These Are My Feet

48

2011-12-23T17:44:00.000-08:00

It took me more than a week to get around to my annual birthday post, which probably says all that needs to be said. This year i did my annual bike ride solo, riding around San Diego's south bay to Coronado Island and then back to home. About 90 miles total, but slow.

In most ways this was a better year than last. My hip is better, though not perfect, and i've even done a little running, wise or not. I did my first double century bike ride, and i got my "black fringe" in tai chi. My work has gone fairly well. I guess the theme would be normalcy.

I do however have this feeling of having crossed some threshold that i can't quite define yet. I find that my days are bracketed by certain pleasant moments-- the minutes i get to read in the evening before i fall asleep, the first cup of coffee in the morning. I don't have any grand plan for my life, as young people must, and it's a strange transition. The only remaining life-change for me is when both kids are out of the house. The older son will be in college by this time next year, and the younger will be there (i presume) in four years. That will make me 52 and faced with a decision about what to do next.

I don't know what the decision will be. I'm certain that i don't want a standard path. I don't want to play golf, or build my dream house, or (god forbid) relax. My inspiration at the moment is Dick Proenneke, who at about that age moved to Alaska to live alone in the wilderness for the next 30 years. That seems like a decent retirement. I just have to hope that my kids don't want to move back home.

Part of the problem is that at this age i find it ridiculously difficult to plan anything. I still need to. There's college to be paid for and a house to make salable, and various loose ends to tie. The conundrum is to figure out how to walk the fine line between utter randomness and enough structure to provide for those who depend on me.

Not Much To Say

2011-09-05T19:16:00.000-07:00

This is my second post of 2011, and it's September. I suppose that's mainly because i've not had anything to say that i couldn't fit into a tweet or a Facebook update. Some things that i've considered writing about, but can't find enthusiasm for:

The disappearance of the middle class. In the 1970s/1980s my aunt and uncle worked on the assembly line at the International Harvester plant. It was probably not a fun or fulfilling job, but they managed to make enough money to pay a mortgage, buy cars, take vacations, etc. Now, the jobs are gone, the plant is gone, etc.
I've had a titanium/ceramic hip for over 18 months now. Still not perfect. I have done a little running recently, and i did a 23 minute 5K with my sons, which isn't bad for an old guy with a replacement hip-- even if it's the slowest i've run.
I've been trying to develop into an ultra-endurance cyclist. I did my first double century back in June.
How when you get old, you start to realize that the things you wanted out of life were either silly or pointless; and how i wonder whether this is some sort of biological defense mechanism to keep you from killing yourself.
How blogging is probably going to disappear.

My Hip at One Year

2011-02-11T18:30:00.000-08:00

This past Wednesday was the first anniversary of my hip replacement surgery. I can't really say it's back to normal, nor am i sure what normal is now. I don't have any pain bearing weight on it, but it's definitely weaker and i still have some difficulty lifting that leg. I'm not sure if my hip flexor needs more rehab, or if i'm dealing with an ongoing process of healing for muscles that were significantly traumatized.

I'm back to doing my martial arts training at a near full levels of effort, although i don't spar or grapple. I've done a lot of cycling, including another century ride; and i can even jog for short distances. On the other hand, i'm the heaviest i've been for years, and i've lost most of the substantial aerobic base i took years to build up.

I get asked fairly often if the surgery was worth it. I think so, but i don't think a year is long enough to say for sure. The deciding factors in the long run will be how close i can get to my previous physical condition (adjusted for age), and whether any radically better alternatives show up. I don't yet consider the lifetime of the prosthetic itself to be a factor, because i'm not convinced that in even a decade the methods of dealing with worn-out joints will be the same as they are now. There are so many younger people getting joint replacements now, that i think the demand for better, different solutions will increase dramatically.

47

2010-12-18T07:43:00.000-08:00

It's hard to find good things to say about a year in which the chief memory is having major surgery. But all in all it was a relatively smooth year and if you subtract the hip replacement and the end of my running days, it wasn't bad. Though for some reason 47 seems much older than 46, much more on the verge of 50.

I did a decent birthday ride this year, about 80 miles up through Camp Pendleton and back with my friend Cathy. We got rained on riding through the community of Vista, which was actually kind of fun (especially since it eventually stopped). It's nice to ride through Pendleton, but they limit the roads you can ride on to just what you need to get through the base to parts north. When i drove on the base prior to the Hard Corps marathon in 2009, i saw much more of the base and i wish i could ride through it.

It was a pretty leisurely ride and we did a lot of chatting. Although i'm not in very good shape by the standards of some previous years, i'm in decent bike shape, since i've done more mileage this year than any in recent memory. So I had expected to ride 100+ miles, but we realized we were going to run out of daylight so we stopped in Rancho Santa Fe at the golf shop run by Cathy's significant other Tom.

Running was the unifying force in my life. I planned my days around it, and to some extent my year. It helped me sleep and eat better and helped me de-stress. I'm still trying to figure out what to replace that with. Biking, swimming, tai chi are options, but none of those have quite the same qualities of convenience and simplicity. I hope that by 48 i will have at least figured out this one aspect of my life.

My Hip At Six Months

2010-08-08T21:10:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is 6 months since my hip replacement surgery. I'd love to say that i am completely normal and good as new, but for the last month or so i've had some pain in the front or side of my hip that i hope is tendinitis. I can bear weight on my hip, i can ride my bike without pain, and i can swim without pain; but lifting my leg straight up as one would do in kicking outward or lifting your leg into a high seat (e.g., my truck) is painful. It seems to be getting slowly better, so i'm hopeful that all of my spare parts are still in place. Still, i wished to be essentially back to normal by this point, so i have to admit to some disappointment.

When i last visited my orthopedic surgeon, he said that i could "bike my brains out". He probably did not understand the license that gave me to overdo it. I now regularly ride 50+ miles at a time on the weekends, and i favor hills and other challenges. I also do regular tai chi and i've been testing my leg on kung fu forms. I suspect this is inappropriate behavior for a hip-replacement patient, but i'm not inclined to take it easy until forced to do so. At this point in my life this is what i have to live for, so i'm clinging to it with all the strength i can muster.

There are things of which I may not speak;    
There are dreams that cannot die;            
There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak,  
And bring a pallor into the cheek,    
And a mist before the eye.      
And the words of that fatal song      
Come over me like a chill:                
A boy's will is the wind's will,  
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.

Elephant Maintenance, Part I

2010-07-10T21:48:00.000-07:00

Some images from my adventures in home improvement.

These are three nests that i removed from a bush near my garage that had grown out of control. Don't worry, they were long-since abandoned. I've been putting the debris from this bush in the greenery recycling for the last 3 weeks, but i still have about half of it left.

A couple of weeks ago, i put in a temporary section of PVC to patch an irrigation problem. Unfortunately, it didn't hold; but it did make this interesting looking inverse-crater thingy. Sadly, laying PVC for irrigation is one of the things that i'm good at. Imagine how badly the things that i'm bad at turn out.

The White Elephant Project

2010-06-09T19:52:00.000-07:00

The origin of the term white elephant comes from southeast Asia, where receiving a white elephant as a gift often turned out to be a curse. They are expensive to keep but, because they are sacred, could not be used for labor or given away. So the expression means any thing that you can't get rid of, but you are obligated to take care of even at great expense.

That's a pretty good description of my house. It's a decent house in a good neighborhood, but in retrospect buying it seemed like a better idea at the time. We searched for a long time for a house that had a number of specific features. First, we wanted a fourth bedroom because we thought that our families would visit more often if we had a spare room. As it turned out, that extra room has been occupied maybe 20 nights during the 8+ years we've been here. Second, we (mostly i) wanted more lot space. I grew up on a farm, so our 1 acre lot is a compromise between rural and suburban. Third, we wanted an older neighborhood, or at least one that was not a completely uniform development where the choices were between beige stucco and gray stucco.

We found a place with those features at a fairly sane price by southern California standards. We knew it was a bit of a fixer-upper, but we had reasonable expectations of increasing equity and disposable income. In fact, those expectations were met until the economic meltdown of 2008. We made some minor home improvements, replaced the heating/air conditioning and the roof, renovated the pool, did a little landscaping and painting, etc. I put in grass on the back part of our lot (over 7000 sq. ft.), which was a blindly stupid thing to do in a place with no rain.

Any house requires more maintenance than you expect. A house that's almost 40 years old requires more. A 40 year-old house where the previous owner was an ambitious but unskilled DIY-er, where there are parts of the property you don't set foot on for months, where the trees grow faster than you can cut them down is a bloody, freakin' nightmare. It is a white elephant.

Technically, there is nothing sacred about this particular white elephant. My reluctance to sell it stems partially from the fact that my kids like this community, and partially from the reality that it's definitely not a seller's market. However, since i simply can't let it fall apart for the next five years while my sons finish up school, i've started to make some incremental fixes. In the cluttered bazaar that is my psyche, i call this the White Elephant Project.

The project is complicated by the fact that i have no money, so it is primarily a sweat equity sort of thing. The only real difference between me and the previous owner is that i am fully aware that i have no skill. I will probably limit my activity to cleaning, cutting, and the minor repairs that i've mastered over 25 years of home ownership. I am somewhat fortunate that my property can be improved significantly simply by removing things.

My first steps have involved trimming some of the runaway flora, and fixing some of the irrigation (there must be a mile of unused PVC under my ground). I got a pro to remove the more troublesome trees. This summer i hope to take down a rotting shed, fix some of the outdoor plumbing and electrical, and get some of the windows fixed. Probably the biggest challenge is figuring out what to do with all of the extra space. I'd really like to open it up to a sort of community garden thing, but i'm fairly sure my litigious neighbors would go apeshit.

I feel guilty at times that i have a sort of reverse American dream, by which i mean that traditionally the dream is to own one's home while mine is to unload the thing at the first opportunity. In a sense this place should seem sacred, since it is where my kids grew up; and fixing it should be a labor of love. Instead, it feels like a huge, festering symbol of every bad choice i've ever made.

Anyway, i will probably do periodic updates on the project as it proceeds.

Paleolithic Fitness

2010-05-15T15:41:00.001-07:00

In my quest to find something to replace running as my primary fitness activity, i've come across material on the idea of paleolithic (and its cousin primal) fitness. The idea here is roughly that our early ancestors were (we assume) pretty fit even though they did not exercise in any methodical way. Rather, fitness was the consequence of needing to hunt for sustenance, being limited to only natural (often raw) food, and having little in the way of sedentary pastimes. It seems the case for this approach is often made on evolutionary grounds-- that the best exercise and food mimic the patterns of the earliest humans because those are the patterns that allowed us to survive when conditions were the most harsh for our species. I get the impression though that there's a bit of the Noble Savage mixed in too.

Most of the gurus eschew long-duration cardio exercise in favor of interval-like training, presumably to simulate chasing after prey (or being chased after by predators). That's a little strange to me, since it's fairly well established now that humans have evolved lungs and hearts that are remarkably good systems for endurance, but we didn't end up with a structure that's all that good for speed. On the other hand, i do believe in the benefits of interval training. When i was running, i found intervals to be the best way to get faster. There seems to be a lot of similarity between the paleo/primal approach and the functional fitness movement. Not much equipment, simplicity of exercises, more focus on full motion and less isolation. Strength training is mixed with endurance training and flexibility, and they avoid strict schedules and prescribed exercises. I think that's probably a great approach for general, base fitness; but i also suspect that it's insufficient for any specific sport.

Another aspect of the paleo approach is a tendency toward more protein and less carbs (that is to say, meat). At least one program i found completely eliminates grains, and discourages legumes (beans and stuff). That might explain why they don't care for endurance sports. I honestly don't know if cavemen really had meat-rich diets; or if that's a bias formed from things like the Lascaux cave paintings and the Flintstones. I suspect cavemen ate whatever did not kill them and they could digest. Again, i think this dietary approach works backwards from an idea of fitness that prefers to build muscle, get lean, and not do too much endurance exercise. I think it would probably be disastrous for Michael Phelps or the average Kenyan marathoner. Plus, to be honest, i'd rather have spaghetti than six-pack abs.

My Hip At Three Months

2010-05-08T22:41:00.000-07:00

Today is three months since my hip replacement. I am probably a bit further in my recovery than average, but i'm not where i wish i were. I've been biking for a few weeks now without any pain, and i've been doing tai chi for the last two weeks. In general, regular motions are not too bad, but any sort of eccentric motion is both difficult and sometimes painful (twists, lateral steps). My left leg is still very weak compared to my right, and i find that i sometimes use my quads and calves to compensate for weak glutes and hip flexors, which puts pressure on my knee.

After a year of physical deterioration, i feel very impatient to get back into some sort of shape. I'm about 20 pounds heavier than i was when i was running regularly, and since i still have limited mobility i feel... old. I tried to come to terms with the things that i would not be able to do after the surgery, but i'm not quite over the psychological impact of going from being somebody who was in abnormally good shape to somebody who pretty much meets people's expectation of a 46 year-old man.

The only goal i have set at this point is to ride the Tour de Poway Century ride in early October. However, i also hope to get back to my normal weight by the end of summer, and get the strength back in my left leg. I'm trying to do Tabata-style training to compensate for the lack of hard cardio , but i find i'm not quite fit enough at the moment to get through the full sets for exercises like push-ups and pull-ups. I can do squats, however, i'm not sure that i'm working both legs equally.

At this point i'm still stubbornly convinced that i can get back to some physical level that will make both me and other people forget that i am an invalid. As i approach 50 i realize that most people's expectations will be lower, but i've spent the the last decade among people who were 50, 60, or 70 and still pushing the envelope. There will probably be a day when playing golf or taking walks will seem adequate, but i hope that day does not come soon.

Re-Reading

2010-05-05T20:32:00.000-07:00

I've been re-reading a lot of old books, in part to save money and in part because i've begun to realize how poorly i can recall books that i remember liking the first time. It's a strange feeling to read a book that you read twenty years earlier and to find how little of the plot seems familiar. For example, i've been re-reading Saul Bellow's novel Humboldt's Gift. I remember most of the characters, even the names, but the plot is completely fresh. I'm about half way through and i honestly don't know how it's going to unfold (ironically, memory was a common theme in Bellow's later works).

What's even stranger is that i have a vivid memory of the circumstances surrounding my purchase of this book. While still in college my wife (then girlfriend) and i made a trip to Chicago while visiting my family in Indiana. We went to Stuart Brent's bookstore on Michigan Avenue and i picked up a pamphlet that listed 100 books that Brent considered essential. One was Humboldt's Gift. I had not even heard of Bellow at that point, but there was something about the title that appealed to me. I ended up buying it in mass-market paperback form at a chain bookstore in the mall in Fort Wayne, near where my parents lived.

I know that i liked the book and i ended up reading most of Bellow's novels at various points through my life. On re-reading it, it seems much more appropriate for someone my current age. The main character, Charlie Citrine, is a 50-something author in the middle of a nasty divorce and with a couple of young daughters. He is clinging to illusions of youth, what's left of his money and fame, and what dreams a middle-aged man can have. To my 20-ish self he must have seemed almost foreign; but now i see a character who, although he has had more success than most, has problems familiar to most middle-aged men.

That, i guess, is the benefit of re-reading. It's a bit like sampling a case of wine as it ages in that it's a different experience each time, but you're never sure until you're done with it which point was the best.

What To Expect After Total Hip Replacement

2010-04-23T19:40:00.000-07:00

I see a lot of articles and forum posts that either try to set expectations for after THR surgery, or ask questions about what to expect. There are no correct answers, so i hope to provide one more data point. My facts:

I had my surgery at the age of 46.
I was very active until about a year prior to my surgery (marathon runner, black belt)
Mine was a left total hip replacement necessitated by osteoarthritis.
I had a posterior surgical procedure. My procedure was also "cement-less".
My new hip is a Stryker model with ceramic surfaces.
My surgery was on Monday afternoon, and i went home on Tuesday evening.
My first time standing was the morning after my surgery. I walked three times with a walker on that day.
I used a walker for the first week and a half after my surgery, and then i switched to a cane.
I had at-home physical therapy for the first two weeks.
I had to self-inject blood thinners for three weeks after my surgery. This sucks.
I started driving about 2 weeks after the surgery.
I returned to work after 2 weeks at home.
At 4 weeks i could walk without a cane.
I had outpatient physical therapy from 2-6 weeks (twice a week).
At 6 weeks i started riding my bike trainer.
At 10 weeks i started doing tai chi again. My left leg is still weak at this point, but not painful.

I'm at about 11 weeks now. For the last two weekends i've ridden my bike on the road, for almost 2 hours the last time. I can walk for about an hour, but i get some pain around my incision near the end of that.

Should you come across this via search engine or something, don't hesitate to ask questions.

The Beat

2010-04-18T19:22:00.001-07:00

Went to see The English Beat yesterday at a place called the Canyon Club in Agora Hills, north of LA. It was primarily a party for my sister-in-law's 40th birthday, and to a lesser extent, my son's 16th birthday.

The English Beat (originally The Beat) is (are?) one of my favorite bands from my college years. Maybe a half-dozen of their songs are classics, and Save It For Later is one of my favorite songs (they also did a few General Public songs). The band still sounds great, and they are awesome live. They don't really have new material, so their show is a recap of their catalog from the 80s for the most part.

It was an all-ages show, so my kids and a few others were there, but most of the crowd was the band's original fans, which is to say, middle aged white people. I'm sure most of them were having fun, but as is my nature, i found the depressing essence at the core of it. For example, i learned that there is a uniform for middle-aged guys, which consists of "relaxed" jeans and a collared shirt worn un-tucked (except for the requisite dumb-ass wannabe hipsters with the soul-patches and black jackets). This outfit delivers the message "I am still cool, but i am also 25 pounds overweight". Sadly, i fit in a bit too well.

