iPhone 4 – Quick impressions

Posted on 2010/06/27 by richardykuo

I stood in line for 13 hours to get the iPhone 4.  That was an interesting experience, to say the least … I'll save that for a later post.

My opinion of the iPhone is that the product really came together with the 3GS.  The original iPhone was a revolution in UI and hardware.  The 3G was faster still and brought the App Store to the masses.  But none of this really came together until the 3GS … the phone itself was still slowing down the whole experience.  Speed is important … Google knows this in terms of search results, and it's especially true with phones, where the goal is to use it and be on your way as quickly as possible.

So does the iPhone 4 represent another quantum leap in mobile smartphones?

In short, no.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing.  The iPhone 4 hits on all the important points … things that aren't as sexy to announce, but that we all need.  It is 25% thinner, yet has about 25% more battery life.  The screen has 4 times the pixel density in the same size screen, which, while it is a pleasure to view, does not make it much better for reading things from a practical perspective.   The processor is faster … not like the 3G to the 3GS, but it is faster.  And the phone has twice the RAM, which is noticeable in subtle ways while browsing … pages need to be reloaded less frequently when switching between them.

None of this fundamentally changes the way I use the phone.  Basically, this is how the phone experience went.

I picked up the phone from the store and headed to work.  Waited for the phone transfer to activate itself from my 3GS on AT&T's network and ended up just rebooting the phone to get carrier reception going.

At my desk, I noticed the phone was, in fact, having the dreaded reception issues noted by various pre-orderers … 1 bar in a known 5 bar zone.  I fiddled for a while and watched the bars drop very slowly if held in a certain way and return if held another way.  This wasn't always reproducible, but it was common enough.  Anyway, I had the good fortune to pick up a bumper at the Apple store as well.  I'm not normally a fan of cases … I don't like the extra bulk in my pocket and I think they detract from the industrial aesthetics of the phone.  But, I put on the official bumper and observed the problem was, if not gone, at least tolerable like any other phone.

In hindsight, it's blindingly obvious from an engineering perspective that touching the antenna band is going to mess up the signal.  My understanding of this is that the change may have been mandated by new regulations requiring a minimal amount of radiation near the user's head.  Therefore, the primary reception area is down at the bottom of the phone instead of in the portion where you put your head to.  Antenna design is a black art and Apple probably didn't have time to work out all the kinks before the product cycle was due.

Anyway, I tend not to complain about these things if there's a suitable way to deal with it, and the bumper is just that.  I suspect other people will raise a stink about it.  It is, after all, not unreasonable to expect your phone to have good reception when held in a normal way.  From a design and product release cycle perspective, that's sort of a disaster and I'm curious to see just how Apple ends up handling it. 

Anyway, after getting down to using it, and doing the obligatory demos throughout the day, I found it feeling just like my 3GS.  It does everything my 3GS did, just slightly better.

Multitasking has, so far, done pretty much nothing for me.  Everything I actually needed to multitask was already part of the OS and already multitasking enabled.  We'll see if this changes, but, so far, this addition has not made my mobile life any better.  I can see streaming Pandora in the background will be somewhat useful, and mobile check-ins / GPS announcement and background uploads will be nice whenever apps get around to really doing something interesting here.

The camera is much improved, as is the ability to record HD video now.  I don't use the camera much, tho. And the HD video isn't really accessible unless you pull it off the phone via syncing to your computer.  You cannot upload to YouTube or e-mail clips in 720p … the phone always downsamples it to a very low quality.  That's very disappointing, and I think it needs to be fixed.

Finally, I've tried FaceTime a couple of times now.  It's fun, but not something I need.  If you are addicted to talking to certain people all the time, especially partners or children, you may find this a more engaging way of doing it.  I do think the ability to do this more on the go will increase adoption in a way we haven't seen before.  But it will take time.  Not everyone owns an iPhone 4 yet, and the inability to conference to a PC or Mac is a gaping hole in the strategy.

I feel like we're starting to enter the period with phone hardware where everything that really needed to be in the phone has been added.  Think back to how PC's needed to be expanded with sound cards and network cards.  Now it's all thrown in along with the kitchen sink.  Of course, that's simplifying the issue.  4G speeds will be a huge improvement when it comes out.  There's still a ton of improvements to be made in software and services.  I'm probably missing a few other things as well.

In conclusion, the iPhone is still the best smartphone on the market.  If you have a 2G or 3G model, you will get a lot out of this upgrade.  If you have a 3GS … well, the iPhone 4 is better across the board, but it will not change your life in any particular area.  But if you use your phone a lot, the improvements are not all gimmicks.  They are in key fundamental areas that will be with you in the background, every day.  It may just be worth it.

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Track day at Thunderhill

Posted on 2010/06/20 by richardykuo

Intro

A few months ago, I decided that I would attend a track day.  The story of all the stuff I had to do to finally end up at the track is another story … this blog post is going to be about my actual track day experience this weekend.

First of all, the track I ended up at was Thunderhill Raceway Park.  It's really in the middle of nowhere … a good 3 hour drive from Mountain View and 1.5 hours north of Sacramento.  I decided to attend through one of the many driving event/performance driving companies in the area … in this case, Hooked on Driving.  At 285 bucks, this wasn't one of the cheaper events in the area … but as it turns out, we were running with a really high quality group of people … so, depending on your attitude, the extra few bucks might indeed be worth it.  I think I've seen other events run as low as $180.

Second, the car I was taking up was an 2000 Porsche Boxster (non-S).  A fun little car … not too much punch, but good around corners and very balanced with a decent top speed.

The night before

I booked myself a room in Willows, CA (which is the closest town) for Friday so that I could get a good night's sleep before the event on Saturday.  I left Mountain View at 9 PM, stopped for food, and ended up in Willows around 12:20 or so.  It was a clean and uneventful drive and time passed more quickly than I expected.

I ended up staying at the Days Inn, which, despite being the second best rated hotel in the area, still seemed like a slightly dumpy outdoors hotel for around 90 bucks a night.  For a really sketchy budget stay, there are Super 8's and Baymont Inn's around which have pretty bad reviews on the Internet.  Those would run you about 60 bucks.  I'm not very picky at all but, in this case, I decided not to risk it.  The best of the local hotels seems to be the Holiday Inn Express, at around 115 a night.

