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Wednesday, July 15, 2020

Review: Katadyn BeFree water filter

My last filter was a Katadyn Virustat, but the product is out of stock and replacement filters are also similarly impossible to find. The replacement is the Katadyn BeFree, which does away with the virus elimination stage of the previous device, but in exchange gives you a collapsible bottle and a filter that does not need to be replaced monthly. Just dry it out between trips, and it should be good for 1000 liters.

The bottle is indeed very light at 63g. The instructions must be read carefully, as there are a few counter intuitive ways where you might break it: for instance, you cannot run the filter under a tap horizontally, as it might destroy it! Similarly, when squeezing water through the bottle, take care not to squeeze the plastic filter as well. And of course, it won't kill viruses, but it does impart a somewhat sweet taste to the water.  In typical Swiss fashion, the bottle nozzle comes with a cap so you can't easily contaminate it. You can drink directly from the bottle, but there's no way to carry the bottle easily (except by hand), so the intention is that you use it to filter water into other containers that you then drink from.

Other than the virus thing, everything about this filter is better than the previous models I was using. Water flows freely, the bottle is much lighter and the collapsible feature is very nice. With this weight, you can carry 2 in case you break one, but if you read the instructions carefully there's no reason you would break one unless the water you're filtering is very badly soiled. This thing deserves the rave reviews and the $40 MSRP.


Monday, July 13, 2020

Review: Amazon Commercial Vinyl Tape

When you have a triplet with 2 kids, what tends to happen is that any weakness in the bar tape will get picked apart until the tape unravels. The solution, of course, is to get electrical tape and tape it up again. In the past, I've always bought the big 3M rolls (around $5/pop at the local hardware store), used it a few times, and then lost it again. During COVID19, I couldn't find the tape again, so went to buy some on Amazon.

I've had pretty good luck with Amazon Basics stuff in the past, and this time saw that Amazon has a different "Commercial" brand that makes tape. It even comes in many different colors, none of which is black.

$4.30 buys you a pack of 10, in 5 different colors. You can see from the pictures that the amount of tape in each roll is much less than that of a 3M roll, but thinking about it, this is actually much more useful as a result: each roll is significantly lighter, so you can bring it while touring. (In general, I always travel with some tape in case hotel rooms have blinking lights on TVs that can't be turned off, in addition to the fix-it situations with handlebar tape and the light) The different colors mean that you can use a color coding scheme if you need to tape together wires, etc. And the total amount of tape is probably more than a $5 roll of 3M black tape. And of course, having 10 rolls means that you're more likely to be able to find the tape and not spend $5 every time you have a taping job. Amazon's product managers are the few PMs I have respect for --- they seem to actually make stuff that I need, as opposed to stuff that's fashionable for other people (I don't care that black doesn't match my handlebar tape on one side vs the other)


Friday, July 10, 2020

Review: MSR Freelite 3 person tent

I bought the MSR Freelite 3 person tent from REI during a sale for about half the MSRP. At 3 pounds 7 ounces it was on a per person basis even lighter than my tried and tested Stephenson Warmlite 2R.  The material felt so light that I bought the custom footprint (also on sale), which at 7 ounces is still very light on a per person basis. Boen wasn't quite ready to go backcountry camping until this year, however, so we didn't try it until recently, though I'd set it up once on the lawn just to make sure it came with all the pieces.

Set up in the field was tricky. Putting together the tent pole (singular, just one) was a snap, as all the shock-corded pieces came together crisply and satisfyingly. But the tent is asymetrical and after you lay it down you still have to remember to swing the T piece and put the tent up. The tent is not free-standing, so you cannot pitch it on say, granite: it requires a minimum of 6 stakes to set up properly --- preferably more as the rainfly has guylines that will need to be tensioned when rain or high winds are expected.

Our first trip was in surprisingly cold weather, and we woke up dry but there was condensation on the fly. Our camping companion's tent had the same problem though, so I'd just chalk that up to the conditions. On our second trip, the tent stayed dry all night and all morning. To be honest, if you're camping in California, it's quite possible to not encounter rain for the lifetime of the tent, and UV will probably destroy the rain fly after 10 years.

Taking down the tent is much easier than putting it up, the only problem being that the stakes that come with the tent, being red, are very difficult to see if you make the mistake of leaving them on the ground and just unhooking the loops from the stakes to take down the tent first. Solution? Pull the stakes first before dealing with the rest of the tent.

I wouldn't pay MSRP for this tent, but at 50% off? It's a steal and comes recommended.