My wife hit the dance floor to hang with her sister, so i spent my time primarily keeping an eye on the kids, particularly Henry who was going back and forth into the crowd, and my older son's girlfriend Erin, for whom i felt particular responsibility among a crowd of hundreds of drunk adults. The club was a bit warm and i had too many layers on, so i spent much of the last hour of the set outside with the smokers. I got to look around the strip mall in which the club sits, and its odd juxtaposition of nightclubs and antique shops. Although, i guess it's not really that strange of a contrast in this case, since the band is effectively an antique.

It was a good show, but nostalgia is not my thing. Being reminded of a time when i was young and hopeful and had all my original parts doesn't appeal to me that much (it's probably significant also that on my own 40th birthday i did a two-day solo bike ride). If i had to repeat something, i'd much rather go see the Aquabats with my son and his friends again.

The Asymmetry of Trust

2010-04-11T18:48:00.000-07:00

Trust is asymmetric in many ways. For example, to trust is not to be trusted. Also it takes many examples of demonstrated reliability to develop trust, but only one instance of unreliability to break it. There's another more subtle form of asymmetry though.

Suppose that someone takes your lunch at work. If you approach a person you trust and you ask "Did you take my lunch", you have an expectation that the person will tell the truth. Whether they say yes or no, you believe their answer (although "yes" might piss you off or make you trust them less). On the other hand, if you approach someone you don't trust, while you might have an expectation that they will lie to you, you would probably accept a "yes" answer as truthful. In other words, while you have a low expectation of a "yes" answer in both cases, you are about as likely to believe this answer from either a trusted or untrusted party, whereas a "no" answer would only seem trustworthy from the trusted party.

I'm not sure if this is already a well-understood phenomenon in decision theory or game theory. It would probably be expressible in terms of prior and posterior probabilities in a Bayesian sense. The prior probability favors a true answer for the trusted party and a false answer for the untrusted party (there's a probability p of a "true" answer and a probability 1-p of a "false" answer). Given a "yes" answer the posterior probability changes in favor of true for the untrusted party, but not for the trusted party.

10 Most Influential Books

2010-04-04T10:35:00.000-07:00

There's a meme floating around about listing the 10 most influential books on a personal level (rather than in a historical sense). Nobody asked me to, but i made my list anyway.

Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien

Kind of a cliche, but like many people i found LotR very comforting during my high school years when i felt like a bit of a freak. I even had a "I'd rather be a hobbit" t-shirt.

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

I read this the first time when i was 18 and i was spending the summer with my grandparents in Tucson. There's nowhere in the world less like St. Petersburg than the Sonoran desert, but for some reason the oppressive heat in my grandparent's double-wide mobile home seemed appropriate to the story. I read it again in college while studying Russian literature, after i had learned some Russian and i had visited St. Petersburg (Leningrad). I'm not sure i would have done either of those things had i not read the book.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb -Richard Rhodes

I probably could not name my favorite work of fiction, but this is easily my favorite work of non-fiction. It's an amazing story, amazingly told, of events that profoundly affected the course of events during my lifetime and history in general. This book had an interesting effect on my personal politics. On one hand there's an inspiring story of science and engineering and how the virtually impossible can be accomplished with will and money; and on the other hand is a great cautionary tale about how Pandora's box can be pried open with enough will and money.

The Moviegoer - Walker Percy

I read this book originally as part of a college English class. I don't think there is any other book that i have spent so much time thinking about. I still think occasionally in terms that i learned from the book (like "vertical search" vs. "horizontal search"). This book made me seek out (and become a fan of) The Third Man because of the "kitten and the carbine" section.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera

I also read this in college. Blew my freakin' mind. Completely changed my idea of what fiction can be. It's hard to say "this book is about such and such" since it's not just some thinly-veiled political allegory. It's not even really a narrative so much as a sort of exploration, like many impressions of the same place and time that build to a single effect.

1984 - George Orwell

I read this in high school and it quite literally scared me. At that time, people of my age and culture would equate Big Brother with the totalitarian Soviet Union. My thinking about that has grown more sophisticated over the years (i presume), but after visiting the Soviet Union, i still had that in the back of my mind. No book has had more influence on my political beliefs, or at least my attitude about privacy and personal freedom. I once read a criticism of 1984 by Isaac Asimov in which he stated that it was overrated because Orwell had so badly predicted the mileu of future times (in other words, it was bad science fiction). On the contrary, what scares me about this book is its plausibility. Today, 25 years after Orwell's setting, it feels more possible than ever.

The Republic - Plato

I think these lists are supposed to be filled with profound works of philosophy that change lives and minds. This is clearly one of the great works of history and it did definitely make me think differently about certain things. But the notable thing about this book is how readable it is, even in translation. With a few exceptions, the topics still seem relevant and it's possible to imagine having a serious conversation about them with a few smart friends. This book really drew me to read other classics and look for similar connections between my time and ancient times.

The Bible

This might seem odd here if you know my personal beliefs, but again this is about the books that had the most influence on my life. When i was growing up we'd go to church and there would be "Bible readings", passages from the Old and New Testament that would often form the basis of the day's sermon. Similarly, in my Lutheran school we'd have "devotions" built around a few verses. One summer I said to myself "you know, i should really read this thing", so i sat down with the revised standard version that my grandmother gave me for confirmation and i began to read from beginning to end. Soon i realized why we never did that in church and school. Wow. If you read the Bible in it's entirety, and you really absorb what it's saying, there are really only two possible outcomes: zealot or atheist. Still not quite sure which i'll become.

The Snow Leopard - Peter Matthiessen

I read Matthiessen's Wildlife In America not long before this (it would be 11 on this list), and it was so eye-opening that i read everything Matthiessen has published. The Snow Leopard is ostensibly a recapitulation of Matthiessen and George Schaller looking for snow leopards in the Himalayas. So it may seem strange for me to say that this is the best book i've ever read about Eastern philosophy. I don't know that a book can be spiritually enlightening in the way that personal experience is, but this about as close as any has come for me.

History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russel

It might sound glib to say that this is one of the funniest books i've ever read. I still remember laughing at Russel's description of Spinoza:

Spinoza (1634–77) is the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers. Intellectually, some have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme. As a natural consequence, he was considered, during his lifetime and for a century after his death, a man of appalling wickedness

Opinions vary radically on how good of a book this really is, but it made me seek out the full works of these philosophers, so it served a great purpose.

Rocky Votolato

2010-04-02T07:08:00.000-07:00

My latest musical obsession is the singer-songwriter Rocky Votolato. My favorite song of his so far is Maker's, which i believe refers to Maker's Mark, a brand of bourbon. Here's a youtube video with the audio of the song:

His songs inhabit that happy land between melancholy and desperation, which for some reason appeals to me. Makers has one of the best choruses ever, both lyrically and musically:

The bones inside your mind where all broken
The keys that opened any answers were all stolen
Filling and refilling up the glass with makers
We both agreed
The Final Moment!
The sweetest remedy to ever be delivered!
Heaven or heavenless we're all headed for the same sweet darkness

Hip Hip Hooray

2010-03-26T19:50:00.000-07:00

Sorry, i'm running out of hip puns for these titles.

It's been almost 7 weeks now. I can walk pretty well-- most people would not know that i am still rehabing from surgery. I've done a couple of 15-minute sessions on my road bike trainer without any discomfort. I still have trouble with stairs and i can't really do any motion that puts much torque on my hip, but most signs are encouraging. This is the first time in almost a year that i've been able to walk without a limp.

I finished my outpatient physical therapy this week. I'll still have to do various exercises for the foreseeable future, but it's nice to be past the regular hospital visits. I'm eager to get back to some sort of routine-- maybe at least start doing tai chi in the next few weeks. My biggest frustration at the moment is that there is very little information on what i can or should do once i'm relatively well recovered. Obviously, there are pain and flexibility thresholds that you have to deal with, but information on what's possible otherwise is vague or unavailable. Generally anyone with a normal THR, regardless of the joint type, is warned against "high-impact" activities, but beyond running and basketball the guidance is limited. I gather that most doctors are conservative about post-THR activities, both because they don't really know how the latest generation of technology will last and because most of their patients are so old that they get no objections.

I don't regret the surgery, because whatever limitations i have now are less constrictive than the constant and unavoidable pain i had before. But i do feel a bit like a guinea pig in the sense that i will probably have to constantly experiment with what i can and can't do, and i won't know the consequences until i either do some damage or reach an age where i am necessarily sedentary anyway. Whatever. I guess i was on that path before, finding the barriers and the limits to what i could endure.

My First Marathon

2010-03-20T09:46:00.001-07:00

The following is something i wrote about my first marathon several years ago. I thought i'd put it here for posterity (and since i don't have much to write about running anymore). This is from 2003.

Personal stories about marathons are both abundant and fairly boring. Still, i couldn't resist, if only because there were a couple of odd twists in my case.

In spring i started running regularly again for the first time in several years (correlating closely to the age of Henry). I'd also been doing long bike rides, including my first organized century ride in February in Palm Springs. Employing a sublimely irrational leap of logic peculiar to people in their 40th year of life, i combined these two facts to conclude that i could run a marathon. At first, i just tried to increase my mileage, but eventually i started following a prescribed 18 week training plan. Working forward from my training start date, i chose the Santa Clarita Marathon in Santa Clarita, CA. The training went well, at least until the last few weeks, and by the middle of October i was pretty anxious to run the race.

Then on the Sunday prior to the marathon (Oct. 25), California started on fire. Since the major fires were almost literally in my back yard, the marathon was not foremost in my mind. It was late Monday before i realized that Simi Valley, site of one of the larger fires near LA, was due west of Santa Clarita. At first it appeared that the fire would not affect the marathon, but on Tuesday the winds changed direction and the fire started burning eastward. At noon on Wednesday, the marathon was canceled.

This is where things started to get strange. For some reason, the idea of not running the marathon was inconceivable to me. Since marathon training focuses on a particular race, i also couldn't figure out how i could delay until a convenient race came along. So i started looking for other marathons that i could run on the same weekend. There were three: the New York marathon, for which registration had long been closed; another in Kansas City, MO; and the third in Boise, Idaho. After a few hours of thought, i decided to try the last, so i registered for the race and bought airline tickets to Boise.

Yes, that's correct: Boise. Boise, Idaho. The place with the potatoes. Let me recap, just in case this isn't registering. I decided to fly voluntarily to Boise, Idaho at my own expense on my own time to run 26.2 miles. I'll never be able to explain this, even to people who understand the compulsion to run any marathon. I don't really understand it myself. Obviously, it's partially because i didn't want to waste the training. I think it's also because i am about to turn 40 and i subconsciously wanted to complete the race before that birthday. Also, at some point during my training i decided that i was going to run the race in honor of my childhood friend, Todd Bair, who was killed by a car bomb in Saudi Arabia in May. I don't know what i expected to accomplish by this, since even my best effort would a meager memorial, but the idea had motivated me while training. Because of this, not running would have seemed a double defeat.

So on Saturday, Nov. 1, i flew to Boise and got a room at the Owyhee Plaza Hotel, which was the start/finish point for the race. I spent most of Saturday trying to figure out what i'd wear, because it was cold. I'd brought gloves, a hat, and several layers of clothing; but i'd forgotten how cold 20 degrees really is. The next morning, the temperature was about 22 degrees at start time. I had a base layer, a long-sleeved shirt, and a singlet that i wore to hang my number on. I wore shorts, mostly because i don't own any running tights. There were only about 300 starters for the marathon, so we were able to go straight from the hotel lobby to the start area, and we waited in the cold for only a few minutes before the gun went off.

Near the end of my training plan i developed a case of what's called iliotibial band friction syndrome, which means that the long tendon that runs from your hip to below your knee gets really tight and rubs against the bottom of your femur when you run. After the first mile, my knee started to hurt but not enough to affect my stride. Like all rookies i went out too fast. I'd planned to run about 8 minute miles, with the goal of finishing in about 3hrs, 30 minutes. I did the first two miles in 14:28, but i felt like i was just jogging. My knee got gradually worse up to about mile 6, but it still didn't seem to change my gait.

Up until about the half way point i tried to find people who were running a similar pace and i ran along with them. One of these people was an older man whose shirt said that he had finished marathons in all 50 states. Twice. I figured he must know what he was doing, so i hung with him for a couple of miles. Amazingly, after about mile 11 my knee started to feel better. I was warm enough, my legs felt good, and i wasn't straining at all. I reached the halfway point in about 1:40, or about a 7:40 pace. I probably should have known this wasn't a good sign.

For the next two miles i ran very comfortably, but then at mile 15 i started to feel pain in my left quadriceps. I hoped this was just some temporary tightness that i could run through, but it didn't go away. I started focusing on getting water and Powerade at the aid stations, but i could sense that i was slowing down. Between miles 15 and 20 i focused on passing half-marathoners who had started about 10 minutes before i hit the second half of the marathon. I reached 20 miles at 2:38, still a bit below 8 minute pace.

Mile 21 featured the only major uphill on the course. Compared to San Diego hills this wasn't much, a big-ring sort of hill for a biker, but at the time it hurt plenty. Just after the 22 mile aid station, my legs rebelled. I had to stop and walk for about 200 yards. Then i slowly eased back into running, but i was probably going slower than 9 minute pace. For the next two miles, every time a spectator yelled out "You're looking good", or "You're almost there", i wanted to stop and beat them with a large stick. Good thing i couldn't lift my arms.

At around mile 24 we went down a hill, which made my knee start hurting again. Fortunately, the next mile and a half were straight, flat, and picturesque. For me, the end of the marathon was like a cruel manifestation of Zeno's paradox. Even when i turned the final corner and saw the finish banner in the distance, i could not convince myself that the end was any nearer. The banner seemed to float backward and i felt like i was chasing it. Finally i did cross the line, but i was virtually insensible. I couldn't speak or even acknowledge the volunteers, and it took me several seconds to remember to stop my watch. My watch said 3:38.40, although my chip time would later be listed as 3:39.10. Slower than i'd hoped, but all things considered i was happy. I beat P. Diddy, and George Bush's PR :-)

Some people have an intense emotional release at the end of hard runs like this. I did not. I felt pain and depletion, but little else. I stood in the finishing area for about 10 minutes, wrapped in mylar, drinking orange Powerade. It was still only about 30 degrees but i wasn't cold. After 3 and half hours of running it's almost difficult to walk. The ground seemed a little too far away, kind of like when you're stepping off a curb in the dark. Some clever sadist decided to put the post-race food and race t-shirts up two flights of stairs. I had to walk up sideways to avoid putting too much pressure on my knees. I had two arcs of salt on either side of my face from the sweat, and depressions in my forehead from the hat i'd been wearing. I must have looked frightening, not in an intimidating way since i was so decrepit, but sort of like those transients that you see on street corners arguing with nobody in particular.

All in all, i'm glad i made the trip. Boise is a nice little city, very pretty and clean, and the course was good for a first-timer. Finishing a marathon gives you a tremendous feeling of accomplishment, although in my case it took some time to sink in. Like many worthwhile things, i think what makes the marathon special is that it's just hard enough to make you uncertain that you can do it. For most human beings there seems to be some sort of limit reached between 20 and 25 miles, so by definition you have to exceed that limit to finish the marathon in the time you hoped for. It's a controlled environment in which you can push yourself beyond what you were designed to do, which in principle gives you confidence that you could push yourself in a less controlled environment. I heard Oprah say that the marathon is a "metaphor for life", but i think that's only true in the sense that life's a bitch and then you die. Life is messy and complicated, marathons are not. To me, the appeal of organized marathons is that they remove all of the complications, so that all you have to do is show up and subject yourself to some degree of suffering for some number of hours. There's something very liberating and joyful about lining up with a bunch of other lunatics dressed in similar goofy clothes to run the exact same course, but in the end only really caring about how you did relative to your own expectations.

Evil

2010-03-06T09:20:00.001-08:00

Like many families in our community, mine was deeply affected by the Chelsea King case. Only my older son knew her personally, because he participates in two of the same activities that she did at their high school (cross country and orchestra). But it still feels like losing someone for whom we were responsible. I guess i also felt a personal connection because she was killed while running along trails that i've run dozens of times. There is a special kinship among runners whether you are acquainted or not. I was frustrated that i could not help in the search on these trails, since at the time i could still only walk for short distances with a cane. I'm also sad that i can't go out and run there again, to reclaim them in some sense.

I feel the same way as most people about the murderer in this case (whose name i won't dignify by writing). I want him to die. Not after some protracted legal process during which he gets more and more publicity until he transforms from scumbag loser into "notorious". I want to put a bullet in his brain, dump him in the landfill, and forget about him. This case might end up changing the laws regarding sex offenders, but that should be credited to the inspiration of Chelsea and not the evil of the criminal.

As a non-religious person the concept of evil is sometimes difficult for me. For the religious, the existence of an agent of evil is a necessity to reconcile the preponderance of evil behavior with the presence of an omnipotent and benevolent God ("hell must exist for heaven to have any value", to crib from a favorite author). I do not know if this culprit was in control of his impulses and chose to be evil, or was compelled to do evil things. I don't know if he was abused as a child, or if he lacks some crucial part of his brain that endows most of us with empathy. I also do not care. The point at which sympathy for him could be useful has long since passed. The damage that he has done to the world is out of proportion to any abstract notion i or anyone else might have about the sanctity of life. This is evil, simple as that. Whether you believe that this human being is a demon who needs to be sent back to hell, or a deeply dysfunctional machine that needs to be switched off, there should be no debate that he should be removed from our midst.