The morning

The event registration started at 7 AM and driver meetings started at 7:50, so I woke up around 7:10, got dressed and left around 7:30 AM.  With a 10 minute drive to the track, I ended up parking and arriving pretty much right on time.  They handed me an envelope with some event materials and I proceeded to sit down in a rather 70's looking building with a bunch of other people.

David Ray, the event organizer, went ahead and greeted everyone, including sponsors, before sending everyone off with their respective groups.  The event is organized into A (beginner), B, C and D (experienced) groups.  There were also cars with X's on them which I imagine means expert or coach.  I ran in beginner, naturally, since this was my first time out.

You get five 20 minute sessions spread out through the day.  The A group had a bit of extra orientation after the initial sendoff.  Everyone got an introduction to how passing works, how to point people by, where the passing zones were, where to pit in and out, and how the different colored flags at the flag stations work and what they meant.

After that, it was off to the cars.  By the time I had arrived earlier, the covered canopy areas had been taken up and I ended up finding my own parking spot.  At this point, I grabbed my group letter (A) and a random number (64) and stuck them on the upper passenger side of the windshield to mark my car.  This would ensure that the organizers would know what group I was running in and let the photographers later have photographs I wanted already prepared for viewing after the event.  I also ditched everything from the car that might bounce around … one of the requirements for driving on the track.

Soon, it was our turn.  Announcements were made over the PA system for the A group to line up at the grid … an array of about 20-25 cars lined up in columns near the entrance to the main track waiting to enter.  I didn't bother coming into the grid until near the end of the call … they tend to call you about 20 min early and I don't like to spend all that time waiting.

Once you get to the grid, you stand outside your car and look lonely so that a coach will find you.  I ended up with a friendly grizzled old guy with glasses and a white beard.  I would later find out that he was a former race car driver and ran racing teams for a while.  He was also coaching some guy there with a Ferrari F430 Scuderia and Nissan GT-R for some ungodly amount of money.  I felt a little guilty but, obviously, I had really lucked out.

I strapped on my helmet … a Simpson Diamondback.  For fans of Top Gear, this is the same helmet the Stig wears … in other words, pretty high end.  The day was starting out overcast, so I changed out the face shield for the stock clear one instead of the aggressive looking reflective blue shield.  All drivers are required to have some sort of SA 2000 or 2005 certified helmet … you can rent one from the track if you need to, but in this case I had decided to buy and bring my own.  What can I say, I'm a fanboy.

They started out with letting the coaches take the car out for a couple of laps to show you around the track.  Then they switched off and let the students drive around slowly.  I was a little surprised by the couple of blind turns over hills and the relatively sparse need for shifting on the course.  Combined with the total lack of walls, this makes the track pretty beginner friendly.  Anyhow, the session seemed to end just as it was getting started.

After the run, each group goes back to the building to meet up and do a download/debriefing.  The instructor emphasized the need to give point-bys to faster cars and showed a few more basics on apexing, etc.  Most of this I knew from reading up on racing online.

After the download, I had some free time to walk around and look at the other cars.  There was an impressive array of cars here … most quite decently high end.  At least three different Ferrari F430's and an Audi R8 were among the stars, along with more Porsche's than you could shake a stick at, including one brand spanking new Boxster Spyder.  My old Boxster was not going to win any trophies against these beasts, especially with me behind the wheel.

Many of these cars were clearly full-on race cars … carrying full body liveries and being hauled to the track and back in trucks.  This was no joke … lots of money and effort was going into getting these cars onto the track and back.

Second session.  One nice thing I started to appreciate was that Hooked on Driving had placed cones in the proper locations for turn-in points, apex points, passing zones, etc.  However, in this session, I was going into turns way too hot and not using the brakes hard or early enough.  In addition, I was so focused on the road that I really had no idea where the flag stations were.  On the bright side, I didn't really have a problem spotting cars riding my ass and giving them a point by.

We went back to the building for our second download.  Then as were doing the download, we heard thew news come thru that someone in another session had flipped their Acura NSX at Turn 8.  Totaled.  Luckily, the driver walked away fine. 

Right before lunch, we hopped in coach cars to get a ride along with an experienced driver taking the course at speed.  I got in a BMW sedan (not too many Ferrari's to go around, unfortunately).  It seemed pretty controlled and smooth and not as much of a roller coaster ride as I expected, although I was surprised at how much the tires were squealing.  In hindsi
ght, stock tires tend to warn you a lot as you approach their limits, so that was fine.  Still, when I was driving I could barely hear my tires over the wind noise, if at all.

After lunch

Afterwards, lunch.  Pretty generic American style fare … cole slaw, mac and cheese, BBQ, etc.  I was hungry, so good enough.  David Ray gave another quick set of announcements and asked if anyone wanted some advice on particular turns, to which the NSX driver responded "Turn 8!"

I tried to mess around with my iPhone but it was a real waiting game … the Wi-Fi wasn't free and the service was AT&T Edge with terrible service.  Go figure.  Not exactly an urban center, I guess.

Third session after lunch … we really hammered down on my braking … smooth but firm input and release, and braking earlier overall.  Definitely became much more comfortable as the third session ended.  By now, the sun was out and things were toasty.  I also noticed I was getting passed a lot … but by Vipers, 911's, and Ferrari's, so I didn't really feel so bad.

After the third session, I went to gas up.  There's fuel right on site, but at $4.99 per gallon for 91 octane, it was damn expensive.  Still, I bought it.  They also had 100 octane for $7.99/gallon … I really wanted some, but decided not to mess around at that point in time.  Finally, they had 110 octane, leaded … real race fuel that you don't dump in an ordinary car.

I also noted the demographics of the people at the event … nearly all older white males with the occasional wife.  A few asian males, typically younger … no older ones that I saw.  One or two hispanics … no blacks at all.

