Oxyfish

My apologies to the trick-or-treaters on our road between 6 and 7pm tonight, who were disappointed to get no candy from our house. Let me explain.

We live on a relatively short cul-de-sac, with 22 houses and dozens of small kids. For the past few years, most of the parents and kids would trick-or-treat on the street together, with the parents at the upcoming house running ahead to be there to answer the door. While we were all out, we’d leave our trays of candy outside the front door with a sign, in case anyone came by and we missed them. At least 12 of the houses had trays loaded with candy in front of them at some point.

This year, a couple of high-school kids caught on, and almost every single tray on the street was emptied while we were out. As we were all returning from the far end of the street, I overheard another family complain “another house with nobody home and no candy!” I felt terrible as I ran in the back and headed to answer the door, where our tray was completely empty. My 3-year-old was not to happy with me grabbing a handful of her candy to hand out – I had to make a couple hasty promises that I’m sure I’ll regret. Later I raided the kitchen for raisin snack packs to fill the tray, and while most kids were good-natured about it, I’m sure a few won’t be back next year because they didn’t get candy.

Mostly, I’m ticked off. I brag that I live in a neighborhood where the neighbors all know each other and look out for each other, and we can more-or-less leave the door unlocked. When something like this happens, as small as it is, it reminds me that the real world isn’t like that. Bummer.

Frontier Airlines came through again for me last night. Here’s the story.

I was on United 595 from Denver to SFO, departing at 5:54. On the takeoff roll, the plane started to shudder violently, and even the seasoned passengers started to look a bit alarmed. We climbed out successfully, but it was obvious that as the pilots increased power, the vibration returned. Unsurprisingly, about 10 minutes later, the pilot announced that we were returning to Denver.

After deboarding, the craziness began. They had two more flights to SFO that night, but both were pretty full, and both were hours late. They apparently found another (smaller) plane for us, but couldn’t find a crew (it wasn’t a 767, so our crew couldn’t fly it). After several hours of dithering, they finally canceled the flight for the night, and started getting hundreds of people hotel rooms.

I hustled over to Terminal A to see if I could get on the last Frontier flight out, at 9:35pm. They had one seat left, and the gate agent was extremely nice, allowing me to purchase a ticket and managing to get me a great seat. It looked like my colleague Jeff was going to get left behind, but she offered to write down my credit card number, so if they could find him a seat at the last minute he wouldn’t have to be held up by getting the ticket bought first. Sure enough, one of the seats freed up, so they got him on the flight, then processed the purchase of his ticket. That’s going above and beyond.

I appreciate that the United folks had a nightmare on their hands, but they really didn’t handle it very well. So it just highlighted the contrast when the Frontier folks were nice and competent. I will be flying Frontier more often.

No, that’s not an oxymoron, although a few hours ago I would have said otherwise. The web seems to abound with stories of disgruntled and unhappy customers, and this was almost one of them. But this story has a happy ending.

I bought a salad in the airport, to eat for dinner on the 5:50pm Frontier flight from DEN to SFO. Unfortunately, I left on the seat next to me at the gate. I remembered it just as I boarded the plane, but the flight attendant refused to let me leave the plane to go get it, citing “security”. WTF?

My salad was about 20 yards away. There was 20 minutes before departure. I and the salad had both passed security screening. What possible security problem could there be? I was stunned. The plane wasn’t even full, there was no backup on the jetway. I even went back to the front after everyone was on, with at least 5 minutes before the door was shut, and was not allowed to get off for the 60 seconds it would have taken to get my salad.

I was hungry and pissed off for the first hour of the flight. I composed the first draft of this blog post, ripping them a new one about “security theatre” and other crap. Then the flight attendant who had refused me dropped a folded note on my tray table (I was working and had headphones on). The note said on the outside “My Apologies”, and inside read:

Sir:

After reviewing the regulations regarding passenger deplaning and reboarding, my interpretation was not correct.

Please accept my apology, and use these free DirecTV coupons to help pay for the dinner you left in Denver.

What’s more, he even signed it with his full name and employee number. Wow! I have to say, I really appreciate when people have enough self esteem to question themselves, do some research, and then own up to being wrong and try to make it right.

I am now a big fan of Frontier Airlines, because not only have they trained their people to provide genuinely good service, but they seem to foster a culture of learning from mistakes. And while in any customer service training course you can read stories like this one, they don’t happen as often in real life as they should, and they should be rewarded. I look forward to flying Frontier again!

