Mitch in California 26-28 Feb 2010 – Part 2

There is apparently a heater built into the air conditioner in my hotel room and I did not suss out how to use it so I was a  bit cool Friday (and Saturday) night in the room.  But it was no cooler than our house in Bellevue so I felt fine.

Saturday morning was clear, cool, bright, sunshine and I jogged before breakfast.

The pool looked very inviting in the bright sunshine.

Breakfast at the Tri-Valley Inn Pleasanton consisted of coffee, corn flakes, orange juice, milk. . .

Toast, muffins, donuts, and margarine.  Kumar was cheerful and helpful.

Robert topped by after my jog and first breakfast and we went to “Zorn’s” for second breakfast.  I bought Robert his favorites and I had eggs with hashbrowns.

The birthday boy gets treated to breakfast at Zorn’s.

Mitch in front of Zorn’s: Pleasanton’s original family restaurant.

Robert dropped me in front of the BART stop and I pumped about $10 into a ticket.  I accidentally left my laptop in Robert’s car so my pack was lighter but I could not blog.

The machines are fast, simple, and efficient.

The BART station was empty on a Saturday morning.

Changing trains at Merit for the Fremont line.

Eventually I arrived in Fremont.

. . . at the foothills of Mission Peak, with

. . . green fields, parks, and Lake Elisabeth in the middle of town.

I approached the lake trail from the library.

a squirrel

.

Lake Elisabeth

The lighting was very high-contrast and the sun was warm.

There were very few Canadian Geese because Fremont hires doggies to chase them away.

Willow tree along the lake

Walk in the park

I finally arrived at the Fullers’ house and was greeted by Jon, Bryneth, and one of their three cats.

Jon looks very well

Ian is 6’7” tall now and is destined to grow to 7’ tall.  Bryneth is also tall but not nearly as big as Jon.

Here is the biggest (fattest) and the shyest of the three cats.

. . . And here is their third cat.

I had a delicious lunch at the Fullers and caught up on what everyone is doing.  Debbie is getting produce from “Full Belly Farms” and it tastes great!

Arnold picked me up from the Fullers’ house and we drove to Berkeley.

Berkeley is such a great tourist town.

If you set off a nuclear bomb in Berkeley you will be fined by the city.

The people who live in Berkeley are so wonderful.  It is always very entertaining and fun to walk or drive through the city.

Eventually the GPS navigated us to the Lawrence Hall of science and we had a great time touring inside.  The DNA molecule outside did not have as many kids crawling on it as I expected.

They have converted some of the 1960’s sound-proof phone booths to cell phone booths (no phone inside).

Others still have a phone in them but I don’t know if they work.

It was a “contrasty” day; the golden gate and bay bridges are offset against the bright sky.

Golden Gate

Berkeley Mastodon fossil.

Largest lizard I have seen live up close for many years.

The nano-tech exhibit was for very young children.

I am one billion, seven hundred fifty-two million, six hundred thousand nanometers tall.

Amelia and Mitch

We played variations of Nim and Kalah.

We built really cool buildings with the wood slats.

Eventually the museum closed and the de Leons drove me to Simeon’s house on their way to the gymnastics competition in Petaluma.

Simeon lives in a tiny little room in a nice apartment. He seems well-adjusted, contented, in good health.

He has a tiny little desk and keeps his books under his bed because the room is so small.

Eventually I BART’d home (changed trains in Oakland) and went to sleep.  It was a very long, wonderful day.  Robert brought my laptop back to my room but I was too tired to do email.

Mitch in California 26-28 Feb 2010 – Part 1

To celebrate Robert David’s 50^th birthday I scheduled a short trip to California for the weekend of 2/26 – 2/28.  After the “Summit at Tulalip” all-week off-site meeting at work I packed some socks, underware, and running shorts in a backpack and headed to the sunshine State.

The shared-van “Shuttle Express” service is less expensive and more convenient than parking at the airport.  This time they were punctual, courteous, and efficient.  One of the passengers on the van was chatting for about 40 minutes on his cell phone about the regulatory arbitrage in China right now.  It turns out that the international “holding companies” that were created in the Cayman Islands, Isle of Man, Tonga, etc. for tax avoidance in the 1980s and 1990s are now flourishing by selling to the Chinese joint ventures.  The person in the van was a greedy sleaze looking to abandon his company to go work for a different law firm that needed his quant skills.  He was chatting with a head-hunter about an interview he just had.  He was a definite “no hire” in my opinion – no ethics, integrity, moral compass, or semblance of loyalty, team-ability.

There were not many people at the airport on Friday afternoon (a sign that the economy is still pretty bad).

Oakland expanded into two terminals since the last time I was there but it is still very small, convenient, charming.

I hitched a ride from OAK to the hotel with David Goldberg (remember my Vegas trip with Robert and David in 2008?).  He was arriving from Phoenix 10 minutes before me but his flight was delayed so he and his wife arrived 15 minutes later.  They rented a car (I had planned to take BART and a taxi) so I rode with them from the airport to Pleasanton.