Thursday, July 09, 2020

Review: Born Standing Up

Born Standing Up is Steve Martin's memoir of his time as a comedian and why he gave up stand up comedy. Contrary to my expectation, it wasn't a very funny book. What does come through is how much his relationship with his father affected his life:
MY FATHER, GLENN VERNON MARTIN, died in 1997 at age eighty-three, and afterward his friends told me how much they had loved him. They told me how enjoyable he was, how outgoing he was, how funny and caring he was. I was surprised by these descriptions, because the number of funny or caring words that had passed between my father and me was few. He had evidently saved his vibrant personality for use outside the family. (Page 19)
The story of how he went from performing as a demonstrator at the Disneyland Magic Shop to becoming a full time stand up comedian is low key and interesting: I've never actually seen him live (or even recorded), though I don't remember him being particularly funny in the movies where I saw him.

What was fascinating was his decision to quit at the peak of his success:
 Though the audiences continued to grow, I experienced a concomitant depression caused by exhaustion, isolation, and creative ennui. As I was too famous to go outdoors without a discomforting hoopla, my romantic interludes ceased because I no longer had normal access to civilized life. The hour and a half I spent performing was still fun, but there were no band members, no others onstage, and after the show, I took a solitary ride back to the hotel, where I was speedily escorted by security across the lobby. A key went in a door, and boom: the blunt interior of a hotel room. Nowhere to look but inward. I’m sure there were a hundred solutions. I could have invited friends to join me on the road, or asked a feel-good guru to shake my shoulders and say, “Perk up, you idiot,” but I was too exhausted to communicate, and it seemed like a near-coma was the best way to spend the day. This was, as the cliché goes, the loneliest period of my life. I was caught and I could not quit, because this multi-zeroed income might last only a moment. I couldn’t imagine abandoning something I had worked so hard to craft. I knew about the flash in the pan, I had seen it happen to others, and I worried about it happening to me. In the middle of all this, I saw that the only way I could go, at best, was sideways. I wasn’t singing songs that you hum forever; I was doing comedy, which is as ephemeral as the daily newspaper. Onstage I was no longer the funniest I ever was; my shelf life was expiring. (Pg. 183)
So that's why comedians frequently are depressed --- the nature f the job seems counter-productive to having a good social life. Towards the end he of the book he realized he'd stopped doing comedy:
 I had become a party host, presiding not over timing and ideas but over a celebratory bash of my own making. If I had understood what was happening, I might have been happier, but I didn’t. I still thought I was doing comedy. During this time, I asked a woman to dinner, and she accepted. After the salad course, she started talking about her boyfriend. “You have a boyfriend?” I asked, puzzled. “Yes, I do.” “Does he know you’re out with me?” I asked. “Yes, he does.” “And what does he think of that?” “He thinks it’s great!” I was now famous, and the normal rules of social interaction no longer applied. (Pg. 185)
The book is filled with interesting insights --- and yes, he does eventually reconcile with his parents. Worth the short reading time. Recommended.

Wednesday, July 08, 2020

Yosemite/Hetch Hetchy Ranchiera Falls













Monday, July 06, 2020

Review: Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World






Thursday, July 02, 2020

Review: Death by Black Hole





Monday, June 29, 2020

First Impressions: Garmin Edge 830







Thursday, June 25, 2020

Review: Godox TT350P



And I got the catchlights back:

Monday, June 22, 2020

Reread: Dune




Thursday, June 18, 2020

Review: Tales from Earthsea




Monday, June 15, 2020

Review: House Again Tea Infuser




Thursday, June 11, 2020

Review: Panaracer GravelKing tires

Now that the local parks are open to Mountain Bikes again, we've been resuming our almost weekly cadence of mountain bike trips. My wife's Cheviot was not quite a mountain bike, having come with 33mm nifty swifty tires which aren't actually particularly swift.

I looked for wider tires and bought some Panaracer Gravel King tires. The product managers idiotically created several sizes and types of tires but gave them all the same name, so you have to be careful when you order tires what to get.

I started with the Gravel King SK+ 1.90 tires. These have knobbies and barely clear the Cheviot frame and brakes, but made such an awful noise that my wife asked for them to be removed and replaced with the nifty swifty because she'd rather put up with poor traction on the mountain bike trail than listen to those tires.

Upon switching to the 1.75 version of those tires, all those complaints disappeared, the tires cleared the frame better, and the rolling resistance was also much better. Get these, and not the knobby versions for an all-round bike.

Review: Voler Shift Terrain Pro Short





Highly Recommended.

Monday, June 08, 2020

Review: Tides

Tides is appropriately written by a sailor. The book taught me several things that I didn't know, even though I was taught how to sail in the San Francisco Bay Area, where a tide table consultation is required before leaving the slip --- with currents exceeding 10 knots through the golden gate, a sailboat will not make it in or out of the gate except during slack tide.

