Time and transport

The first five months of this year were very hard for me. I worked too much, worried too much, and ended up getting sick. I decided to take measures to stop this.

Of course, measures, like new year’s resolutions (which I never make), tend to be too abstract: stress less, have more time, enjoy more. Yes, of course, but saying it does nothing. One thing that has been helping, though, is that I’ve been very tired. Not really able to drive myself to exhaustion right now. But little by little, I’m getting my energy back.

The best thing I’ve done so far is to change my commute. For over a month, I’ve been taking either the company shuttle, or the public bus, to work. For both, my stop in Seattle is a 15 min. walk from home, and my stop in Redmond is a 15 min. walk from my building. Door to door, then, it’s 50 to 80 minutes, compared to 25 to 135 minutes when driving. I don’t understand how a small city like Seattle can have such traffic jams.

That’s why I used to drive: choosing my departure times carefully , it was much quicker than taking the bus. But driving makes it too easy to become engulfed in work. Arriving home at a late time, after having had no exercise for the whole day, only to get some dinner, and continue to work. Hell. Now, taking the bus, I walk for an hour every day, and that helps me relax. I’m using the time in the bus to read or nap. I’ve finally started catching up with my pile of unread books, after months of neglect.
It’s funny that this tiny difference in my commute is having a big impact on my whole week. I should have known, though: walking is my preferred way to think. It probably has something to do with feeding my brain new images. Perhaps.

Please like me

I’ve been reading the book Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, in an effort to get myself back to shape after mental exhaustion. Very often, I get into the same situation when inquiring into areas where I’m ignorant: I buy a well liked popularization book. Almost always, I end up disappointed. Why does the book dumb down the concepts? Why the profusion of silly jokes? Why the pop culture references?

I discuss this topic with friends now and then. The conventional wisdom is that the authors of these books use these tricks to draw the audience in, to make the subject more digestible and appealing. I think the conventional wisdom is wrong.

Take the aforementioned book, for instance. In a particular section, it states that research shows attention and learning increase when subjects are supplemented with examples. Throughout the book, there are plenty of examples to illustrate particular points. The author is being coherent, then.

But many of those examples are so silly, they detract from the information. When explaining that a memory is located in the same area of the brain that processed the initial perception, the author gives the example of the Charlton Heston movie Planet of the Apes. You see, Charlton Heston’s space ship lands in what looks like a distant planet ruled by apes. At the end of the movie, he discovers he is in Earth, in the future, after humanity has finally succeeded in destroying itself. Ah yes, this explains how memories are in the same place they originated. Same place, future time. Get it now? Charlton Heston, man. Of course! Without this superfluous piece of information, you’d be lost. Just like Charlton Heston was in that planet.

Does this example seem silly to you too? I don’t know many people who share my contempt for silliness in popular science books. But back to the conventional wisdom on popularization books. My theory is that the authors are less concerned with making the subject digestible than with making friends. They want to show that they are nice, smart, funny guys, and that their book is relevant to you (buy it!). It is insecurity, and narcissism that disguises itself as populism and humility. It seems to me a particularly American disease. In Europe, of course, we suffer from elitism and obscurantism. I don’t know which of the two tendencies I prefer.

Maybe I’m wrong, of course. Maybe there are many people with a genuine interest in science, who would never read a book with diagrams, drawings, numbers, but truly love those silly pop culture references. These people’s romance with science seems a star-cross’d one indeed.

Photos from Utah, Virginia and DC

It will be a while before we pool and geo-tag our photos to make the official albums.
In the mean time, here are albums with the shots from my camera:
Bryce Canyon hike
Virginia and Washington, before the wedding

More Seattle skies from the balcony

What I work on

I generally do not to write about work in this blog, but it is the first time that I can point to some publicly available software to which I have contributed.

If you catch any news on Bing: that’s the group I work in.

As to my personal contribution: it reminds me a bit of that scene in The Ten Commandments where Charlton Heston is building a monument city for his father, and watches an obelisk fall into place, then says:

Put a thousand slaves to clear the sand off the base of the obelisk

By which I mean I’m one of the slaves removing the sand, not Charlton Heston.

