, I wasn't overly thrilled with my decision last night to have the bourbon, but I've recovered fine while sitting through the morning meetings.

See Jon Ski

I've posted pictures from ski trips past here.

Time Shock

Well, I tried to wander around before the lectures yesterday, but the falling snow put the kibosh on that idea. If I'm similarly stymied this morning, at least I have the bus tour this afternoon.

I did wander out later during the morning coffee break -- partially to look around and partially to get away from all the smoke. The smoke in my room has lessened somewhat, which means that much of it was probably due to the previous inhabitant. But the section of the hotel with the conference contains a lot of people, and thus a lot of smokers. It always shocks me to see someone lighting up at a random place indoors. I want to say, "Hey you can't do that," but of course they can; it's only my American sensibility (and that's even a sensibility limited to parts of the country).

Speaking of the part of the hotel with the conference, an adjacent room featured a metal detector and a bunch of cops hanging around outside. The next time I walked past it, I put my glasses on and saw a sign with the Korean flag, another flag and the words "Welcome Reception." Then it was off to the Flags of the World web site to identify the other flag as the Mongolian flag. I did a news search, and sure enough, President Bagabandi of Mongolia was due to visit Cheju. Cool.

Last Friday, George warned me about the effect of the time difference. He said he had stayed up on the entire flight to Kuala Lumpur last year, and then he had gone to sleep right afer arriving -- the standard suggestion for dealing with jetlag. He said everything was fine until about 8 PM the next day, when he was overcome with sleep, only to wake right up at all hours of the night.

I, by contrast, napped some on the flight over. But I sayed up most of Korean "Monday" and went to bed around 10 PM. I woke up at about 6:30 and felt pretty good. I went down and had an overpriced breakfast at the "Cozy Cafe", checked my e-mail and went to the morning talks. I was feeling pretty good; maybe I was better able to handle this time difference than George. Wrong. After lunch, I was dead. During an endless series of 25 minute talks, my modus operandi was: listen to the first 5 minutes of the talk, decide the speaker didn't have anything interesting to say that couldn't be gleaned from the proceedings, nap for 20 minutes, wake up, clap, repeat. I went to my room and took a nap before the reception, wandered around there for a while, checked my e-mail (yeah, I'm obsessive) and went back to sleep.

I did, however, beat George in the sleeping through the night department. There are some areas you just shouldn't try to compete with me -- probable primality testing and sleeping are the two that come to mind. I made it through the next day (Wednesday) pretty well, though I decided to get to bed by about 9...for some reason sleeping 9-6, which corresponds to sleeping 7 AM to 4 PM Eastern Time, seemed like a good compromise. Well, at least it gets me up and using the computers before everyone else.

Smells Like Greensboro

I'm trying not to be jaded. Really. I recognize how lucky I amm to be able to jet around the world. In the past twelve months, I've been to Belgium, England, California (3 times), Minnesota (twice), Arizona (twice), Michigan (twice) and Illinois. But here I am in Korea and the biggest culture shock I'm having is from how much everyone smokes. My hotel room reeks just as much as ones I've had in Greensboro, North Carolina and in Winnipeg.

Landing in Seoul went smoothly. Immigration and customs, I'm sure, will be more of a hassle in the US on the way back. I looked around for a while and found the shuttle bus to the domestic terminal. It's funny how my experience traveling was more important than the language/culture barrier when figuring out where to go.

Everything went so smoothly, in fact, that I managed to get on an earlier flight to Cheju. For whatever reason, I was in economy class on this leg. No matter; it was only an hour to Cheju, an island off the southern coast of Korea. Once there, I pretty easily found the No. 600 bus to Chungun, the resort area where my hotel is located. Looking out the window, I could see the streets of Cheju City...lots of neon, Korean characters everywhere, but other than that not clearly so much different than English cities. After a bumpy hour crossing the island, I arrived at the Cheju Shilla hotel.

It had taken me until I got to Korea to find my hotel in my guidebook, so I had had some trepidation about the quality. I needn't have worried. When I finally did find it, it was labeled "super-deluxe". Pictures of world leaders who stayed here -- Clinton, Gorbachev (in his pre-Pizza Hut, Soviet leader days) -- adorned the walls. Actually, you could say that it was more of a culture shock staying in a fancy-schmancy hotel than the fact I was in Korea.

After checking into my room, I headed for a conference tutorial session that was already in progress (it hadn't been on the initial program, so I hadn't planned to arrive in time for it). After a few minutes on braid groups, I was feeling pretty groggy, as well as concerned that my house might be in ashes half a world away. So I ducked out and headed for the hotel's Internet center. The price was 5000 won for 30 minutes of service. That seemed like a fair price to check on the continued existence of my home, but there didn't seem to be anyone to pay. Oh, well, an ever fairer price! The alarm appeared to be eminently false, so I dashed off a few quick, "look, I'm in Korea" e-mails and headed off to bed.

It's somewhat easy to forget where I am when I'm in the hotel, especially during the talks. Fortunately, one look out the window reminds me. To the north is the snow-capped peak of an extinct volcano. To the south is the sea with a fleet of what appear to be fishing boats anchored just off shore. I'm up pretty early -- it's already Wednesday here -- and the sun is about to rise, so I'm going to try to get in a couple of hours of wandering around by the beach before the first talk.

Classes of Service

Because of the length of the flight to Korea, my employer sprung for a business class ticket for me. This expenditure seemed fairly extravagant.

This judgement did not pervent me from resolving to enjoy the hell out of the experience. With almost 48 hours in transit and less than 90 on the ground in Cheju (yeah, I'm a nut), flying was going to be a significant portion of this trip.

Perhaps due to the lack of business class on the Dulles to San Francisco leg, I ended up in first class. Woo hoo. Of course, I had gotten about 3 hours of sleep the night before, so I was not awake to enjoy most of the flight. Still, I slept in a really comfy chair instead of the cramped chair I would otherwise be subject to. And the meal service was comparable to being in a restaurant instead of...I don't know; the guest of a bad cook who doesn't like you. As I was warned by a colleage who has more experience with United, they offered teh meal service in order of number of frequent flier miles, which meant when they got to me, I was pretty hungry, and they were out of the fruit.

I arrived in San Francisco and hustled to Gate 102 for my flight to Seoul. I turned on my cell phone only to receive a message from the alarm company saying that a fire alarm had gone off at my house. Oh, crap. I called them back, and all they could tell me was that they had called the fire department and hadn't heard back. Nice. I asked them to check into things and call me back. I made a few frantic calls to get someone out to the house to look into things. ADT then called back to let me know that the fire department hadn't seen any signs of a fire, and had thus not broken into the house. I felt a little better, but ultimately I had to get on the plane without knowing the fate of my worldly goods.

