alex chiang: web 6.0

January 29, 2006

odometers 2006

Filed under: dreck — alex @ 3:38 pm

Been meaning to write about this for a while, but kept forgetting to. I’m curious about my modes of transportation, and wanted to keep track somewhere of how I get around. So here are the current values of various odometers I own (starting from Jan. 1). I’ll revisit this in 2007 to see what happened.

  • car (vw tdi golf): 43,000
  • commuter bike (trek 7600): 2848
  • road bike (giant ocr1): 750
  • mountain bike (gary fisher marlin): unknown, as I smashed the bike computer on a trip to Moab
  • cruiser bike (schwinn): a computer on a cruiser? come on…

It occurs to me that I have a lot of bikes.

January 26, 2006

unlimited suck-shine tour

Filed under: dreck — alex @ 12:30 pm

Went to Denver last night to catch the Unlimited Sunshine Tour, featuring Gogol Bordello, Tegan and Sara, Eugene Mirman, and headliner Cake.

We missed Gogol Bordello, but managed to catch about 30 seconds of Eugene Mirman introducing a video clip he made that I’d already seen (the one about drugs and smoking pot off a hooker’s tits). Funny stuff, but come on… where’s the new material?

Then came Tegan and Sara, an indie band from Canada. I was predisposed towards liking them, since I loved their album, but I could see how their sound could get annoying after a while.

I was reminded of the Cranberries, where the main singer records both a melody and a harmony track on their songs. Tegan and Sara was similar, but in real-time. When they harmonized, it was way cool. When they sang the same line, they ran into the same problem that plagues all musicians trying to play both the same tone at the same pitch. When you’re in tune, it sounds great. When you’re out of tune, the harmonic dissonance can be distracting. If you’re going for that effect, cool, but realize that it can be overpowering at times…

Finally, another 15 seconds of Eugene Mirman, and then Cake came on to “play”. Note the strategic use of scare quotes, since I do not consider a 45 minute set with a 10 minute encore to really be considered playing for such a huge audience of devoted fans.

I saw Cake in their hometown of Sacramento in 1999, and vowed never to see them live again. I was reminded of a human jukebox, since all they did was get on stage and play their songs without any improvisation or crowd interaction. I could have gotten the same effect by staying at home and listening to their CDs, except without getting beer spilled on me and watching 16 year old high school kids make out.

During the first 44 minutes, I was thinking to myself, “wow, I was completely wrong. These guys are *awesome* on stage,” as they were totally interacting with the crowd, and having a good time. There were still 16 year old high school kids making out in front of me, but at least the show was better.

Then they bade adieu and walked off the stage. WTF? I just spent $35 for a 45 minute set? Thanks John McCrea.

So I renewed my vows of never seeing Cake live again. Just listen to the CDs. If you truly want to replicate the concert going experience, drive on down to the local high school to watch the 16 year olds doing their thing.

January 24, 2006

sell out (google AdSense and MediaWiki)

Filed under: geek — alex @ 1:57 pm


Sell out, with me oh yea, sell out, with me tonight
Google company’s gonna give me lots of money
And everything’s gonna be all right
– adapted from “Sell Out”, by Reel Big Fish

I did the unthinkable today and added Google’s adsense code to portions of this site. Me — the guy who used to write complaining emails to webmasters who advertised on the web about how they were sullying the pristine quality of the ‘net. Of course, that was back in 1996 when you still had to know the difference between PPP and SLIP, and a Trumpet Winsock wasn’t some weird woolly thing you put over a brass instrument. Oh well.

In any case, I wanted to put the AdSense code into a MediaWiki v1.5 setup that I have. The previous link was very helpful, but I prefer to have the ads on the left hand side, underneath the default “toolbox” section of the MonoBook skin. So here’s what I did to achieve it…

In adsense.php, remove the lines with a <div> in them. There’s one near the top and one near the bottom. (also, be sure to put your own AdSense code in there or else someone else will get credit for your clicks!)

Now, all you have to do is modify MonoBook.php:

            </ul>
          </div>
        </div>
+        <div class="portlet" id="p-google">
+          <h3>&nbsp;</h3>
+          <div class="pBody">
+            <!-- Google AdSense -->
+            <?php include("adsense.php") ?>
+          </div>
+        </div>
        <?php if( $this->data['language_urls'] ) { ?><div id="p-lang" class="portlet">
          <h5><?php $this->msg('otherlanguages') ?></h5>
          <div class="pBody">

The lines starting with + are the ones you add. You don’t actually inset the actual plus signs themselves. You’re done. There’s no need to modify main.css.

January 19, 2006

wtf, potty parity?

Filed under: dreck — alex @ 5:35 pm

An article in the CSM today about potty parity, which is basically the idea that since women take longer in the bathroom, we should increase the ratio of men’s to women’s bathrooms so that the lines are of equal length.

Excuse me, but this idea makes about as much sense as intelligent design, which is to say that it doesn’t.

Let me make two suggestions. First, to all women — stop treating “piss and/or shit time” as “talk to my friend while taking a piss and/or shit time and then doing makeup afterwards”. Stereotypical and misogynistic, perhaps, but that doesn’t make it less true.

The second suggestion is that we just go Ally McBeal style and become anorexic hyperimaginitave freaks who want to get into Rober Downey Jr.’s pants, because let’s face it, who doesn’t. Hm, no that doesn’t sound right. What I meant to say was that we should just eliminate the concept of gendered bathrooms and just have 100% unisex bathrooms. That would be the best method of load-balancing.

If you ask me, getting infected with PC-itis is the new AIDS.

