Taking Back What's Lost

A long time ago, I used to do lots of creative things, mostly as a teenager. I used to write, I used to act, I used to sing. I once directed a public performance of a play I wrote. Before all that, I used to draw, and I played instruments, the saxophone and the violin. I was good at some of it, and bad at, well, most of it. Either way, these are things that I have mostly lost. College left me without a lot of free time or energy, and grad school had all that plus the "feature" of making writing into an abominable chore instead of something I enjoyed. My creative output today is mostly in the software I write, or in blog posts, or in sandbox-style video games like Dwarf Fortress.

I've decided to try to reverse course a bit. I've done a bit of writing (nothing terrific so far), and I'm taking violin lessons again. It's funny how much muscle memory remains after almost twenty years. I've put a fair chunk of money into it - like with the gym, I find that being able to say, "I've paid for it, I might as well put it to use" is a remarkably good motivator. So for now I get to spend a half hour or so per day (about all my wrists can stand) making the cats flee, but I really do feel like I'm picking it up quickly this time around. Being able to still (sort of) read music helps a lot, as does having the cash to pick up things I need (shoulder rests, rosin, tuners, etc) without having to think too hard about it.

This all makes me wonder. If expenditure is a motivation for me such that I really am going to the gym regularly and practicing an instrument regularly, how on earth do I motivate myself to write more?

Iran

I'm a bit perplexed by the reactions from a lot of people whose blogs I read, or on my Facebook friends page. They seem utterly, absolutely convinced that the Iranian election was stolen, and as far as I can tell, based on absolutely zero knowledge. Yes, the guy everyone wanted to win is alleging irregularities, and sure the Ayatollah is acting defensive. Ahmadinejad is certainly following the first rule of avoiding a coup detat (To wit, "Don't leave the country")

But let's look at this clear-eyed here. Sometimes the good guys (or less-bad) really do lose fairly. Is there really much evidence that Ahmadinejad doesn't have the support of 63% of the population? Mousavi's a good guy, and it sounds like he ran a very smart, very technically sophisticated campaign - just like Howard Dean. And it's the technical sophistication that makes me suspicious: Iran is not a technically sophisticated country, much of it is dirt-poor. It's not unreasonable to think that he simply didn't have access to large swathes of the population, swathes that Ahmadinejad spent the last four years busily bribing and pandering to with his "death to Israel" crap: and don't think for a minute that that doesn't play well back home. The English-speaking blogging Iranians may not like it, but they're a teeny, tiny minority in that country - and reading what they say, I get the feeling that it's more embarrassment over delivery than content.

Meanwhile, believing that this 63% win is a deliberate move requires one to simultaneously believe that Ahmadinejad is simultaneously a political genius and a dribbling moron. (Wile E. Coyote: Super Genius) Seriously: you're positing that he has the brass balls and political skill to manage a freaking 13+% cheat AND be dumb enough to think that that would fly? But more than that, this isn't Diebold bit-flipping here, this is pretty low-tech voting: you know, secure. You need organization to cheat a vote like that, boots on the ground and a lot of people willing (or eager) to look the other way. In order to believe that he could do such a thing, you have to believe that a large part of the country is too backwater and uneducated to prevent it... and yet not backwater and uneducated enough to actually vote for him in the first place? I don't buy it.

The way I see it, most of the country is poor and uneducated, which is exactly the way the Ayatollah likes them. They've been bribed and pandered to for years, came to identify with the guy. On top of that, it looks like Mousavi pulled an Al Gore: he let it be clear that he considers Ahmadinejad to be a stupid hick, and that just didn't play well with all the folks who thought he was just plain old folk.

Now, I'm not saying that old Ahmadinejad didn't try to pad the numbers. But given all this, what's more likely: that he padded and cheated 5-6% extra and got surprised by doing better than he expected, or knew he was going down, and bilked em for more than 13%, probably much more?

Nah. As far as I can tell, the primary basis that we Americans have for decrying this election as a sham is the refusal to believe that Ahmadinejad can win a fair election. It reflects well on you all to think that highly of humanity, but you've seen the kind of assholes who can win legitimate votes even in Western countries.

Now, that's not to say that I wouldn't like to see how far Mousavi can run with this, maybe even bring down Khameini. But let's not kid ourselves that he's a virtuous aggrieved party: plenty of good has been done by sore losers, after all.

Edit:
I should admit that there are (at least) two scenarios that brush aside my objections:
First, if Khameini set up the vote-rigging but handed over the operation to Ahmadinejad, that would be a whole new ballgame. In that case, he doesn't have to be brilliant to have the machine, and he can easily be dumb enough to misuse it, thinking that 63% is totally reasonable. That would explain Khameini's performance: first seizing the moment so as to try to bulldoze his way through it and treat it as a fait accompli, then (potentially) stepping back and realizing that Ahmadinejad had either a) been a total idiot in a way that did not bode well, or (more intriguingly) b) been more reckless than stupid and had double-crossed him and grabbed for power. After all, Khameini can't just admit to being party to this and so HAS to do everything he can to make it stick, but at the same time a 63% majority gives Ahmadinejad unprecedented clout in his new government. It's an interesting idea, and I admit that I'm fascinated by the possibility that Ahmadinejad may have just made Khameini his bitch, but I still don't think it likely, and that level of recklessness really doesn't square with Ahmadinejad working alone.

