Birdies and Bogeys

RIDDLE

2011-02-21T09:42:00.000-08:00

I got my master's degree before my bachelor's degree. How?

STEPPING FEET

2010-11-06T22:40:00.000-07:00

Today at Bird Rock Coffee, Mike Myrdal, the lead for Stepping Feet, a local Dave Matthews cover band played, a bunch of good Dave songs as well as some Jack Johnson and others. Good music, good coffee, and work of course -- a great way to spend a Saturday morning!

SHORT DISTANCE

2010-09-16T22:26:00.001-07:00

Highlights from a long stretch of short distance.

A TALE

2010-05-04T09:30:00.000-07:00

A tale.

SUNDAY GOLF HIGHLIGHTS

2010-05-02T22:33:00.000-07:00

Some ridiculous numbers by golf's top two rising stars today:

Ryo Ishikawa, 18, shot a 12-under 58 to win The Crowns tournament on the Japan Golf Tour, turning a five-shot deficit into a five-shot win.
Rory McIlroy, 20, shot a 10-under 62, going 5-under on the last five holes, to win the Quail Hollow Championship by four. After making the cut on the number Friday, he went 16-under for the weekend!

In more obscure golf news, Ravi Chugh, 25, got it to 4-under on the 13th hole today at Oaks North Golf Course for the first time in his career, and made a run at his first-ever bogey-free round through 16 holes before bogeying the final two holes.

SEATTLE WALKING TOUR

2010-04-08T22:59:00.000-07:00

Walking around the city is not a bad way to spend one of those not rainy days in Seattle. More details here and in this map, which the following image previews.

THURSDAY AT THE MASTERS

2010-04-08T22:56:00.000-07:00

In addition to all the off-the-course story lines at the Masters this week because of Tiger's return to golf, there were lots of nice ones on the course too. Arnold Palmer, 80, hit the ceremonial first shot as he for the past several years and was joined by Jack Nickalus, 70, for the first time. Tom Watson, 60, continued his unbelievable major tournament play (he had a putt to win the British Open last summer at age 59!) shot a bogey-free 5-under (!) tying his career-best (!) and is only one behind the first-round leader! (He's 60!) Fred Couples, 50, who is in the middle of a record-setting debut on the Champions Tour shot 6-under (his career best at Augusta!) and has the first-round lead.

In addition to these legendary Masters champions making headlines, Tiger also had a noteworthy first round. He shot 4-under to break 70 for the first time in the first round at Augusta (really? wow), and he made two eagles in a round for the first time at Augusta (and burned the edge on a third makeable eagle putt).

Can't really ask for more from a Thursday at the Masters...

But there's more: Masters.com has video highlights of several individual holes for many golfers:

This is certainly a step in the right direction.

LOOKING FORWARD TO RETIREMENT

2010-02-28T13:00:00.000-08:00

Last week I played golf at Tecolote Canyon one morning with a delightful 80-year old. "Golf is the reason I'm still around."

He has made a hole-in-one on the 17th hole, which he can see from his house at the top of the ridge overlooking the canyon. "I'm probably one of the only people in the world that can say that."

I'm still waiting for my first hole-in-one, but once it happens maybe I should start hoping to ace a hole I can see from where I live.

THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA

2010-02-02T23:20:00.000-08:00

I recently finished The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, which was excellent. The book addresses several topics:

the state of industrial agriculture based around endless production of cheap corn;
the origins of the organic food movement;
the industrialization of the organic food chain;
what it means for a farm to be truly sustainable;
the ethics of eating animals; and
whether it's still possible to hunt (pig) and gather (mushrooms) today and what the experience might teach about us eating

I collected a long list of passages, predominantly from the parts describing the industrial organic food chain and Polyface Farms, a local and sustainable farm featured in Pollan's work.

Even though the additive promises to diminish air quality in California, new federal mandates pushed by the corn processors require refineries in the state to help eat the corn surplus by diluting their gasoline with 10 percent alcohol. (p.111)

Polyface Farm stands about as far from this industrialized sort of agriculture as it is possible to get without leaving the planet. ... Before my journey through the organic food industry I would have that virtually any organic farm would belong on the Polyface side [of a comparison with industrial agriculture]. But it turns out that this is not necessarily the case. There are now "industrial organic" farms that belong firmly on the [industrial] side. Then there is this further paradox: Polyface Farm is technically not an organic farm, though by any standard it is more "sustainable" than virtually any organic farm. Its example forces you to think a lot harder about what these words -- sustainable, organic, natural -- really mean. (p.130-131)

I enjoy shooping at Whole Foods nearly as much as I enjoy browsing a good bookstore, which, come to think of it, is probably no accident: Shopping at Whole Foods is a literary experience, too. That's not to take anything away from the food, which is generally of high quality, much of it "certified organic" or "humanely raised" or "free range." (p.135)

But what about the "free-range" lifestyle promised on the label? True, there's a little door in the shed leading out to a narrow grassy yard. But the free-range story seems a bit of a stretch when you discover that the door remains firmly shut until the birds are at least five of six weeks old -- for fear they'll catch something outside -- and the chickens are slaughtered only two weeks later. (p.140)

Throughout its history, the sharpest growth of organic has closely followed spikes in public concern over the industrial food supply. Some critics condemn organic for profiting time and again from "food scares," and while there is certainly some truth to this charge, whether it represents a more serious indictment of organic or industrial food is open to question. (p.132)

After Arthur Harvey, a Maine blueberry farmer, won a 2003 lawsuit forcing the USDA to obey the language of the 1990 law, lobbyists working for the Organic Trade Association managed in 2005 to slip language into a USDA appropriations bill restoring -- and possibly expanding -- the industry's right to use synthetics in organic foods. (p.156)

To the eye, [the industrial organic farms in California] look exactly like any other industrial farm in California -- and in fact some of the biggest organic operations in the state are owned and operated by conventional megafarms. (p.158)

Gene Kahn makes the case that the scale of a farm has no bearing on its fidelity to organic principles, and that unless organic "scales up [it will] never be anything more than yuppie food." (p.159)

Yet [Drew Goodman's] success, like Gene Kahn's, has opened up a gulf between Big and Little Organic and convinced many of the movement's founders, as well as poneering farmers like Joel Salatin, that the time has come to move beyond organic -- to raise the bar on the American food system once again. (p.169)

Compared to conventional chickens, I was told, these organic birds have it pretty good: They get a few more square inches of living space per bird. ... and because there are no hormones or antibiotics in their feed to accelerate growth, they get to live a few days longer. Though under the circumstances it's not clear that a longer life is necessarily a boon. Running along the entire length of each shed was a grassy yard maybe fifteen feet wide, not nearly big enough to accommodate all twenty thousan birds inside should the group ever decide to take the air en masse. Whichm truth be told, is the last thing the farm managers want to see happen, since these defenseless, crowded, and genetically identical birds are exquisitely vulnerable to infection. This is one of the larger ironies of growing organic food in an industrial system: It is even more precarious than a conventional industrial system. But the federal rules say an organic chicken should have "access to the outdoors," and Supermarket Pastoral imagines it, so Petaluma Poultry provides the doors and the yard and everyone keeps their fingers crossed. (p.172)

And while it is true that organic farmers don't spread fertilizers made from natural gas or spray pesticides made from petroleum, industrial organic farmers often wind up burning more diesel fuel than their conventional counterparts: in trucking bulky loads of compost across the countryside and weeding their fields, a particularly energy-intensive process involving extra irrigation and extra cultivation. All told, growing food organically uses about a third less fossil fuel than growing it conventionally. ... Yet growing the food is the least of it: only a fifth of the total energy used to feed us is consumed on the farm; the rest is spent processing the food and moving it around. (p.183)

Grass farmers grow animals -- for meat, eggs, milk, and wool -- but regard them as part of a food chain in which grass is the keystone species, the nexus between the solar energy that powers every food chain and the animals we eat. ... One of the principles of modern grass farming is that to the greatest extent possible farmers should rely on the contemporary energy of the sun, as captured everyday by photosynthesis, instead of the fossilized sun energy contained in petroleum. (p.188)

"You can't let your cows take a second bite of a grass before it has had a chance to fully recover." If the law of the second bite were actually on the books, most of the world's ranchers and dairy farmers would be outlaws, since they allow their stock to grze their pastures continuously. ... Grass farming done well depends almost entirely on a wealth of nuanced local knowledge at a time when most of the rest of agriculture has come to rely on precisely the opposite: on the off-farm brain, and the one-size-fits-all universal intelligence represented by agrochemicals and machines. (p.189-191)

The animals fanned out in the new paddock and lowered their great heads, and the evening air filled with the muffled sounds of smacking lips, tearing grass, and the low snuffling of contented cows. The last time I had stood watching a heard of cattle eat their supper I was standing up to my ankles in cow manure in Poky Feeders pen number 43 in Garden City, Kansas. The difference between these two bovine dining scenes could not have been starker. The single most obvious difference was that these cows were harvesting their own feed instead of waiting for a dump truck to deliver a total mixed ration of corn that had been grown hundreds of miles away and then blended by animal nutritionists with urea, antiobiotics, minerals, and the fat of other cattle in a feedlot laboratory. Here we'd brought the cattle to the food rather than the other way around, and at the end of their meal there'd be nothing left for us to clean up, since the cattle would spread their waste exactly where it would do the most good. (p.194-195)

A diverse enough polyculture of grasses can withstand virtually any shock and in some places will produce in a year nearly as much total biomass as a forest receiving the same amount of rainfall. (p.197)

In fact, grassing over that portion of the world's cropland now being used to grow grain to feed ruminants would offset fossil fuel emissions appreciably. For example, if the sixteen million acres now being used to grow corn to feed cows in the United States becoame well-managed to pasture, that would remove fourteen billion pounds of carbon from the atmosphere each year, the equivalent of taking four million cars off the road. We seldom focus on farming's role in global warming, but as much as a third of all greenhouse gases that human activity has added to the atmosphere can be attributed to the saw and the plow. (p.198)

But if all that energy has been drawn from the boundless storehouse of the sun, as in the case of eating meat off this pasture, that meal comes as close to a free lunch as we can hope to get. (p.199)

The ninety-nine cent price of a fast-food hamburger simply doesn't take account of that true meal's cost -- to soil, oil, public health, the public purse, etc., costs which are never charged directly to the consumer but, indirectly and invisibily, to the taxpayer (in the form of subsidies), the health care system (in the form of food-borne illnesses and obesity), and the environment (in the form of pollution), not to mention the welfare of the workers in the feedlot and the slaughterhouse and the welfare of the animals themselves. If not for this sort of blind-man's accounting, grass would make a lot more sense than it now does. (p.201)

This is what Joel means when says the animals do the real work around here. "I'm just the orchestra conductor, making sure everybody's in the right place at the right time." (p.212)

I began to understand just how radically different this sort of farming is from the industrial models I'd observed before, whether in an Iowa cornfield or an organic chicken farm in California. Indeed, it is so different that I found Polyface's system difficult to describe to myself in an orderly way. Industrial processes follow a clear, linear, hierarchical logic: First this, then that; put this in here, and then out comes that. But the relationship between cows and chickens on this farm (leaving aside for the moment the other creatures and relationships present here) takes the form of a loop rather than a line, and that makes it hard to know where to start, or how to distinguish between causes and effects, subjects and objects. (p.212)

Polyface Farm is built on the efficiencies that come from mimicking relationships found in nature and layering one farm enterprise over another on the same base of land. ... The idea is not to slavishly imitate nature, but to model a natural ecosystem in all its diversity and interdependence, one where all the species "fully express their physiological distinctiveness." He takes advantage of each species' natural proclivities in a way that benefits not only that animal but other species as well. So instead of treating the chicken as a simple egg or protein machine, Polyface honors -- and exploits -- "the innate distinctive desires of a chicken," which include pecking in the grass and cleaning up after herbivores. The chickens get to do, and eat, what they evolved to do and eat, and in the process the farmer and his cattle both profit. What is the opposite of zero-sum? I'm not sure, but this is it. (p.215)

"This is the sort of farm machinery I like: never needs its oil changed, appreciates over time, and when you're done with it you eat it." (p.217)

But the cliche that kept banging around in my head was "happy as a pig in shit." Buried clear to their butts in composting manure, a bobbling sea of wriggling hams and corkscrew tails, these were the happiest pigs I'd ever seen. (p.217-218)