At this point, the downloads after the sessions were really more optional.  Still, it felt like the sessions felt very quick, even at twenty minutes, and the time waiting between sessions (roughly an hour) also seemed to go too quickly.  I found the time a little stressful … almost like waiting at a tournament would be … but I was enjoying the process of improving on the track.

My fourth and fifth sessions were more of the same … getting better at taking the correct lines, braking enough to smoothly take the line without squealing the tires much, etc.  By the end of the day, I had made a lot of progress and mostly had all the lines down, especially the last tricky ones at 14 and 15.

Post session

At the end of all sessions, the coaches went out again for some fun runs.  The F430 Scuderia was ungodly loud.

The professional photography crew (gotbluemilk.com) was operating out of a trailer and selling your specific photos for 25 a pop or 60 for the whole day's set.  I really didn't have any other options for photos so I went ahead and spent the money.  They burned them to a CD for me and I was on my way.

Another generic BBQ picnic dinner was served at 5:30 … which, oddly enough, I ate ravenously, despite having eaten a full lunch at noon.  Racing actually does take quite a bit out of you.

I suddenly realized I had no idea what my actual top speed or lap times were at the end of the day.  I do know I got up to the top of 4th gear on the long straight, so I estimate that got me to around 115 mph.  Not bad.

Around 6'ish they opened up the track for a free track walk.  People were allowed to walk or bike the track and observe all the little details they can't see when taking the track at speed.  I walked about 3/4 of the track but decided to cut back to my car and head home as the walk was getting exhausting in my casual sneakers … doubly so since I was tired already.  I hopped in the car, gassed up again, and headed home.

I felt a real sense of confidence on the way back.  None of the curves or turns on the street were anywhere near what I had experienced.  I knew what the limits of the car were at high speed now … if there was a need to be worried, I would know it now.

Summary

All in all, I found the experience rewarding and expect to do it at least a few more times.  I feel like my driving ability has increased significantly from one session and will be hammered in solidly in a few more.  On the back end, the mechanical learning I've done on the car has been very helpful to me as well.

Racing is mentally taxing.  However, like everything, it's a matter of pattern recognition.  The initial inputs are overwhelming and you get tunnel vision just focusing on the road.  Experience under fire will turn that into a wider field of perception and muscle memory will simplify the process.

On the other hand, it's clear to me that racing as a hobby is quite a money pit as well as a time investment.  I spent 500 bucks overall just for the one day event itself, not to mention the time to drive back and forth.  Consumables like tires/brake pads/brake rotors and risk of damage to the car + towing costs, etc, also have to be factored in at some point, which just means it really costs even more.

I honestly have drawn some sort of mental analogy right now where cars are a real life version of Pokemon for many of these folks.  The machine is an important part of the equation and that is massively affected by the money involved.  The bottom line is that I'm skeptical that I'll willing to invest either on a long term commitment basis.  But I'm keeping an open mind for now.

We'll see how it goes … my intention is to engage right now at a moderate level until the important learning tapers off.  If I enjoy it more to continue beyond that … then so be it.

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My iPad comments

Posted on 2010/04/12 by richardykuo

For those of you still living in caves, Apple released its iPad last week.

My original opinion of the iPad, upon hearing of the announcement, was that I absolutely did not want one.  I have plenty of experience with Tablet PC's and I did not see any sort of reason to repeat that experience with the iPad.  Tablets are excellent for annotation, art, and not much else.  The stylus is a horrible mode of interaction for a mouse based computing environment.

The turning point for me came when I decided, around early March, that I wanted to subscribe to some magazines and newspapers.  Not being a particularly paper sort, I decided to try getting them on the Kindle.  It quickly became apparent that there was no way that the content was going to look good on a regular Kindle, so I looked at the Kindle DX.  At 489 dollars, the Kindle DX offers a 9.7" e-ink screen over the standard 6" Kindle, and decidedly more screen space as a result.

That price point drove me to look at the iPad.  The iPad is infinitely more flexible … serving as a web browser, media player, mail station, and running thousands of different apps in high color and resolution.  And the base model costs just 499.  The only thing the Kindle has going for it is the e-ink screen, and even the usefulness of that is debateable as reading in white text on black backgrounds on the iPad is quite easy on the eyes.  The supposed battery life advantage of the Kindle also does not exist.  The Kindle aggressively drains its own battery over the course of a week, meaning that it is most likely dead if you don't pay attention to it for a while.  The iPad actually lasts for 10 hours of usage … and it lasts far longer in standby mode that a week if you actually do leave it undocked or charged.  And you are more likely to have it charged because it is useful for other things.

I chose to get the 16GB model.  I just couldn't perceive what I would want out of the larger storage models.

The iPad succeeds mainly on the strength of the software.  The hardware is just what you would have expected … it really is just a large iPhone minus things like the camera.  Where it stops being just a "large iPhone" is that Apple took the time to redesign all the apps for the large screen.  Books look like actual books with bindings and pages sitting on wooden shelves.  Contacts and Calendars have the appearance of large pages flipping and bookmarks and wooden tiling.  Entire photo albums can be previewed and thrown back by pinch/zoom gestures.  The software does just well enough to make you feel like you're playing with a bit of those magic computers you see in all sci-fi movies and tv shows.

With all that said, I have little use for contacts or calendars on an iPad … those belong on my phone.  Photos … not a big deal.  I can check mail on my phone very easily, although mass replying is a different story.  In short, the iPad is still a fancy toy and not entirely practical for most.  But there are no lies about what it does … it is certainly an excellent and well thought out product that should not have to apologize for what it is.

The iPad does enough actually productive things for me to keep it.  These four things are as follows.

One, it is a very nice book reader due to iBooks and the Kindle app by Amazon.  I intend to get rid of my actual Kindle now.

Two, it has exceptional battery life … literally 9-10 hours of continuous mixed usage.

Three, the remarkable lightness makes it a palatable alternative to carry to the coffee shop or a lecture or a friend's house where you might not want to bring a laptop due to bulk and/or battery life.

Four, it does make for an excellent bed/couch surfing companion.

I am not going to count the picture frame functionality, which might appeal to some but not to me.

