Recently, we returned from a week long trip to the heartland, that would be Ohio - “The Heart of it All.” It was great to see family and friends and catch up with the old stomping ground. However, the travel to get there (or anywhere) is just getting to be outrageous (fiscal costs aside.) For my mental health and your entertainment, here’s my Top Ten list on things I hate about travel…

10 - Airport Security. Does anyone really think this is deterring or preventing any attack? I’ve had a “Leatherman” multi-functional tool with a 3 inch long razor sharp knife buried in my briefcase for months. I didn’t know it until I was digging around for something else and came upon it. This bag (with knife) has traveled to Germany three times and Ohio once. It’s a farce and it’s costing valuable time…

9 - Flight Check-in Procedures. While I love the ability to check-in online in advance or to use the machines onsite, this is of little value when there is a 400 meter long line to drop off one’s bags. There has to be a better way. Had we not been traveling relatively light and been able to condense our luggage into carry-on-able state, we would have missed our flight due to the airline’s inability to check people in.

8 - Pre-flight safety talk. I’ve flown millions of miles, literally, I’ve heard this talk thousands of times. Does anyone really think that it is increasing their safety? Unless the “incident” happens on the runway, you’re toast. Passengers are locked into a pressurized aluminum tube hurtling along 5 miles high at 600 miles per hour for the vast majority of the flight. In the event that something does go wrong, you’re not walking away from it. Can the “speech” or at least condense it to say “sit down, shut up, follow our instructions.”

7 - Rental Car Companies. Hey, I’m a capitalist too, but do you really have to hard sell me the additional insurance too each time we go through the rental experience? You know me, you’ve got my profile, I never buy the insurance and I’m not going to buy the insurance this time either. I know the car has to be returned full of gas. Can’t we just check a license, scan a credit card, and be done with it?

6 - Airline food. It’s one thing when the airline gives you bad food as a part of your fare. It’s another when you buy the bad food on the airplane. Why does it have to be bad? Can’t some enterprising soul improve this experience and offer it as a service to the airlines? Why can’t an apple be the snack? It’s bad and getting worse…

5 - Reclining seats. For flights of less than 5 hours, planes shouldn’t have reclining seats if in the economy section in the plane the recline leads to less than 12″ of clearance between the passengers in the plane. These are a nuisance, the recline does nothing other than annoy your seatmate located behind you, and it’s liable to break laptops due to the lack of space.

4 - Megaphone Mouth. Every flight has at least one, the person who is unaware or unable to adjust the volume of their voice to a sound level consistent with the surrounding environment. Over 90% of the time the volume problem is mated to someone who has diarrhea mouth as well - they just can’t shut up. For the sake of my own sanity and everyone within earshot, SHUT UP!

3 - Advertising. I admit it, I’m advertised out. You may have a great product, I don’t care, I don’t want to know about it, it’s unlikely to have any impact on my life at all. The signal to noise ratio on ads has dwindled down to nothing. When watching the on-board “entertainment” I don’t have my DVR present so I can’t ignore your ads - rather than the message being conveyed, it simply irritates me. How about an ad-free environment? That would be unique.

2 - Chicago O’Hare. In twenty plus years of flying, I have never once, not one time, been able to fly through Chicago without a problem. This time it was 3 hours of delay due to thunderstorms (where the delay was mismanaged by the airlines and the airplane had to return to the gate for fuel!) and discretionary maintenance performed during the flight, another 3 hours also requiring a return to gate because the maintenance people didn’t fix the friggin’ problem the first time and the fix had to be undone so the plane could proceed. Guess I’m a slow learner - unless I have to go TO Chicago, I will never fly THROUGH Chicago again.