"Learned helplessness" is the pyschological term, and it's not uncommon in CAFOs, where tens of thousands of hogs spend their entire lives ignorant of earth or straw or sunshine, crowded together beneath a metal roof standing on metal slats suspended over a septic tank. It's not surprising that an animal as intelligent as a pig would get depressed under these circumstances, and a depressed pig will allow his tail to be chewed on to the point of infection. Tail docking is the USDA's recommended solution to the porcine "vice" of tail chewing. Using a pair of pliers and no anesthetic, most -- but not quite -- of the tail is snipped off. Why leave the little stump? Because the whole point of the exercise is not to remove the object of tail biting so much as to render it even more sensitive. Now a bite to the tail is so painful that even the most demoralized pig will struggle to resist it. Horrible as it is to contemplate, it's not hard to see how the road to such a hog hell is smoothly paved with the logic of industrial efficiency. (p.218)

"Part of the problem is, you've got a lot of D students left on the farm today," Joel said, as we drove around Staunton running errands. "The guidance counselors encouraged all the A students to leave home and go to college. There's been a tremendous brain drain in rural America. Of course that suits Wall Street just fine; Wall Street is always trying to extract brainpower and capital from the countryside. First they take the brightest bulbs off the arm and put them to work in Dilbert's cubicle, and then they go after the capital of the dimmer ones who stayed behind, by selling them a bunch of gee-whiz solutions to their problems." This isn't just the farmer's problem, either. "It's a foolish culture that entrusts its food supply to simpletons." (p.220-221)

At Polyface no one ever told me not to touch the animals, or asked me to put on a biohazard suite before going into the brooder house. The reason I had to wear one at Petaluma Poultry is because that system -- a monoculture of chickens raised in close confinement -- is inherently precarious, and the organic rules' prohibition on antibiotics puts it at a serious disadvantage. Maintaining a single-species animal farm on an industrial scale isn't easy without pharmaceuticals and pesticides. Indeed, that's why these chemicals were invented in the first place, to keep shaky monocultures from collapsing. Sometimes the large-scale organic farmer looks like someone trying to practice industrial agriculture with one hand tied behind his back. (p.221)

So the carbon from the woodlots feeds the fields, finding its way into the grass and, from there, into the beef. Which it turns out is not only grass fed but tree fed as well. (p.224)

The fact that Polyface can prove its chickens have much lower bacteria counts than supermarket chickens (Salatin's had them both tested by an independent lab) doesn't cut any mustard with the inspectors, either. USDA regulations spell out precisely what sort of facility and system is permissible, but they don't set thresholds for food-borne pathogens. (That would require the USDA to recall meat from packers who failed to meet the standards, something the USDA, incredibly, lacks the authority to do.) (p.229)

In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling. (p.233)

Imagine if the walls of every slaughterhouse and animal factory were as transparent as Polyface's -- if not open to the air then at least made of glass. So much of what happens behind those walls -- the cruely, the carelessness, the filth -- would simply have to stop. (p.235)

Joel is convinced "clean food" could compete with supermarket food if the government would exempt farmers from the thicket of regulations that prohibit them from processing and selling meat from the farm. For him, regulation is the single biggest impediment to building a viable local food chain, and what's at stake is our liberty, nothing less." ... He believes "freedom of food" -- the freedom to buy a pork chop from the farmer who raised the hog -- should be a constitutional right. (p.236)

Having seen what happened to last year's pile, and all the piles before that, Joel can see the future of this one in a way I can't, its promise to transubstantiate this mass of blood and guts and feathers into a particularly rich, cakey black compost, improbably sweet-smelling stuff that, by spring, will be ready for him to spread onto the pastures and turn back into grass. (p.238)

They were paying a premium over supermarket prices for Polyface food, and in many cases driving more than an hour over a daunting (though gorgeous) tangle of county roads to come get it. But no one would every mistake these people for the well-heeled urban foodies generally thought to be the market for organic or artisanal food. (p.241)

It's true that cheap industrial food is heavily subsidized in many ways such that its price in the supermarket does not reflect its real cost. But until the rules that govern our food system change, organic or sustainable food is going to cost more at the register, more than some people can afford. ... There are many of us who could afford to spend more on food if we chose to ... So is the unwillingness to pay more for food really a matter of affordability or priority? (p.243)

"Why is it that we exempt food, of all things, from that rule? Industrial agriculture, because it depends on standardization, has bombarded us with the message that all pork is pork, all chicken is chicken, eggs eggs, even though we all know that can't really be true. But it's downright un-American to suggest that one egg might be nutritionally superior to another." Joel recited the slogan of his local supermarket chain: "'We pile it high and sell it cheap.' What other business would ever sell its products that way?" (p.244)

Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing. And it's a short way from not knowing who's at the other end of your food chain to not caring -- to the carelessness of both producers and consumers. (p.245)

When I asked how a place like New York City fit into his vision of a local food economy he startled me with his answer: "Why do we have to have a New York City? What good is it?" ... Though when I pressed him, pointing out that New York City, den of pestilence and iniquity though it might be, was probably here to stay and would need to eat, he allowed that farmer's markets and CSAs -- "community supported agriculture", schemes in which customers "subscribe" to a farm, paying a few hundred dollars at the start of the growing season in exchange for a weekly box of produce through the summer -- might be a good way for urbanites to connect with distant farmers. (p.245)

Bev was nearing the end of his financial rope while the USDA dilly-dallied on the approvals he needed to open. Yet when he'd finally secured the necessary permits, hired a crew, and begun killing animals, the USDA abruptly pulled its inspector, effectively shutting him down. They explained that Bev wasn't processing enough animals fast enough to justify the inspector's time -- in other words, he wasn't sufficiently industrial, which of course was precisely the point of the whole venture. I realized Joel had wanted me to see Bev's predicament as proof of his contention that the government is putting obstacles in the path of an alternative system. (p.246)

Joel was even higher on metropolitan buying clubs, a scheme with which I was not familiar. A group of families gets together to place a big order once or twice a month; a lead person organizes everything, and offers her home as a pickup site, usually in exchange for free product. The size of the order makes it worth the farmer's while to deliver. (p.248)

"The biggest problem with alternative agriculture today," Nation writes, "is that it seeks to incorporate bits and pieces of the industrial model and bits and pieces of the artisanal model. This will not work. In the middle of the road, you get the worst of both worlds." (p.249-250)

But for local food chains to succeed, people will have to relearn what it means to eat according to the seasons. This is especially true of pasured animals, which can be harvested only after they've had several months on rapidly growing grass. Feeding animals corn in CAFOs has accustomed us to a year-round supply of fresh meats, many of which we forget were once eaten as seasonally as tomatoes or sweet corn: People would eat most of their beef and pork in late fall or winter, when the animals were fat, and eat chicken in the summer. (p.253)

This informal alliance of small farmers and local chefs is something you find in many cities these days. ... Chefs like Waters have also done much to educate the public about the virtues of local agriculture, the pleasures of eating by the season, and the superior qualities of exceptionally fresh food grown with care and without chemicals. (p.254)

Why should food, of all things, be the linchpin of this rebellion? Perhaps because food is a powerful metaphor for a great many of the values to which people feel globalization poses a threat, including the distinctiveness of local cultures and identities, the survival of local landscapes, and biodiversity. ... Indeed, the most powerful protests against globalization to date have all revolved around food: I'm thinking of the movement against genetically modified crops, the campaign against patented seeds in India, and Slow Food, the Italian-born international movement that seeks to defend traditional food cultures against the global tide of homogenization. (p.255)

Of course the problems of our food system are very different -- if anything, it produces too much food, not too little, or too much of the wrong food. But there's no question that it is failing many consumers and producers, which is why they are finding creative ways around it. (p.257)

Today the total economy, astounding in its ability to absorb every challenge, is well on its way to transforming organic from a reform movement into an industry -- another flavor in the global supermarket. It took capitalism less than a quarter century to turn even something as ephemeral as bagged salads of cut and washed organic mesclun, of all things, into a cheap international commodity retailed in a new organic supermarket. Whether this is a good or bad thing people will disagree. (p.257)

By definition local is a hard thing to sell in a global marketplace. Local food, as opposed to organic, implies a new economy as well as new agriculture -- new social and economic relationships as well as new ecological ones. (p.257)

All of which is to say that a successful local food economy implies not only a new kind of food producer, but a new kind of eater as well, one who regards finding, preparing, and preserving food as one of the pleasures of life rather than a chore. (p.259)

Deciding whether that future should more closely resemble Joel's radically local vision or Whole Foods' industrial organic matters less than assuring that thriving alternatives exist; feeding the cities may require a different sort of food chain than feeding the countryside. We may need a great many different alternative food chains, organic and local, biodynamic and slow, and others yet undreamed. As in the fields, nature provides the best model for the marketplace, and nature never puts all her eggs in one basket. The great virtue of a diversified food economy, like a diverse pasture or farm, is its ability to withstand any shock. The important thing is that there be multiple food chains, so that when any one of them fails -- when the oil runs out, when mad cow or other food-borne diseases become epidemic, when the pesticides no longer work, when drought strikes and plagues come and soils blow away -- we'll still have a way to feed ourselves. (p.260-261)

The yolks were a gorgeous carroty shade of orange and they seem to possess an unusual integrity: separating them from the whites was a cinch. ... I could see why pastry chefs in Charlotesville swore by Polyface eggs: What Joel had called their "muscle tone" made baking with them a breeze. (p.265)

Perhaps not surprisingly, the large quanitities of beta-carotene, vitamin E, and folic acid present in green grass find their way into the flesh of the the animals that eat grass. ... As it turns out, the fats created in the flesh of grass eaters are the best kind for us to eat. (p.266-267)

One of the most important yet unnoticed changes to the human diet in modern times has been in the ratio between omega-3 and omega-6, the other essential fatty acid in our food. Omega-6 is produced in the seed of plants; omega-3 in the leaves. ... Too high a ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 can contribute to heart disease, probably because omega-6 helps blood clot, while omega-3 helps it flow. As our diet -- and the diet of the animals we eat -- shifted from one based on green plants to one based on grain (from grass to corn), the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 has gone from roughly one to one (in the diet of hunter-gatherers) to more than ten to one. We may one day come to regard this shift as one of the most deleterious dietary changes wrouth by the industrialization of our food chain. (p.268)

Conventional nutritional wisdom holds that salmon is automatically better for us than beef, but that judgment assumes the beef has been grain fed and the salmon krill fed; if the steer is fattened on grass and the salmon on graint, we might actually be better off eating the beef. The species of animal you eat may matter less than what the animal you're eating has itself eaten. (p.269)

[To the argument that] animals on factory farms have never known any other life. The rightist rightly points out that "animals feel a need to exercise, stretch their limbs or wings, groom themselves and turn around, whether or not they have ever lived in conditions that permit this." The proper measure of their suffering, in other words, is not their prior experiences but the unremitting daily frustration of their instincts. (p.310)

Egg operations are the worst, from everything I've read; I haven't managed to actually get into one of these places since journalists are unwelcome there. Beef cattle in America at least still live outdoors, albeit standing ankle-deep in their own waste eating a diet that makes them sick. And broiler chickens, although they are bred for such swift and breast-heavy growth they can barely walk, at least don't spend their lives in cages too small to ever stretch a wing. That fate is reserved for the American laying hen, who spends her brief span of days piled together with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage the floor of which four pages of this book could carpet wall to wall. (p.317)

From the point of view of the individual prey animal predation is a horror, but from the point of view of the group -- and of its gene pool -- it is indispensable. So whose point of view shall we favor? That of the individual bison or Bison? The pig or Pig? Much depends on how you choose to answer that question. (p.323)

But surely a species has interests -- in its survival, say, or the health of its habitat -- just as a nation or a community or a corporation can. Animals rights' exclusive concern with the individual might make sense given its roots in a culture of liberal individualism, but how much sense does it make in human nature? (p.323)

If American was suddenly to adopt a strictly vegetarian diet, it isn't at all clear that the toal number of animals killed each year would necessarily decline, since to feed everyone animal pasture and rangeland would have to give way to more intensively cultivated cow crops. If our goal is to kill as few animals as possible people should probably try to eat the largest possible animal that can live on the least cultivated land: grass-finished streaks for everyone. (p.326)

It is doubtful you can build a genuinely sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food production. (p.327)

Grandin told me that in cattle slaughter, "there is the pre-McDonald's era and the post-McDonald's era -- it's night and day." We can only imagine what night must have been like. (p.329)

Sometimes I think that all it would take to clarify our feelings about eating meat, and in the process begin to redeem animal agriculture, would be to simply pass a law requiring all the sheet-metal walls of all the CAFOs, and even the concrete walls of the slaughterhouses, to be replaced with glass. If there's any new right we need to establish, maybe this is the one: the right, I mean, to look. ... Such farms exist; so do a handful of small processing plants willing to let customers on the kill floor, including one -- Lorentz Meats, in Cannon Falls, Minnesota -- that is so confident of their treatment of animals that they have walled their abattoir in glass. (p.332-333)

Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do. Tail docking and sow crates and beak clipping would disappear overnight, and the days of slaughtering four hundred head of cattle an hour would promptly come to and end -- for who could stand the sight? Yes, meat would get more expensive. We'd probably eat a lot less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals we'd eat them with the consciousness, ceremony, and respect they deserve. (p.333)

A cynical person might say that cooking like this -- with ambition -- is really just another way of showing off, a form what might be called conspicuous production... No doubt there's an element of truth to this, but cooking is many other things too, and one them is a way to honor the group of people you have elected to call your guests. Another thing cooking is, or can be, is a way to honor the things we're eating, the animals and plants and fungi that have been sacrificed to gratify our needs and desires, as well as the places and the people that produced them. (p.404)

WALKING DIRECTIONS BOOKMARKLET

2010-01-28T17:51:00.000-08:00

Recently, I've been looking for apartments in Hillcrest, and one of my main considerations is proximity to the UCSD Medical Center, which is where the campus shuttle stops. To make it easy to find the walking distance from an apartment, I put together the following bookmarklet:


javascript: (function() {
  var landmark = "%28Ucsd+Medical+Center-Hillcrest%29";
  var addr = '';
  if (window.getSelection) {
    addr = window.getSelection();
  } else if (document.getSelection) {
    addr = document.getSelection();
  } else if (document.selection) {
    addr = document.selection.createRange().text;
  };
  var url =
    "http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_d"
      + "&saddr=" + landmark + "&daddr=" + addr
      + "&hl=en&geocode=FTvO8wEdxS4E-SHPKHyKbaQYvCkJxkkg1lTZgDENTC4cul0vFg"
      + "%3BFTqa-gEdm4UC-SlbcbhcTnHcgDFhpNpiYHTcfg&mra=pe"
      + "&mrcr=0&sll=32.977978,-117.220825&sspn=0.019872,0.038581&ie=UTF8&t=h"
      + "&z=14&dirflg=w";
  window.open(url);
}())

After saving this script as a bookmark, I can then highlight any text on a page (e.g. the address for an apartment in a rental listing), and navigate this bookmark to pull up Google Maps with walking directions. Sweet!

