Magic Spot Flowing

…or maybe the zeroth. :)

My boss added a 5th law of PMing today:
5. If you think you just received everything you need to move forward, chances are good you’re wrong.

A moment ago, I was sitting, carefully removing pumpkin puree from my hand blender with a finger, and wondering how many other people like (plain) pumpkin enough to eat puree off an implement. This is fairly flavorful pumpkin — I’ve definitely had pumpkin that’s bland enough I wouldn’t eat it plain — but I suspect the desire to eat any kind of pumpkin plain is not that great in most people. Add sugar and spice and all that’s nice and it’s a different story, of course.

In other news, I’m getting comment-spammed so badly that I basically can’t take the time to find any new “good” commenters out of the mess. So if you’ve left a comment recently and not seen it show up, sorry, it went in the dustbin along with the hundreds of spam comments. Mail me if you need to get approved.

I wrote this as a little light work joke, but it’s funny in part because these situations do tend to keep cropping up…

The Laws of Project Management

1. There is no spec.
     1a. If there is a spec, it will change as soon as you start work.
2. There are never as many resources as the project requires.
3. Things are very urgent when people tell you what the due date is, but not when you need something from them in order to meet it.
4. Whatever it is, they needed it yesterday.

Whenever I do Portola loop on my bike, I always pass the entrance to Windy Hill OSP, and I have thought many times about riding up there and hiking, but today I finally did it. I wasn’t sure if it would work well. I thought I might be too tired, but that turned out not to be the case. Again, my W2W-acquired endurance triumphs. I’m tired now though, and planning a nap soon.

Going up on the bike takes about 50 minutes, about 8.5 miles. Mostly it’s up Alpine, and then a little ways on Portola. There are no bike racks (that I could find), but there are plenty of nice-sized trees to lock up to. Bike parking was a lot easier than car parking; the preserve was quite busy.

I wasn’t sure if I would want to do this, but ultimately we did climb up to the summit, elevation approx. 1900 feet (the entrance is around 550 ft). The hiking took about three hours, so we were going pretty slowly to cover the 5 or so miles up and down Spring Ridge Trail and the Anniversary Trail. We saw several coyotes and a small brown lizard. The views were terrific, but the thick haze did make them a bit less exciting, so it would be better on a really clear day. But you can see all the way to the ocean and all the way to Mt. Diablo. Really amazing.

Coming down on the bike is faster — 35 minutes — and of course, a lot easier.

Overall, a challenging and enjoyable thing to do. I think I’m going to try biking+hiking for more of the nearby preserves, like Arastradero and the Dish area!

I had a nice ride today with some friends up in the hills above Millbrae/San Mateo. We started at Millbrae Caltrain and went up Trousdale, which just about killed me. I rode up most of it, but walked a bit and had to stop I think four times. The grade is about 9% — pretty brutal. The view down to the bay is amazing, though.

Then we did something I’ve always wanted to try — and I’m sure my mom will have kittens when I tell her I did this — ride on I-280 in the “bikes permitted” section. (It was built on top of the original path of Skyline Blvd., so they fought not to lose the bike access because the alternatives are much more complicated.) It was only for one exit, and isn’t all that dangerous, since you don’t have to worry about merging, except at the bottoms of the exit ramps, where there are stop signs.

The next leg was Sawyer Camp Trail. It was a little busy, requiring us to keep our speed down so as not to injure any pedestrians, but it was absolutely beautiful — two lakes (San Andreas and the Crystal Springs Reservoir), deer, and oak forest. Very nice.

Then a pleasant descent down Crystal Springs into San Mateo, pizza, and a jaunt through the town before Caltraining home. Total distance: 16 miles (including the legs to and from the Caltrain stations).

A while back I bought an LG Dare. Mostly I like it fairly well, but it has a couple of problems — even leaving aside the fact that it’s now restarted spontaneously four times since I bought it.

One is that it’s hard for it to distinguish between scrolling and selecting. Oddly, the browser and the other functions seem to have different prejudices. The browser tends to scroll when I’m trying to select, and the phonebook and menus tend to select when I’m trying to scroll. You get better at it, but it’s still not perfect.

The other is that it hates commas. And apostrophes, in some cases.

