Errant Musings

Yet Another Japan Post

2011-05-10T23:31:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me that travelogues are primarily interesting to the person giving them. This is one of the things I find so fascinating about travel--you can't really share. Photos and videos are nice, I guess, but there's just nothing to compare with the heady cocktail of excitement, nervousness, tiredness, and just plain being there that one can only get first-hand. On that note, I'm probably going to stop doing Japan trip posts after this one.

I have vastly more photos and videos than I've posted, but despite my considering them very interesting, I imagine that most others do not. So, in keeping with the general theme of travel-posts-as-narcissism, all of today's photos will be pictures of me.

The first one was taken in the gardens in front of the old imperial palace in Kyoto. It's a very nice palace; its main downside is that, being built entirely of wood, it has a habit of burning down all the time. As such, it's fairly new. The palace buildings themselves are very nice--they build the roofs out of a special kind of cedar tree bark, which is great for natural air conditioning. The roofs are fairly hardy as untreated wood goes, but they do need to be replaced every 20-30 years. The inner gardens are beautiful as well.

Speaking of gardens, the silver shrine has, I think, the nicest. The golden shrine gets its reputation from being plated in gold, whereas the silver shrine's silver plating was one of those good intentions that ended up disappearing in the face of a wartime budget (something medieval). Despite never having been plated in silver in its entire history, the name stuck. To make up for the lack of metallic sparkle, the shrine goes all-out on their large gardens. There is both a zen rock garden, which consists of big piles of rocks raked into razor-sharp precise shapes, and then grounds filled with flowers, carefully sculpted trees, rivers, and colorful bushes.

Incidentally, the silver shrine is generally famous as a cultural development center. Among other things, this shrine's culture is largely responsible for the development of the tea ceremony and flower arranging as quasi-religious experiences in Japan.

The final picture shows me outfitted in full tourist regalia--camera pouch, sweatshirt tied around the waist, and water bottle in hand. Most of my wardrobe isn't fashionable enough to compete with your average Japanese person, and I didn't really try. In the background is the Fushimi Inari Taisha, or at least a miniscule part of it--there is a large main shrine, dedicated to the fox-god of rice and prosperity, and that's not it. This photo was taken in front of one of the thousands of small shrines lining the trails. The trails are probably several miles all told, most of which are bridged by large orange shinto gates. At first this is impressive, but after hiking up the steep trail for a while, it blurs into kind of an orange haze. This shrine will punish you for slacking on your exercise program, it seems.

By the way, those little statues off to the side are, in fact, frogs wearing bibs. I'm not sure which god this is, but I asked about the bibs, and they really are bibs for eating. Since Japanese gods are frequently given gifts of food, I guess there is probably some relation between the bibs and the offerings.

Anyway, it's late, and I'm never going to get over the jet-lag if I don't go to bed. So good night all, and thanks for tolerating the travelogue. The videos were a bit too big to post, but if you're curious, try to catch me sometime when I'm near my laptop. I have a walking tour of some underground tunnels, baby dolphins, close encounters with a whale shark, cute children feeding deer, juggling, and panoramic shots of both an 11-floor train station and downtown Osaka. I think they're cool, but who knows -- maybe I'm just biased.

We're in Kyoto!

2011-05-04T07:36:00.000-07:00

First observation about Kyoto: It is much easier to find coin-operated laundromats here. I am not sure why this is, but there are lots of them. Next observation: There are these large, amazing shrines all over the place. After putting on our laundry, we found a big complex less than a block away. Then walked past another one holding some kind of carnival on the way back. All told, I think we walked past half a dozen or so shrines today.

So, it is possible to take a bullet train from Osaka to Kyoto. Indeed, we actually passed through Kyoto on our way to Nagoya about a week ago. It's worth observing, however, that on a bullet train, the distance between Osaka and Kyoto is maybe ten minutes. Which is to say, it's not very far. So, figuring we'd save some money to spend on food or books or something, we bought regular tickets, and loaded up all our luggage onto a regular old train. The train was packed, which meant we had to stand for forty-five minutes, but we arrived in Kyoto a little footsore and about fifty bucks richer--the tickets for the both of us cost (roughly) twelve dollars on the regular express train.

We bought breakfast in the train station. Rachel had a big old sushi/onigiri tray, and she bought me a bag of bread sticks while I watched the luggage. Add in a carton of milk each, and voila: breakfast. It left us a little full for lunch, so we just grabbed snacks from a Circle-K across from the laundromat. Combie [convenience-store] food is a little predictable and processed, but since we're tourists, it's still new and interesting. I ended up with some kind of cream cheese/caramel concoction and a Calpis water (a lightly sweetened milky-white soda), while Rachel had some kind of tapioca-strawberry milk and some manner of bread.

I forgot to dig my camera out the luggage before we went exploring Kyoto, so all the photos on this post are actually from yesterday, when we went to Nara. The first one is Rachel pretending that she's holding something to catch the deer's attention--they sell special crackers formulated for feeding deer. They seem to like them, but these are some of the fattest deer you've met--they get a bit overloaded sometimes. The second one is a picture of Todaiji from the outside. I was told by our friend who met us in Nara that it is the largest wooden structure in the world. This seems possible; those little white specks just below the door are the people standing around, waiting to enter. The building contains a really large statue of Buddha (not the world's biggest, but it's up there), and various other very large statues as well.

After visiting the statue, we were joined by some of our friend's family members, which is where we have this third photo from (I'm leaving out stuff for privacy reasons; if you ask me in person, I have more photos and videos). This is a little boy who was taking a picture of his aunt. I thought he was kind of cute, handling the gigantic camera, so I took a picture of him. His aunt, struck by the general humor of the situation, in turn took a picture of me taking a picture of him. It was one of those recursive moments.

As three-year-olds are wont to do, he got a bit tired and cranky after a while, so our guides headed home. Rachel got some more photos of manhole covers--there are lots of neat ones, many of them colored--and we shopped around for souvenirs. Eventually, we headed back to Osaka, and since we went past Dotonbori, I decided to stop and try get a night-time shot of the big central area.

Dotonbori is something like Osaka's Times Square, and fittingly for the city, it is all about shopping and restaurants. There is a mind-blowing number of shops here--they just go on for block after block, thousands of stores of all different types. The nicest of the shopping arcades have rain shields over the top, creating a weird, hybrid indoor/outdoor feel to the place, something you can only pull off with year-round pleasant weather. This advertisement of the running guy is one of the classic symbols of Osaka. It's an ad for a candy company, who appear to have gotten really lucky with the popularity of this ad. The advertising in this area is entertaining and over the top -- huge animatronic crabs, dragons, drum-playing clowns, giant octopuses wielding cleavers, that kind of thing.

We spent ... quite a lot of money here.

Aquariums and Sundays

2011-05-01T06:15:00.000-07:00

Despite it being the single most- photographed thing I've done on the trip so far, I somehow managed to completely miss mentioning the Kaiyukan in my last post. We've been going at a pace of about two tourist attractions a day, which is pretty exhausting but fun.

Kaiyukan is the name of a really big aquarium found in Osaka. It is themed around the ring of fire, and has a lot of fish in it. This is actually my second time going, and I was sad to realize that after the first time, the only photo I have of the first time is of a block of acrylic glass that's on display. I repented, and now have an enormous number of photos and videos of fish. I've included one where I'm hanging out with some jellyfish, thanks to the magic of acrylic glass.

Another highlight of Friday was eating Okonomiyaki for dinner. The traditional okonomiyaki involves putting it together yourself and cooking it at your own table. Apparently, this ideal is a little too free-form for most Japanese restaurants, so they find various ways to subvert it. In this case, the okonomiyaki was delivered to our in-table grill fully cooked, ready for sauces to be stuck on top. The grill itself was only slightly warm, and really just served as a way of keeping the food hot. This isn't really a complaint though--this stuff was amazingly delicious. I had some kind of pork/noodle/cabbage mix that was great with soy sauce, and Rachel's was a squid/onion mix that tasted good with mayonnaise.

It was a bit interesting trying to find church -- there are only a handful of wards in Osaka proper, and they don't exactly locate the buildings in the major tourist centers. After fighting with lds.org a bit, which insists on giving driving directions, we figured out a method of getting to church that involved a bit of walking. It ended up being not too bad--we did need to walk ten blocks, but these ended up being very short blocks. I'll also note that most streets in Japan are narrow -- I think I might be able to jump between sidewalks with a good running start. Maybe I'd have to get in slightly better shape first, though. The photo here was taken as we approached the church building.

Church was good, and I found I was able to follow along with the testimonies and the lessons pretty well, which is great progress. I'm still missing a lot, but at least I can follow along. Lots of members and an investigator or two kept us company, and the ward has a friendly, family-like feel, a point mentioned in a few of the testimonies. Several people expressed surprise that I hadn't served a mission in Japan, and subsequently wondered how I'd manage to learn the language; I guess that's a compliment.

While we still needed food and travel, we did our level best to only mildly crack the sabbath, and spent much of Sunday in our room or walking around the neighborhood. I've also used some of the time to update the last few blog posts with long-promised pictures; if you've already read them, you can run back through and browse. While walking around, we did run into an honest-to-goodness grocery store (something like Macey's), so we'll definitely be heading down there tomorrow to load up on candy and so forth. Bye for now!

Lots of Ramen and a Castle

2011-04-30T06:57:00.000-07:00

It's pretty late, and I don't want to miss church, so just a quick update. I've gone through and added photos later, so if you read the original post, just scan for pictures this time...

First thing in the morning, we went to a ramen museum. Most of the activities were free or reasonably priced, and we ended up only spending money on a T-shirt. The museum would be a lot more fun if our reading skills were better, but we did borrow audio guides, which at least gave us an audio track for two of the exhibits. I'll note that we're talking specifically about instant ramen here; the museum is basically a giant advertising stunt for Nissin, the original makers of "Cup Noodle" and inventors of instant ramen in general. The original shack in which Nissin's founder invented instant ramen is one centerpiece, and there's also a movie theater where they tell a heavily animated story about how ramen was invented. You can sign up for a course where you make your own ramen in a big, commercial kitchen upstairs, and there's a make-your-own Cup Noodle, heavily geared toward little kids. We did neither.

Of course, I left craving ramen, so we picked some up at the tourist trap ramen place conveniently nearby. It was good stuff, although I think Rachel prefers the pork broth to the soy broth that I ordered (she wasn't hungry, and just ordered gyoza). I've got a photo here now -- this was really good stuff, possibly even worth the ten bucks I paid for it. The noodles are decorated with green onion, a bit of seaweed, crispy onion bits, several slices of grilled pork, and an entire soft-boiled egg. There are a further half-dozen things you can add to adjust the flavor along the back counter.

Next stop was Osaka castle. It's got enormous stone walls around it's base, and a windy entrance path that traverses fully two moats, both wide enough to sail a steamboat down. There are ramparts overlooking the path all along the way, loaded with murder holes and all the usual castle features. The castle itself doesn't have any windows for the first several floors, and the walls are made of enormous stone blocks. The lowest ornamentation and windows are perhaps 60-70 feet off the ground. There's a well out front, covered with a heavy wooden grill which also, presumably, is defensive. Of course, the one time it was invaded, the castle fell, but it looks impressive, and the defenses did kill quite a lot of people before eventually not working well enough. There's probably a message in there somewhere.

Incidentally, we finally tried takoyaki. They're kind of like fritters, but with octopus and onions in them. They're also not deep fried, but rather shallow fried in cup-shaped pans. Alas: the dough was raw. We'll probably try again some other time, but probably not in the same place. The frying trick is really interesting, and probably both uses less oil and goes faster. I wonder if the same trick would work on fritters.

Anyway, church tomorrow, and I need to sleep. The images on this post were added after the fact.

Doing business in Japan

2011-04-29T06:44:00.001-07:00

I'm going to lump days 2 & 3 of our Japanese trip into a single quick post, because it's getting late and I need to get to sleep.

On Wednesday, Rachel and I went to Nagoya to get ready for the seminar I was helping to present on Thursday. I ended up spending a lot of the time developing subtitles for the two videos we wanted to show -- the last of the subtitles were typed out on Thursday morning, while the first sessions of the seminar were running. The final system we worked out was for me to take a machine transcription and fix it to be proper English; then, Luna would convert it to Japanese, and I would fix any linewrap and timing problems in the Japanese. Doing it that way, we managed to get about 4 minutes of subtitles done in a little less than an hour.

Lunch in Nagoya was "Hokkaido" cuisine, I think. In my case, that meant slices of seasoned pork on rice, and in Rachel's case that meant fried chicken. Probably the most interesting dish was the "Hokkaido Oyakodon." Oya means parent, and ko means child, while don is short for donburi, which refers to a rice bowl. Normally, oyakodon is chicken with egg, but Hokkaido oyakodon is salmon and salmon roe. Luna thought the name was funny and clever, so she ordered it. By the way, Luna has been a huge help this trip; I did my best to give her a pile of gifts, but it's really hard to say thank you enough.

After we were done with business stuff in Nagoya, we went sightseeing with Ikeda-san. He took us to see Nagoya tower, and then we went for kaiten-zushi (that's conveyor-belt sushi, the first time we've had it!). It was good; I've discovered that tuna sushi can indeed be delicious, you just need to get the high quality stuff.

The next day's seminar went fine; I did some of it in Japanese, but the modeling I did in English with Luna interpreting. I wanted to do it in Japanese, but I just didn't have time to memorize enough terms. It was a pretty big stretch just getting the videos ready. There was one glitch ("Matches perfectly, you can join it! Oh, apparently you can't, sorry"), but we worked out what was going wrong before the end, and use it to illustrate a common mistake ("This is what compatible mode is for! So if you also see this problem, switch to compatible mode!").

After the seminar, we wandered around Osaka with Luna, visiting the massive shopping district of Dotonbori. I have a video of Dotonbori, but no photos, sorry! Various random things were bought, and we ate dinner at Luna's teenage hangout, a kind of all-you-can-eat pizza place. Available pizzas included ham/pineapple, squid ink/squid/onion/tuna flakes, chicken/corn, and shrimp/corn. Yes, the Japanese really do put corn on pizza. It tastes fine, really--the squid ink on pizza probably deserves more attention, although it mostly makes it black and tastes vaguely of ocean (of course I tried it, don't be silly). We're planning on meeting Luna again in a couple of days for a trip to Nara, her parents' current hometown.

A new word for you: Shokuchuudoku

2011-04-28T16:43:00.000-07:00

Here it is in kanji:　食中毒. It's pronounced shoku-choo-doku and the literal meaning of the word parts are food/by means of/poison (food poisoning), and it's a pretty good summary of my flight over the Pacific from Sunday night to Tuesday morning.

It might not have been food poisoning -- it might have been me getting too hot in the overly warm plane cabin -- but at any rate, I had a miserable time which I won't describe in detail. As a sidenote, I have discovered one way to get transferred to a business class seat! If you just get so miserably sick that you can't sit up anymore, and if there's turbulence so you can't lie down in the back anymore, they'll move you! I cannot recommend this method, however.

I was still unable to walk for more than a few seconds at a time when I arrived, so they bundled me into a wheelchair and we went running around Haneda airport, with a rapidly shifting escort of similarly uniformed Japanese women pushing me around. We only had about an hour to get to our next flight, and the stewardesses felt that I was so badly sick that I needed to be reported to quarantine, so I had an interview with a doctor as soon as we landed. The doctor decided that whatever I had probably wasn't infectious (he guessed it was probably food poisoning as well), and said I could go ahead and catch our next flight.

On the following flight, they moved me to a row where I had 3 seats in a row, so I could lie down and sleep a little more. All the sleep helped, I think. Then they stuck me on a wheelchair when we reached Itami airport as well, complete with a fresh complement of helpful uniformed Japanese women to push me around.

We had been going to take a series of trains to get to the airport, but that sounded too complicated by this point, so we went by a direct bus to Osaka train station, which is very close to our hotel. While at the train station, Rachel spotted an escalator that looked cool, producing the only photo I have from this section of the trip. Sorry about that, but I was really not in a good state of mind for taking photos. Once we got to the hotel, I decided to try and eat something; if I could do so without dying, then I thought I'd try to keep going for the rest of the day. We had planned to go and see the cherry blossoms in Yoshino, a high-altitude area where they bloom later, and I still hoped to go. We went and bought breakfast at the hotel cafe, wherein I dropped about twenty dollars for, um, a tiny glass of apple juice, two small croissants, and a glass of warm milk. Rachel had a brief episode of sticker shock and decided to go for the six-dollar croissants only. After that cafe, all the food has looked pretty cheap!

I was still a bit woozy from the flight ordeal, but I felt better after breakfast, so we decided to risk the trip to Yoshino. We called Luna (normally a resident of Seattle, but visiting her parents), who had offered to be our tour guide, and set off. She had never been to Yoshino either, so this was new for everyone.

The cherry blossoms here are at least partially growing wild, so there are many different types, and they bloom at different times. Most of the forest consists of enormously tall cedar trees, with little tufts of greenery at the top, making it look like you're driving through a vast hall of pillars, but every so often there are cherry trees blooming among them. We went for a short hike to get to the best area, called the "upper thousand trees" (okusenbon), which is where a passing man dressed entirely in purple took a photo of the three of us.

The purple man was very friendly, telling us about his wonderful trip to the Atlanta Olympics, and the friendly Georgians who told him that they had been told by God that they should be nice to visitors. He said they were indeed very nice. He gave Rachel a cat-shaped bookmark as a memento.

The photo here is a pretty good idea of what most of Yoshino looked like -- scattered cherry blossoms among the cedars. Mind you, some of these cherry-blossom trees are over 100 feet tall, so they're by no means an insignificant part of the forest.

One last thought: In Utah, when you go hiking, you're on your own. We don't have bathrooms on our mountains. We don't have running water. We don't have a little cafe at the top where you can kick off your boots and sit down to chat with the other hikers over a cold Gatorade. This, then, would be a difference between Utah and Japan. The last photo is the takoyaki stand at Okusenbon. So once you're done traipsing around the mountains, you can stop here for some fried octopus dumplings and a can of green tea. It's a pity they weren't carrying water, or we'd have bought something!

Spanakopita, games, etc.

2010-09-20T21:42:00.001-07:00

I made spanakopita today. Unfortunately, I didn't take a picture, so you'll just have to believe my claim that it looked nice. It didn't really look like the photo on that Wikipedia entry; ours was a lighter gold color, and had a bit higher pastry-to-filling ratio. It tasted great; we splurged on some really nice quality feta cheese, and it was definitely worth it. I've had a roll of phyllo dough wasting space in the freezer for months, and this was both a great way to use it up and a fun experiment with a dish I've never made before.

I mentioned some ideas for games I'm working on in my last post. Brian offered to help out with a web game, but I'm not sure how to get hold of him anymore. So Brian, if you're still reading: Send me an email and I'll run my idea by you.

I tried out Minecraft today, although that poor guy probably doesn't need any more links. Penny Arcade did a couple of comics about what a great game it is, and since they're one of the most popular gaming comics on the web (they're #1 or #2), the Minecraft web-site immediately crashed under the load of interested gamers going to try it out. The basic idea seems to be that you wonder around, punching trees, which gives you wood, which you use to make tools, which you use to dig a hole, where you can find diamond and ore, which you use to build a castle and weapons to defend yourself from the zombies. Also: You can build roller coasters, just because. It is, in fact, fun.

Minecraft is also yet another example of publisher-less publishing, and the value of getting attention--the guy managed to get a few thousand registrations over the past 6 months, but in the past few weeks I believe he's made somewhat more than a million dollars. His Paypal account was frozen because they were worried something fishy was going on (600,000 euros in a week!), but as soon as he can get that taken care of, he'll be independently wealthy. Good luck to him.

A New Post

2010-09-12T12:27:00.000-07:00

At the encouragement of my wife, who is a good person, I'm posting another blog post. I don't know that I really have anything especially interesting to say. I suppose I will just sort of blather and hope that it works out.

I've been thinking quite a bit about hobbies lately. There's quite a lot of things I'm interested in doing. I enjoy writing music, writing video games, and writing stories. I suppose all of these things have "writing" in common. However, at the moment, I'm kind of between projects -- I have some old, half done things that I could pick up again, or I could try and start something new. I've though of trying to do some software work to help make next year's GEEX conference better, for example. I've also thought of trying to start my own online web game (a major obstacle there being that I would need to learn quite a lot, so it would have to be something really simple). I've also got a bunch of half-finished video games lying around, waiting for a little more attention to make them playable. The same goes for songs -- I've got a whole bunch of rhythm tracks, bass tracks, and interesting chord patterns sitting on my computer, waiting for a little more attention.

Arguably, the trick is to focus on just one thing, so that I can make a lot of satisfying progress with it. Right now, the most likely candidate for getting more attention is an old scripting language/game that I was working on a while back, and which has some really interesting stuff that I could expand on. I don't know. I guess I also feel like, even if I were to push this stuff through to completion, would anyone ever actually play with it, listen to it, or read it? Self-motivated projects are fragile things.

Anyway, that's what I was thinking about today.

I'm Engaged!