The dirflg=w URL parameter grabs walking directions. There are hard-coded parameters like the Lat-Long viewport and a geocode (to give information about the UCSD Medical Center landmark), but these sorts of things would be simple to fix for another landmark or if the structure of the URL parameters change. The bit of feature detection to determine how to obtain the highlighted text is from here.

OVERHEARD ON THE WALK

2010-01-21T19:30:00.000-08:00

A: We finished that bottle of Bacardi 151.
B: Man, that stuff's 151 proof, right?
A: I don't know.
B: Man, that's like sixty-something percent alcohol.

I really hope these two weren't coming out of the engineering building...

CHIVALRY ON THE WEB?

2010-01-18T23:08:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I came across a friend's personal wedding website, what seems to be an increasingly common way for couples to help organize wedding information and coordinate with their guests. I have only known two couples that have set up sites like this, and both times the girl's name has appeared before the guy's in the URLs. Although two examples certainly don't prove anything, my conjecture was that, as a simple form of modern day chivalry, when couples set out to make a wedding website, they choose the girl's name to appear first.

It seemed like a simple enough theory to look into (and it was officially winter break after all), so I decided to do a bit of investigative journalism (i.e. Python scripting). The two wedding websites I knew of had the form GirlAndBoy.com and GirlAndBoy.weddingwindow.com, so I decided to write a script to search for the existence of websites of this form, as well as corresponding sites where the boy is listed first (BoyAndGirl.com and BoyAndGirl.weddingwindow.com).

My plan was to try all pairs of popular female and male names, and I found a list of 5,189 female names and 5,243 male names spanning many nationalities. Unfortunately, by a back-of-the-envelope calculation, trying 27,205,927 pairs of names would have taken a couple months. Instead, I used a tool on the US Social Security site that lists the most popular baby names for babies born in each year dating back to 1880. I retrieved the top 100 names for each gender in 1980 since 30 years old seemed to be a reasonable age for a couple looking to secure a wedding website, and because the most popular names for newborns are unlikely to change much over a timeframe.

So my experimental setup was as follows. For each of the 10,000 boy-girl pairs, I checked for the existence of four sites:BoyAndGirl.com GirlAndGirl.com BoyAndGirl.weddingwindow.com GirlAndBoy.weddingwindow.comOut of the 10,000 pairs, the experiment did not finish within 40 seconds for 165 of them. Some of these time outs were due to wireless network shadiness, password-protected sites, and other errors that could have been rectified with manual inspection. Since the experiment finished on the vast majority of name pairs, however, I chose not to re-run on these ones that did not finish.

There are a few possible lenses through which to view the results. One is to consider just the *.weddingwindow.com results. In the event that, for a particular pair, both BoyAndGirl.weddingwindow.com and GirlAndBoy.weddingwindow.com were taken, it's unclear whether the second couple was able to obtain the URL they wanted or had to swap the order of their names because the other was taken. It's also not possible to determine which URL was claimed first (and since they were first, they would have had free choice among both options), so in cases when both versions are taken, we cannot conclude anything. There are 849 pairs for which there was exactly one *.weddingwindow.com, of which the girl was listed first 485 times and the guy 364 times. So looking just at these numbers, the girl was listed first 57.2% of the time.

When looking at just the *.com results, again we cannot conclude anything when, for a particular pair of names, both versions of the URL exist. There are 2,985 cases where exactly one URL was live, and 1,241 of these listed the girl first while 1,744 listed the guy first. So in the *.com case, the guy was listed first 58.4% of the time.

Another possible way to view the data is to assume that when a couple decided to set up their website, they considered each of the four URLs. For a given pair, if exactly one of the four sites was taken, we can say that the order of names was actively chosen, since they had all four possibilities at their disposal. Things are less clear when there are two matches. If both matches had the same parity (where parity here means gender ordering), then we can assume that both couples got the ordering they wanted: the first couple, whoever they were, had complete freedom of choice, and the second couple at the very least were able to switch domains to maintain the gender ordering they wanted. If the two matches don't have the same gender parity, then we can't conclude anything. Similarly, for all pairs of names with three or four matches, we can't conclude anything. Using this metric, there are 1,343 couples who listed the girl first and 1,793 who listed the guy first. That puts the guys ahead at 57.2%.

So, have we figured anything out? Well, just considering *.weddingwindow.com websites, where the sites are certainly set up for wedding purposes, the girls have an edge, like I predicted. Things are less clear in the other two cases. A brief manual inspection shows that several of the *.com sites are not dedicated for wedding organization, but rather as blogs, personal online stores, and even link farms. So although the *.com sites perhaps don't tell us much about our original goal of understanding the URLs chosen for wedding websites in particular, perhaps future investigation can look into how couples' websites in general are set up, and whether there is indeed a bias towards males first as this exeriment suggests. The methodology of the last approach, where we assume a couple chose from the four website forms we tested, is the most suspect, so it's unclear what the 57.2% number tells us.

Although these results are inconclusive, the fact that the *.weddingwindow.com results in particular are biased towards females first provides some support for my initial conjecture. Future work is needed to more rigorously test this claim, however. There are probably other wedding websites that offer customized and predictable URLs, which would provide a broader base of sites for future experiments. Also, the experiment I ran tested just the sites that happened to be live during a stretch of a particular few days; certainly there are wedding websites that had existed before but expired before my tests, and more that have been created since. It would also be useful to expand the experiment to include other domain suffixes like .info and .net, names from different origins, as well as same-sex couples.

Bottom line: who knows, but perhaps there's still hope for some chivalry.

DINNER AT THE HOMESICK RESTAURANT

2010-01-02T20:08:00.000-08:00

I read "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant" by Anne Tyler over break. It's a really engaging story of a woman whose husband left her alone to raise three children, each with distinct personalities. The story explores the relationships among the siblings and with their mother, strained in many ways but always managing to remain intertwined as a family.

A few passages:

There ought to be a whole separate language, she thought, for words that are truer than other words -- for perfect, absolute truth. (p.10)

Her one mistake: a simple error in judgment. It should not have had such far-reaching effects. You would think that life could be a little more forgiving. (p.23)

But whenever Jenny returned, she was dampened almost instantly by the atmosphere of the house -- by its lack of light, the cramped feeling of its papered rooms, a certain grim spareness. She almost wondered if she had some kind of allergy. It was like a respiratory ailment; on occassion, she believed she might be smothering. Her head grew stuffy, as it did when she had studied too long without a break. She snapped at people. Even Ezra irritated her, with his calm and docility. (p.83)

Was this what it came to -- that you never could escape? That certain things were doomed to continue, generation after generation? (p.209)

READABILITY BOOKMARKLET

2010-01-02T15:34:00.000-08:00

In this year's Pogie Awards, David Pogue names Readability as the year's best tech idea. Readability is an awesome bookmarklet that attempts to scrape the current page for content the user likely wants to see (the main article, title, author, pictures) and removes everything else (menus, ads, fancy formatting).

The meat of this bookmarklet is in readability.js, which removes the stylesheets and scripts from the page, walks the DOM tree to identify the nodes that likely contain the relevant content, and formats this content with a clean stylesheet, using a few simple settings that can be configured in the bookmarklet. They use several simple heuristics to identify paragraph divs with relevant content -- including the number of commas in a paragraph as well as its overall character count -- that seem to work well for most typical sites. Also, since the current page doesn't get navigated, if it turns out that the pruned-down document threw away some useful content, a simple refresh gets you back to the original presentation.

In Firefox, the SiteLauncher extension provides a simple way to set up custom keyboard shortcuts to navigate a bookmark (or bookmarklet). If you're going to spend a couple minutes reading an article, this is a great way to get rid of all the extra fuss with a single shortcut.

TIGER

2009-12-05T23:07:00.001-08:00

My thoughts exactly:

Now all we have left to look up to is Derek Jeter.

(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opinion/06dowd.html)

27

2009-11-04T22:36:00.000-08:00

A DRUMMING DREAM JOB

2009-08-12T13:50:00.000-07:00

I have long thought that the folks at Elias Sports Bureau who get to dig up surprising and peculiar statistics about the day-to-day goings-on in baseball and other sports have some of the most desirable jobs around. Here's another one of my recreational dream jobs, from a NYTimes article describing the upcoming Rock Band Beatles game):

Nearby, a sound designer and trained drummer was at work on his computer, tagging each of the colored dots that represented drumbeats with information that would automate how the animated Ringo’s hands should move in order to play them: which drum on his kit should he hit, how hard and with which hand, given his peculiar ambidextrous style?

As someone who enjoys Rock Band, who's interested in music, and who doesn't know much about the Beatles, this article was an interesting read.

About the common insults of Rock Band and Rock Banders:

Gamers in turn are baffled by the criticism of what is, after all, “just a game.” People who play Halo or Gran Turismo are rarely asked why they don’t pick up a real gun or race real cars. You rarely hear that Monopoly is a waste of time because it doesn’t actually teach anything about buying hotels.

About Apple's paranoia over the audio data for the game:

Apple’s preoccupation with security meant that the high-quality audio [single-instrument tracks] he created never left Abbey Road. If the separated parts leaked out, every amateur D.J. would start lacing mixes with unauthorized Beatles samples. Instead, Martin created low-fidelity copies imprinted with static for the Harmonix team to take back to the States — in their carry-on luggage. They were just good enough to work with until the game coding could be brought back to Abbey Road and attached to the actual songs.

GREAT TIME FOR GOLF FANS

2009-03-15T21:19:00.000-07:00

Tiger's back, NBC's got a new toy that records video at 7000 frames per second (!), and the Pro Tracer makes watching golf feel like playing a video game. The only other thing you could ask for is Tiger back to his usual dominating form, and over the past two days it seems like he's tending towards it.

Oh, and the-next-big-thing Rory McIlroy has been awesome to watch recently.

T-35 MINUTES UNTIL TIGER'S BACK!

2009-02-25T10:28:00.000-08:00

Great commercial: Nike Golf: The Good Life.

FIXED WIDTH FONT IN GMAIL

2009-02-17T21:06:00.000-08:00

http://blog.leosoto.com/2007/11/fixed-width-font-on-gmail-2.html

Why has it taken me so long to think of searching for this...

Update: http://blog.leosoto.com/2009/03/fixed-width-font-on-gmail-again.html

THINKING FOLD

2009-02-14T18:29:00.000-08:00

I first met OCaml in September 2006 (how sad life must have been before then), and I've since written (100-ε)% of my code in it. I'm happy to report that I'm emitting higher-order, fold-y code snippets like the following ever more frequently.

Hashtbl.fold (fun _ -> (+)) G.fidNumRegions 0

Update (7:17pm): I changed the data structure, so that line of code is no longer. Oh well, there will be others...

WASTED KEYSTROKES

2008-10-05T15:22:00.001-07:00

In my program analysis projects over the past year, I often run experiments that dump a bunch of information into log files, which I scan for exceptional and not-so-exceptional output, and then head back to my source. I repeat this process frequently and quickly during development and debugging. I'm down to a fairly quick and efficient set of keystrokes for this task, but my workflow consists of closing and reopening my log file.