The San Francisco to Seoul segment had me in business class. I'm not quite sure if international business class is inferior to domestic first class. The flight attendants may be a tad less obsequious. The chair, on the other hand, is quite amazing. (Go ahead, click on that link to see it.) It comes with 7 pages of instructions. The most notable feature is the leg rest, which comes out of the chair in La-Z-Boy-like fashion. There's also an individual video screen, which I had permanently tuned to the map channel. As I was writing a draft of this entry, we crossed the International Date Line and entered Russian airspace. (Is this such a great idea?)

I was somewhat bothered to be in the front row -- it's the dreaded lack of a seat in front of you for storage purposes -- until I discovered the seat next to me was empty. Wow. A place to pile all my junk!

So after a bit of napping, I resolved to stay wawake and try to adjust myself to Korean time. Let's see, if it's 10:45 AM there, that means it's...8:45 PM yesterday back home. Weird.

Computations on Catalan's Conjecture

I'm giving a talk next month at the AMS 2001 Spring Southeastern Section Meeting. It's now posted on the schedule. If you click through and can read PDF files, you can see the abstract. Note that the bound should be 3x10⁸.

San Diego

Hi. I'm just back from San Diego, where Blogger didn't work, so I'm bringing this to you all at once.

When I got into my hotel room (after hitting Rubio's at the airport to supplement the barely digestible airplane food), the thermostat was set at 50^o. You might think they were trying to conserve energy by having the heat set that low when nobody was in the room. But, no...the air conditioning was set that low. It was freezing! (Though try as it might, the air conditioner only managed to get things down to around 55^o.) No wonder they're having power problems.


On Monday night, we went to a Moroccan restaurant. I've been to restaurants corresponding to many countries, but never Morocco. We sat in low chairs along a low table. Before the first course, they brought out a cistern and poured water over our hands to clean them. This was necessary since the first few courses involved neither utensils nor individual portions (OK, they served the soup in individual bowls.) The "salad" consisted of baba ganoush and other such things that we scooped up between bread and thumb. Then we had the appetizer, which was a chicken-filled pastry (sprinkled with powdered sugar!), a main course of lamb and chicken, followed by a dessert of baklava and some mint tea. As a colleague remarked, it was more interesting as theater than food.


Tuesday night, we went out for Japanese food. I had the mixed sushi. The wasabe helped clear my sinuses, and I somehow accidentally ordered sake. I don't think I've had sake before; it wasn't bad. And though I'm no sushi expert, I enjoyed it.

Wednesday morning, I agreed to meet someone to go inline skating. We selected a must-skate location and followed the directions to Mission Bay. When we got there, the wind was blowing the sand across the parking lot, and it was tempting to turn back. We decided to press on, but my skating partner had forgotten the key to his skate bag. Well, I had the good feeling of wanting to skate without the exertion of having done so. The next morning when we met to skate, there was ice on the car, and that was enough to make me throw in the towel. What happened to sunny Southern California?

The flight back was fairly annoying. It was delayed out of San Diego because of "weather" in Chicago. Apparently, rain is quite a problem for them. Sigh. They couldn't tell me exactly when we would leave, and they couldn't tell me whether I'd be able to make my connection in Chicago. When I got to Chicago, it was half-an-hour after my connection was supposed to leave. "Fortunately" my second flight was delayed by two hours, which stretched to 3 hours, and I finally got to BWI at 3 in the morning. Sigh. Hopefully Sunday's flight to Korea will go better...

Ski x3

OK, I've really caught the skiing bug now. With two weeks of travels coming up, I wasn't going to be able to hit the slopes again any time soon. So I took Friday off work and headed to Ski Roundtop. There were a number of good things about this trip -- we almost had the slopes to ourselves, there was a variety of beginner slopes and...well, those were the two main things. On the down side, the reason that we had the slopes to ourselves was because the conditions were so bad...

Yes, I've advanced as a skiier to the point where I get to start complaining about the conditions. Slush during the day, which turned to ice after the sun went down. I felt like I wasn't getting any better as a skiier, but if I looked at it, my technique was getting better -- I just wasn't able to control myself as well on the ice.

One of the more amusing moments during the day was when my skiing companion and I got to the bottom of the lift and started talking. She completely forgot where we were and was quite startled when the chair came along a few seconds later! As someone who is easily distracted myself, I can't poke too much fun. But a little.

I also wasn't too thrilled with the layout of Roundtop. We had to do a lot of trudging around at the bottom of the slopes to get to where we needed to be. There was no ski check (that I saw). And the instruction was OK, but not so hot. I think I'd rate the 3 locations I've been to as Liberty, then Whitetail, then Roundtop. Don't get me wrong -- I'd go back to any of them again. But I don't think I'd take vacation time to do so again unless the conditions were better. And now I can cope with not skiing for the next couple of weeks. Back to San Diego!

Skiing, again

I had a theory. Since the Super Bowl would be on the following Sunday, not many people would be on the slopes. We could go skiing during the day, and I could tape the game. Avoiding any contamination, I would head home and watch the game on tape.

How did the theory work out? Pretty well, I think. I'm not really clear on how crowded ski resorts generally are, but Ski Liberty didn't seem too bad. Especially by the evening, when even the guys whose job it was to make sure people took turns getting in line had slipped away. But that was OK, since the line was short enough that there weren't enough people to have to take turns.

I started out the day by taking my second lesson. I was in level 2, which was for those of us who were "not very confident turning". Since level 1 was for first-time skiiers, I figured I had to be set for level 2. So we took the lift to the top of the mountain, where the instructors had us demonstrate our turning to separate us by ability level. Hello! I thought we had already established that we weren't good at turning. But I established it some more, so I ended up in the worst 3 instead of the better 6.

Which was fine. 'Cause I got more individual instruction. Oh, yeah, and I really was worse than most of the people. I realized that my previous lesson had taught how to turn but not when, why or how much to turn. And then the 3 people in the class could all ride up on the same quad lift chair with our instructor and chat. Oh, yeah, and then the other 2 in the class weren't as good as me, so I felt good by comparison.

But I learned how to turn enough that my instructor pronounced me ready for a level 3 lesson next time. So it was time to head for Sneaky Pete (here's a guide to the trails.) After a few runs down that, the hardest part was getting off the lift, and it was on to Dipsy Doodle.

I don't know about you, but I don't think a trail called Dipsy Doodle should have a 90^o turn on the steepest part of the trail. I basically stumbled down that, but it was cool doing one run from the top of the mountain. I'd like another lesson under my belt before trying that part again, though. But at the bottom, and on another Sneaky Pete run, I was just flying down the mountain, zipping around. It was a heck of a lot of fun. The "First Class Area" bunny slopes were pretty darn easy by that point, but it was fun to go back and do them without having to slow down as much as I did at the beginning of the day.

Oh, and the Super Bowl? I'm glad I was able to fast forward through all the parts between plays. I hid my eyes from the TV playing at the resort, and was surprised by the outcome...well, as surprised as everyone who had seen the Ravens dominate the whole thing.

