Newspapers

Since several newspapers have folded, executives in this industry are now hocking paywalls as the solution to their revenue problem.  The real question here is to ask why newspapers are failing.  The rise of free and instantaneous internet news has driven down the number of subscribers.  Furthermore, online marketplaces such as Craigslist, and to a lesser extent, social networking sites, have siphoned off classified ad revenue.  As I see it, the current system will only get worse.  As newspapers are driven farther into the red by those switching to the internet, more and more quality journalists will be laid off.  With neither solid writers nor the funding for interesting and comprehensive stories, the quality of newspapers will degrade at a quickening pace, fueling their demise.  Is there a solution to keep the local paper afloat?  I think so.  National and international news is readily available everywhere on the internet: Reuters, AP, MSNBC, and CNN all provide coverage in this area.  Newspapers should focus on something that only they can do best: local coverage.  The local coverage for The Virginian Pilot is terrible.  The staff has been drastically reduced and the paper thinned.  The sports section writes about the Redskins as if they were a home team, while plenty of local minor league, college, and high school games are ignored.  If newspapers were to drop national coverage entirely and focus solely on local news, business, and sports, they could bring themselves back into the game.  There are plenty of stories to tell about what is going in any local area and plenty of people willing to hear about them, but these stories are displaced by some far away event that is already well covered on the internet.  I admire the Virginia Gazette for following this approach.  I have no doubt that paid subscriptions would rise if newspapers focused on improving local coverage.

Good stories would be worth paying for.  However, as newspapers continue to crash and burn, the quality of their stories has suffered and the demand has gone down along with it.  Nobody wants to pay for a newspaper article that could have been written by a blogger on the internet.  Newspapers complain that their demise would lead to the end of investigative journalism and educating the public on current events.  They argue that no blogger has the resources to provide the quality and detail of coverage that newspaper journalists provide.  This may have been true in the past, but is no longer.  Again, reinforcement of local coverage would really help turn things around.

Online Media

This reality shock extends from newspapers to media corporations of all kinds.  Those in the TV and movie industries are upset at the rise of freely available internet media, ranging from cable and broadcast content on Hulu, to user content on YouTube, and to plain old bootlegging.  The CEO of Sony Pictures, Michael Lynton, complains that “nothing good has come from the internet,” and that “anyone can have whatever they want at any given time.”  Lynton goes on to argue that the internet should have rules as well as “guardrails” to keep people following these rules.  Whose rules should the people of the internet follow, you might ask?  Lynton’s rules.

As the old phrase goes, “I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust the sails.”  Lynton has it backwards: Sony should adapt to the reality of the current world, not the other way around.  He argues that his company is trying to make money, and thus, people should pay for the content his company produces.  Wrong.  For any rational individual, it should be: “I want quality content, therefore I am willing to pay for it.”  Nobody will pay someone for a piece of junk just because the seller wants to make money.  If someone produces something that is subpar, nobody is going to be willing to pay for it, and if they want it at all it will probably be bootlegged.  Like newspapers, TV, cable, and other media companies put profit first and quality products second.  If this were reversed, I imagine things would change.  TV shows should be kept in production based on reviews, not based on viewership, which is really an ad revenue metric.  Sequels to movies shouldn’t just be made because the previous installment was profitable.  I can think of no unplanned movie sequel that was as good or better than the original.  Furthermore, consumers should be given more options to purchase content.  For example, all previous episodes of any currently airing series should be available for purchase instead of just the last n, as is done with Hulu.  As with newspapers, an emphasis on quality and availability would more than likely support the media industry in the age of the internet.

Internet Connectivity

As bandwidth usage has increased due to increased consumption of online media sites, ISPs feel they’ve got to get their piece of the pie.  Recently, Time Warner experimented with tiered internet pricing.  This is a step backwards to the days of dial up where nearly everyone paid by the hour.  Fortunately, enough people complained that Time Warner reverted to the current unlimited monthly scheme.  While tiered pricing has been held off for now with respect to wired broadband, it’s a mess when it comes to wireless.  As it stands, a cell phone owner is charged separate fees for telephone usage, text messaging, and wireless data, and all three use pricing tiers.  Cellular telephone billing is the most convoluted of the three, with bizarre rules on who and when you can call with or without incurring some kind of penalty.  Text messages are by far the most profitable:  receiving 160 bytes costs around twenty cents — this works out to $1.5 million per gigabyte — that’s only for the size of a compressed HD movie!  With the advent of data plans, many cell users dream of circumventing weird telephone talk rules and expensive text messaging by purchasing an unlimited data plan.  A data plan could replace text messaging with instant messaging and telephone calls with Skype, but Apple is struggling to change the direction of the wind by restricting Skype use to areas of WiFi connectivity.