A few days ago, it occurred to me that Vim probably has a way to reload the current buffer. (I'm sure I've had this same thought a long time ago, but I had never stored the command in my main memory.) Indeed, a simple :e does the trick, which is much better than what I've been doing for so long.

This made me wonder how much time I've wasted in the past year on the unnecessary keystrokes from my reloading process. It's not difficult to estimate the answer to this Fermi question. There have been 10 months where this reloading pattern was a part of my routine (Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Aug, and Sep). The daily frequency at which I rapidly reloaded log files varied between around 5-20, so let's say 10 on average. 10 times a day for 30 days for 10 months is 3000, file reloads. As far as how much quicker invoking :e is than what I was doing, a very conservative bound is, say, 1 second. So that's an upper bound of 3,000 seconds, or 50 minutes, I could have saved since last summer.

I suppose that's not very significant, especially considering that it's taken me about 20 minutes to do the calculation and write this...

NEW JERSEY PRIDE

2008-10-01T22:34:00.000-07:00

While stopped at a light today, a driver in the car next to me asked where in New Jersey I'm from (my car still has Jersey plates)? He was from Glen Ridge, so this was enough reason to start a conversation while we waited.

Although we probably had only about 30 seconds until the light change, we managed to commiserate about the Yankees' failure to make the playoffs this year and the long and painful winter ahead; to agree that the Mets' failure again helps to ease the pain; to discuss how the fortune of the Red Sox and Rays would play out this year and next; and to make a prediction that the Cubs would finally win it all.

I don't have a lot of New Jersey pride, not because I dislike the place but because I'm pretty indifferent about it. I started going to school away from home when I was 13 (that's ten years ago now), and I don't think I would have had vastly different life experiences had I grown up in New Jersey or some other suburban American area. Nevertheless, it was refreshing to have this kind of random conversation sparked by our common bond.

I have no idea where Glen Ridge is, though.

LAST NIGHT AT THE STADIUM

2008-09-21T23:27:00.000-07:00

ROCK BAND RESEARCH

2008-09-10T19:32:00.000-07:00

Today I presented some mostly-silly ideas about "Making Rock Band Less Efficient, Less Affordable, and a Catalyst for Computer Science Research" at this week's Half-Baked Half Hour, a weekly meeting over the summer where grad students present mostly-silly ideas about sometimes-relevant topics. You can grab the PPTX or PDF slides if you dare. You have been forewarned that it may be a waste of your time.

APPLE BUYS NYTIMES?

2008-09-10T19:18:00.000-07:00

Did Apple hack NYTimes.com, or just buy it?

Update: Apparently a previous attack happened in January.

SHARK FLASHBACK

2008-07-19T22:34:00.000-07:00

Wow. Greg Norman leading the British Open by 2 shots at age 53? Can you really ask for a better British Open story? (Well, it would have been nice if David Duval had stayed in contention today.)

Unfortunately, I won't be able to watch the final round as it unfolds, as I'll be driving on day one of a two-day journey to Oregon. I hope that the Shark can hold out and claim his third Claret Jug, a historic victory (the eldest major champion by 5 years), as he was the last dominant golfer before Tiger hit the scene in 1996 (and I became a golfer/golf fan in 2000). Although I am disappointed I won't be able to watch the end of this championship, I'll take solace in the fact that I'll be driving through Pebble Beach (!) and will hopefully get a chance to hit some balls there.

As an aside, this two week trip to the University of Oregon will be a desperately needed respite from my latest addition: Rock Band. It rocks. If you have any doubt, check out these two ridiculous Rock Band drummers.

MAJOR COLLAGE

2008-07-14T21:13:00.000-07:00

Tiger won the US Open four weeks ago in a Monday playoff (on one knee). I just finally caught up on the Sunday and Monday broadcasts, and it was fun to see all of the shots that I didn't get to see in person (the vast majority of them). With British Open week upon us, get ready for the first Tiger-less major since in almost 12 years. Here are snapshots from the 14 of 46 majors that Tiger has won (images grabbed off ESPN):

PUTTER + COMPUTER

2008-06-20T20:16:00.000-07:00

Adams Dixx Putter

EMPTY NIGHTMARE

2008-05-27T21:02:00.001-07:00

PERSIMMON WOODS

2008-05-01T23:05:00.000-07:00

These look awesome!

OPENING DAY!

2008-03-31T09:12:00.000-07:00

It's that time of the year again, and today the Yankees will (weather permitting) kick off their last year in Yankee Stadium.

The past few years they have got behind early in the season and have had to play great the rest of the way. In 2006 and 2007, after their slow starts, I started keeping track of every set of nine games, hoping to win at least six of each. On average, they almost kept up that winning percentage, coasting to the division title in 2006 and almost catching the Red Sox last year after a miserable start.

This year, I'm not waiting for them to dig themselves into a hole; the goal is to win six out of nine all year. I think 108 wins is a pretty good bet to win the division and would be a great way to close out Yankee Stadium (if they play well in the postseason also, of course). Here's a progress report to keep track of how they're doing on this goal.

MORE SUNDAY RED

2008-03-16T14:51:00.000-07:00

The Tiger Show continues. He has now won all three PGA Tour events he's played in this year, his last five dating back to last year, his last seven tournaments around the world, and nine of the last ten he's played in (he finished second in the other). Are you kidding me?

We have it so good right now, watching Tiger at one of the highest peaks in a career consisting only of peaks. Everyone thought his 1999-2002 run would never be matched again, but now his run since 2005/2006 is arguably even more impressive because he is always in contention. From ESPN:

Jack Nicklaus won seven of 19 tournaments in 1972, seven of 18 in 1973 and five of 16 in 1975. Arnold Palmer won eight of 21 starts in 1962 and seven of 20 in 1963.

Woods won eight of 21 in 1999, nine of 20 in 2000. But the last two years have been unreal: eight of 15 in 2006, seven of 16 in 2007.

And three of three (not counting Dubai) so far in 2008.

His winning 25-foot birdie putt at the 72nd at Bay Hill today gave him the third stretch in PGA Tour history in which someone has won five starts in a row. The other two: Byron Nelson's historic streak of 11 in a row in 1945; and the other (you guessed it) Tiger's streak of seven from 2006-2007.

Earlier in this perfect season, one of the commentators (with his thick British accent) in Dubai was falling over backwards in his praise for Tiger, saying something like "You can't imagine anyone being more perfect, really, can you?" It's hard to argue with that at the moment.

Tiger's back at it next week at Doral, where he's won the last three years. Let the streak live on.

BRILLIANT FRIDAY AT TORREY PINES

2008-01-25T19:22:00.001-08:00

Today was the first time I got to see Tiger in tournament action, although I'd seen him in practice rounds twice before (at Baltusrol in 2005 and earlier this week here at Torrey Pines). He didn't disappoint; despite some difficulties off the tee, he went around the North course in 7-under, making it look very easy.

I was right behind the cameraman as he took this shot of Tiger on the tee at the 6th (Robert Benson-US PRESSWIRE, grabbed from CBSSports)!

As if watching Tiger pick apart Torrey Pines on a beautiful day wasn't enough, while waiting for Tiger to walk up the 5th fairway, I noticed Hank Haney standing right next to me outside the gallery ropes. Haney is Tiger's swing coach and is the No. 3 ranked teacher in the country. He walked with the gallery the rest of the way, and on the 9th hole I went up and talked to him. I asked him about the kind of software he uses in his golf academies and told him a little about the golf/vision project I'm working on. He told me a little about how he uses video playback software in lessons, how amateurs need to get their spin rate down to get longer, and wished me luck on my project. It was very cool!

WOULD YOU BREAK 100?

2008-01-17T21:56:00.000-08:00

GolfDigest is running a sweepstakes this year to have an amateur golfer play the South Course at Torrey Pines right before the US Open this summer. The winner gets to play the course in tournament conditions with three celebrities, and the round will be broadcast on Open Sunday. The idea was born when last summer at the Open at Oakmont Tiger said that a 10-handicap would have no chance at breaking 100 in Open conditions.

Here's my 100-word essay on why they should pick me:

Since moving to La Jolla (I chose graduate school by proximity to great golf), I've honed my game on the South. Throw in another 1000 yards, Open rough, lightning greens, and the TV cameras rolling, and I'm the best bet in grad school sports to break 100 (by 5 shots). Ice your shins, Rory, because you're as beatable as ever. In the offchance I fail, I'll blame it on playing more than just the field. But I'll just pick up, transfer to school in New York, and find someone who needs a fourth at Bethpage.

A DAY OF RECREATION

2007-11-20T23:04:00.000-08:00

Here's a summary of my day, with very few details omitted:

18 holes
breakfast
lunch
foosball
indoor cycling
lifting
tennis
dinner
1 mile run

Today would have been even more glorious had the bowling alley had an open lane for us.

DREAMSEAT

2007-11-18T19:17:00.000-08:00

Can anyone lend me $999.99?

HUH?

2007-11-15T02:29:00.000-08:00

A-Rod? Yankees? No time to even try to process this.

A JOYOUS HALF-SECOND

2007-11-04T01:54:00.001-07:00

I had forgotten until just now that Daylight Savings will take effect shortly, and for a fleeting moment I allowed myself to believe that I would get an extra hour of sleep. And then back to reality: an extra hour of work.

30 MILLION REASONS TO BE HAPPY

2007-10-28T23:49:00.000-07:00

I didn't think Arod would opt out of his contract, but now that he has I am relieved. Although his individual numbers are irreplaceable, the $30+ million price-tag he demands and the drama and controversy he attracts will not be missed, nor will his slapping at first basemens' gloves, yelping at third baseman fielding pop ups, fear of catching pop ups himself, or his purple-colored lips. Winning or losing will be more fun without him.

To his future employer, a message from a nytimes.com reader: "Whoever gets him will need to offer incentives for him to hit over .200 in the post season."

WAITING FOR OCTOBER

2007-09-19T23:20:00.001-07:00

GOOD FRIDAY

2007-09-14T20:57:00.000-07:00

Tiger shooting 28 on the front nine and the Yankees scoring six eighth inning runs in a comeback win at Fenway makes for a happy Ravi.

TAMPA BOMBERS (5-0)

2007-03-05T19:35:00.000-08:00

Minor leaguer Bronson Sardinha hit a 2-run 2-out walkoff homer against the Tigers at Legends Field this afternoon. I know it's only March 5, but baseball is in the air!

Is it too soon to ask them to save up some wins for the postseason...

MACBOOK MAKEOVER

2007-01-23T14:52:00.000-08:00

The MacBook underwent cosmetic surgery yesterday and is now sporting Yankee colors:

DAD'S CUTTING-EDGE CELL PHONE

2007-01-20T20:07:00.000-08:00

Last night my dad asked me how to get speed dial to work on his cell phone. He's been trying for a couple weeks. He's gotten to the point where he added me as number 2 on his speed dial -- but he didn't know how to actually use it by holding the speed dial number down to dial the number.

After debunking that mystery, he wanted to learn how to use text messaging. Why on Earth would he need to text someone, I wondered. It turns out he wants to text Deal or No Deal to have a shot at winning those $10,000 prizes. Go figure.

DESKTOP SEARCH?

2007-01-19T21:48:00.000-08:00

I am happily running Vista on my MacBook, but I have an ironic problem: Vista's integrated desktop search isn't searching my desktop!

It's been fine with most files and applications, but files I've recently added to my desktop aren't showing up. I guess it takes a while for newly-added files to get scraped, since other files and folders on my desktop appear.

...AND I'M A PC

2007-01-13T14:02:00.000-08:00

Just as PC Guy was nervous to upgrade to Vista, I was nervous to install Vista onto the Mac. The install seems to have gone well though, and Vista is running smoothly with glass (even though the integrated graphics card on this machine falls short of what Microsoft says Vista requires). I also didn't need to do any extra work to get wireless to work, despite others saying they needed to.

There are probably some other driver issues I will have to deal with later, but all in all dual booting Mac OS X and Vista seems to be in order.

HI, I'M A MAC...

2007-01-13T10:52:00.000-08:00

Say hello to my newest toy:

I've been lusting over the black MacBook since it came out last year, and I spent the fall trying to decide whether I should get one in the spring. I spent the last couple weeks trying to build up my confidence to ask a BlackBook out, but I always lost my nerve when I got to the computer store.

I was finally ready to order one of the new black MacBooks with the Core 2 Duo on Wednesday. As I was placing my order, the Apple rep showed up with 50 more of the generation 1 machines at a hugely discounted price. He only had white ones, but I had no choice. There was no need for me to spend hundreds of extra dollars for a machine whose purchase I was struggling to justify. And I'd read that the generation 1 Macbook runs Vista and its glass well.