Update on My Borg Implants

2010-03-02T07:21:00.000-08:00

It's been three weeks since my surgery now. I've been walking with a cane for the last week and a half, and i can take small steps unassisted. There are still certain things i can't do, like bend past 90 degrees at the waist or cross my legs, but things are slowly approaching normalcy (i can't say "returning" since this is my new normal). I've returned to work, and i can drive (one of the benefits of having a left hip surgery).

I'm eager to get back to some level of physical activity since i feel like a large bucket of Kentucky fried chicken at the moment. I have managed to do some low-key weight lifting, and i have a set of rehab exercises i go through for my hip, but i really need something that will make me sweat. It'll probably be 6-8 weeks still before i can do anything too strenuous, but i'm hoping i might be able to start some swimming before then (i assume you sweat when you swim even if you can't tell).

I haven't quite come to grips with the idea that i am partially artificial yet. Since i'm still swollen and weakened from the surgery, i can't say that i notice a difference between the real hip and the replacement hip, but i have this image in my head of a gap in my body filled with machine parts or makeshift framing. Or like a patch of bondo on the fender of a 1960s Chevy. Although i no longer have the hip pain that bothered me before the surgery, i can't shake the feeling of "otherness". I'm hoping that when the hip strengthens and i can walk normally that i will eventually just forget that it's not "stock".

Home Alone

2010-02-28T09:01:00.001-08:00

Last night, for a period of several hours, i was at home alone. This ostensibly unremarkable occurrence was in fact so rare that i cannot remember the last time it happened. Of course, i have been alone at night on road trips, and i have been at home alone during the day (as i was recently after my surgery). But i honestly can't remember the last time that i was alone during the evening hours in my own house. (Note: I am callously discounting the presence of our chihuahua in my definition of alone)

This situation required an unlikely alignment of the planets. First, my younger son had a sleep-over for a friend's birthday party. My older son was at his girlfriend's parents' house (not unusual), and my wife was out with friends. I suspect that such situations will occur more frequently, especially when my younger son gets to high school.

Lest this sound pathetic, i must aver that i am quite good at being alone. I had complete control over the television, so I watched Inglorious Basterds on-demand, without having to filter out any of the extraneous background conversations that are typical of a house with teenagers and proto-teens. I did not have to share the computer, and i could turn the sound up and listen to fragments of songs on last.fm without piano or cello or violin or Iron Chef America in the mix. i could even read a book in my living room. It probably would have been more enjoyable were i able to open a bottle of wine (doesn't mix with my blood-thinners), and if i could move from place to place without my cane, but i'll take what i can get.

In my current job, i work almost entirely with people in their 20s, and i am often struck by the radical differences in our lives, of which they of course have no knowledge. Probably 80% of the interesting things in my life, both good and bad, occurred after 30. Many of my coworkers, i would guess, spend evenings alone on occasion and they probably either take it for granted or desperately try to avoid it. I suppose "wisdom" is the label we give to the difference between our expectations at 25 and our reality at 50. I wonder if there is the same dichotomy between 50 and 75.

My First Week as a Cyborg

2010-02-15T21:00:00.000-08:00

Today is one week since my hip replacement surgery. At this point i can walk fairly well with a walker and my pain is minimal. I actually managed to get up (and down) my driveway this afternoon with my physical therapist. That was encouraging because going up and down inclines prior to my surgery was very painful. My leg is still pretty swollen and the area around my incision is so stiff that it feels kind of like i have a 2x4 taped to my thigh.

The surgery last Monday went fairly well, although it started later than it was supposed to. Surgery is sort of a 5-phase process. There's pre-op where they get you into an embarrassing gown and nifty socks, set you up with an IV, take your vitals, shave appropriate areas etc. Pre-op has this monitor with all of the on-going surgeries, like flight departures at the airport except it doesn't update to show you delays.

After pre-op is another staging area, where multiple people come around and ask about your medical history, and they mark the area for surgery so that there's general agreement about what's being done. This is also where you consult with the anesthesiologist. In my case, she recommended a spinal, which basically means that your lower half is completely turned off, so they give you an extra sedative to keep you in a medium sleep.

Next they take you to the actual operating room. Here they administer the initial anesthetic (spinals feel really strange), transfer you to the operating table, and knock you out. If you're lucky (as i was) that's the last thing you'll remember. I don't really remember much about the operating room. It was larger than i expected, almost like a classroom. My x-rays were on one wall. There were several people there when i was rolled in, but not the surgeon.

After the surgery, there's a post-op area (although that's not what they call it). I'm not really sure how long i was there. I woke up there, and was still pleasantly morphined. I can remember being in the room, with other patients and a few nurses, but i'm vague on what they actually did in this room.

Finally, they take you to a regular hospital room. I was catheterized and had a blood drain connected to my incision, but i didn't feel too terrible. I think it was around 2 in the afternoon at this point, but i'm only sure that there was still daylight. I was happy to find that i had no post-operative nausea, but i kept expecting it, even after i ate dinner.

I made it through the first night, and at 10am on Tuesday the physical therapist arrived to help me stand and walk for the first time with a walker. It was fairly hard, but i still had some morphine in my system so that helped. I managed a full lap around the hospital floor, which is apparently unusual. I did another lap later in the day with an occupational therapist, and finally made another excursion in the afternoon.

I was originally expected to go home on Wednesday, but because i had shown good progress they arranged for me to go home Tuesday night. The first couple of days at home were a bit tough (on me and my family). All of the biomechanical processes of standing, sitting, lying down, etc. are pretty tough. It hard to get from place to place with a walker, and you can't really carry anything with you.

So far, i've been really lucky. I never had any post-op nausea, and i haven't had any bad reactions to the Vicodin i take for pain, or the blood thinners i have to inject myself with every day. I've had a decent appetite, and i haven't had any problem with infections or fevers. My physical progress is encouraging and i get a bit more mobile every day. I'm hoping that this week will show as much progress.

Pre-Op

2010-02-05T20:53:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to get away from the litany of woe that this blog has become, but i can't think of a way to put a cheerful spin on my impending surgery. I am about 2 days away from the event now. I look forward to an end to the irritating pain that has accompanied my every move for the last year, but it's difficult to accept that i will never run another marathon, never spend another Sunday afternoon running down some trail, never fight another sparring match, never play another pick-up game at some random basketball court.

I'm trying to focus more on what i can do. I'm thinking that i will try swimming. There's a good master's program in the community in which i live, and i've started to identify events that i can train for in the future (the Alcatraz swim is intriguing). I probably won't be able to spar in the style that i've become accustomed to, but i think this might be an opportunity to work on boxing. I hope to be able to revive my interest in backpacking, since at least the long walks will get me into the same territory where i would previously have run.

The remainder of this month is probably going to suck. I'll be in the hospital for a few days, followed by physical therapy and daily nurse visits for a while. I have to take blood thinners for 3 weeks after surgery. I've never had a general anesthetic and i don't really know what the aftermath will be like. I cling to the idea that in a month i will be essentially normal, except that i will have entered a new phase of life in which certain activities are no longer an option.

Probably the worst part of these weeks leading up to the surgery has been the sense of isolation. I've always had relatively few people in my life that i could have meaningful conversations with about things that are important to me. There are not that many people who have both an intellectual side and also understand the compulsion to run long distances, or the desire to fight, or even the general notion of taking on physical challenges. There are even fewer people with those qualities who have had to accept giving up all or some of it. Strangely, my current workplace is the first where there are several people who run or do other endurance events. When i hear people talking about doing a half-marathon or running a trail, i get this indescribable sense of being outside of their world, looking in. I imagine that it's like being a ghost.

The nurse at my orthopedic surgeon's office said that i might be the healthiest person for whom they've ever done a hip replacement. I take some comfort in this. A doctor acquaintance once told me "we know how to fix joints, but we don't know how to fix hearts". He meant that people should be more concerned about the damage done by lack of exercise than potential wear and tear to joints (though the inability to fix broken hearts applies in the more poetic sense as well). So, while i'm bummed about the limitations imposed by having an artificial hip, i'm also well aware that far worse things can happen.

Grandma

2010-01-16T12:45:00.000-08:00

My last remaining grandparent, Wilma Stone Wetter, passed away last Saturday at the age of 99. For quite a while she had been alive only in the most technical sense, in that her heart beat and her lungs filled of their own accord. Her death was as merciful as death can be.

Of my five grandparents (i include my mother's stepfather), she was the one with whom i was the closest. My parents bought the farm that she and my grandfather had owned since the 1940s, and the two of them lived across the driveway from us for years before they retired and moved to Arizona. I also spent summers with them during my college years in Tucson, at their home in the Tortolita mountains.

Grandma was inscrutable. She could be bitter and caustic, possibly the remnants of her divorce from my mother's real father in the 1930s. She was deeply religious and apparently sincere about her Christianity, but she also alienated many people, including her oldest daughter (ie, my mom). On the other hand, she was always exceptionally kind and generous to me and had an influence on my life.

She was smart and had a long career teaching English. Although teaching was one of those "acceptable" jobs for women of her era, it was still fairly rare to work until retirement. She grew up in Milan, Ohio (birthplace of Edison) in a family of pedagogues. She went to Bowling Green University and (i have heard) was something of an athlete. I imagine her early life as carefree and probably more interesting than most girls of her time.

I don't know exactly when she met my grandfather. He (Herbert) was an interesting and often charming man, so I can see that she would have been attracted to him. Unfortunately, he also had many problems, the extent of which i don't really know (skeleton in closet). He left when my mom was about 6 months old. I've never heard the story of this stage in my grandmother's and mother's lives, but i assume it was not easy (it was not something either talked about). My mom's step-father (Orville) was a good man, but he was in such stark contrast to Herb that one can only assume that she chose him more as a reaction to her previous experience than out of sheer affection.

My grandmother lived during a time of incredible change. Her lifetime encompassed both world wars, the arrival of most of our modern conveniences, the great depression, the battles for civil rights for women and minorities, 9/11. Really, the world that she was born into was a different planet. True, she observed the majority of this change from north-eastern Indiana, which is a bit like being in Tatooine during the reign of the empire. I give her credit though for dealing with the world as well as she did. Life disappointed her early, and it would have been easy to be nihilistic or self-destructive. She did things that i could never understand, like spending most of her retirement years doing crossword puzzles or arguing with people at fast food restaurants over the discounts provided by coupons. But she also had a double knee replacement in her 70s, which seems to me a sign of hope.

Not So Hip

2010-01-06T19:01:00.000-08:00

I've been fortunate in my life that, except in a few rare cases, reality has been better than my expectations. So when i went to an orthopedic specialist on Tuesday, even though my expectations were that i had some structural damage and might need surgery, i was mildly stunned to hear that i have degenerative osteoarthritis and my only real option at this point is hip replacement surgery.

From the x-ray it was pretty clear that the cartilage is gone from my left hip and i have bone against bone. The bone has been in contact long enough that cysts and spurs have begun to form. There doesn't seem to be any ameliorative therapy for this.

Most significantly for me personally, this essentially ends my marathon career, and certainly ends my quest for a sub 3-hour time. At this point i am not sure that i will be able to run at all, and I don't know how much if any of my martial arts i will be able to continue.

Needless to say i'm a bit depressed about this-- being the crazy runner guy has been my identity for the last several years. The brochures on hip replacement talk about how you'll be able to return to activities like bowling, golf, or shuffleboard; which makes me want to scream and throw things. I could do those things with one good leg. Still, given my nature i expect that i will find some new activity (biking, swimming, etc.) that i can pursue to ridiculous degrees.

46

2009-12-14T19:30:00.000-08:00

I never much cared for John "Cougar" Mellencamp, but he did pen some memorable lyrics. The line i always recall is:

Oh yeah, life goes on
Long after the thrill of livin' is gone

I hated that line when i was young. I still don't think it's brilliant, but now I get it. I totally get it.

Such is life at 46. I don't have much to complain about, and i've been blessed with great kids, adequate health, etc. But by definition, the older you get the less you have to look forward to. There will be many things to celebrate in my future, but they will mostly be other people's successes.

As much as i love my kids, i've reached the age where i sometimes contemplate life after they've left home. That is the last real transition of your life for which you can anticipate something positive. I don't just mean grandchildren and more disposable income. I view it as a chance to fix some of my regrets, to live a little bit of the lives that i missed. To let go of things i acquired more out of convention than desire.

So fuck you John Mellencamp. Even if you were right.

Living In Interesting Times

2009-10-18T20:35:00.000-07:00

It may be that in the future i will look back on this year with some mixture of nostalgia and bemusement; as something that was not much fun but a source of interesting stories to tell. Or, possibly, it will suck just as much in hindsight.

I can't complain too bitterly. Although the economy has been tough on our family, we have survived better than many. As the holiday season approaches, I dread two solid months of socially enforced cheerfulness, but on the plus side i find myself employed at a new start-up about which i am sincerely enthusiastic.

My mood would probably improve considerably if i could run, but since the end of April i have not run regularly. My hip, which was a painful irritation in the spring, is now nearly a disability. There are many days on which i can't even walk without pain. Running was so important to my mental well-being; it not only helped me stay in shape and sleep well, but it was really the only time i had completely to myself. To many people this would probably not matter, but for a deep introvert such as myself solitude is like air to breath.

Under different circumstances, i think it would be fairly easy to feel sorry for myself; and there are some days when it feels like i've accomplished nothing that i set out to when i was young. But the last couple of years have helped me realize that i am more of an optimist than i seem to be. I managed to stay confident after my first-ever layoff. I participated in dismantling a dead company and found some worthwhile experiences and interesting people along the way. I guess i discovered that i am more resilient than i expected, and i actually can deal with change and stress. But, seriously, i have no desire to further test that capacity.

Vianden

2009-08-27T18:01:00.000-07:00

My older son Nathan has been in the town of Vianden in Luxembourg for a music festival for the last two weeks. He auditioned to go after his cello teacher was asked to teach there. Among other things, he got to play at Vianden castle, accompanying child prodigy Umi Garret in Beethoven's piano trio #1. Although Luxembourg borders a few different countries, he apparently hasn't done much sightseeing as he is occupied with practice several hours per day.

I must admit it has been strange having him away for almost two weeks, especially as school has started already and he would normally be starting classes and going to cross-country practice. We are hoping that this will be a memorable and significant experience for him, whether he chooses to be a musician or not. He has been to Europe a few times before, but this is his first trip of any distance that he has made by himself. We are looking forward to seeing him this weekend.

Nathan Plays Popper Tarantella

2009-05-14T08:44:00.000-07:00

This is a video of my son playing David Popper's Tarantella, accompanied by his teacher

Tournament 2009

2009-05-12T20:04:00.000-07:00

Sunday was the annual White Dragon tournament. I did reasonably well again this year, but i blew a chance at being in the top three when i lost my final sparring match. This was my first year competing as a black sash, so i felt fairly good that i didn't embarrass myself. My son had a tough year against better competition, but i think it was a good experience for him-- he's used to having things come easy.

Our school won again this year, and one of our kids won the kids' division again, which makes 7 years straight.

Privacy

2009-05-03T13:55:00.000-07:00

Privacy is not something that i think about much, even though i am by most measures a private person. I have no public visibility beyond a Facebook page; and to be honest i don't do much of anything that would be interesting to the outside world. But privacy is something that i feel strongly about, something that i regard as a fundamental right. I've always thought that threats to privacy would come in the form of government monitoring, something that whether covert or obvious would be done against the will of the parties being monitored.

My recent experience with data marketers makes me realize that we are for the most part passive participants in our greatest privacy threats. Public records, sweepstakes entries, warranty cards, store loyalty programs-- all situations where we volunteer information without much thought about how it will be used. And it is used. It is collected and sold and used to target us for more crap. Other than being exceedingly annoying, there's usually nothing sinister about most of this data collection. The companies collecting it and using it rarely care about the behavior of the individuals beyond the marketing value of a person's particular demographic segment. The potential for abuse is significant, but it is limited by the connections that can be made between various public transactions.

On the other hand, i am less comfortable with the sort of behavioral targeting that happens on the Internet. First, web browsing is nearly ubiquitous and far more frequent than paper transactions. Second, i think relatively few people are familiar with the concept of third-party tracking cookies and how they are used to do behavioral tracking. Again the companies doing the tracking have little interest in individuals, but i think it would freak most people out to realize that there are organizations tracking a good portion of their browsing history and using it to categorize them for ad targeting. Third, i think the potential for abuse is far greater. The data collected is detailed and more personal, and can be more easily correlated to other sources.

There is also little regulation of this industry. The internet standard for specifying privacy practices (P3P) never saw significant adoption, and compliance is voluntary. Of course, opting out of this type of tracking is relatively easy, since you can block the cookies from being set in the first place, or you can use technological solutions like AdBlock that eliminates many of the ads you see on web pages. However, I'd wager that at least 3/4 of Internet users are unaware of behavioral targeting, and of those that are many are comfortable with ad targeting so long as the result is not intrusive (ie, no email spam or cell phone calls). I would have counted myself among the latter until recently, when i began to realize the strong incentives that marketers have to connect behavioral information to ever more detailed personal info (age, address, marital status, number of children, telephone numbers).

The concept of privacy is evolving i believe from "being left alone" to "being in control". Specifically, personal and behavioral information is something that you own, and sharing it should be at your discretion. Also, since you own it, sharing it should be something that you potentially profit from. There are marketing organizations and identity management companies that are working on such ideas, but i sense that making this idea a reality would require legislation that hasn't happened yet.

Hard Corps Marathon

2009-04-26T08:48:00.001-07:00

Yesterday i ran the inaugural Hard Corps Marathon, on Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton. This was my first regular marathon since NYC in 2007, so i was pretty psyched to run. Ultimately, i had a fairly mediocre result (3:18), but i still enjoyed the event. Also, because of the relatively small field i had my best overall finish in a marathon (15th).