January 17, 2006

knowledge dump

Filed under: dreck — alex @ 3:06 pm

At work, I’ve got all these great new books piled up that I want to read (like IA-64 Linux Kernel: Design and Implementation, Itanium Architecture for Programmers, and Linux Device Drivers (my definition of “great” and your definition of “great” may be two different things)), but no time to read them. What to do?

I am reminded of my extremely smart college buddy, Dan Tu. Dan had a special penchant for “insane hot” wings from (the now defunct) A. J. Wingers and quantum mechanics (and electricity and magnetism and physics and etc. etc.). Dan’s favorite place to study was the throne, on the 4th floor of the Taft-Van Doren dormitory. He’d grab a textbook, simulatenously announce, “I gotta take a dump,” and disappear for an hour. I would fumble my way around a problem set, wait for him to come back, and then get him to explain the solution to me. At one point, I asked him about his odd habits, and he stared at me while stating, “Shit goes out, knowledge comes in”. I never questioned him again.

And so, in honor of Dan, I have adopted his strategy at work. New economy multi-tasking at its finest, I can eliminate (har har) two problems at once. It turns out I can usually read at least an entire subsection of a chapter while dropping a deuce, and in this manner, should be able to finish at least a few technical books a year.

That’s me — getting smarter, one dump at a time.

Update: there really should be an acronym to describe this behavior. In a play on the old GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), I suggest GOKI. Thus, you would be able to construct a sentence such as, “Later. Gonna go pull a GOKI” or perhaps “Time for a GOKI”.

January 12, 2006

ni hao, ma?

Filed under: dreck — alex @ 1:12 pm

Interesting article in the CSM today about how more and more Asians are learning Mandarin. I offer no additional insight, other than to point out that this is a good move, and if you ever decide to have kids, you may want them to grow up tri-lingual, with fluency in English, Spanish, and Mandarin.

Tangentially related, I’ve been watching Firefly, an excellent TV series that got cancelled a while back. The same characters went on to the big screen, making a movie called Serenity. Both are highly recommended, because it’s a damn good story.

Anyhow, in the futuristic Firefly world, there are only two languages left — English and Mandarin. It’s amusing to watch white people horribly mangle the Chinese expletives. I find that I understand what they’re saying about 20% of the time.

Update: Here’s a link to some horrible translations for the horrible spoken Mandarin in Firefly

January 11, 2006

everybody’s got debt

Filed under: dreck — alex @ 12:46 pm

First off, Tamara Draut’s publicity agent is doing a heckuva job. The agent managed to get Draut’s new book mentioned in both Slate on Monday and the CSM today. Not too shabby.

Right then, on we go. Her book is called “Strapped: Why America’s 20-and-30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead”, and Daniel Gross over at Slate, thinks that her book (along with one written by Anya Kamenetz) is “annoying” because:

It’s not that the authors misdiagnose ills that affect our society. It’s just that they lack the perspective to add any great insight.

To be fair, Gross spent a lot more time mocking Kamenetz than Draut. But that’s neither here nor there. The CSM article has a few amazing quotes:

“We’re so individualistic,” says Deborah Thorne, a sociologist at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. “We see this as an individual problem, and then we look to the individual for the solution. The fact is, these are national problems, and they require a national solution. But this is just not on the radar of politicians. It’s not an issue with which they concern themselves. But it’s the issue the American family is concerned with.”

Ok Ms. Thorne, why are these national problems, other than because you say so?

Compounding these generational challenges is what Ms. [Dayana] Yochim calls “incessant commercial wooing.” On TV, she says, “it’s all about luxury and excess and consumption,” right down to the fancy lofts and apartments where sitcom characters live.

“That is not how people really live in New York City,” she says. And with commercials filling 20 minutes of every televised hour, she adds, “No wonder we all suffer from ‘the wants.’ ”

Oh, I get it now. TV gave us “Friends” and now all we can think about is living in a sweet loft in Manhattan and trying to bang Monica, Rachel, and Phoebe — at the same time (actually, ok, I plead guilty to the latter (but not the former)).

Please. If you are so weak-willed and mamby-pamby that NBC can control your wants and desires, well perhaps the problem is you. No wait, scratch that. The problem is definitely you. Remember 6th grade when we learned about peer pressure and how you shouldn’t succumb to it? Hm, probably not.

Even an Ivy League education is no guarantee of instant financial stability. Jeffrey McDaniel graduated from Dartmouth and his wife, Meghan, from Smith. But in 2002, as they began paying her graduate school tuition and their wedding bills, they did considerable belt-tightening.

“We ate on $10 to $15 a week,” says Mr. McDaniel, a fundraiser. They lived in a $590-a-month unair-conditioned apartment on a trolley line in West Philadelphia, battling roaches and mice. After Mrs. McDaniel earned her master’s degree and began working full time, they moved to a better area and continued paying off debts.

Unfortunately, the article never tells us McDaniel’s major. Arguably, a degree from Dartmouth in something like American Studies is worth far less than a degree from DeVry Tech in engine repair.

In any case, I’m just ranting because I too am annoyed by the whinyness. So here’s my take on the matter, as a fellow 20-something with $0 debt and decent assets.

First, grow a spine. Go read “The Millionaire Next Door”. You’ll hear that the easiest way to increase your wealth is to live below your means. Falling for peer pressure and keeping up with the Joneses when it’s beyond your means is dumb.

Second, choose a useful major in college. If you really want to study history or sociology or whatever, great. I admire you for chasing your dreams. But don’t come whining to me that you have no money because there are no jobs in your useless major. I slaved away 5 years of my life in college as an engineer — even though I would have much preferred something like English Lit — because I knew the job market in engineering is just a leeetle better than English Lit. You’ve made your bed, so sleep in it.

Maybe everyone should just grow up with Jewish or Chinese parents.

ps, hard to believe that this is my 3rd year of blogging. I’m such a loser.