Things I didn't know:

  • A tide coming up or down a river is called a bore. The largest tidal bore in the world is in the Qiantang river in China. (The pictures are impressive)
  • I'd long assumed that tides are small in places like the Mediterranean was because of restricted flow through a funnel. This is false. The reason tidal variation is small in certain places (e.g., the Carribean) is because tides actually vary around various centers in the oceans, and the further away you are from the center, the higher the amplitude.
  • The earth itself (not just the ocean) is also affected by the same gravitational forces that creates the tides:  

If the moon can cause such a stir in the ocean, wouldn’t it also affect the solid earth? Do our bodies, made of 70 percent water, have a tide? Yes and no. The earth is as rigid as a steel ball, but it does distort under the gravitational influence of the sun and moon. High tide on the solid earth varies from half a foot to three feet and spreads over such a large distance—about ten thousand miles—that it’s not perceptible. For example, a high spring tide might raise the sidewalks and buildings of New York by a couple of inches. You could never detect this as you walk down Broadway, because everything rises and falls together over a six-hour period (unlike on the coast, where the ocean rises and falls relative to the beach). The tide’s daily squeezing and releasing of the earth has long been known to affect water wells too. A Wisconsin well, about eight hundred miles from the nearest ocean, has a two-inch tide. An inland well in France increases its flow from sixty to ninety gallons an hour during spring tides. (kindle loc 1883)
The book itself is written English-major journalism style. Sometimes I get very impatient with this style, because all sorts of "color" that might be interesting to an English major is uninteresting when I'm in a hurry to learn information. Similarly, I roll my eyes whenever he does something English-major like, for instance, visiting the British Library to examine Newton's manuscript for "Principia" and then writing things like: "The equations didn't mean anything to me." He does this several times in the book, which had me wondering why he was bothering to burn all those fossil fuels getting to those exotic destinations just to throw his hands up at a little bit of math.

All in all, the book was interesting in the concepts and for its visual imagery of some of the places he visited. It probably could have been 50 pages long if he'd just condensed all the technical information into concise, easy to understand form, but I guess that wouldn't get a publisher interested.

Thursday, June 04, 2020

Review: Betrayal of Trust





Monday, June 01, 2020

Review: Usagi Yojimbo - Yokai

Usagi Yojimbo - Yokai was an amazon giveaway. I haven't ever read any of the series before. The story revolves around Miyamoto Usagi, a dual-sword wielding samurai who apparently wanders about doing good deeds. He encounters a woman who has lost her daughter and agrees to help.

All is not what it seems, however, and soon he's embroiled in a supernatural battle and meets an old friend. The art is pretty, fully painted, but nothing that strikes me as being awesome. The story is kinda meh, but Boen was happy enough to have me read it to him. Typically, giveaways are intended to get you to look for more books by the same author/artist to read, but this left me cold.

Thursday, May 28, 2020

Crush Vol 1

Crush Vol 1 was an Amazon giveaway. Lots have been written about how werewolves are a metaphor for a woman's menstrual period, so it's inevitable that some comic will take the metaphor and make it literal in a story.

The story revolves around Elizabeth, who turns into Crush whenever she bleeds, which includes that time of the month. Crush, is an amoral monster, who only barely resembles Elizabeth, but somehow she and her friends are convinced that the monster would never do something like kill. There's an unresolved long-running plot involving some other monster that's similar to crush and seeks her out, but it's never really explained in this volume, and doesn't seem special enough for me to want to pursue it.

The art is nothing special. It's clear that the artist wants to evoke Matt Wagner's Mage, but neither the story nor the art can quite live up to that!

Monday, May 25, 2020

Review: Scary Godmother

Scary Godmother was a kindle giveaway, and somehow Boen asked me to read it to him over several nights. Each story is self-contained, but it helps to read everything in order since  characters carry over from one story to the next. The art is cute. The text is simple and easy for kids to understand, and the plotline mostly targeted for little kids.

There's no explanation for any of the "scary" characters in the book, and how they live or come about. Your kid's expected to know all the myths (i.e., what's a vampire, etc). It's fun entertainment but I can probably count any number of other books that are worth your time.

Thursday, May 21, 2020

Review: Plastics - A Toxic Love Story

Plastics is much less technical than I would have liked. It doesn't cover in great detail how plastics were invented, nor does it discuss, for instance, how the details of recycling plastics work. It does spend some time discussing the effects of plastics on your health, but again, without a lot of detail. What it does point out that I didn't know about, was the lack of regulation over chemicals and safety:
while twenty thousand chemicals have been introduced since 1976, the EPA has been able to require intensive reviews for only two hundred, and it has used its authority to restrict only five. The hurdles are so high, the agency could not even successfully ban asbestos, an undisputed carcinogen.