This marathon is run entirely on the Camp Pendleton grounds, primarily on a road that parallels the coast. Pendleton is a scenic place and most of the race was in view of the Pacific Ocean, so i'd give high marks to the course. The weather was decent, but it was a windy day, and the northward part of the run was nearly into a headwind.

I'v been dealing with bursitis in my left hip for a while now, but other than some annoying pain it didn't affect me too much. The wind though slowed me down. I had planned to try staying at about 7 minute/mile pace, but the wind in the first half was just too much. I got through the first half in around 1:35. After we turned around and headed southward, i was able to speed up a bit but i still couldn't manage much better than about 7:15 or so. I felt pretty good up to 20 miles, and i figured i could run negative splits and finish in around 3:10. However, the finishing miles are uphill and it started to take a toll. Around mile 23 i started to feel nauseous, and i stopped to walk for a while because i thought i was going to throw up. I didn't, but i had a hard time getting my pace back up.

The finishing hill surprised a lot of people apparently, since despite my slow pace i still passed about 5 people. Unfortunately, i also got passed a few times. I was a bit disappointed in my time, but my main goal was to qualify for Boston 2010, which i did comfortably (at my age, i only have to run sub 3:30).

Overall, it was a nice event. Good course, good organization, good volunteers, and probably the best event shirt other than my 2006 Boston long-sleeve. The only organizational glitch they had was that the parking was surrounded by the course, so it was hard to leave for those of us trying to get out before the final runners were off the course.

I plan to take a long break from running so that i can finally heal my hip. I'm not sure *how* long, but i'll probably be on the order of months. It's gonna suck.

The Demeanor's - Tonight at King's Music in Lemon Grove

2009-04-18T10:58:00.000-07:00

Environmentalism

2009-04-02T20:41:00.000-07:00

I used to be an environmentalist-- not quite the deep ecology sort-- but fairly committed. I did the standard recycling, i composted, i contributed money to GreenPeace and the EDF. We replaced our toilets with the low-flush sort, and we had shower heads with manual valves so we could switch the water off and on during a shower. My wife and i managed to share one car for the first twelve years of our marriage even after both kids were born.

But for the last decade or so, i've been more part of the problem than the solution. No change of heart, just a reallocation of my time toward kids and my strange hobbies. Changing houses also had a major effect. My current house is twice the size of the previous, and the water i expend on my landscape has increased several-fold i'd guess. A second car became a necessity when jobs moved to different parts of town and kids moved to separate schools.

I've been thinking more about environmentalism recently because of my new job. Our company automates the process of stopping postal junk mail. I don't know what the success rate of direct mail marketing is, but i know that 90% of the junk that i get doesn't even get a glance before it goes into the recycling bin. The Direct Marketing Association tries to minimize the problem by pointing out that recycling has reduced the amount of junk mail waste so that it accounts for only 2.4% of landfill material. Granted, that means that eliminating junk mail leaves us with 97.6% of a whole lot of crap, but that 2.4% is a substantial, identifiable chunk that really has no reason to exist.

Of course, a lot of people who make a living from direct marketing would disagree with me. My personal feelings about marketers and list compilers aside, it is a large industry that employs many. The point being that i've begun to realize that the key to environmental problems is, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, the economy (stupid). By which i mean the squishy, macroeconomic, USA-today pie-chart sort of economy that involves the subjective trade-offs between clean air and sending one's kids to college. During my lifetime, environmentalism has become a sort of ideological dividing line, where the true believers on both side care more about their influence than reality. But i think most regular folk can pretty much look and see the effect of humanity on the nearby surroundings without a lot of expert opinion. The problem is that most people value their livelihood somewhere just below their family and well above pretty much anything that's not causing immediate harm to their family or their livelihood.

My personal approach to being environmentally aware has become more pragmatic. I think the key concept for me is that you can't ever improve on not creating something in the first place. Product A might be more "green" than product B, but nothing at all will always beat both of them. Repairing will generally beat replacing. All things being equal, i will pay a premium for an item that requires fewer resources to produce, on the theory that we all ultimately pay less for landfill space, transportation, and environmental remediation. The environmentalist/entrepreneur Paul Hawken calls this "source reduction". To me it seems both economically sound, and logically unassailable.

Demeanors, Tonight, 6pm at Metaphor Cafe

2009-03-21T16:30:00.001-07:00

The Demeanors are playing a show at Metaphor Cafe in Escondido tonight almost a year after they made their debut at the same place (March 29).

Marathon Plans

2009-02-23T21:49:00.000-08:00

My plans to run the LA marathon were changed for me when they decided to move it from February to May. Fortunately, another race came along-- the Hard Corps Marathon at Camp Pendleton. I'm psyched to be running the inaugural event, and i'm happy that it's close to home.

Initially, i had hoped to make this another attempt at a sub 3-hr marathon, but my hip has been bothering me so much that i've cut back my training a bit. Rather than doing the 70 mile/week program that i originally started, i'm following Hal Higdon's Advanced II program, which is 6 days a week but lower mileage. I'm still training for 6:45/mile pace, but realistically i don't think i can manage that for a full 26 miles. At this point, i'm hoping to just qualify for Boston in 2010. Since i'm in a new age group, i only have to run 3:30 or better.

If i can magically make my hip better, i hope to run a fall marathon also, but i haven't picked a race. Ideally, that would be a more serious attempt at sub-3.

Attention

2009-01-19T20:39:00.000-08:00

I have a step-uncle who likes to tell a story about something i did when i was very young. I was shooting a basketball behind my house at around three years old and i was trying to get my mom's attention. I kept saying "Vatch me mom! Vatch me" (he always tells the story with the Germanic "W"-- i'm not sure why i talked liked Greta Garbo when i was three). Anyway, at some point i finally got frustrated and yelled "Dammit mom! Vatch me".

My uncle tells this story for a laugh, but it also shows that the desire for attention develops early and is a real human need. Maybe not on a par with food and shelter, but still a need. Of course humans desire praise and affirmation, but the need for attention has taken on new dimensions in the era of social networks. In fact, i'm thinking of pitching "Watch me, dammit" as a new slogan for YouTube.

This idea, that attention is as powerful a motivating force as money, has been building for a while. The open source software movement at first, and Wikipedia recently prove the lengths that people will go to for some recognition. The blogosphere is an attention market, and Facebook and its kin are sort of attention five-and-dimes. These places, where essentially anyone can vie for the eyes and ears of a vast potential audience, are the basis of the attention economy.

The rise of the attention economy is the story of my generation (we Last Analogs). When i was kid there were three TV channels and broadcast radio. Information and entertainment was still fairly hard to distribute and you had to go to libraries to get any sort of expert information. The basic idea of the attention economy (as i understand it) is that information is now so abundant and easily distributed that attention is the scarce good. I guess this also implies that control of one's attention serves in the same capacity as fiscal discipline. So, i think, the winners in the attention economy are those who can draw attention to what they are producing, and those who can allocate their attention wisely enough to profit from it.

The trouble is, i'm not entirely sure how this benefits those of us who are interested primarily in good old-fashioned material goods. It'd be cool if a million people started reading this blog and i could live on the profits from Google Adsense, but given my personality i figure to suck at the producer side of the attention economy (plus, it's sheer fantasy even for the motivated). On the consumer side, i don't yet see how to parlay the power to focus into real gains. Producers can map a greater share of attention directly to ad revenue or something like that, but i don't see the parallels yet on the consumer side beyond the clear similarity between "spending" attention and spending money. In attention terms, what is "saving" (extra time?), what is "investing"? (education?). How do i buy low and sell high?

As a software geek, i think the key thing i've learned from studying the attention economy is that it's pointless to build things that simplify information distribution (Twitter notwithstanding). Even search systems and recommendation systems are probably too coarse grained at this point. We almost need an agent between our real world and the virtual world that filters everything based on an estimate of real value taking into account not only relevance and preference, but our schedules, goals, and plans.

Re-Employed

2009-01-09T18:24:00.001-08:00

I was gonna entitle this post "Laid On", but that sounds oddly obscene. Anyway, today i finished my first week at a new gig, another Internet start-up called ProQuo. A good friend and former Yahoo! colleague is running the development side there, and so it was an easy transition. I'm doing the same variety of stuff i've been doing for the last few years, though there's no music involved and the scale is smaller. ProQuo's main business is automating the process of stopping junk mail and other types of direct marketing. It was a good first week. I like the people, the technology is nice, and i get to do Python! (geek).

The only big change is that i have a commute for the first time in about 5 years. It's not too bad-- the 56 makes it much better than my former commute into Sorrento Valley. Also, i have a MacBook Pro as my desk machine, which is the first time i've used a Mac regularly since my days at the Supercomputer Center. I spend probably half my time in the bash shell typing commands at Linux boxes, so i'm not taking full advantage of the capabilities.

Winter Rose

2009-01-01T13:22:00.001-08:00

white_rose2
Originally uploaded by mikemull

I have six rose bushes in front of my house. They are all trimmed back for the winter, but with the recent cycle of rain and sun, they are reviving. In the last couple of days, a single white rose bloomed on one of the bushes.

White roses have a variety of symbolic associations, but i think this single rose in the midst of the thorns is an interesting omen for the beginning of the year.

Good Stuff 2008

2008-12-28T17:47:00.000-08:00

So, this wasn't a very good year personally, but other than the global financial meltdown, it wasn't really that bad. The election of Barack Obama was probably not the triumph of reason that i wish it to be, but at least i don't have to worry about President Palin for another four years. I think some decent music was made this year, i read several good books, and there were two good movies about superheroes. My kids both entered new phases of their education and have succeeded so far. I learned some stuff, both academically and wisdom-wise.

I listen to music almost entirely via some radio-like delivery mechanism these days, so it's tough to determine what's new and what's just new to me. There were a few times this year when i heard something that i thought was new and it turned out to be a band that broke up years ago (eg, The Promise Ring). Stranger still, several favorite artists put out albums this year that i never really got a chance to listen to thoroughly (Ben Folds, Drive By Truckers, R.E.M.). Still, there was stuff i really liked. Here's my list:

Fleet Foxes by Fleet Foxes
The Stand Ins by Okkervil River
April by Sun Kil Moon
When Life Gives You Lemons, Paint That Shit Gold by Atmosphere
And You Were A Crow by The Parlor Mob
Nortec Collective Presents Bostich & Fussible

Really though, most of the music that i enjoyed this year was done in previous years, and i just discovered it. I listened to a lot of Damien Rice, Richard Shindell, Grace Potter, A Fine Frenzy, and various ska bands that my son introduced me to.

Again this year i didn't see most of the "serious" movies that will be nominated for Oscars. However, i thought Iron Man and The Dark Knight were the two best comic-derived movies i've seen. I thought the first half of Wall-E was absolutely brilliant. I saw No Country For Old Men on video, but i thought it was an excellent rendition of McCarthy's book.

I read quite a few books this year, but not many that were published in 2008. The most memorable non-fiction i read was Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson. I'm not sure that i read a single fiction book that was published this year. The most recently published novel i can remember was The Last Samurai by Helen Dewitt, which is brilliant. My favorite books this year were all by Cormac McCarthy. I read No Country For Old Men, The Road, and the first book of the border trilogy, All The Pretty Horses. Amazing.

My nomination for concept of the year: attention. I think the idea of an attention economy and the almost evolutionary change happening in our culture due to the incessant demand for our attention will be the meme of the decade.

Workin' For a Living

2008-12-22T09:38:00.000-08:00

Nathan and his friend Won Ji have been busking to collect money for their high school music program. Here they are playing in front of one of the local Starbucks's.

Novel vs. Novel

2008-12-19T18:39:00.001-08:00

Due to a unique set of circumstances i find myself reading two novels at the same time. It's not unusual for me to interleave the reading of multiple books, but i try not to overlap novels if only because it's easy to confuse plot lines and characters. The two books are Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections.

Both are contemporary American novels written by well-respected authors. Both won the National Book Award in their respective years of publication. Both are pretty damn good books. And there ends the similarities.

Franzen's novel is about the Midwest and East, and the (sub)-urban inhabits thereof. It focuses primarily on two generations of the same family, an elderly midwestern couple and their children. Much of the conflict in the novel comes from the difference between these two generations. The parents need to see their children as successful even if that means a certain degree of willful reinterpretion of reality. The children (all now adult) seem to practically define their lives in contrast to their parents, to the extent that merely being in their parents' presence has become a burden.

I identify easily with the characters in Franzen's novel, even occasionally being reminded of members of my own family. The book covers a good span of both time and space, and includes some esoteric material that i assume required research on the part of the author. Yet it all strikes me as very familiar, very real for lack of a better term.

McCarthy's novel is very western, both in terms of geography and content. It starts in Texas, and proceeds southward to Mexico. The characters are ranch dwellers, comfortable riding horses and shooting guns. Other than several years spent in the desert Southwest and a general appreciation of ruralness engendered by my own youth on a farm, i don't have much in common with the people in the novel.

Still, i enjoy McCarthy's novel more. Perhaps it is just escapist fantasy for a middle-aged, middle-class, suburb dweller. The brilliance of The Corrections for me is that sometimes it cuts so close to the bone that it's painful. On the other hand, All The Pretty Horses makes me want to live in its world.

However both of these are uniquely American novels. The Corrections could be more easily compared to a European novel (Buddenbrooks comes to mind for me), but there is the pervasive theme in both novels of individuals trying to transform themselves rather than being transformed by the exigencies of history.

My Butt Hurts

2008-12-19T18:29:00.001-08:00

I managed to get my birthday bike ride done today, albeit belatedly. It was a modest ride, over to the coast on the 56 bike path, and then back to the Black Mountain area for the noon ultimate frisbee game. Since i haven't done a bike ride for months, i hurt in numerous special places. Besides the obvious aches and pains, i always forget how much stress it put on your hands to be leaning on the shifters all day. It was a beautiful day though, and i had no flats or other mechanical difficulties, so i'd call it a success.

45

2008-12-15T18:27:00.000-08:00

Today is my 45th birthday. I was not able to do my annual birthday bike ride because it's raining heavily throughout southern California, but since i'm not otherwise occupied i'll probably get a ride in later this week. In the 17 years i've observed this tradition, this is my first rain-out, although i've had a few close calls. I remember one year biking up the road to Cabrillo National Monument in a thunderstorm. It was cool.

Not much to say about 45, except that i am now in a new age group running-wise. My Boston qualifying time goes all the way up to 3:30. Of course, i am also now closer to 50 than 40, which is mildly depressing. But the way i figure it the older i get the more bad-ass i will seem compared to my peers until someday i'll be the Gengis-freaking-Khan of my nursing home.

Laid Off

2008-12-09T15:59:00.001-08:00

Yesterday i got laid off from Slacker, the first time in my career that i've been thrown off the ship rather than kept around to help it sink with dignity. It also marks the first time since college that both my wife and i are not employed.

I can't claim that i'll miss the job much-- i've been struggling for months to make something interesting out of what had basically become pointless data munging. But unlike all of my previous jobs, Slacker was the first place where i was interested in the product from a consumer standpoint. My G2 is really the first portable music device i've owned that makes any sense to me. Digital convergence might spell the end of Slacker as a hardware company, but i hope the service survives in some form, if only because it makes the long runs a bit less boring.

Whatever i do next, i hope it's more in the realm of building stuff. I never quite figured out how to turn measuring into creating. It's the same problem i've had with managing people i guess, in that no matter how hard i work i don't get any feeling of accomplishment. It's unlikely that i'll be working in music, and i'll miss that, though there were also times when i felt mildly soulless when attempting to make quantitative judgements about musical preferences. As i keep saying, so many of my own musical discoveries are made by accident that i'm skeptical of the entire business of automated recommendation. Or maybe i just want to believe that we're harder to figure out than some people think we are.

I'm supposed to be going through some sort of anger, denial, acceptance process after being laid off, but to be honest i'm pretty OK with it (or maybe i'm just in a prolonged denial phase). We are not in any sort of financial danger, and it's not proving to be the blow to my ego that i always feared it might be. It's not that i don't care, but rather that i don't really treat my job as an aspect of my self-worth anymore.

Murmur

2008-12-01T13:44:00.001-08:00

I was a huge fan of R.E.M. back in my college days, and the album Murmur holds a special place in my heart. For some reason, my wife and i played this CD constantly in our first apartment after we got married, and it still reminds of those simpler, happy days.

It's been 25 years since Murmur was released, and it's almost shocking to think that it's been around for more than half of my life. It still sounds pretty fresh, and i don't think it would be out of place among modern indie releases. In fact, it sounds like the album that i keep hoping My Morning Jacket will make.

There are so many songs on this album that i still love. Sitting Still is one of my favorite songs ever, and Perfect Circle bypasses all defenses and buries itself directly in whatever part of my brain is responsible for melancholy. Of course, Radio Free Europe has to be one of the best pop songs the band ever wrote, even if i feel like i've heard it a few too many times now.

Do You Want To Live Forever?

2008-11-13T22:11:00.000-08:00

I was reading an article a couple of days ago that claimed "the first person to live 1000 years on Earth has probably already been born". I'm not sure how much credence i give to the science behind this claim, but it made me confront the question of whether or not i would want that. I'm not speaking about the general societal impact of having a bunch of superannuated resource drains who have long since outlived their 401k income. I mean would I, personally, want to live that long?

It seems like anyone would want to live as long as possible assuming decent health and a basic level of material comfort. But i'm not so sure. Human beings are really not designed to comprehend epic sweeps of time. We regard 100 years as a vast lifetime, and i suspect that we've evolved to feel certain ways at certain points of our development. Do we really want to live for 30 or 40 years in which we experience the intense emotions of intellectual discovery, love, sex, parenthood, marriage, etc. followed by centuries of relative sameness? As it is i have much to look forward to in terms of my kids' lives and possibly my grandchildren, but enthusiasm for one's descendants surely dims after a few generations.