My absolute favorite teacher from high school passed away recently, and I’m surprised at how much I actually cared. I wrote a condolence letter to his widow that I’m sharing below. If you have a favorite teacher, do me a favor, and write a letter or reach out, before they pass away.

Dear Ms Ballard,

Please accept my deepest sympathies for your loss. I do not normally write condolence letters, but “Doctor Bob” had a major influence on me, and I felt compelled to express that to you.

I regret that I never took the time to write to Dr. Perrin to tell him how profoundly he affected my life. I took several classes from him, including relativistic physics, and a special math seminar in advanced algebra with only one other student. He infected me with his love of both physics and math, and along the way gave me tools that I still use today. I have a very clear memory (from over 20 years ago) of him trying several ways of explaining a complex math concept, until I finally cried “Bingo!” as I got it.

Doctor Bob made a substantial difference in not only my attitude towards these sciences, but also for literally generations of students. The world needs more like him. He will be sorely missed.

Sincerely,

Tom Shields, Andover ‘85

Robert Perrin Obituary

My family and I headed to Sugar Bowl for a few days over the holidays. The snow came a bit late this year, and they only finally got enough coverage around Dec 21, so by the 23rd they were slammed. Ski areas live and die by the snow levels, so they were financially unable to bring on most of their personnel until the 22nd or 23rd, so virtually everyone we interacted with was on their first day of the year.

To add to the craziness, this year they decided to put in a new computer system with complete customer tracking. Since nobody had been trained on the system, the end result was complete chaos and crazy lines. They never did find the reservations for ski school that we made, so we got entered into the system twice. The ski school snacks were missing, so our kids got a cup of water for snack. They also had eliminated some of the discounts, like savings for having your own equipment, and a 10-pack deal for ski school.

So, I called Sugar Bowl to register my unhappiness. I talked to a couple of the more experienced folks: Laurie at the ski school, and Kate in special tickets. They both were unfailingly helpful, apologetic, and informative about what was going on. They gave me a discount on my next ski school trip, and gave me a bunch of tips on navigating the system. One was to get my ski school reservation number so they can more easily find it.

We then went one more time to Sugar Bowl, and had a wonderful experience. The lesson here is that the provided great customer service, and a commitment to address the problems and continue to improve. I think Sugar Bowl will end up far better with the new system despite the startup problems. And I will continue to go there. Kudos to them.

Best part is the perfect blog posts for a bunch of blogs. Captures them perfectly – it’s been a while since I laughed out loud at a blog post.

The Ultimate Blog Post

We moved down to the Peninsula in 2001, while expecting our first child. We were convinced that the market was at its peak, but we decided to buy anyway, to get “in the game” and start building value. We found a beautiful new home in Burlingame, built to the maximun 3200 sq feet, on a typical Burlingame 6000 sq foot lot with a postage-stamp backyard. Mainly we loved that it was only a few blocks from the Broadway downtown area, and that there were 5 other families with young kids on the street for instant playdates. However, after 5 years, we really wanted a little more space, and a bigger backyard.

Read the rest of this entry »

A while ago I Tivo’d (well, actually ReplayTV’d, but it’s not quite as well-known a verb) a special on Ella Fitzgerald called Something to Live For. She was a fascinating person, driven to perform and succeed, and I really enjoyed the story and especially the music, as I am a great Ella fan. One line I will always remember was mentioned by a contemporary of Ella’s while she was being interviewed about how Ella got her start. She described a club in Harlem, where Ella went to perform. She recounted how Ella didn’t wear fashionable clothes, nor was she a beautiful girl, but relatively plain and poorly dressed, so when she got on stage, she was actually booed. But then the music started, and she opened her mouth to sing, and the room quieted down. By the end, everyone was so transfixed, “you could have heard a rat piss on cotton!” What a great line! Ella really was something special.

It’s the end of the year, so I’m spending a little time reflecting on the past year and what I might do differently next year. One perennial resolution is to “get more organized”. This time, to prepare, I read Getting Things Done, and I like a lot of the ideas. One problem is that I use a Blackberry, and there aren’t good systems for GTD that incorporate a BB.

Another major issue is dealing with email. I found the below article useful in thinking about this problem.