Skiing

Another thing that has been occupying my time is my newly acquired hobby of skiing.

Well, actually I did attempt one other ski trip, back in '94. My friend Ben, who has been skiing since birth, kept encouraging me to go skiing with him some time. With his vast experience, he'd be able to show me how to ski. So a group of us planned a trip to Seven Springs. Unfortunately, due to an illness in the family, Ben had to drop out at the last moment. Not to worry, he assured me, I could just learn from the guys who were going.

So I rented my skis, and while we were going up the lift, I asked my friends for some pointers on skiing. Skiing? No, they only knew how to snowboard. Oops. So I went down the mountain -- once. Ski, pick up speed, fall. Ski, pick up speed, fall. Ski, pick up speed, fall. Ski, pick up speed, fall. Ski, pick up speed, fall. Ski, pick up speed, fall. Ski, pick up speed, fall. Ski, pick up speed, fall. Oh sure, the repetition may be annoying you, but at least you're not falling over constantly. I got to the bottom, turned in my skis, and put off the sport of skiing for a while.

Well, the weekend before last, I took it up again. We went to Whitetail. This time I took a lesson. And it made all the difference in the world. I had a certain amount of fear based on my experiences trying to learn how to do other things involving coordination -- like rollerblading. If I tried to learn with a bunch of people, almost everyone else would get the hang of it quicker. The instructor would say, "Do A. OK, now that you've mastered A, here's how you do B. And C. Now try D." Meanwhile, I'm stumbling along trying to figure out A. As a result, I was very nervous right before the class started.

I needn't have worried. I don't know where on Planet Clumsy they found my fellow beginning skiiers, but boy did they make me feel better by comparison. Half an hour into the lesson, we were ready to practice going downhill. A little. We would walk up the hill for a minute, then ski the distance we had just covered. Simple enough. I found myself picking up more speed than I'd like, but I'd turn at the bottom and slow to a stop. Not my classmates. They were constantly falling down, running into each other... After an hour or so of this routine, it was time to inflict them on the rest of the slope via the lift.

After riding up, the instructor gave us coupons for hot chocolate and a $29 return visit. He was doing that, he said, in case we got separated on the slope. After skiing down a little bit, a group of us waited for the rest to catch up. We noticed the instructor heading back up to help someone who had fallen and couldn't figure out how to stand up again. Someone said, "Can we just go? It's not like he can stop us." So we went.

I had fun. If you look at the trail map, I only skiied the two tiny ones on the far left. But I had fun. And I only fell once, getting off the lift. And I knocked over some orange cones. Woo hoo! It was so much fun that I wanted to go back the next weekend...

The Sims

I realize I haven't updated this in quite some time. What have I been up to? A number of things, but one of them is The Sims. The Sims is a computer game that simulates, uh, real life. Why playing around with an imaginary character, getting him to work, to eat and to sleep is more interesting than doing the same in my life remains a mystery. Nevertheless, I want to share with you some fine moments from the life of Fred Grantham, my alter ego.

Here, Fred practices his big speech...


And here, he goes for a little late-night indulgence of his artistic side...


Finally, here's a picture of the Sim-Grantham house...

Very Funny

Football. Days to delivery, 6. Male postal carrier was talkative and asked recipient about the scores of various current games. Carrier noted that mail must be wrapped.

It's been a while since I posted anything. What I do have to pass along is a very funny article on "Postal Experiments" from The Annals of Improbable Research.

Name This Story

Ben, Paul and I last year tried to write a collaborative story. We didn't get very far, but I've done a little editing and posted what little we made it through at Name This Story.

Note: I've removed the attributions, butI I'd like everyone to know I'm not the one who introduced the concept of "pants with no ass" to the story.

Stick a Fork in Her

Looks like Chavez is done for the Labor post, according to the Washington Post. Well, I'll keep those quotes around in case she gets nominated for something else later.

Another Chavez Quote

I guess everybody's focusing on the Guatemalan "guest" story, but here's another nasty quote from the Senate campaign:

• She vigorously attacked opponent Barbara Mikulski, calling the unmarried Baltimore congresswoman a "San Francisco-style liberal" and telling her to "come out of the closet" and debate her. Mikulski won the heavily Democratic state, with 61 percent of the vote.
  --Michael Shaffer and Gary Cohen, "An Extended Hand, A Thumb in the Eye", U.S. News, January 15, 2001.
  

'Puter Patch

I changed most of my web pages today on the old server to re-direct here. I did a google search to see who had pointed to the old pages (so I could e-mail them if necessary) and found a mention of a now-dormant weblog of mine.

"I found another interesting blog today:

Slaves of Karthon -
....
Basically its a fictional weblog. The author is using it to post his character's campaign journal from some kind of role-playing game. It's an interesting idea and I'm curious to know whether others have done similar things.... "
--the 'puter patch June 6, 2000.

Looks like the 'puter patch is now dormant itself...

Well, That's Sort of Getting at It

Chavez is well known to many in the Washington area for her 1986 campaign against then-Rep. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) for an open U.S. Senate seat. Chavez accused Mikulski of supporting "Marxist-feminist" and "anti-male" views, suggested she has "a hostility to working with males," and called her a "San Francisco-style, George McGovern liberal."
--Mike Allen and Frank Swoboda, "Chavez Likely Will Face Intense Senate Hearings", The Washington Post, Thursday, January 4, 2001, p. A12.

San Francisco-Style Democrat

I'm annoyed that Bush nominated Linda Chavez to his Cabinet. I don't like her. Why? Consider these quotes from her 1986 Senate campaign versus Barbara Mikulski:

• "We are as different as two people can be," said Chavez. "Barbara Mikulski is a San Francisco-style Democrat -- people are going to reject her brand of liberalism . . . . Barbara can run but she cannot hide."
  --Tom Kenworthy, Michel McQueen, "Schaefer, Mikulski Win in Md.; GOP Nominates Chavez for Senate Race; Turnout Is Modest", The Washington Post, September 10, 1986, p. A1.

  
  

• A political insider says:
  ''Mikulski is the one Democrat who gives the Republicans hope for winning. . . . Her life style, her conduct with the staff is very much on the order of Bella Abzug. That's not going to go very far with Roman Catholics and some other Maryland voters.''
  --John Dillin, "Battle lines set for party struggle to control Senate", The Christian Science Monitor, September 11, 1986, p. 3.

  
  

• Linda Chavez, the Republican nominee in the nation's sole women-only Senate race, said Wednesday she is more in tune with Maryland's voters because she is a mother with a mother's perspective on issues such as war and peace and illegal drugs.
  ....
  Talking with reporters later in the White House driveway, Chavez said the fact that she is married, while Mikulski has never been, is not an issue.
  ....
  As a mother, she said, "I think that I have a perspective which I think is common to people in the state of Maryland, and I'm not sure she does. ...
  ....
  In other comments, Chavez said she merely was using "a political term" when she referred to Mikulski on election night as "a San Francisco-style, George McGovern, liberal Democrat.""I think it was very clear from what I said last night _ and I have tapes of it _ that we were talking about philosophical differences and that she represents the leftward shift of the national Democratic Party," Chavez said.
  --Terence P. Hunt, "Motherhood Becomes Issue in Woman-Vs.-Woman Senate Race", Associated Press, September 10, 1986.