The other concern i have about hyper-extended lifetimes is that the probability of ending up with the words "freak accident" in your obituary goes way up. I'd assume that to live 1000 years you'd have to be essentially immune from cancer, heart disease, and most of the other natural causes. So the only thing that can kill you is an accident. That probably makes you more cautious than you'd be given a normal lifespan if only because you don't want to be the guy who bites it only 18 years into your millenium.

The average lifespan has increased substantially over the last couple of centuries, but increasing that span by another order of magnitude would require an entirely new way of thinking about our lives. It would also depend a lot on the individual. My grandmother is 97, but she's been unhappy since roughly World War II, so she would probably not welcome another nine centuries. I have a hard time imagining what my goals in life would be if i were given a thousand years to accomplish them. Possibly, every century or so i'd have to start all over: go back to college, learn a new career, move to a new country. Sub-divide my life into several sections and take a different path each time.

Training

2008-11-03T18:38:00.000-08:00

I'm through 3 weeks of my training program for the LA Marathon-- 51, 55, and 51 miles respectively. It's been tougher than i'd hoped, mostly because my hip bursitis has been hurting worse than normal. It's going to be hard to get through another 15 weeks, especially as the mileage and pace ramp up. Fortunately, daylight savings time finally ended so it's not dark until 6:30 in the morning any more, at least until mid-December. It will start getting colder though.

This is the 3rd time in 4 years that i'll be training through the holidays. It's brutal, because well-meaning people inundate your home and workplace with high-calorie, low-nutrient food; and being hungry most of the time it's too convenient to grab a couple of cookies rather than something more healthful. It also means lots of cold mornings in my case; and my brain resists getting out from under the covers on those chilly dark mornings. I do however enjoy the feeling of running into the dawn. The light at dawn, in that brief transition between night and day, is almost mystical. I always try to get up for it when i'm camping, but it's even more satisfying when you're running because you feel more like part of that outdoor world.

The Demeanors, Headlining @ Epicentre, Tonight

2008-10-30T09:45:00.000-07:00

Maynard Is Scary

2008-10-23T19:32:00.000-07:00

Maynard James Keenan is a scary dude. It's not because he's physically imposing or even attempting to be scary, like say a Marilyn Manson or some black metal demon worshiper. In some of these Tool videos from the 90s it's possibly that he was, as Bill Hicks said, "reeeeeallll fucking high", but even taking that into account he's frightening, in the way that nocturnal animals and nightmares are frightening.

...And These Are My Shoes

2008-10-19T15:57:00.000-07:00

I was cleaning out my closet, and i discovered that i have more shoes than i thought.

Not exactly Imelda Marco territory, but still more than i would have guessed. Of course, 5 of these pairs are running shoes, 2 are biking, 1 basketball, and 1 hiking. Next up, my lovely collection of bags (seriously, i have a hiking backpack, 2 hydration packs, a couple of cargo bags, a Chrome bike messenger bag, an UnderArmor backpack, and one actual suitcase). It's amazing how much money you can spend over time and still end up in the same sartorial domain as a physics grad student.

Self Surveillance

2008-10-09T18:04:00.000-07:00

I've been reading the book Distracted:The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson (excellent read BTW). There's a section on surveillance that i can't adequately summarize here, but one of the key points is that surveillance is about control. Control, whether it's over your children, employees or citizens is antithetical to trust. Surveillance attempts to make people behave by reminding them that they are being watched, while trust requires the assumption that people will use their best judgement even when nobody is watching.

A meme that i've seen lately trying to escape the primordial ooze of the internet is the idea of self-surveillance. Just to be clear self-surveillance is the process of monitoring one's self, as opposed to surveillance directed outward on the rest of the world (which has been called sousveillance or inverse surveillance). Self-surveillance is basically just a software-assisted form of what calorie counters and budget minders have been doing for ages. However, the ubiquity of the internet, GPS, and other self-sensors make the process simpler and more comprehensive than previously. You can monitor calories and fitness, track your attention, track your sleep while you sleep, and if you're not sleeping you can keep score of, ahem, other things. [I got these examples from FlowingData, an awesome web site for data geeks]

No doubt self-surveillance is about control, and i think there's an element of self-mistrust also (keeping a diet log is often less about keeping precise calorie totals than being honest with yourself). As an avid runner, i've kept track of the distance and duration of my workouts for several years, ostensibly for improvement but i also have to admit that logging a run is as satisfying as checking something off your to-do list. It's very easy to buy into the idea that if you can measure it, you can improve it; and the more you can measure... you see where this is going.

Still there's something unsettling to me about self-surveillance. In part it's the same vague unease that i have with recommendation technology and my concern that trying to discern preferences from behavior limits the serendipitous discoveries. With self-surveillance i'm concerned that monitoring is a way to replace reflection, in the same way that our attempts to manage a flood of information have supplanted deep thought on any particular subject. It's true that keeping a budget can improve one's finances and logging your diet might improve your health. But human beings don't always improve incrementally. Mistakes, accidents, and the occasional delusion seem to be necessary elements in human growth, sort of like how mutations can lead to both harm and evolution.

Of course, another problem with self-surveillance is that it facilitates regular surveillance. Every signal you emanate, every database you update, every link that you establish between disparate sources is a potential channel for the watchers too. That might seem like a strange concern for those of us already exposing so much of our lives on blogs and social networks, but there's a big difference between what we actually do and what we "surface". It seems likely to me that there will be a reaction to self-surveillance that explores the precise technical nature of trust and privacy.

Imogen Heap - Hide and Seek

2008-10-07T22:19:00.000-07:00

I'm not a huge Imogen Heap/Frou Frou fan, but this song is amazing (even if it was used in an episode of The OC). This live version is pretty good, but it doesn't have the strangeness of the full-on vocoder version on Speak For Yourself.

Encounter With An Alien

2008-10-05T19:38:00.000-07:00

[Had to resort to purchasing a new PC to get back up and running. It's abso-freaking-lutely amazing what you can buy for $500 these days. ]

I came home from the store and found that a hummingbird had flown into my garage and was trying persistently to get to the bush behind the garage through the closed window. I tried to coax it toward the door and i actually got it to perch on the end of a broom handle a couple of times, but it was determined to find a way through the glass.

After a few minutes of furious effort it got tangled in some cobwebs and slid down to the sill. It sat there motionless, except for the flicking of its tounge. To my amazement it allowed me to wrap it in a cotton cloth and pick it up. They are so small and delicate that i wasn't sure that i could get a grip on it without injuring it, but i was able to move it outside and place it in the bush. It sat motionless for several minutes, and then we noticed that it seemed to be suspended by its wings, so we gave it a bit of a perch and it flew away.

I have an uneasy feeling that he or she probably did not fair well from the experience, but i guess i'm glad that it was at least able to fly. I have a strange affection for hummingbirds (for the record it was an Anna's hummingbird, but i'm not sure of the gender). I've had numerous close encounters with hummingbirds over the years-- they have often hovered directly in front of my face for several seconds. Clearly a creature that will bang into a pane of glass until exhaustion has no significant intellect, but there is something both alien and endearing about them.

The Demeanors @ Epicentre, Tonight

2008-10-03T08:01:00.001-07:00

Brick

2008-10-03T07:50:00.001-07:00

The Gateway PC that serves as the communal computer at home has become brain damaged. After restoring it twice, i've decided that it probably has a more serious problem than i first thought and it needs to be replaced. I just need to get 11Gb of ITunes downloads transferred off of it first.

Nathan at SOMA Show

2008-09-25T21:55:00.001-07:00

Nathan at SOMA Show
Originally uploaded by mikemull

I like this photo. The black and white gives it more drama, and the "spirit fingers" in the foreground are actually a bit ghostly.

Palin Comparison

2008-09-23T19:56:00.000-07:00

This presidential campaign is the first in which people of my generation are a part of either ticket. As it happens we have Barack Obama, who is a couple of years older than i and Sarah Palin who is a couple of months younger. Similar age is about the only thing they have in common though, beyond the trivial coincidences of living in the same nation and being of the same species.

It's no surprise that i support Obama and disdain Palin. Obama is well educated, enlightened and informed. Palin is not, which is fine, but not really what i'm looking for in a potential president. I don't like the fake-folksy demeanor, the persistent reinterpretation of history, or the staunch pro-life stance (people compare Palin to Reagan, but she's much more like W). I am concerned that she is ignorant of foreign policy, and that she's embroiled in various small-time political scandals that indicate a tendency to seek and abuse power.

Worse though is the religious rhetoric, and the fundamentally (no pun intended) anti-intellectual views that she espouses. I don't think she's smart enough to be intentionally theocratic, but clearly she's the sort who cannot separate her fundamentalist beliefs from her political actions. Like all religious neo-conservatives she will rail against the "terrorists" (viz. Muslims), but the real enemies of her belief system are skeptics, freethinkers, scientists, seekers of truth. Her ideas would be loathsome to a John Adams or a Thomas Jefferson, as they are clearly loathsome to the woman with whom she is most frequently contrasted: Hillary Clinton.

I'm confounded how any fraction of the 70% of the population who disapproves of Bush can support Sarah Palin, who is essentially a female version of the same thing. I'm not exactly an Obama groupie. I have issues with his traditionally liberal view of government and i'm nervous about how his tax restructuring will affect people in California where so much of one's income goes to housing. But he's such a vastly superior human being in all respects that it's really no contest. I know that the dyed-in-the-wool conservatives will vote McCain/Palin regardless, but anybody who's undecided at this point must seriously consider the very real possibility of President Palin. I do not want the first President of my generation to be such a poor representative.

LA Marathon

2008-09-22T20:27:00.000-07:00

I've been planning to run the LA Marathon in 2009, as my second attempt to break the 3 hour mark. It's not a super-fast course, but i figured it had the advantage of being a short road trip and a familiar place. Even though it's not on a par with the other major city marathons yet, i want to run it once just to check it off the list.

However, it's starting to be more of an adventure than i expected. The race has been operated for several years by an outfit called Devine Sports. They scheduled the 2009 race for Sunday, March 1st. However, Devine has had some financial trouble, and according to a recent LA Times article, Devine sold the event to an organization created by Frank McCourt, the owner of the LA Dodgers. That alone wouldn't be a big deal, but the new organization apparently plans to move the race to Monday, Feb. 19 (President's Day). True, it's still early enough that most people aren't too deep into their training cycle; but that's still gotta be a big ship to steer in another direction.

I'm undecided about what i'll do now. I like the idea of a Monday marathon (very Boston-like), but it means i have to start my training program two weeks early. That doesn't sound like much, but since i like to run in the mornings it means starting before the DST time change and even more dark, cold mornings. That week is also what we affectionately call "ski week" around here, meaning that my kids have the whole week off so we go snowboarding. My alternatives are the Napa Valley marathon on March 1, or maybe waiting all the way until summer and doing the Rock'n'Roll San Diego again.

The Demeanors @ Metaphor Cafe, Tomorrow, Sept. 20

2008-09-19T08:14:00.000-07:00

David Foster Wallace

2008-09-14T09:13:00.000-07:00

I know it's peculiar to mourn a complete stranger, but i find myself very sad today at the news of David Foster Wallace's suicide. If you're not familiar with his writing, you should be. But it's not just that he was a significant writer. To me he was a symbol of success for a way of thinking that was intelligent, broadly curious, and never intellectually satisfied. He was funny and human but never simple. He was the sort of person i would like to be. To think that even he could not cope is profoundly depressing.

If you don't know his work, start with A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. It's one of my favorite non-fiction books, and probably my favorite book title ever. This is a collection of essays, but the title essay is the real payoff.

Fender Mustang

2008-09-07T10:26:00.001-07:00

My son Nathan has become something of a guitar nerd. He can identify guitars in videos and movies, and he's always on the lookout for deals on E-Bay and elsewhere for lefty guitars. He finally found one that met both his standards and his price. This is a Fender Mustang, which was the favorite guitar of famous lefty, Kurt Cobain. Clearly, i'm not crazy about Cobain being a role model, but it is a pretty cool guitar.

TransRockies Recap

2008-09-01T20:04:00.000-07:00

The TransRockies run is hard, tough, grueling, exhausting; all adjectives that are necessary but not sufficient to describe the experience. It is difficult because of the altitude, the climbing, the distance, the daily wear and tear, the sleeping in tents, the carrying of gear on one's back, etc. On the other hand, it is six days where you don't have to worry about much else beyond running. In fact, it'd be a pretty good way of life-- get up, eat, run, eat, hang out, eat, sleep, repeat. Roughly speaking, the TransRockies is somewhere between traveling circus and military exercise.

Still, it's pretty hard, especially for us sea-level folk. Running a 100+ mile week is tough in any case but i was surprised at just how much of a toll the altitude could take. At 8 or 9000 feet it slows you down; at 11000 feet it makes you delirious.

Day 0 - Denver to Buena Vista

On Sunday, I arrived at the Denver airport along with hundreds of Democratic National Convention attendees. I had about 3 hours to kill before the shuttle would pick us up for the trip to Buena Vista. By 1pm four TR teams had assembled, including myself and Mr. P. We didn't chat much with the other teams on the way out, but later on it would come in handy to know these particular runners.

We got to Buena Vista in late afternoon, and checked in our team. Buena Vista is a cute little town, with a mixture of older buildings and modern stores and hotels. It's pretty easy to walk from end to end, which we did a couple of times in going from the Super 8 to check-in, and then back to the community center for the pre-race barbecue. On the way home from the latter we got rained on and jogged back to our motel, which was a disconcerting introduction to the difficulty of running at this altitude. A few hours after the barbecue we got hungry again and went to the local Mexican restaurant for a snack.

Day 1 - Buena Vista to Numbers - 13 miles

We went back to the community center for our first pre-race breakfast, which was good but seemed heavy at the time. We met a couple from Maine; the husband had been asked to come out and play music at the campfire for the Salomon runners and employees.

The first day was a "gentle" introduction to the altitude. We started at Buena Vista and ran primarily on a gravel road that ran along the Arkansas River. It was a relatively mild incline, and a total distance of just under 13 miles. At my normal altitude that'd be an easy 1:40 or so. We worked pretty hard to finish in 1:54, about 30 minutes behind the race leaders. Maybe this altitude thing was gonna be harder than i thought.

After the race we soaked in the river for a while, and then caught a shuttle to the nearby Arrowhead campground, which was the site of our first tent city. After settling in, we traveled into Buena Vista with some other runners, our purpose being to buy some gloves for Mr. P. We also got some Alleve and the other runners got beer-- a sort of combination carb source and sleep aid for runners.

Tent City at Arrowhead Campground

Day 2 - Vicksburg to Twin Lakes - 10 miles

The second day was the shortest mileage of the week, but we were still all a bit anxious about it because it would also be our highest altitude. The first half of the run, after a short flat section, was a climb up to 12,600 foot Hope Pass. It was an exhausting climb. The slopes were never too brutal, but at 12000 feet it's tough to keep moving. Coming up over the pass and seeing the Twin Lakes area in the distance is one of the highlights of the week. The single track descent on the other side is fun too, because it's both beautiful country and well-maintained trail. It eventually took us 2:24 to finish the run, both the hardest and slowest 10 miles i've ever run.

After the run, a shuttle took us into Leadville, which is a Mecca of sorts for trail athletes, both runners and mountain bikers. Leadville was my favorite stopping point in the race. It has decent restaurants and shops, but doesn't seem like a tourist trap. This was also our first experience of the "portable shower truck", basically a semi-trailer with shower stalls and a set of sinks outside. Without this innovation, the event would probably not be very popular.

Leadville

Day 3 - Leadville to Nova Guides - 24 miles

The third day was the first long day, and the longest day of the week in terms of mileage. The profile didn't look too bad-- there was one climb and descent to about 7 miles, and then another climb to about 15 miles, after which the rest was downhill and flat. I felt OK on the first climb, but the second was hard. By the 15 mile control station i was tapped out, and i had to do a GU shot. That seemed to help a bit and we moved well through the downhill section. The last 3 miles was a flat section on a dirt road leading into Camp Hale. It was pretty hard but i vowed to continue running, no matter how slow. We finished in 4:24, which was at least within our limit of 4:30, so we felt good about it.

Our camp site for the night was a place informally called Nova Guides. Actually, there's a sort of lodge there operated by the Nova Guides, an outfit that does everything from jeep trips to rafting. They have a restaurant, and a grassy area where we could stretch out and rest. We also had a memorable dinner that night. Mr. P and i sat with a group of young women who are all in the military. I can't remember the last time i've laughed so much.

The campfire that night was a bit rowdy, in part because there wasn't anywhere else to go, and in part because several people got involved in the music making. It was fun, but i was more interested in the sky, which without much artificial light was deep and detailed.

The circus comes to Nova Guides

Day 4 - Nova Guides to Red Cliff - 14 miles

The fourth day was slightly shorter, but had another tough climb at the start. It wasn't obvious from the elevation profile, but it turned out to be very steep at the top part of the climb, and everyone slowed to a crawl over the last mile. At the top though we had a beautiful section of trail along a ridge with great views in every direction. For some reason, i was feeling relatively good this day and managed to keep up with Mr. P despite his much longer stride. We totally bombed the downhill and had our best finish of the race, albeit in a none-too-speedy 2:34. Still, it moved us up a couple of spots in the overall ranking.

Our stopping point for that night was the town of Red Cliff. There's not a lot to Red Cliff, but it does have this amazing bar/restaurant called Mango's. They have probably the best fish tacos i've ever had outside of San Diego. We sat near the race leaders that evening, Erik Skaggs and Max King, the latter of whom had been in the shuttle with us from Denver Airport. It was kind of cool to talk about running and other stuff with the elites of the race; something that would not likely happen in a typical race.