The unspoken fifth thing here is that the form factor itself, I believe, has tremendous hidden potential.  For use in ambient interfaces where keyboards are not desirable … kiosks, information wall hanging, vehicular control interfaces … the iPad could revolutionize the way we interact with our world.  I believe we're just scratching the surface of what's to come.  But please note that I don't think releasing new apps for the iPad willy nilly just because it has a bigger screen is going to amount to much for most applications.  Sadly, I suspect that is what will happen for a while.  Mark my words, tho … more innovation with the interface mechanics is the key to real progress.

The last thing I want to mention is that the battery life of the iPad points to something fundamentally wrong with today's laptops.  The iPad is pretty damn close to being a useful device for me doing actual work.  With some better native software and web apps, I would have in the iPad an incredibly sleek, instantly responsive, and exceptionally durable and long lasting portable computing device.  Why do laptops last 2-3 hours and feel slower and heavier?  The computing world is doing something wrong here.  I look forward to the day when I feel comfortable doing all my portable computing from the iPad (or an equivalent).

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Book review – Superfreakonomics

Posted on 2010/01/24 by richardykuo

Freakonomics was an entertaining book of the Malcolm Gladwell variety … unintended consequences of decisions that were borne out by careful statistics gathering made for a quick, interesting, and ultimately, very successful read.  Some years later, we've been given Superfreakonomics.  Being a sequel, the audience should be naturally expecting more of the same.

I'll just state it up front … this book feels like a cash in.  While I found most of the stories I read in Freakonomics to be original, Superfreakonomics has very little in the way of a common theme.  Furthermore, the book devolves from Freakonomics in that it seems to simply talk about interesting stories or experiments.  Most of these have hardly anything to do with economics, experimentation, or carefully selected statistical measurement whatsoever.

A couple of experiments and anecdotes are ridiculously sloppy … for example, studies on the male-female wage gap are considered, and then examples of transgendered subjects are used to change gender while holding other things constant.  I can't even begin to explain how obviously invalid such a "control' would be.  They do acknowledge this somewhat … but then why even bring it up?  It's useless data for a book.

Rehashing old news happens a lot in this book.  For example, the Milgram experiments are discussed, and so are the negative effects of the Americans with Disabilities Act.  The Kitty Genovese murder is discussed as well, albeit in more detail than we typically get and leading to a conclusion a little less cynical than one normally gets out of the subject (the reporters might have manufactured the unhelpfulness of the residents to generate outrage).

That isn't to say I didn't read some interesting things in this book.  We see that teaching monkeys how currency works is possible, and then we learn that the male monkeys eventually start using this currency to pay female monkeys for sex. Oops, I spoiled the ending.  We also learn that kids who are born at such an age that they are oldest right when baseball season starts have a dispropotionate likelihood of being picked.  This continues on a self-reinforcing cycle throughout their later years.  We get a whole slough of interesting data on the economics of prostitution, including a fairly convincing argument that pimps provide more relative value than realtors.

Anyway, to wrap up here … you will learn some interesting things from this book if you read it.  It just doesn't seem in the same vein as Freakonomics.  And you can easily finish it in an afternoon if you're a quick read, so it won't be a total waste.

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Book review – The Art of Learning

Posted on 2010/01/10 by richardykuo

On the way back from Houston last week, I dug into The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin.  Josh was a remarkably gifted former chess wunderkind in his youth whose exploits were chronicled in the movie "Searching for Bobby Fischer". In an unusual turn of events, Josh changed his focus to tai chi competition in his early 20's and became a world champion there as well.  He now is focused on brazilian jiu jitsu.

The entire theme of the book is essentially that Josh does not feel like he is gifted specifically at chess or tai chi.  He attributes his success to a love of learning and details the specific pieces of it that he has observed throughout his career.

Let's cover a few of the interesting chapters.

Losing to win

Losing is tough.  Nobody really likes it, per se.

On the other hand, you must be willing to lose to win.  It's as simple as that.

Josh tells anecdotes of particular competitors in childhood who collapsed immediately when faced with a truly tough situation or their first big loss.  He also talks about kids who instinctually avoided tougher enemies … partly because the prospect of disappointment from their parents was so daunting.

What Josh did was different.  He sought out unfamiliar competitors and uncomfortable styles of play.  In losing … in exceeding the levels of his comfort and his game … he raised himself up time and time again.

Even in adulthood, he tells the story of a large, dominating individual named Frank who slammed Josh around for months in tai chi training.  Josh willingly submitted to this in order to better himself. In the end, Frank stops practicing with him in just a few fights after Josh finally rises above his level.  Instead of viewing Josh's success as a new opportunity to better himself, he shrinks away.  Frank only likes winning.

To be blunt, I know many people like Frank.  A lot of people derive satisfaction from the act of winning.  I have always felt it is better to appreciate a hard earned victory.  In fact, many of my friends know that I will try certain things precisely because I am terrible at them.  And I have never once been disappointed by my ability to become decent at something with enough effort.

I am freqently disappointed when I see people fail to challenge themselves, even when there is no cost to them at all except a little bit of ego.  If there is nothing to lose, why not try it?  When I truly apply myself to certain problems and find myself overcoming what once seemed incomprehensible and impossible, I feel gratified.  This has ranged from coordination in drumming syncopation to being able to tease out and find a tiny mathematical bug in some MPEG-2 code that was causing red colors to bleed all over the place.  I feel like this lesson is one I've already internalized well, so it was gratifying to see it put to paper. 

Two approaches to learning

This chapter talks about two mindsets to learning.

The first, an "entity" mindset, describes the kind of person that ascribes success to an innate level of ability.  "I am smart at this."

The second, an "incremental" mindset, describes a person that believes success is a result of hard work.  "I should have tried harder" or "I got it because I worked very hard at it".

The research shows that incremental theorists are far more likely to rise to the level of the game.  Entity types are far more likely to have a learned helpnessless response when encountering failure, to the point where, after hitting a roadblock on a tough situation, the loss affects previously mastered problems.

It should come as no surprise that the incremental approach is the better one.  For yourself and with kids, the idea is to compliment effort and speak of everything as a process of effort and time.  Kids are not dumb and know that results matter as well, so you shouldn't dodge the issue when a setback occurs.  Simply consider losses to be part of the learning process and wins to be enjoyed, but in a transient fashion.