  
  

I'll leave it to the reader to decide the connotation of "San Francisco-style" and "life style" in this context. But I was annoyed that my Google search for 'San Francisco-style Democrat' turned up nary a mention of this controversy that I remember quite vividly. I don't think anyone will bring this up in her confirmation, or that it would hold things up anyway. But at least as soon as Google indexes this page, people will be able to search for these quotes.

Pseudorandom Thoughts

I had considered changing the name of "Android's Dungeon" for the New Year/new site. I decided against it, but if I did, 'Pseudorandom Thoughts' would be a candidate.

Well, pseudoprime.com is now pointing to the rni.net home page. I sent them e-mail about it.

I wrote a check yesterday and put "1/1/1" in the date part. Fun.

Inaccurate Cargo

Well, at least from here I can access www.pseudoprime.com.

Unfortunately, when I go to pseudoprime.com, it takes me to accuratecargo.com. Hmm.

I think I'll wait until the new year to see if this clears up before bugging tech support about this one.

Doctored in mathematics...

...I could have been a don.

As part of the continuing push to revamp my web pages for 2001, I have cleaned up the math pages on my site. New and of note are PDF versions of all the papers -- this format should be accessible to a greater portion of web surfers, especially those outside the mathematics community.

Setup

I just got back from helping a friend of my parents set up his first computer. Well, attempting to, anyway. Everything seemed to be going well -- I removed all the extraneous plastic coverings, plugged everything where it needed to be plugged. I powered up the system and the monitor. As Windows ME started and I decided I would need to shut down the on-line setup so we could do it later, the monitor started flickering. I went to check that it was plugged in properly, and my assistant said, "It's stopped flickering." I looked up and said, "Yes, but there's smoke coming out of the speaker." I unplugged everything very quickly. It's back to the store, probably tonight, to exchange it for a less smoky one.

Look for the companies involved to be flogged in this spot if we don't obtain satisfaction.

D&D

I've re-vamped the D&D part of my web site, mainly by adding a new weblog for the campaign for which I'm the Dungeon Master.

RNI

Just a quick note to mention that I've moved hosting of my web site over to RNI. The exciting part of this for me is that starting later this week, my web site will be available permanently at pseudoprime.com, no matter which provider I'm using.

I'm planning to take advantage of the switch to improve a few things. If you find any broken links, please e-mail me.

Today, I've restored a lot of old links to the archive, so you can see what was on my mind early in the year.

Blondie's

I associate certain restaurants with particular places fairly strongly, so much so that going to eat somewhere becomes a major goal of a trip. When I got to Cincinnati, I want to eat at Skyline; when I'm in Athens (GA), The Grill or Taco Stand is an important stop; and Ann Arbor draws me toward Cottage Inn, Zingerman's or Blimpieburger. During my recent trip to Berkeley, I missed my chance to visit Blondie's, a pizza place that is one of my few positive memories of my year there.

Yesterday afternoon, we were given the afternoon off the conference to explore San Diego. I decided to skip the sights and TCOB. Steve, another guy from Back East, had business at the same location, so I gave him a ride.

We needed to find a place to grab a quick lunch. Searching my memories of my summer in San Diego, the UTC food court was a close, convenient place to get a bite. Unfortunately, it didn't occur to us that holiday shopping season would be in full swing, and the quest for a parking space would throw "quick" out the window. Eventually, however, my karma prevailed and we found a place.

Steve lost any concern with his delay when he discovered that the food court contained a Rubio's franchise. Rubio's is, he explained, San Diego's foremost purveyor of fish tacos. Fish tacos, I knew, were the characteristic food of San Diego. I remember being jarred by the sight of a "Fish Tacos" sign at a concession stand at a Padres game.

I admit I didn't find Rubio's fish tacos particularly exquisite compared to others I had tasted before. But I was glad to get a chance to go there, even if I never made it to Blondie's.

San Diego

When I got off the plane it was 81^o. Wow. I briefly regretted my decision to pack long-sleeved shirts. (The weather has since cooled off slightly.) I retrieved my luggage, which was at the most crowded baggage carousel I've seen. People were tripping over each other trying to get their suitcases out of there. I picked up my rental car in a remarkably hassle-free experience and hit the freeways of San Diego.

I hadn't been back since I lived here in the summer of '93. Blue skies, warm weather, ocean views...why did I leave? Ah, well. I'm happy in Maryland, but this wouldn't be too bad either. I found my way to my hotel, which turned out to be in Old Town San Diego. It's fairly touristy, but as a traveler, having restaurants and shops nearby is pretty cool.

I could hardly wait to head for one of the many nearby Mexican restaurants. Sigh. But I had the opening conference banquet in a few hours. I wandered down the street, browsed through a gallery containing a number of Chuck Jones prints and contented myself with a couple of margaritas and some chips and salsa.

After a quick nap, I headed for the banquet. When I arrived, I realized that the conference featured many nodding acquaintances, but nobody I knew really well -- none of my old Georgia buddies. I picked out a table, nodded at a few people and sand down. One, an elderly mathematician, seemed to recognize me more than I expected, given that I had not seen him since '93. I chatted with a Canuck about the different voting systems in use in the US & Canada and tried to enjoy my non-Mexican meal. Then, at one point, the aforementioned elderly gentleman referred to me as "Jeff" and asked me a question about another mathematician. I realized that he had mistaken me for someone else, perhaps 20 years my senior. I felt really awkward -- how do you point out to someone that they not only don't remember you, but they've just mistaken you for someone who comes closer to doubling your age than equaling it? I ducked and said I didn't know anything about the guy he had asked me about, which puzzled the man I was talking to, since he thought we worked together.

I spent most of the rest of the evening trying not to make eye contact before ducking out early due to jetlag.

Frequent Flier

I have achieved my goal -- I am now a frequent flier. The results won't be official, I suppose, until the United Airlines version of the Electoral College convenes at year's end. But with the flight to San Diego, I will have accumulated in excess of 21,000 flying miles for the year 2000. I actually have flown more than that -- the real total probably exceeds 35K. But some of those miles were on other airlines or went uncredited due to various incompetences.

After a flying lifetime of spreading my flights across many different airlines -- I currently maintain memberships in four different frequent flier programs, I decided it was time to settle down with one airline. When I found myself flying to Belgium this past May on United, I had my airline.