2010-03-14T22:10:00.000-07:00

I proposed today, so it's official -- I'm going to be married sometime this summer. Precisely when this summer, and precisely where the marriage will be taking place, and precisely what kind of reception there will be, etc. etc. is all undecided.

It's still a little over 3 months away, so it's not like there's a huge rush, but there certainly is a ton that needs doing.

For some reason, I'm very cheerful. This is probably related?

Almost Democracy: The Death of Hukou?

2010-03-02T00:56:00.000-08:00

If you read the title, you may be wondering: "What is hukou?" In China, there is a system where everyone is classified according to where they are supposed to live: In the countryside, or in the city. It's a form of segregation, except that instead of being divided along any kind of racial lines, it's built around where you were born.

This system's been around for around sixty years, and it's heavily entrenched in China's socialist legal code. If you're from the countryside, your benefits, medical care, and welfare all assume that you work as a farmer or similar. People who live in the city get corresponding city benefits.

The problem is that most of China's progress has been in the cities. The cities are where the economy is growing, it's where the prosperity is improving, it's where you can get an education, and it's where you can get ahead in the world. The countryside, by comparison, has stagnated. In a mirror of the west's urbanization, rural Chinese have migrated en masse to the city to find work and a better life.

The problem? Their documents do not entitle them to government-provided services in the city, and under communism, that's pretty much everything. These "migrant workers" live anywhere they can, get medical care however they can, and get an education wherever they can, if at all. In short, they are the city's second-class citizens, and they have the second-class wages to prove it. The Chinese government didn't intend for them to be in the city--their destiny was to become farmers. It's a long-standing problem, and something really ought to be done. And that's where it gets interesting.

Just recently, several newspapers in China called for the abolition of hukou. There are a few notable points here: The editorial was printed by more than a dozen newspapers, which sends a message of solidarity; if it were just one paper, it could be classified as a dissident voice, but it isn't. So this is interesting on a lot of levels -- firstly, it's the press criticizing government policy in a communist country. Secondly, there is a reasonable expectation that the government will listen -- the editorial is hardly a call to arms, but rather an appeal to authority to act. Thirdly, it suggests that China may be evolving mechanisms of policy correction, even in its nigh-total absence of democratic institutions.

In our own political theory, the free press is considered a vital corrective force, a check against governmental abuse. It's interesting to see the press function that way even in a society where the press is not particularly free, and where the general population can't vote to throw out officials they don't like.

I have no idea for a post

2010-02-06T00:10:00.000-08:00

This post is largely free of any intellectual content whatsoever. I just dropped by and noticed "wow, it's sure been a long time since I last posted!" So I figured I'd just type something out, stream of consciousness style, edit lightly, and hit the orange button.

It has long been an observation of mine that when my friends acquire girlfriends, the vast majority of their free time disappears. "Fascinating," I thought, "girlfriends appear to eat nearly all of one's free time." Then, somewhat to my surprise, I found myself girlfriended, and surely enough, the vast majority of my free time immediately evaporated. "Where did it go?" I wonder to myself, sometimes. I'll have to ask her if she knows.

I'm going to go and help a coworker move tomorrow. If anyone would like to come along and help, I could use the help. Since he's moving within the Salt Lake valley, I plan to also spend some time in Salt Lake, possibly acquiring chocolate and/or Ikea furniture. These are both things which are more interestingly obtained in Salt Lake.

Badly spoken English is something of a pet peeve of mine. For some reason, this seems to hold true even when the English is, strictly speaking, French. I present this specimen: voila. This French word means something like "look there!" It is often accompanied by pointing. The problem is that, in the hands of non-French speakers, this word is frequently mutated into "viola," a pleasant but totally unrelated musical instrument. Today, I actually heard someone SAY viola when they MEANT voila. I winced.

Thus, I invent this rhyme:

I before O is played with a bow,
but swap them around to show what you've found.

Perhaps you can think of a better one. My brother once told me about an online text-adventure game he played, in which one could find a character called "the ghost of the English language." The ghost could confer upon you the power to use the public chat channels, but before it did so would give you a quiz about proper English usage. Players were not allowed to speak on the chat channels until they had achieved a full 100% score on the quiz, which they could take as many times as they liked. When one succeeded at the quiz, the ghost would say "now go forth, and avenge my death!"

That is all.

2010-01-06T02:44:00.001-08:00

Greetings, oh vast public.

Ever had one of those nights where you don't sleep much so you end up falling asleep really early the next day and then you wake up around 10 PM and you can't sleep at all the following night? Yeah, me too. And since I've completely run out of RSS feeds to read, web-sites to visit, e-mails to respond to, missionaries to write to, and web games to update, I have resorted to the bottom of the barrel, and you are getting a blog update.

The photo-shopped church sign, by the way, is mine. I don't know if I've posted it before, but I liked the result so I've had it sitting on my desktop for ages. If it made you smile in vague amusement then it has done its job.

Speaking of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I'm a regular Kiva user. I have a hundred or so dollars which I regularly flip through their loaning machine, and which is used to provide small loans to entrepreneurs who are trying to create a livelihood (usually in other countries, but sometimes in poorer parts of the U.S.). Kiva allows users to count their loans toward teams, and maintains a ranking of which teams are providing the most loans. "Kiva Mormons," the team which I usually count toward, is just a handful of loans behind the "Flying Spaghetti Monster" team, and there's some competition to try and recruit more people so that we can pull ahead.

There have been some people in the team that worry that competitiveness is not a good motivation for charitable work. This got me thinking, especially since I heard of this verse in the Koran:

For every one of you [Jews, Christians, Muslims], We have appointed a path and a way. If God had willed, He would have made you but one community; but that [He has not done in order that] He may try you in what has come to you. So compete with one another in good works.

I think "compete with one another in good works" is a great way for religions to relate to one another. If you believe you are God's true church, make an argument with deeds rather than words. I can also think of a nod to this in Christianity:

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

This is more advice for those who are trying to discern true religion from false, but it's also a reminder to those of us who call ourselves the true religion -- we ought to be producing good fruit. So yes, I think that competing in good works has a sound basis. And with that, just 93 more loans to pass the spaghetti people!

Height = prosperity

2009-11-29T00:35:00.000-08:00

I found this article a while back, and thought it would be fun to share. It has some relevance to my earlier post about health care--specifically, how do you measure the quality of a country's health care? In short, one answer is "measure how tall they are."

Differences in height between two people living in the same society are due to genetic differences. However, the difference between the average height of populations is due to the quality of life in each society. Height is strongly affected by a combination of nutrition, disease, and environmental stress; thus, societies with lower quality of life will be, on average, shorter. When I was first reading the article, I was a bit skeptical; it seems like there would be other factors that matter. However, you'll find that most of these have been considered, and the premise still works very well: height = prosperity.

One interesting point is that Americans used to be the tallest people in the world. It was true around the time of the revolutionary war, and our height gradually increased all the way into the 1950's. However, something happened around then -- the average European heights kept increasing, while ours stayed pretty much the same. The average European is now significantly taller than we are. Sure, we win out on average income, but it's not translating into a lifestyle that makes us taller. The biggest contrast is in the Netherlands; we are 3-4 inches shorter than the average Dutch person (average height for men and women are 6'1" and 5'8" respectively; for Americans, it's about 5'10" and 5'5"). This is comparing American Caucasians to European Caucasians; if you include our immigrants, the difference increases by another inch.

The full article is here, and summarizes a lot of neat studies. I loved the study about serving the World War 2 rations of corned beef and cabbage for school lunches. It's a fun read, so enjoy it :).

Holiday specials and tacos

2009-11-22T15:23:00.001-08:00

There's an hilarious xkcd post about bad movies in general and the Star Wars holiday special in particular. "How," I wondered, "could anything possibly be that bad?" So I asked YouTube.

At first, I stared in disbelief. Then, I started laughing. Then, from the deep recesses of my soul, some tortured voice started calling out: "What are they doing?" it said. "This isn't right!" it said. "Make it stop, please make it stop!" it cried. So I closed the browser window, hoping that some vestige of my sanity remained.

I had watched for very slightly more than 60 seconds.

In other news, I went to Taco Riendo in south Provo (it's one of those cursed restaurant buildings that can't make up its mind -- the genealogy so far is Wingers->Tandoori Grill->Taco Riendo). It was really good -- I'm hopeful that it might hang on. So far I've only had the tacos ($1.59 each--you get a soft corn tortilla, a pile of meat, and free access to the taco fillings bar). It has very little in common with Taco Bell, which is a good thing. I also got a piece of flan, being that I am a sucker for flan, and it was really good. It dwells somewhere between custard and cheesecake.

Zeno's paradox

2009-11-19T20:44:00.000-08:00

One of the more famous Greek puzzles is called "Zeno's paradox," named after the philosopher who conceived it. The problem goes something like this:

"Achilles, the great warrior, was to compete in a footrace with a tortoise. Because Achilles is so much faster, the tortoise was given a large head start. Supposing that Achilles started 100 meters behind, and is ten times faster than the tortoise--well, he should run 100 meters, but in that time the tortoise has moved 10. So Achilles runs another 10 meters, but in that time, the tortoise has pulled ahead by 1. So he runs 1 meter, but in that time, the tortoise has stayed ahead by a tenth of a meter. As he runs a tenth, the tortoise holds his lead by a hundredth. Achilles must cover an infinite number of such smaller distances; and since no mortal can complete an infinite number of things, surely it is impossible for him to catch the tortoise!"

It's an interesting paradox. The thing that's so interesting about it, however, is that it also has quite a simple solution. To begin, this paradox tells a lie: "No mortal can complete an infinite number of things." But if the infinite number of things is ever smaller and smaller, then sometimes we mortals can do precisely that. Suppose I try to solve this problem first:

"I wish to sum up all of the distances which Achilles will travel: First the hundred meters, then then 10, then the 1, then the tenth, then the hundredth, and so on, forever. How large a number shall I have when I am done?"

Well, the answer will look very much like this:

111.11111111111111...

except of course that the string of ones shall go on forever. But this number is not infinite. In fact, consider the decimal representation of 111 and 1/9 (one-hundred-eleven and one-ninth). If you do the long division, you will soon realize that it is 111 followed by an endless string of 1's after the decimal point. Thus, the sum of the earlier infinite series is precisely 111 and 1/9 meters, which is the point in the race where Achilles will pass the tortoise.

And there you go: How to answer Zeno's paradox. I hope I said it clearly enough.

Debating Health Care (Poorly)

2009-11-08T21:45:00.000-08:00

I've been hearing a lot about the state of health care in the United States. Since I have some strong opinions in this area, I present you with my own rant on the topic.

Before digging in, I wish to start with a little bit of Chinese history. Fifty years ago, Mao Zedong started introducing a series of agricultural reforms to the new agricultural communes in China. These reforms were unscientific and had not been tested; grain production dropped by nearly a quarter over the next three years. To avoid government anger, officials would exaggerate their productivity in their official reports, which in turn led the government to requisition too much grain for state projects. This cycle of deception led to the deaths of tens of millions of people by starvation--comparable to the entire body count of World War 2.

Much of the grain taken by the state was being routed to work crews building massive infrastructure--dams, canals, and so forth. Unfortunately, many of these were so poorly designed and constructed that they turned out worthless. Many trained engineers had been disqualified from the work because Mao Zedong had ideological problems with them.

Mao's successor in the communist party was named Deng Xiaoping. Deng Xiaoping abandoned many of the communist economic theories and moved China toward a comparatively capitalist system. Defending this, he said "I don't care if it's a white cat or a black cat. It's a good cat so long as it catches mice." He had been forced out of power during Mao's lifetime due to his willingness to apply market economics to China's problems. After Mao's death, he returned to prominence, and is the architect of much of modern China's prosperity. Deng Xiaoping advocated seeking truth from facts. And this is what I feel is often missing from health care debates: People make emotional or ideological arguments, with no reference to actual facts about health care.

A handful have claimed there is no need for reform. Sen. Shelby (R-Ala) claimed that Obama would destroy "the best health care system the world has ever known." Of course, he is already on government health care, so I'm not sure how to interpret that. Still, what does he mean that it's the best health care in the world? How do you even measure that? The two most obvious measures that come to mind are:

1. What is our life expectancy?
2. What is our infant mortality rate?

The problem is that the United States does badly on both of these measures. And it's not just a problem of having a large population: Japan, Canada, the United Kingdom, and France are crushing us soundly, and all have 50+ million populations.

While some of the difference is probably the poor American diet and activity levels, how do you explain the infant mortality rate? Infants all weigh pretty nearly the same amount. Besides, the problems with our health care can be measured in a host of other ways (error rate, amount of preventive care, etc.), and we fare poorly on these measures as well. There's an article linked at the end if you want some actual numbers.

There's been a lot of ideological name-calling. Claiming that health care reform is evil because it is "socialist" is an attempt to evoke the ideological red scare of yesteryear. The fact is, most of the health care systems that are destroying us on efficiency, outcomes, and access to care are socialized systems. Is it okay for more of us to die or get sick so that politicians can score points? Or do you believe that America will implement socialized health care more poorly than other countries which have done it? Why do you believe we are less competent than they are?

Some believe that government always performs poorly compared to the private market. What is this argument based on? Do you believe private mercenaries would do better than our army? Do you believe a network of private toll roads would be preferable to the Interstate system? Do you believe that the heavy government price regulation of our water, sewage, and electrical systems has resulted in poor delivery of these services? The truth is that government does certain things better than private industry, and this is a well studied issue in economics. Further, health care run fully by the government has been tried and tested dozens of times in dozens of places, and many of them are healthier than we are. It's not an automatic failure.

I think there's a hidden issue behind this hatred of government programs. American social programs are usually directed at the poor. The middle class gets taxed to pay for these things, but we don't see the benefit. I agree that this is genuinely unfair. We don't resent roads because we all see the benefit from roads. We don't resent national parks because we can all visit them. We don't resent the military because the military defends everybody. I think that a basic level of health care should also be available to everybody, however that is accomplished. I think that there'll be a fair amount of bellyaching tell it gets passed, but as long as the benefits hit everyone, we'll shortly be wondering how we lived without it.

Finally, I refer you to someone who's done a lot more research than I have. This article is much longer than this post, but is backed by a great deal more research. You may not like its conclusions, but if you wish to contradict them, do so with actual facts. Please don't fight back using pure ideology. Because if there's one point I hope I made at the beginning of this post, it's that the cost of clinging to ideology in spite of reality is measured in human lives.

We ran out of candy

2009-11-02T23:40:00.000-08:00

It's a little late, but are some random snippets about the Halloween party.

Nearly everyone showed up late. Most of the food did, eventually, get eaten (and the barbecue turned out amazingly well), but it was more a trickle through the evening rather than a big munchfest.

Seriously, the barbecue was great. I still need to figure out a safe way to use a charcoal grill on my balcony. I put a tarp down just in case, and it ended up with small holes burnt in it. Scary. I used a sauce called "Soy Vey" for the marinade (this is what happens when Jewish people marry Chinese people), and it was really good. Just wow. I think you need to grill over hot charcoal to get the full effect, though.

A few people dressed up as rock stars. I wore solid black (I wanted some depressing jewelry, but couldn't find anything I liked). Kim probably wins best costume, though Ismail also made a good shot at it. Curt & Shana showed up nicely costumed, though they didn't go for the rock star thing. Mary gets an honorable mention :).

We played quite a lot of Rock Band. This was the point of the party, and it was entertaining. Thanks to Ismail for bringing the Beatles edition. It was good variety!

Apple crisp with cream on top is delicious. I should purchase some method of whipping cream.

I had a veritable horde of children descend upon my home. This is a refreshing change from the last few years up in Orem, when I didn't see a single child. Nathan and I knew we'd probably get more trick-or-treaters this year, so we purchased four large bags of candy. Ismail also donated a bag of Mexican candies, so there really was a lot. No matter -- the doorbell rang every few minutes for an hour or so, and we were completely out of candy by seven o'clock. It was kind of embarrassing, though no one played any tricks (that I know of...). Next year, we shall buy TEN pounds of candy. Crazy kids and their insane sugar requirements!

Congratulations on the mission call!

124th post!

2009-10-26T23:08:00.000-07:00

Wow, 124 posts! And as you know, 124 is a really nice round number, so this is usually when you stop and talk about how much you've posted, right?

The prime factors of 124 are 31, 2, and another 2, you know. And it's the model number of some Russian airplane. And it's ... yeah, there's nothing special about this number. Unless, that is, you are counting in base 31, in which case this number is '4,0' but in that case you are out of your mind, you crazy people. However, I forgot to say anything on my 100th post, and it's getting embarrassing. Not that this helped.

The best thing that happened today was a decently good veggie burrito at Bajio's for dinner. It has caramelized onion and corn and sour cream and stuff in it, and it's one of my favorite things there. Of course it tastes much better chimi-style (deep fried and crispy), but it's a lot less healthy that way. I *do* try to be healthy sometimes.

It's a pity that the reason I was at Bajio's is because I was putting out fires at work and way too stressed to do anything leisurely for dinner. It would've been more fun to be going there because I felt like a veggie burrito. But be the reasons whate'er they will, it was a good burrito.

The fires are mostly out, by the way, but not completely out. One small consolation is that they are no longer my problem.

Feeling Vaguely Important

2009-10-24T22:44:00.001-07:00

Last week was not my first time giving job interviews. I've given a few job interviews, occasionally to people that we hired. However, last week was my first time giving a job interview to someone significantly older than me. I'm aware that by the time you reach adulthood, age matters a great deal less in determining positions of authority, but it was still pretty strange.

I still hadn't had a chance to run out and grab cheese by mentoring time, so we ran by a grocery store on the way to my place and had him pick a cheese flavor. He went for sharp cheddar. I couldn't stand sharp cheddar when I was 10, but it tasted good and he enjoyed it, so no complaints.

At a certain sister's suggestion, I'm holding a Halloween party this weekend. If you actually know me then you're invited (I don't know how many random internet denizens I have reading my blog, but you guys are totally getting left out in the cold here). We'll be playing Rock Band and (maybe) Dance Dance Revolution. If you want to dress up, dress like a rock star (this requirement restricts you in no way, given what I've seen of rock stars; think of it more as an inspiration). It's also way past time I had a barbecue, so the food will be grilled deliciousness. If you are vegetarian and wish to attend, warn me and I will try to have something filling that doesn't contain animal products.

Toasted Cheese Sandwiches

2009-10-22T00:30:00.000-07:00

It's funny. I'm always tired in the mornings, so why am I never tired enough to fall asleep at night? It's one of the great mysteries of the universe.

I'm hanging out with Camren the protégé after sleep and work (I'd say "tomorrow," but that's not strictly...). I'm planning on making toasted cheese sandwiches. I have good bread, but the only cheeses in the fridge are a delicious old world swiss and parmesan. I may have to go and buy some cheddar. I had the swiss with potatoes and veggies yesterday and it was awesome, but kids tend to have uncomplicated palates.

Work has been really interesting lately, but also pretty stressful. I'm working on some genuinely hard problems. I imagine many of my readers can relate -- the actual work can be very hard, very tiring, and very frustrating, but the immense satisfaction you get when it all comes together makes it all worth it. I suppose a lot of good things in life are like that.

One of my current pet projects* is to build some videos that explain what our software does and how it works. One of the big problems with working for a company that develops 3-d modeling plug-ins that provide a new formulation of curved surfaces (with associated modeling tools) within existing CAD/CAM packages is that I don't really have a comprehensible answer to "what do you do for work?"** Hopefully, a video that explains what I do will be a slightly better answer than "here, look at some pretty pictures of jewelry! Also, electric guitars!" which is how I currently explain it.

OK, time to attempt sleep.

* Yargh, I have multiple pet projects.

** That was a joke. Laugh.

What I did for General Conference

2009-10-05T23:53:00.001-07:00

I listened to General Conference, of course, but I also visited my sister and her kids in distant northern Utah. The kids are very cute, but since this is a public blog, I shall not prove it to you. You shall just have to trust me.

While we were driving around, I ended up sitting in the back seat where my nephew usually sits. His favorite CD was playing, which included this song, the which is now thoroughly stuck in my head. Please visit that link and share my excruciating, yet catchy pain. Then, if you wish to escape that song, feel free to replace it with this one, which still qualifies as (A) the catchiest song in the history of the universe, the video for which is (B) the strangest thing I have ever watched. There is no way to escape from that song, by the way.

While up north, I bought a lot of swiss cheese. I was not previously aware that swiss cheese could taste so darn good. I already liked swiss cheese, mind you, but this was unusually good swiss cheese. Alas, there is no way to attach flavors to blogs, so I cannot share with you. You shall have to visit me and ask very, very politely if you want to see what I mean.

Happy Independence Day

2009-07-04T23:00:00.000-07:00

For Independence day, the BBC posted a list of ten good things that America has brought the world. I'll quote one of them:

Item Number Four is aviation. America did invent the aeroplane but it was rather a dull device at first and spent its early years being flown short distances in wobbly straight lines by plucky pioneers.
Before long though, America had invented barnstorming, and intrepid entertainers were performing the Charleston on the wings of bi-planes as they were flown under low bridges. A pointless but brilliant feat.
I put it down to the manner in which the Declaration of Independence promises the right to the pursuit of happiness.