1 - SFO Baggage Claim. Ah, home airport, sweet home airport. Not. SFO has to have the most inefficient and slow baggage handling capability of any first world airport. Bar none. Number one, your plane can be on the ground for say, an hour, and your bags won’t have arrived at the carousel. Number two, when bags do deem appear, there’s a 50/50 chance that your bags will arrive (I’ve had situations where the bag was “misplaced” in the handling area and had to be shipped - a week later - to my home.) On Sunday night, the airplane landed at 8:40pm. The “priority bags”; from our flight appeared at 9:45pm. Our bags appeared at 10:15pm. No, this wasn’t an Airbus A380, it was a Boeing 757. Did our bags take a different flight? Were the baggage handlers having lunch? Smoking pot? Playing cards? Who knows, but sometimes I have to check a bag and when I do, I know SFO will suck at handling it.

If that’s not enough, someone siphoned gasoline from our truck during it’s time at the long term parking lot; avoid FastTrack parking in South San Francisco or make sure your gasoline access point is secured with a lock.

OK, I feel better now - maybe you even got a laugh out of all these complaints - it’s like Festivus for travel! What do you hate about travel?

170 Transactions per second 10200 per minute 612000 per hour 3672000 per 6 hours 4896000 per 8 hours? How could these numbers be bad?

• The Myth of the Interchangeable Programmer: Can’t We Just Offshore Him?
  Good discussion on how Management view programmer productivity and how that flawed view leads to outsourcing and H1-B visa abuse.

• Great day out at Raleigh farmer’s market and NC Art Museum, then pool. Now watching storm roll in. #

What an extraordinary drive by Lewis Hamilton at today’s British Grand Prix! Horribly wet conditions, with great puddles of water on the track, and a few dry spells to tempt people into risky tyre changes. Everybody seemed to be spinning, or sliding off the track, except for Lewis Hamilton in his McLaren, and he wound up winning by over a minute, lapping everyone up to third place. Unquestionably the best drive of his short career.

The Driver’s Championship is in a fascinating state: half-way through the season, we have a three-way tie at the top, with Hamilton, Räikkönen and Massa all on 48 points. Nine races down, nine to go. This is going to be fun.

{{This article was retrieved (or, possibly, scraped) from the blog of Geoff Arnold.}}

Abso-bleeping-lutely brilliant, Lewis!!!!

There are two schools of thought here......obviously disagreeing on the issue.

One, considers Java to be purely Object-oriented language as
Every single program that you can write in Java has to be encapsulated
in a Class (unlike in languages like C++) i.e you cannot write any java
program without having to write a class and since we know that every
class in java implicitly extends Object class, thereby exhibiting characteristics and features of an Object-Oriented Language.

On the other hand, some people refute the previous claim by saying that
Since there are primitive data types in Java such as int, double, char, boolean etc. and we can write a simple program in Java without having to create any object or without having to use other objects or predefined classes, so it can't be called as a completely object-oriented language, especially when we compare it with languages such as Smalltalk, Python, Lisp etc.

As it goes, I'm also a bit confused on the issue but i would like to believe that Java is a
purely object-oriented language.

Any comments, corrections are welcome and required. :-)

Some good commentary on Microsoft’s Vista flop on SeekingAlpha - interestingly Windows XP sales are booming. This creates an interesting situation for Microsoft. As I’ve mentioned before - they’re increasingly competing against some fast moving competitors (Linux and OS/X) with some very old, quickly decaying technology (Windows XP). So while selling XP might make short term-sense - it’s creating a much larger problem for Microsoft in the future.

What’s worse is that the new NT 6.0 kernel (the kernel that powers Vista and Windows Server 2008) isn’t competing strongly either. According to SearchEnterprise.com - Windows Server 2008 is a real power-hog compared to RHEL; a poor sign when just about every vendor in the industry is pushing efficiency and power savings. Even Microsoft’s friends at Intel IT have decided to ignore Vista - declaring that they won’t be upgrading some 80,000 desktops - that’s pretty significant.

Here it goes: 1. I like Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi but do not like Congress because of its second line leaders. 2. I like BJP but do not like L.K Advani 3. I like Mayawati but do not know who BSP is? 4. Dislike left parties but their socialist agenda sounds good at least on paper. The problem is you always end up compromising.