A hike and a wedding

I’m back in Seattle now, after a great vacation in Utah, Nevada and Virginia. I’m exhausted. The four-day hike across Bryce Canyon was great. When Guillermo gets back from his honeymoon we’ll be pooling our photos together, geo-tagging them, and making an album. In the mean time, here is a little teaser:

After the hike, Guillermo and I were off to Virginia, to prepare the wedding. It was fun, but hardly restful. Both Guillermo’s and Caroline’s families are great, and the friends from Barcelona, and several other places, were wonderful. Being a best man in an American wedding is quite a responsibility. You will be happy to know I didn’t lose the rings, and delivered my speech sober.

Here are a few photos of Caroline and Guillermo getting the wedding license, and planning the receptions and the ceremony.

We had a bit of time for the most basic of visits to Washington DC. Guillermo mentioned something I found very true: in DC, you find, in a relatively small area, monuments commemorating the involvement of the US in many wars. This country has fought like a lion, and that is a very impressive thing.

I didn’t take any photos of the ceremony nor the reception, I was far too busy. You’ll just have to imagine, until I get albums from friends.
All in all, it was a lucky lucky 10 days. Our plans were very tight. Many things could have gone wrong, but they didn’t. Everything went just right. I think this is a very good sign.

Cartoons

In two days I’ll be going on a hard-earned ten day holiday to hike Bryce Canyon and see Guillermo get married in DC. I am in desperate need of the vacation, I’m almost there in my mind.

Nothing much worth writing about in the last week, but a friend sent me a link to a youtube video. It’s an electronic song that someone made almost fully out of sound fragments from the Disney movie Alice in Wonderland. I’m completely mesmerized by the music and the video, I’ve watched it several times. I almost want to rent the film now. I was thinking about animated films. In late years they have become much less interesting than they used to be. Alice’s expressions in the video are more natural than today’s overdone 3D faces that grin constantly. Another thing I can do without is the celebrity voices. And the pop-culture references. Cartoons are for children, Hollywood, children, and adults who enjoy children’s entertainment!

Sickness and DVD

Howdy, I’m back!

These last four months have been just hard and stressful. I made all my deadlines last week, and then got sick. This is typical for me: apparently, adrenaline protects me from sickness while I have work due. A shame. This Monday, after a whole week of headaches and mild fever, I went to the doctor, and now I’m on antibiotics, for a sinus infection (sinusitis).

The past week I was not up to leaving the house, so I’ve been watching lots of DVD – especially since I disconnected the TV signal in March. I was in the mood for a series, so I rented My So Called Life. I had never seen it nor heard of it (apart from being recommended by mom). Watching Claire Danes suffer through adolescence is very entertaining, and although sometimes the show got repetitive and clichée, and although I developed a dislike of Bess Armstrong, who played Claire Danes’s mother, overall I enjoyed myself. It’s funny about teenage: we never completely leave its struggles.

Another DVD I saw was Batman: The Dark Knight. I hadn’t thought that much of Batman Begins, but this one came very highly recommended. Some people I know with PhD’s had told me that the Joker (played by Heath Ledger) “got in your head and messed with it”. Well, it’s an entertaining film, with a great cinematography, clearly inspired by Michael Mann, but … completely unmemorable. It has as little sense of humor as Lord Of The Rings, and is as pretentious. Ah, yes, that supposed moral ambiguity: the Joker has a sentence that goes something like: “The beauty of Chaos is, it’s fair”. Was that it? Really? Hello? It is so easy to poke holes in that argument. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader.

Speaking of moral ambiguity: a second-hand DVD store near home was carrying Lust, Caution, so I decided to buy it. I had already seen it. I started playing different sections, to make sure the DVD was OK, but I got drawn in, and watched the whole thing from the beginning. There you have an example of moral ambiguity with characters that are real, and a story line that is clear and understandable. And thankfully, no discussions on heroes, role models, or “what the city needs”. It’s a good and rare thing to see a film for adults that delivers.

Finally, I decided to rent Slumdog Millionaire, which I did not see in the theater (I never go any more). I’m not a fan of the director, Danny Boyle, nor of word-of-mouth juggernauts, which have led me to see such horrors as Il Postino, Life is Beautiful, Torrente or Borat. Unexpectedly, I enjoyed Slumdog, which I found very entertaining, fast moving and optimistic. I also liked the soundtrack, an important parameter for me. It is nice to see a film that doesn’t take itself too seriously, doesn’t attempt depth, and is intended as just good old fashioned entertainment.

By now, I’m getting better, the headache is moving away, and I’ve had enough DVD for quite a while. Can’t wait to get out for some exercise. Tomorrow, probably.