I'm still working on setting up my applications, but I've enjoyed Mac OS X a lot so far. I'm also going to try to set up Vista today. If that goes well, then all will be good.

NICER THAN HAWAII

2007-01-06T11:40:00.000-08:00

January 6 in Philadelphia, and it's 71 and sunny! As my live golf forecast tracker reports, today is an excellent day to play golf in Philly. Even better than San Diego, San Francisco, and even Hawaii. Maybe I don't need to go the West Coast for grad school after all.

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRE

2006-11-14T14:41:00.000-08:00

Over the past month I've learned 100 or so of the most commonly used GRE words. Exactly zero of them appeared on my test today. I guess my test wasn't that common. Oh well, at least now I know some quotidian words like quotidian.

PROGRAM[] HELLO_WORLDS;

2006-11-11T22:06:00.000-08:00

Very amusing: http://www.infiltec.com/j-h-wrld.htm.

THE OS SINGULARITY

2006-11-11T07:37:00.000-08:00

There was an interesting contrast between a tech talk I gave on Wednesday night and a research talk that James Larus of Microsoft Research gave at Penn on Thursday. In trying to motivate a Visual Studio Express talk I was about to give, I talked briefly about the architecture of the .NET Framework and the CLR in allowing programs written in different languages to be compiled down to the same bytecode to get executed by a common runtime.

In of the motivations for the Singularity project, Larus said that the CLR model is inherently flawed because the job of memory protection should be done at a lower -- in the operating system. The Singularity project is a research project that experiments with what could be if an operating system was designed and built from scratch. Some of the design tenets are process isolation to ensure safety between programs, well-defined interfaces for process interactions to aid in verification, and producing provably safe assembly code.

This seems like a very interesting project to work on. Maybe I should consider UW as my top choice so I can have the chance to work on projects like this at MSR. But I can't live in Seattle -- I don't have an umbrella...

VI OR EMACS?

2006-11-04T07:38:00.000-08:00

So what I hear is true: vi users are vi chauvinists and emacs users are emacs chauvinists. I've received a few snide comments among the CS department when launching vi, so I was interested in learning about what the big fuss is.

I actually just randomly started using vi this year. Up until this semester, I had been using pico -- a completely undecorated editor, like Notepad for Unix -- for any terminal editing needs, but after working on a large development project last spring with someone who used vi, I decided that it was time for me to start using a sophisticated Unix editor. So I choose vi instead of emacs. (I think part of my aversion to emacs over the years has been that I had tried to use emacs my freshman year and messed my configuration files so many times that I was sick of trying to figure out what was wrong. I have left the loadup of emacs in a state of errors on my account. vi just opens up.)

Anyway, here is a brief comparison of vi and emacs, and here is a somewhat formal study of their differences.

I NEED COFFEE

2006-11-03T15:31:00.000-08:00

How busy have I been the past few weeks? I think this pretty much sums it up: this morning when preparing my daily cup of coffee, I added some milk, opened my normal two sugar packets, and proceeded to pour the sugar straight into the trash instead of my cup.

Perhaps I was even more tired than usual from too much dreaming -- I dreamt about buying a black Macbook. Oops.

GAMES 162 AND 1

2006-10-04T11:53:00.000-07:00

It's the postseason and baseball stats get even more ridiculous than normal. Here are some tidbits from the last regular season and the first ALDS game last night (with some Tiger stats thrown in at the end for fun).

Jeter and Cano went into the final game within striking range of catching Joe Mauer for the batting title but both ended up a little short. In any case, it was fun to watch the averages change by the minute - here's a summary of the order in which events unfolded (the last couple at-bats, after Mauer clearly was going to finish on top, may be missing):

Jeter hit - .34572
Cano hit - .34238
Jeter strikeout - .34516
Mauer strikeout - .34556
Cano hit - .34375
Jeter groundout - .34405
Cano groundout - .34303
Jeter groundout - .34404
Mauer hit
Cano fly out - .34232
Jeter strikeout - .34350
Mauer hit - .34808
...
Bottom line: Mauer .348, Jeter .343, Cano .342

Jeter became only the fifth player in the past 75 years to amass 90 RBIs and 30 steals in addition to a .340 average. And two of the other four were Rockies who accomplished the feat in Coors Field the last decade. The other two are Willie Mays and Jackie Robinson.

The Tigers had the worst final 50 game stretch in history for a team entering the postseason. That's a very interesting stat, but not as surprising as it first sounds, because after all, for the majority of the existence of baseball, only two or four teams made the playoffs, making it much less likely that a slumping team would qualify. Interestingly enough, the Cardinals had the second worst final 50 game stretch of a team entering the postseason. A late slump doesn't necessarily mean much though. The 2000 Yanks went 3-15 in their last games of the regular season but then cruised to a championship.

Derek Jeter and Robinson Cano became the first SS/2B duo in history to hit .340 in a season.

"Murderer's Row and Cano", as Jim Leyland describes it, is not only the best lineup in history, it is also completely balanced, alternating between lefty and righty batters all the way down.

Pudge Rodriguez hit .300 for the season for the 10th time in his career. Only Bill Dickey has more .300 seasons (11). (Jeter has 8 so far.)

2006 was the first complete season in history in which there were no 20-win pitchers.

After going 5-for-5 last night, Jeter became the 6th player to hvae a 5-hit game in the postseason. Check out a pitch-by-pitch breakdown of his efforts yesterday.

And now for some golf. Tiger captured his 6th PGA Tour event victory in a row at the WGC in England in the most dominant fashion in the stretch. His 8-shot victory resulted from immaculate ball striking all week - missing only 12 fairways for the event - including a stretch of 36 consecutive holes without missing a green. If his putter hadn't been balky for stretches, his margin of victory would have been even larger.

Tiger hit an iron from 225 to 3 feet on 2 but lipped out the eagle putt. It was the shortest putt he's missed in over two years. His eagle chip on 18 on Sunday slipped by, ending his consecutive eagle streak on the hole at 3.

He is now 12-for-20 in World Golf Championship events, and an even more absurd 10-for-15 in such events that are played as stroke play.

Tiger has made 200 professional starts on the PGA tour and won 54 times (a staggering 27%). As a comparison, Jack Nicklaus, who some still argue is the best golfer in history, won 12% of his tournaments.

ONE POINT TO GO

2006-09-30T21:51:00.000-07:00

Jeter went 3 for 3 tonight, bringing his average up to .345. Joe Mauer didn't play so he's still at .346. One more game to go...

OKAY, TOMORROW

2006-09-28T18:58:00.000-07:00

I spoke too soon. Let's start tomorrow. (Yanks were no-hit through 8.1.)

I SMELL A PENNANT

2006-09-28T16:39:00.000-07:00

I've had a lot of random stats and things I've want to post for a while now, but the lambda-calculus, senior project, and similar endeavors usually drain my motivations to.

Ryder Cup

The worst American loss came in 2004 when the Europe won 18.5 to 9.5. That was ugly. Well it didn't get any better this time around. The US lost 18.5 to 9.5 again! The US didn't seem to play as horribly as last time - they hit the ball decent overall but no one could make a putt that mattered, and the Europeans made every one they could have. It was still fun to watch with a lot of memorable moments.

A walk-off homerun is pretty cool. But a walkoff ace? Now that's something. Paul Casey closed out a match Saturday by acing the 16th hole. That's style.

Scott Verplank made the first American Ryder Cup ace in history, also the 16th hole. Pretty cool.

Tiger wins 3 and 2 9-iron-less. Caddie Steve Williams dropped his 9-iron into the lake (on the 8th hole I think) while standing to close to the edge. Didn't seem to stop Tiger though.

The US Ryder Cup rookies performed much better than most expected, especially JJ Henry and Zach Johnson. Let's hope they keep developing as players, because the crop of young American players is, how you say... not good.

The young Europeans on the other hand, especially Luke Donald and Sergio Garcia, were electric this weekend. Sergio is definitely in his element here and put on an impressive display. If only he could bring that to the regular tour, especially the majors...

0-4-1. 1-9-1 in his last 11 overall. Phil Mickelson. Third best player in the world? I guess it makes sense, he does usually shut it down for the year in August. Well I guess this year he shut it down on the 72nd hole at Winged Foot.

Yankees

Matsui's back. He can still put a hurt on a baseball.

Sheffield's playing first, and pretty decently actually.

Abreu is a fantastic. Something like 41 RBIs since he joined at the trade deadline.

Cano is fantastic-er. Since his return from the DL on August 8 (see Cano Well), he's leading the majors with 51 RBIs. In that stretch he's batting .369 to move him past Jeter into the second spot in the majors batting .343. Wow.

Derek Jeter is the only shortstop in history with five 200 hit seasons.

The Bombers have hit 200 homeruns seven years in a row (tying a major league record).

Yankees lineup last night: Damon, Jeter, Abreu, Arod, Giambi, Sheffield, Matsui, Posada, Cano. (Poor Melky.) The completely stacked lineup is finally complete. Let's start the playoffs right now.

CONSISTENCY AT THE PLATE

2006-09-19T19:27:00.000-07:00

Derek Jeter's consecutive hitting game streak ended at 25 games on Sunday night, and while trying to keep the streak alive in his last at-bat late in the game he diverted from a rule he practically never breaks: swinging at a 3-0 pitch. He ended up grounding out sharply to first on a pitch that may have been ball 4, but still the right call given the meaningless outcome of the game and his well-deserved right to make this one less-than-completely-selfless play this year.

The Toronto broadcasters last night pointed out that Jeter's swing at a 3-0 pitch the night before was the first since 2002! That's 118 straight 3-0 pitches without swinging (although that 118 number does sound low for a period of 4 years, but still).

He didn't commence another such streak last night. He got a 3-0 fastball up in the 7th inning and parked it in the left field seats.

MVP.

AT HOME IN BALTIMORE

2006-09-10T11:25:00.000-07:00

I know the Yankees have followers at almost all of their away games, but yesterday in Baltimore was a little ridiculous. It felt like a home game. There must have been at least four or five Yankee fans for every Orioles fan. And we had more to cheer about.

ONLINE PASSWORD SECURITY

2006-08-28T16:55:00.000-07:00

A research project at Stanford called PwdHash aims to solve a problem that every user encounters: password security. Most people use one or a small number of passwords for each of their online accounts. If this password is compromised on one site, then the attacker can use that password successfully at many other sites.

The PwdHash solution is simple: allow users to maintain only one password to remember but transform, or hash, the password differently depending on the host site and use the hashed version as the password.

The user installs the PwdHash plug-in to IE, and whenever the user enters "@@blah" (where blah is his one-size-fits-all password), PwdHash will compute a transformed version of blah based on the current domain. So the user only has to remember one password for himself, but he's actually using a different password for each site. That's pretty elegant!

I haven't tried it, but it sounds like an effective solution, assuming that the PwdHash method is itself secure, ie, that it is difficult to invert the transformation, taking a hashed password and domain and working backwards to compute the original password.

A temporary slightly easier-to-read less academic-researchy-looking project overview can be found here.

I <3 BOWLING

2006-08-24T16:09:00.000-07:00

So I got the call from Joe and Hank in the pro shop at AMF that my ball was ready to pick up. Joe made the final adjustments to the finger inserts and ovaled out the thumb hole a little, and I was ready to go.

I'm glad Hank had me throw the ball into the couch in the pro shop a few times before I hit the lanes. Otherwise I think I would have hit myself in the head. The thumb hole was much tighter than I'm used to and it took some serious muscle unlearning to stop gripping tightly with my thumb and just let the ball go.

I got my lane and, to my dismay, the lanes right around me were packed. I stepped up to the line, put my fingers into the new grip on my new ball, and tried to keep my thumb straight and my palm up until my thumb came out, and what do you know -- I had my first strike (although it was a Brooklyn).

With just a normal delivery the ball obviously had a lot more hook action that what I'm used to. After a spare in the second I was feeling pretty good. I stumbled a little with three open frames, but as Hank and Joe came out to watch, I rolled three perfect strikes and closed out the rest of my game en route to 185. Not a bad start. A record for first game with a new ball said Joe.

By the second game I felt great. Joe told me that I should be starting much closer to the line so I could take smaller steps. And with this setup and my new powerful ball, it seemed like every shot was taking a nice hook back into the pocket. Another game of several strikes and spares left me with a 197.

The custom fit made me forget that the ball was 14 pounds. My forearm was a little tired from the new action, but I can definitely see this approach being much more effective than what I've been doing so far. I was hardly doing anything with my release, just trying to roll it straight and I was still getting a good hook action. And when I needed to pick up a 6-10 spare, I was able to keep the ball straight on command.

I told Hank that if I need lessons, I'm coming to him. He told me that he could tell that I've been reading up on the game, because I was adjusting my setup and angle pretty well for different shots.