I’ve posted a few pictures that I took when I went down to the waterfront last night to watch the fireworks. Enjoy.

{{This article was retrieved (or, possibly, scraped) from the blog of Geoff Arnold.}}

Fourth of July fireworks on Elliott Bay

Happy 4th of July. A snapshot taken from a fireworks show in Grand Lake, CO. More on: Flickr

I’ve been kicking around an idea for a blog post on the relationship of dualism and religion. The arguments go something like this: small children are natural dualists (and animists) for a whole bunch of adaptive reasons: taking the intentional stance towards stuff is often a good way of modelling the world. And if you never get a chance to question this dualism (and culture, family, language, and wishful thinking can make it hard), you wind up with a worldview which needs some kind of supernatural authority to make sense of it. Etcetera. Not very novel, perhaps - various writers, from Scott Atran to Dan Dennett, have visited this territory - but perhaps it makes clear the fact that arguments about religious epistemology are mostly intended as justification.

And then I started to think about all of the reasons why people do, in fact, question dualism. I imagined that some might reject theism as incoherent, and then find they have no need of the supernatural, while others might come to a materialist monism as the best explanation of the world that they see, and only then realize that they had no need of a deity. “Best explanation of the world…?” What might this be? Mental illness replacing demonic possession? The effects of drugs on the mind, demonstrating an unquestionably physical basis for aspects of emotion and personality?

It was at this point that I realized that I actually knew very little about the history of the brain: how personal experience, evidence, and dogma have influenced the way in which people have thought about brains, minds, and souls over history. And by a happy coincidence I came across a highly-esteemed book on the subject by an author who is a new favourite of mine. So I picked up a copy of “Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain - and How It Changed the World” by Carl Zimmer, the author of “Microcosm”, the wonderful book on E.coli that I just finished.

“Soul Made Flesh” doesn’t pretend to address the entire history of the study of the brain. Instead, Zimmer concentrates on one man: Thomas Willis, a 17th century English doctor who effectively invented neurology. I read the first two chapters over dinner this evening, before going down to the waterfront to watch the Ivars fireworks on Elliott Bay. Zimmer’s style is as deft as it was in “Microcosm”; I’m really going to enjoy this. (And when I finish it, I may be able to write that piece on dualism with a little more evidence to support my hypothesis….) My only frustration? No Kindle edition. Sigh….

{{This article was retrieved (or, possibly, scraped) from the blog of Geoff Arnold.}}

Theism, dualism, and brains

• I’ve turned my 7 yr old daughter into a teenager - gave her my old (and very worn) iPod Nano. Need to teach her some iPod etiquette. #

My great aunt Edith is 100 years old this year and so a big Lazar family celebration was organized for this weekend, with cousins and spouses traveling here from all over the US (Edith lives in San Francisco). My father, sister and nephew came from back east and our new house was ready just in time for them to stay with us.

This afternoon we all met up at my uncle Martin and aunt Wendy's place in San Jose; this is the first time I've been with so many relatives since, oh, maybe my first wedding back in '87, maybe longer. The core group was my great uncle Nate, my dad and his six first cousins: Norm, who was great to me when I lived near him in college; Norm's older brother Irv; Andrea, who lives just down Middlefield from us; Eleanor; Arthur, son of the birthday lady; and our host Martin. Plus a bunch of the cousin's kids came from near and far. Martin's two daughters both have babies, who spent most of the afternoon sleeping or looking cute.

There were several pro (Eleanor's husband Tom) and semi-pro photographers, so I'm sure I'll get pics to post soon. Meanwhile, here are two I snapped with the phone:



Tomorrow Edith will come down for the party at Andrea's house and Sunday the inner circle are having lunch with her in San Francisco. What a great holiday, eh?

I took an interesting class a few months ago, it was called Life Options, it dealt with self discovery, dreams, and values. One of the things that I found was the my past jobs paralleled my love of cycling, so my mission statement was pretty simple;