The soft zone

The soft approach embraces adversity.  The hard approach resists potential obstacles.  The author compares it to walking in the rain to your car … do you tense up, scrunch over and run to your car as quickly as possible?  Or do you accept the rain and not let it affect you … perhaps even try to enjoy it as you walk?

This analogy resonated with me significantly because, strangely enough, I had found myself recently thinking about this very issue before I even read this chapter.  Why, I wondered, did I tend to try and cover myself and run to the car when it wasn't going to help much at all?  Running does not really keep much drier, but it certainly makes me feel stressed out.  So lately I've taken to simply walking normally and letting the rain fall on me.

Back to the point.  You are concentrating on an important game.  Suddenly, a jack hammer starts going off outside.  Or perhaps some fans start heckling you.  What do you do?

The best players can take the noise and turn it to their advantage.  Spike Lee, for example, would constantly heckle Reggie Miller courtside.  Seems good, right?  Not when you realized that Reggie Miller was using him as fuel for his fire … blowing out the Knicks time after time.

Adversity doesn't go away.  We don't live in a perfect world.  Becoming flexible, like a reed in the wind, instead of fracturing under pressure, is extremely important.  Turning such events to your psychological advantage is a key element of competitive psychology.

Other notes and conclusion

In recounting his road to the Push Hands Tai Chi world championship, I was shocked at the extreme level of cheating present at the Tai Chi world championships in Taiwan.  Pretty much everything you can think of was done to favor the local teams … from changing the rules right at the beginning of the tournament (of course, the local teams knew well in advance), to trying to wear out the foreign teams with another mandatory tournament, to simply not counting scored points.  It was absolutely disgusting to read.

It is a testament to Josh that his extreme depth made him so far superior to his opponent that he was able to overcome truly staggering levels of dishonesty by the officials and still win.  My parents are from Taiwan, even if I'm not, so I feel some sense of cultural embarassment.

The world Josh has lived in is, in a word, intense.  The extreme levels of intensity required to perform at a competitive level are daunting.  I feel as if I should engage in some sort of competitive activity to keep my mind sharp, but my fear is that it will dominate my time to the exclusion of other activities.  Not to make excuses, but considering it further, that's a completely valid problem to have with the whole thing.  What I need is a way to compete without it sucking up too much of my time.  I'm not sure my mindset can handle that, though!

Many of the concepts in the book rang true as soon as I read them.  We learn by practicing and honing our minds to process patterns, not by memorizing rules.  Our brains are essentially big, giant, pattern recognition machines.  Internalizing those patterns is a matter of repetition, deep analysis, and then taking numerical insights to an unconscious level.

To sum up, I absolutely recommend this book.  It gives you valuable no nonsense insight into the m
indset of a winner, and it demonstrates the importance of a healthy and productive mindset.  Josh is phenomenally attuned to his own psychology and is more capable of expressing those thoughts in the written word than most authors I have read.  Easily worth the money.

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Optimize your life #11 – A case for a good night’s sleep

Posted on 2010/01/01 by richardykuo

Let me just say this up front.  I love sleep.  Not too much, not too little.  Just a good eight hours of sleep a day.  I don't like forcing myself awake and it really hurts when I do it.

But let's get to the point.  Sleep is important.  And you've heard it a million times.  By now, if you haven't been living in a cave, you've surely read the stories about how studies have shown that naps just after lunch boost productivity tremendously.  Or that driving sleepy (being awake for about 20-24 hours) is the equivalent of driving drunk. In fact, animals kept awake artificially literally die after a couple of weeks.

And yet, I would bet a good majority of you still treat your sleep schedules as disposable and flexible.  Something to be traded against getting more done.  Or something that just has to be sacrificed for other things.

My question to you is this.  Why, as adults, are we so cavalier about our sleep schedules?

Actually, it's not that puzzling.  There are a lot of concrete things that need to get done at specific times.  Waking up for work, dealing with a crying baby, cramming just a little bit extra for that test.  And the downsides aren't that obvious.  Sure, you're a little tired, but you're awake, and still getting things done, right?  Maybe, you don't feel so great, but no harm done.

Well, here's the case for the other side of sleep.  This is the attempt to make concrete what you're actually losing when you trade off an hour of sleep to go to the gym or make an early meeting.

Consider this first.  We evolved sleep.  Yes … in the grand scheme of things, we evolved over many millenia so that we would leave ourselves comatose and vulnerable to predators and attackers for 8 hours a night.  Doesn't sound like a good idea, really.  Why would this happen?  It follows that there have to be some serious, serious benefits to sleep that outweigh the tremendous negatives.

For example, world class Tetris players dream of falling blocks at night.  I assure you that if you invest yourself heavily in any activity, you will probably dream about the activity.  Or perhaps you'll recall when you've had something interesting happen to you one day and that night you awaken groggily finding yourself dreaming about the event. The only difference is that your dream version is oddly twisted or random in nature.  I would argue that your brain is replaying the events of the day because it is wiring you to better handle that situation in the future.

From personal experience, I can also attest to this in a different area.  While Rock Band and drumming may not be what you consider to be the most productive endeavor … you can put that aside and treat it as the mechanics of any activity.  Let me just say that I've had more cases than I can count where I try to play a difficult pattern or song on the drums for hours.  I'll come back to it and nail it the first time after a week.  Or even three weeks.

The big question is "What happened in between?"  I certainly didn't leave off just before the point where I was going to be able to play the pattern and then come back three weeks later and pick up right where I left off.  Something changed while I was not even playing Rock Band at all … my brain and body indisputably rewired itself to better handle that specific activity.  In fact, I have learned more about how I learn from playing Rock Band than I have from other activities, but we'll leave that for another blog post.

The book Brain Rules put a lot of my previous thoughts on this into focus. It's an excellent book that delves into how the brain works, and I highly recommend it.

An anecdote from the book runs as follows.  Students were given a set of problems to answer.  The problems had two approaches.  The first was a standard and traditional approach. The second was a shortcut solution that required some leaps of insight to arrive at.  All students are given 12 hours between the first and second set of problems.  The interesting part, of course, is how the students are divided up; one group simply has twelve hours pass, but the second groups gets 8 hours of sleep somewhere in those twelve hours. 

