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Mammoth Mountain

Friday, April 8th, 2005

Well, tonight I decided to procrastinate and put something into my blog. I was thinking about writing something technical, but right now I just wanna chill out and think about other things right now. Last month, I went to Mammoth Mountain with some friends. hb and pana had arranged to rent an excellent condo and we all stayed there. It reminded me of summer camp back at home in Michigan, except it wasn’t summer and we had beer. Anyways, it was a helluva good time. I snowboarded for the first time on that trip. I’m so glad I wore wrist guards, because toward the end I acutally shattered one of the wristguards while biffing it. It wasn’t even that bad of a spill, but I hit it at just the right angle. whew I can still type. Before I went on the trip, I practiced my balance on an Indo Board that hb lent me. It helped so much! Thanks to hb’s excellent “sink or swim” (read: you start on a blue square/black diamond trail) tutelage, I was doing the “falling leaf” (rear edge only) technique pretty much the first time down the mountain, and by the end of the last day, I was carving on both edges. Man, that was fun! mmm….good times…Pana summarizes the “headlines” from the trip quite eloquently in her blog:

Everyone made it out safely for the weekend, some got a little lost along the way.

Rotten watermelon showdown between HB and Dom, Dom finds tree with crotch.

Bill attempts a merger and acquisition. (update: I hear that it was “finalized”)

Gang of wild raccoons stole the pretzle monument.

Teri and Dom were victims of hit and run inner tubes.

Bunnie, Kingpin and Teri can now call themselves snowboarders.

Krunner says, “It’s too big”.

Dom discovers new species of the Feather Spider.

Killer arachnid almost eats HB’s leg.

Pana bails hard while performing snow pirouettes.

Bunnie made a good impression in the snow with his assets.

Kingpin and HB battled it out in a foul game of Fart Pong.

Angry Kloud wreaks havoc in the desert.

Man, the Angry Kloud was weird. On the way home, driving through the desert, there was this singular atmospheric anomaly, one cloud that exhibited a higher albedo than the rest, and it was just thundering and lightning inside itself over and over again. It was like one of those raining thunder clouds that would follow Daffy Duck around in the Looney Toons. I wonder what caused it. Maybe the military was testing some new cloaking technology that uses spontaneously generated clouds :-D

Awww yeah…what a view from the top. I remember now, the air was so thin up there, it was tiring to even go up a flight of stairs.

Posted in Social | 2 Comments »

Hacker Japan

Friday, April 1st, 2005

So I had an interview with Hacker Japan a couple of days ago. Rika Kasahara, the reporter, came with all the cool recording and photography gadgets you’d expect of a tech-trendy Japanese reporter. Was a fun interview, I look forward to checking out the article once it is published, although I think I may only be able to understand limited protions of it since it is going to be in Japanese. Rika is a maverick Japanese girl, self-described as one of the “nails that stuck out”. While not good for intergating into Japanese society, I think it’s exciting. But then again, my American cultural biases informs me to value innovation and courage. It was really interesting talking to her about the culture of Japan and how it can be limiting or empowering. For example, we both agreed that while Japan produces excellent hardware products, they don’t seem to be very good at producing quality software.

My hypothesis is that in software, it is too easy to code around bugs instead of getting rid of them. Thus, in the context of a society where saving face is important, review processes probably don’t catch critical bugs. Also, good critical review of software architecture decisions is probably really tough, because the architects typically out-rank the programmers and it’s quite a gaffe to criticize your superior. In the end, programmers end up “coding around” bad decisions and bugs because its much easier to do that, than to criticize a superior. I think there also tends to be a lack of architects at the lower levels in Japanese companies–lots of worker bees that are very compartmentalized–so their software lacks a cohesiveness. On the other hand, hardware bugs are extremely costly, and as a result there are very strict methodologies that have been developed that help manage hardware project execution. Abstractions are also very tight in hardware, so compartmentalization of effort is a better match to the deliverable. At any rate, it’s interesting to theorize on how cultural biases may affect the engineering process. Not that I have much basis for my theories, but that doesn’t stop me from pondering.

On an interesting note, I had a (different) girl tell me yesterday, rather out of the blue, that I was hot. How often does a geek-guy get that? *blush*

Posted in Hacking, Ponderings, Social | 6 Comments »

Archive for the ‘Social’ Category

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Mammoth Mountain

Hacker Japan

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