The list includes such other classics as ice cubes and American cheese. You can read the article here.

The more things stay the same

2009-07-03T23:02:00.000-07:00

I was reading an article about the Berlin airlift and shortly after an article about Russia allowing use of its airspace for United States planes transporting weapons into Afghanistan. The two events are almost exactly sixty years apart, and are a great illustration of just how fast some things change.

World War II had just ended then. It's difficult now, I think, to imagine just how angry the world was with Germany. The four major powers (the Soviet Union, England, France, and the United States) had a fairly simple plan: They would destroy all of Germany's industry, and rebuild it as a mostly agricultural society. That way, Germany could never again build up the enormous military and industry that it had during World War II. That ended up being unworkable, and a new set of problems quickly emerged.

Germany was divided into four sub-countries, one for each power, and the capital city of Berlin was also divided into four districts. Since Berlin was in the Soviet sector of the country, the Soviets hoped to eventually make the whole of it communist, and after a few years they cut off all supplies to non-Soviet Berlin to try and force them to acquiesce to Soviet control. This resulted in the Allies mounting a very difficult and very large operation to supply the entire city by air. There had been no written agreement with the Soviets about land rights to the city (the Allies were relying on Soviet goodwill), but they did have clear written agreements on air passage rights. The Soviets couldn't stop the airlift without being dishonorable.

One of my favorite stories from the airlift was when the French agreed to build a new, larger airport for the supplies. There were two towers owned by the Russian army blocking the flight path. Since there was no chance the Russians would agree to their removal, the French simply blew them up during the night-time. The next day, the furious Russian commander approached the French commander and asked "How could you blow up those towers!?" Apparently, the Frenchman replied, "we used dynamite."

Nowadays, the Soviet Union is gone, and Russians and westerners can visit each other relatively easily. We've got a completely new set of insurmountable obstacles nowadays. So next time you're wandering if the Palestinians and the Israelis will ever forgive each other, or if it's possible to truly dismantle terrorism, or if it's really possible to feed Africa -- perhaps it just takes time.

Link has some competition

2009-06-08T22:45:00.002-07:00

I have no idea what the game's going to be like, but for the Legend of Zelda fans out here, you should probably see the trailer for The Last Guardian. That link claims mature content, but there is no bad language, no nudity, and the violence is bloodless and cartoonish. There aren't even any swords. Curiously, the main character looks like an Asian, albeit a superhumanly athletic one, whereas last generation's games stuck strictly by the everyone-looks-European convention.

I took apart my iPhone on Sunday. The goal was to get the home button working. The case will never quite be the same, but we got it apart and back together in working order, which was quite a feat (it took about 2 hours). The only thing we couldn't get working was ... well, the home button. It worked while it was apart and we were testing it, but it quit again as soon as it was back together. It is to laugh.

The 3G phone has now dropped to $99.00. I am officially tempted, in spite of the extra $10.00 a month that they get you for on the plan (it comes with faster Internet). I'm trying to decide if the new line of phones is worth the extra cash.

Whose brilliant idea was red and white stripes?

2009-05-26T01:31:00.001-07:00

I have some beautiful shirts. They have red and white stripes on them. When I was first given them (they were gifts), the stripes were a gorgeous, snowy white, and the red was as bright as cherries.

After a single washing, this is no longer the case. How could it possibly be? Everyone knows that red bleeds like mad in the wash, and unfortunately this appears to be true even when I leave the water on the coldest setting the machine provides. So my shirts are now faintly pink with red stripes.

Whose brilliant idea was it to put red and white on the same article of clothing? I really don't know how to avoid this one.

I can actually get these shirts more-or-less acceptable if I wash them by themselves in a large load. This is very wasteful of water, but by having such a high water-to-dissolved-dye ratio, the white ends up mostly white. It still fails utterly to be a crisp, snowy white, unfortunately (already ruined that). It has occurred to me that carefully painting the stripes with bleach would probably fix things, but one tiny mistake and the shirt will look like I was playing with bleach.

I have ordered a new home button and case opening tool for my iPhone. And lo, there shall be a great voiding of the warranty soon. Hopefully this will also make the phone usable for taking pictures again, which might even result in my blog being a little more colorful.

Revival?

2009-05-18T22:35:00.000-07:00

I've run out of news reader stuff to read, I don't feel like playing games, and it's a decent hour to be sleeping. My brain hasn't quite shut down yet, so here I am -- blogging, my Absolute Last Resort Of Boredom.

Cav's trying to get me to learn Esperanto, I've started on it before, and already know a few words and structures, so what the heck -- going through flash cards for a few hours ought to get me up to a vaguely conversational level, and the roots are super easy to remember (I know a Slavic, a Germanic, and a Romance language, and all Esperanto roots are drawn from those three categories, so I recognize most of them). I will try to resist the temptation to blog in Esperanto, however.

I've been invited to speak at some kind of high school teacher's convention in Salt Lake City. I'll be talking about demos and multimedia and stuff. It should be a lot of fun. I really need to work on my presentation, but the deadline's still a month away, so my usual get-things-done panic hasn't properly kicked in yet. I have 100 minutes to fill, how hard can it possibly be? :P

Bulgarian Musaka recipes

2009-04-09T00:40:00.000-07:00

Most of this post was not written by me. I miss Bulgarian food occasionally, and Google has been great for finding recipes. I've found it's a lot more successful, of course, if I search in Bulgarian. Lately, I've been trying to find good recipes for Moussaka. These attempts usually result in dozens and dozens of recipes which have very little in common -- Bulgarians make moussaka with eggplant, sauerkraut, pumpkin, leeks, spinach, rice, carrots, and any number of other things. I found a forum thread that gave a recipe rather similar to the one I remember and love, and went ahead and translated it. This is the thread just as it was written, but translated to English; dashes separate posts, and square brackets give my translation notes. I'm leaving this here partly to have the recipe posted somewhere that I won't lose it, and partially so that people will nag me to try it (you know you want to!).

----------------
Biskvita:
This is the so-called "cafeteria" stew, from a book of recipes for occasions when you're eating with company.

For four portions:
350 g. minced meat (mixed -- pork with beef or whatever you like)
600 g. potatoes
100 g. onion
300 g. tomatoes (fresh or preserved)
50 g. oil
30 g. flour
130 ml. fresh milk [i.e. not yogurt]
2 eggs
50 g. kashkaval cheese [mozzarella or mild cheddar are very similar]
1 tsp. butter
Red and black pepper, parsley [Red pepper is paprika, not particularly spicy]

Peel the potatoes and cut them into thin little slices. Then half-fry them in the fat (in the original recipe it says to "blanch" them). Grease a pan of appropriate size, and layer: chopped tomatoes, half the potatoes, the slightly-rinsed minced meat [maybe it just means 'add a little water'?], the remaining potatoes, and slices of tomato. Add boiling hot [beef] bouillon to cover everything, then bake in a heated oven until it looks cooked. After this, pour on a bechamel sauce: The flour is fried with the butter and then you stir in the milk. After it thickens (while stirring continuously), pull it off the heat and add beaten eggs. Pour this mixture on the musaka, sprinkle grated cheese on the top, and then cook it until the crust browns.

My changes -- I cut the potatoes into cubes and I don't fry them, but just add them raw. I add carrot, I add the tomatoes later, and I use less meat. For spices, I add savory and just a little bit of basil (homegrown -- it has nothing in common with the stuff they sell in packets).

----------------
Raza:
And my changes to your changes B-)
They're the same as yours. We also really like the musaka with the potatoes cut into cubes (It's not particularly aesthetically pleasing, but it's really good, eh? :-D) However, I use yogurt and eggs for the topping. If I have some pumpkin [squash] on hand, I chop that too into cubes and add it to the potatoes. It comes out softer and lighter. I also make musaka with just pumpkin and blue [unripe?] tomatoes. And I've made it a few times with sour cabbage [sauerkraut I think]. Once I was too lazy to roll the surmi [dolmades] and so my sly plan was to try them in the form of a musaka :-D. I was worried [my heart was curling up?] that someone was going to make fun of it :-D.

----------------
Veshtitsa:
Hehe, yeah, Raza ;-)

I add pumpkins and a [sweet] pepper, it makes it really delicious! And because my husband doesn't eat meat, ordinarily I make it with soy minced meat, steamed beforehand with onion and carrots and lots of spices: savory, dill, cumin, and black pepper. My son even thinks that it tastes better with the soy mince than with the meaty variety. I don't do a topping, my family doesn't like it :-D.

An unintended cultural insight

2009-04-05T02:22:00.000-07:00

Google has an interesting feature where it tries to guess what you're going to type. So if you type part of a word or phrase, it shows you a list of common ways to complete that phrase from its search history. It seems to censor certain words, but for the most part, you get a clear view of what people are searching for.

One of the curious side effects of this is that it reflects the mood of our times. Try typing in "overcoming," and see the most common results. Now try "mormon," then "lds," for an interesting view of both sides of the coin (Mormons refer to themselves as LDS far more often, thus searches for 'lds' will find mostly things that Mormons are typing in, while searching for 'mormon' will find what others are asking about them).

If this kind of stuff interests you, Google also keeps a site where they show what the most common searches are over time. Look at www.google.com/trends.

Mentoring seems like it will be fun

2009-02-24T00:13:00.000-08:00

So, I finally met the kid that I'm going to be mentoring. His name is not Cameron, but if you call him that, he probably won't notice. If anyone feels like going and doing some fun thing that would entertain and preferably educate a nine-year-old (almost ten?), having random interesting people come along is a good idea on occasion.

Also, I need to come up with one entertaining/preferably educational thing that will keep a nine-year-old occupied approximately once a week. I could *really* use suggestions, dearest readers.

Today (sigh, yesterday) was the T-Splines board meeting. There was lots of talk about software and sales and marketing and then we talked about what we really want to do with the company. So we're going to have a big old debate about what kind of company we really want to be, since "a surviving one" seems like it's probably a given by now.

Foods I want to make

2009-02-15T22:15:00.000-08:00

I have some Chorizo in the freezer. It tastes like taco meat and is shaped like a sausage. I'm not sure what to do with it.

I'd like to try making proper sushi. I talked about that one already. I still haven't bought the deep freezer.

I want to make orange chicken. Brother-in-law Steve has the best recipe that I've had, so I should nag him about that.

I've been making a lot of roast vegetables lately. The method's really simple -- you cut the vegetables up thinly enough so that they'll cook through (about 1/2" thick). I do one potato, one carrot, and an onion. Mix about 1 tsp beef bouillon powder, 2 tbsp olive oil, and about 2 tsp rosemary together into a goop. Add any other spices you feel like. Dump the chopped veggies in a big bowl, pour the paste over the top, and stir the raw vegetables until they're coated. Stick them in the oven at 425-ish for about 25-35 minutes, until they're brown (the onion often goes a little black). They're really good ^_^. You can tweak the amount of oil to try and be low-fat, but if you underdo it they'll get too dry.

I haven't made rice pudding in a while.

I want to figure out how to properly grill tomatoes. I've tried a broiler but they still don't brown at all -- too wet. I think a charcoal grill might do it. Grilled tomato halves with dill, feta cheese, and paprika on top is really good, by the way.

I have a lot of old curry powder that needs using. I should make curry, obviously.

I used to have the ultimate recipe for baked pancakes. They're either German pancakes or Swedish pancakes (the difference between those two was very subtle). I don't know where it went. Same goes for my ultimate brownie recipe. Actually, I think that one's in my mission journal somewhere, if I don't mind putting up with 100 pages of a missionary journal to find it.

But seriously, folks, what are you supposed to do with Chorizo?

Fuselages!

2009-02-14T18:26:00.000-08:00

A customer posted that they intend to use my software to help design fuselages. Actually, it'll probably be pretty good for that, but there's something vaguely terrifying about "if you did it wrong, maybe people will die." In fairness to me, that's not my problem -- a heck of a lot of analysis and adjustment happens long after it has exited our program, but there's still that vague anxiety of "are our surfaces mathematically correct? Do we meet all of our physical properties?"

I bet lots of people worry about stuff like that, and virtually nobody worries about exactly that.

Today was Valentine's day. Not my favorite day of the year. I tried a new Thai restaurant and bought a paper shredder. Tonight, I shall shred things. Nothing melodramatic, unfortunately -- just old bills and so forth.

Newly embiggened E3

2009-02-12T20:50:00.000-08:00

I wrote an angry letter to my old apartment complex today. They jilted me on my security deposit. I'm curious how they'll respond -- it's a fairly small amount, but I still resent it when large companies pull these kinds of stunts.

And the real reason that I'm posting on my blog: A games web-site recently posted an article referring to the newly embiggened E3 to take place in 2009. For background, the (deliberate!) downsizing of the E3 convention has been a complete disaster for them, and most of the major players pulled out as it collapsed. Therefore, they recently decided to enlarge it again, which is what the article was about.

The article has since been corrected, but not before a lot of Simpsons quotes made it into the comments. Life imitates art, and American culture imitates The Simpsons.

Zeers and refrigeration

2009-01-29T22:31:00.000-08:00

Time for my annual blog post! Yeah, I know, I hardly ever post any more :P. Recently, I've been reading up on fridges and freezers -- I've been thinking of getting a deep freezer. While I was doing that, I read about a really simple invention, called a "zeer." In northern Africa, the weather is hot, and there isn't much refrigeration, so vegetables often go rotten within 2 or 3 days. A few years ago, a schoolteacher came up with the idea of taking a clay pot, and putting a smaller clay pot inside of it. You then fill the space between the two pots with sand, and then run water over the sand. Last of all, you put a wet piece of cloth over the top. Thanks to evaporative cooling, you get no-power-required refrigeration! It's very simple, but it makes vegetables last many times longer, and makes the markets both more hygienic and the produce nicer. Here's an article about it.

Deep freezers have a bunch of advantages, but the one that actually got me thinking about it was discovering that sushi-grade fish is (surprise!) always frozen before being thawed out for serving. In fact, it legally must be frozen to an extremely cold temperature, since such freezing destroys parasites in the fish. Now, shipping fresh fish is kind of impossible, but frozen fish? That can be done! But unless I use it within a few hours of delivery, I'd need to keep it frozen, and that means a heavy-duty, extremely cold freezer.

Unfortunately, I can't find any realistic specifications on chest freezers. It looks like some of them can go as low as -20 °F, which is cold enough, but I can never find a temperature range and a particular model listed in the same place. It looks like the dials on the sides of most deep freezers are labeled "1" through "6," rather than anything useful.

I've heard quite a few horror stories about the hazards of homemade sushi, mind you, so I'm trying to be Very Sure.

Vesela Koleda!

2008-12-25T21:27:00.000-08:00

The title of the post means "Merry Christmas" in Bulgarian. It's a little difficult to come up with a good blog post for Christmas. I think it's probably traditional to talk about giving Christmas presents to homeless children or something of that sort, so in line with tradition, I'll talk about something else. You should still give presents to homeless children, mind you.

Christmas in Bulgaria has the curious distinction of being a less commercial holiday with a stronger religious focus. While I believe this is fading from year to year, there is a rather curious reason for this, and it has to do with Communism.

The Communists were ideologically atheist, and as often happens when one group assumes their ideology is superior, they went to great lengths to weaken the influence of religion in their countries. Religious freedom in Bulgaria was heavily curtailed, with Eastern Orthodox churches sometimes raided by the police on Easter and Christmas and the attendees arrested. Even so much as attending church became an act of bravery and political defiance, and possession of Bibles in the home was outlawed.

As part of this campaign of religious eradication, the Communists wanted to stop the Christmas holiday. Christmas traditions, however, were and are as popular in Bulgaria as anywhere, and attempting to wipe them out directly would have met with strong resistance and popular disgust. Rather than tackle this head on, they simply moved most of the major traditions to New Year's day. Bulgarians would set up trees, put up lights, and have presents delivered by a man who wears white and red named "Grandpa Frost," all for New Years day.

The curious side effect of this is that Christmas was left with only its religious aspects -- it was a day to remember the birth of Jesus, and nothing else. Of course, once the Communist yoke was lifted, the Bulgarians were free to celebrate Christmas the western way if they wished, and the traditions have been drifting a few days backward ever since.

So remember today the priceless gift of freedom to worship God "according to the dictates of our own conscience." Merry Christmas everyone.

SparkArts is Coming

2008-11-17T20:25:00.000-08:00

SparkArts is coming again. I'm going to be giving an "as simple as possible" class about game programming this year, and there will be a bunch of other competitions and mini-seminars. Clarissa is running things this time around, which is enormously less work for me.

Anyway, if any of my blog readers haven't heard of it yet, and you'd like to spend a day or two playing around with computers and playing with game projects, it's going to be a ton of fun. It'll be November 21 & 22 at the Salt Lake library main branch.

Craving Apple Cobbler

2008-09-30T01:07:00.000-07:00

Sunday was a very unpleasant day. I will just say "food poisoning" and leave out the details, OK? OK. This blog post will be a summary of unrelated things that happened in the meanwhile.

While I was out of commission, I grabbed one of the unread sci-fi books off my shelf and read it. It was called "Star Man's Son," and it was pretty bad. The book is about a strapping young lad who wanders the post-nuclear countryside looking like Conan the Barbarian and accumulating injuries. And oh, the injuries! Gashes, burns, fractures, concussions, stab wounds, poison, numbness in the extremities ... and you sort of get the feeling that the author was restraining herself in order to keep the hero mobile. Never fear, she introduces a companion partway in, and they spend much of the remainder of the book nursing each other back to health while fleeing the ever pursuing spiky/hot/feral/dangerous things. They got captured and recaptured so many times that I lost count. The rest of the book is largely a sermon whose gist I can sum up thusly: "Nuclear war is bad." Enlightening.

I also read through the last few Megatokyo books again. Fred's a genius. Then I got addicted to Vox Angeli's "Les Promesses" and memorized the lyrics, which was good French practice. I was sort of tempted to post a translation here, but that's a lot of work, and most likely no one cares. It's an angsty song about childhood dreams fading and dying as we grow up. This is a much beloved theme in French art, which perhaps explains why France is grumpy.

I had apple cobbler a couple of hours ago and it was goooood. Nothing like drastic starvation to make food taste incredible. I just finished a bunch of laundry, so now it's time for bed. Light dreams!

Chasing the Rising Moon

2008-09-18T00:44:00.000-07:00

I was driving east along University Parkway today, and noticed the moon slowly setting behind the eastern mountains. "What the heck?" thought I. I am no great scholar of celestial bodies, but I'm pretty sure that the moon sets in the west. Then I hit a red light ... and the moon stopped setting, and gradually started to rise. By the time the light turned green, a fairly big sliver was visible. I then drove two blocks, and it set again, going all the way behind the mountains.

It was kind of an interesting race--the moon gently rising, and me driving toward the occluding mountains. The moon stately ascending, and my eastward journey forcing it back down again. Of course, the moon wins eventually--but for a little while, I could outrace the moon.

On an unrelated note, how many of my readers are aware of Kiva? It's a web-site (www.kiva.org) where you can make loans to people in the developing world to help them start a business. You always give a $25.00 share, so it's not too hard to afford. The web-site aggregates these $25.00 loans and gives them to individuals, usually by means of a local micro-credit bank. Micro-credit is one of the great discoveries of the last century--it lets you provide the means to help someone out of poverty, but since they repay the loan, it also preserves their dignity. When they're done repaying the loan, you can either withdraw your $25.00, or you can reloan it to someone else (I do the latter).

Anyway, I mention it partly because they've now got something called "Kiva teams." It's kind of amusing--the second-biggest team in terms of loans is the Atheist team, only surpassed by the quasi-official Kiva Friends team. There is a Mormon team, but it's far, far smaller. So what are you waiting for? Get over there and help people, and make our team look good! I'm only mostly joking.

Schmoozing and a new restaurant

2008-08-29T21:46:00.000-07:00

I was asked to spend the day at a convention in Salt Lake City, recruiting programmers for T-Splines. It's pretty difficult to find people who are qualified in both C++ and graphics, although I did get one really lucky break. While I was there, I ran into Howard Tayler, of Schlock Mercenary fame. I also saw him two weeks ago in Denver, so I walked over and said hello, and mentioned I was looking for C++ programmers who were good at graphics programming. Howard looked thoughtful for a moment, then jumped up on stage and announced loudly that if anyone were looking for a C++ graphics job, talk to (pointing at me) that guy right there! He's hiring!

I got two leads from it, so I officially owe Howard one. The least I could do was a web-comic link (see previous paragraph).

The other fun thing today was trying out a new restaurant, and this one has a story behind it. About a year ago, there were two Brazilian guys in the ward, George and Lucas. I hung out with them, and was invited to Lucas's birthday party. While there, I met another guy from Peru. I mentioned that the little I knew of Peru was the food, and he asked where I was getting Peruvian food. I mentioned La Carreta, and he laughed and said that if you want real Peruvian food, you have to go to El Chalan in Salt Lake.