Tri-Valley Inn reception, complete with mini-fridge. . .

Robert signs in at the reception.

The Tri-Valley Inn motel in Pleasanton ($49 for bed, breakfast, swimming pool, free parking) is a block from Robert’s house and is surprisingly good for the price.

The rooms are cold and dusty (no heating) but otherwise clean and cozy.  Robert stopped by to greet the out-of-towners as we arrived.

The sun-belt people thought it was cold but it was really not bad for mid-winter.

Swimming pool

I had packed a dinner and had eaten it on the plane so I went to my room and went to sleep. The others went out for a midnight dinner.

twit the quail leaves incubator, enters brooder

Removing lint from 2.5mm jack - unjamming microswitch

My (awesome!) phone is "naked" in my pocket all the time so lint, & gunk get into the 2.5mm headset / audio jack at the bottom:



And the microswitch inside would occasionally jam, so that the phone would never come out of "headset mode," even after the jack is removed. One day last year it just would not come out of "headset" mode at all. So for several months I have been walking around with a bluetooth headset all the time because the phone could not function without a bluetooth headset or a wired headset. It was very inconvenient. Finally, today, I started searching for a way to unjam the microswitch and found it here. live.com search is awesome! To unjam a 2.5mm jack microswitch:

• Start playing a music file or anything that should go through the main speaker
• Make sure it is playing by attaching headphones to the jack, then remove the jack.
• Soak a Q-tip in WD-40 and twist the cotton end into a tiny corscrew that fits in a 2.5mm hole.
• Twist the WD-40 soaked cotton into the 2.5mm hole and twist for three minutes.
• Put the headset in to make sure music is still playing
• Repeat if necessary

It works!

network for track meet

I think we need three wireless access point routers, one each at Registration, Announcer's booth, and at the finish line. They need to be on the same network so that all laptops, computers, and cell phones using the wireless network can communicate with each other. Should we run them in WDS mode or wireless bridge repeater mode? If all three wrt54g routers run dd-wrt, and the one in the announcer's booth has the radio power cranked up to over 100 milliwatts, will everything work?

The registration area has six (6) computers and two printers. Coaches sign up each athlete for each event; the meetmanager software tracks payments, assign heats, lanes, numbers, and schedules. Logistically the people entering the data share the registration area with food and souvenir vendors so it is crowded.

The announcer watches meetmanager's scheduling screens to see which races and events to call. The athletes must gather and stage in certain areas and then be sent to the right lane at the right time. Only one machine is needed in the announcer's booth.

The finish line has the photo finish cameras and electronic timing. They take a feed from meetmanager to get their data set up and meetmanager takes their results electronically to record times and scores. There are usually three or four machines at the finish line running meet manager. One of them is tethered to a cell phone and it uploads results from meetmanager to the public Internet as the races finish. Dozens or a hundred fans are under the announcer in the stands. There are lots of coaches, athletes, and helpers running around with phones, wifi-capable devices, etc.

FAQ

• Are the three spots shown connected with wires?

No; there are no wires, just power at each location.

• A wired backbone?

No network wires of any kind anywhere.

• You may be using a mixed AP/peer-to-peer mode?

Yes. The AP’s must be joined by bridging, repeating, or wds.

• Do you have a line diagram you can draw on a white board of each connection?

No, but the idea is that there are about a dozen machines, 6 at registration 5 at the finish line, and 1 in the announcer’s booth on one net with 3 wireless routers and no wires.

Agents in the Matrix and tough economic times

Before the movie "The Matrix," John Quarterman wrote an interesting book with the same title and around that same time Alan Kay published a great article about "software agents" that captured my imagination. Microsoft was interested in these ideas as well, and we brought some people and technology together into a suite of offerings that became http://agents.live.com/ (Windows Live Agents). While teaching in Microsoft's (awesome) Silicon Valley Campus in Mountain View I met a talented, articulate, warm and friendly developer in this area who is now looking for a job. I believe there is a huge promise and potential to Alan Kay's vision that we in computer science have yet to realize. But the economics and business models apparantly don't work so we're stuck with less appealing software, sigh.

OneNote rulez!

OneNote is the best computer application around. And now we don't need to retreat to live mesh or windows live sync or Groove or other file sync methods to get onenote notebook synchronization over the public Internet. OfficeLive now offers sharepoint services as part of the standard small business offering.

- Go to http://officelive.com/
- Sign up for a *SMALL BUSINESS* account with a liveid
- In the left column, click on "Business Applications"
- Click the green "Activate for FREE" button that appears
- In the left column, click on "Team Workspace"
- At Right-most column header, click on "+Add"
- Choose "Document Library" from drop-down
- Name it "notes" (or whatever you want)
- Under "Document Template" drop-down, select Microsoft Office OneNote section
- Click "Create"
- Under "New" drop-down, click "New Document"
- In OneNote, save the file (it's just that simple!)

Add people with a liveID as editors and such to your sharepoint site so they can also open, sync, share, notebooks. OneNote uses your liveID credentials and syncs to the sharepoint when it sees 'net. Pretty slick!