The role of the ISP is changing and providers are doing their best to prevent this change.  As landline telephones have been replaced by cell phones, landline internet will be marginalized with respect to mobile internet.  As the PC market has shifted from desktops to laptops over the past ten years, the next ten years will see a shift to small mobile devices.  The role of the internet will have increasing importance on cell phones, ultimately replacing cell telephone and text messaging.  ISPs do not want this, instead restricting the type of phones you can buy and the applications you run on them.  Google’s Android is a step in the right direction, and with more effort it won’t be long before an enthusiast can piece together a phone from custom hardware, install an embedded version of Linux, and connect to the internet from anywhere using software of his choice or creation.  Of course, no traditional-minded ISP would let anyone connect to their cell network with a custom-built phone, a custom OS, running custom software.  But the future will most likely be an internet of ad hoc wireless networks, making use of such custom mobile solutions.  Driven by the desire for constant connectivity and mobility, users will connect to their family, friends, and coworkers with one or two hops (and bypassing ISPs).  A significant portion of the internet could be accessed in this fashion, requesting data held by peers and forwarding it back to a user over multiple hops.  Using technologies with high bandwidth and long range, such as WiMax, a mobile ad hoc network would even be feasible in less populated areas.   Some of each user’s bandwith would be reserved for forwarding others’ requests and responses.  Data could be routed to peers with the least load (shameless plug for the paper I’m presenting at WASA 2009.)

The internet of the future will be mobile and more dynamic, but there is still a place for the ISP.  Unavoidably, there will be connectivity gaps and bottlenecks in an ad hoc wireless network, and a landline ISP will take care of this.  Also, most data will still be stored in fixed, physical locations with landline connections.  Internet users will still have to pay monthly fees to a service provider to handle gaps in coverage, but no longer will there be separate charges for landline phone, internet, TV, cell phone, text messaging, and data.  It will all be data, and it will be a big relief from the obtuse system that is in place today.

Conclusion

Those who are stuck in the system of the past are hindering the development of the future.  Today’s leaders must understand it is they that must adapt to the changing world.  The world cannot and will not shift to accomodate those who wish the world to adapt to them.  Viable business models for the internet exist and more are developing, even those with a “free” component.  Continuing adoption of a less than optimal strategy will only lead to a poor outcome for those that refuse to adapt.

My current system is basically using printer paper to write down or sketch out stuff I’m working on, which I then carry around in a folder.  I usually carry the paper around until the stuff on it makes its way into latex or code or the stuff on the paper isn’t worthy of any more effort.  Then I throw it away.  It usually takes from a few days to a week or two for me to get a new sheet, fill it up, and do something with what I put on it.  Sometimes I have several sheets going at once, which all go in the folder.  There isn’t really any order to it either, just a bunch of bullet points on some idea or a sketch of something.

This isn’t really working out and I need a better way to organize everything, or at least keep it around in case I want to go back and look at it. A white board would be great, but you can’t carry it with you and there is also the issue of erasing stuff when you run out of space.  So white boards are out.  Plenty of computerized note taking/sketch programs are available, but writing stuff out can be faster and I like to make drawings and diagrams of stuff.  I don’t have a wacom tablet or tablet PC to make sketches with, so that’s out too.

So, research notebooks sound like the answer.  Except that I’m picky.  I want a notebook with:

• Hardcover, so I can bear down on it without the need of a desk
• Spiral binding, so I can flip one side of it underneath the other to save space
• Grid rules, so I can lay out writing and sketches neatly
• Heavyweight paper, since I’m a heavy-handed writer and my writing pushes through thin paper
• 75-100 pages, so I don’t have to get a new one every month

It seems difficult to find such a notebook, even if it exists.  I’ve been looking at BookFactory, which seems to have a lot of options, but I haven’t really found one yet that meets my specs.  The closest I found was a sketchbook at the school bookstore that had everything but the grid rules, but the paper was also really coarse and not really good for handwriting.

Maybe I’ll find something.  For now, I got a regular spiral notebook with grid rules and will see how that goes.  At least I’ll try to keep everything I write down.

Jason and Dan stayed at my house last night and then came back after the race to shower. It was nice to see them again. My mom made a ton of pasta and meatballs and a pecan pie and we barely put a dent in any of it. Looks like leftovers for quite awhile (for my mom at least). They went to bed pretty early since Jason wanted to get up at 4 AM to eat.