Anyway, today I finally tracked down and actually ate at El Chalan. It is, indeed, a little different from La Carreta (Purple Corn Juice, by the way, tastes like a cross between Kool-aid and cinnamon). The portions were enormous, and I was grateful for what little English competence the staff had. I had Pollo Saltado (chicken, tomato, cilantro, and fried potatoes in a salty/amazing sauce), and it was very good (although honestly, La Carreta is pretty good too).

One thing I thought was really sad/funny was a huge advertising poster right by the front entrance. You're likely familiar with pay-check loan companies, those societal vampires that suck financial independence from the poor by giving them ultra-high interest loans. What, you ask, could possibly be more exploitative? How about a company that gives loans to people who need to cover bail? You've been arrested, you're taken to prison, you're given a court date, you can't cover the bail cost, and... oh, just call us! We'll help you out! Oh, of course there'll be a price to pay later, but who wants to go to jail? Precisely such a company was advertising at the restaurant entrance, complete with logos of all the credit card types they accept. I chuckled cynically halfway home.

I'm still wondering what Leche Asada is, by the way. I was so full after the Saltado that I couldn't order any. Roasted milk? Really? (It's a type of custard, by the way, but I'm hazy on the details)

It's ART!

2008-08-22T00:10:00.000-07:00

I don't know who wrote this originally. It came up in a discussion about the difficulty of reading literary criticism.

“By renormalizing the model’s waistline, Maxim Mexico takes a bold socio-political stance in the ongoing battle of the politics of representation, clearly referencing the oppressive reification of male-gaze heteronormative modes of synthesis in a semiotic blancmange of post-structural teakettle barbecue hatstand fishmonger.”

I need to go collapse in gales of laughter now. Please excuse me.

By the way, I learned several new words from this:
Reification: The process of treating an abstract concept as if it were a real, concrete thing.
Semiotic: Having to do with semiotics, which is a field of study encompassing the use of symbols and signs in languages.
Blancmange: White edible stuff. A kind of dessert.

The universe fails to disappoint

2008-08-09T23:22:00.000-07:00

Lots of fun things happened today.

Firstly, we made it in time to get a seat at the round table with Larry Niven. Unlike the other round tables I went to, he didn't have much to rant about, so the ten of us just came up with questions and he'd answer them. Most of the people there were huge Niven fans (I think I fit in that category), while others had barely heard of him. I have a photo of him, if anyone's curious -- but it's a terrible photo, and I think it indiscreet to post it. If you want to see what he looks like, ask me.

After Niven, we went to a panel about the effects of the Harry Potter phenomenon. That panel had a Harry Potter fan-girl sitting near the front. Now, I rather think of myself as a Niven fan, but I have never achieved anything close to the level of religious devotion demonstrated by that young lady. I present as exhibits:

Every time a Harry Potter character was mentioned, she would squeal in delight. This was not infrequent.
Most of her comments were along the lines of "Harry Potter is the best book I have ever read," and "Harry Potter just makes me the happiest person in the whole world."
She was in costume and carrying a wand. It was a very enthusiastic costume.
She would happily and immediately fill in any trivial information that the panel couldn't recall ("Well, what color was the cover?" "Uh, blue?" "That's the fifth one").

That panel was a lot of fun, by the way. Harry Potter is largely responsible for a renaissance in juvenile literature. Publishers used to claim that there wasn't a lot of money to be made in juvenile sci-fi/fantasy, and the Harry Potter books proved otherwise. Since then, a lot of older books have been sent to reprint (Diana Wynne Jones was mentioned, as well as Patricia Wrede's dragon books), and sequels commissioned (such as the additional Chrestomanci books).

Harry Potter also converted a lot of children to the notion of reading for fun -- one librarian said that she had a large number of non-native English speakers in her area, and all of them insisted on laboriously working their way through the difficult Harry Potter books for their summer reading. They had to rework their programs around it -- but the kids were motivated, and they were forcing themselves to read things far above their comfort level.

After the panels, we went to a recommended pizza restaurant. We were hoping it would be good, but what we weren't expecting was genuine New York-style pizza. Yup, it exists in Denver. By this point, we'd decided that the day was campaigning for a "best day ever" award. The pizza was $2.55 a slice, so Cav and I each ordered two slices. Then the slices arrived and we realized our horrible mistake: a single slice was about as big as my head. I took a picture of one of them, because I was pretty sure no one would believe me -- that's Cav, holding part of his first slice, with his second slice on a plate in front of him.

It turned out that we needn't have worried. After about half an hour of blissful pizza nirvana, we returned to the present and discovered our plates completely empty. We both burnt our mouths a bit because it was too hot, but I'm pretty sure I didn't even notice. It was just that good. I wish we could get this kind of pizza within reasonable day-trip distance of Provo.

The next panel we attended was listed in the program as follows:

532 The Best Convention Panel Ever
Survey says: "If you put these people on a panel, you don't need to do anything else." Come see if they were right.
Connie Willis, Joe Haldeman, Mike Resnick

The panel was hilarious. They'd put it in the largest room and got a huge turnout. Connie Willis is a very, very funny lady, and the other authors got in a lot of good quips as well. Mostly, they talked about their experiences as authors, with fans, with rejection letters and so forth. One of the authors said "Um, I don't know, I've never had a story rejected" and got vicious glares from the rest of the table.

By the way, judging by the Hugos and the panels, it looks like the two people who are really popular right now are Connie Willis (she won yet another Hugo this year) and John Scalzi. I will probably be looking for their stuff next time I get books.

The last big event, as I keep hinting, was the Hugo award ceremony itself. As award ceremonies go, it was terrific, which is to say it was way less boring than watching paint dry. Writers and artists like to be terribly clever, so the commentary was entertaining. The award-winning novel, by the way, was The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon, so if you're looking for something to read, it might be worth a look.

After the Hugos was the usual wandering around and munching on things at the Sheraton. They upgraded from chicken wings to shrimp cocktail and lettuce wraps, but otherwise it was pretty much the same as all the other nights. Most of the rooms on the top floor are rented, and you can wander through and talk to people. It was sort of fun, but Cav & I were so tired by then that we drifted back to our own hotel pretty quickly.

Oh, somewhere in the middle of all of that, I acquired about a pound of chocolate honey. If anyone wants to try chocolate honey, be really nice to me. Fortunately, I am driving home, so I don't have to worry about how I'm going to carry all this stuff.

I have to go to sleep NOW

2008-08-09T00:51:00.000-07:00

I was up late, researching all of the kafeeklatsch participants tomorrow looking for editors for Cavan to talk to (he's already dead to the world here). Anyway, while I was flipping through, I saw Larry Niven as one of the authors who's doing a meet-up tomorrow. I had no idea he was even here, and I'm kind of in awe. I think I've read at least 10 of his books, and he's definitely one of my favorite science fiction authors.

I'm a little worried that I won't get a spot, though -- I'm guessing that Niven has nigh-godlike status here. So I need to get up fairly early if I'm going to be in line on time to actually sign up for him.

Oh, by the way, there are some folks selling chocolate honey on the dealer floor. I tried some, and it's pretty good. The chocolate-orange honey was particularly nice. I'm probably going to get some samplers, but if anybody wants some (it's $3-$10 for outrageously small amounts), send a text message to my phone and I will grab extra.

I Want To Do Everything

2008-08-07T23:13:00.000-07:00

My observation today is that life is much too short, and doesn't have nearly enough time in it for me to do all the things I want to do. Case in point: Writing books seems like fun. Obviously, I'm hanging out at a writers conference, and I just can't help but feel that these are my kind of people. I find myself wishing that I had enough time to master programming and writing fiction and music composition and cooking and a dozen or so languages. There are simply way too many things I want to do and not enough time to do them in.

Don't get me wrong--I love programming, and really enjoy the jobs and fields I've been able to work in. I don't think I'd have been as happy if I'd picked a different primary interest. But given the option, I'd rather do them all.

Sightings for the day:

I met Patricia Wrede, the woman who wrote "Dealing with Dragons" et al. She's a roundish, excitable person who bubbles about books the way Susan Ream did. I mentioned that I loved her Dragons books after one of the panels. She said thanks.

I finally got around to meeting Brandon Sanderson. We signed up for his kaffeeklatsch, which is basically a limited-attendance event where they stick 10 of you around a table (one of whom is the author), and you get to chat for about an hour. That was awesome. While I don't think he leaked anything that would violate any contracts, he talked a lot about the excitement and process of writing the latest Wheel of Time book, and also told war stories about getting his big break in publishing.

Another really good guy to meet was Jim Frenkel of Tor, one of their main editors. He had a really bad cough (I felt bad for the guy, talking for an hour and wearing out the voice he didn't have). He gave a lot of really good advice about how to get noticed by publishers--it basically amounted to building up some kind of street credit in small venues, because publishers get way too much stuff. If you can prove that someone's already given you a chance then it'll make them give you a second look--so publish short stories and get some awards! Actually, after the round table, Cavan and Chris and I ran into him again in the hall and sat down to talk for another half an hour. Cavan is familiar with the New York neighborhood where Jim grew up, and we got a wonderful story from his childhood about a time when they were pretending to be batman and robin, and actually ended up finding and catching (with a tiny bit of help from the police) some real criminals.

The number of authors here is dizzying, by the way--I think there are over 200 published authors at this convention. We're having a lot of fun!

We have arrived in Denver

2008-08-07T00:05:00.000-07:00

We are alive, we are safe. The weather was scary--there was heavy rain, so we had to slow down a lot. We ended up arriving two hours later than we wanted, but that also means we arrived unharmed and in one piece ;-). I'll take it.

We only went through a little over a single tank of gas, so the car is definitely winning on fuel efficiency. The convention looks like it is going to be several days of awesome, quirky fun with people who are completely insane. Huzzah!

J'ai parlé français!

2008-08-05T00:06:00.000-07:00

Sunday at church I overheard Jerry (a guy in my ward) out in the hallway speaking French. It sounded like really bad French. Jerry went on his mission to Florida, and spent most of his time in Haitian communities, so I was pretty sure he was actually speaking Creole. Most Haitians are descended from Africans who were brought in as slave labor a century or two ago. The language spoken there is a mixture of French and African languages, with a bunch of other minor influences thrown in. So out I went and said something about Creole sounding like French with a really bad accent.

Anyway, the lady with whom Jerry was speaking was actually a native of Haiti. She spoke Creole, French, and English (in approximately that order of fluency). She asked how I knew it was Creole, which led to her realizing I spoke French. Since her French is much better than her English, she brightened up and said "oh, can I speak French with you?" So we talked in French for a couple hours, and it was fun (we mostly shut up for sacrament meeting, though). My French is a little broken, but with a sufficient amount of random abuse of the language, I can talk about quite a few things. It got me totally excited about trying a French-speaking trip sometime.

I'm such a xenophile.

Bush tea is not hipster food

2008-08-02T14:46:00.000-07:00

Thank you, internationalization. Thanks to enterprising South African exporters and their American counterparts, I no longer have to go to specialist South African stores to buy bush tea (sometimes called "rooibos," from the Afrikaans). For the unaware, bush tea is a popular South African drink. It has a mild, warm flavor that reminds me of nothing so much as hot buttered bread, and is usually drunk with added milk and sugar. It is the ultimate comfort food, and in South Africa, most folks drink it. Exotic it isn't.

That is, until you bring it here. All of a sudden, it's some kind of mysterious health food, conjuring up images of deepest Africa and beaches and tropical fruit (or whatever it is Americans associate with Africa these days--civil wars, perhaps?). Never mind that actual bush tea drinkers in actual Africa live in rather dull (other than the high crime) suburbs and drink the stuff after driving the kids to soccer practice. In this country, it's a cultural experience, a breathtaking journey into the unconquered mountains of All Things Foreign. And because bush tea has a flavor only slightly more interesting than milk, it needs to be Enhanced. And this is where I have objections.

See, most of the bush tea blends you can buy here insist on adding things to the tea. The most common addition is just vanilla, giving you "Madagascar Vanilla Red Tea" or something of the sort. That's not too bad, but if I wanted vanilla in it, I could probably have added my own (I'm a genius that way). The latest abomination, however, comes from California, from the very depths of everything hipster. And thus, I bring you:

The Wonder Herb of South Africa
RED TEA

Yes, I'm quoting the packaging. It really is this painful. The stuff in italics is my running commentary, just in case that wasn't blindingly obvious.

RED TEA ISN'T JUST RED TEA. It's tea with an attitude. Gag! Gag! You've heard of the great gift of health from a cup of green tea, now there is RED TEA which provides even more health promoting properties. Dude, Americans have longer life expectancies than South Africans. Are you serious? Reasearchers have discovered that RED TEA, an indigenous wonder herb of South Africa called rooibos (ROY-boss), It means "red bush," bro. Because it's the leaves of a bush, and they're red. Of course, you could just call it bush tea, the way English speakers often do, but that doesn't sound foreign enough, does it? is full of polyphenols and flavonoids which help protect the body from free-radicals that weaken natural defenses and eventually lead to aging and the onset of disease. Seriously? I'm drinking the wonder drug? I'm never going to get old or sick again? Man, and here was me thinking it just tasted good. Look, ma, it's HEALTHY! Studies show drinking RED TEA daily can reward you with powerful anti-oxidants that help create a healthier, longer life. And make you a lot of money, I'm sure, but that's totally incidental.

Anyway, that's all well and good. I don't care what you put on the label as long as I get my bush tea. But no, you had to start adding things:

South African rooibos is paired with the sunny tropical flavors of passion fruit and mango. Sunflowers and rose petals add unique floral notes, while hibiscus lends a tart-sweet finish. [Our product] brews into a rich garnet-hued tea, also refreshing over ice.

Aaaaaaaaaggh! Run away! Run away! I really wish I had read the label a little more thoroughly before buying this stuff, because it tastes almost nothing like actual bush tea. It tastes like some kind of slightly-sour (that'll be the passion fruit) tropical fruit monster, with the bush tea flavor mostly overwhelmed by all the extra stuff. It really doesn't work well with added milk, which destroys the whole point.

Anyway, it is possible to get plain bush tea, but you need to stay away from the health food stores. Try Smith's. It also helps if the tea was packaged by a South African firm, rather than an American one, since South Africans seem less tempted to try and make it taste more foreign. Oh, and you might try adding a little vanilla. That blend was actually pretty good. But try it the normal way first ;-).

In Defense of Scoundrels

2008-08-02T01:14:00.000-07:00

I have a "Quote of the Day" feed, and a few days ago it fed me this fascinating little nugget:

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." -- H. L. Mencken

It reminds me of Voltaire's philosophy, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." The rights you save may be your own.

On a less abstract note, today was mom's birthday. We went out to a very good Indian buffet and followed it up with Sub Zero ice cream. Apparently Sub Zero is unique to Utah Valley, so I'll describe it.

The basic idea is that they use liquid nitrogen to mix the ice cream on the spot. This lets them do a huge variety of flavors. You can choose your base mix and the flavor to add, as well as choosing mix-ins. Then they dump liquid nitrogen into the bowl and you get a misty show from which ice cream emerges. The ice cream is weird stuff. It's rock solid and melts slowly, but also has a very creamy feel when you eat it. Mine was butterscotch and graham crackers.

Spam and egg sandwiches

2008-07-31T23:28:00.000-07:00

A whole crowd of us have been frequenting L&L Hawaiian Barbecue recently (it's just north of Provo High). Their main appeal seems to be that they sell genuine Hawaiian food. Until recently, I had to plead ignorance on what exactly that meant -- I mean, I've had ham and pineapple on pizzas, sure, and I've had sweet-and-sour chicken with pineapple in it, but apparently there is a bunch of other stuff that Hawaiians eat. Weird, strange stuff. So I thought I'd post a sample of some of the randomness.

Possibly the most interesting one was the spam sandwich. This is something like a hamburger -- you get a fried slice of spam meat with eggs and other hamburger-esque toppings. The young lady who ordered it assures me it was delicious, and she ordered it again the second time we went, so there must be something to it.

Their "signature dish" is hamburger patties (just the meat!) with fried eggs on top. Sounds healthy, doesn't it? Far too healthy, in fact, which is why they have to add gravy. I don't know, that one might be good, but it's definitely on the unusual side.

They have a whole bunch of variations on the theme of grilled meat, and here I'm on somewhat more familiar ground. You can get barbecue beef ribs, teriyaki chicken, and kalua pig. The kalua pig there is especially good. If you imagine slow-roasted pork, cooked until it is falling apart, and salted enough to give it a flavor (pork, you know), then you're on the right track. Nearly everything is served with rice and macaroni salad.

There are a bunch of other things on the menu (salmon-patty burgers, anyone?) but we haven't tried most of it yet. You could call it a work in progress.

We Offer You Happiness

2008-07-30T18:28:00.000-07:00

I get several hundred spam emails a day. Most of these are automatically detected and sorted away to junk mail folders, but occasionally the filters catch a real email, so I give the junk folders an occasional scan to see if I should have caught something. It was on one of those scans that I spotted this subject line:

***JUNK*** We offer you happiness.

The actual email was mostly filled with random garbage text--it would have taken a cryptographer to figure out what they were selling. I think this subject line is intriguing, because it boils down the entire art and science of marketing to its essence: "We offer you happiness." What we deliver is a plastic device that requires batteries, or carbonated sugar water, or a means of accumulating debt quickly--so come and get your happiness!

And on that happy note, dear readers, I pose you this question: Is chocolate ever a bad idea?

"Family" "Home" Evening

2008-07-14T22:13:00.000-07:00

The ward has started doing FHE groups, and I figured it was time to give the institution another shot. The last time I went to an FHE group, the group leader solicited suggestions from the group and mine was "keep it short and sweet." One hour and a half later, long after the conversation had devolved into an endless giggle-fest about some pop culture inanity, I excused myself. Unfortunately, that turned out to be typical.

I was hoping that, with the FHE committee rising phoenix-like from the ashes of the semester cycle, it might go better this time. It wasn't a terribly high bar to clear, but the group did admirably. There were announcements, there was singing, there was a short prepared lesson, and there was an acitivity which lasted precisely fifteen minutes (the young lady conducting the event ran a timer!) There was also obligatory candy at the end, which any child will tell you is the essential thing.

All in all, the new incarnation appears to be a success, and I'll try to encourage things by attending. It has long amused me that singles-ward FHEs fail two out of three of their initials, but it still makes for a good evening :-).

By the way, the girl conducting pronounces FHE as "fihee." Yet another acryonym is slyly sneaking its way toward word status!

Plunging strength against the sea

2008-06-24T21:58:00.000-07:00

Quote for the day comes from Steinbeck: "Kino would drive his strength against a mountain and plunge his strength against the sea. Juana, in her woman's soul, knew that the mountain would stand while the man broke himself; that the sea would surge while the man drowned in it. And yet it was this thing that made him a man, half insane and half god, and Juana had need of a man." I really hated that book (10 points if you knew what it was without Googling), but I rather enjoyed the quote.

I had a corned beef sandwich for lunch today, and it was very good. It had corned beef, pesto, provolone cheese, and grilled peppers on it. It might be worth trying to make them at home. If anyone wishes to join in this experiment, then we can make it an expedition.

Incidentally, it is indeed much easier to get songs written while the computer is unplugged from the Internet. I finally managed to scratch out something passable on my little electronic keyboard. I really wish I were better at it.

The End of the Internet

2008-06-14T21:01:00.000-07:00

I made an attempt at productive catching up on things today. It went okay. I ran out of places to stick things a while ago, so I've purchased a bunch of big plastic cabinets for organizing my stuff. Hopefully this will help me get clutter down to a saner level. Of course, there is always the rather high risk that the clutter will be increased by a net total of several big plastic cabinets; we'll just have to see.

I've been thinking about buying an electric piano again. I have a decent MIDI setup on my computer, and I have several half-finished computer programs which I was writing to teach myself to sight-read. Real pianos have a much better sound, but electric pianos have the enormous advantage of being usable while wearing headphones, which is particularly nice for composing stuff -- I can play something incredibly repetitive or not-quite-right without worrying about irritating the neighbors (never mind the roommate). I bought myself a little keyboard a while ago, and while it's definitely a step up from typing notes in by name, it's kind of cramped.

Speaking of which, I've noticed that it's gotten more difficult for me to do creative things on a computer. I think it's because I use them as a tool far more than I use them as a toy anymore, and it's kind of sad. It used to be that the only reason I'd ever use a word processor was for writing a story, but now word processors put me in technical report mode. I still write short stories occasionally, but now it's almost all written out with a pencil and paper. The same seems to go for composition, somewhat--I have a couple ideas bouncing around, but I'm having an awfully difficult time actually staying focused enough to get them down.

Perhaps the problem is really habitual multi-tasking. When I first started using computers, they didn't have any kind of network connection at all, and you could only really use one program at a time. Maybe the endless distraction of hopping on the web, dashing off instant messages, or checking e-mail is detrimental. Perhaps I should try unplug the network cable sometime and see how it goes.