My original goal was to hit 25K -- the level needed for Premier status. Unfortunately, even with the return flight from San Diego, I will only find myself with 24,551 credited flight miles. Fortunately, United has had much labor strife this year. Fortunately, because the strife has caused UAL to kiss some serious passenger behind in order to keep its customers. For example, by lowering the Premier thershhold to 21K. Victory!

So to what can I look forward as a certified member of the jet set next year? I get to skip the long check-in lines and use the Premier check-in. I get to "pre-board" the aircraft and put all my stuff in the overhead compartment before the rest of you unfortunates get on. I get to sit in "Economy Plus" with its 5 extra inches of legroom. (This alone makes all my struggles worthwhile.) And I get upgrade coupons, which will work out to an upgrade to Business or First Class on roughly every fifth flight.

I can't complain too much about my penultimate flight as a non-privileged traveler. The flight was less than 2/3 full (pre-Christmas doldrums?), and I got a row of three seats to myself. (Talk about legroom.)

Still, I can't help but think it would have been just a teensy bit better as a Premier member. I'll let you know next year.

Master Maze

George bought a few sets of MasterMaze from Dwarven Forge. Since they don't deliver to a PO Box, and since we play D&D here, he had them delivered here.

I have come to one conclusion: Polaroids are terrible for taking pictures of minatures. These look really cool, and it'll be great to play D&D with a realistic looking dungeon to put the minatures in, but you wouldn't really know it from the picture.

Trust me.

Where's Jonboy?

I know a lot of people wander in and read my weblog, but this note is directed at people I actually do know. I've made a Yahoo! calendar so it's easy to figure out what I'm up to. I need to give you permission (via a Yahoo! ID) to view the calendar. (I don't want the rest of you weirdos to be able to find me.) If anyone wants to look at it, and I haven't given you permission, e-mail me. Then click here to view the calendar, once I've added your ID to the list.

It's pretty cool. It's nice for me, because I can see what's going on from home, work or while I'm traveling. And it allows me to share calendars with others who have Yahoo! calendars.

Dumb Ass, Don't Tell

"And it was only then that I worked out with Colin Powell this dumb-ass 'don't ask, don't tell' thing."

David Brooks calls this quote from Bill Clinton's recent Rolling Stone interview, "a classic act of Clintonism" showing how he adapts his tone and language to the audience. The only problem...

"Due to a transcription error, the words 'don't ask' were printed as 'dumb-ass' in our interview with President Clinton. We regret the error."

Never mind.

Squablack?

The other day at work my boss was preparing a talk for an important muckety-muck. He wanted to use a graph that had been prepared by somebody who has since left our organization. Unfortunately, the graph needed to be updated, so my boss was trying to do it by hand. This, as one might imagine, was causing a number of problems. I volunteered that I had the program that our now departed colleague had used to generate the graph, and I could update the program to produce a new graph.

Since no good deed goes unpunished, I was asked to make a number of other changes. "Can you make this line thicker?" Then, my boss complained that since the graph was color, it was coming out as gray on the black-and-white printer. "Fine," I said, "I'll change 'blue' and 'red' to 'black' everywhere." So I did a search-and-replace. (Fans of vi will recognize the %s/red/black/g command.)

I sent off the new version of the graph to him, and he finally seemed satisified. About an hour later, I got a call from him asking why the work "squablack" was on the graph.

Beware search-and-replace.

High Standards

A Washingtonpost.com article about standardized testing in Maryland schools contained this gem:

Despite the slight gains, almost half of the state's elementary and middle schools performed below average, a cause for concern among education officials...

Viewer Mail

Happy Thanksgiving.

I don't get as many e-mails about the weblog as I had expected, but I got a couple earlier this week.

A Trevor Bryan wrote to inform me that, "lisa bangerts from mansfeild nottingam not manchester". Good to know. Who's Lisa Bangert again? Oh, yeah, she's the Page 3 girl I mentioned in my '93 Britain diary. Glad to know she's acquiring a fan base.

I also got a note from someone at Tharsis Books in response to my review of Martian Race. They plugged As It Is On Mars, which they appear to publish, and Mars Crossing.

Finally, words of praise from a fan:

Pal, I had a read through your Android's dungeon today. That's
hilarious.

The Aztek

I was in Minnesota earlier this week. My rental car was a Pontiac Sunfire -- an adequate compact car. A co-worker of mine, however, belonged to Avis Preferred. Apparently, in addition to allowing you to skip the rental counter, this program will give you a free one-size upgrade on your rental. So my Sunfire would have been upgraded to a mid-sized car, a mid-sized car would be upgraded to a full-sized sedan, and my co-worker's full-sized reservation was upgraded to...an SUV.

Pretty cool, right? I mean, better than the dorky rental cars we get most of the time. Wrong. Avis provided him with a Pontiac Aztek...truly the Pontiac of SUVs. I don't know if the pictures there truly capture the awfulness of the design. (Although the misspelled name certainly does.) Imagine a circa 1990 Honda Civic hatchback on steroids. Imagine an armored personnel carrier with less of a sense of style.

He complained that as he was driving it around, he could see people in other vehicles pointing and laughing at his car. The worst, he said, was when a woman driving a UPS truck laughed at his mode of transportation.

You know, I like the idea of skipping the rental counter, so I'm going to try to sing up for Avis Preferred. But I think I'll try to make sure I never have a full-sized car reserved for me.

Remove Fork, Insert Foot in Mouth

In an earlier weblog entry, I predicted a Gore victory in this month's elections and refered to a William Saletan article in Slate. Well, he's written another article explaining his errors. I was still holding out hope that I could say "told you so" if Gore still pulls it out, but even then I'd have egg on my face.

OK, so why was I wrong? Well, you can look at Saletan's article for some of the explanation. As for my additional insight -- Bush's a jerk -- I neglected another factor. Gore's a jerk. But he's my kind of jerk.

When I was 14, I was on a TV quiz show called "It's Academic". One of my teammates buzzed in without knowing the answer. I glared at him to make sure everybody knew he was the bozo who had rung in. This is exactly the kind of pompous behavior the nation came to expect from Al Gore. (I, on the other hand, have matured since then.) I guess I had a blind spot because I thought Bush deserved to be shown up. I didn't realize that -- compared to frat boys -- American can't stand "smarty-pants".

So can Gore still win? My thought is that he has a decent chance in the hand recounts. He's only down by about 300 votes in Florida. Given how much that dropped from the initial count, and given how prone to error these ballots seem, I think it's very plausible he could pick those up if things were counted more carefully. Bush, on the other hand, wants to stop the hand recounts. I mean I guess I understand that -- it's like a football team running out the clock when they're ahead. But how is he going to sell this to the public? "I don't want a more accurate count 'cause it'll take longer." Maybe he'll wake up and realize he looks bad -- just like he stopped demanding Gore concede before the recount.