Red Cliff

Day 5 - Red Cliff to Vail - 23 miles

This was the day that had made me nervous all week. It was long, but the scary part was the elevation profile, which looked like a big "M". Ten miles up, followed by a jagged 5 miles at above 11000 feet, followed by about 9 miles of down.

As it turns out i was right to be concerned. I was feeling relatively good up the first climb, but during the stretch at altitude i began to feel very bad. This was my first real problem with the heights. I began to feel dizzy and a bit nauseous, and there were sections where it felt like i was blacking out between steps. I had to walk a lot on runnable sections, and by the final summit i was beginning to wonder if i would finish. For the first part of the downhill section, i still couldn't get into a rhythm, and had to walk occasionally. After the final control station with 5 miles to go i finally began to feel better, and we ran the last downhill section pretty fast. We had to push to come in under 5 hours, about 4:57. It was a disappointing time, but still one of the hardest physical efforts of my life. This was the only point in the race where i doubted my ability to finish, so the poor time was largely compensated for by the mere fact of finishing.

Our camp site that night was just outside Vail Village, so we were essentially back in civilization. We had cell-phone reception and were relatively close to a Starbucks, so it wasn't quite the hard life. We also had steak that night, for which i'm eternally grateful to the caterer, The Gourmet Cowboy.

Vail Village

Day 6 - Vail to Beaver Creek - 21 miles

The distance and profile looked pretty daunting for the last day, but it was easier to face since we knew we'd be done at the end. Unfortunately, Mr. P was struggling with a sore foot- an apparent case of bursitis at the point where his Achilles tendon connects to the foot. It made it very hard for him to run downhill, which we'd be doing plenty on this day. He still kicked my ass up the hills- even if i could match his cadence he'd pull away since each stride was so much longer.

The run started with a pretty long climb, but it topped out at only 10,500 feet so it seemed much easier than the previous day. We then had a long, steep, descent on a pretty but very narrow single track. It would have been a blast had Mr. P been feeling better.

As a cruel twist, the organizers added another climb with about 5 miles to go. To add insult to injury the very last section of this climb was straight up a ski slope. I felt like i needed a rope to climb it. It sucked. The very last part of the run was another steep downhill cutting across the face of another ski slope. It was an awesome finish, but again pretty hard on Mr. P's injured foot. It was extremely gratifying to run the last few paces into the finish chute, knowing that we'd just finished a damn hard event. There are too many platitudes about the value of finishing over winning, but in this case finishing did feel like a pretty amazing accomplishment.

That night we were comfortably bunked in a hotel in Beaver Creek, with warm showers and flush toilets and cable television. We had our finisher banquet at the Park Hyatt and i got to drink wine (mediocre, way over-priced wine, but still...). We sat with the Polish Gore Tex team and had a good time exchanging stories and jokes (please, no Polish joke comments). By then, i'd started to feel happy about surviving the week without any major injuries, extremes of weather, significant sickness, or encounters with aggro sheep dogs (inside joke, you had to be there). I even started entertaining thoughts of maybe, just maybe, doing it all again some day.

SOMA

2008-08-23T19:33:00.000-07:00

I was leaving work early yesterday to pick up my younger son for a basketball game at 5pm and i had the radio tuned to local station 94.9. The DJ was doing a bit they do every afternoon called the "Dog Dare", which is basically a song request. The DJ was reading this particular request, which went something like this: "My son Brandon is playing his first professional gig tonight at SOMA with his band, The Demeanors". It was a request from Brandon's dad Rich (Brandon is the Demeanor's excellent drummer). It was pretty cool. The DJ mentioned the band and the show three times, i think.

The show itself was really, really good. I was so impressed. I've heard them play five shows now, but this was far and away the best. Part of it i'm sure was just the superior sound quality of the venue, but i also think that the larger crowd gave the whole thing a higher energy. Although the side stage at SOMA is not a huge space, there were at least 200 people in the crowd and most of them were in to the music.

It was a bit bittersweet for the band though, since this was probably the last show for their trumpet player Jacob. His parents, who are Mormon, decided that the rock-n-roll lifestyle is not in his best interest. I understand their concerns, but he obviously derives great joy from the music, and i can't imagine how hard it must be for them to take it away from him. I of course worry about what Nathan is exposed to, but since he's a straight-A student who keeps up with cello, piano, and cross country i figure i have to give him the benefit of the doubt. In fact, every kid in the band is a wonderful individual, and the type of music is energetic and joyful rather than nihilistic and negative.

Ironically, this was also my first show at SOMA. As an all-ages venue, there haven't been many shows over the years that have been enticing enough to overcome the essential creepiness of being as old as the parents of most fans. I did feel pretty creepy last night-- i figure most of the kids assumed i was a narc-- but there were enough lingering parents around that i wasn't the only creepy dude.

Tapering

2008-08-20T08:32:00.000-07:00

TransRockies starts in five days, so at this point there's not much that can be done training-wise. I'm trying to stay virus-free and injury-free, and i'm trying to eat as well (and as much) as possible. I still feel under-trained, but i'm relying on the past five years of regular running and the experience of several marathons and ultras. The altitude is still my biggest concern. I know what it's like to run long distances every day, and i know what to expect in terms of terrain and weather, but the altitude over an entire week is a huge unknown. I'm hoping that the scenery makes up for the suffering.

I was watching the women's Olympic marathon when Deena Kastor, one of my running heroes, had to drop out with a broken foot only 3 miles in. It's hard to imagine how frustrating it must be to train so hard and so long for a particular goal and then to not even have a chance of competing at the end. I've been thinking about what i would do if an injury prevented me from running at TransRockies. In principle, i can walk the whole bloody thing-- there are worse things than a week-long hike through the Rockies. I have to concede though that i'd be disappointed if i could not run the entire distance.

Mr. P and i have a tentative goal of finishing in under 20 hours total. That won't be competitive in our division, but it's respectable. That goal however must be secondary to finishing, surviving, not getting eaten by a bear, etc. I'm more excited for this race than i've been since my first marathon, but like any first-in-category race, it'll probably be more of a learning experience than a competition.

The Brothers, The Brothers

2008-08-15T08:52:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite novels is Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. It's one of the few books i've read multiple times, and back in my college days i read portions of it in the original Russian. I love Russian literature in general, and over the years I’ve read everything from Lermontov to Tolstoy to Bulgakov. But for some reason, I never read The Brothers Karamazov. I’m not sure why—maybe it’s because they made a movie out of it that had William Shatner playing one of the brothers.

Despite that I had high expectations for the book, and I really wanted to love it the way I love Crime and Punishment. When I started to read it a couple of months ago, I assumed that I’d eventually be drawn into it, even if the beginning was a bit slow. In theory, this is exactly the sort of book I like: deep, philosophical themes couched in a murder mystery/courtroom drama. But, Jesus, the most interesting thing that happens in the first 300 pages is the death of a monk ('cause he's really old -- no mystery here).

It's an incredibly complex novel. The structure, the characters, and the subject matter all serve to explore themes of faith vs. rationalism and what is morally permitted if there is no God. And of course, there are the Freudian overtones in the story of a son killing his father over a woman. The three (or four) brothers cover a spectrum of different personalities and represent the paths you can take in life and the dilemma in the fact that you can't choose all of the paths. But i just didn't feel it, like with Crime and Punishment.

Crime and Punishment is not a happy book. In fact, it's a bit oppressive at times. But what always struck me about the book is that you feel this oppressiveness in the writing, you feel Raskolnikov's fear and guilt. I never really felt sympathetic at all with the characters in The Brothers Karamazov. It may be that i read it too late in life-- all of the brothers are still young men and it's hard for me to relate to any of them. If there's a character in the book to whom i most closely correspond it would be the father, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, who is an ... um ... i forget the Russian word for "asshole".

Crime and Punishment also works better as a crime story. Even though you know the murderer from the outset, there's a fascination in the way the detective in the story hounds Raskolnikov (this is the basis for the television show Columbo). In The Brothers Karamazov you know that the accused is not the murderer, and furthermore the actual murderer is revealed before the trial starts. There is "drama" in the trial, but no real suspense. It must have been incredibly frustrating to the people reading it in the original serialization.

Like all Russian realism, everything in the book is supposed to be significant, but i'm still scratching my head over certain characters, like Ilyusha, a boy who is at first tormented by his peers and then becomes their friend just in time to die. I'm still not sure about the significance of the Elder Zosima (the aforementioned dead monk) either. His death involves one of the strangest episodes in the book. Although i suppose it's yet another illustration of the boundaries of faith, it's really surreal. The one thing that this book has over Crime and Punishment is a sense of humor. However, it's not the sort of humor that will have you laughing out loud. It comes out more in absurd contrasts or gentle pokes at a character's foibles.

I regret that i no longer have the ability to read the book in Russian. Although i read what seems to be regarded as the best current English translation, the language still didn't ring true. From what i understand Dostoevsky's prose in this book is a bit unorthodox to begin with, so a translation is bound to seem odd no matter how skillful.

The Demeanors @ SOMA, August 22

2008-08-11T21:03:00.001-07:00

The kid's band is opening a show at SOMA on the 22nd. Ironically, he didn't know who that is on the poster.

TransRockies Training

2008-08-10T21:05:00.000-07:00

This was a tough week. I did several trail runs, and including last weekend i've done 90 miles in the last 9 days, including over 40 in the last 3. This morning was my first run over 3 hours since the New York marathon, but this was much harder given that a large portion of that time was climbing to the top of Mt. Woodson from the Lake Poway side. I'm a bit fried, but i'm still not sure i'm fit enough for TransRockies. We'll finish, but i'm dreading Day 4, when we'll be doing our second consecutive 20+ mile run. Day 6 is also over 20, but there we have the promise of relief at the end. I'd feel much better if i get could get in a couple of 70 mile weeks, but i think that i need to taper for these last 2 weeks.

The Demeanors @ Epicentre, Take 2

2008-08-06T21:52:00.000-07:00

San Jacinto

2008-08-04T16:18:00.001-07:00

This weekend Mr. P (my friend and TransRockies teammate) came to San Diego to do some training. He flew in on Friday night, then on Saturday morning we ran down the Silver Strand-- the sliver of man-made land between Coronado Island and Imperial Beach. We did about 16 miles, but it was nice and flat. Afterward, i went to my weekly kung fu lesson and Mr. P drove up to Joshua Tree to do some bouldering.

Our real intent for the weekend was to run up Mt. San Jacinto from the Mountain Station at the top of the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway. It's only an 11 mile round-trip, but it's single track trail and most importantly it's at a decent altitude (the peak of San Jacinto is a bit over 10000 feet). This was meant to be more psychological preparation for the Rockies since one run at altitude wouldn't affect our fitness much.

Turns out it was pretty hard. Although i'd backpacked the trail in the past, i'd forgotten how technical it is. Lots of rock-hopping and step-ups, not to mention tree roots that i tripped over about every 10 yards. The altitude did affect us, especially on the stair-step sections. I got the same dizzy sensation i get after getting choked in submission grappling. It took us a sobering 1:15 to do the 5.5 mile up to the top (about 13:40 pace). The downhill trip was a touch faster at 55 minutes, but not much easier on the legs. We did stop briefly at the top to drink some water and take some goofy cell-phone pics:

Mr P. pretending to be exhausted

Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

It was a revealing run, but i think it accomplished its purpose. Some of our days in the Rockies will be about twice this run, and we'll have to get up and do it again the next day. I think this gave us a good idea how hard we can afford to run and how easy we'll have to take it after each run to be ready for the next one. I think most of the trail that we run in the Rockies will be slightly less brutal, but i think i'll need to run some stairs or something over the next few weeks.

I managed about 52 miles this week, but i still feel horribly under-trained for TransRockies. I'm probably going to have to do one more hard week before tapering.

Running With My Son

2008-07-27T22:19:00.000-07:00

I've got just over 4 weeks until the Trans-Rockies run, and i really need to be doing more mileage. I had planned to do about 15 today, but after doing 10 hilly miles on the trails near Black Mountain Ranch on Saturday, i just wasn't feeling it. So i decided to go run the 5-mile loop at Lake Miramar, and i asked my older son Nathan if he wanted to come along. He's training to run cross country when he starts high school this fall, so five miles is about right for him.

This is the first time that we've ever really run together. I know that he can run a relatively fast mile, but i didn't know what to expect for a longer run. I let him set the pace at the outset and he hit a pretty comfortable stride right away. We did the first mile in an easy 7:30 or so, and more or less stuck to that pace. He's got a nice, long stride and seems to be pretty fit (it doesn't hurt that he's skinny as a rail) . We did the full five miles in about 37 minutes-- not super fast but i was still pretty impressed. He was clearly not pressing to keep that pace and probably could have done under 7 minute pace in race circumstances. Maybe not fast enough for cross country yet, but much better than most adults can run.

Eventually he's going to be kicking my ass, but i intend to delay that for as long as i can.

Danny Perez Defeats Danny Z

2008-07-25T08:48:00.001-07:00

Danny Perez defeats Danny Z
Originally uploaded by mikemull

Went to see pro boxing at 4th & B in downtown San Diego last night. One of my wife's friends and former instructors, Danny Perez, started his middle weight comeback with a pretty decisive 6-round unanimous decision over Serbian Daniel Stanisavljevic.

The Most Interesting Person In The World

2008-07-22T20:34:00.000-07:00

Dos Equis has been running an ad campaign based around "the most interesting man in the world". I think it's a really cool idea, but they spoiled it for me by making the attributes of the most interesting man more supernatural than interesting. Still, it got me thinking. Most people know somebody who seems to live larger than everybody else. So, who really is the most interesting person in the world?

I know lots of people who've done interesting things, or have interesting qualities. I know people who travel to exotic places as casually as others go out to dinner. I have a friend who's Bulgarian by birth, Canadian by citizenship, speaks five languages and is an avid windsurfer; most of that also applies to his Russian wife who defected when she was a member of a traveling Soviet soccer team. I have a friend who has climbed all the 14000 foot peaks in the US, in between scuba diving and rock climbing. I have several friends who have started successful, interesting businesses; or have established lives in unusual out-of-the-way places. I used to have a Romanian friend whose father was a well-known opera singer. He had lived in Paris, and one time when we were in Cambridge our waitress at a French restaurant practically sat down to have dinner with us because she was so impressed by his French accent. So if i, with my relatively mundane existence, know such interesting people there must be someone out there who intrigues even other interesting people.

The characteristics of an interesting person are subjective i'm sure, but this is my take: an interesting person has several well-developed abilities; they are probably multi-lingual, probably athletic, individualistic, and a little bit eccentric. He or she would not be a major celebrity, but might be prominent within his or her field. An interesting person would be well traveled, but not like a tourist. Travel would either be an aspect of this person's profession, or just an outgrowth of wanderlust or some sort of personal journey of discovery. This person would have an easy familiarity in numerous cultures, but would still seem somewhat mysterious in any of them. He or she would have a history that couldn't be entirely revealed, like a brush with the law or a stint in some secretive branch of the military. It would be a person who's not fabulously wealthy, but who never seems to lack for means. An interesting person will have some scars.

I don't have many candidates, who aren't either fictional or dead (Indiana Jones, Sir Richard Francis Burton, Gertrude Bell, Rick Blaine). I suppose many journalists could be considered, like Christiane Amanpour or Robert Fisk. Certain authors could also-- i'd include Peter Matthiessen-- and i'm sure a list of MacArthur grant recipients would yield numerous candidates. Valerie Plame, especially before her cover was blown. Any of hundreds of explorers, inventors, athletes, entrepreneurs and performers could likely be identified. Still, i'm convinced that there's a person out there who is the most fascinating of the fascinating, though i suspect that he or she does not in fact prefer Dos Equis.

Spiders Are Such Assholes

2008-07-19T19:18:00.001-07:00

Yeah, spiders look cool and they're useful and all, but they're real assholes too. If you don't find yourself outside early in the morning you might not know this, but they leave their webs strung around all over the place and there's nothing more irritating than having to get a spider web off of your face.

Actually, i really dig spiders. This is a Black Widow that i photographed behind my house last week. What an amazing creature.

Amy Smith

2008-07-18T19:32:00.000-07:00

This is an amazing human being:

Fattist

2008-07-16T21:08:00.000-07:00

I took the Implicit Association Test at Harvard's Project Implicit to see if i have any automatic preference for thin people over fat people. It concluded that i don't. What led me to try this was an article on the "fattist" overtones of the Pixar movie Wall-E. If you haven't seen the movie, the humans on the spaceship that left earth 700 years earlier are all obese, supposedly because they do nothing but eat and float around playing video games. Probably a dozen generations of exposure to micro-gravity have not helped, but that's never mentioned. What has upset some people is the implication that these fat humans are literally responsible for the destruction of Earth's environment due to their out of control overconsumption.

Or something like that. I'm a bit conflicted over the issue of "fat pride", because my family history would suggest that weight and appetite control have a significant genetic component. I also deeply understand the use of food as an emotional balm. I don't think there's any simple equation that says attractiveness is directly proportional to thinness -- certainly those coat-hanger fashion models are about as scary as humans get. In my profession there is no correlation between size and professional success. But, yeah, i'd rather be thin than fat.

I don't mean skeletal, more like athletic. It's not so much about appearance as about quality of life. If, like me, you take pleasure in running, jumping, moving in general then fat is an impediment. There are some great athletes who are heavy and there are many people who look good despite having no athletic inclinations. But, jeesh, people of my generation have become so sedentary that they might as well be a brain in a bell jar. So maybe i'm not fattist, but i do have a prejudice against people who have decided, prematurely in my opinion, that being fat is not only inevitable but preferable to getting off the goddamn couch.