Random Tidbits

2008-06-01T21:06:00.000-07:00

I am starting to build up quite the collection of potential blog posts in my unpublished pile. Most of them aren't very good. This post will be an attempt to include all the stuff that looked half decent and chuck out the rest.

The photo on the left is one of my favorites from our California trip. There's a gorgeous stretch of I-15 that weaves back and forth through towering Arizonan canyons for a few dozen miles. Then, just as you're cresting the hill and crossing the border into Utah, you get this shamelessly showy golden landscape rising over the horizon, and the road drops for miles downward toward those mountains. I was trying to make a picture that both captured the impressiveness of the landscape and the feel of driving into it.

Next on the random list, there's a fungus that's actually digesting the radioactive materials inside of the Chernobyl reactor. That article's a wee bit dodgy, by the way, but you can find something more level-headed if you look for a bit. It's already amazing that a life form can live inside of a heavily radioactive environment, but actually using the radioactivity as a food source earns mother nature yet another hat-tip: She's smarter than we are. Again.

A while back, on the freeway, I saw what was apparently an ad for a (self-published?) book. I didn't catch the title, but in large letters, the contents were described as "Harry Potter Meets Star Wars." This struck me as such a fantastically bad idea that I immediately wanted to read the book. Luke Skywalker confronting the school bully Anakin, waving a light saber that only works when you yell Latinesque phrases? Harry flying a broomstick powered X-wing in some kind of mega-dangerous, octane charged intergalactic race to defeat the evil sorceror? The possibilities are endless and, almost universally, very stupid.

Finally, it's about time to get some entries up for the family photo competition. My first entry is a picture of Cavan, who having apparently woken up a measly 13 seconds earlier, is still stunned by the extremely rapid sequence of events that resulted in him sitting inside a precariously rocking skyline on a windy day. At least, I think that's what the facial expression means.

This next picture is entitled "too much fun." One of Disneyland's less- advertised features is that after a few hours, your kids will be so totally overstimulated that they will collapse in little exhausted puddles. This is a picture of my nephew, chilling in the stroller between rides. I spent a lot of time with the Kjars, and I have to say that this little guy did a stellar job of behaving. He demonstrates wisdom and patience beyond his three years.

This next shot is just cute--Granny's chilling with the grandson, while everyone is hurrying up and waiting for the next family shot. I love it when you can get good shots of people just being themselves without trying to pose for the camera. They always look a lot more relaxed and genuine. If the shot happens to be well-composed, so much the better.

I have some other pretty good shots, but I think that will do for now. Also, this post seems to be trying to set some kind of length record. Congratulations on reaching the end of it!

The hot smell of thunder

2008-05-20T20:35:00.001-07:00

It smells like a thunderstorm outside. It's dark, the sky is navy blue, and there's a hot wind blowing. I'm not sure whether it's really a smell, but there's kind of a feel in the air when thunder is coming, sort of like all the tension has drained out of the air. It feels like everything is covered in a quilt of heavy air, just waiting.

Maybe it will rain.

This is perfect weather to be in a bad mood, which means I'm in luck. I'm in a foul mood. To make things worse, I don't have any obvious reasons for being in a foul mood. I just AM, okay? Work's been pretty good this week, and I just discovered a fun new space opera game. Some kids from the ward are planning on going to the Indiana Jones movie this week and I was invited (readers: if any of you want to go, that might persuade me to go. Let me know). Heck, I even lost weight this week. However, my foul mood defies the necessity of excuses. Growl! Growl!

Also: I want excuses to go camping, bike riding, or [preferably indoor] rock climbing. I don't like doing any of these things by myself. If anyone wants to go with, would you please let me know?

California has better weather

2008-05-09T22:39:00.000-07:00

It's sad but true: California has more pleasant weather than Utah. But hey, at least we don't have horrible wildfires, right? (Oh wait...) So far, we've been to the San Diego Zoo, Sea World, Disneyland, and California Adventure (which is pretty much Disneyland with more roller coasters and less pixie dust).

Anyway, I thought I'd throw up a few pictures, since I've been taking tons of them and it's fun to share. This first one takes a bit of explaining. The two youngest siblings and I left early so that we could go visit an old friend of mine in San Diego. Since this particular old friend can only really accommodate two people at a time, and since there were three of us, I figured it would be a good time to finally pick up that backpacking mattress I've been meaning to get.

While I was out looking for the right mattress, I found this marvelous little device. It is specifically designed to make, and I quote the packaging, "beer can chicken." Basically, you take a can of beer and mount it in the railing. Then, you stick a chicken over the top, and stick the entire contraption on an outdoor grill. Presumably the beer boils, and you end up with a roast chicken that tastes vaguely of boiled beer. Yummy! Naturally, I laughed uncontrollably for a couple of seconds and then took a picture.

There are several things I love about this device:

1. Not only does it mean that you're making beer can chicken, it means that you're making a lot of beer can chicken. Enough that you need to run out and buy yourself a special device in order to streamline the process.
2. Yes, the store also has an entire aisle with hundreds of DVDs, all of which have names like "Colorado deer hunt in August" or "Best of the rutting season." I got a little nervous that if anyone saw me, they'd suspect I was secretly a redneck. This device strengthened that fear a little.
3. Seriously, who DESIGNS these things? I mean, in addition to the theoretical group of people who buy beer can chicken frames, who exactly has a meeting where they say "oh yeah, beer can chicken, just like Maw used to make! But 'member how it kept done fallin' over? We should go weld up some kinda frame an' sell it in a hun'in store! We'll make a killin'!" I kind of want to meet that man. From a safe distance.

Oh, I did find my mattress. It's wonderful. It's one of those that contains super spongy material. All you have to do is open the air valve, and it inflates itself as the spongy stuff puffs out. I did not purchase a frame for making beer can chicken.

The second picture is from my visit to Areae's offices in San Diego. They're a nice group of folks who are trying to make it super easy for anyone to make their own multiplayer online game. Their project is called Metaplace. Their offices are rented from an office block in a smallish city north of San Diego. It had this rather strange little fountain outside, which is so kitsch as to be nearly transcendent. There's no sign telling you to keep out of the water, because who would want to go swimming in a pool filled with hippo drool? Honestly.

Duplicate songs on iTunes

2008-04-30T17:17:00.000-07:00

Cav just stuck up a post where he was trying to figure out the chances of playing the same song twice in a session when you have a library of 1641 songs. I thought I'd have a shot at solving it, although my probability math isn't perfect either :-P. His question was particularly aimed at iTunes, but for our purposes we're going to assume that song selection is purely random (iTunes biases things somewhat in reality).

Obviously, for a 1 song session, the chances of playing the same song twice are zero. In a two song session, they are 1 in 1641, and in a 1,642 song session, the chances hit 100%. A 1,641 song session has an extremely small chance of playing each song exactly once. Those are some good reality checks on the probability. But how do you work it out for other session lengths?

Well, let's say I want to figure out the probability for a session of length n. We'll assume I know the probability for a session of length n-1, which we'll call p, and which is some value between 0 (no chance at all) and 1 (100% chance). I picture it something like this:

0....................0.5.....................1 ppppppppxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
This is kind of a random-o-meter. 'p' is the probability that we've already had a duplicate, and 'x' is what's left over. So, here's how I think of it: We're throwing a random dart at the meter. If it hits 'p', we had a duplicate even before we hit the current song. If we hit an x, we MIGHT still have a duplicate, because the current song might be the duplicate. What are the chances of that?

Well, we know that we've already played n-1 songs, and none of them were duplicates (or our dart would have landed on p). There are 1,641 songs to choose from, and there's an (n-1)/1641 chance that this time, we will pick a duplicate. So, if we land in the x region, then (n-1) in 1641 times, we still get a duplicate. So the probability is:

p: The chance that we have already played a duplicate
PLUS
The chance of hitting the x region (1-p) TIMES the chance of playing a duplicate (n-1)/1641

We already know the values for n=1 and n=2, but now we have some rules for figuring out additional values:

1: 0
2: 0.06%
3: 0.18%
4: 0.36%
5: 0.61%
10: 2.7%
20: 10.97%
30: 23.41%
50: 52.96%
100: 95.4%
200: 99.99997%

I hope that was enlightening.

Something really unusual in Hollywood

2008-04-16T16:27:00.000-07:00

The National Association of Broadcasters is a nationwide group that acts as a kind of networking umbrella for everybody who works in broadcasting. They cover television, radio, and similar technologies. They lobby for the interests of broadcasters before congress, and they put on a huge national convention every year.

Last year, the convention was in Las Vegas, and was attended by about 111,000 people. The keynote address was unusually controversial. It was given by Tim Robbins, who works in a variety of media (acting, writing, directing, music, etc.).

Although there was a no-recording clause for the speech, and although everyone had to turn off their video cameras, someone caught a brief audio clip of the most controversial segment. In short, he railed on the media for the low moral character of their shows, and eloquently called for a change for the better. He got quite a round of applause for it, too. It's remarkably inspiring, so if you have a few minutes, give it a listen.

A whole new breed of penguin

2008-04-02T21:19:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, BBC released some short clips about a newly discovered colony of penguins. My apologies to those of you that have YouTube blocked -- just search for 'penguins' on the BBC's website, and it's in the sidebar.

There were some great pranks from other sources yesterday. Probably the biggest was YouTube modifying the entire front page so that all the featured videos linked to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up," instead of the video actually posted. In other words, they rickrolled their entire userbase. The name of the user posting the video was "YTRickRollsU," and the user page was a "Happy April Fools Day 2008" page.

I don't know what poor Mr. Astley did to deserve all the attention, but I hope he didn't sell his soul for it.

Oh, it looks like Robert Mugabe, the tinpot dictator of once-prosperous Zimbabwe, may have actually lost the election. This in spite of a significant campaign of media control and intimidation against his opponents. True, they have an inflation rate of 100,000%, some 80% unemployment, and the lowest life expectancy in the world, but it's still rather remarkable for someone as entrenched as Mugabe to actually lose an election. Here's hoping that Tsvangirai is more competent than his predecessor--fortunately for him, that's a wonderfully low bar.

I meant to do my taxes two days ago. I haven't forgotten, I just keep leaving necessary forms in all the wrong places.

The Red Army Choir goes South

2008-04-01T12:30:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, in a far away, cold northern land, there was a huge army that served the communist overlords. They were known as the "Red Army" or the "Soviet Army". Americans used to think that someday, the Red Army was going to invade the United States. When I was in elementary school, they used to do drills where we'd all have to duck under our desks. This was supposed to be helpful for when the Russians dropped a nuclear bomb on our school, though in retrospect it probably wouldn't have done any good. We also used to read scary stories about Russians cutting up American flags and then teaching all the children that freedom was bad. I think they were trying to train us up as future guerilla fighters, just in case.

Anyway, back in those glorious days, the Russians had a massive men's choir called the Red Army Choir. That's not actually what the choir was called. The full name was "Дважды Краснознамённый ордена Красной Звезды академический ансамбль песни и пляски Советской армии имени А.В.Александрова" which means "the Academic Ensemble of Song and Dance of the Soviet Army, Bearer of Two Orders of the Red Banner and the Order of the Red Star named after Alexandrov." Anyway, they would sing the Soviet anthem and a lot of other patriotic, communist songs for the purpose of inspiring the plebeian masses.

Anyway, it turns out that the Soviet Union kind of sort of collapsed, and singing patriotic songs about it fell out of favor. But that still leaves you with a perfectly good choir who now have a lot of free time on their hands. So what should they do about it?

Enter the Leningrad Cowboys. They're a Finnish rock band who have enormous hair and ridiculous sunglasses, and who thought it would be just hilarious to ... frankly, words fail me. You're just going to have to watch it.

The Leningrad Cowboys and The Red Army Choir singing "Sweet Home Alabama"

Truly, reality is often stranger than fiction.

Odd Signs

2008-03-28T16:57:00.000-07:00

I spotted two particularly odd signs today.

The first was a billboard on southbound I-15. It's been up for maybe a few weeks, I'm not sure. The billboard has a picture of a yellow sunflower blossom on a blue background and, in large print, the title "Escape Polygamy." So presumably, if you're a woman (or man?) feeling trapped in your polygamous relationship, and you're fed up with it, and you just happen to be on southbound I-15 with a good memory for phone numbers, you can call the number on the sign.

I suppose there are polygamous relationships around here, although you never hear about them outside of occasional mentions in the news. It's still a rather curious billboard to have on one's morning commute. "Ha!" I yell at it, "It's tricky enough to find just the one!"

The other one was a sign posted in the men's room at work. It was advising, in rather polite terms, that you please refrain from passing kidney stones in this particular receptacle because they clog the drain. If it is strictly necessary to pass kidney stones, perhaps one of the other commodes might be suitable? It further mentioned that this should not be taken as any kind of medical advice, and that maybe, if you have kidney stones, you should consult a doctor.

Just maybe. That one obviously has a story behind it. A curious and strange story, filled with pain and horror and frustrated, mystified plumbers.

P.S. Cavan stinks! Will that cover my shout-out obligations?

Going for an English

2008-03-26T13:42:00.001-07:00

Come the weekend, an English working man might get together with a few mates, down a few pints at the pub, and then finish off the evening by picking up some curry from an Indian restaurant. Indian food is popular in Britain much the way Mexican food is here, which might explain this rather odd skit: Going for an English.

I missed work today, so I'm going to keep this entry short and go to sleep.

P.S. Shana is awesome.

Toasted Cheese Sandwich

2008-03-25T22:10:00.000-07:00

Today's blog title is named after what I had for dinner. It had Mrs. Ball's chutney on it, and therefore it was a good toasted cheese sandwich. What I actually wanted for dinner was steamed veggies, but I have to go grocery shopping for that, and since I left work early because I was feeling sick, I really wasn't up for grocery shopping. Hopefully taking vitamins can sort of make up for eating unhealthily.

Anyway, I'm not incredibly sick (I'll just say "sinuses" and leave it at that), but I'm not exactly bouncing around at the moment.

The Clinton campaign, smarting under a couple months of criticism for not releasing Hillary's tax returns, recently sent out an email demanding that Obama release his. Literally two minutes later, they did. Details on that little exchange here. For those who are too bored to read the actual 103-pages of returns, the summary is: He made about $1.5 million in 2006. He made a lot of money from his book, and made most of his money before that from managing a hospital and legal work. Frankly, the whole thing's pretty boring.

Given their hesitance, it might be that the Clintons' is a little more fun. But no one will know until they release it!

Oh, and regarding my music choice: I don't think I could ever like hip-hop, so I'm probably safe. It's not that country's evil so much as I used to think it was evil when I was a teenager. So the only person who's really disappointed is my former self. And he's a brat, so he'll just have to deal with it.

Blogging on Empty

2008-03-24T22:32:00.000-07:00

I could've sworn I had something clever to say, but now I can't remember what it was. So you shall just have to put up with something stupid instead.

In a complete betrayal of everything good and holy, I purchased some country music. I feel as if I have somehow betrayed everything I once stood for. I have little to say for myself, except that I liked one of the songs. So there.

Easter was a lot of fun. I got to hang out with the sibs and much of the rest of the family. There was also an embarrassingly large amount of food served, and I don't think I have quite recovered yet. I continue to work out every day at the gym, but I'm not sure that a mere workout is going to cut it.

Sorry if the news is all boring, I'm just posting to try and stay in the habit. Apologies all round.

2008-03-22T01:01:00.000-07:00

I recently realized that some of my readers had never heard of lolcatz. They're not exactly high culture--more like the internet version of kitsch--but they're often pretty funny.

So here's a quick example.

There's also good stuff over at Cute Overload, although technically they're a slight variant from the lolcatz genre.

Weasels and coffee.

2008-03-21T14:56:00.000-07:00

Another mini-post: This has to be one of the world's strangest products. Oh, and I'd say that the phrase "no one knows why they do this" has several layers of metaphoric meaning here.

This all started from a conversation about scorpions in vodka, by the way. Apparently, you see, they stick an actual scorpion in an actual bottle of vodka, and then said vodka is drunk. I don't know why anyone does that either, but at least that's got a layer of weirdly awesome on top of the insanity. The weasel thing is just plain insanity.

I liked Obama's speech

2008-03-20T17:18:00.000-07:00

Obama gave a really good speech. Better than Romney's really good one. It's a little uncomfortable, deeply thoughtful, and definitely worth the time to read. So go! Read it! Then comment!

Brain oozing out of ears

2008-03-19T15:17:00.000-07:00

I've spent the last couple weeks working on a really hard problem.

It all started about six months ago. One of my coworkers wandered into my office in an absent-minded fashion, stuck some burritos in the microwave (I am the Keeper of the Microwave), and doodled some stuff on my whiteboard. He'd been thinking about a painful theoretical problem I'd brought up earlier, and he thought he had a solution. Which he did. It was awesome.

The problem was that it changes everything. It's a completely new way of representing curved surfaces. It can do everything the old method can do, but entire classes of problems simply disappear in a poof of simplicity. We wanted it yesterday, and it pretty nearly requires rewriting all of the code from scratch. Just in case you're not aware, Rewriting From Scratch is kind of the opposite of Staying In Business.

Over a couple of months, we worked out how it might be possible. We were considering some new features that were impossible in the old code anyway, and it was a great excuse. We would start on the new code, but it would have an interface between the old and the new. All the old code would remain in service, but the new tools would be added to the new side. A thick layer of conversion code would let the two sides communicate, and it would be responsible for making sure we could transition all the existing customers' models into the new style.

I spent a furious couple of weeks writing the skeleton of the new code. Everything had to be done over--data handling, saving and loading files, moving objects, undo and redo -- everything. I've already sunk several dozen days into writing the conversion layer, and there's still a good distance to go. I go home mentally exhausted pretty much every night, and it's hard to ask much more from a job than that.

C'est le jour du saint Valentine

2008-02-14T18:58:00.000-08:00

Today is Valentine's day, so naturally I decided it would be a great day to celebrate Curt's birthday. I treated Shana and Curt to dinner. The restaurant refused to take reservations, so we had to walk in and get in line for a table. The wait was only a little over an hour, which was a lot better than some of the people who were after us.

"Why are you celebrating Curt's birthday on Valentine's day," you may be asking, "when his actual birthday doesn't even happen till Saturday?" This, of course, is because we are stupid. Still, they gave him a brownie sundae for dessert, even though it wasn't his actual birthday. This might be because we lied and said it was his actual birthday. Maybe we will all go to hell.

Oh yeah: Andrew, the Novell cafeteria does do take out, although they charge a tiny bit extra for the containers. The main problem is that Novell's campus is kind of in the middle of nowhere, so it's a pretty long trip to get down there. If you're going to go that far, you may as well eat in.

2008-02-13T21:01:00.000-08:00

This is what I had for lunch today. It was pretty good! One of the perks of renting office space from Novell is that we get to eat food at their cafeteria. One of the downsides of not actually working for Novell is that they charge us higher prices at their cafeteria.

Coming home was an adventure today--it was snowing heavily and the roads were icy slick. There was an awful lot of running red lights going on, and nobody really minded much because they couldn't really accelerate into the intersection anyway. I was planning on going out to buy some stuff, but ended up just going home in the end.

I have to go to BYU tomorrow. The colloquium is about regression testing of software, and that's something we do a lot. Maybe it will be helpful.

Well, that's all from me. I'm off to do another page of exercises for my Japanese course and then go to sleep. Nathan's out of town, so my apartment's really quiet right now.

What a day!

2008-02-06T21:39:00.000-08:00

I actually locked myself out of my car! I technically knew that this was possible, but it requires quite a few things to go wrong, all in a row. Well, they did. Fortunately, knowing that I'm the kind of person that locks myself out of my car, I left a copy of my car keys at my parents' place, and they ran them down to me. Thanks, parents!

Of course, I was also sufficiently brilliant to leave my company ID inside of my car just before locking myself out, so I had the inestimable privilege of wandering around the freezing parking lot for the 20 minutes it took for the parents to drive my keys down.

Anyway, after all that, I needed some cheering up, so I went and bought fish. Specifically, it was some kind of herb-crusted salmon salad. It was really good, and so I'm back in a pretty good mood. It's a pity that food's ability to put you in a good mood also makes you gain weight. Ah well, I'll try and work a little harder at the gym tomorrow.

Back in school! Sort of!

2008-02-04T22:56:00.001-08:00

I've signed up for an independent study course at BYU. I've been wanting to learn how to read Japanese properly, and while I've been making some progress in self-study, having a structured way of learning and access to a teacher should be an immense help. My goal is to get some reasonable level of JLPT certification. I still have no idea what on earth I would do with such a thing as a JLPT certificate, but it's a way of keeping myself busy.

The course is Japanese 300. Clarissa is also taking it, although unlike me, she has schedules and grades and things. I will get a grade in the course, but I remain blissfully detached from caring what it is. There was a big section on using the course to meet graduation requirements, and I chuckled my way right over it. It's a lot more fun to take classes without the pressure--now I just have to see if I will do any of the work.

I had Italian food for dinner tonight. It was really good. But I find myself craving a cookie, and I don't have any. Such are the privations of life!