Everyone was gone when I got up and I was just eating breakfast when they got back from the race. It was 9:30 and they had cooled down and driven back. That was hard to believe. Jason ran around 65 minutes and Dan 1:11, both really good times. Despite the winds it sounds like everything went well.

I was able to run 30 minutes the past two days but the IT band was pretty sore afterwards yesterday so going today probably isn’t a good idea. Every few days or so it seems I have to take off or else the pain will get significantly worse. It’s so frustrating with everyone else out running and doing well while I’m stuck in this purgatory. Two guys on the team that had been injured for the past year and a half with various things ran their first college races over the weekend at VCU, which was really good for them.

On a side note, the PSP has worked really well for watching movies and TV shows while I’m on the elliptical. I get a machine facing the window and put on a Star Trek or CSI episode and I’m good for an hour. Then I just pick up the next day where I left off or load on some new stuff. The glare can get bad, but it’s only a minor issue.

Overall it was nice being home for an extended period of time, though my only wish was that I wasn’t injured. I did get to see Sarah quite a few times since she has an elliptical machine and I could use that one instead of going up to the local gym. She came over and ate dinner at my house one night, which was nice. We watched quite a few movies when I was on the machine, but finished only one or two since I only went for an hour at most.

It seems there is less and less a distinction between going home and school since there is always stuff I’ve got to do. I might go home again next weekend since my former roommates and teammates Dan and Jason are coming to run the Shamrock half marathon. I wanted to do the full marathon, but thanks to all this crap going on with my IT band, I can’t.

It’s nice with the time change that it stays lighter later. The sun angle is getting higher so it doesn’t look like the sun is perpetually setting. It does seem to be getting warmer too. A few days ago it was 75, but with seemingly hurricane force winds. A neighbor’s giant oak tree snapped in half and came crashing down into the lake. What a mess that made.

The memory stick for my PSP came by the time I got home this weekend and after a lot of screwing around, I was able to get a shareware program to encode videos so the PSP can play them. It’s really cool. With 8 gig and 45 minute TV shows taking up about 100-200 MB in the PSP format, I can pack the PSP with a ton of MP3s, videos, and movies to keep me occupied when I go back to school. I’ve also got several games for it which I could play if I’ve ever got some downtime somewhere, but that rarely happens anymore.

Looking up all the stuff for the PSP encoding led me to discover something else: PSP homebrew. The first PSP firmware allows the execution of 3rd party programs. There are a ton of third party games and programs out there that seem pretty cool for a handheld system. The only problem is that I don’t have the initial firmware installed, so it appears as though I have to downgrade the firmware I’ve got. Since I haven’t upgraded the firmware in two years since I’ve had the PSP, there are a few “relatively easy” downgrade hacks available.

Some of the stuff about downgrading and altering the firmware seems really complex. There are hardware mods to the battery, memory stick, and even PSP motherboard to get an older firmware version working. There are several save game buffer overflow exploits that have been used to execute third party code to get the older firmware running. I can’t believe how people figure this stuff out. It really goes to show that experience is more valuable than just straight up education. I’ve nearly got a master’s degree in Computer Science at this point and there’s no way I would figure out some of the hacks that these PSP hackers/developers have come up with. I want to screw around with this some more to see if I can get a hacked firmware on my PSP so I can use some of these third party applications. There are even IM clients for the PSP that people have written. I may actually have to scour a local Gamestop for a few older PSP games that have the savegame buffer overflow hack though.

I still think the handheld instustry needs some improvement. There are so many gadgets out there that perform one specific task, but none that do everything. If you want GPS navigation, you have to get a handheld solely for that. If you want a phone, you’ve got to carry a cell phone. If you want games, carry a PSP or DS. If you want Internet, you can get limited functionality on a phone, or better functionality if you are lucky enough to have a Blackberry or iPhone. You can carry around an XM receiver if you want to listen to a good selection of radio stations or an mp3 player if you want to listen to your own music. All of these things could be condensed into one gadget that does everything. The iPhone comes close, but it doesn’t have GPS and it doesn’t allow any third party applications. Maybe Google’s Android idea will allow something big. If the PSP had a touchscreen and cell phone capability (a GPS addon is already available), it would kick some serious butt. The touchscreen would make web browsing much easier than the cursor. I’ve heard rumors of a PSP phone, so things are moving in the right direction.

Once my PhD funding starts this summer I may purchase my own cell phone plan (I’m still leeching off my parents at this point). I’d like to get one with unlimited data and a cool handheld. Maybe by that point there will be an improved iPhone or something that uses Android or even that PSP phone.