Controlling for all kinds of variables and run every which way you can think of, the students who don't get the sleep discover the shortcut 20% of the time.  The ones who do get sleep discover the shortcut 60% of the time.

Hmm.  Ever had that "shower moment" when you came up with some really great idea or solution?  It's probably because you took a break and let your brain recharge itself. 

Let's hear about other kinds of evidence.  Sleep deprivation appears to accelerate the aging process.  Healthy 30 year olds restricted to four hours of sleep a night over six days had parts of their body chemistry performing at the level of a 60 year old.  Yikes!  And it takes a week to recover from that.  Want to keep looking fresh?  Get sleep!

Military studies indicated that losing one night of sleep resulted in a 30 percent loss in cognitive skill.  Losing two nights bumped that up to 60 percent.  And, lest you think this doesn't add up … being restricted to 6 hours per night over 5 nights resulted in the same performance as someone who hadn't slept for 48 hours.

Oddly enough, while you may feel like nothing important could be going on while you rest, nothing could be further from the truth.  Your brain is not doing nothing while you sleep.  In fact, based on scans, it is positively hyperactive.  In that context and given everything you've read above, you can form a pretty reasonable hypothesis about what is happening.  Your brain is constantly replaying and optimizing your activities while you sleep in ways that will make you better at them when you awaken.  Researchers can see this behavior in rats traversing a maze.  The neural pattern that fires when they work their way through a maze can be seen firing as they sleep.  Only it happens faster, and thousands of times over.  That's what happening when you dream about skiing, biking, or whatever your choice of hobby is.

The bottom line is that sleep is not just how you rest your body.  Sleep correlates directly with your ability to learn.  And that learning … well, I've said this before, but learning is everything.  Learning is so important that we humanly evolved to put our bodies at risk for eight hours a night just so that we would be a lot better at it.

So my challenge to you is this.  Do everything you possibly can to defend your sleep schedule.  If it's out of whack right now, take some big steps to restore some balance in your life on this front.  It should be clear to you now that getting the proper amount of sleep is absolutely essential to your ability to improve.   Respect that and don't let those precious hours of sleep get taken from you!

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Book review – Emergency

Posted on 2009/04/12 by richardykuo

So, I finally managed to tear through another book.  The one is called "Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life", and it's written by Neil Strauss.

The book chronicles one author's quest to be able to survive in case the system breaks down.  Survivalists like to say … we are all only three days away from total chaos, and that's the three days you can survive without water, not be incredibly hungry, etc.  The scary thing is … it may not be the way most of us are used to looking at the world, but it's true.

Some helpful acronyms to know if you're speaking survivalist lingo, by the way:

  • WTSHTF (When The Shit Hits The Fan)
  • EOTWAWKI (End Of The World As We Know It)
  • BOB, BOV, BOL (Bug Out Bag, Vehicle, Location)

Warren Buffett has often been quoted as saying that your lot in life has a lot to do with timing and placement … where and when, in other words.  He's been famously quoted as saying something to effect of "Bill Gates may be a billionaire today, but if he had been born two centuries ago, he probably would have been eaten by a bear".

Personally, this resonates with me.  Most of us would probably be eaten by a bear.  It wasn't that long ago that all people could worry about was how to keep a roof over their heads and where the next meal would come from.  Society has built up such a tremendous amount of infrastructure around us that we end up thinking and worrying about completely different problems that the ones our ancestors were designed to face.  It's amazing, but also a little unsettling.

The chapters in the book are vanishingly small and plentiful … many running at the length of just a small anecdote of two to three pages.  It's not wrong, but perhaps a bit different.  I think the design is meant to capture some of the random stories and short thoughts that chronicle his experience.

The novel takes a while to get going.  I found myself already halfway way through the book and Neil was still recounting his experiences with trying to get an second citizenship in another country.  It's incredibly expensive to do if you don't just move there … tiny countries basically sell citizenship in return for investment or job creation.  The US doesn't make it easy on you either … in the aftermath of 9/11, the government has made it very difficult to keep international bank accounts and they want to keep an eye on everything you do just so they can try to gank your tax dollars even after you stop being a citizen.

While he waits for the citizenship to go through, however, the pace picks up.  The author starts taking gun lessons, wilderness survival training, knife fighting classes, and edible plant walks.  While the novelization of the details is light, the details are fun and interesting every time you do get them.

I particularly enjoyed the chapter on his training at Gunsite.  The man who recommends the training program to Neil tells him "People with guns are dangerous.  Gunsite graduates are deadly."

Neil flys out there … and btw, it's still quite easy to check a weapon on a plane.  The instructor tells them at the beginning of the class "You don't rise to the occasion.  You default to your level of training.  When the stress hits, you will only be half as good as your best day of recent training."  I'm sure this applies to many situations, not just shooting!  People learn by doing!

He picks up some interesting tidbits.  Shooting for the head with a pistol is risky because the skull is excellent protection, meaning a bullet can simply glance off.  If you have a clear shot, you go for the eye.  If you are preparing to go into a gunfight, you bring a shotgun, not a pistol.  Pistols are portable self defense, but low damage weaponry.  Colonel Cooper recommeneded a 12-gauge shotgun with an 18.5 inch barrel.

The class concludes with the following advice.  "Be safe, and be good to everyone you meet … but always have a plan to kill them."  Funny guys.

In CERT (Community Emergency Response Teams) class, they start off with the following.

"If there's a big disaster, you cannot expect assistance for how many days?

"Three to five days."

"So who's going to get you when there's an emergency?"

"Nobody."

"Nobody is coming to your aid in a disaster.  You have to be independent."

In retrospect, what happened during Katrina wasn't surprising.  Federal and local rescue planners already know it will take forever to get to survivors.  The indignance of the rest of the country is because we're ignorant.  Apparently, in the event of a major earthquake, it could take as long as 30 days to restore water everywhere.  The average person needs a gallon of water per day to survive.  Drink from the water heater if you have a house.