Speaking of looking bad, I'm afraid that Gore will have to drop the Palm Beach bad ballot challenge. Yes, it stinks. Yes, it probably cost Gore the election. But there's no realistic way to turn the clock back. And if they somehow manage to do that, it could open up all sorts of unpleasant challenges in other states. What's going on now is reasonable -- but I don't want to see this tied up in court for months. Hopefully this will at least throw the spotlight onto usability issues related to ballots. Yes, it's obvious to me how to fill out that ballot. No, it wasn't obvious to enough people. Let's make it more obvious.

Search Engine Madness

Inspired by West Coast Girl, I present my "Search Engine Outtakes". (All searches on Google unless otherwise mentioned):

• Android's Dungeon -- #1 !
  
• Southwark colleage -- #1 (oops)
  
• boy-in-the-bubble disease -- #4
  
• android sketches -- #12
  
• Paul Simon's Graceland -- #50
  
• dancing chicken carcass -- #16
  
• Gibbs Lisa -- #16
  
• android -- #14
  
• Jaye P. Morgan gong show -- #17 (Northern Light)
  

Haircut

I got my hair cut today.

While I was trying to decipher what the guy cutting my hair was saying about the Redskins (he mumbles, and speaks with a Cuban accent), I heard the woman cutting hair next to me say something to her client like, "And that converts it back to decimal." After more discussion of the merits of Brad Johnson vs. Daunte Culpepper, I decided to listen in on the conversation taking place to my left. I heard the guy getting his hair cut say, "So 127 is localhost?" His sylist said, "Yeah," and then proceeded to go into a discourse on routers that went over my head. It was completely surreal. It was like I had been transported into some sort of .com commercial. I'm not sure what the tag line would be -- "Feel like everyone's getting in on the Internet economy but you?" or "Where do you go for your technical information?"

I briefly considered getting her to cut my hair instead because -- I mean, how cool is she? But then I realized that I was confusing two totally different skill sets, and I was really there to get a good haircut. Which I did.

I Feel Your Pain, Al...

"And the awful truth is that America doesn't like knowledgeable, well-educated white guys who preen visibly over their grasp of detail. If it did, Al Gore wouldn't be fighting for his political life."
--Marjorie Williams, The Breakfast Club, Slate

Why Me?

On my recent flight to Chicago, the woman in the adjacent seat woke me up to ask me to hand her my copy of the in-flight magazine. I was so stunned, all I managed was to be as surly as possible while handing it to her.

I used to be scared of 8th grade girls, too..

This made me laugh.

"Speaking inside a middle-school gymnasium in the Chicago suburbs today, George Bush tried out what seemed a clever new way to contrast his proposal for "tax relief" with Al Gore's. The distinction collapsed, however, under tough questioning from a girl in the eighth grade."
--Jacob Weisberg, Slate

Read the whole article here.

HmMm...

"After many false starts and delays for reasons beyond telling, there is now a Mensa SIG^* for prisoners: Mprisoned."
--Mensa Bulletin, October 2000, p.5

^*Special Interest Group

Why Service Stinks

''We're just putting more of our energies into rewarding our best customers.''
--American Airlines

Business Week has written an article addressing the topic of why customer service has gone downhill in recent years. I've felt that this was because the cost of providing it has gone up (or at least, hasn't gotten cheaper as fast as other things). But this has some good points about market segmentation I hadn't taken into account.

The first part of the article paints a bleak picture of a world where only the wealthy get good customer service. But continuing on, there are some bright points worth noticing. First of all, "Thanks to the Internet, for example, consumers have far better tools to conveniently serve themselves." I get far better customer service from Amazon than I've gotten through most off-line bookstores, all without interacting with a human being. And don't get me started on bad travel agent stories.

But the most interesting part is the admission that companies may not be doing such a great job in their market segmenting. "The problem, of course, is that what someone spends today is not always a good predictor of what they'll spend tomorrow." Nationsbank (now Bank of America) doesn't have me as a customer any more partly because of how they treated me when all I had to deposit was my grad school salary. But I think the best hope may be embodied in this sentence: "In the future, therefore, the service divide may become much more transparent." Somehow, it's not so much lack of service that's annoying -- it's bad service. If companies admitted, "Hey, you're on your own," we might all be a little happier.

Name changed to protect the clueless

From: Xxxxxxxx@aol.com
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 19:34:20 EDT
Subject: JUST CHECKING IN
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I GOT YOUR ADDRESS FROM YOUR MOTHER. IWANTED TO MAKE SURE THAT YOU ARE
GONINGTO VOTE FOR GEORGE. I HAVENT SEEN MIKE LATELY TO TALK HIN INTO VOTEING
FOR GEORGE, I KNOW IT WOULD BE A WASTE OF TIME, BUT IT WOULD BE FUN. WELL HOW
IS LIFE IN THE NORTHWEST? I UNDERSTAND YOU ARE LOOKING FOR A NEW JOB, HOW IS
IT COMING? I HAVE A FRIEND WHO RETIRED FROM ONE OF THE PHONE CO. IN DALLAS,
I'LL GIVE HIM A CALL AND SEE IF HE CAN BE ANY HELP. SEND ME A OF YOUR RES..
HOW ARE THE KIDDS, AND OF COURSE THEBOSS? WE ARE ALL DONING FINE AND
THEWEATHER IS COOLING OFF AS YOU CAN SEE MY TYPING LACKS.

Rocknrace

Today I woke up at around 8:30. Last Sunday, it was a different story. Up at 5:30, out of the house by 7. I was off to the Rock 'n Race. The goal of the Rock 'n Race was to raise money for and awareness of colon cancer. I must admit, though, it was the prospect of seeing Paul Simon at the post-walk concert that drew me in. That, and the 5K walk. I needed the exercise. In fact, my joke was that while everyone else was walking to fight colon cancer, I was walking to fight heart disease.

As the beginnning of the race approached, I joined the mob at the starting line. Looking around, everybody else had their number pinned to their shirt, like I did. But many people had placards pinned on their backs. "I am participating in memory of..." "Mom"..."Uncle Joe"..."Grandpa" Wow. That really got to me. Eventually I looked around and saw that some of the placards said, "I am participating in support of..." That made me feel somewhat better. Of course, eventually I noticed someone whose placard ended "...myself." Wow, and I was just out for a walk.

Then Katie Couric fired the starting airhorn and we were off. Shuffling very, very slowly. Was the whole walk going to be this slow? No, it turned out, it was just as we were passing by Katie Couric, and everybody strained to get a look, or a picture or an autograph. Once past her, the pack spread out to a reasonable pace, it was time for a nice walk around DC. We walked to Union Station, then swung back and walked up and down the mall. Beautiful day, nice and invigorating.

Then it was back to plop down on the mall for the entertainment portion. I munched on the breakfast provided for me. (Hey, between that and the t-shirt, I hope they saved some money out of my registration fee to fight colon cancer.) I listened to the Max Weinberg Seven and profiles of people who had survived colon cancer...and those who had lost loved ones to the disease. Again, pretty moving. And I should mention, it's worth reading up about colon cancer. Something like 90% of all cases are cureable if caught early enough, so if you're at risk, it's really worth it to get checked out. Please.