Hospital Trip

2008-01-25T22:17:00.000-08:00

I went to visit Grant at the hospital today. His blog has a lot more about the exact reasons for his hospital visit--suffice it to say that he's had major surgery, and the recovery has not gone very smoothly. I ended up staying for three hours, and mostly just shot the breeze about a bunch of things. Auntie Elaine was there too, and enjoyed chiming in when we were commiserating on how impossible dating seems to be around here (seriously, what is so messed up about Utah dating culture? I can't put my finger on it exactly, but there really is something strange about it, and it seems it's not just me. Maybe I'll rant about that another time).

Anyway, Grant's been playing a lot of Civilization IV, which looks incredibly addictive >_<. Now, there are several games that will keep me up late, but the building simulation games are the only kind that will keep me from making it to bed at all. Apparently Grant's had a similar experience. I no longer have Civilization installed on any of my machines, it's just too destructive, but boy has he got me tempted. Resist! Resist!

At any rate, his today was better than his yesterday, and yesterday was the worst day of his life. They're hoping he'll make it out of the hospital tomorrow, but he's going to need some pretty intense nursing at home for a while. He's got a lot of TV shows and movies downloaded, and he's probably going to be doing a lot of reading. If anyone has some brilliant ways for him to pass the time, feel free to contribute.

Random Event of the Day

2008-01-02T22:04:00.000-08:00

Whenever you travel in another country, it's usually best to pay for everything by credit card. It's safer, it's got fraud protection, and it works at literally dozens of stores (I'm teasing ... most places I've been, you still need cash, but the cards still come in handy). Unfortunately, using a credit card with a foreign currency usually results in a small charge from the credit card company.

So, there's this fellow named Mike (his real name) who wanted to go to Costa Rica for about a month. His credit card had a charge for using foreign currency, and he wanted to avoid that charge, so he signed up for a Capital One Visa card. Unfortunately, because they're a suspicious bunch, they only gave him a $1000.00 credit limit. Mike needed a little more than that, so he asked if he could get the limit raised. "No," said CapitalOne. "You need to use it for about a year first." Okaaay, so what can he do? "Well, you could transfer a bunch of money into the account, which would effectively raise your limit." So that's what Mike did.

Oops, transaction rejected. Mike calls and ask what's wrong. "Oh, for amounts that big, you'll have to mail us a check," said Capital One. Greeeat, should have said that in the first place. By this time, Mike was getting a bit suspicious, and had them put notes on his account. Then he mailed them a check for $6000.00. And away they went to Costa Rica.

So, what happens? When he tries to use the card, he discovers the account has been frozen! Apparently, mailing them a check is a major breach of policy! "Read the notes on my account!" Well, the notes pretty clearly say that he was instructed to mail them a check. "So remove the hold!" No can do, that would be breaking the rules. "AAAAGGGGH!"

And so it ends, with him stranded in Costa Rica, selling pencils to tourists to try and get a boat ride home. Nah, just kidding, he went to his web site and posted the whole sordid tale. Within a few hours, the story had been posted to Reddit and made the front page. Maybe a few hundred thousand people read it. It also hit the online version of the Consumerist.

The guy in Costa Rica got a few calls offering support and money. And how they heard about it, I don't know, but Capital One pretty quickly removed the hold on the account and sent an explanatory email to the poor stranded traveler. He's being rather understanding, considering the circumstances. You can read a bit more detail here.

So there you go: the power of the Internet. Getting back at the big guys through flash mobs and all that. Actually, that's kind of the kicker of the whole thing: This happened today. Newspapers are getting rather thoroughly outpaced anymore. Fun, isn't it?

Happy New Year

2008-01-01T00:53:00.000-08:00

2007 is over and 2008 has begun. The world's a year older and so on. I guess it hasn't been a bad year -- some interesting things happened, I went some interesting places, and I possibly even learned something. Eh, maybe that's being too hopeful. Here's hoping that 2008 works out even better, hmm?

Belgian Waffles and Cougars

2007-11-24T22:48:00.000-08:00

I actually got dragged off a to a football game today (or at least a broadcast of one). A friend of mine in the ward wanted to go at a local movie theater, and I turned him down last time he invited me to something, so I felt I probably ought to go. Anyway, it ended up fun (we won, and I ate popcorn), so hurray for football. In a fit of sanity, I changed out of my red T-Shirt into a blue one to go watch the game.

My parents are having their anniversaries this week, so we took them out to breakfast at a local restaurant. The food was really good, so score one for Mimi's breakfasts. Unfortunately, the service was sloooooww, so score minus-one, for a grand total of meh.

I filled in for a friend's shift at the temple for most of the afternoon and evening, which was a lot of fun. I haven't done baptisms in quite a while, so it was a nice change of pace from always doing sessions.

Rivalry Week

2007-11-24T10:02:00.000-08:00

It's rivalry week! The rivalry in question is BYU vs. the University of Utah, also known as Blue versus Red. The school colors are actually blue & white vs. red & white, but we prefer to emphasize the differences. It's a bad week to be wearing red in Provo.

Since one of the favorite (and particularly destructive) pranks this time of year involves painting things red, most of the BYU campus statuary is coated in shrink wrap. The theory is that overzealous students will chuck their bucket of paint on the shrink wrap, and the statue can then be restored simply by waiting for it to dry and then removing it. The Y on the mountain is 200-odd yards tall, though, and the shrink wrap trick is a little impractical at that size. Instead, they just stick day-and-night patrols on the Y and check anyone going up for paint.

The football game is today, so the madness will hopefully die out by tomorrow.

Giving Thanks

2007-11-22T22:58:00.000-08:00

It was Thanksgiving today. This has brought several pertinent things to attention:

1. My niece is very cute.
2. My nephew is pretty cute too.
3. Many of the members of my extended family can cook extremely well. Thanksgiving dinner was wonderful.
4. Folks in my family get along with each other pretty well, and everyone hates leaving when we get together. This is a good thing.

Susan tells me that I should inform Cavan that his trip to Russia was clearly ill-advised, as it has caused him to miss out on a very large chocolate trifle. It was, indeed, a particularly pleasant chocolate trifle, complete with cream, nuts, cherries, chocolate cake, grated chocolate, and loads of chocolate pudding. Cavan, if you're reading this, consider yourself informed.

Incidentally, Thanksgiving at my house is a bit of an amalgam of traditions. It's not a holiday in South Africa, so our family customs had to be pretty much invented on the fly. Turkey with cranberry sauce is good stuff, but for variety's sake, this year we threw in a ham as well. Why not? Mashed potatoes are pleasant enough, but roast potatoes are much nicer, so we do roast potatoes and yams and skip the mashed variety. Stuffing seems like a good idea, but it cooks so much better when you cook it outside of the turkey--and when you do it that way, you can make enough for everyone to eat a lot of it. My mother's stuffing-like invention involves adding a lot of sausage, and is actually one of the main dishes. And of course, there was dessert.

Now, I have nothing against pumpkin pie. They fed it to me in school, and I learned to really enjoy the stuff. But, and this is important, my parents don't really like it. Blasphemy, I know, but they're not going to serve something they don't like. So instead of pumpkin pie, we had to settle for, well, chocolate trifle and lemon meringue pie and custard and some kind of chocolate-and-coconut covered marshmallow things that Elaine assures me are very similar to some favorite South African candy that I don't remember too well. I say "settle," but I think we win on that count.

I think an easy way of describing the meal is sort of a cross between a traditional American Thanksgiving and a British-style Christmas dinner. We just took all the bits we liked from both and mixed them together until you're so stuffed that you have to sort of waddle out the door as you're leaving.

Thanks to all who prepared, those who came, and those who hung around afterward and kept things interesting. It was a great day.

Coding Blog

2007-11-21T22:35:00.000-08:00

I've got a fairly long list of programming snippets (usually in C++), and have started a different blog so that I have somewhere to stick them. Most of my readers here are friends and family with little interest in computers, so I've been hesitant to stick heavily technical posts here. Having a separate blog for it makes sense.

Hitting the Gym, and Updates

2007-11-12T22:24:00.001-08:00

I spent the evening with some friends who are going back to France tomorrow. We had a mock Thanksgiving dinner (France has no Thanksgiving, and they found the whole concept of deep-fried turkey fascinating). They have a cute four-year-old boy who is sweet and ignores pretty much everything he's told. It was nice to actually use my French a bit, since it gets rusty if left unused.

Shan, if you are going to get a membership then of course I would love to go. Actually, that goes for anyone who doesn't mind putting up with the gym's oozing, oily salesmen in order to get a membership (just be aware that the price you pay and the price they say have pretty much nothing to do with each other--don't give them anything until after you've read the small print on the contract and added up all the unmentioned fees). My hope is to go about 8 o'clock on weekday mornings, so if anyone wants to try it, let me know!

Oh, and Cav asked about a couple more passages. Here they go:

John 10:30, KJV: "I and my father are one." NIV: "I and the Father are one."
John 14:9
KJV: Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Show us the Father?
NIV: Jesus answered: "Don't you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'?

There are, to my knowledge, no passages claiming that a vocal confession of Christ saves us. The strongest passage that I'm aware of in support of this doctrine is this:

Ephesians 2:8-10
KJV: For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.
NIV: For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.

Nothing particularly notable on either of these. The word "vocal" never occurs in the NIV NT. The word confession occurs a couple times, but it doesn't seem to be strongly tied to the "grace only" doctrines.

Quick Life Update

2007-11-11T21:45:00.001-08:00

It was an interesting weekend. I was reminded that I needed to teach a lesson on Sunday sometime late on Friday night; Saturday was occupied in rapid serial fashion by a quick trip to the gym, several hours of catching up with friends at Van's, and then a session of D&D (with a small gap in there where I actually planned out said session). The talking squirrel is turning out nicely so far, and the druid's back.

That was a lot of fun, but the lesson ended up getting prepared at sometime past midnight, and while it went all right, it was delivered on insufficient sleep. It didn't help that the topic was "women in the church," which I'm sure the Relief Society enjoyed, but it's difficult to figure out where to go with that for an all-singles Elder's Quorum.

Anyway, it's coming up on bed time. Good night, gentle reader(s).

Further Bible Thoughts

2007-11-06T21:39:00.000-08:00

I got such good comments to my last post that I thought I'd do a little follow-up research.

First off, I don't think the NIV really has a good shot at being a replacement for the KJV. The Book of Mormon language generally parallels the KJV and makes recognition of matching passages easier. Our doctrine and lesson books and libraries of sermons are all centered around the KJV. The terms we use come out of the KJV. And there are probably cases where, in doctrinal matters, the KJV is closer, although I haven't really got a good one yet. I think that for reference, the KJV is probably the best way to go. However, for reading, there are definitely times when a modern-language translation can shine.

A quick example: Try reading 2 Corinthians 11-13. Now, I'd read that in the KJV, and while it's a bit of a grammatical maze, you can puzzle out the meaning. What doesn't come through in the KJV is that Paul is ranting. Sure, he's talking about a serious topic (namely, the apostasy of the Corinthians), but he's doing so in such an aggressive, fiery way that you can almost picture the audience wincing at his forcefulness. The KJV tends to come across as soft-spoken and formal, no matter what's being said.

It was mentioned in a comment from Eve that the NIV might have an anti-LDS doctrinal slant in the way things were worded. I would really like references for this. I've taken a few shots at passages with fairly strong references to decidedly LDS doctrines, and thought I'd share the results.

1 Cor 15:29 -- Baptism for the dead as an authentic practice.

KJV: Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? why are they then baptized for the dead?
NIV: Now if there is no resurrection, what will those do who are baptized for the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized for them?

Rom 8:16-17 -- Man's potential to become heirs of God with Christ.

KJV: The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children then heirs; heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorifed together.
NIV: The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.

Amos 3:7 -- God reveals his will to prophets

KJV: Surely the Lord GOD will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets.
NIV: Surely the Sovereign LORD does nothing without revealing his plan to his servants the prophets.

Genesis 3:4-5 -- A moderately meaningful difference in this one: The word "gods" was changed to "God." This one doesn't bother me all that much, admittedly, since it's a pretty fine distinction, and we're usually fine with Elohim being translated as "God."

KJV: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
NIV: "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

Genesis 3:22 -- Plus, the plural is still here. Some branches of Christianity explain this one as God addressing "the heavenly court," by the way.

KJV: And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
NIV: And the LORD God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever."

Job 38:7 -- So this one looks like a difference...

KJV: When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
NIV: while the morning stars sang together and all the angels ^[a] shouted for joy?

But to be fair to the NIV, that footnote [a] reads "Hebrew the sons of God." This one also strikes me as pretty minor.

Anyway, there are piles and piles of these. This was just a random sampling. I hope someone was interested, since these are fun to put together. Feel free to throw out suggestions.

Reading Materials

2007-10-26T21:52:00.000-07:00

So, I was going to add a picture of a fun FHE activity here, but I couldn't get the photo off my phone. Oh well. It was a bunch of [mostly] college students sitting around in the bishop's living room and playing pictionary with movie titles, followed by apple pie and ice cream. It was fun and sociable. That's about all for my life in this post, the rest is a lengthy discussion of Biblical language. Those easily bored should probably stop reading.

I've been reading the New Testament lately in the New International Version. The New International Version is a Bible translation that was done fairly recently, and renders the entire Bible in modern English. That's not to say casual English--it is still quite formal, just less archaic. There aren't too many LDS people that read the NIV translation (though I do know of a couple). As far as I can tell, the main argument against it is that the language is somehow less formal or less respectful. In particular, there exists a feeling that using "you" to address God is overly casual. I want to discuss that a bit.

The reference Bible translation for most Latter-Day Saints is the King James Version. It's familiar, it's comfortable, it's the version that our fairly expansive theological literature refers to, and it's difficult to read. The archaic style both gives it a ceremonial air of formality and slows down the reader. There have been some official statements on this: for example, using the pronouns "thee/thou/thy/thine" has been endorsed several times as being more respectful. This is a really interesting statement. It's true that in modern English, these words connote respect, but there is a chicken and egg problem here. The reason that we use thees and thous in the Bible is because William Tyndale used them in his translation in the 1500s to make clear the difference between "one of you" and "all of you," which are two different words in the original Greek. At the time, thee and thou were the singular, informal English forms, and it seems likely they acquired that air of formality because they were used in the Bible. (If you're interested, there's a wikipedia article that gives a much more thorough treatment than this post can). Now, when we read the scriptures, should we interpret them according to what the words mean now, or what was actually written in the first place?

By the way, most of the other Indo-European languages have kept their old plural-formal/singular-intimate distinction, and at least in the languages I'm familiar with (Spanish: ti/vosotros, French: tu/vous, Bulgarian: ti/vie), you always address God using the singular-intimate form. Here's a quick illustration from the Lord's prayer:

English: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.

Bulgarian (Latinized, dropping Biblical terminal vowels): Otče nash, Koyto si na nebesata, da se sveti Tvoeto ime! da doyde Tvoeto tsarstvo; da băde Tvoyata volya, kakto na nebeto taka i na zemyata.

French: Notre Père, toi qui es dans les cieux, que tu sois reconnu pour Dieu, que ton règne vienne, que ta volonté soit faite, et tout cela, sur la terre comme au ciel.

Spanish: Padre nuestro que estás en el cielo, santificado sea tu nombre, venga tu reino, hágase tu voluntad en la tierra como en el cielo.

Although the tu/ti form definitely has intimate and informal connotations in these languages, it's still used for addressing God. This usage even carries over into Book of Mormon translations. Here's Lehi praising God in 1 Nephi 1:14:

English: Great and marvelous are thy works, O Lord God Almighty! Thy throne is high in the heavens, and thy power, and goodness, and mercy are over all the inhabitants of the earth; and, because thou art merciful, thou wilt not suffer those who come unto thee that they shall perish!

Bulgarian (Latinized): Veliki i čudni sa tvoite dela, o Gospodi, Bože Vsemogâshtiy! Prestolât Ti e visoko v nebesata i Tvoyata sila, i dobrina, i milost sa nad vsički žiteli na zemyata; i poneže si milostiv, Ti ne shte pozvolish onezi, koito idvat pri Tebe, da poginat!

French: Grandes et merveilleuses sont tes œuvres, ô Seigneur Dieu tout-puissant! Ton trône est haut dans les cieux, et ta puissance, ta bonté et ta miséricorde s'étendent sur tous les habitants de la terre; et parce que tu es miséricordieux, tu ne souffriras pas que ceux qui viennent à toi périssent.

Spanish: ¡Cuán grandes y maravillosas son tus obras, oh Señor Dios Todopoderoso! ¡Tu trono se eleva en las alturas de los cielos, y tu poder, y tu bondad y misericordia se extienden sobre todos los habitantes de la tierra; y porque eres misericordioso, no dejarás perecer a los que acudan a ti!

I don't want to give the idea that these languages are being at all disrespectful (indeed, you might have noticed that the Bulgarians capitalize the pronouns). Rather, I want to show that using an intimate form of "you" need not be a sign of disrespect.

But why bring this up? Part of the problem is that the archaic forms simply aren't understood clearly anymore. They are turning into kind of ritual formula, repeated without truly understanding the words. In any given testimony meeting, at least a handful of the testimonies are going to end with "in the name of thy son..." The speaker is repeating a ritual phrase, without understanding its meaning. Can you imagine that same speaker ending a testimony "in the name of your son..."? I think not! Further, it's very rare for members to actually use the grammar properly--The "thee" form has a fairly complex set of rules, and it's often used incorrectly. If this is truly a question of respect, then is it really all that appropriate to address deity with halting, bad grammar?

A counter-proposal, of course, is that we should take the time to learn the Jacobean English properly. This, to me, seems similar to the Moslems requiring that you learn Arabic to read the Koran, or Catholics requiring that you learn Latin if you wish to understand the liturgy. In the Moslem case, the scriptures were felt to be the literal word of God, and translation would destroy their integrity. The Catholics settled on Latin because tradition acquires a momentum of its own, which I think is also why Jacobean English has stayed with us so long. The terrible irony in the Catholic case is that the Latin was originally translated from the Greek, so that the commoners might understand!

And that, in a nutshell, is the point. Modern English may not have the same religious gravitas, but it does add a certain electric quality to the scriptures. It bypasses that piece of your brain that has to work at decoding the language and goes straight to the meaning. While I would struggle to make it through a full chapter of Paul's letters in the KJV, I find myself reading entire books at a sitting in the NIV, and enjoying the flow of the text and the arguments. It's not that I don't understand the KJV, but it just doesn't feel the same. I've read maybe five-thousand pages worth of Jacobean English in my life, but my practice with modern English is perhaps a hundred times that. Is there really a good reason not to take advantage of that easier path to understanding?

Anyway, I have probably beaten the topic to death by now. I'll leave you with a few parting words:

"[M]y soul delighteth in plainness unto my people, that they may learn." (2 Ne 25:4)
"For it shall come to pass in that day, that every man shall hear the fulness of the gospel in his own tongue, and in his own language" (D&C 90:11)
"You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thornbushes, nor figs from thistles, are they? Even so every good tree bears good fruit; but the rotten tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a rotten tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down, and thrown into the fire. So then, you will know them by their fruits." (Matt 7:16-20, NIV)

Paying Attention to the Small Things

2007-08-23T22:52:00.001-07:00

My thought for tonight is that life is happier when we daydream more.

This is a tree from Zion's park. I loved the texture of the bark, and wanted to try and catch it in a picture. I found myself in forced idleness for several hours, with little more than a camera to play with, and some interesting pictures resulted. It was a great trip.

Goal setting and tracking

2007-08-12T22:37:00.001-07:00

I imagine that most folks set goals for themselves sometimes. New Year's Day is especially popular. Thomas S. Monson has (famously) said "When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported, the rate of improvement accelerates." My old set of goals was looking a bit stale, so I've spent some time over the past couple of weeks revamping my goals, getting them written down, and figuring out how to keep track of whether I'm meeting them or not.

Most of the goals are pretty simple things. Being more regular about giving to charity, for example, or having an exercise program. Some of them are really difficult to define, though, like trying to spend more time doing social things. It's a little difficult to have a check-box for "yes, I did something social today!" What counts as "something social"? I have a few ideas, but I don't think I've nailed it yet.

My current approach to tracking is to print out a bunch of small paper booklets carefully sized to slide into the billfold of my wallet easily. I tend to have my wallet with me all the time, so it's easy to pull it out and write on it (this is really useful for tracking eating and exercise). I haven't found a writing instrument that fits in my wallet yet, and I haven't gotten in the habit of carrying a pen everywhere, but other than that it's worked pretty well.

So, readers, what do you do to track your goals?

Literal virtuality

2007-08-09T23:33:00.000-07:00

I'm back from SIGGraph in San Diego and I have Internet again. The hotel had Internet, but it cost ten bucks per night per computer, and it wasn't particularly fast. If I were paying three-hundred bucks a month for Internet at home, I'd expect my downloads to be leaving skid marks when they finished, so I put off posting till I got back.