On the edible plant walks in California, Neil asks what the parsley like plant is that he keeps seeing all over the place.  One student quips "California parsley surprise".  The lead explains more seirously.  "Hemlock. Dead in 30 minutes."  Guess I'm not going to eat any plants out here.  In fact, the walk ends up being peppered with interesting trivia about how eating so and so plant will kill you in such a way (usually not a pleasant way).

The knife instructor's slogan is "Cogito ergo armatum sum."  I think, therefore I am armed.  In addition to forging, sharpening, and the usual lessons on the types of swings and strikes, perhaps the most brutal part of the book is when the knife instructor teaches him how to slaughter, gut and skin a goat for food.  Although it's just words on a page, the description of the act as he cuts the goat's throat in front of the instructor made my queasy.  I'm pretty sure that if I did this in front of a friend, they would think differently of me.  Neil has the same thought as his girlfriend waits in the car.  But there wasn't a time long ago that everyone had to do this…and it was normal, because it was part of staying alive.  How can our moral standards be so different today?  It can't be possible for people to be bad because they slaughter a goat, or else everyone centuries ago would have been a bad person.

All in all, I found the book to be a rather light read, but still very informative.  Many of the instructors and other characters he meets are surprisingly quotable.   It would have been nice to get more in depth coverage of each of the topics in the book, but I suppose that wasn't really the point.

In the end, I think what you learn from this book, aside from the useful trivia, is that survivalism and training, isn't, as a practical matter, that useful of a skill to pick up right now.  On the list of things people die from, disasters are really, really low on the list.  But if the nagging sense that you wouldn't know what to do when a crisis hits is bothering you … if knowing you're ready for anything makes you walk around with a little more confidence and a little less fear …than these folks aren't as crazy as they sound.  After all, there's a lot of mental security built in when you're at the top of the food chain.

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Go-kart racing

Posted on 2009/03/15 by richardykuo

Last Wednesday, some folks from my team went to a self funded offsite.  The activity?  Go-kart racing.

As I drove up to the location, I noted that the building was a large warehouse like affair.  Indoors?  Interesting.

As we walked in, it was obvious that there were a few regulars on the track already … but otherwise, fairly empty.  Not unexpected given the time of day.

I filled out the requisite forms, including the standard "If you die, it's not our fault" stuff.  The cashier girl handed me a quarter for the locker and a complimentary head sock.  Honestly, I didn't know what a head sock was, but I figured it out pretty quickly from looking at it.  It's a balaclava … aka a ski mask.  Presumably this is to keep your head from catching something from the helmets.  I was actually pretty happy about getting the balaclava, because I've been meaning to get one for whenever I go skiing again.

We hopped into some jumpsuits, watched a safety video, and got to racing. 10 min of practice, followed by 5 min of qualifying and 15 min of real racing.

Getting strapped in was pretty easy.  They also make you wear a life preserver like neck brace while you drive.  When you get into the kart, the smell of exhaust is quite strong.

Racing the go-karts is a lot of work.  The kart is shaking all around you, and it takes quite a bit of effort to fight the steering.  This wouldn't be so bad, but given the races are 15 minutes, that's definitely enough to make it a workout.  However, I wasn't that tired at the end of the race, so I'm guessing this gets easier fairly quickly.

At first, I was drifting / skidding around corner.  I found this easier to do, but I knew in the back of my head this was probably slowing me down.  So I started experimenting with slowing down and going into turns with full traction.  I never really got the consistent hang of it, but did get a few good lap times here and there as a result.

In the middle of the race, I felt a sharp rap against my side, as if I had run through a branch of a tree.  There were no obstacles on the track (or trees), so I'm fairly certain one of the flag wavers in the middle of the track let his flag hang down when I was driving by.  Consequently, I have a huge bruise on the side of my chest right under my armpit that is healing right now.

Of course, my curiousity was piqued after the race, so I learned some basic racing technique later from a friend.  The idea is to:

1. Accelerate as much as possible thru straightaways.

2. Brake as much as possible as late as possible so that you are at the correct speed going into the turn.

3. Stay off the gas around the turn, and accelerate as you are come out of the turn.

Drifting/losing traction is usually bad for speed, so the idea is to do the above three things without slipping or skidding.  On most sharp turns, you tend to want to take an outside in type of turn, but the line you should be following around the track is shown to you already before you race, so you don't really need to try and figure this out yourself in this case.

Interestingly, when I came out of the building and drove off in my actual car, I had this urge to drive very quickly.  My brain was thinking "Why isn't the car slipping a little?" and "Why am I not gunning the accelerator?"  Turning the wheel also felt abnormally effortless due to the return of power steering.  I compensated quickly, so no harm done. =)

Not surprisingly, at the end of the day my arms felt pretty wobbly.  The next day, my left arm felt sore and difficult to extend … but not my right.  That must be because we were constantly turning left during the race. 

Anyway, while I found go-karting somewhat interesting, I can't say I'm planning on making this a regular hobby.  At least I got a free balaclava out of it … a fact which I proudly demonstrated to my friends later that evening.  It's quite a menacing clothing item!

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Fruity pebbles are for kids. Try miracle berries!

Posted on 2009/03/01 by richardykuo

In non tech related matters, I got a chance last week to try a quirky little food that I've had my eye on for years.

The miracle fruit (see the Wikipedia page) was discovered (by Europeans, god bless our Euro-centric culture) in 1725 when an explorer noticed native Africans chewing the berry before meals.  In a nutshell, when the fruit is chewed, one's sense of taste is altered such that sour foods taste sweet!

Pretty crazy, huh?  In fact, it represent such a huge change in one's sense that most people start questioning whether or not it's legal when they hear what it does. (The answer is yes, of course, it is legal.)

Reading the New York Times article on flavor-tripping parties certainly did nothing to lessen my curiosity.  And, as an aside, the name "flavor tripping" certainly does nothing to lessen the questionability of the activity.  So when a friend casually mentioned hearing about miracle fruit, my ears perked up and we decideed to make a little event of it.