I use a lot of commas when I write email, and even when I write texts or notes. I like commas. Unfortunately, the comma is not on the main QWERTY soft keyboard, nor is it the second option on the T9 punctuation softkey like it used to be. Instead, they prefer @. I understand that @ is used in email addresses, but I honestly do not type email addresses very often unless I’m in an address field (which is less common than being in a text field) and I don’t think I’m very unusual in this regard. Certainly not in text messages, and rarely in the browser. And while I like having the .com key occasionally, I’d really rather have a comma.

The extra keys available on the regular QWERTY change depending on context, but the one I really want, the [, ‘] option, is never available. In the text messager, it’s [@’] (so I have to shift for ‘) and [.?] (logical). In the browser, it’s [.com], [.] and [/], so neither , nor ‘ is available in QWERTY and I have to switch into symbols for either and press shift to get to the ‘. Argh. I don’t often need to type a URL when I’m in an input field in the browser, only if I’m in the address bar, which is a totally different thing. Why give me those keys? I need my complex clauses and contractions! With apostrophes. No “its cold outside” for this linguist.

The issue of accessing the symbols keyboard brings me to my second major keyboard complaint. Like the iPhone, the QWERTY soft keyboard on the Dare has a switcher-key that turns it to numbers and symbols. However, unlike the iPhone, it has two keys: one for QWERTY and one for symbols. This is less than ideal. The iPhone guys thought this through and realized: if you’re in symbols already, you don’t need the symbol key. Ditto QWERTY. So they gave just one key, which toggles back and forth.

Unfortunately, LG was not that clever, so there are two keys. The ‘reason’, I think is, that in the browser the QWERTY key can also be used to access accented letters, but there’s gotta be a more clever way of doing that than always taking up precious screen real-estate (the Dare has a smaller screen than the iPhone, although a larger keyboard because the QWERTY goes across the long side) with two keys.

All this makes typing on the Dare a much longer and more complex process than it should be, diminishing the practical usefulness of being able to type faster on the QWERTY.

Give me punctuation or give me a red pen!

I hate them. Why does everyone talking about them on the internet seem to love them, except one guy who twittered that he hates them?

Oh, and someone who thinks the “older version” solves it. No it doesn’t; the older version doesn’t have chat!

Dear Google,

Please give me back my old Gmail (with chat, thanks), where every element blended nicely into every other, instead of my messages being white while my inbox border is blue, and my chat search box being white while the top and edge are blue (or whatever color). And where my chat windows had nicely coordinating icon colors for minimize/pop-out, and blinked a nicely contrasting, if kind of obnoxious, orange.

Your new “default” theme is not the same as the old Gmail and you know it.

And your new themes are almost entirely ugly, and most of them are impractical as well.

Don’t do this to me. Make a theme that really makes it the same as it was before. Please? Pretty please?

By the way, I hate the iGoogle themes too. Can I have my old iGoogle page back while you’re at it?

…Okay, except the Terminal theme is the geekiest, coolest annoying thing ever. You are forgiven. But give me back my normal Gmail anyway.

One of my favorite things about not having a car is that it reminds me to think of my journeys as part of the fun of my trips. Journeys take more of my time than they do of most people’s, so if I don’t enjoy them and look for ways to spice them up, I’d be much more annoyed by their duration, and I might as well just give up and buy a car.

This weekend I had several long-journey adventures.

First, I decided that instead of taking the Capital Corridor train all the way from San Jose to Davis, I would shorten (and save money on) the journey by taking BART to Richmond. (It’s not really shorter, but the weekend afternoon CC and Caltrain schedules don’t mesh very well.) There are two options: Caltrain to Millbrae to Richmond, and bike to Fremont to Richmond.

Fremont beckoned. In the three years that I’ve lived in the Bay Area (I moved here on the second weekend of November in 2005, so this was my anniversary weekend), I’ve never been to Fremont, only through it on CA-84 and I-880. And I’ve never biked over the Dumbarton Bridge (CA-84) which is one of the four bridges in the Bay Area you can bike over, and the only one that’s within my normal bike area that I have never biked over (since I crossed the Golden Gate for the first time during Waves to Wine).