Critical Section – The Tyranny of Email

An article in a recent Economist talks about some interesting language research that involves requiring two people to cooperate in a virtual world through a computer interface that prevents them from using known symbols to communicate. They end up inventing their own “language” over the course of the game. The game is not well explained, but it was apparently invented by Bruno Galantucci.

A couple of interesting points:

Having observed winning pairs at play, Dr. Galantucci says that communication is established as soon as one player decides to copy the symbols proposed by his co-player, rather than impose his own. At that point, the pair’s chances of finding each other jump. As soon as there is imitation, he says, there is common currency.

And the best one, in my opinion:

One strength of Dr. Galantucci’s experiment that does not exist in the real world, however, is that he is able to interview his subjects afterwards. What is striking, he says, is that a pair can be successful even if a symbol represents something quite different in the virtual world to each player – as long as they agree on what they should do when confronted by it. In other words, people only need to convey a small amount of information to communicate effectively, and they can do so while holding fundamentally different ideas about how their language describes the world.

Economist article (pay required)

A great site with custom-built bikes of incredible creativity. And a couple of awesome trip reports. The bike/canoe one is one I’d like to try sometime. The couchbike story had me laughing out loud…

The Bicycle Forest

Louisa was signed up for this, but she hurt her hip and couldn’t run. So, I took her bib, and with almost no training, decided to go for it. After all, I ran a marathon just a few months ago, so how bad could it be? Famous last words…

Read the rest of this entry »

A pretty biting and complete article on why the media gets science stories so wrong.

Guardian Unlimited | Life | Don’t dumb me down

Update: Because of some of my complaints, and those of many others, Runner’s World has decided not to sponsor the SF Marathon next year. Too bad – SF deserves a great marathon.

San Francsico Marathon

Well, I finished, which is great, but in 4:25, which was a little disappointing as I was shooting for under 4 hours. I ran the first half in exactly 2 hrs, and kept the pace through about 18. Then I slowed a bit, and was hit with crippling hamstring cramps around mile 21. So I walked and ran the rest whenever I wasn’t howling and hopping in pain from cramps. I guess maybe 6′7″ 225lb guys weren’t meant to run marathons.

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I discovered CellarTracker about a year ago, and halfheartedly entered a few bottles. But a recent Napa trip gave me the wine bug again, and I did some reorganizing in my wine “cellar”. This prompted me to revisit CellarTracker, and I now have entered much of my inventory. Nearly every wine I have, even some of the more obscure ones from Australia and South Africa, were already in the database, which is great. And the best feature in my opinion is the tasting notes from other users of the software. A perfect example of a collaborative web site where the value is built through the community. Hmm…wonder if they want to raise some venture capital…

CellarTracker!

Paul writes a nice, if a bit long, essay on what he wishes he had known in high school. Treat high school like a day job, but don’t let it define you, and spend your time working on interesting things that provide options down the road.

What You’ll Wish You’d Known

Well, I’ve been out of commission for a while, but I’m back! The main problem was that my crappy old server (an old desktop machine) finally had a disk failure, and I decided the time was ripe to upgrade to a real machine. I’m now on a Rackable 2U unit, and I switched from Linux to FreeBSD to boot.

I was fortunate that I could bring up the old machine enough to copy off most of the data, and I do remote backups to my home machine via DSL, so I had a reasonably good copy of everything. Over a weekend, I was pretty much able to get everything back up and running. Of course, there are always a few gotchas!

The one that killed Movable Type for me was not that I needed to install Perl (I did) and not that I needed to change the config a bit for the new version (I did that too), but a basic problem with Berkeley DB hell.

Read on if you want the gory details. Suffice to say, after a few hours of struggle, I beat it into submission. Please also note that I posted a couple entries that I wrote while it was down, and backdated.

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I had a magical late afternoon in Quebec City. We arrived by car at around 5pm and checked in to the Chateau Frontenac, which is a Fairmont property. It is huge, and spectacularly placed on the edge of the bluff overlooking the mighty St Lawrence.

Although it was cold and a bit blustery, John and I put on shorts and went for a run. First we headed down to the promenade and happened to see the Queen Mary 2. It is the hugest ocean lner on the planet, and awesome even from some distance. The people swarming on the dock and decks were like ants.