I’ve tried running a few times this week. I made it 15 minutes on Sunday without any problems and decided to quit while I was ahead. I went again Tuesday but everything tightened up after about 10 minutes. Gibby seems to think I should try running every day, but it seems so counterintuitive compared to most injuries I’ve had. He says it’s the only way to really loosen it up, assuming I stop and stretch everything when I feel tightness coming on. Interestingly, he also says I’m much looser than I was a week ago and that I am actually more flexible in the IT band area than another teammate who is also having the same problems. I doubt I’ve ever been told that I was more flexible than someone.

Over the past few days on the elliptical I’ve noticed that my left foot wants to point out. My right foot placement is fine, but the left one seems screwed up, most likely because of whatever popped a month ago. I’ve been trying to adjust my foot placement on the elliptical so the left foot is straight out and when I do, I can feel something in my knee protest. Something tells me that I may continue to have IT band problems in the right leg unless I can straighten out whatever went wrong with my left knee. The tracking issue/foot placement is probably causing some kind of screw up with my form. I really hope I didn’t tear something (like the meniscus) in my left knee, because the only option for solving that is surgery. It very rarely heals on its own. I keep reading on the Letsrun message boards about people with terrible IT band problems that last for years and they can’t run at all. I really don’t want that to happen to me. I’ve also read plenty of stories about people with meniscus tears, but it seems the surgery and return to regular running is pretty straightforward. I’ll have to see how this goes and if my left knee is still screwed up after another month or two, it may be a good idea to get it looked at.

Since spring break starts this weekend I’ll be going home so hopefully I’ll be able to get on an elliptical somewhere. If the public rec center is too crowded I may try to get a weekly gym membership somewhere. I could also try the bike, but I’ve heard that most people with IT band problems only make it worse with the bike since IT band injuries are common in cyclists. But, if it’s a tracking issue in my left knee that’s causing everything, I may be okay on the bike. Who knows. I’ll try running some more too, but I’m not getting my hopes up for a sudden, miraculous recovery. I never get those. Regardless, I don’t enjoy being inside on the elliptical or bike and can’t figure out why anyone else in the rec center at school would bother unless they don’t like the cold or are injured like me. Also, like me, maybe they can’t stand sitting still all day and go nuts if they don’t do anything. That said, it’s so boring suffering on the machines for an hour. What’s bad is when I decide to watch one of the TVs that are set up in front of some of the machines and one of them is tuned to CNN. CNN has a clock and it seems to creep by so slowly. A lot of the time, I’ll use one of the ellipticals by the window and cover up the timers on the machine so I can’t see the time. I’ll just listen to music the whole time, but I just ordered an 8 gig memory stick for my under-used PSP so I can put on some movies and watch those.

I also got the XM radio from my sister set up and working. Like she said, the reception is crap indoors. I tried using that on the elliptical, but even right next to the window, I got no signal. To get it to work in my room, I’ve got to attach an external antenna and practically shove it out my (south-facing) window. I can listen to it on the internet, which is what I have been doing instead. The radio itself would be good for the car, but I have no way of attaching it to the car stereo and I’ve heard that low power FM transmitters don’t work very well. I wonder how much a car XM receiver would cost? Something like that would have been great for the trip last summer, especially in places like Wyoming or Nevada where there weren’t any radio stations.

The caffeine addiction is becoming stronger. On the days I don’t have any, I feel more tired when I’m on the elliptical. When I have something with some kick to it, I feel that I’m ready to rock and time really flies by when I’m on the machine. Then, I’ll usually crash sometime later. It’s like borrowing energy from later in the day to use up earlier. I’ve also had some coffee in addition to the energy drinks I’ve bought. Coffee doesn’t seem too bad if I put a packet of sugar in it, even the school stuff which most people say isn’t all that great. It keeps me warm when I march around all over campus in the cold.

School has been tough with these faculty candidate presentations at 8 AM and meetings with my adviser. I get up early, go to the meeting, eat something, do the elliptical, rush back to class, do some work, and then it’s after 5. Hopefully that will be the end of those with the exception of the regular 3PM colloquiums. This week I’ve also had a very hard Theory of Computation assignment that just about everyone else is confused on. I’ve worked with a few people on it and we all are stuck on a few issues. I’ve got a lot of it figured out, but am still sketchy on some stuff. Fortunately, the professor pushed back the due date and we’ll have an extra class meeting tomorrow to help us understand. I would rather leave to beat the traffic home, but I’m here to learn and I want to understand this material — this is the big difference between undergrad and graduate school. In grad school, you aren’t just there to get by anymore. The more I look at something and can’t figure it out, the more I want to understand it, so I’m doing everything I can to learn the material.