After that, by 11, it was time for the main attraction...Paul Simon. This summer I went through my entire CD collection and listened to all of the CDs. I realized how great Paul Simon was. Wow; the guy put out wonderful music from his work with Garfunkel in the '60s until 1990's The Rhythm of the Saints. (I wasn't familiar with the Capeman, and I don't have his new album yet.) And here was a chance to see a living legend for far less than a concert ticket. And get a free t-shirt! And fight colon cancer! How could I pass this up?

Anyway, it was a really nice experience. For an hour-long concert, he played quite a number of songs from Graceland...4, I believe -- Boy in the Bubble, Graceland, Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes and You Can Call Me Al. He also did Bridge over Troubled Water, a very different version of Kodachrome, The Boxer and three songs from the new album. His encore was Late in the Evening.

As I shuffled off to the Metro to get back home in time for the Redskins game, I was pretty darn happy with what I had gotten accomplished by noon that day. Today, I'll have to settle for writing this as my accomplishment.

England Pictures

I've uploaded pictures from my recent England trip here.

George Hits Japan

And now for the final entry in the George Trilogy, as our hero arrives in Tokyo...

I can't remember the last time I was doing something peaceful like getting off an airplane that I got shoved so many times. Then the cab ride from the airport to the hotel was damn expensive and the parts of the city that we drove through didn't look like a place worth driving through. But things get worse...

The meter on the taxi is ticking away, the city is just a mass of concrete with no style at all, and we finally get cleaned out of cash when we get dropped off, and the ride cost us 25000 yen. 25000 yen is roughly equivalent to 250 dollars. The hotel looked ok from the outside, but it had all the signs of being a low budget place to stay. There was no driveway to the main lobby, no doorman, and no bell boy to tote the luggage upstairs for us. All of these things were standards on my previous trips for this company. At check in we learned that the front desk staff doesn't speak good English, and you guessed it, we don't speak good Japanese. We get checked in after a while and head upstairs. The room looks like a jail cell. Very small box of a room with a crapper that spit at me when I went to use it. When I got into bed I found that the pillow must be stuffed with beans, and then the whole thing smelled of cigarette smoke. Needless to say we moved to a better hotel the next day. This one had all the features that I expect to have on business trips.

Saturday, without checking out the weather we joined a bus tour to Mt. Fuji. Along the road it started to rain pretty hard. No problem, it will probably blow over. No such luck, we get there in a serious rain. No problem, I've been wet before. Boy did I get wet, and although I was standing on it, I never actually saw it. The clouds were so low you could see about 20 feet in front of you. The next stop was lunch. They took us to one of the traditional places where you sit on a mat on the floor and cram you legs under the table. It was ok, but being far from decent plumbing I wasn't going to take any risks and didn't eat much of it. After that we went to The Valley of Big Hell. This is where an ancient volcano had collapsed upon itself and now it smokes and bubbles up hat springs of water high in sulfur. Just in time to hike around here the rain started to come down like crazy and we got soaked through and through. The thing to do here is hike up a
bit to this shack that boils eggs in the hot spring water and eat one. Supposedly it gives you seven extra years to live. They looked pretty bad but tasted like normal eggs. The trip back to Tokyo was on the bullet train. I was a bit disappointed with its speed because it didn't feel like it was going fast, but it shortened a 3 hour drive into 36 minutes. Not too bad. We had to walk back to the hotel from the subway station that evening. You guessed it, raining even harder now. Joining the rain were high winds and lightning. We looked like we had been through hell when we got to the hotel.

Sunday I found out why the weather just got worse as the day went on. Typhoon #17 approached Tokyo on Saturday and passed by just to the east on Sunday. Sunday was boring as a result of the weather. I did the next best thing and hung out in the bar.

George and the Singapore Sling

The second of three installments from my friend George...

A great thing happened the same day I sent my last report. It was my last
night in Singapore and I still had not been to the Long Bar in Raffles Hotel
for my Singapore Sling. Now, for all of you who don't know the importance
of Raffles (I was one before heading on this trip), The Long Bar at this
hotel is where the Singapore Sling was invented. Being here for so many
days and not having one was eating at my conscience. So after work off we
went. A pretty good drink too. Didn't taste too fruity, and packed a
decent punch. A few went down and the guy I'm travelling with got a bit
tipsy. Next thing I notice is this bar menu telling me that the kitchen is
about to close and lo and behold they have hamburgers for $13 and it costs
an additional $1 for cheese and an additional $1 for bacon. Hell with it
all, I want two with both cheese and bacon. The tasted good and were a good
size so I didn't mind spending that much.

Anyway, we had to leave the hotel at 4 AM to get to the airport for our
flight to Tokyo so I got loaded on Singapore Slings and stayed up all night.
Singapore is a nice place, and I finally felt satisfied with my stay there.
I would go back if anyone comes up with a reason.

George in Kuala Lumpur

Well, I've run out of England stories. For your vicarious traveling pleasure, however, George has agreed to let me post his Tales of the Mysterious East. Today: Kuala Lumpur.

Greetings from the other side of the world. Everything is going along mostly on schedule down here. We have made it past Kuala Lumpur and are pretty much finished with Singapore now.

We only had one day free in KL and pretty much got lost walking around the city. We walked over to the Petronas Twin Tower (tallest building in the world), and then proceeded to get lost in interesting parts of the city. Not necessarily parts we wanted to see, but definitely educational. I don't think I had ever seen so many chickens running around in a city before. Malaysia appeared to be a country desperately trying to not be third world, but at the same time definitely is third world.

Singapore though is completely modern. Heavily influenced by the Chinese, and somewhat enjoyable. For a place as small as it is, there seems to be a lot to do. Just don't go to the beach expecting to see Singaporean babes in bikinis. For some reason they wear more clothes to the beach then they do to go shopping. It's been fun though.

The food is killing me though. I'd had enough of oriental foods before I got off the plane in KL. By the time I reached KL I had endured two days of nothing but curried chicken or Chinese food of some sort. Last night we attempted to eat hamburgers, but even these were Japanese style with some kind of onion/tomato/gross stuff all over it. When this trip is done I might not eat Oriental for a few years.

Who Won the Debate?

I watched the presidential debate last night. I admit, I thought Gore won, and Bush looked out of his depth. But then, I went in with that expectation. So I turned to the commentariant to tell me what the "consensus opinion" was. In Slate, Jacob Weisberg explained that "Bush got his clock cleaned." So I was right. And in Salon, Andrew Sullivan concludes, "It was a knockout." For Bush. Hmm. So maybe this debate just did confirm whatever expectation people went in with.

Here's what confirmed mine. After Bush suggested getting the Russians to mediate in Yugoslavia, the following exchange ensued.