In Europe, the burden of proof is on safety rather than danger. European regulators “act on the principle of preventing harm before it happens, even in the face of scientific uncertainty.” Guided by that precautionary principle, Europeans began limiting DEHP and other phthalates while American regulators continued debating the risks. (The EU, for instance, barred the use of DEHP in children’s toys in 1999, nine years before the U.S. Congress passed similar legislation.) A new directive known as REACH (for Registration, Evaluation, and Authorization of Chemicals), adopted in 2007, requires testing of both newly introduced chemicals and those already in use, with the burden on manufacturers to demonstrate that they can be used safely. The agency charged with implementing REACH targeted DEHP as one of the first fifteen “substances of very high concern” to be regulated. (Pg. 106-107)
By the time we get to the Pacific Garbage patches (there are actually several garbage patches, distributed all over the world's oceans), we start to get a surprisingly balanced view of things:
The lighter, like every other piece of plastic debris they hauled up in their nets, was coated with a fine slime of microbes, including bacteria and phytoplankton—organisms that are essential to the health of the ocean. To his surprise, Karl found that the plants attached to such plastic objects are copious producers of oxygen, churning out even more from their polymer platforms than is normally produced in open ocean. The finding suggests that, at some level, the multitude of plastic debris may be “improving the efficiency of the ocean to harvest and scavenge nutrients and produce food and oxygen,” (Pg. 134)
The author (and the scientist quoted above) stopped short of saying that plastics in the ocean is a good thing, but as with many things it's not immediately obvious that plastics are an unmitigated evil. For instance, in comparison to paper bags, plastics actually have a lower carbon footprint: they're lighter and therefore the cost of shipping is much lower, and paper itself has issues:
Life-cycle analyses—studies that analyze a product’s cradle-to-grave environmental impact—have consistently found that, compared to paper bags, plastic bags take significantly less energy and water to produce, require less energy to transport, and emit half as many greenhouse gases in their production. Author Tom Robbins called the paper bag “the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature,” but that’s true only if you ignore the tree-felling, chemical-pulping, intensive-bleaching, water-sucking industrial production that goes into making that natural, potato-skin feel of a brown paper bag. (Pg. 158)
The book also disabused me of the idea that landfills are about decomposition. They're not. They're truly about waste disposal, and the goal is for landfills not to decompose, as that would add to their carbon footprint. The author's passion clearly lies with the environmental activism movement, and it's clear from her coverage of it, where she points out how quickly lip service the plastics industry fades once the spotlight on them disappears, and why the structure of the industry is such that it's difficult to get consistent action from them without government regulation:
The only players with significant financial resources to invest in recycling are the resin producers, the major oil and chemical companies, he said. But their top priority is “to make and sell virgin plastics.” As long as oil and gas prices are reasonably stable, there’s no financial incentive for the Dows, DuPonts, and ExxonMobils to get into the recycling business. Nor do they want to alienate the beverage companies that buy their raw plastics to make bottles. Meanwhile, the companies that make plastic products—which might be expected to have an interest in using recycled materials—are too fragmented a constituency to put together an all-out campaign for more recycling, said Rappaport. “The guy making trash bags has nothing to do with the guy making bottles. He’s got nothing to do with the guy making toys. It’s so fractured that nobody can get enough critical mass and money together” to put into developing the recycling infrastructure. (pg. 192)
Her visit to China's recycling center was also enlightening. Once again, the recycling happens there easily because the workers are getting paid $200 a month, which explains why plastic recycling doesn't happen on the coasts of the US --- China can outbid any US-based recycling center, and shipping from the US to China is incredibly cheap because container ships would be going back to China empty otherwise.

I started out the book rather negative, but by the end of the book realized that I learned a lot more than I expected. Recommended.

Monday, May 18, 2020

Rejuvenating old phones

Boen clamored for a phone since his big brother had my old Moto X4, so I dug up Xiaoqin's old Moto X Pure, which had a battery that wouldn't last 30 minutes. I looked at the iFixit site and discovered that it had relatively little glue, which was probably all gone because the screen had already been replaced once, so orderer the ZURUN 3400mAh replacement on Amazon. The replacement was fairly easy, though like an idiot I had 3 screws left over after the procedure which would affect the longevity of the product.

Similarly, Xiaoqin dropped her Pixel 3aXL and broke the screen. That phone was less than a year old, so it was worth sending out the phone for repair despite Google asking for $150. During the COVID19 crisis my wife and I didn't even consider going into the walk-in shop, despite their "essential" status. That would have probably saved some money.