I could get used to this. Here's to Hank and Joe and the joys of a custom-fit ball!

BOWLING OVERHAUL

2006-08-22T18:47:00.000-07:00

Today was a big day for my bowling life. I bought my first ball. Here she (rather, one of her identical twin sisters) is:

I started doing my homework on how to choose a ball yesterday, and I learned about the different basic types of balls: polyester or "plastic", urethane, reactive resin, and particle. Urethane balls are the cheapest and are the house balls that you find at bowling alleys. They have a hard cover, so they're the most durable, and they roll the straighest. Urethane covers are a little softer and offer more potential to hook the ball. Resin particles added to urethane covers offer more hook, and these reactive balls fill the midrange category. For even more hook, particles like glass or ceramics are added, and these particle balls allow the best bowlers to put maximum hook on their shots.

I also came across the difference between conventional drilling and fingertip (FT) drilling, something that I've noticed in passing but have never considered using myself.

So with this limited information, I decided to go to the pro shop at an AMF nearby and have the pro flesh out more details and my options. I ended up learning more about the equipment and got a few tips for good bowling as well.

- Three things to keep straight: Elbow, thumb, and wrist.
- In the release, the thumb should come out first.
- The typical oil pattern in public alleys, known as the "house shot", has oil from until about 35 feet, where the oil tapers to the 40 foot mark. After that point, the lane is pretty dry. Most of the oil is in the center of the lane, and the last two or three boards are pretty dry. This is a pretty easy setup where you can keep the ball straight or hook it if you want.

I was interested in the lower end of the reactive balls, and I was told that the performance of all of them was pretty similar. And these balls aren't going to magically start hooking by themselves, so no matter which one I selected I would be okay.

The last remaining question was whether to stick with conventional drilling or go straight to the FT. With the conventional drilling the holes for the fore- and middle fingers are deep enough for two knuckles, while the FT holes fit only the first knuckle. I've heard from some that it is a radical jump and that you have to relearn the way you bowl, but the pro said it's easy to switch over. In any case, I decided to go for the FT from the start. I figure that if I keep bowling regularly and improve, I will want to switch to FT anyway, so why not?

I picked out the ball I want (which happens to smell like lemon-lime - for some reason, the Tropical Storm balls come scented - whatever...) and then had my hand measured for a custom drilling. I picked out white finger inserts, and then the order was placed. I should be getting my ball in a couple days.

I bowled a couple games afterwards with the house balls, and I started to try and feel the difference between the conventional grip and the FT. After hearing the pro talk about how light the ball should feel with a proper fit and how the weight of the ball should rest on the palm of the hand, I realized that the way I've been using two knuckles causes me to really strain all three of my fingers just to hold the weight of the ball. When I tried straightening my thumb and putting it deeper into its hole, allowing only the first knuckle of my other two fingers into the ball, the weight of felt much lighter and more comfortable in my hand.

I still wasn't completely used to it through my two games, but I shot a few strikes with this grip that felt really strong and controlled and with less effort than before. It's crazy to think how much strain I've been putting on my fingers up until now. No wonder a 14 lb ball used to feel so heavy - you're not meant to hold and swing that weight with just three fingers!

So now that I've reached a comfortable 150 average, it's time to start over and learn to bowl more properly.

Oh yeah, and the ball will have my name on it. That's a good-looking, and good-smelling, bowling ball.

PROVING PROGRAMS:A NOBLE CAUSE

2006-08-22T13:09:00.000-07:00

Fall semester is fast approaching, so I need to get back to thinking about what I can do with my senior project that might help my graduate school application. I'm taking a graduate software foundations class in the fall with Benajamin Pierce, and he has collected a list of great papers in programming languages (PL) research.

To begin to get an understanding of the field in general and where my interests for research could lie, I am going to read some of the classical papers first. I started by reading "An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming" by C.A.R. Hoare in 1962, and he described the importance of proving the correctness of programs, a major part of the PL field:

The cost of error in certain types of program may be almost incalculable - a lost spacecraft, a collapsed building, a crashed aeroplane, or a world war. Thus the practice of program proving is not only a theoretical pursuit, followed in the interests of academic respectability, but a serious recommendation for the reduction of the costs associated with programming error.

Hoare goes on to outline that proving correctness of programs will solve three of the most serious problems in computer programming: reliability, documentation, and compatibility.

Sounds like a very good cause. Maybe I'll go work on that.

BOSTON MASSACRE 2006

2006-08-21T20:02:00.000-07:00

Although we didn't need the sweep as bad as the Massacre of 1978, which erased the remnants of a 14-game Boston lead over New York, and paved the way for the last World Series title of that era, a 5-game sweep at Fenway is pretty sweet.

I couldn't stay up late for last night's thriller because of a killer headcold and jury duty early this morning, and because of the 8-hour waste that is jury duty, I was only able to catch the bottom of the 9th on the radio. But the Yanks seemed to do okay without my watchful eye.

I saw the Yankeeography recap of the 1996 season on YES today. It was a blast to see and hear from all of the players that made that team special and started their modern run. I remember it was always that if the Yanks were ahead after 6, the game was over -- Mo would breeze through the 7th and 8th and Wetteland would close it out. I forgot just how true that was. The Yanks were 70-3 when leading after 6 that year. Wow.

Things are looking good for the Bombers.

THE BEST CLOSER IN HISTORY

2006-08-21T17:03:00.000-07:00

I'm not talking about baseball's best closer, Mariano Rivera, but an athlete whose record down the stretch is arguably even more incredible: Tiger Woods.

He captured his 12th major victory Sunday at Medinah in dominating style, shooting 4-under on the front nine to put away the competition. Tiger has had at least a share of the lead heading into the final round 12 times in a major, and each of those has led to one of his 12 major wins. And he's 37 for 40 in the same category when counting all his wins. That's a ridiculously incredible record. To perform so well time and time again under pressure is an amazing thing to watch.

His stretch over the past couple years, and especially recently where he has won his last three tournaments, including two majors, it seems like no one can beat him again, like it did in the years 1999 and 2000. His most recent swing changes have given him a more complete and controlled game than ever before. The only hope for the competition is that he changes his swing again and goes through another transition period.

12 majors and 51 wins by age 30 - legendary.

Apparently he will be the best closer for another 38 years:

"It will happen eventually," said Sergio Garcia of a possible Woods Sunday falter. "It's going to happen. I mean, he's not going to be 68 years old and in the final round of a major and tied for the lead and he wins."

THE BEST MEDICINE

2006-08-19T07:43:00.000-07:00

I've been a little under the weather the past couple days, but I was still well enough to watch 12 straight hours of sports yesterday. Two Yankee Red Sox games with Tiger and the PGA Championship sandwiched in between.

I felt like the sick kid from Seinfeld who asked for Paul O'Neill to hit two homeruns as Jeter (aka MVP) got the go-ahead hit to lead the Yankees over the Red Sox in the longest 9-inning game in MLB history (4 hours 45 minutes). It definitely made me feel better and I went to bed a happy germ incubator.

Now all I need is Jeter to catch a ball in his cap.

"YANKEE UP"

2006-08-17T20:29:00.000-07:00

Five games at Fenway. Enough said.

XBOX LIVE

2006-08-17T20:17:00.000-07:00

Now that I'm at home and have a little more motivation to sit on my ass and play video games, I plugged in the Ethernet cable to my Xbox for the first time. And it was surprisingly easy to sign up for an account, although my dad was very confused as to why I had to enter my phone number and address to play games now.

I was pleased to see that there is a free subscription type for Xbox Live, but then I realized that there's hardly anything I can do with it. There are a bunch of arcade games but only trial versions. There's only one that seems really cool and that's the Marble Madness look-a-like. I'm thinking about ponying up the money for enough Microsoft Points to buy the full version, unless anyone knows of any "promotions" where I can get some free points...

I think I should make a marked effort to play more video games. Why? Because I don't want to get old. I had my brother, who I played a lot of video games with when I was little and who is now 31, play the marble game, and let's just say I don't want to outgrow this age.

For as easy as it was to connect, it seems to be a ridiculous network hog, and for no good reason. I have a couple of laptops (including my new Gateway convertible that I got last week - I'll have more on that later) connected to the wireless router at home, and I usually have no problems. But for some reason tonight my connection was really sluggish. It almost felt like dialup again. I blamed it on YouTube being slow tonight. But as soon as I turned off the Xbox - I was playing Tiger, not on Xbox Live - my computers came back to life. That could get annoying.

RELIEF FOR THE NATIONAL LEAGUE

2006-08-14T10:31:00.000-07:00

We heard about how badly the American League dominated the National League in this year's interleague play. But reading the interleague stats in the sports section today got me thinking about it again.

For the first time since interleague play began in 1997, one league defeated the other by a significant number. These year the AL went 154-98 against the NL, a .611 winning percentage. To put that into perspective, projecting that winning percentage over a full 162-game season would leave the AL with a 99-63 season, and obviously the NL at a measly 63-99. Ouch. In the years up to this, the highest winning percentage for a league was around .540, which had been done a few times.

In general, the NL has been dominated by the offensive style of the DH-backed AL league over the past decade, evidenced most by their 9-0-1 record in the past ten All-Star games. The NL has fared better than that in the past ten World Series, however, claiming the title in 1997, 2001, and 2003 (which is also the last year in which the NL champion won even one World Series game). Back to the bad news: only one out of the 16 NL teams had a winning record in interleague play this year. On the other hand, only four of the 14 AL teams had losing records. Even the AL's lowly Devil Rays and Royals had winning records, while the NL's ugly duckling Pirates was even worse in interleague play than overall, at 3-12. Ouch again.

The biggest reason by far for the discrepancy must be the DH rule. I do think eliminating the DH would require far more strategy on the part of AL managers, but I would hate to see the offensive boost go by the wayside (after all, I'm a Bronx Bombers fan).

So how can we help the National League? Here's my proposal, inspired by golf's equity system known as handicapping. The handicap system is designed to allow golfers of different skill levels to compete on a more-or-less level playing field. In a similar way, we can treat the American and National Leagues as of different skill levels, and handicap them appropriately.

Coming into today, the AL teams have scored a combined 8267 runs in 1640 games - 5.04 runs/game. The NL teams have scored 8909 in 1872 games - 4.76 runs/game. So if in every interleague and World Series game we start the NL off with about one-fourth of a run, the playing field should be leveled. Sound good?

BACK TO THE RAINY CITY

2006-08-10T19:49:00.000-07:00

After four and a half days and 2900 miles, I made it back home today. In the last 30 minutes of driving, it went from sunny to dark and cloudy to downpouring and then back to sunny. I think I saw more rain in the 10 minute downpour than I did all summer in Seattle.

In any case, I have a 7am flight right back to the Rainy City tomorrow. Not the most efficient travel plans, I know, but Student Ambassador training happens to fall this weekend in Redmond, so back to Microsoft I go.

CLEVELAND ROCKS

2006-08-10T17:05:00.000-07:00

Like the song says, "Cleveland rocks! Cleveland rocks!" Well, maybe if you're into rock and roll and its hall of fame. Otherwise, not really.

Sanjay, Kinari, and I had an eventful dinner at Brasa, a Brazilian steakhouse that brings out non-stop racks of meat to the table until you say stop. Literally. They give you a little marker that is green on one side and red on the other, and when you need a break from the pork chops, lamb chops, sirloin, flank steak, turkey wrapped in bacon, chicken, filet mignon, filet mignon wrapped in bacon, filet mignon covered in parmesan, and the other seemingly-endless list of meats that we didn't get to... that's when you turn the marker over to red.

The food was really good, although I did feel like I was cutting days off my life with each bite. But it's been over 24 hours now and I'm ready for some more.

We also went to Jacobs Field for an Indians game against the Angels. It was mildly interesting, but overall it was a sad experience being in a ballpark whose club isn't in any kind of playoff hunt. I'm ready to get back to Yankee Stadium, where the team has opened up a three game lead over the course of my road trip, despite the loss in Chicago. Not bad.

CANO WELL

2006-08-09T19:00:00.000-07:00

I made it to Chicago exactly on the schedule I wanted. I saw US Cellular Field for the first time at 6pm, took the exit, and I still just made it to the upper deck box to see the first pitch of the game to Damon (the parking situation around the stadium, which is just off the interstate, is no good).

The game started off really well for me. The upper deck was populated with a lot of Yankee fans, and in particular, there were a lot of Chien-Ming Wang supporters. It seems like because Matsui is injured, the new international favorite is Wang. There were tons of supporters with Korean flags all over the upper deck rooting on Wang and his scoreless inning streak (it ended at 19 after giving up 3 in the 2nd).