I'm back to the old cell phone for pictures. I do have good intentions about getting a new and better phone (not to mention a new and better camera), but these intentions were stalled when I discovered that the phone I actually want is hard to find outside Europe. It exists here, but it's not available online from the major stores. Meanwhile I'm still using my poor, half-broken old phone, which limps gamely along like a wounded elderly cat. Today's first picture is Harbor Boulevard, which runs past the convention center. The hotel was walking distance away, so I walked this route a few times a day.

Next up is the convention center itself. Here you're looking at gate A. You can just see the sign for gate B in the distance. Gates C through H are beyond that, so it's a pretty big building. Their biggest event of the year is Comic Con, which pulled in 125,000 people last week (and not everyone could get in). SIGGraph only pulls in about 30,000 people, so comparatively speaking the center was pretty empty. By the way, for those who are curious about this sort of thing, the largest convention center in the world is the Hannover Messe (Hannover Fair), which has half a square kilometer of exhibition space. By comparison, the San Diego monster is a cozy, friendly sort of place.

One of the fun sides of SIGGraph is that the motion picture industry shows up en masse (this is a great place to get hired for jobs in animation or special effects), and they like to show off all the neat stuff they've done this year. Even more fun is they tell you how it works--this is the place for special effects wizards to get together and trade war stories about how they pulled off the latest batch of movie visuals. There are usually a bunch of composite scenes playing at the electronic theater, showing you how everything works. They'll start with the actor hanging from a blue screen with a few real-life props, then gradually fade in the wire frames and other animated objects until he's climbing onto the side of an airship, or plunging on the back of a dragon into the ocean below, or what have you. The effects folks also wander around looking at all the latest research, scavenging for cool ideas for the next batch of movies.

This is also a neat place to check out new devices and ideas. There are usually at least 3 or 4 new ways that someone might implement a 3-D television. Some of them are serious commercial attempts, and others are set up purely for fun or for art exhibits. The one you see in this picture is more on the novelty side. It's a spinning globe with a pattern of lights on the outside. Right now it's got a sliding checkerboard pattern, though it had a rotating map of the world a few seconds before. Like every 3-D display ever invented so far, it gives you a splitting headache if you stare at it for too long--the real problem is not figuring out how to make a 3-D display, it's keeping that display from giving you horrible headaches after ten minutes of use.

A more practical demonstration was a high-resolution color display that works well in bright sunlight! It reflects lightly effectively, so it looks as good as a piece of paper. It didn't use or need a backlight, and the surface looked almost like color printed on paper. The entire display is based on bazillions of tiny mirrors, which is terribly cool, besides looking good. They tell me that a black and white version will be available in commercial products pretty soon, but the color version still only works in the lab -- and at SIGGraph, of course.

I also got to play with the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), a $100 computer that they're going to sell to developing countries for education. At that price, you have to be a sort of intermediate-level developing country to afford it, but it's still a really cool idea. The computer is pretty nice and definitely usable--as long as you have VERY tiny fingers. The keyboard is just a little too large for adult hands, which made typing awkward.

Of course, most of the time I was just working. This picture is of our booth on the convention floor. The guy on the left is the CEO, and the guy on the right is a coworker. The glowing rectangle in the back is playing a looped video showing pretty pictures of our stuff. I spent most of my time at the conference standing around that booth and answering questions. Mostly, it's just the one question--"so, what's a T-Spline?"--over and over and over and over. I got asked again at the Salt Lake airport while I was heading home (I was wearing a T-Splines shirt), and it was funny how it gave me flashbacks to the booth.

Probably the most exciting moment for today was packing up the booth. Imagine this schedule:

3:30 Exhibition floor closes
4:00 Shuttle departs hotel for airport
6:30 Flight boards at San Diego airport

You may notice a very small gap between the closing of the floor and the departure of the shuttle. To make matters worse, we couldn't find taxis that could fit our booth in the trunk, so we really needed to make that shuttle--and waiting an hour for the 5:00 shuttle could make it tricky to catch our flight. We tore down and packed the whole booth frame in ten minutes flat, and I ran from the conference center with a one-hundred pound wheeled booth box in tow, trying to make it to the hotel in time to get the booth taken by shuttle to the airport. We all made it in the end (with 90 seconds to spare!), though we spent the first part of the shuttle ride catching our breath.

Anyway, now I'm home, with full access to a proper kitchen and a multitude of liquids and pastes containing more than 3.4 ounces, and it's great. And since it's getting late and I still have work in the morning, I need to head to bed.

California AGAIN

2007-08-03T23:57:00.000-07:00

I'm going to California. Despite my frequently avowed dislike for the state, I just can't seem to avoid it. On the bright side, this time I'm going to San Diego. Most of my dislike of California stems from having to spend too much time in Los Angeles. There is much good to be said of San Diego.

One of the good things to be said for San Diego is that Allaryin (Ammon) moved there just a week or two ago, which means I'll probably get a chance to go say hi. He started life in Texas and has been drifting gradually west ever since. Ammon recently acquired a new baby girl (with the esteemed assistance of his wife, of course). I have been informed that said baby girl is adorable, and if I visit I'll probably be observed making silly googly noises. That should be fun.

Another good thing to be said for San Diego is: the weather.

Now, my purpose in traveling to San Diego has nothing to do with either the weather, nor the fact that Ammon just moved there. These are merely happy coincidences. No, I'm going to go play salesman at some conference for the week. The conference is to be attended by, and I quote, "Digital innovators, creative researchers, award-winning producers, provocative artists, energetic executives, and adventurous engineers." They really seemed to be stretching on some of those adjectives--engineers are very nice chaps, after all, but "adventurous" is not usually a defining quality. The conference is a lot of fun because there are a lot of very smart people there, and very smart people are a lot of fun. Unless they get drunk of course, in which case they're pretty much like drunk people the world over, but that doesn't happen all the time.

It is possible that, by now, you are wondering why on earth there is a picture of a mutant cow for this post. Interestingly, it's not entirely unrelated. Said mutant cow was made using software that I wrote, and which we'll be hawking at the conference. So, in essence, I'm traveling to California to sell software that lets you make your own mutant cow. Admittedly, it can be used for things other than mutant cows. Some folks have even used it to make weird horned monsters.

Ultraman Redux

2007-07-20T20:28:00.000-07:00

I mentioned Ultraman in an earlier post, but I still owe Eve some photos so I figured I'd do that for today's post. Here's the dubbed pilot episode of Ultraman if you're still curious/masochistic. Japanese doesn't dub well to English for some reason.

One of the "neat tricks" in movie and television production from the 1960's was to build a set in miniature (kind of like a model train), and then film the action on your miniature set. That way, you could add giant space ships, huge monsters, or epic battles without actually spending very much money. Nowadays you'd accomplish the effect with computer graphics, which looks a lot better but isn't nearly as funny. Anyway, it seems that somebody decided that it would be fun to make a television show about a giant spaceman fighting giant space monsters, and thus Ultraman was born. I don't think there's any particular significance to the name (the explanation of the name at the end of the pilot is ultra-cheesy). I guess superlatives make popular names for superheroes.

Ultraman became a pop-culture phenomenon in Japan, and is still very popular with boys (Boys have interesting taste in TV shows). I was introduced to it for the first time by the Ultraman aisle at Yodobashi Camera, a large shop in Tokyo that sells just about everything for males of all ages. Eve, the dazzlingly attractive young lady pictured in a previous post, had heard of Ultraman in the English classes she teaches and was immediately fascinated by the aisle. At this point, I received the impromptu commission to photograph every single model of Ultraman available, and was exhorted to make said photographs available online later. This was difficult for three reasons:

1. Japanese electronic shops are jumpy about people taking photographs inside. I didn't see a "no pictures" sign within eyeshot, but I still wasn't particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of attracting official attention, so we had to photograph on the sly. That meant no flash, so the pictures are a bit blurry.

2. Do you know how many versions of Ultraman there are? At least this many. This is only about half of them (and I left out "Ultraman Nice" because it was too badly blurred).

3. After about the first five photos (complete with imaginative announcements), I was laughing pretty hard. This probably made the later photos blurrier than the early ones.

Nevertheless, I have now officially posted the Ultraman photos (it was somewhere between numbers 2 and 3, in case you missed it). If the link quits working, send me a message and I'll probably fix it--I'm changing servers soon, and my old links might break. And now, while the rest of you stay up through the rest of tonight reading the seventh Harry Potter book, I will head to bed.

Localized Chinese Food

2007-07-14T22:58:00.001-07:00

Most of you probably know that when you eat out at an ethnic restaurant, what you're getting is not usually very "genuine." Taco Bell is not really Mexican food, Panda Express is not really Chinese food, and so on. It's more like those films that claim to be "based on a true story." Of course, this same thing happens in other countries too, which brings me to one of a handful of photos I managed to get in Japan after the Camera Incident. This is--believe it or not--a Chinese restaurant. Indeed, several of the items on my tray kind of resemble things you might find in Chinese cuisine, but the style is so Japanese that the Chinese food almost feels out of place.

The wooden bowl on the left has steamed rice, and the bowls on the upper left and upper right are the "main entreés." The first one is shrimp in some kind of sauce, the second one is sweet and sour pork. In true Japanese style, they are both very small portions, but they make up for this by giving you a million kinds of everything. The center bowl is half an egg roll with several kinds of decorative garnish and some kind of sweet, deep-fried sesame dumpling thing. Yes, they only give you half an egg roll, diagonally cut in artistic fashion. The bottom two bowls have a half dozen varieties of pickled vegetables, and the lower-right one is egg-drop soup, positioned exactly where the miso soup usually goes.

The most intriguing thing was that cup in the middle that looks like an egg. No, it's not an egg. It's homemade sweet almond tofu, and it's a good dessert. Tofu doesn't taste like much, to be sure, but it has a good texture for pudding, and the homemade style tofu is softer and wetter than most.

This restaurant was really good, by the way. If for some reason you ever find yourself in the Granvia hotel next to Hiroshima-eki, feel free to drop by the Chinese place on the second floor. It's good stuff. This is the place that got me thinking "I wonder if you could serve American food in kaiseki style?" That is, a little bit of roast beef on one plate, a little bit of mashed potato, a little bit of corn ... just for the heck of it. Seems like a ton of work, though.

In more contemporary news, I helped my sister and her husband move to Logan today. The picture here is of their living room before any unpacking. You'll note that Yoda (back left) is still around and doing fine after multiple moves. Logan is a 5 hour round trip from Provo, which meant that the drive was more painful than the actual work. We packed five adults into a Prius (note to self: never do this), and a few neighbors from the new ward showed up to help, so the loading and unloading was done in short order.

In related news, my sister had her second child on Thursday, a cute baby girl. The two-year old big brother is taking the news well so far, although I imagine he hasn't yet realized that parental attention is a precious commodity, and the younger siblings are going to steal it away. The new baby has continued the fine family tradition of being born with a full head of hair, which we're fairly sure is unusual but makes for cute babies.

Questions for the Readers

2007-07-11T20:11:00.000-07:00

Been a few days since I last posted, and it'll probably still be short.

Firstly, my neck has gotten better, but it still hasn't completely healed. Is this the kind of thing one goes to see a chiropractor for? I really have no idea. It is healing on its own, but it does seem a bit weird for a pinched nerve to last for a whole week. It's usually fine except when I'm driving and can't turn my head quickly.

Secondly, what's the best way to watch for web page updates? It seems like someone told me about a service somewhere that could alert me any time a certain web page changes. This would be good for watching blogs, forum posts, all sorts of things.

I went straight from vacation into crunch mode at work. Well, if there's a good way to go into crunch mode, that's probably it--at least you start out pretty relaxed. I have a conference in Los Angeles at the start of August, and we want to have a lot of things to show off by then. Y'know, I hate Los Angeles. It's big, it's dirty, it's crime-ridden, and the single-minded selfishness of the place creeps me out. At least for conferences I don't have to look at anything more than the hotel and the conference center--and it is a very nice conference center. Oh, and I'm aware there are probably tolerable regions of Los Angeles, but I'm always stuck downtown, and downtown is a nasty place by most measures.

Tenki no shita

2007-07-06T18:08:00.000-07:00

Post title means "under the weather," which means nothing in Japanese. I somehow managed to pinch a nerve in my neck, which aches like crazy. It made the plane ride home very unpleasant. I can't straighten my neck out without shooting pain, and working on the computer is also difficult. I'm going to go lie down now.

I will try to keep the blogging momentum going, but please excuse me for this short post.

Turbo Shrine Dash!

2007-07-04T07:30:00.000-07:00

So, I'm going to Tokyo to hang out with Eve tomorrow, which means that whatever else I want to see in Kyoto had to be seen *today*. Unfortunately, Kyoto is the city of a million shrines (this may be an exaggeration, but I dare you to prove me wrong: There's way too many to count). I mentioned that this was probably because the city had been the capital of Japan for 1,000 years, and Sister Sakai (our helpful taxi service for the day) corrected me: "Actually, 1,200 years." But what's two centuries between friends?

It was Sister Sakai's day off, and of all the 25 years she's lived in Kyoto, she had never been on the thousand gate hike at the Inari shrine. Therefore, naturally, we went to the thousand gate hike first. We got about halfway up the mountain before discovering two things:

1. The 'thousand gates' is more metaphorical. And not in the usual way. I there are *way more* than a thousand gates. If anyone has bothered to count them, congratulations. The entire walkway for long stretches is bridged by gates as far as you can see, and it's an exhaustingly long hike. The hike even branches off along multiple alternative paths, all of them covered with gates.

2. This is a fairly difficult hike. Even though it's paved with steps the whole way, it's still really steep, and the weather's quite hot. Clarissa and Sister Sakai made it to the halfway point (complete with bathrooms, vending machines, and souvenir shop) before asking that we go back. I figured I'd seen enough torii gates to last a lifetime, so back down we went.

3. The gates are all painted bright orange!? They also have black kanji carved on them. The kanji give the donor of each gate -- large gates from bigger companies, smaller gates from individuals or small businesses. Inari is a fox god (so there are many fox statues) and also the god of commercialism and making money (I am not making this up). Thus, Inari is a very popular god in Japan, and the businessmen like to show up at his shrine and pray for business success. Apparently, for a goodly fee, you can even go into the inner part of the shrine to pray closer to the enshrined object. Crass commercialism seems somehow appropriate for a god of commerce. Oh, we also spotted a miko (something like a priestess) doing a rather interesting bell dance for some client, whom we were informed had probably paid a goodly chunk of change for the privilege. There was a koto and a shamisen playing for the dance, and it was pretty.

The next shrine was the 'bursting waters' shrine (I think; I can't remember the Japanese name). There's a spring and you can drink from it. They provide long-handled metal cups for catching the flow of water, and UV lights to sterilize the cups after you drink. Having ancient looking mossy stone coves glowing purple from the UV lights seemed like a funny anachronism. There was also a stage , and Sister Sakai said that there exists a Japanese proverb: "If you jump from the stage at the bursting waters, you can fly." I was skeptical. Had anyone tried this? "Yeah, quite a few people. They all died."

After that we went to make reservations at the Imperial Palace (the emperor still uses it on occasion, so the security is tight), then went to the garden castle until our reservation came up. Unfortunately, this meant that we ended up with only 10 minutes to look at the garden castle, so we kind of did it at a run. The garden castle has tons of cool painting and nightingale floors, which squeak like a room full of birds being tortured. This is to prevent assassination. That's about all I saw.

The Imperial Palace doesn't let you into most of the buildings, but they do keep most of the outer doors open so you can look inside. The whole tour is shepherded by swarms of policemen, and was impressive.

Come evening, we went to the Sakai family's house (eh, it's small, but it's not so small that they can't have guests) and we ate sukiyaki. *Really good* sukiyaki. If we can get decent sauce, we need to give it a try. Mom's cast iron skillet would probably work (you cook it at the table ... hmm, we'll have to work something out).

No sign of the camera still, so I'm assuming that it's really and truly gone. After a brief period of mourning (and a chance for my bank account to recover) I'll have to get a new one. Clarissa has yet to come through on her promise to lend me some photos, but she swears blind that she has them, so hopefully they'll show up ... one of these days.

Parents normal, kid is a southerner

2007-07-03T07:52:00.000-07:00

My youngest sister arrived in Kyoto today, and we did some more of that hanging out thing. She only got about 2 hours of sleep on the train over, so she spent much of the day snoozing (falling asleep on the longer bus trips, falling asleep on the sofa in my hotel room, etc. etc.). Nathan had a work emergency, so he ended up stuck in the hotel room while we went to explore the silver shrine (he assures us that he's feeling a bit shrined out anyway, so this was no big loss). The silver shrine is not, as you might suspect, made of silver. No, it's made of wood. I think the only reason it's called the silver shrine is because there's a golden shrine on the other side of the city, and they wanted the names to match (the golden shrine IS gold-plated, so that's cool and all).

The silver shrine has awesome gardens. There's a cute display informing you that there are several types of moss. There's 'intruder moss,' 'normal moss,' and 'VIP moss' (with the latter being the most desirable). And sure enough, you may spot a gardener crouched down on the moss somewhere, hacking away at intruder moss to try and help the good moss flourish. It seems that all moss is not created equal! Japanese gardens are kind of interesting--they're deliberately kind of rough edged, with no obvious organization, to make it seem more like a natural forest. But they're also not natural at all--everything is just a little too perfect, the waterfalls arranged a little too conveniently, the bushes a little too round and the lilies a little too numerous for it to be completely natural. And of course, there's no bad moss.

After the silver shrine, we ate out with my sister's home-stay family from Kyoto. We had a very pleasant Korean barbecue. I think that the Korean barbecue in Los Angeles might be a bit more authentic, ironically, but it was very good Japanese/Korean food :-). The meat is Korean style, but they have to bring it neatly arranged in geometric patterns on decorative plates. If you order scrambled eggs and toast in this country then it's going to arrive in a geometrically arranged pattern on a decorative plate. Soup? It'll be in a decorative bowl, with approximately three separate garnishes, selected for their harmonious colors. Even at really cheap restaurants there's going to be some kind of effort to make the food decorative. It's kind of funny, but the Japanese expect it and like it, and it's also kind of fun. Oh, I tried both tripe and cow tongue, and they were fine.

One of the most entertaining things about the silver shrine was the sand gardens. The sand is carefully arranged with a rake into various geometric patterns. The sand is wet (naturally; dry sand happens to Other People in Other Countries), so it tends to stick together and keep its shape. Some of the shapes leave you wondering how they pulled it off -- large, perfectly flat plateaus with patterns raked into the top, much too large to reach across by hand. We were wondering if they have rakes with very long handles -- or perhaps they build the plateaus piece-by-piece, smoothing out the joins as they enlarge them? It is a great mystery.

My sister says she has photos of a lot of this stuff, so even though my own ability to produce photos has been cruelly removed, she should be able to supply handy supplementary materials later. Just as soon as I can get my hands on her laptop. Possibly after I get home.

The post title is in reference to the 12-year-old son of the homestay family. His parents have quite a normal, standard-Japanese accent, but the kid has a strong, slangy southern edge in the way he speaks. The accent in the Kyoto area is called "kansai-ben," and it tends to be a lot rougher and more informal than standard Japanese. The usual "wakarimasen" (I don't understand) becomes "wakarimahen." There are also a lot of different hesitation noises, and he has a bit of a schoolyard "tough kid" speech style. At least it's very entertaining to listen to.

Hiroshima, Osaka, and Kyoto

2007-07-02T02:11:00.000-07:00

I'm having a bit of hard time with the Internet here. It's working fine for Nathan, and it SORT of works for me, but we'll see how it goes.

I've been riding quite a few bullet trains lately. The first hour or so I spent gawking out the window at the ridiculously spiffy landscape flyby, but lately I've taken to reading books. I got through some enjoyably brain-dead space opera, and now I'm now reading some enjoyably brain-dead Anne McCaffrey. Will they crack the conspiracy? Will our hero survive and get the girl? Will the girl forgive our hero for being a doofus? I'm mildly in suspense on the final point.

In a moment, I'm going to wander downstairs and find out if the hotel's sushi is any good, but before that I'll update you on our touring:

We went to the "peace memorial" in Hiroshima. It is very close to where ground zero was for the atomic bomb back in 1945 (August 6th, I believe? The date gets repeated over and over and over in the exhibits). About 140,000 people died, and there are a lot of people left in the area who are "genbakusha" -- that is, survivors of the atomic bomb. They tend to have unique medical issues.

There was one building that was almost directly beneath the blast, which meant that all the horizontal surfaces were blown out but vertical walls mostly survived. It's called the A-bomb dome, because the original building had a large central dome, of which only a metal skeleton survives. There's a large park with a cenotaph, fountains, trees, etc. near that, and at the south end of the park is the museum. The museum and park cover the tragedy from nearly every possible angle--there are newspaper articles about the bombing, both contemporary and recent. There are models of the city before and after. There were huge numbers of schoolchildren (mostly junior-high aged it seems) who were working on demolishing houses for firebreaks against bombings, so about 8,000 of these students died; there was various memorabilia of all the different students, some of whom lived for several days before dying.