By far the easiest repair, however, was the the Moto Z Play Xiaoqin's mom was using (also a pass down). That one started having battery problems as well, and I dreaded having to open up the case. Then I realized that the Moto Z series of phones have a mod pack ability that we never used, and now was the time to use it. Ordering a Moto Z Battery mod from eBay, when the mod arrived I removed the phone from the protective case, slapped on the mod, and handed it back. Everyone was surprised by how quickly the repair was done, and I was surprised that it worked. Of course, compared to the $16 the Moto X Pure repair cost, the Moto Z Play mod cost $50, but not having any screws left over must count for something!

In normal times you could just go down to BestBuy and have their technicians replace a battery for $50. Though for waterproof phones there's a big question as to whether the phone would stay waterproof after the operation, usually by the time the phone requires that level of maintenance you're no longer as worried about damage, and the phone was fully depreciated anyway! The rest of society might believe in throwing away old stuff, but I firmly believe that it's better for the environment if we keep using what we have for as long as possible.

Thursday, May 14, 2020

Neil Gaiman's Likely Stories

In this 80 page comic, Neil Gaiman re-unites with Mark Buckingham to provide adult-oriented stories. The framing story is a pub, with dark stories that perhaps no longer seem so dark in the light of the very real crisis brought about by a pub in Ischgl. I read through the book in one night, and the stories had a mildly haunting quality, but nothing that's particularly outstanding. It wasn't a waste of time, but I'm not going to put a "recommended" tag on it.

Monday, May 11, 2020

Review: The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

Despite not liking his novels and his latest collection of short stories, I'd already had The Paper Menagerie on hold (in ebook form) at the library, and ended up reading it without high expectations. I have no regrets. Not only are most of the stories in this collection of higher quality, the entire collection as a whole explained to me why I found his other work uncompelling.

Ken Liu's best form is that of a short story. In a short story, he's capable of creating a coherent plot, sketching out characters that come to life, and even evoking emotions that elude him in long form. "The Literomancer", "Good Hunting", "The Paper Menagerie", "The Regular", "The Paper Menagerie", "All The Waves" are all award-worthy reads that are put together so well that I was astounded: not only are the subject topics germain (Liu kindly puts together a set of references in this collection for each story, so you can follow along his research), the characters are excellent and the cultural references uniquely his. Liu not only puts references to Chinese myths and history in his stories, but is also happy to explicate and work on Japanese history as well. "The Literomancer" in particular is happy to explain the intricacies of Chinese characters in a way that (to me at least) is not only familiar, but insightful.

The volume's longer form novellas demonstrate why his more recent work hasn't been appealing: his last story, admittedly inspired by one of Ted Chiang's stories, is bloated,  and overstays its welcome, with next to no character development, and despite the extensive bibliography, doesn't offer any new insight.

Nevertheless, even if you've read many of the stories in this volume, to read it in context and to explore his extensive makes revisiting them in this book well worth your time. Highly recommended.

Thursday, May 07, 2020

Review: ANCOOL 5X Replacement Watchband for Fenix 5X

It was inevitable: while I'm nowhere near as hard on equipment as Bowen is, my Fenix 5X is still a daily wear device. 18 months after buying it and wearing it nearly continuously, I broke one of the eyelets on the wrist-band. And of course, it's the eyelet I use most often!

Garmin wants $50 for an OEM wrist-band, which is a bit rich. I've had mixed results from 3rd party vendors for things like cables, but I figured silicone is silicone, and it doesn't matter where it comes from. The ANCOOL band comes with a 12 month warranty, so I picked one up despite certain reviews claiming that it wasn't as comfortable as the OEM band.

Those reviews are wrong. The band is just as comfortable, and the easy-on-easy off nature of the band meant it was easy to swap back and forth. Recommended.

Monday, May 04, 2020

Review: The Making of a Manager

To a large extent, we are all products of our history and experiences. I spent my career at startups, so when I wrote Startup Engineering Management, I wrote a lot about the hiring process end to end. Julie Zhou, however, spent her entire career at Facebook, so for her, "working hard on recruiting" meant finding more time to interview.

The Making of a Manager is a good management book for people in precisely Julie Zhou's shoes: working at a hypergrowth environment after the growth has started, and with a ton of mentorship available and lots of money. The effect is that most of her advice revolves around the interpersonal sociology (what others would call politics):
if nothing my report said could convince me to change my mind, it’s insincere to act as if she had had a say. What if she responds, “Actually, I do have the time for it”? Or if she brings up a slew of other reasons why she’s the best candidate? I’d only be scrambling to give her another excuse, which would make her feel unheard. (Kindle loc 1333)
And her book also perfectly illustrates how low the expectations we have in industry for management positions:
at the point in which your team becomes four or five people, you should have a plan for how to scale back your individual contributor responsibilities so that you can be the best manager for your people. (Kindle loc 596)
Our standards for management are so low that we think that the management span of attention is at most 4-5. Compared to the great managers I know, who've successfully managed as many as a hundred people without intermediaries, most companies' approach to management guarantees that Zhou's perception is correct: if you do not give sufficient management training and set low expectations, that's precisely what you get.