The Yanks scored quick in the first, and in the bottom half, the defense was tested right away. Scott Podsednik led off with a double down the right field line. Abreu hit Cano with the throw, and he made a perfect relay to third to gun him down. I haven't seen any replays but it seemed like he might have been safe, but it was still an awesome throw to mark Cano's return from the DL. He also played well the rest of the game, getting three hits and almost making a spectacular play in the 11th, so it's good to have him back.

Unfortunately Mo blew the save in the 9th and the Yanks lost in 11, but it was still a fun game and it's good to see that Cano is back and healthy. It was also nice to see Arod snap an 0-12 skid by reaching base all five times. And Jorge gunned down all three runners that tried to run on him.

TOMORROW MIGHT BE A GRANDE MORNING

2006-08-07T21:44:00.000-07:00

In Fargo, ND. The Yanks play the White Sox in Chicago tomorrow night at 7:05. Fargo to Chicago = 640 miles. Wish me luck.

T-RAVICH OOF 8/7 -- ??

2006-08-06T07:22:00.000-07:00

Friday was my last day at work, so I will be out of the office (OOF) indefinitely. It's been a great summer here - the Virtual Earth team has been awesome to work with.

Time to hit the road...

HIGHEST NUMBER IN THE WORLD

2006-07-29T14:21:00.000-07:00

I learned something new about our number system last night. Apparently, there is a limit on how large a number can be - who would have known?

I was talking with a friend about how Microsoft is finally constructing a Building 7 on campus. Building 7 has always been the missing building in the center of main campus here, and so it is always the building where interns and others not in the know are sent as a joke.

They've finally decided to have a Building 7, so I was wondering why now, after all these years, they wouldn't just leave the mystery be and remain sevenless. The answer: "Maybe they're running out of numbers."

So there you have it, we are in the middle of a crisis: the world is running out of numbers.

MARIMBA!

2006-07-24T23:41:00.000-07:00

I had quite a small world experience this weekend. Some of you may know that I spent a year abroad between high school and college at Maru a Pula school in Botswana. I wasn't quite ready to go to school and I had gotten a chance to listen to and play with the school's amazing marimba band, so I convinced myself and my parents that I would spend a year down there.

It was an amazing year meeting new people and working with a couple of drama and English classes. In between semesters I traveled through the deserts and dunes of Namibia, Victoria Falls of Zimbabwe, the deltas in Botswana, and the beaches and wineries of Capetown in South Africa.

But most memorable was the time I spent playing marimba. I was lucky enough to have some time of Alport Mhlanga, a Zimbabwean musician who is a guru in performing and composing songs for marimba, mbira, guitar, and voice. He has taught music for a number of years at Maru a Pula and his marimba band performs in a way like no other.

As I assisted him in organizing concerts for his bands, I would learn a lot of the music myself and I spent many more days than not in the marimba room tinkering away. Mr. Mhlanga, or Baba (meaning "father") as the players and I would call him as a sign of respect, is a wonderful storyteller, and it was a pleasure to listen to him talk about life as well as his music.

It has been more than three years since I left Botswana, and my conversations with Baba by email aren't more than a few times per year.

Luckily on Friday morning I checked an email I account I hardly use, reading an email Baba had sent about a month telling me that he'd be in the USA this month for ZimFest, a Zimbabwean music festival. I checked out the website and was ecstatic to see that it was going on this weekend and that its venue in Oregon was only about 300 miles from Seattle.

Shruti and I drove down to Oregon yesterday, and I surprised him as he was spending time relaxing before the concert. It was amazing to see him again in good health and, as always, with his great music. It brought back a lot of great memories from my year in Botswana, and it makes me miss playing the marimba again. I haven't touched an instrument since I left. I'll find my way back to it at some point.

HIGH TEA

2006-07-23T10:04:00.000-07:00

This morning at 6am I was joined by sir Matt Humphrey and good lady Shruti for proper English tea and biscuits to celebrate the 135th Open Championship. Tiger Woods played lovely golf, putting beautifully all day and making only one bogey. Chris DiMarco made a nice run for a few holes, but Tiger finished out his 11th major in fine form.

There was a bit of a travesty on the final green, with some imbecile throwing some kind of paint product onto the green. The cops -- not the traditional Hoylake cops of course -- took care of it quickly and it didn't spoil the spirits of the good lads.

Truly a splendid day for golf indeed. Cheerio.

HUMERUS

2006-07-22T22:39:00.000-07:00

So the other day, when trying to sound cool and name a bone in the leg, I offered humerus. Well it turns out that the humerus isn't in the leg - it's in the arm. Who would have known?

So yeah, I don't know how I made it through more than 21 years of my life without knowing the reason that people call the funny bone the funny bone. That makes a lot of sense. But it's still not very humorous when you hit your humerus.

Speaking of humorous, Amanda said something really funny a couple days ago: "I woke up in the morning and wondered to myself if today would be a venti day." How's that for a walking, or sleeping, Starbucks ad.

CHANGE OF HEART

2006-07-19T23:32:00.000-07:00

So it's official: I'm not interviewing for a full-time position at Microsoft in a couple weeks. For the past several months coming into this internship, I fully expected to interview with a couple groups I liked at the end of the summer and try to go into senior year with an offer. It sounds so nice to cruise into senior year with an offer from Microsoft, and I've been rationalizing it by saying that I'll put off grad school until after two or three years in industry.

In the past couple of days, my attempt to internally rationalize this finally caught up to me. As I was being asked what days next week I wanted to interview, I realized that my answer was not days away - it's months away.

I'm going to wait until the school year to interview for full-time positions, most likely until the spring so I can go through the graduate school application process properly. I know that if I don't try to get into a Ph.D program right after school, that it would inevitably become harder and harder to leave the work life and go back, and I would regret it if I didn't try now.

So come the fall, I'll be taking standardized tests, lining up letters of recommendation, constructing my personal statement, and doling out plenty of application fees to try to get myself into a top Ph.D program in computer science.

I feel better.

GOT MELKY?

2006-07-18T21:52:00.000-07:00

I'm so glad we do!

ONLY AT MICROSOFT

2006-06-27T22:26:00.000-07:00

Tonight I got to listen to, ask a question of, and shake the hand of Bill Gates. That's pretty cool.

THE BOWLING GODS

2006-06-22T18:30:00.000-07:00

Other bowlers actually showed up for the league on Monday, but my game did not. After bowling well for the past few weeks, I averaged 128 over three games. Today, on the other hand, the bowling gods shined down upon me. A solid 156 in the first game followed with a 221 in the second. I was close to breaking the high I set a little while ago, but I can't complain, because about three or four of my seven strikes in the game (including five in a row) had lucky late hits.

If only the golf gods were willing me to give back my golf game too...

OGILVY WINS THE OPEN

2006-06-18T22:36:00.000-07:00

Actually, the title should be "Mickelson loses the Open."

It's been six years since I started watching golf, and Phil Mickelson's collapse on the 72nd hole is definitely the most shocking golf moment I have witnessed. I have seen lots of surprising moments in terms of no-names winning and contending in majors - like Shaun Micheel, Ben Curtis, Todd Hamilton, Jason Gore, Kenneth Ferrie - but I have never seen a collapse like this. Jean Van de Velde's in 1999 at Carnoustie was just before I started following golf, but I've seen plenty of replays of that. I think today might have been worse.

Watching Mickelson over the last couple years has really been an impressive transformation from his old, go-for-broke, and frankly stupid way of playing when it really counted. But especially in the majors lately, he's been one of the most boring players to watch - controlling his shots and hitting lots of fairways and greens. And on top of his better course management, he was still harnessing his massive talent to take advantage of holes where he could and shooting a number of impressive scores over the past couple years.

The new Phil couldn't keep the old one out today, though. All day he hit wayward drives into the rough, but kept managing to escape the rough with great shots. There were many short putts he had today that reminded me of him at Shinnecock two years ago, where he squandered a great opportunity by missing some short putts. He was solid on the greens today, so he had me convinced that he wasn't going to let it slip again. But he really played silly on the 18. Another horrible drive left him in no position to try another miracle shot, but he tried and he paid. I guess no matter how good you get, you still revert to old habits.

I feel really bad for Colin Montgomerie. Over the past few years he's become much more likable, and it's a shame that he still hasn't won a major. He had a golden opportunity sitting in the middle of the fairway on 18, but he changed club selection late and buckled with his approach. And he made matters worse by three-putting, which in hindsight ended up costing him a spot in the playoff.

The US Open is always fun to watch because of its harsh conditions, but this year's was especially interested -- Winged Foot kicked everyone's you know what.

222!

2006-06-14T22:23:00.000-07:00

Wow, I just crushed my bowling high by 20 pins. The game I bowled before that was pretty bad too, so I was surprised. But I caught fire at the end, with six strikes in a row late in the game. A couple were very lucky, but it was still awesome. I love these two free games a day.

And tomorrow, the US Open!

DUCKLINGS AND QUACKERS

2006-06-13T22:04:00.000-07:00

I joined the Microsoft summer recreational ultimate league, and last night was the first game for me and the rest of the Ducklings. We played really well, especially for most of us never having played organized ultimate before, and we won 13-6. It's been confirmed that my laziness the past few years has left me in bad shape -- this will help kick me back into gear.

This past weekend I got a personal trainer session at the Pro Club. I told him that I need to focus on core muscle training and flexibility and that I want to play golf until I'm 100, so he's going to put together a bunch of exercises for me to work on. I'm meeting with him again in a couple weeks, and until then I have some basic flexibility exercises to do with exercise and medicine balls. It's been good so far.

And lastly in the realm of recreation, Amanda, Shruti, and I joined a Monday night bowling league, and we call ourselves the Quackers -- a play on our supremely intimidating school mascot. Our first game was last night, and we dominated. Mainly because no other teams showed up. But we got to bowl a few games for ridiculous cheap, and the league membership allows us each to play two games every day for free (read if you can't find me, I'll be at the bowling alley). My goal is to keep getting better and pull my average up to 150. Go Quackers!

CARS

2006-06-11T14:24:00.000-07:00

Saw Pixar's Cars last night. Wow. The animations were incredible. A lot of the long-range views of the race track and of landscapes were scary good. My graphics professor last year said that we are the last generation that will be able to tell the difference between CG (computer graphics) and reality. I think he's well on his way to being right.

Maybe I should go finish that ray tracing assignment I never finished...

C# ORCAS

2006-06-08T22:48:00.000-07:00

I learned today that many really cool features are already lined up (and have been since last fall apparently) for C# 3.0, codename Orcas for the next release of Visual Studio. Here are some of the new features, taken from the C# 3.0 Specification:

Implicitly typed local variables, which permit the type of local variables to be inferred from the expressions used to initialize them.

This will allow code such as the following to compile:

var arr = new string[]{"Hello", "there", "world"}; foreach (var str in arr) { Console.WriteLine(str.ToLower()); }

When I first saw the var, I immediately thought of JavaScript and all of the negative connotations that sometimes come with dynamic, type-unsafe languages. Although this looks the same, it is still in fact strongly typed. The compiler simply infers the static type for you to save you some keystrokes. If the static type is not sound, then a compile-time error results. Hence, this is not dynamic typing.

Despite the type safety, I don't see myself using this for much besides small, on-the-go programming tasks. For lasting code, I don't think I'd want to see var all over my code.

Extension methods, which make it possible to extend existing types and constructed types with additional methods.

This is kind of a weird one. It allows the programmer to add methods to a class that "look like" they are instance methods. They are not in fact, and do not have the privileged access of being an instance method, but the syntax allows the sometimes cleaner dispatch:

obj.AnExtensionMethod();

This comes in very useful for the new query expression features, see below, but if not enforced by rule or by practice, this is something that can be badly abused. In general, defining extension methods in excess would break our deeply-ingrained notion of recognizing instance methods of a class. Abusing this would lead to an annoying need to dig in to IntelliSense of other documentation to find the true status of any method that looked like an instance method.

Lambda expressions, an evolution of anonymous methods that provides improved type inference and conversions to both delegate types and expression trees.

Awesome! Python is proof that functional programming and list comprehensions are extremely powerful. Adding lambda functions to C# will now allow the best of both worlds of programming (assuming that the implementation of lamda expressions is fast...).

The lambda syntax is also so much cooler than the clunky anonymous method syntax from 2.0 (which, admittedly, I've never used, but now I will go out of my way to build filters out of anonymous methods).

Query expressions, which provide a language integrated syntax for queries that is similar to relational and hierarchical query languages such as SQL and XQuery.

This seems to be the capstone feature 3.0, taking advantage of all the generics-friendly features that have been outlined so far. This addition creates a uniform way to access any form of data -- SQL databases, XML, arrays in memory, user-defined collection -- from any .NET language using the same query-friendly syntax. And the kicker is it will be typesafe.

This feature is called LINQ, and looks really cool. This post has already been way too techy, so get more details at the LINQ Project website.

I'm excited.