I mapped out a route using Fremont’s bike map, aiming for roads with bike lanes because I’m not familiar enough with Fremont’s roads to know which non-laned roads would be comfortable for riding. The route I chose was scenic, but not short:

Willow > CA-84 Bike/Ped sidepath/sidewalk > Marshlands Rd > Thornton Road > Paseo Padre Parkway > Mowry Ave > Civic Center Pl > BART Way

The total distance was 17.8 miles, so my roundabouting added about six extra miles (Fremont is about 12 miles as the crow flies). Luckily, I planned for the extra time, leaving around 1pm for a 2:30 BART train. I got to the train just in time to board without being in a desperate hurry, but not without being worried. Thank goodness for having a tailwind most of the way, and for my leftover W2W fitness.

The route, despite involving bike lanes for nearly the entire way, was not entirely what I would call pleasant riding. To go about it backwards, Paseo Padre is a bit like Central Expressway (something I suspected from its Parkway appellation) only the bike lanes are even more poorly lined at intersections even though they are official bike lanes and not shoulders. The intersections were poorly designed overall, with bad pavement and short lights, and the intersection of Thornton with CA-84 and surrounds (yes, you get off 84 and then have to cross it again) was seriously the most terribly-designed intersection of a bike-laned road with a major highway I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen lots. Fremont? Not a terribly bike-friendly town, based on what I saw.

Before you get on Thornton, Marshlands Road is a two-lane road with “bike lanes”. The lack of real bike lanes rather than gravelly, terribly-paved, nearly unpainted imitations isn’t a serious problem because there’s almost no traffic, but the paving in general is very poor, although the scenery is quite nice: marshy areas, with hills arising out of them.

The bridge bike-ped path, and the path leading up to it (it starts at Bayfront Expwy, where the road gets wide and the speed limit high) was for most of its length fine except for having a lot of debris, which is basically par for the course for sidepaths. However, it also had two inset plates which were so inset that had I hit them unawares, I could easily have lost control of my bike. Note to self: find out who is responsible for that crap, and get it fixed. And then there was the flooded road. Yes, really. The road up to the bridge, itself, of course, was not flooded. Can’t have that. Cars must get through. But the sidepath/road to the recreation area (which you’re supposed to use until you reach the sidepath for the bridge itself) was under several inches of water.

No thanks. So I rode a short distance on the shoulder of the bridge approach, then carefully took my bike down a small embankment and over to the bridge path proper.

Riding over the bridge was pretty awesome though. The temperature was in the upper 70s and it was as clear as a bell. I watched the blueish water of the bay, and seagulls flying along below me, as I took in a view of the contrasting pinkish-tan East Bay hills ahead. It’s a longish climb but shallow, and an equally nice descent.

I enjoyed my BART ride too: conversation with a fellow bike enthusiast, reading and people-watching, and an unexpected view of the city and the bay when the train came up out of the Oakland subway portions. Transfer at Richmond was fairly painless (this was also the first time I’ve ever been north of Berkeley or south of Bay Fair on BART — now I’ve been to all the line termini in the inner Bay Area!), and the views began again. The Capitol Corridor runs along the edge of the North Bay there and I’ve never seen it in full daylight before, so it was a treat.

As we approached Davis, the sky pinked and the sun slanted prettily over the green fields. I rode around downtown Davis for a while as it got dark (sporting my new MiNewt light so I could actually see — amazing). It’s a pretty town, lots of trees and big houses, perfect for just tooling around going nowhere and enjoying it.

Today Mike and I went on another long-journey adventure: a ride over to Winters for lunch. It’s a 28-mile roundtrip, so neither long nor short by ride standards (mine anyway), but certainly longer than you would usually take just to have lunch. But the ride was part of the point, which is my point: when you ride, the journey is fun too.

It’s an interesting area to ride in, very different from the Bay Area. Out in the farmlands, you wouldn’t know you’re in California except that when you look west, you see mountains — that, and the fact that it’s in the 70s in November! But the farmland is amazingly like every other farm landscape I’ve ever seen, except flatter than some. Green, brown, and tan fields, distant lines of trees and small buildings.

It’s very, very flat, and so windy that it’s almost like having hills, though today was not as windy as the last time we went riding. Also, no tomatoes to avoid, but plenty of cracks in the asphalt. Does anyone know why asphalt cracks horizontally in that weirdly regular way? Or why fruit trees are painted white in the middle of their trunks, but not at the thicker lower part? Such are the mysteries that arise while enjoying the journey.