We headed along the promenade, not knowing we had to climb several hundred steps to get up by the Citadel. We huffed our way up, and then headed through the park, past battlements and cannons set in nicely manicured lawns. After a mile or two we turned around, and went back on the road, through the arch and into the old town.

John had to get back, so I left him and headed up and along the wall through the old city. After a few more sights, I came back up along cobblestone streets lined with old apartment buildings and tiny alleyways. It reminded me of an old European city, where people drive small cars because big ones don’t fit down most of the roads.

As I came back to the promenade, I saw more people gathered to look at the QM2. My high school French was just enough for me to get the gist that it was preparing to embark. I cooled off quickly in the cold – it was about 7 degrees (that’s centigrade – about 45 fahrenheit), but I stood and watched. I could see activity on the ship, and even some turbulence in the water, but it didn’t seem to be moving. Finally, glacially, it separated from the dock. Over 15 minutes – which is a long time in shorts in 7 degrees – it seemed to move about 100 yards. Finally it picked up a little speed, but still seemed hardly to be moving.

I was surprised that I didn’t see any tugs. There were police boats at 4 corners, keeping back a few pleasure boats, but she seemed to go under entirely her own power. There was a wake up near the bow when she pushed away from the dock, so there must be a screw or something for maneuverability. Just before I froze and had to go in for a hot shower, I saw a small boat pull up to the bow for a few minutes, presumably picking up the pilot to bring him home.

I was surprisingly excited by the whole event. It reminded me of the beginning of Titanic, where everyone is so excited to be taking the trip of a lifetime to the new world. There was a mixture of anticipation, excitement, and finality in the whole thing – once the ship has sailed, you can’t go back.

-ts-

Aubrey de Grey has devoted his life to curing the “disesase” of aging. He argues, somewhat convincingly, that breakthroughs could occur in our lifetime. Time to re-think the life insurance policy?

Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS): A practical way to cure human aging

Other resources:
The Longevity Meme
The Methuselah Foundation

I got this on email, and found it funny enough to post:

Finally, the guys’ side of the story. We always hear “the rules” from the female side. Now here are the rules from the male side. These are Men’s rules! Please note, these are all Numbered “1″. And that is for a reason!!!

1. Learn to work the toilet seat. You’re a big girl. If it’s up, put it down. We need it up, you need it down. You don’t hear us complaining about you leaving it down.

2. Sunday = sports. It’s like the full moon or the changing of the tides. Let it be.

3. Shopping is NOT a sport. And no, we are never going to think of it that way.

4. Crying is blackmail.

5. Ask for what you want. Let us be clear on this one: Subtle hints do not work! Strong hints do not work! Obvious hints do not work! Just say it!

6. Yes and No are perfectly acceptable answers to almost every question.

7. Come to us with a problem only if you want help solving it. That’s what we do. Sympathy is what your girlfriends are for.

8. A headache that lasts for 17 months is a problem. See a doctor.

9. Anything we said 6 months ago is inadmissible in an argument. In fact, all comments become null and void after 7 days.

10. If you won’t dress like the Victoria’s Secret girls, don’t expect us to act like soap opera guys.

11. If something we said can be interpreted two ways, and one of the ways makes you sad or angry, we meant the other one.

12. You can either ask us to do something or tell us how you want it done.
    Not both. If you already know best how to do it, just do it yourself.

13. Whenever possible, please say whatever you have to say during commercials.

14. Christopher Columbus did not need directions and neither do we.

15. ALL men see in only 16 colors, like Windows default settings. Peach, for example, is a fruit, not a color. Pumpkin is also a fruit. We have no idea what mauve is.

16. If it itches, it will be scratched. We do that.

17. If we ask what is wrong and you say “nothing,” we will act like nothing’s wrong. We know you are lying, but it is just not worth the hassle.

18. If you ask a question you don’t want an answer to, expect an answer you don’t want to hear.

19. When we have to go somewhere, absolutely anything you wear is fine. Really.

20. Don’t ask us what we’re thinking about unless you are prepared to discuss such topics as sports, the shotgun formation, or monster trucks.

21. You have enough clothes.

22. You have too many shoes.

23. I am in shape. Round is a shape.

Thank you for reading this; Yes, I know, I have to sleep on the couch tonight, but did you know men really don’t mind that, it’s like camping.

Pass this to as many men as you can – to give them a laugh. Pass this to as many women as you can – to give them an education!! Peace on Earth, MAYBE.