Turtles all the way down

I know that complaining about airlines is so passe it hurts, but I can’t resist doing it one more time.

I have 25,000 miles on American Airlines, which is usually enough for a free roundtrip ticket, modulo blackout dates. However, American decided to effectively black out a whole month of travel between the two cities I’m interested in by requiring 25K miles to be used in each direction. Or I can buy a $380 round trip ticket for a short flight that is notorious for being delayed and canceled.

Right.

I’m choosing not to travel. Instead of American making at least some money off of me, now they’re making none.

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United States Patent 5255452 was granted to Michael Jackson on October 26, 1993. Perhaps this is only of interest to us patent geeks, but who’d have thunk it?

A system for allowing a shoe wearer to lean forwardly beyond his center of gravity by virtue of wearing a specially designed pair of shoes which will engage with a hitch member movably projectable through a stage surface. The shoes have a specially designed heel slot which can be detachably engaged with the hitch member by simply sliding the shoe wearer’s foot forward, thereby engaging with the hitch member.

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Interesting observation:

Vineet Nayar, the highly respected CEO of HCL Technologies, one of India’s hottest IT services vendors, was speaking this morning in New York City to an audience of about 50 customers and partners when he related a recent experience with an education official in a large U.S. state.

The official wanted to know why HCL, a $2.5 billion (revenue) company with more than 3,000 people across 21 offices in 15 states, wasn’t hiring more people in his state. Vineet’s short answer: because most American college grads are “unemployable.”

After years of managing grads from both sides of the Pacific, my conclusion is that quality employees are difficult to find just about everywhere. I’ve seen more than my share of slack and incompetence from grads in India, though I’ve also seen absolute brilliance and hard work from their classmates.

And I’d say the same about American grads. Some you want to hire, others you don’t.

The main difference between the two? American grads cost more. That’s what I suspect this is all about.

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I’m a sucker for this sort of thing…this list is actually a little old, as I haven’t been doing much recreational reading lately, but it is still a great set of books.

1) Robert Pirsig – Zen and the Art of Motorcyhcle Maintenance
2) Edward Tenner – Why Things Bite Back
3) George R. R. Martin – any of the first three Fire and Ice books
4) Jared Diamond – Guns, Germs, and Steel
5) V. S. Ramachandran – Phantoms in the Brain
6) Jonathan Weiner – The Beak of the Finch
7) Neal Stephenson – Cryptonomicon
8) Richard Dawkins – The Selfish Gene
9) Brian Greene – The Elegant Universe
10) Robert Greene – The 48 Laws of Power
11) Simon Singh – The Code Book
12) Frans de Waal – Chimpanzee Politics
13) Tom DeMarco – Peopleware
14) Sudhir Venkatesh – Gang Leader for a Day
15) Seth Godin – The Dip

As a general rule, my singing sucks. It always has. I’m not exactly tone deaf, as I usually know when I’m off. However, I have trouble controlling my pitch and correcting said off-ness.

Enter Rock Band and Guitar Hero. Now, I can sing a song that I know and receive real time feedback about where I am pitch-wise with respect to where I should be. The process has been enlightening.

First, I’ve found that I tend to over-exaggerate pitch changes. When the song requires going up or down one or two steps, I’m going up or down by an octave. I think I do this because it seems like the right thing to do, even though it sounds wrong (and is wrong). I believe that I do this because I have trouble controlling my pitch. I don’t hear pitch clearly enough to know when my pitch is wildly changing.

Second, I usually can’t tell up from down. Without those little lines in the games guiding me, I’m up when I should be down and vice versa. Again, I know that I am off, but without help I can’t figure out why.

Finally, I often confuse volume with pitch. When vocals go up in volume, I think they go up in pitch.

As a result of these observations, I find myself singing mostly in key, but very quietly, and in a fashion that sounds monotone. I’m fairly certain I sound monotone to myself because I associate volume and pitch too closely.

I imagine this is like trying to solving math equations and coming up with answers that make no sense over and over. You know that you’re wrong but can’t figure out how to make it right.

With enough practice and training, I’ll probably improve. Nonetheless, those who can sing effortlessly at birth have a huge inherent advantage.

I spent most of the last week working on the new Chicago-Kent Law Review web site. The old site was coded in static HTML, and we felt it best to move to a blogging platform in order to make updates and maintenance easier, as well as to take advantage of build-in social media features.

The site is looking pretty good, but it is going to take a while before all of the information from the old site is moved over. About 90% of the old site was ported pretty easily, and the other 10% is going to take manual editing. In particular, the contents of old issues, including PDFs of the articles, is still a work in progress. I don’t expect it all to be done before our planned launch on June 20, but the site will be fully functional by then, and is already better than the previous site.

Between my side-job as a webmaster and my day job doing patent prosecution, I’ve been more than tied up. I’m shooting to bill around 45 hours per week this summer, which will give me a good head start heading into the fall semester. However, all this does leave as much time for the family as I had been expecting.

In particular, I have two kids in baseball, and my older son is also taking basketball camp, tennis lessons, and both may be doing swimming. Thus, not only my days, but most of my evenings and weekends are packed as well.

Too bad it took a budget crisis to do this, but perhaps it’s the cloud’s silver lining.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has unveiled a plan to save money by phasing out school textbooks in favour of internet aids.

Gov Schwarzenegger wants to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in state spending each year.

He says converting to online study will also help keep pupils more up-to-date.

Carrying around heavy antiquated texts is a waste of trees, effort, and good posture. Online texts are an improvement, but they have their drawbacks, as they may not be accurate or updated frequently enough.

For some classes, it may make sense to have the students go out and research their own topics, via the Internet, and create their own “text” of sorts. Then each student may have an opportunity to teach the class himself or herself.

I think that the Internet is the only “textbook” you need. More on this later.

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I can consistently crash Firefox 3.0.10 from a particular place in a Wordpress administration page.

If I go to the newish plugin installer, and search for a plugin, I’ll get a list of search results. This is good.

But if I choose to install one of them, Firefox crashes. This is easily reproducable, and does not occur in Internet Explorer.

The news sounded good at first. eMusic was going to get the Sony Music back catalog.

However, the devil is in the details, because subscription pricing changed. Currently I get 200 downloads a month for $49.99. Under the new plan, which is being forced on me, I get only 100 downloads a month for $41.99. Thus, the per-track price has almost doubled.

I probably won’t be downloading much from the Sony catalog either, I’m effectively subsidizing Sony as the expense of independent labels. That sucks.

eMusic, you used to be one of my favorite Internet companies. No longer.

Instead of eMusic getting my $50 per month of recurring revenue I’ll be spreading it around to other download services.

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From my wife: “The Wire is like Deadwood in the Hood.”

From my youngest: “It’s strange being me. When I close my eyes, I can only see black.”

Another from the youngest: “A one and a two and a one, two three…expense!”