Another interesting thing about Zhou's book is that Facebook was famously good about promoting from inside. So she assumes that's how everyone else operates and doesn't consider that other possibilities exist.

I don't want to put down this book. It's worth reading for the many practicalities of operating inside Facebook. It's incomplete, as opposed to a deeper understanding of how organizations should be constructed and operated, and doesn't provide those organizational principles. But if you're a Facebook employee newly promoted into management (and want to do the minimum so you can manage your 4-5 people) I bet this is an essential book and thereby is recommended.

Thursday, April 30, 2020

Review: The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories is Ken Liu's giant collection of short stories. The stories run the gamut, from the title story (a fantasy set in the tradition of the Chinese martial arts stories), to a series of related short stories about a post-singularity, uploaded human digital world. Many stories explore contemporary technology trends though given the current state of the world, we're seeing how over-optimistic some of those projections are.

Liu cannot compared with his contemporary Ted Chiang --- some of stories (e.g., the ones about crypto currency) clearly do not age well and were probably written in a hurry. One of the stories in the book is actually an excerpt from one of his novels, which I thought was cheating, but obviously intended to sell his novel series, which was sort of lackluster.

But by and large, the stories were decent and made for a good break. Mildly recommended.

Monday, April 27, 2020

Review: The Spindle and the Sleeper

The Spindle and the Sleeper is another one of Neil Gaiman's young-adult/kids books in tandem with a talented illustrator. This is a mash-up of two well known fairy tales (the spoilers are in the title!) though unfortunately it only features 3 dwarves rather than seven.

The language isn't as lyrical as in say, Instructions or The Ocean at the End of the Lane, and the illustrations aren't nearly as beautiful as those in say, Stardust, which also had a better story. The best I could say of the book is that it's rather short (64 pages, and designed for fast reading especially since the many illustrations take up the full page).

Is this the first Neil Gaiman book where I couldn't put a recommended tag on it? yes it is. Good thing I paid $1 for it, but I really should have checked it out of the library, except that the library's closed because of COVID19.

Thursday, April 23, 2020

Tactical Canvas Webbing Belt

I somehow managed to replace my all time favorite Eagle Creek money belt.  In between my previous purchase and this time,l I discovered that the price went up to a stunning $17! Too rich for me. I searched for a regular plastic/nylon belt on Amazon, and found a generic, made-in-China, tactical canvas belt.

The tactical part probably means it's black and if you taped it with electrical tape it might become quiet. For me, I just wanted to make sure that it worked. I cut it to the correct size, and then used a lighter to seal off the ends so they don't fray. At $5 a belt you're willing to do that. It works, and I won't make a fuss about it.

Recommended at the price.

Monday, April 13, 2020

Review: Aickar 1200A Car Jump Starter

Some devices are bought mostly as insurance, hoping you'll never need them. The Aickar 1200A is one of them. I already owned the Powerstation PX-3 Jumpstarter/Air Compressor, but it's a bit big to keep in the car all the time, so I bought the Aickar when it was on sale for $45 or so.

A couple of days ago, someone who shall not be named left the car lights on all night, and in the morning the battery was dead. I immediately took out the PX-3 Jumpstarter, but the 6-year old battery  wasn't sufficient to turn the motor. I feared for the worst, but the Aickar, despite having not been charged for at least 6 months, got the car started right away!

I'll still keep the PX-3 Jumpstarter because the tire inflator is too useful, and I'd recommend the Aickar 1200A too, but looking at the Amazon page it looks like it's been discontinued. That's the nature of these devices. I'd look for another similar device by a reputable company on sale and jump (sic) on it.


Thursday, April 09, 2020

Long Term Review: Woom 5 Off

My relationship with the Woom 5 off got off to a rocky start, with major problems that were the manufacturer's fault (wrong pedals), difficult to swap wheels, and a front wheel that never got on correct (due to my inexperience). I've also never had a good experience with hydraulic brakes --- the ones on my Airborne Seeker for instance, would never stop squeaking or making noise, even fresh from a bike shop after a tuneup.

But after a rainy winter Bowen picked up mountain biking again, and he's significantly become more confident and sure-footed on the Woom 5. Steepish descents no longer bother him, and he's attempting flourishes on his bike that he never did before. The brakes aren't squealing at all, and even the rear wheel is beginning to be easier to swap. When I tried working on his old Woom 4 (which his brother is riding), I was immediately amazed by how much worse the brakes were and how much harder they were to work on.