Of Fleecy Marmots and Other Fun Toys

2008-07-12T17:34:00.000-07:00

I spent my afternoon at REI buying gear for the TransRockies run. I wanted to get a lighter-weight fleece, even though i have a pretty good one already. Got a pretty good deal on this Marmot model:

On the positive side it's really fun to say "fleecy marmot". Not sure why. On the down side, the older i get the more i look like Max Schreck from Nosferatu, so i should probably avoid black garments with high collars.

I also got a Camelbak hydration pack:

I think this might be a bit heavy though, so i might trade it in for something lighter.

And, some new North Face trail shoes:

I'm not a big fan of trail shoes-- they're bulky and hot-- but i figure the Rockies will be, well, rocky. The major benefits of trail shoes are the tread and the sturdier soles, which isolate you from sharp edges.

Michael Johnson 400m WR

2008-07-11T08:32:00.000-07:00

This is amazing- Michael Johnson's 400 world record from 1999. Off the final turn Johnson looks like he's running a different race than his competitors.

Dark Leopards of the Moon

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

I've been reading a lot of poetry recently, which one of my college lit professors claimed was a symptom of clinical depression. Whatever. Personally i think it's because of that video game commercial that uses the We Happy Few speech from Henry V-- such a great pep talk.

My tastes do run toward the melancholy (William Cullen Bryant's Thanatopsis is probably my favorite poem), but i mostly like interesting language and cryptic imagery. At the moment, i'm mildly obsessed with William Butler Yeats. I think certain poets make more sense at certain times of one's life. In my college years, it was Leaves of Grass because Whitman seemed like he was always spurring you on to some journey. Yeats seems to be the poet of aging men. It might not be apparent in The Second Coming, probably his best known poem; but Sailing to Byzantium or Men Improve with the Years are poems that probably only make sense to someone who has reached a certain age. I love the second half of the third stanza of Byzantium:

Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity

The phrase "fastened to a dying animal" is one of those amazing poetic tropes that could not be revised.

My introduction to Yeats (beyond The Second Coming -- everybody has heard the "What rough beast...slouches toward Bethlehem..." line) was from the Waterboys' song "The Stolen Child", which is basically Yeats' poem set to music. Much of Yeats' poetry based on Irish folk legend doesn't resonate with me like his other works, but this version is surprisingly effective because each stanza of the poem ends with the same lines, which the Waterboys sang as a chorus.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand
My favorite thing about Yeats is the degree to which he sometimes takes his symbolism, which results in lots of strangely satisfying WTF? moments when reading his poems. My favorite image is from Lines Written in Dejection:

WHEN have I last looked on
The round green eyes and the long wavering bodies
Of the dark leopards of the moon?
All the wild witches, those most noble ladies,
For all their broom-sticks and their tears,
Their angry tears, are gone.

The holy centaurs of the hills are vanished;
I have nothing but the embittered sun;
Banished heroic mother moon and vanished,
And now that I have come to fifty years
I must endure the timid sun.

Dark leopards of the moon? The hell you say? When i start my geriatric death metal band, that will be our name.

Western States 100 Canceled

2008-07-01T12:59:00.000-07:00

Wow. This is such a bummer. The very first marathon i was supposed to run was canceled due to wildfires, but i was able to find another marathon the same weekend (albeit in Boise, Idaho). I can't imagine the disappointment these folks must feel.

The Claw

2008-06-29T18:59:00.001-07:00

Mirror 001
Originally uploaded by mikemull

I was goofing around with my Canon, taking flash pictures in the mirror in my living room. When i looked at this one it freaked me out, because there was this bizarre claw-like image centered almost directly on my shirt. Being a skeptical sort i did not immediately assume that i had capture some angry poltergeist, but i didn't really know what caused it.

Upon closer inspection it turned out that one of my kids (or one of his friends) had placed their hand against the mirror and had created this identical pattern on the surface. I'm not sure if the flash reflected the image back at me, or if it was partially absorbed, or whatever. I'm thinking about having this silk-screened on a shirt.

Guitar Lounge

2008-06-24T22:11:00.001-07:00

Guitar Lounge 1
Originally uploaded by mikemull

I kind of like this photo. The interesting thing is that it's not posed-- this is just what the room looked like when i walked in. Nathan and his friend Won Ji were trying to record stuff, and they just happened to be using the furniture as guitar stands (that's Henry on the couch with the guitars, watching Spongebob).

TransRockies Run

2008-06-22T11:22:00.000-07:00

I and my friend and former kung fu instructor (who i'll just refer to as Mr. P) were hoping to make a trip to hike the Machu Picchu trail this year, but the timing just isn't working out. Instead, we're going to do the TransRockies run, a 6-day two-person team race through the Colorado Rockies. Under normal circumstances it would be a fairly hard event-- 125 miles in 6 days-- but the fact that it's all at 8000 to 12000 feet and i have to sleep in a tent makes it a true adventure. The altitude concerns me, especially Stage 2, which peaks at 12536 feet. Based on past experience, that's gonna be a wind-sucking slog.

This also means i've got to get my running mileage up quicker than i anticipated. The longest leg is only about 24 miles, but the hills and elevation changes are brutal. I also need to drop at least 5 pounds and work on my leg strength. All in all though i'm really psyched. It's been years since i've spent much time in the Rockies and Mr. P and i had a great time on our last adventure race.

We're also going to run under the name of my friend Cathy's business, Pristine Planet. It gave us a team name and, i hope, will get Pristine Planet some attention from the no-doubt environmentally conscious fellow competitors.

Late For The Sky

2008-06-20T16:20:00.000-07:00

This is one of Jackson Browne's best songs in my opinion, but it's hard to listen to. It's a beautiful melody, but the lyrics are like a punch in the stomach.

The words had all been spoken
And somehow the feeling still wasnt right
And still we continued on through the night
Tracing our steps from the beginning
Until they vanished into the air
Trying to understand how our lives has led us there

Looking hard into your eyes
There was nobody Id ever known
Such an empty surprise to feel so alone

Now for me some words come easy
But I know that they dont mean that much
Compared with the things that are said when lovers touch
You never knew what I loved in you
I dont know what you loved in me
Maybe the picture of somebody you were hoping I might be

Awake again I cant pretend and I know Im alone
And close to the end of the feeling weve known

How long have I been sleeping
How long have I been drifting alone through the night
How long have I been dreaming I could make it right
If I closed my eyes and tried with all my might
To be the one you need

Awake again I cant pretend and I know Im alone
And close to the end of the feeling weve known

How long have I been sleeping
How long have I been drifting alone through the night
How long have I been running for that morning flight
Through the whispered promises and the changing light
Of the bed where we both lie
Late for the sky

Irrefutable Evidence

2008-06-18T08:26:00.000-07:00

The Demeanors at Metaphor Cafe, June 19

2008-06-16T18:23:00.001-07:00

Ten-Lined June Beetle

2008-06-15T13:30:00.000-07:00

Found one of these on the floor of the car:

Image from: http://www.torreypine.org/animals/Insects/JuneBeetle.htm

Back on the Run

2008-06-15T09:57:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago i did a leisurely run around Coronado Island with my former martial arts instructor. God, it felt so good. I took off a few months from running to try to fix the chronic bursitis in my left hip. It didn't help much, probably because i needed to stop all activity, which, as the world's oldest hyperkinetic, i couldn't do even if i wanted to. Although i've decided that i won't run a marathon this year, i'm going to start running consistently again. I can't really explain why i need to run, especially to the majority of people who regard it as a punishment of sorts, but at this stage of my life it's as much a psychological balm as it is exercise. It helps me sleep, it helps me structure my life, and it's comforting to know that what you get from running is directly proportional to what you commit to it.

This'll be the first year since 2002 that i haven't run a marathon (and the first since 2004 that i haven't run at least two marathons). In some ways it's tempting to call it a career and focus on other activities, but i still have that sub 3-hour goal hanging out there. The 3:02 i ran at last year's Carlsbad marathon convinced me that it was well within my reach, but i'm not quite ready to jump back into 70-mile weeks and 5am runs. I also have it in the back of my head to do Western States one of these days, but since i haven't even done a 50-miler yet, i've got a lot of work to do before i'm ready for 100 miles in the mountains.

I'd also like to run Boston again, i'd like to do LA, London, and maybe the Marine Corps marathon for good measure. So, yeah, i still have a lot of running to get out my system.

The Family Farm

2008-06-13T20:20:00.000-07:00

[This is a poem i wrote many, many years ago about the place i grew up]

This place is something I know
something without abstraction that I can
comprehend with only
my eyes.

This thing, a low flat sheet of rough cement that
casts no shadow from the dull light of this sky,
an island of man-made rock amidst mud and thriving weeds.
Structures like these, places like this, leave behind
remnants not ruins.

This is the complete absence of mystery,
the complete knowledge of a place,
a rectangle, cement, and patches of rust,
followed by furrows, nearly straight,
plowed, dirt turned by the
same man.

Black

2008-06-08T18:40:00.000-07:00

When i was a freshman in college i spent a couple of years studying the Hung Gar form of kung fu with a grad student named Aaron Chen. I really loved it, but when Sifu Chen returned to China i didn't seek opportunities to continue. I always wanted to pick it back up, but life intervened. Being primarily interested in Chinese martial arts, it was also harder to find a convenient school, at least compared to the ubiquitous karate and tae kwon do schools.

Flash forward almost twenty years to the start of my midlife crisis. Since i've always been slightly kinesthetic, i figured i needed some sort of skill sport to balance my obsession with endurance sports. As luck would have it, a Chinese martial arts school had opened not far from where i was working at the time. It was not Hung Gar, but it was another southern style called Choy Li Fut. It took me a while, but i finally took off a lunch hour and went over to check it out.

I had some skepticism of an established school like this at first. Sifu Chen had no ranking system. He didn't even have a school-- we just practiced on the school commons or in the gyms. Soon though i was won over, mostly by the skill of the new school's chief instructor, Sifu Ming Lau. There's an Arthur C. Clark quote that goes "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". I would say the same about sufficiently advanced physical skill. Sifu Lau, like Sifu Chen, could do things that seemed superhuman. It would be years before i would see the breadth of his abilities, but the depth was quickly apparent.

Not quite six years later i've finally managed to advance through all of the basic ranks to achieve my black sash at that school, White Dragon of Mira Mesa. The significance of this black belt status is hard to explain to somebody on the outside of the system. The popular notion of the black belt, i think, is of reaching the pinnacle of a martial system. In our school the black belt conveys some of that and it is the goal of most students when they start. Most people who reach that level are also pretty fit and pretty capable of defending themselves. However, it also implies mastery of only the basics, and it signifies a sort of transition where you have to decide if you will incorporate the martial arts into your life permanently. Although there are advanced tests, it's not really about levels any more. What's left to a person at this point is only to get better-- in short what's left is kung fu.

Although i've got a long way to go to become truly adept, i have to admit that this is one of the more satisfying accomplishments of my adult life. It's not something that i'm naturally gifted at and i had to train pretty consistently for a fairly long time to get to this point. Unlike running marathons there is no age-group standard to measure myself against, so as the years passed i had to work harder to do things that would have been easy for my twenty-something self. The irony is that by the time you reach this point you come to realize that the levels and goals are less meaningful than the process. For me at least, i just love the motion and the contact and the sense of purpose that i get from the martial arts.

The Demeanors at Epicentre, June 6

2008-06-02T19:06:00.000-07:00

My kid's band plays at the Epicentre in Mira Mesa on June 6th.

Image by TikiThomas.

Another Country

2008-05-31T10:07:00.000-07:00

Before i started working in on-line music i thought that i had fairly broad and eclectic musical interests. I grew up on Bach cantatas and jazz standards and i had explored numerous pop and art music categories. I listened to 12-tone music and Norwegian death metal and Ornette Coleman and music from Africa and Latin America. By the standards of some of the people who work in the music industry, my taste is still very shallow; but i stick to the idea that people who like music will always keep looking for new stuff.

But when i look at other people's professed musical interests, i see one very common theme. After listing a few bands, they will conclude with "i'll listen to anything, except country". It's the "except country" part that gets me. I see this so frequently that it seems like music sites should have two options: (A) country (B) everything but country. I know what people mean when they say this. Historically speaking there has been a lot of dreadful country music, and i've listened to a crapload of it. I grew up in the middle of nowhere and my dad's truck only had an AM radio. We had basically two radio choices: country and talk, by which i mean Less Nessman-style farm reports.

However, country music is a hugely important part of American music (even if it has roots in European folk music), so i'm depressed that so many people have dismissed it out of hand due to a bad experience with a Billy Ray Cyrus song. Also, with apologies to a lot of George Strait and Loretta Lynn fans, i think we're in something of a Golden Age in country music. There are several mainstream country performers that i like right now, and there's a both-way crossover happening between country and other pop categories. Music of course is always a matter of taste, but i'd be honestly surprised if a person couldn't find something on the fringes of the genre that they like.

My first case in point would be Neko Case. She's firmly in the alt. country realm, but her last album Fox Confessor Brings the Flood was indie-rock friendly (and she's also part of indie favorites The New Pornographers). There's something unique and ethereal about her voice that makes me fall a little bit in love with her every time i hear her sing. It's not too far from case to the more accessible songs of Alison Krauss like Restless and The Lucky One, but of course Krauss also has authentic bluegrass credibility (and some rock and roll cred after her recent collaboration with Robert Plant). Krauss has also did one of my favorite country duets ever, the somewhat painful Whiskey Lullaby, with country superstar Brad Paisley. Personally, i like Paisley a lot, although i can see why songs like Ticks would only appeal to someone who grew up in sight of a corn field.

My subversive attempt to get people to listen to country music is my Slacker custom station that i call Another Country, which i borrowed from the title of a Tift Merrit album (yes, she's on the station). I've mentioned my alt. country preferences in the past, and a lot of those bands appear on the station. I've got some of my favorite regular country performers (Paisley, Sugarland, Vince Gill), some more-or-less indie stuff like Okkervil River and The National, southern-ish bands like Drive-By Truckers and My Morning Jacket, old-school country like Hank Williams and Patsy Cline, and a little bit of folk (Richard Thompson, Richard Shindell). My only real criteria are that i like it and it has some tenuous roots-music connection. I've got the music discovery mode on so that related artists get pulled in, but not too much (i'm listening to White Lightning by George Jones as i type this).

I doubt that i'll gain many converts, but i sort of hope that some people will go to it and think "hey, this doesn't sound like country music" at least for a couple of tunes. Or maybe they'll be surprised to find that Buck Owens is pretty decent and not just a Hee Haw comedian. At the least they can verify more rigorously they they don't like country music.

Metal Taxonomy

2008-05-29T09:24:00.000-07:00

Cool taxonomy of metal music from Paul Lamere, generated from Last.fm tags. Not to be picky, but "brutal death metal" seems like a superfluous sub-genre. It implies that other death metal categories are too genteel. It seems like to make death metal more brutal, someone would actually have to die. That would probably be "snuff metal".

Corvids

2008-05-27T21:27:00.000-07:00

I have a fascination with crows and ravens (corvids), especially the Common Raven (Corvus Corax) that is so abundant in my part of the world. They don't have quite the grace or swiftness in flight that hawks do, but they have an eerie awareness that shows in their eyes. This TED video by Joshua Klein shows some examples of the surprising intelligence of these birds.

Twenty Years on The Internet

2008-05-25T22:56:00.000-07:00

I had the good fortune of starting my life as a wage slave in a small government experiment called a supercomputer center. The original idea behind those federally funded facilities (there were five) was to make expensive computing resources available to a large community of researchers (or, as we called it, a "cycle shop"). Of course, to make a centralized computer available to a decentralized community, you had to string some wires. One of our sets of wires was another, even older, government experiment called the ARPAnet. Or as you might know it, the Internet.

Infrastructurally speaking the Internet then doesn't much resemble the Internet now. You could literally enumerate all of the sites on the network and only a handful were outside of government or educational facilities. We thought T3 was a bad-ass fat pipe, and our client interfaces were telnet and ftp. There wasn't that much interest in the Internet from private companies yet, and the idea of e-commerce was a mere twinkle in the eye of a few forward-thinking lunatics.

But we had TCP/IP so in that sense it was the same Internet that we have now. E-mail really hasn't changed much, except that there was not much spam. Pornography was already firmly established (no pun intended), but it usually amounted to cumbersome reassembling of pictures from alt.sex Usenet groups so it was no threat to more traditional channels. My first year on the Net saw both the infamous Morris worm, and the first notable prediction of the net's imminent death.

That pre-WWW internet was so nerdy and obscure that years later when people started talking about getting on the Internet it was as if everybody had suddenly decided to learn Morse code and take up ham radio. Still, there was the sense that something unusual was happening, and many of my colleagues from that era ended up in some sort of Internet business. I can't really identify the inflection point, but even though the ARPAnet had already been around for quite some time before i experienced it i think that it was in the period during the late 80s and early 90s that the critical mass was achieved. The true possibilities of the Internet wouldn't really become obvious until the advent of the World Wide Web and the web browser (meaning Mosaic for most of us), but there was already the feeling that this was a new, and inevitable, sort of communication.

It would have been impossible to imagine the scope and influence of the Internet back when i was reading alt.kibology and trying to write code to do socket communication. At the time, futurologists were more fascinated by the prospects of virtual reality and extropianism. The net was envisioned in far more fantastic ways in the cyberpunk novels. Although i'm sure i'd find it if i looked hard enough, i don't recall any predictions at the time that foresaw the huge, but relatively quotidian, impact of the network on our lives. Nobody said "Twenty years from now travel agents will be obsolete and you'll replace television watching with updating encyclopedia articles". Nobody imagined that we'd devote substantial amounts of time to carefully crafted on-line personas or sending random thoughts via cell phone to casual acquaintances.