I was introduced to Pandora the other day. It’s pretty cool. I’m not great at discovering music, so I like that aspect. And it’s fascinating to see how the classification performs. I started it with Eddie from Ohio, of course. After a while, it worked its way around to Carbon Leaf — not unexpected, and awesome.

Also, new folk-musical love: David Rovics. So cool.

I had a crappy day at work today, and have been feeling a bit muddled lately, but tonight I got back to feeling to how lucky I am, and how much I am given every day by the awesome people I know and meet and the awesome planet I live on.

Oh, goodness. My blog has no music category! That Must Be Fixed.

I seem to have been overcome by winter lethargy lately. Not severely so, but enough that I’ve noticed my demotivation. It’s funny because I am not a fan of the concept that winter is not ‘cycling season’, but I really just don’t feel like riding in the cold and rain very much. I’m missing the sunshine. I also don’t feel much like cooking, which is weird because usually the winter sends me into baking, casserole, and soup mode. I don’t even really feel like shopping for food. I feel like reading and drinking hot drinks, and that’s about it.

Any suggestions for defeating the winter blahs? Or for good activities that go with it, but still encourage me to get things done/try new things? (Reading, movie-watching, and hot drinks are already on the list.) This is kind of a new deal for me — like I said, I don’t normally react to winter this way, so I’m hoping some suggestions might reinvigorate me.

Language Log likes to talk about snowclones. In fact, they popularized the term “snowclone” (though they did not coin it, as you can see by the entry).

Here’s one I don’t think they’ve looked at, even though they have used it, which has an intriguing distribution:

You are in a maze of twisty little X, all alike.

In the original phrase, the X slot was filled by ‘passages’. It’s from the text adventure game Colossal Cave Adventure, and while it’s clear that this phrase is a full-blown snowclone (anything can fill the X slot, though the rest of the phrase is mostly still fixed), it’s one with limited distribution: the main usages are clearly computer-related or otherwise nerdy (or geeky if you prefer).

(I know the phrase, but I’m actually not familiar with Colossal Cave or similar games as such. I actually thought the passageways line was from Zork, but the Google Meme Observatory corrected me. Shows what I know! The computer games that I played when I was younger all had graphics, albeit simple ones like flat green buffaloes and pink H’s surrounded by green blocks.)

Here are 22 interestingly representative examples of the snowclone:
You are in a maze of twisty little paragraphs, all alike.
You are in a maze of twisty little injokes, all alike…
You are in a maze of twisty little corporations, all alike…
“You are in a maze of twisty little emoticons, all alike.”
In the limiting case, just because I install a Python parser, it shouldn’t force other modules into a maze of twisty little whitespace, all alike.
code that seems to be a maze of twisty little bitShifts, all alike, follows.
You are in a maze of twisty little tabs, all alike.
A maze of twisty little standards, all alike
You are in a maze of twisty little weblogs all alike.
You are in a maze of twisty little classes, all alike.
You are in a maze of twisty little menus, all alike.
You are in a maze of twisty little boxes, all alike
You are in a little twisty maze of think-tanks, all different.
You are lost in a maze of twisty little filesystems, all alike….
You are in a maze of twisty subroutines, all alike. You may be eaten by a deadline.
You are in a maze of twisty little APIs, all alike…
Anyone who’s worked in a maze of twisty little cubicles (all alike) will be able to relate to the situations presented here.
When considering the rules mentioned above, plus some other rules about tax-treatment on pre-IPO stock options, the whole mess might be paraphrased as: “You are in a maze of twisty little rules, all alike.”
you are in a maze of twisty little header files, all alike…
You are in a maze of twisty little accounts, all alike (2007/3/30)
You are in a maze of twisty little config files, all alike
A maze of twisty little railroads, all alike
You are in a maze of twisty little offsets, all alike

And for the final touch, a link to Language Hat!
I live in a part of Berkeley build up in the 1920s, which for drivers is a maze of twisty little streets, all alike.

(Sadly, Mr. Language Hat did not use it, just one of the commenters.)

The variations show that the phrase is either a tad flexible, or difficult to remember with perfect accuracy. And indeed the wiki page explains that there were both a maze of passageways all alike, and one of passageways all different, which was described in several variant ways.

I’m rather fond of this snowclone. I think my favorite is the “maze of twisty little whitespace all alike”, but that’s just because I hate Python.