The berries themselves don't keep very long … apparently, you have to eat them within a couple of days of being picked.  Sorry, but I don't schedule my activities around fruit.  So instead, we opted to try a set of packaged tablets from ThinkGeek.

The day of, we made a field trip to the local Safeway and wandered through the aisles grabbing anything that looked tasty or tart.  The cashier gave us an odd glance or two as we checked out single fruits of several different types, but nothing we couldn't handle.

The tablets appear to be manufactured here in the States but are courtesy of some "pan-biotic" Taiwanese company.  We put 911 on speed dial just in case.

The tablet itself must be taken by dissolving it all over your tongue.  Resist the temptation to wash it down like medication … the effect is produced by binding the active compound of the berries to your taste buds, so just suck on the tablet like candy.  To me, the tablet tasted chalky, sort of like a slightly sweet vitamin, but not acidic at all.  You should be through it in a couple of minutes.

Then the fun begins.

Lemons – Sweet!

Limes – Also sweet.

Oranges – Awesome.  Kind of like an orange without the rind.

Tabasco sauce – tasty sweet at first! The heat hits you slightly afterwards.

Sriracha hot sauce – No difference.  Just spicy.

Chocolate – tastes the same.

Chocolate pudding – not much different.  But I do love me some pudding.

Tomatos – Awesomely sweet.  You know that whole debate about whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable?  Officially a fruit with miracle berries.

Strawberries – Fantastic!

Vodka – Still strong, but goes down smoother.

Guinness – Much less bitter, even slightly sweet.

Pickles – Sweet and crunchy.

Dried fruit – No difference.  Except dried apples tasted kind of bland.  Honestly, tho … could've just been the apples.

Peppered beef jerky – very slightly sweeter.  No effect on the peppery taste.

Olives – no change.

Jamaican ginger ale – No difference.

Towards the end of our flavor trip, we ate another tomato and realized the effect was wearing off.  That was about 40 minutes in.  We also slowly came to the realization that we were surrounded by half eaten snacks and various fruits, all of which needed cleaning up.

I think it's worth trying a range of foods just to see for yourself, even if you kind of know they aren't going to work.  Also, it should be pretty obvious from the above, but drinking alcohol is a lot easier after eating a miracle berry … so be sure to pace yourself.  Then again, maybe getting a little tipsy isn't so bad.

Overall, I would sum it up as definitely worth trying, and a lot of fun all around.  I'm curious to see what an overnight shipment of a berry or two will do, but I'm sure we'll get to that at some point.  Do it with friends … I think a party tasting is an excellent idea and is now definitely in the cards.

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I bought another computer – Dell Inspiron Mini 9

Posted on 2009/03/01 by richardykuo

I really don't need another one, but at these prices, it sort of made sense.

Since TV is sort of a background activity for me, it's nice to be able to surf the web or look up things that pop into my head while I watch the tube.  It's also not bad to have an available computer sitting around in the living room when guests come over … after all, god forbid someone should visit and not be able to check their e-mail, update their Facebook status, or look random things up on the Internet. 

I still have my ThinkPad X300 (which by the way, is ranking pretty low on my list of satisfactory computer purchases).  The problem with using that out in the living room is that A. I have to actually be here and B. It's a pain to unhook all the cables and reattach them just so that I can use the laptop in a different room.  And, really, all I want is something I can leave out in the living room and surf the web on.

For 200 bucks, the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 much fits the bill.  It would have been more like 185, but CA seems to see fit to charge tax and some sort of bogus recycling fee.

So now it's sitting out on the living room couch.  The speed is completely satisfactory … the only thing this little computer can't handle is YouTube HD video.  Google Docs and Apps work great.  1024×600 is just enough to surf the web without wanting to claw my eyes out.

My main complaints with the Mini, if I have to list them, are the following.

One, the keyboard is unusually tiny and has a strange layout. Now, I'm used to tiny keyboards, and I can get used to this one, but the size of this thing is definitely pushing it.  The apostrophe key, in particular, is on the bottom of the keyboard instead of next to the Enter key, which is causing me to accidentally hit Enter a LOT.

The touchpad also has a bad habit of activating when my palm touches it while I'm typing.  This leads to all sorts of strange things happening when I type into the browser as the cursor jumps to odd places.

That's pretty much all of the legitimate complaints I can think of.  Disk space and RAM are barely there, but since I'm only using it to surf the web, it's more than sufficient.  And, like I said, the Mini 9 browses the web quite speedily.  I could remedy that by buying a bigger Mini, but that would cost literally twice as much.  I'll live.

Ubuntu is a pretty amazing OS for being free.  I built my entire home network around it using VM's just to re-familiarize myself with Linux, and, while the whole process was and still is quite painful, it manages to get the job done.  If you can ignore everything else about the OS and just surf the web, it works even for normal people.

Honestly, I always wondered why it took so long to commoditize computer hardware to these levels.  I've always found it frustrating to see computer power rise and rise and just see the extra power get sucked up by a bloated operating system and applications.  Palm OS still has some of the most productive apps I've ever used and it runs on a 33 MHz processor.  Meanwhile, my 200 MHz Windows Mobile phone takes 5 seconds to show me a freaking menu.  Ridiculous.

In short, a lot of computing usability advances have nothing to do with the power of the available platform and everything to do with how we make use of the existing power … battery life, human interfaces, and simple cost, cost, cost being among them.  When the industry can put a full fledged computer into anyone's hands for 200 bucks … well, thank god something is going right in this country.

I have high hopes that the widespread availbility of Internet access and computing is going to cause a marked increase in general intelligence amongst the populace.  Although I happen to think that giving away computers ala the OLPC effort is a little silly.  A Mini running Ubuntu completely outclasses anything the OLPC can do, runs an open OS and uses standard hardware, and it's available to anyone.  I enjoy it when the market begins solving some of these problems for us.

Unfortunately, lower costs aren't good thing for computer manufacturers.   Commoditization is the inevitable killer of companies and a sure sign that an industry is going "over the hill", if you look at industry lifecycles.

Anyway, if you're looking for a secondary PC to throw around the house, the Mini 9 is a good fit.  And hey, if you're on a tight budget, it's about the cheapest primary PC you can get out there right now too.

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