As a whole, the exhibit is quite gloomy (but of course, given the topic, it's hard for it to be anything otherwise). There is a desperate, urgent feel to the place, that "this must never be repeated, anywhere." The people who went through it seemed very intent that some kind of meaning be made out of the tragedy, and the meaning they pull from it is to make Hiroshima a "world peace city." The mayor of Hiroshima sends a strongly worded protest to any government that performs a nuclear test, and the full text of all those telegrams is engraved in stone. It did occur to me that the present emphasis in Japan on world peace is probably drawn especially from the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (I've been told that a commitment to nonviolent resolution of problems is actually in their pledge of allegiance).

After Hiroshima, we went to Osaka. Osaka is (I believe) the second-largest city in Japan, and famous for its food. Unfortunately, we only spent a little less than a day there, so didn't have a chance to sample much of it. Osaka looks like it has enough things to do to occupy an entire vacation, so perhaps some other year. Osaka has an amazing aquarium--there were dozens of tanks with some mighty big fish in them. The walkway spirals downward weaving through the tanks, so you start by seeing penguins, otters, iguanas and monkeys on the surface, and then gradually descends into the brightly colored swarms of fish swimming below them. The aquarium is themed around the "ring of fire," with species from various places around the world according to the position on the outside, with the "Pacific ocean" tank in the center. The Pacific tank is the spectacular centerpiece of the whole thing. There's a whale shark of some kind swimming among the manta rays and schools of fish--perhaps twenty or thirty different kinds. The walls of the Pacific tank are made of nine-inch-thick acrylic glass (the whole aquarium uses some 350 odd tons of acrylic glass, which they mention is more acrylic glass than is usually produced worldwide in an entire year). As you exit, you're walked past tanks and tubes of creatively lit jellyfish, in all their tentacled glory.

The one place we did get to eat was an okonomiyakiya. That's a kind of cook-at-your-table omelet, with lots of cabbage, meat, and noodles, and the slightest hint of egg. You eat it with a bunch of sauces, and you're not allowed to cook it yourself (the staff does it for you, and exhorts you not to touch it!). It was definitely one of my favorite meals of the trip, and there have been quite a few great ones.

And now, we find out whether the connection will work well enough to let me post this.

How to Lose Your Camera

2007-06-30T16:27:00.000-07:00

It looks like there has been a serious wrench in the gears as far as getting further pictures posted: My camera went missing yesterday. I'm not sure where or how exactly; it just noticed it wasn't around my neck anymore when I arrived on the ferry near Hiroshima. I immediately went back across on the ferry and walked backward along the path we took to the last place I remembered taking a picture. The ferry staff also checked the exact boat I'd been on and said it wasn't there. I thought I might have taken it off in a restaurant (eel on rice, was pretty good otherwise...) but the staff couldn't find it at the table. None of the shops I'd been in seemed to have it either.

I tried to leave a message at the police box, but the officer was on patrol, so I left a message at the information desk for the ferry instead. The lady there said she would call the hotel if they found anything. I don't have very high hopes for this, however, so it looks like I won't be photographing anything else.

This is now Sunday morning. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to figure out how to get to any of the Hiroshima branches, so it looks like we can't make church today. There do seem to be some branches in this area, but they're in rather distant prefectures, and I couldn't see any sane way of getting there by public transport. We're going to head to the site of the peace park (where the atom bomb was dropped some 62-odd years ago) and look around. Yesterday we went to Miyajima, which has been a shrine for about 1,200 years. There's a very nice torii gate built far out on the beach, and at high tide the gate and the shrine look like they are floating. We also took a cable car up to a station on the mountains, and I hiked to the peak. It was a bit hazy, but there was still a good view of the ocean on all sides. I believe that if you can make it on a clear day (which would probably mean that it would be a cold day), you can see a goodly dozen other islands poking out of the surrounding seas.

I bought some traditional maple-leaf sweet buns for a souvenir, and was having good fun until I discovered the lost camera. That pretty much ruined the day, but I'll get over it.

Shinkansen does not mean "Bullet Train"

2007-06-29T07:11:00.000-07:00

Bullet trains are a nickname given to the shinkansen by the English-speaking world. In fact, shinkansen means "new trunk line," since it is the new "backbone" line for getting across Japan. They do look kind of bullet shaped, though, and they go fast. I took a few videos from my camera looking through the train window; things close to the track whiz by in a blur and are impossible to make out, while the background rushes along at a frenetic pace. Unfortunately, the video clips are very large (50 MB for 30 seconds), and I don't have the programs with me for re-encoding them, and I don't want the hotel to get furious at me for uploading 50 megabytes, so you'll have to remind me to show these to you when I get home. Actually, the picture uploading isn't working from here either, so I'll have to show you my pictures from a different connection too.

We did finally manage to do some laundry before leaving. There was a laundromat (called a "coin laundry" in Japan) near Tokyo station, and we went there. It was sweltering hot out, and even sweltering hotter inside the laundry, but our luggage is now loaded with enough clothing to last out the rest of the trip. While we were there, a fellow from upstairs was wondering around looking for four foreigners who had a reservation at his restaurant. They never showed up, but we went up to take a look. It was on the third floor of an apartment building, and it was something like a tempura bar. We got a lot of tempura seafood with rice, miso soup, and a couple of other sides. It was really good. He had a box of tomatoes there and told us they were going to try doing them tempura style to see what would happen. Although, as he said, "pretty much anything you tempura is going to taste good." He then walked us for a few blocks until he was sure we knew where the train station was, and practiced his English on us, which was good fun.

We're out of Tokyo now, and in a much nicer hotel. The old hotel was in a good location, but it was small and the bathroom was a bit unpleasant. This hotel feels positively decadent, and although it cost a bit more I think it's definitely worth it. The bathroom sparkles, the room is reasonably spacious (with room to put the luggage somewhere AND sit down), and the restaurants look very good. We had Chinese food for dinner, of all things, and it was kind of like Chinese food done Japanese style, which is really interesting.

Oh, in all the restaurants in Japan, they hand you a hot, wet face cloth before you eat. It shows up steaming in a wooden dish, and it's for cleaning your hands. If it's a really cheap road-side type place, they'll give you a wet cloth in a little plastic bag and it won't be hot, but it's nearly always there. Since the weather is hot and humid right now, and you tend to get "train hands" from riding on the public transport, this is an awesome tradition. I think we should steal it.

Tokyo Disney Resort

2007-06-28T06:48:00.000-07:00

We have to get up kind of early, so unfortunately this post will be very short.

1. We're going to ride a shinkansen [train] tomorrow. Hooray! They go about 200 miles an hour, which is fricken awesome.

2. It's a little hard to find a laundromat in Tokyo. We need one.

3. Tokyo Disney Resort was fun. For some reason, Stitch has completely supplanted Mickey as the mascot here -- yeah, the little blue alien from Lilo & Stitch. He is stupid popular. There's piles and piles of Stitch merchandise, and the sign at the entrance reads "Tokyo Disney Resort/
Find Stitch!" There's a Stitch on every ride, I think, and a bunch of other places as well. Sure he's cute, but ... really? He even has his own dedicated parade, complete with some kind of 'Aloha' song.

4. Tapioca in a mango juice drink? Weird but ... kinda gooey. Fun.

5. I ate a Disney churro. It was pretty good.

6. "It's a Small World" as a song still sticks in your head, even if it's in Japanese.

Tomorrow will probably be comparatively boring, so maybe I'll have time to upload photos tomorrow. Maybe.

Yokohama ni Yokoso

2007-06-27T05:57:00.000-07:00

We're going to Disneyland Tokyo tomorrow, which means I need to try and get enough sleep tonight, which means the post will probably be short. I'm sure you'll all manage.

We spent the morning in our hotel room, largely because I had a bad sore throat and needed to vegetate for a while. The sore throat hasn't gone away, but it has faded over the course of the day, so I do hope it doesn't erupt into anything worse. I've discovered that hot, humid weather is actually fairly pleasant when you're not feeling well!

We went to Yokohama (the post title means 'welcome to Yokohama'). This is the second time we've taken a field trip there. This time we went to Chinatown with my sister. It is possible to tell the difference between Japantown (i.e. everything) and Chinatown, but it admittedly takes a trained eye. I'm told the main trick is that in Chinatown, everything is red, that being a lucky color in China, and of course Chinese text looks a little bit different (but you sort of have to know Japanese to notice this). Yokohama's Chinatown is the largest in Japan, and for this reason Yokohama has great Chinese food. We didn't avail ourselves of this, however--no, we had something else in mind.

The idea was to take my sister's host family out to dinner at a shabu shabu restaurant, but apparently Nathan didn't hang onto the check tightly enough and the dad stole it from us when he wasn't looking. So, in fact, we were treated to dinner by said host family (on the understanding that we'd return the favor if they were ever in the U.S. ... which we would). Shabu shabu is a 'boil it yourself' buffet. You have a divided pot with water on one side and something like soy milk on the other, both of them boiling. You have very thinly sliced bits of pork and beef, which you pick up with your chopsticks and dump in the boiling water. I think "shabu shabu" is the sloshing sound from rolling meat around in the water. The meat only takes a few seconds to cook, so you can stuff yourself pretty effectively. There's also a wide selection of vegetables and noodles available for boiling, and it was really delicious. The hardest bit is trying to figure out how to get the grated carrot back out using nothing but chopsticks!

Although we were defeated on the bill-paying front, we managed to sneak in a box of See's candy which I brought along. I also had some packets of American money for Rin & Ren, the two kids. I have some photos with the family now, which I'll show off to anyone who asks--but probably not on the blog. Unfortunately, I think the family still wins on the hospitality front, because they then decided to drive us all the way back to Akihabara, which was terribly convenient for us and a longish drive for them. Thus defeated in the hospitality game, we plot revenge if they ever visit the states--maybe we can rent a limmo? ;-)

Tomorrow: Disneyland!

The ABC Song

2007-06-26T05:47:00.000-07:00

Today was "hang out with Eve and Rissy" day. We slept in pretty late, so didn't get all that much done this morning. Probably the biggest thing we're trying to solve is the problem of doing laundry in Japan. It turns out this is really difficult -- laundromats do exist, but there aren't any nearby. Taking a taxi would probably work, but of course we'd rather not (taxis are about $20 each way I'm guessing). For those of you who think I have a lot of money, I'd like to point out that part of the reason for this is that I hate spending it stupidly, and taking a taxi to the laundromat is pretty high on my stupid list.

So, Hang Out Day started off with a boat ride. Tokyo is a waterfront city with a bay to the south, and there is a company that offers "Tokyo Bay Cruises." These are not quite as luxurious as the name makes it sound--there's no tour guide, and the boat clips along at power boat speeds, and you end up somewhere different than where you started--so it's really more of a ferry with a decorative passenger compartment. There weren't very many passengers, so we were able to sit out in the open on the back of the ship, which was fun. Tokyo is a massive city, kind of like an extended version of Manhattan. The cruise must have traveled a good 10-15 miles and it was high rise buildings the whole way. The photo I've included here was taken from the boat, and shows part of a forest of particularly tall high rise apartments on the shore.

Whimsically enough, we ended up on the boat to the Asakusa shrine, which was a convenient way of checking two sites off the to-do list in one trip. Asakusa is very different from the Meiji shrine. Instead of a huge forest of trees, it's surrounded by avenues of tourist-vampire shops. The shrine itself is taller and more impressive than the Meiji shrine, and done in red, black, white, and gold. It lacks the quiet gravity of the Meiji shrine, but it's a lot more energetic. There is a nice garden off to one side, and the picture I've included is a pair of wooden miniature shrines from the garden. I actually have no idea what they are or what they're for, but they look cool. You can see part of the massive main shrine towering over the trees in the background. Honestly, the company was more fun than the actual shrine, but the shrine was good too.

After Asakusa, Eve set off on her self-selected mission to acquire ... um, I don't remember what. Possibly little rectangular brownie-like candies. We might also have been pursuing handkerchiefs. Whatever the case, our newly acquired mission led us to the nearest 100-yen shop. The shop is several stories of aisles packed with goods that all cost (you guessed it): 105 yen. I acquired some sugary snacks (Japan has better gummy candies) and some pottery. Then we went to dinner and ate food. I ate raw fish, Clarissa had a cook-at-your-table sukiyaki plate (that's meat and vegetables boiled in a nummy broth), Eve got a fried then boiled (yeah, weird) pork cutlet which she says was wonderful, and Nathan discovered that yes, they really do expect you to cut up your meatloaf with chopsticks.

At some point, Clarissa decided she needed to acquire some figurines. The stores near the hotel had closed, but Yodobashi Akiba (near the train station) was still open, so we headed that way. Yodobashi has an entire floor of action figures. Eve particularly enjoyed the entire aisle dedicated to Ultraman figures--a show so stupid that it's awesome. If you're curious about the show, you can give Youtube a browse, but be warned: Your eyes may never forgive you, if they can survive your brain oozing out of your ears. After that little nugget of entertainment, we headed back to our hotel.

The title of the post is because Eve sung us the alphabet song, which was really cute. If you've never heard Eve sing before, you should browbeat her into doing so, because it's awesome. Then the girls headed home (for some reason they have to get up in the morning) and that brings you up to now, at which point, dear reader, I have no idea what happens next. I'm probably going to go downstairs and buy a drink. Maybe I'll get one of the sodas with gummy candies in it.

Visit to the Meiji Shrine

2007-06-25T07:09:00.000-07:00

We visited the Meiji shrine today. Before I get into that, I'll mention that I'm acquainted with one of the priests who works at the shrine, but we didn't see him today. It's a pity, because he's devilishly hard to get hold of. We've tried telephone (to the shrine; we don't have a home number) and email, and we don't have any other contact information. I don't have any ideas left for getting hold of him.

The shrine and grounds are impressive. The first picture is the Torii gate (rhymes with story) near the entrance to the shrine. There are two of these, both about the same size. The huge posts are each cut from a single Japanese cypress, which the sign tells us were 1,500 years old. The walk to the shrine stretches over about a kilometer of wide, graveled walkway (you can get a feel for how wide the path is from the picture). The walkway is surrounded by trees, and there was an old man with a wide broom walking his way along, sweeping up all the leaves that fell onto the path. This struck me as a sisyphean task, especially when autumn comes around, but the walkway is remarkably well groomed, so I have to hand it to the old guy with the broom.

The shrine itself is a huge stone courtyard with two spots for trees. On the right is a single tree surrounded by racks of votive tablets. Apparently, what you do is buy a wooden tablet for 500 yen (about 3 or 4 dollars) and then write a prayer on it. You then hang this around the divine tree, and the priests will offer up the prayers at some point. I'm not sure what that involves -- burning them or something, perhaps -- but the practice seems very popular. There were several thousand of the tablets hanging there in rows and columns and stacks, completely surrounding the tree. The tablets were written in a variety of languages, so this seems to be a popular practice. The handful I noticed mostly seemed to be things like "that my family may be happy and prosperous" or "I want my boyfriend to find his way back to me."

Further into the shrine is the area where you go to offer prayers. They have rows of tables with wooden slats instead of a surface. The idea is that you chuck a few coins into the slats and they fall through into a collection box of some kind underneath. You then clap your hands a few times (to make the gods of the shrine pay attention, I think) and then bow to the enshrined gods while offering up any prayers you have. I took a miss on this bit (something about the second commandment), but it still made me think.

One of the things that "you have to be there" to notice is that the prayer room of the Meiji shrine really does have a certain feel to it. It was very much a spiritual feeling--like a good home, or like a temple. It crossed my mind that while the gods of that temple may be a little hard of hearing, I think those prayers are still being heard. I suppose the visitors won't all get the things they're asking for, but I think that's all right. Getting what you want is not really the purpose of prayer anyway.

The outer part of the shrine has a large garden that has been cultivated for several centuries. The garden is spectacularly well groomed. Of course, there's something kind of funny about the way they do it. The garden is supposed to give you a kind of 'back to nature' feel, so everything is arranged in a flowing, organic way. By comparison, English style gardens are a lot more geometrically arranged.

The picture here is from the iris garden. You can't see it, but every single one of those irises has a little wooden tablet with several kanji characters on it posted next to the plant. I can't read very well still but I think they might have been family names. Perhaps you can donate to the shrine and get an iris planted?

You might also notice the fence along the side of the walkway. The fence is made entirely of woven bamboo strips poked into the ground, woven into an interlocking pattern. And in a wonderful "you're in Japan" moment, as soon as we walked past that wooden canopy, there was a rest area filled with vending machines. I got a milky white drink with little chewy cubes in it, and it tasted great.

We also went to Harajuku and looked at all the costumed teenagers wandering about. I ate some sukiyaki, and we found the Apple store in Shibuya (after much asking around--most of the people we asked had never even heard of the company, which made things dead difficult). Oh, and it's gotten late, so I think I'll have to wrap it up now.

Yokohama Church

2007-06-24T07:21:00.000-07:00

So, for some reason, I didn't take a picture of the church building in Yokohama, so you'll have to settle for this highly attractive Catholic church instead.

So, we went to church in Yokohama, largely because Clarissa persuaded us to do so. It was a lot of fun -- there was a nice fellow who translated sacrament meeting for us, and then taught Sunday school in English (there was a special "English only" class for us foreign types). There are a lot of foreigners in the ward (many Chinese?) so it has a cosmopolitan feel to it.

After church, we got invited to some kind of "family home evening" activity, where a Chinese guy was making noodles for everyone who showed up. It seems to have been aimed at the single adults, in which category both Nathan and I are abundantly qualified. The food was a cold noodle dish with a salty broth, chewy noodles, cucumber, ham, tomato, and omelet strips. It was really good. This was preceded by an amusing brief message about reverence from one of the bishopric.

After that, Clarissa's homestay family invited us over. They really do have a very nice house. We ended up eating dinner there (we were told that the mom had just done yakisoba noodles for 600 kids at a school function, and that doing dinner for five people was hardly any work at all by comparison). We also got lots of advice on stuff to do in Tokyo, and the dad drew various maps of places we could go. The conversations were built out of an amusing English/Japanese pidgin, since everyone spoke just a little of the other's language. The kids, Rin and Ren, are absurdly cute, and I totally spaced taking any pictures. We got invited back for Wednesday, so I'll have to take care of that then. I have some gifts to give them anyway, so being invited back is fortunate, cause I didn't bring them this time around.

Anyway, I'm trying not to stay up too late, which means not writing too terribly much. It's 11:30 already. Bye bye faithful reader! (I find it hard to believe there's much more than one).

A post from Japan

2007-06-23T06:23:00.000-07:00

Well, I appear to be in Japan. Two days ago, I was getting a haircut, and I mentioned I was going to Japan, and the hairdresser said "Cool. Where's that?" So in order to avoid further stupid comments, I'll explain: Japan is a country. If you cross the ocean from California, you'll get there. It's very green and hot and muggy, at least in summer.

The first picture is some kind of twisty statue in Yokohama. This city is where my favorite youngest sister is staying. It is close to Tokyo, which is to say it takes about an hour on the train for us to get from our hotel to Yokohama. They have a kind of amusement park there with a ferris wheel, which we rode. I have a lot of photos taken from the ferris wheel, but I didn't have the presence of mind to take a picture of the ferris wheel itself. Interesting.

We left Utah Thursday morning and arrived in Japan on Friday afternoon. That might sound like it takes over 24 hours to get here, but it's mostly the time zone changes -- it really takes about 14 hours. My sister met us at the airport and I barely recognized her. She styled her hair to match the current Japanese fashion, and she was wearing a currently fashionable hat, which conspired to make her look different. Since she hasn't been posting pictures in her own blog, I'll stick one up for you.

The train ride from the airport to our hotel (in Akihabara, which is in central Tokyo) was really long--about 90 minutes, and the train was crowded enough that we had to stand the whole way. What made it seem twice as long is that we were carrying all our luggage with us. The luggage has this "neat" feature that it can roll in any direction, not just straight backward. This seems like a great idea until you realize it doesn't have any brakes! This means that on a train ride, it kind of wanders all over the place, and when there's people all around you it takes a lot of strenuous effort to keep it off of everyone's toes. On top of that, it doesn't roll too well when there's a lot of weight in it--Nathan's big luggage weighed a bit over 50 pounds, and the wheels completely gave out somewhere in the flight over. This makes it *very difficult* to move around, and we're busy making other plans for luggage.

For my final picture, I took a picture of a Japanese street scene. This was taken while hiking to the Square-Enix store to buy geeky products. The "differentness" of Japan really hits you when you're out on the streets. Simply wandering around the city, taking in all the sights and watching the people is a lot of the fun of being here. A lot of the buildings are a little dingy and grubby. Rather than focus on scrubbing the buildings till they sparkle (we'll call that the "Provo way"), they are instead covered from top to bottom with bright, cheesy advertising and signs. The entire city is covered in advertising of one sort or another, lots of bright colors, super-cute cartoon characters, and stylishly smug foreigners modeling exotic products. The Japanese love European-style sophistication, and most of their advertising uses Caucasians as models. The cacophony of advertising gives everything a noisy, cluttered feel, which is kind of fun but also kind of exhausting.

That's about all I have time for (and I probably won't be able to pump out a big post like this every day :P). I have church with my sister tomorrow, and need to go to bed to make it to the station in time.