Audio obsession

The last two months I’ve been busier than I like at work, it’s been tough. At the same time, at home, I’ve been consumed by audio, to the point of not being able to get a good rest. Of course, that was just the time for a thorough tidying of the apartment. I’m an obsessive person, and every now and then I get into these periods of feverish activity.

The audio obsession has a long history: for years I’ve been annoyed by the lack of clarity in dialogues in DVD in my system. I’ve tried many tweaks, and even replaced some equipment, and still, I often needed to turn subtitles on. I’d be following dialogue normally, and then some sounds would just seem to disappear, and I’d lose sync. Since I have no problem understanding English speech in real life, needing subtitles was a bit of a slap in the face.

In January, I began another wave of research and tests. This time I went deeper, I bought books on digital audio, pored through internet forums, asked around. Nobody seemed to have exactly my same problem. Several experiments yielded incremental overall improvements, but still the lack of clarity. I remembered I didn’t use to have the problem so badly when I watched DVDs on the laptop, as a student. Today, listening to DVDs on the mac with my headphones gives very clear and defined speech. I assumed this was due to my headphones being so good (Grado, I heartily recommend them).

Then, just for laughs, I connected my mac to the amplifier and played a DVD through it. The change was immediate. Speech was easy to follow, words had much better defined contours. Aha! A bit more testing, and I found the issue. I had my system set up so that the Dolby decoding happened in the amplifier, instead of in the DVD player. The amplifier manual recommended this. However, the Dolby decoder on the amplifier turned out, evidently, to be bad quality. The DVD player does a much better job.

I have found this audio stuff very entertaining. I have visited two high end stores, and concluded that my cheap system is very good, and expensive gear does not have *that* much more to offer me. On my to-do list is exploring digital home recording of old LPs, learning about room acoustics, exploring the new amplification technologies, and possibly building my own speakers. That is the fun part of this whole story. The un-fun part is the dead ends, the frustration, the days and nights spent on tests and online research. But I don’t get to choose. Obsessions are both a blessing and a curse.

Here are my pearls of wisdom from this whole journey:

• If you have bookshelf speakers, get them on speaker stands so they level with your ears in the listening position. Both the floor and bookshelves are bad places for your speakers, they will produce resonance and reverberation.
• Place speakers at least 3ft/1m from any wall. This reduces reflections and sound wave interference.
• Avoid a naked floor, or reflecting objects like table tops, between you and the speakers. A rug will do. Again, interference reduction.
• Get good source components (DVD, CD) and have them handle decoding and digital to analog conversion (DAC). Your amplifier should be as simple as possible.
• Somehow, everyone seems to think surround is good, and a center channel is a must. Resist! Two speakers work great for both music and movies.
• When going to listen to equipment in stores, carry a bunch of CDs and DVDs that you know well, and use them to test. You may find your current system is better than you had thought.
• Don’t trust manuals. Experiment, experiment.
• It’s hard to get equipment better than a good computer.

Toilet business

This is recycled from an email I sent my running group in NY this morning:

One of the areas where I was greatly surprised in this country was restroom behavior. Back home, when using the urinal next to another guy, it was rare to talk at all. If you were next to your friend you’d sort of joke about it, try to be funny: “So, how’s it hanging?”, “What’s on your mind?”.
At work in Spain, it was much the same thing. When my boss was in the next urinal, we’d either not talk at all, or kinda joke. Conversations are typically interrupted until you’re washing your hands.

I was pretty shocked when, at Bear Stearns, the hedge-fund manager, at the urinal next to mine, started a conversation with me. It was not only him, I grew used to seeing people chat about business or family while at the urinal. When spoken to at the urinal, I will respond just to be polite, but it seems pretty strange to me. It’s like mixing … well I’m sure you understand.

I have seen other things that strike me, like people talking on the cell while, um, sitting on the toilet. This one I have also seen in Spain a couple of times, and it is equally disturbing.

But today was the absolute topper. The guy in the booth next to mine was typing on his laptop between, er, intervals.

There is something sacred for me about books, computers, or conversations. I don’t want to bring any of them to the toilet. I guess I’m old fashioned.

Scott had a terrific answer:

I agree with “No pissing and talking.” and “No talking on the phone/laptop use in the stall.” Whenever I hear someone on the phone in the next stall I like to flush my toilet a few times and complain aloud about how the toilet is clogged and then shout, “Uh-oh! It’s overflowing!!!”