Second, this could be a combination of multiple attempts to rig the vote such that the right hand didn't know what the left was doing, and possibly also combined with an unexpectedly strong showing in the vote. End result: a series of supposedly easily-covered boosts (possibly intended just to force a runoff) turns into an obvious error. Occam is shaking his head gravely as I type this.

Three-minute hate

I think I may finally have gotten the hang of Perl's regular expressions, at least to the point that I'm able to bang out some basic logreaders pretty quickly. We still hates them, precious, but I have to admit that it was the right approach: I was sorely tempted to use some manner of incremental tokenizing to grab chunks of the log piece by piece, and use nested if statements to deal with different formats, and... yeah, it sounds even worse when I write it out like that.

One of the big conceptual problems I have with regular expressions in general is that they nearly always result in write-only code. Sure, it can be commented, but in practice nobody ever does. Worse, once you get reasonably good with them, all of a sudden you're the go-to guy for regex (This is not as bad as, say, database expertise, but still) Yeesh.

Search Engine Bingo

Has Microsoft managed yet to come up with a marketing campaign for anything that doesn't reek of desperation? These Bing ads have been the worst so far - and maybe it's just because the service itself is so badly done that it feels like they're trying to put lipstick on a pig. Nevermind the name, just call up the site, and try it a bit. As far as I can tell, they're just trying to out-Google Google. Same basic stuff, with a couple annoyances (images and ads at the top, so that those of us without much vertical real estate have to scroll down to see more than one actual result) And really, that's a winning strategy for them: Bing plus Internet Explorer's default page = lots of people who won't bother with Google because they're already using something comparable.

Let's try some comparisons: Google, Bing, Wolfram Ego. The Bing page is a little more slick than the Google page, sure, but it sure looks to me that they put very little thought into it beyond "Make it like Google, only better". And then there's my own experience actually trying to use it: when I used it this afternoon to search for information on a Microsoft product (Netmon) the very first link, to a Microsoft page, was broken. WTF? To be fair, I get the same result with Google... but then, shouldn't the bar be just a tad higher for a Microsoft service searching microsoft.com?

Wolfram, on the other hand, is intriguing. I may mock the egotism involved, but I'm seeing the basis for some very interesting (and potentially useful) stuff there. Go look up your hometown on it. It's not quite as engaging as, say, Wikipedia, but it does a good job of laying out the sort of basic facts that might be useful

Celebrating the coffeehouse

There's a nice little post on the history of coffeehouses over at I Need Coffee. I have my own favorite penny university, of course. It's a shame that Hanover has such a lousy coffee shop culture. The two main places in town (I'm not counting the bookstore-bound Starbucks) just don't have the right atmosphere, and neither is open past 6pm.

Too slow!

I stopped by the grocery store with a brilliant idea yesterday, but it was just too late -- the ramps are gone!  I will have to leave it to someone else to attempt ramp pesto.

(Ramps, for the regrettably uncultured, are sort of a cross between garlic and green onions.  I think they're technically wild leeks.  They have long broad leaves that are a bit fibrous but have a wonderful garlic flavor, which I intended to pair half-and-half with basil for the pesto.  I'm not sure pine nuts would have stood up to it, though.  Pistachios might work better)

Still Alive

Been busy as hell at work, then had a Weekend of Social Engagement Doom, then was sick for a week.  But I'm still alive!  

In the process of being sick, I decided to give the Codex Alera series (by Jim Butcher) a second chance.  Last time I tried I only got ten pages into the first book.  This time, I burned through the whole series in less than a week (damn you, Kindle, and your instant gratification!)  Less shark-jumpy than his Dresden Files series, and more carefully-crafted.  He keeps a lot of secrets from one book to the next, and is confident enough not to answer all the questions he raises, even five books in, there are questions unanswered from the first book.

(Oh, and as evidence that I'm still alive and well, I still hate Perl.)

Two-Minute Hate

Regexes. Damn them.

On the plus side, those two minutes are billable time. On the minus side, it's more like a twenty-minute hate, and counting.

Whole Bean

So, how would you go about brewing whole bean coffee? As in, not grinding it, attempting to extract a coffee-type beverage while leaving the beans intact. I thought about trying this with a cold-brew system, but I only have half a pound of whole beans, and less than a quarter pound of interest in this question.

Wallace and Gromit game!

For those of you who are fans of either Wallace and Gromit, or of Telltale Games (or like me are a fan of both) the new series of W&G games starts with its first episode on Monday. I've already pre-ordered, since I've been a huge fan of their adventure games. The only downside is that it sounds like they couldn't get the actor from the films to do Wallace's voice.