I hold to the belief that technologies are morally neutral, so i don't have an opinion on whether the Internet is a good thing or not. It has been used in some good ways, and in some very bad ways. But to this point in my life it has been far and away the most interesting technology to arise. Not because i can use Google to find Demetri Martin videos on YouTube in 15 seconds, but because it has been so unpredictable. Just take my former employer Yahoo! as an example. It was amazing that a company with a 40 billion dollar market cap grew out of a couple of guys with a directory of web sites. It was astonishing that a company so successful could be so rapidly supplanted by Google especially in the area of search. It's incredible that the Internet has evolved so rapidly that a company with ten thousand employees, many of whom are brilliant, is struggling to prove its relevance less than 15 years after it was founded. Its almost possible to imagine now that nothing is permanent. Google itself might be following the same arc. Once mighty companies that dominated our time with their television programming, or got us to pay $20 a pop to mediate the process between playing music and listening to music are now dinosaurs.

The most fascinating thing about the Internet is that i have almost no idea what it will look like 20 years from now. I think it might be remade four or five times in that stretch of time. Many more fortunes will be made and bubbles will pop. The next generation of applications built on cloud computing and network storage will probably transform the way we think about using our computers. Or more probably, we will stop thinking about computers as separate appliances at all. In 20 years, access to the Internet will be as casual and ubiquitous as picking up a magazine in a waiting room.

The Priceline Guy

2008-05-21T07:59:00.000-07:00

My younger son and i were watching some stupid movie on TV and William Shatner shows up in a minor character role. My son says "Hey! It's the Priceline guy". Forgetting for a moment that he's 11 and doesn't get to watch that much television, i said "The Priceline guy! That's James Tiberius Kirk!".

Needless to say i felt ashamed by this major gap i had allowed in his pop culture education, so over the weekend we watched a couple episodes of the original Star Trek so i could acquaint him with the characters. To be fair, Shatner now looks so little like Shatner then that even if he'd seen the show i'm not sure my son would have recognized him. Also, the original Star Trek was incredibly cheesy, but i still find the stories absorbing. Just goes to show that production values aren't everything.

Rules of Parenting

2008-05-17T08:45:00.000-07:00

My sons are now 14 and 11 years old, which i figure gives me 25 parent-years of experience. Being a father is not something i've ever studied or practiced; i think the skills that make you a good parent are the same skills that make you an adequate human being in general (and the lack thereof, etc., etc.). Still, beyond the obvious elements of providing your kids with food, shelter, and clothing there are many things that you have to learn from trial and error. The following are some things i believe in, even if i don't always adhere to them:

Your kids need an activity that they don't have a choice about

Like many parents i wanted to give my kids an opportunity to do anything they wanted to try. However, often this means that kids will go from thing to thing with never any focus. We decided that our kids would have at least one activity that they would do for as long as they were our legal responsibility. In our case it turned out to be a musical instrument, but i don't think that's so important as the experience of developing a deep skill over a number of years.

Kids can survive without constant television

My kids still get more screen time than i'd wish, but i've seen people literally amazed to find that my kids don't watch TV on school nights, and they don't have TVs or computers in their own rooms.

Quality Time is Bullshit

The idea that you can get away with spending less time with your kids so long as the time you do spend is structured and productive is absolute crap. Your kids are not a project.

Kids Can Do More Than You Think

Probably the biggest mistake i've made with my own kids is that i have not sufficiently encouraged their *big* ideas. There are many cases where i wish i had allowed their curiosity to draw them into an inquiry of some subject rather than just explaining to them the flaw in their logic. (For example, my older son "invented" perpetual motion a couple of years ago). Fortunately both of them have still done things on their own when they didn't get my help.

You Don't Have That Much To Do With It

You can screw up kids who would have otherwise been normal, but your kids' success in life will not be affected very much by either the genes they inherited from you or the behavior you try to instill. This is probably the hardest lesson to learn as a parent. Your children are completely separate people, experiencing the world and learning in their own way. They are not your chance to fix everything that you regret about your own life.

Allow Them To Fail

My parents were great, and they always stressed the idea that i could do anything i wanted to; but for a long time as an adult i wished they had put more emphasis on self-discipline so that i would have had the tools to work harder for those things that i wanted to do. It took me quite some time to realize that this was my fault, not theirs. Now as a parent i really want to try to impart the things that i've learned the hard way to my own kids. However, they don't call it "the hard way" for nothing. About the best you can do, i think, is to challenge your kids. People use this word often, but few people really mean it in the sense it was intended. A challenge needs to be something that is slightly beyond their capabilities; something at which they might fail but not something at which they are guaranteed to fail.

Soviet Union, 1983, Part IV - Memorabilia

2008-05-11T12:19:00.000-07:00

Go here for the beginning.

These are from a small Flickr photoset of a few scanned photos and some scans of items, etc.

Technically, we weren't supposed to take Russian currency out of the country, but i wanted some as a souvenir. I thought about various elaborate ways to hide them, and then it occurred to me: i put them in my front pants pocket.

This is the Tran-Siberian railroad schedule. The whole trip was over 5000 km. We only left the train on a few of these stop, most notably Novosibirsk.

A very odd piece of memorabilia; an Aeroflot wetnap:

This is the Uzbekistan flag that i bought:

This is my hotel card from the Pribaltiskaya:

Soviet Union, 1983, Part III

2008-05-09T18:28:00.000-07:00

Part II here.

We traveled back to Tashkent for the flight to Leningrad, which is of course once again St. Petersburg these days. Leningrad/St. Petersburg was then, and probably still is, the most European of Russian cities; both because of its proximity to the rest of Europe and its history as the stomping grounds of the Russian aristocracy. We stayed at a hotel called the Pribaltiskaya (which basically means "on the Baltic", which it is). We had to take a bus or the metro into the city, but it was worth it to stay in a fairly modern hotel.

We did lots of tourist-y stuff in Leningrad. We visited St. Isaac's Cathedral, and the St. Peter and Paul Cathedral where the czars are buried. We spent an entire day at the Hermitage Museum, which was once the Winter Palace of the czars. We took a boat trip to the Summer Palace to walk the grounds and look at the famous fountains and sculptures. To this day the smell of bus exhaust fumes takes me back to that time.

I'd taken my first humanities class during the previous school year, and so the artwork at the Hermitage was of particular interest to me. It was amazing to see paintings by Raphael and Titian and sculpture by Rodin and Michelangelo. However, after about the 30th Rembrandt painting i started paying more attention to the building than the artwork. It amazed me that people lived here. Granted it was more than just a private dwelling, but still. It was pretty good to be czar.

The Summer Palace (aka Peterhof) was equally grand, though more for the grounds than the structure. The building itself was largely destroyed during World War II and appeared to be still under restoration 40 years later. We got into an argument with our tour guide about the fountain on the grounds, because all of the statues surrounding it were of Greek deities, and yet he claimed that the figure in the center of the fountain was the Biblical Samson. I argued that it was more likely a figure of Hercules who, like Samson, was associated with battling lions. At the time i was convinced that they only claimed it was Samson in order to sell replica statues to American tourists, but it turns out i was wrong. In fact, it's often referred to as the Samson Fountain.

My most memorable night in Leningrad was a group dinner that we had at a restaurant in the city. We had several courses, including borscht, which it turns out i really liked. The waiter instructed me in the proper technique for opening a champagne bottle, and we all practiced our Russian. There was a group of Western German tourists at the restaurant and they got pretty boisterous when the Russian traditional dancers started performing. It was like something out of a James Bond movie.

The dinner ended a bit after 9pm and several us of went for a walk along the Neva. It didn't really get dark in Leningrad in May until around 11, so it seemed like late afternoon. St. Petersburg is truly a beautiful city, and this was the first time that we had to really reflect on all that we'd seen during the trip. Many of us had stark differences in political opinion, but we all had come to the same conclusion that it was almost unimaginable that they'd maintained the Soviet system for so long. There was a clear undercurrent of dissatisfaction there, and a not-so-invisible subculture of people trying to exert economic and social freedoms that they technically did not have.

We ended up back at Palace Square and just stood around talking until it got too dark, and then we took the metro back to the hotel. I had grown up with the Cold War and it was difficult for any of us to picture a future where the Soviet Union had dissolved and there was a threat worth worrying about beyond nuclear war. This was before Gorbachev and perestroika, developments that seemed almost inconceivable in 1983. In the moment, i was just an exhausted, jet-lagged teenager, but the trip really changed me. Not only was Soviet Russia a frightening vision of a society that i never wanted to be a part of, but it was also a revealing look at the difference between what i'd been taught and reality.

Soviet Union, 1983, Part II

2008-05-07T21:24:00.000-07:00

Part I here.

From Irkutsk we flew to Tashkent in Uzbekistan, with a brief stop in Alma Ata (i remember the landing in Tashkent as being my scariest ever, but apparently not that unusual for Aeroflot). Of course at that time both Uzbekistan and Khazakstan were Soviet republics. Tashkent was a strange place to me for many reasons. It did not have much of the character of a Central Asian city, in part because of the Soviet influence and in part because the city had been substantially destroyed by a massive earthquake in 1965. In some respects it was an attractive city, but it also had a third-world quality, with some open sewers and the most apparent poverty that i'd seen in the USSR. About the only activity I remember from Tashkent is shopping. I bought an Uzbekistani flag, and a gray felt hat, both of which i still have.

We traveled from Tashkent to Samarkand, one of the most historically rich cities in Central Asia, though i was woefully ignorant of it at the time. For me this was the most memorable part of the trip. Samarkand is famous as a Silk Road landmark and as the base of Tamerlane or Timur. We visited the famous Registan, the main square of the old city, the Bibi Khanum mosque, and i remember going to the observatory of the famous astronomer Ulugbek. The buildings all had a distinctive architecture, with domes and peaked arches and extensive blue- tile mosaics. The main buildings in the square also have oddly over-sized facades, or at least the front section of the buildings are oddly over-proportioned.

We also visited a park of sorts somewhere outside the city where we could see the high mountain ranges of western Tajikistan. They were massive, and they had the same allure as the ocean viewed from the coast. I didn't think about it at the time, but i was also just a couple hundred miles or so north of Afghanistan. In fact, the only time Uzbekistan has been prominent in the news since then is when it was used as a launching point for the US assault on the Taliban.

There was a bazaar in Samarkand, and it was the first real outdoor public market i had been to, trips to Mexico notwithstanding. I saw a beggar there, a man whose legs were shriveled and useless, and he sat on a wheeled platform. It was an unusual sight in the Soviet Union. Although most Soviet citizens suffered deprivation that was severe by the standards of the American middle class, the panhandlers and vagrants common in American cities were non-existent. For reasons i can't articulate, the image of that man on his platform sticks in my memory more than anything else i saw during the trip.

It might be because i had spent the last year in the desert, but i felt very comfortable in Samarkand. Even though it was without question the strangest place i had been in my life to that point, it did not feel foreign. I still remember sitting around with some of the other people in the group on the steps outside one of the buildings, having a fairly intellectual discussion by the standards of a 19 year-old and thinking that it seemed not just normal, but somehow familiar. That began a fascination with Central Asia that continues for me today.

Coming in Part III: Leningrad.

Soviet Union, 1983, Part I

2008-05-05T19:00:00.000-07:00

Often these days i'm reminded of something that took place so long ago that it seems like an artificial memory, like something from a movie or a particularly vivid dream. For example, it is twenty-five years ago this month that i traveled to the Soviet Union, a place that doesn't even exist anymore as a political entity. In reality, i suspect it doesn't exist at all beyond memory, since that place bears little resemblance to modern Russia. I wrote about this a few years ago, but i promised i'd revisit it some day.

In 1983 I was finishing up my freshman year in college and therefore also my first year as a student of the Russian language. The head of the Russian department at U. of Arizona organized an annual trip to the Soviet Union, ostensibly to provide students with an opportunity to encounter the language and culture first-hand. In truth, i think he just loved the place. I'd been fascinated with the Soviet Union for years, in part because of a translator that my mother's company employed who traveled there frequently and would bring me posters and other souvenirs from his trips. Although it was expensive by the standards of my family, I felt that i couldn't pass up the opportunity to go.

I was 19 years old and essentially a hick from the sticks. My only international travel to that point was Mexico and Canada, and i'd never had a passport. The entire process was exciting and a bit daunting. I'd flown quite a few times, but the flight from New York City to Helsinki, Finland on Finnair might as well have been a spaceship to Mars. I remember very little about the trip, except that there was a small area near the back of the plane where one could stand and look out a window at the ocean below. It was the first time in my life that i'd been to a place where i couldn't see even a glimpse of civilization.

I do remember Helsinki, if a bit vaguely after all these years. I can't remember the hotel or the airport, and i only dimly recall my roomate, who i believe was a veterinarian. I remember walking around the city and seeing numerous graveyards (i'd been raised in the Lutheran church and Finland is historically a Lutheran country, so many of the churches and church grounds seemed familiar to me). I ran into some of my fellow travelers while out on a walk and we stopped at a cafe and had a beer. While not an entirely new experience for me, the fact that it was normal and unremarkable was cool. I exchanged money for the first time in my life, from dollars into the Finnish marks in use at that time. I sat in a round chapel in a park where a man played violin, probably Bach given the place. I experienced my first jet lag, and since the sun sets so late i was frequently unsure of what time of day it was. It was all very strange and melancholy and civilized. It suited me well.

We flew from Helsinki to Moscow. My first taste of Soviet bureaucracy was the long wait in the customs line at the airport, which was not much different than the modern security checkpoint at any post 9/11 airport. At that time, most foreigners could not travel inside the USSR without an escort. Officially, the escort was a sort of tour guide who worked for the Intourist agency. Ours was a young blond lady whose name i regrettably can't recall.

We stayed at a hotel called the Orlyonok, which was affiliated with the Soviet youth organization. It was close to Moscow State University, which was exciting for me because МГУ was frequently featured in my Russian language textbook. My room was relatively comfortable, but i was a bit taken aback by the shower, which was just a shower head coming out of the wall near the sink and a drain in the middle of the floor. Having my own shower was a luxury though. According to some of my trip mates, all of our rooms were bugged and an entire floor of the hotel was dedicated to monitoring guests. I was also told that if i left my passport unattended i should not be surprised if it disappeared temporarily. We had our first experience of the Russian black market here when a couple of men approached us in a stairwell to see if we'd be interested in selling our jeans.

That first night we went to the Moscow circus. During a break i got separated from my group, and for some reason i decided to walk back to the hotel alone. It was still fairly light out, but the thing i remember most distinctly is how quiet it was. If you know that Moscow even then had a population similar to New York city, you can understand why this was remarkable. Personal cars were still a rarity then, and the people in the city were unusually subdued. As i walked through the park near the river, you could have heard a pin drop.

Of course, as a mid-western kid i'd been raised to believe that the Soviet Union was evil, and communism was synonymous with a pernicious style of autocracy. I certainly can't defend the pre-glasnost politics of that time, but the truth was obviously far more subtle. As i walked back to my hotel, i saw a policeman approaching (militsia). He stopped, turned, and picked up a nearby public telephone. I have no idea if he was concerned with me, or if his actions were prompted by seeing a lone foreigner wandering along near the university. But for a few moments i was terrified and uncertain. Suddenly i realized that this was how it worked. You weren't scared because of easily identifiable monsters, but because of the monsters you imagined.

In Moscow we visited many tourist attractions, including the Kremlin of course and all of the Red Square landmarks. I remember the waxy corpse of Lenin at his tomb, and my suspicion that it was fake. We visited the beryozka, the state-sanctioned shops run just for tourists, where you could buy souvenirs and things like vodka that were virtually unattainable to the average Soviet citizen. We exchanged our dollars for the colorful ruble notes at the unfavorable exchange rate enforced by the government. We went to the ГУМ, the official state department store, and we rode the ornately decorated metro. One of my fellow travelers traded a bottle of vodka for a full day of taxi service. We began collecting znachok (znachki in plural), which are basically souvenir badges or pins. I had a long conversation with a bell-man at the hotel, which i'm sure he still relates to his friends whenever he needs a good laugh.

The next stage of our trip was the real highlight: a 96 hour train trip from Moscow to Irkutsk in Siberia. We would travel continuously for nearly 4 days, across the Russian countryside, over the Urals and into Asia; and across the vast territory of Siberia. It would impress me with the size of the country and the distance of the horizon, but i'd be disingenuous to say that it was either fun or exciting. Four days on a train is four days on a train, no matter where the train might be going. The most memorable part of the trip was holding up signs reading "Mir Y Drujba" (peace and friendship) as we passed through the stations. It was on the train that i developed my hatred of local beverages. In Moscow, you could buy Pepsi, although it was formulated a bit differently. But on the train we had only Soviet-made drinks, most notably a horrid concoction called Buxaro, which tasted like Dr. Pepper infused with sweaty shoe leather.

It will probably not surprise you to hear that Siberia is cold, even in May. It was snowing at times as we approached Irkutsk. The city itself was cold, but it felt good after so many days of stale train air. We took a walk around the town, a KGB officer following us at about 100 paces, making no attempt at all to be inconspicuous. Many of the people in the city were of obvious Asian extraction, a very distinctive appearance that i associate with Mongolia and the steppes in general. I also recall the key clerk who worked on my floor of the hotel (all Soviet hotels required you to surrender your room key before leaving). She was a lovely young Russian lady who spoke five languages. I tried both Russian and Spanish on her, but i suspect that even in English she was probably more fluent than i.

The key feature of Irkutsk is Lake Baikal, the world's deepest lake. It is known especially for a variety of fish that is so adapted to the high pressures at the bottom of the lake that it will dissolve into a puddle if brought rapidly to the surface. I remember little of the surroundings, and i guess it stands to reason that the world's deepest lake will disappoint somewhat when viewed only from the surface.

Coming in Part II: Siberia to Central Asia