I AM TWISTED

2006-06-06T20:54:00.000-07:00

Better than totally evil I guess...

How evil are you?

DREAM JOB

2006-06-06T08:21:00.000-07:00

Besides being a software engineer (best job in America -- see April 2006) and being a head golf pro and changing grips all the time (see below), how's this for a great job:

"The Yankees took a 13-2 lead after three innings and cruised to a 13-5 victory over the Red Sox. It was the most runs that either team ever scored in the first three innings of any of the 1,961 games between the two since the Yankees franchise moved to New York in 1903. The previous high was 11 runs, done four times by the Yankees and once by the Red Sox."

This is from yesterday's work of the Elias Sports Bureau, which comes up with wonderfully absurd statistics like these. Does anyone know if they accept resumes?

MICROSOFT KEYNOTES

2006-06-05T20:40:00.000-07:00

Today was a nice, relaxing today. I only worked for about three hours, sandwiched in between keynote addresses by Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates for a conference this week at Microsoft. I was able to see both of them last summer, but it was still exciting to see them in person again. What's even cooler is that rising senior interns get to go to BillG's house for a barbeque some time -- I think that might provide some incentive to work after graduation instead of going straight to grad school...

To top off the day, in the 15 minutes between leaving the conference and going back to work, the Yankee B team continued its solid play, with six consecutive Yankee hits leading to 7 runs in the second inning against the Red Sox. Guys like Andy Phillips, with his third homerun in four games, and Melky Cabrera are really stepping up and filling the many big holes that have been left of late. It's exciting to see.

GOLF + YANKEES = HAPPY RAVI

2006-06-04T13:36:00.000-07:00

Changing the grips on my clubs has been long overdue, so I bought a bunch of Golf Pride Tour Velvets, some double-sided tape, and grip solvent so I could try changing them myself. Reading various sets of instructions online, it didn't sound too hard. I was wrong. Here was the first attempt:

I also got a few cool Yankee logo C-Thru grips for a few of my clubs, so I decided to give it another shot. These went on much easier and look awesome:

I think I'll go back and try the rest of the grips again. I think my problem was not putting enough solvent on. It has to be really really slippery to get the grips to slide on. If I can get the rest done, I think I'll be well on my way to becoming a golf pro someday.

2000 HIT CLUB

2006-05-28T12:56:00.000-07:00

Derek Jeter picked up his 2,000th career (regular-season) hit on Friday night, making him the 8th Yankee to reach that milestone. He's picked up a few more hits since then, and at 31 years old, he is well on his way to topping this all-time Yankee record.

1) Lou Gehrig 2,721
2) Babe Ruth 2,518
3) Mickey Mantle 2,415
4) Bernie Williams 2,255
5) Joe DiMaggio 2,214
6) Don Mattingly 2,153
7) Yogi Berra 2,148
8) Derek Jeter 2,004

CATCHING UP

2006-05-25T20:19:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I've updated this, so I'll outline the last couple weeks. In the spirit of Seinfeld, I'll do this as sort of a backwards blog.

Virtual Earth

Discover the latest release of Windows Live Local. There some cool new features, including the ability to share collections of scratch pads. Check out some of my places from this summer.

Religion

I am now a faithful JavaScript-fearing vessel living my life to please ECMA. Well not really, but I am learning JavaScript for my summer work and I'm working through Danny Goodman's JavaScript Bible, which has been a great reference so far.

CardKey Picture

On Friday, May 19, 2006, I think I gave someone a scare that she was losing her mind. I stopped in at the cardkey office to pick up my ID badge wearing a grey polo and an orange sweater. The receptionist looked at me, then looked at her screen, and said, "Wait, I didn't take your picture this morning."

Turns out that exactly one year ago that day, May 19, 2005, I went to the same office wearing a grey polo (albeit a different one) and an orange sweater (yes, the same one) to get my id picture.

There are two possible responses I can have to this amusing coincidence: get new clothes or not start work at Microsoft in the middle of May. Obviously the latter is the superior choice.

Royals Struggle Worse

"The 13-game losing streak is the second-longest ever for Kansas City, which lost 19 in a row last season. The Royals are a major league-worst 10-35 and drawing comparisons to some of the most terrible teams in history. Only Boston in 1932, Baltimore in 1988 and Washington in 1904 had worse records (9-36) after 45 games."

Ouch. I'm glad the Royals are headed to New York tomorrow.

Yanks Struggling and Hurting

The Yanks have been beaten up with injuries lately, so it's good that they've been playing about .500 ball for the past couple weeks. It hasn't been pretty (things like scoring only 3 of 21 runners to reach base against the Mets; and giving up four homeruns to Manny Ramirez in three games) and it's come at a price. We got Sheffield back finally, but we lost Matsui two weeks ago, and then less severe injuries to Bubba Crosby, Shawn Chacon, Jorge Posada, and Johnny Damon. On top of that, Randy Johnson has never looked more like a 42-year old.

Anyway, the Yankees are going back to the Stadium for as easier stretch than last week, Jeter should get his 2000th hit tomorrow, and hopefully the Yanks can keep wading through.

Nasai

There are no words.

Old Works

Really nice course in Anaconda, MT, but easily the hardest I've ever played. I played the second shortest set of tees and it was still a 6700 yard course. Combined with the steady and strong winds, it was a course that I will revisit once I get much better so I can have my revenge.

Hawktree

This picture (with a disposable camera because the battery died on mine) doesn't do it justice, but Hawktree deserves every bit of its impressive GolfDigest rating. If I am ever forced to live in the Midwest, it will definitely be near Hawktree and the other gems on the Lewis and Clark Golf Trail.

DAY 4: RAVI = DRIVING STUD

2006-05-11T21:57:00.000-07:00

So says MattyJ after hearing that I drove 600 miles, played 18 holes, and still made it to the hotel in time to catch half of the Yankee game. Not bad, but I've done better. Last summer I drove 850 miles one day and played nine at two different courses.

Hawktree Golf Club in Bismarck, ND is awesome. It's a modern links-style course with tall prairie grass, huge elevation changes, and lots of wind. There is also black coal slag in the bunkers instead of traditional sand. It gave the course a nice look, and it played nicely the one time I was in a bunker. I'll definitely be back to play, as I have to redeem three or four makeable birdie putts I missed today. I hit a lot of good shots on my first nine, though, and played one of the best nines I've had in a long time.

So I was on cruise control for about 98% of the day today. Lesson learned over the first 125 miles: don't set cruise control to 80. I burned through half a tank in that stretch, and I normally get about 175 per half tank. That was the kind of mileage I got the rest of the day when I was set to the speed limit around here, 75. There was one stretch of about four hours where I used my brakes two or three times at the most. Being a driving stud is not too difficult out here.

As for the Yankees, we took a big blow with Matsui fracturing his wrist diving for a ball in left. This kind of injury will definitely have him out for most of the season, probably coming back in August in the best case. Bubba Crosby and Bernie are going to have to step up big to get us going through the summer.

In Billings, MT for the night.

DAY 3: OH DEER CROSSING

2006-05-10T20:19:00.000-07:00

Lesson learned in Minnesota today: use caution when yelling "Oh dear," especially when in a moving vehicle; the driver may interpret that as a warning of deer and jerk on the brakes to avoid the supposed deer.

Played golf with Katie in Rochester, MN. Oak Summit was a nice, hilly course. Down the street from Maple Valley, which, yes, I played last year on the trip back. Afterwards I had my second ever encounter with Famous Dave's BBQ -- fantastic again.

In Fargo, ND for the night.

DAY 2: DEJA VU... NOT

2006-05-09T20:35:00.000-07:00

In the 200 miles from Mila, OH to South Bend, IN, the overcast skies cleared up and looked like a nice day for golf, a bit on the chilly and windy side though. As I got off the I-90 ramp, the roads looked familiar. I figured that the entire Midwest was just starting to look the same to me now.

As I made the last turn before the golf course, I realized that my when it comes to events taking place in the flyover states, my memory stinks -- I had been here last summer too! I tried playing Blackthorn in August, but the course was packed with an outing or something that day. So I ended up playing Juday Creek that day instead.

Blackthorn is a really nice course, and it's an amazing course for $28. It was a little tough to walk, really hilly and some long walks from greens to tees. And it was really windy, especially on the higher holes, making the course play even longer than it is. I took a lot of pictures but don't feel like posting them now -- maybe later in the week.

In Sparta, WI, for the night and not pleased that this year's road trip Yankee win streak ended at zero.

DAY 1: FULL CIRCLE

2006-05-08T20:05:00.000-07:00

Hit the road early this morning and covered the 400 miles to the first golf stop by 2pm. There was a minor hitch in the route, though. Both Streets and Trips and Google Local mistakenly directed me to an exit 1-S on I-80 that doesn't exist (it should have been 4-S -- an error from a provider's map database I suppose). Anyway, Streets equipped with GPS tracking gave a good alternate route from where I was, and I found Countryside with no problem.

Instead, the problem was that Countryside is little more than actual countryside now - a dandelion-covered field that sadly bears the remnants of a golf course. So back to trusty Streets to find another golf course, and I settled on Seneca Golf Course about 45 miles down I-80.

The course is nicely tucked away from the highway, so it gave me a nice fit trying to find it, and as I rolled into the parking lot, I realized... I'd been here before. I forgot that Seneca was the last nine I played on my way back from Seattle in August. They have four nines there, and the only nine that had the tee free was, you guessed it, the same nine I played last summer. Full circle.

The course was nice. Much greener and grassier than the crappy FDR that I'm used to playing recently. Maybe it was the green or maybe it was the adjustments I made, but I hit a lot of solid shots and started to feel like a golfer again.

In Milan, OH for the night. I'm planning on hitting the road early again tomorrow morning.

GOLF ITINERARY

2006-05-07T20:44:00.000-07:00

Hitting the road for Seattle in just about seven hours, and I've got a full week of golf lined up across the country. If all goes well, I'll play 99 holes at 6 courses in 6 states while driving 6000 miles in 6 days.

Here's the day-by-day plan:

Countryside Golf Course @Lowelville, OH
Blackthorn Golf Club @South Bend, IN
Oak Summit Golf Course @Rochester, MN
Hawktree Golf Club @Bismarck, ND
Old Works Golf Course @Anaconda, MT
Indian Canyon Golf Course @Spokane, WA

I'm most excited about Hawktree, which has been ranked by GolfDigest as the 19th best public course in the country, and Old Works, a Jack Nicklaus design that features black sand traps and is also in the top 100.

Play away!

MR. TORRE'S 1000TH WIN

2006-05-07T18:29:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Joe Torre on his 1000th win as Yankee skipper. It's crazy to think how long his run has been going. I remember back in middle school when Torre just started and Jeter was a rookie, the year that the current (last?) dynasty run started...

Anyway, let me give a glimpse back in history to a year ago today, when a bold (and desperate) prediction was made that arguably has led to today's momentous victory...

Saturday, May 7, 2005

The previous night the Yankees had dropped their fourth straight, leaving them at a disgusting 11-19 on the season, definitely the second-worst lowlight in the Torre era. Needless to say, I was not in good spirits as I was about to embark on a cross-country road trip to Seattle with a friend of mine.

The Yankees were going to be in Seattle right around the time we would arrive, so I started to calculate the best case scenario at the time of the Yankee-Mariners game. There were eight games to play before the Mariners series, the first game of which was the night before my first day of work at Microsoft.

So, of course, my prediction was that the Yankees would win all the way to Seattle, bringing their season record up to .500, and that they would break that mark with a win over the Mariners on the night of Monday, May 16, 2005.

They listened. Throughout the 3000 miles to Seattle, the Yankees got strong starting pitching all week and a blast from the past as Tino Martinez hit eight homeruns in eight games(!), and they had won their eight games in a row.

At Safeco Field on May 16, we were treated by seeing Chien-Ming Wang, early in his career, overcome a shaky start and beat the M's by the weight of Bernie's grand-slam in the 7th. The Yankees would have their ninth win in a row, and their first winning percentage since April 9.

Their winning streak would continue on to 10 games, and since May 7, 2005, rock-bottom of their recent (regular season) history, the Yankees have been the winningest team in baseball, going 102-59 (they're something like a few games up on the Cardinals).

It has been a year in the making, and I can't think of a better culmination than Torre enjoying this monumental win, making him the fourth all time among Yankee managers.
...

Now, on May 7, 2006, the landscape is not nearly as grim. In fact, they're riding a five game winning streak to improve to 18-11 and are sitting atop the AL East by percentage points. They've had some up-and-down starting pitching and an early-season eight game losing streak at night, but they're a perfect 11-0 during the day and they are playing solid all around - second fewest runs allowed in the majors, solid defense, and they're actually not scoring all their runs on the long ball.

But, as I am about to embark on East Coast to West Coast Road Trip #2, I would love to see another 10 game winning streak.