New Computer!

In other news, the parts for my new computer shipped today! This is my birthday present to myself, intended solely for playing games. It's not for research, or for work, just for fun. It'll be a Vista machine, sadly - but then, playing games is the one thing that OS is good for.

All told it should be a decent machine. The Intel Quad Core chips are good for what they do, though I'm skeptical that many modern games are effectively multi-threaded. The only disappointment is that the RAM I wanted was out of stock in the speed I wanted, especially because I suspect that RAM speed is going to be the major bottleneck in this system. I guess I'll resign myself to running Dwarf Fortress with fewer than 300 dwarves until the first upgrade...

The other weird thing is how natural it seems to buy a terabyte disk drive. I know intellectually that this makes sense: I pointed out in a lecture last fall that within a year or so, the industry will be manufacturing one bit of magnetic storage for every star in the sky every year, and a byte every year shortly after that. But I still remember when a 100 MB drive seemed freaking huge, and this just boggles my mind.

(Actually, the really sad thing is that of the handful of games I'm really looking forward to playing, a number of them are Interactive Fiction. I'm told that Blue Lacuna is particularly good, though.)

Giving Criticism

I learned a lot about management during my graduate studies - learning by example sometimes, but mostly learning from counter-example. [1] Being a manager frequently means giving feedback, and I've learned a number of lessons there. Over time it became obvious that there is one iron-clad rule that must be understood: If you do not give credit where credit is due, you have zero credibility in giving criticism where criticism is due.

Note that this is not the Golden Rule, this is not a piece of advice. This holds true regardless of what you think of it, and especially if you think it's not true for you. It's also not a matter of being fair: some of the most manipulative people I've ever known have cultivated a reputation for fairness.

Those who are oblivious to this rule are easy to spot: people don't listen to them. They're called nitpickers, tyrants, "never satisfied"s. These are the people whose children and employees are told privately, "You can't please him, so just please yourself." Working for someone like that can be an exercise in frustration, and it rarely ends well.

If you are a person who does not understand this rule, you are probably saying to yourself, "It shouldn't matter if I say positive things so long as what I am saying is true." In theory, that's true. And in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. But this is not just a matter of discernment and truth, it's a matter of trust. Very few pieces of work that you will ever be presented with are entirely without merit, and if you cannot be counted on to identify what is of merit, how can you be trusted to have identified correctly what was wrong?

This is not a matter of "softening the blow." This is not a matter of trying to find something nice to say whenever saying something negative. It is a matter of cultivating a reputation for fairness: if the person you are talking to understands that you are the kind of person who will identify and comment on the positive aspects of their work or argument, then they will listen to what you are saying, even if this particular interaction is wholly negative. In fact, earning and maintaining a reputation for fairness is remarkably freeing. It is the only way to legitimately be able to say what you think.

This leads into a corollary - you must understand this rule in order to correctly apply it. If you do not understand it, and think of it merely as "softening the blow" or (worse) as "being nice" then you will inevitably wind up spouting mealy-mouthed crap. You'll wind up focusing on trivialities on the positive side, and only getting to the meat on the negative side, and anyone with half a brain will consider this at best a nicety and at worst condescending. If you are presented with something that you wish to critique, you really honestly cannot identify anything non-trivially positive in it, and have not earned a reputation for fairness, you would be far better off keeping your mouth shut: you will probably not be heeded, and are probably wrong about there being nothing non-trivially positive.

I bring this up because I see everywhere people who violate this rule constantly, and then wonder why nobody takes them seriously. Politicians stand up and rail against the new President for what they see as waste, for example - and you know what? There is a lot of waste in both the stimulus bill and other spending bills. But they have no credibility to criticize, because they fail to recognize what is being done right, and they additionally failed to point out the same offenses when they were committed by friends. Without credibility, they have nothing.

There is in general on the Internet a lack of understanding of credibility. I could point out a number of online discussions and online "discussions" where the people talking seem to all assume, "Being right justifies what I say, how I say it, and how I treat those who disagree with me." Put an otherwise normal human being onto a message board with a tiny comment window and a lot of semi-anonymous handles, and that person turns into a college freshman, or worse. I am coming to believe that this is a perhaps necessary result of valuing anonymity - one CANNOT have credibility under these conditions. Anonymity encourages the idea that every comment is an island, but most forums discourage posting long enough comments to engender enough credibility to make an argument - even if the comment boxes are large enough, and the comment screen doesn't cut off or otherwise hide long comments, you simply lose track of a "real-time" comment thread and risk having someone faster or more pithy than you make the case while you're still checking your spelling.

[1] I have a whole other rant ready to go about how PhDs are not adequately trained in management, but almost universally expected to manage. Having gone through the experience of getting a PhD is not a guarantee of knowing how to manage other people - it is if anything a hurdle to overcome when learning to manage! Too many PhDs get into the "I'll do it myself" micromanaging mode, or insist that everyone have a special portion of the project carved out for them as though they are working on theses and not together on a shared goal.