jrc Blog

I volunteered to help manage huge crowds of people at a conference today. Basically, I stood around for hours wearing a bright yellow shirt and directing people to stay in line, behind dividers, not run, and so forth. Even though it involved waking up at 5 AM, I tend to volunteer because you get to meet people, because it’s a break from sitting in front of a computer, and also because it forces you to act in a different way (than how I normally do). It’s fun.

In some ways, it was like the Stanford Prison Experiment, especially when you’re trying to contain 500 hungry, restless college students in an enclosed space. The worst part was trying to herd 4,000 engineers into an auditorium within a fixed timeframe. In my ideal world, people would recognise the situation (”we need to pack this auditorium so please move to the middle of the row and fill up all the seats”) and comply without being told. In the real world, as I discovered, people claim edge seats and refuse to move, even when asked. They make up the worst excuses, too, and glare at you like you’re asking them to give away some sort of entitlement.

It really seems that writing software — i.e. moving bytes and pushing pixels — is easier than managing crowds of people. These weren’t even angry people.

1. Kiev, Ukraine
2. Geneva, Switzerland
3. Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

[Swedes express] a fundamental longing for individual autonomy and a desire not to depend on or be indebted to anyone, particularly not in intimate relationships — what the authors call “the Swedish theory of love.”

“This means that an ideal relationship between two people is based on mutual independence,” Trägårdh says. “In comparative terms, this is rather spectacular. In most other cultures, the opposite — mutual dependence — is seen as the very stuff of love.”

Full article: iht.com

Although for the past months I’ve been renting rooms at friends’ places in San Francisco, tonight is officially the first night in our “own” place in the City. To celebrate, I’ve updated the blog description in the upper-right corner.

We spent the whole weekend moving and packing and unpacking the rental truck, spending >$1200 at IKEA and assembling furniture, and getting Comcast to work (activation requires IE5 for Mac - wtf), among other things. I’m tired! But I’m relieved that the big move is over. Most things are still in boxes though.

One of my new housemates is Swedish, and the other is half-Finnish, so it’s kind of a Scandinavian House. We’re all software engineers, which adds a level of geek to it, too. There’s also an empty 4th bedroom, but we’re planning to use it as an office or library instead of renting it out for now. We only have 1 bathroom so 4 people may be a bit much. The apartment is in a nice location, near Duboce Park.

More to come once the dust settles.

Here’s an approximate distribution of where I’ve lived in my adult life (defined to be after age 16):

• 15% Midwest
• 27% Mid-Atlantic
• 4% Texas
• 44% Northern California
• 10% Scandinavia

We’re moving to San Francisco this weekend, and I’m really looking forward to it. But I’m a bit worried about that California figure getting too high. I’ll have to make sure it doesn’t go over 50% during the course of my lifetime.

“Although it sounds strange to suggest it in 2007, perhaps blood pressure readings will one day replace or augment GDP as a measure of the success of a country.”
- thelocal.se

The other day my co-worker came into my office to chat. One of the things that came up is that our group seems too compartmentalized, as we mostly work on discrete (though related) components. There’s a weekly engineering meeting, but it’s too formal and mostly a waste of time. There’s also a weekly lunch, but it’s too informal and people avoid talking about work. Most of the time, people are so busy that they just stay in their offices.

So we decided to try to institute a fika tradition, which is like a coffee version of tea time. Fika is a Swedish verb which means “to take a coffee break”. My manager liked the idea, too, since he’s a coffee fiend. Now it’s scheduled into our corporate calendar system: “Fika”, every day from 15.00 to 15.30.

Even though there’s a café in building 1, my manager and I ran out this afternoon and acquired a bunch of coffee supplies. We bought a Bodum french press, a water cooker, some Melitta cones and filters, and Peet’s coffee beans. We also fetched my Rancilio coffee grinder, my iJoy massage chair, and some cookies and brought them to the office.

We’re not as efficient and orderly as the Swedish version can be but already after just a few days, it’s been a big hit. People are being forcibly dragged out of their offices, but once set face to face, they start talking, bouncing between work and non-work related topics. People find themselves talking through problems out loud, with improved or unexpected solutions offered by other people (”Did you try…”, “Did you know about…”, “Did you know they’re planning to…”). People also find themselves meeting random people from other teams, who stop by with empty coffee mugs or to ogle the massage chair.