I guess hydraulic disc brakes do have a good use case --- on kids bikes, where nobody sells bikes with caliper brakes, and where the kids weigh so little there's zero chance of them warping the discs and creating noise. There's a $180 premium between the Woom 5 and the Woom 5 off, but it's worth it not to have to deal with V-brakes.


Monday, April 06, 2020

Review: Remington Virtually Indestructible Grooming Kit

I shouldn't have been surprised that one of the items hard to find during the "shelter-at-home" orders turned out to be hair clippers. Amazon was all out of them, with delivery slated for the end of April. Fortunately, I found the Remington Virtually Indestructible Grooming Kit on Walmart, with a week delivery lag, and as of this writing you can still get them.

I got them and then realized that I didn't actually how to do a haircut or even mount the combs onto the clippers. I watched a youtube video, and proceeded to do my kids.
They didn't seem traumatized, and then I did myself (with Xiaoqin helping trim the parts I couldn't see, because I was too dumb to install a mirror outside). It's surprisingly easy to use, and at $25, one use would pay for itself. I might never want to pay for a haircut again!

Thursday, April 02, 2020

Review: 6 Impossible Things

I picked up Six Impossible Things from the library since I was running out of audio books. This is one of the rare physics books you can read as an audio book, since most of time there's no oway it would work: equations and Feynman diagrams just won't work in audio format.

Rather than covering all the details about Quantum mechanics, the book explores 6 different interpretations of the fundamental equations: the Cophenhagen interpretation, the pilot wave/de Broglie wave interpreattion, the Many Worlds interpretation, quantum decoherence, the transactional interpretation. He concludes that they all yield the same results, so you can just choose which one you'd like to use.

It's short, mostly enjoyable, but unfortunately all too easily to forget. Still, it covered certain interpretations I'd never heard of before! Recommended.

Monday, March 30, 2020

Review: Word on the Street

I checked out Word on the Street and the first few chapters rehashed material that were already covered in his previous books, about language change, though in greater detail, especially the part about Shakespeare's language vs modern English. It's very clear that McWhorter is passionate about that topic and it's great.

Then the second half of the book covered Black English in far greater detail than I'd seen in any of his other books. A key point that he makes is that Black English doesn't have African roots, but instead came from the language of the indentured servants and other poor white immigrants from parts of the UK: Irish, Scottish, etc. It's a very compelling argument and very well done.

At the end of the book I realized that it was written during the Ebonics debate. Apparently, during that era, McWhorter was the  only Black linguistics expert willing to come right out and say that you shouldn't teach Black English in schools. His reasoning is that in every country such as Germany, Switzerland and Finland, kids come into the schoolroom speaking a local dialect that's as far apart from say, High German, as Black English vs Standard English. The school room, however, provides the immersion and standard English or High German training that's needed to succeed in society. Therefore, anything that reduces immersion time in standard English is necessarily a loss for the kids coming into the school room. He proposes instead, that the teachers are given training in Black English so that they understand that kids in lower grades who speak Black English are not speaking in a degraded form of English, but rather in an English dialect. Again, a very strong argument.

In any case, I wish I'd had this book around to read back when the Ebonics debate was going on, but better late than never. Recommended.

Friday, March 27, 2020

Review: RockBros MTB pedals





Thursday, March 26, 2020

Review: Yowamushi Pedal Vols 8-12

There's a saying that all bike racers take the same amount of time to tell the same story, whether their race is a 3 week stage race or a 3 minute pursuit on the track. Given that Wataru Watanabe is taking in excess of 8 volumes to tell the story of a 3 day stage race, I'd say he should have taken on a 21 day race instead, as there's an excessive amount of padding in volumes 8-12 of Yowamushi Pedal.

Some of it is the nature of anthology comic books: each week these weekly anthologies devote only a small number of pages to each story (as little as 10-15 pages). As a result, the artist spends a couple of pages providing a synopsis of the story to remind the reader who just started reading or who might have missed a couple of issues.

Even so, by the end of volume 12 we still haven't gotten to the end of the stage race. As with the previous volumes, there's very little racing strategy. The protagonists and antagonists frequently ride side by side like idiots. Sure, these are teen bicycle racers but all it takes is one smart team to take advantage by drafting another team and the game ought to be over.

The best part of these books is that every so often the author/artist would take 4 pages out to describe a mountain bike race, or the various courses in Japan that the cyclists in the comics ride up, or even the bike parks that can be found in Japan. That makes the volumes not a total waste of time but is hardly sufficient to redeem the comics in the eyes of this cycling enthusiast.

Not recommended.

Wednesday, March 25, 2020

Covid19 Cycling





Monday, March 23, 2020

Review: How will you measure your life?