GORE: ...But I think we need to be very careful in the present
situation before we invite the Russians to play the lead role in
mediating.

BUSH: Well, obviously we wouldn't use the Russians if they didn't
agree with our answer, Mr. Vice President.

GORE: Well, they don't.

The "Well, they don't," just had this air of, "Is it too much to ask you to pay attention?" It cracked me up.

The Two Noble Kinsmen

I wondered if I could walk to the hotel and back to the Globe in time for that evening's performance of The Two Noble Kinsmen. It pretty soon became apparent that I couldn't. Well, no problems -- I'd just catch a taxi on the way back from the hotel. Unfortunately, I didn't see one near the hotel. So I walked towards the Globe and tried to hail the various cabs I saw on the way there. No luck -- they were all occupied. Eventually, I made it to the footpath along the Thames...and realized I wasn't going to catch a cab there. Oh, well, I hoped they'd still let me in. I eventually got there about 15 minutes late, and stood in line behind people buying last-minute tickets. I eventually picked mine up and slipped in the back. Looking at the play now, I think I showed up towards the end of Act I.

The Two Noble Kinsmen, unlike The Antipodes, was actually written by Shakespeare. Well, sort of. OK, co-written. Sigh. It's "by John Fletcher and William Shakespeare." But still. It counts.

Anyway, it's the story of these two cousins...nobles, in fact. They're thrown in jail for something or another (look, I got there late). I think 'cuase they lost a war. They don't seem to be too annoyed by this fact until they cast eyes upon Emilia, King Theseus' sister-in-law. They both fall for her, for no particuarly good reason. They scheme to get out of jail (free?) and fight each other over Emilia. Is it a tragedy? A comedy? I dunno, but it was another fun play. At the end, the artistic director thanked us for filling the house for one of Shakespeare's less known plays as the cast threw red roses.

After that it was off to bed, for the next morning I had to take the Tube to Heathrow. The ride was nice enough. There were a couple of Americans sitting across from me that were comparing the size of "the gap" (as in "mind the gap") at the various stations we passed. It was kind of amusing until they started saying things like, "Wow, that's really uneven. Can't these Brits do anything right?" Sigh. I like my country, just not all of the people from there.

At the airport, somehow I got selected for the extra hassle treatment. You know, extra X-ray of the baggage, rifling through my carry-ons, stuff like that. The actual hassling of me didn't take long. The problem is that there's only one person to hassle all of us, and the people in front of me just seemed to need more hassling. Like the guy who seemed to have his entire life wrapped up in his carry-on luggage. Oh, well. After the security guy made a joke about confiscating my sunglasses, I was through and back on my way to the USA.

Tate Modern

The Tate Modern was my next stop. Truthfully, I could have spent the whole weekend there...4 1/2 hours seemed very rushed. Going in, I had very little familiarity with modern art. Coming out...well, I guess I now have some familiarity with it.

The Tate Modern opened earlier this year in what was formerly a "redundant" power plant on the South Bank of the Thames (right next to the Globe). It's a huge building. It has three main floors of exhibitions. The third floor alone took me two hours to view, and I didn't linger for all of it. One of the nice features is a digital voice player you can rent for a pound. When you see a number underneath the description of a work of art, you can punch in that number and hear a curator or an artist speak about the work. That's a good improvement on the self-guided tour with the tape player.

One of the photographers whose work I liked the most was Andreas Gursky. In particular, I liked Rhein II, which you'll have to picture as an oversized landscape rather than a...er, image in a browser. He also does some pictures with interesting special effects.

Some of the works I saw fell into the old "Is it art?" category. For example, one picture (Lucio Fontana's "Spacial Concept 'Waiting'") was just a blank canvas which had been slashed. I think the artist was trying to make some sort of point about getting beyond the traditional two-dimensional canvas. OK. Interesting-looking, actually. But now that you've made the point... Also in that category, I'd put Yves Klein's "IKB79". "IKB" stands for "International Klein Blue," a color he "invented" and patented. And I must admit it's a pretty neat color. I'd love a shirt in that color. But do I really want to see a canvas painted completely in that color? More than once?

I particularly liked their Dali paintings, such as Autumnal Cannibalism and Metamorphosis of Narcissus. There's something about the surrealist pictures that really strikes a cord with me. Some of his other work, however, I just found odd, such as Lobster Telephone. According to the Tate Modern, Dali found both lobsters and telephones to be erotic, so he liked the juxtaposition. I think that tells more about Dali than anyone else. And more about Dali than we need to know.

Speaking of Surrealists, I was interested to see a painting by Rene Magritte. Not because I have a particular interest in Magritte's work. In fact, not because I knew anything about Magritte. I just knew the Paul Simon song "Rene and Georgette Magritte with their Dog after the War". So that's who Rene Magritte is. Incidentally, there's a pretty interesting interview with Paul Simon where he describes how he came to write that song. "It doesn't actually make sense, but why should a song about Magritte make sense?"

Duchamp's "Urinal" was interesting. Some of the story is told here; basically, Duchamp bought a urinal, signed it, and entered it into an exhibition that was open to any artist who would pay 6 bucks. The urinal mysteriously disappeared before the exhibition. Once again the question is, "What is art?" "Is it art if an artist says so?" Good questions, but too much navel-gazing can become tiresome.

I think that's one of the things that makes Gilbert and George (warning: naughty language at their site) so enjoyable.

"We want our art to speak across the barriers of knowledge directly to People about their Life and not about their knowledge of art. The 20th century has been cursed with an art that cannot be understood. The decadent artists stand for themselves and their chosen few, laughing at and dismissing the normal outsider. We say that puzzling, obscure and form-obsessed art is decadent and a cruel denial of the Life of People."

OK, still pretentious, but "speak...directly to people about their life and not about their knowledge of art" is a worthy goal.

Which is one of the fun things about Andy Warhol. You don't stare at his pictures and say, "What the heck is that?" It's Elvis! Two of them! Or Marilyn Monroe. And, yes, it's more complicated than that, but at least you don't have to worry that you're missing everything because you don't know about his strange relationship with lobsters. For the Andy Warhol room, the digital voice player had David Bowie's "Andy Warhol" which I cranked up to maximum volume while walking around the room to the disconcerted looks of other patrons.

On the other hand, sometimes things may speak too directly to us. Sam Taylor Wood's "Brontosaurus" features a film of a naked guy flailing around while classical music plays. She explained that she had a friend dance naked to techno music while she filmed him. When she played around with things, she said she found that the slowed-down images without the original sound looked alien to her. I don't know; the first thing I thought was, "Hmm. Naked guy dancing. Probably to techno music, but it's been slowed down."

Anyway, I look forward to future visits to art museums a little closer to home, now that I have some exposure to twentieth century art. After touring two floors of galleries and taking the voice player's recommended "architecture tour", I visited the gift shop and hurried back to my hotel to drop off the day's purchases.