I guess studying humanities abroad actually did teach me something that could be applicable to high-tech engineering work: how to fika!

People ask me nowadays if I’m vegetarian. I could pass for one, but I avoid using that word because I’m not a purist about it, but also because what underlies my choice of diet goes beyond simple vegetarianism.

Today’s New York Times has a wonderful article by Michael Pollen concerning modern nutrition and diet. The message is that healthy eating has a core principle: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

By “food”, he means real food, not processed food products. The article concludes with a list of rules which give more context to the message. I believe they’re spot-on, and they’re the same rules which I’ve been trying to practice myself but haven’t been able to enunciate quite as well.

Here’s a condensed version:

1. Eat food. … Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best.
3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number — or that contain high-fructose corn syrup.
4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market; you also won’t find food harvested long ago and far away.
5. Pay more, eat less. … Paying more for food well grown in good soils — whether certified organic or not — will contribute not only to your health but also to the health of others who might not themselves be able to afford that sort of food. … “Calorie restriction” has repeatedly been shown to slow aging in animals, and many researchers believe it offers the single strongest link between diet and cancer prevention.
6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. … Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he advised treating meat more as a flavoring than a food.
7. People who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren’t a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t still be around.
8. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden.
9. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases. … Biodiversity in the diet means less monoculture in the fields… Diversifying those fields will mean fewer chemicals, healthier soils, healthier plants and animals and, in turn, healthier people. It’s all connected, which is another way of saying that your health isn’t bordered by your body and that what’s good for the soil is probably good for you, too.

Oh, people also ask me if I’m happy to be “back” from living abroad. I don’t have a cogent answer to that, but I have to say that my #1 favorite thing about Northern California is the food. The availability of fresh, locally grown, diverse ingredients and the infusion of East Asian, South Asian, and Latin American populations — along with the combination of 1) the hippie emphasis on healthy, natural living, 2) the yuppie willingness to pay premium for quality, and 3) the techie compulsion for meticulous perfectionism — make this place (and San Francisco in particular) an ideal place to be a foodie.

I’ve lived in San Francisco for two weeks now but I still work in South Bay. Here’s my commute:

07.30 - Walk to Muni Metro station, 1 block away.
07.40 - Transfer to Muni bus
08.00 - Arrive at Caltrain station. Buy latte and pastry. Sit in train. Use free Internet.
08.11 - Express train leaves San Francisco.
08.55 - Arrive in Mountain View. Transfer to company shuttle.
09.14 - Arrive at work.

Total time: 1 hr 44 min

Sounds crazy, but it’s worth it. On the weekends I have a ton of fun with people in San Francisco, and on Monday I go back to work feeling like I just had a vacation — which is basically true.

I do have the luxury of 1) working from home once in a while and 2) spending the night at my mom’s house (biking distance to work), so I’m not bound to this commute every day. In any case, once you get used to the route, it becomes mindless.

By the way, that hour sitting in the train is very useful, stress-free time (eat breakfast, read books or newspapers, listen to podcasts, work on laptop, take a nap). In the evenings, you can talk to people and even drink beer. So it should be more like

Total time: 1 hr 44 min - 55 min = 49 min

Cost: $3.35 (assuming 23 workdays/month and purchase of Caltrain 3-zone monthly pass with Muni sticker and $25 employer credit)

That also gives unlimited rides on Muni, VTA, and Caltrain (some zone restrictions apply). My monthly transportation expense is $154, plus the occasional taxi ride.

Compared to automobile: 49 min (according to Google Maps). For the commute alone, the transportation expense would be $1408 each month (assuming 45 miles each way, 15 mpg @ $2.70/gal, no parking or toll costs, $0.50/mile vehicle operating and ownership costs, see AAA 2006).

Dear Mr Bach (Microsoft) and Mr Colligan (Palm): Go back to Public Relations 101. Study the responses from Nokia and Sony Ericsson. Don’t go bad-mouthing your competition, because someday it’ll come back to haunt you. And don’t comment on rumors.

Microsoft

Robbie Bach, president of entertainment and devices division: (zdnet.com)