I picked up How Will You Measure Your Life expecting the usual business school professor memoir of self-congratulation and lots of business anecdotes. I was surprised to discover that it was a parenting book! Yes, there are business anecdotes and semi-case studies, but the majority of the book is about prioritization, namely how not to neglect the long term important stuff even though it's the short term stuff that provides positive feedback and reinforcement. For instance, I've definitely got friends who fit into this description:
For those of my classmates who inadvertently invested in lives of hollow unhappiness, I can’t help but believe that their troubles stemmed from incorrectly allocating resources. To a person, they were well-intended; they wanted to provide for their families and offer their children the best possible opportunities in life. But they somehow spent their resources on paths and byways that dead-ended in places that they had not imagined. They prioritized things that gave them immediate returns—such as a promotion, a raise, or a bonus—rather than the things that require long-term work, the things that you won’t see a return on for decades, like raising good children. And when those immediate returns were delivered, they used them to finance a high-flying lifestyle for themselves and their families: better cars, better houses, and better vacations. The problem is, lifestyle demands can quickly lock in place the personal resource allocation process. “I can’t devote less time to my job because I won’t get that promotion—and I need that promotion …” (Kindle Loc 880)
 And of course, I'm always surprised by the number of people who like to outsource important parenting functions:
One of the most common versions of this mistake that high-potential young professionals make is believing that investments in life can be sequenced. The logic is, for example, “I can invest in my career during the early years when our children are small and parenting isn’t as critical. When our children are a bit older and begin to be interested in things that adults are interested in, then I can lift my foot off my career accelerator. That’s when I’ll focus on my family.” Guess what. By that time the game is already over. An investment in a child needs to have been made long before then, to provide him with the tools he needs to survive life’s challenges—even earlier than you might realize. (Kindle loc 1101)
 There's wonderful insight even into why what we do never seem to satisfy our spouses:
We project what we want and assume that it’s also what our spouse wants. Scott probably wished he had helping hands to get through his tough day at work, so that’s what he offered Barbara when he got home. It’s so easy to mean well but get it wrong. A husband may be convinced that he is the selfless one, and also convinced that his wife is being self-centered because she doesn’t even notice everything he is giving her—and vice versa. This is exactly the interaction between the customers and the marketers of so many companies, too. Yes, we can do all kinds of things for our spouse, but if we are not focused on the jobs she most needs doing, we will reap frustration and confusion in our search for happiness in that relationship. (Kindle loc 1364)
 Much of the book's notes go from child development to self-esteem development, and discusses how certain business case studies (such as Dell outsourcing production of components and eventually the whole machine to Asus until Dell could no longer compete) apply to the raising of children.
in outsourcing much of the work that formerly filled our homes, we have created a void in our children’s lives that often gets filled with activities in which we are not involved. And as a result, when our children are ready to learn, it is often people whom we do not know or respect who are going to be there...if your children gain their priorities and values from other people … whose children are they? Yes, they are still your children—but you see what I’m getting at. The risk is not that every moment spent with another adult will be indelibly transferring inferior values. Nor is this about making the argument that you need to protect your children from the “big bad world”—that you must spend every waking moment with them. You shouldn’t. Balance is important, and there are valuable lessons your children will gain from facing the challenges that life will throw at them on their own. Rather, the point is that even if you’re doing it with the best of intentions, if you find yourself heading down a path of outsourcing more and more of your role as a parent, you will lose more and more of the precious opportunities to help your kids develop their values—which may be the most important capability of all. (Kindle Loc 1646-1654)
 The book encourages you to let your children fail and suffer the consequences early, rather than setting them up to become fragile successful kids by overcompensating for them:
The braver decision for parents may be to give that child a more difficult, but also more valuable, course in life. Allow the child to see the consequences of neglecting an important assignment. Either he will have to stay up late on his own to pull it off, or he will see what happens when he fails to complete it. And yes, that child might get a bad grade. That might be even more painful for the parent to witness than the child. But that child will likely not feel good about what he allowed to happen, which is the first lesson in the course on taking responsibility for yourself...Our default instincts are so often just to support our children in a difficult moment. But if our children don’t face difficult challenges, and sometimes fail along the way, they will not build the resilience they will need throughout their lives. People who hit their first significant career roadblock after years of nonstop achievement often fall apart. (Kindle loc 1855)
There's even a great section about hiring executives, describing a common mistake among startups, which is to hire managers who've successfully run big company organizations with lots of support, rather than hiring managers who've built organizations handson from a small base, even if the resulting organization wasn't as large as the more conventional manager.

I enjoyed the book, highlighting section after section, and thinking about the strong parenting advice in this book. Recommended.