I also had to give a paper presentation in my wireless class. Since the professor is my adviser, I was the first to go. As expected, he nitpicked on a few things, which seems common for new professors. Oh, no, I finished five minutes earlier than he wanted — the class is 80 minutes long — how am I supposed to prepare something that takes exactly that long when everyone interrupts periodically? I also had to arrange the slides exactly to his specifications, and include specific examples on stuff. Overall, he was satisfied, but there are little things he wants done exactly his way. This is also the case for the research stuff I’ve been doing too. I have to prepare things in a certain way, which of course, is the way he did them. What worked best for him may not be the best for everyone else and it seems professors learn this as they gain tenure.

On the flip side, the TA stuff is getting old. I really can’t wait until this semester is over so I can be done with a lot of this stuff and just focus on the research aspect. The students seem to have gotten over the programming learning curve and those that asked questions about everything and didn’t understand anything are figuring everything out. A couple of them wanted to take off early for spring break, but since lab attendance is mandatory, I denied access to the submission script until I started the lab.

I’ve also thought about moving this “blog” to either Blogger or WordPress, since LiveJournal seems to have a more immature audience. With WordPress, I would have to go back to my own hosting setup, but I’ve heard it’s worth it since you can control just about everything. My dad has paid hosting he said I could use, but it’s on IIS (puke), so it’s incompatible with WordPress. I should also start using the LJ tags and start segmenting my posts into different categories rather than just spitting everything out in stream-of-consciousness form every week or so.

That’s more or less how things stand as of this week. It will be great to get out of here and get some sort of break since it seems I’ve been rushing around with all these annoying meetings and assignments to take care of. Fortunately, the semester is half over, the days are getting longer, and hopefully the weather will get warmer. And I really hope I’ll be able to run again normally.

I started biking last week and the last time I biked was right when I got home from California. I noticed I felt a lot stronger this time. Before I would go up a small hill and feel exhausted after I got to the top. Now, I get tired, but then recover quickly.

I noticed recently that I am becoming more motivated again. For awhile I didn’t feel like doing anything but now I’m getting back into doing schoolwork, games are becoming more entertaining and can hold my attention, and little itch-scratching project ideas are returning. For example, I wish RSS feeds/sites would display the full text of their articles. That way I don’t have to look at a page jammed with irritating ads flashing crap all over the place. In addition, links and other text and images that I don’t want to see would also be gone. I could create a condensed report from all my favorite sites, print it out, and read it when I am somewhere with no computer. So, the challenge would be to recognize news/post article text while discarding everything else. The RSS partial feed would help identify the start of the full text, but some web pages cram in ads and other formatting inside the article text. An HTML parser would help some, but some kind of language recognition would be needed to detect something that doesn’t fit with the rest of the text.

So, I’ve been on my own most of the time since school really seems to have picked up. Biking takes a lot more time than running and it’s nice to be able to do things when I want to (in the morning if I can) and not screw around. At the same time I really miss going to the meetings and talking to everyone. It’s a lot easier and more enjoyable to run and bike if there are other people to go with.

I got a bunch of stuff to do for class projects which has been taking up a big portion of my time, but it’s better to get started early than to cram everything in at the end. I also spoke with one of my professors about a Master’s project which I can get started on anytime. I’ll probably wait until winter break when I don’t have all the other classes bearing down on me. Everything is about set up to work with the people at Ames from school and I’ll get some kind of plan as to what to do this week. Unfortunately, everything got set up just as all the school work started.

So, I am starting to get things done. It’s hard to get started on stuff, but once you get going it isn’t too bad.

Over the past month, I’ve played and beat Bioshock. It was the first game I’ve played through in a long time. It was a solid game, but was missing much of the RPG element I expected. System Shock 2 had much more of that in it. I liked the game mostly because the atmosphere and gameplay were different than the average FPS. The plasmids and weapons were unusual and made things interesting. The ability to hack stuff and change your abilities with different plasmids made things fun too. Some of it was dumbed down from System Shock though. The plot, however, was almost exactly like System Shock. The same exact plot twist happened at the same exact point in the game. I knew it was coming from the start.

I also started on Tiberium Wars this weekend and so far it’s another sequel that keeps the spirit of the original. The cut scenes really help with the whole C&C vibe and I recognize a ton of the actors from other TV shows/movies, which usually isn’t the case in a video game. I’ve played a few missions as GDI and so far it feels very similar to the first C&C as well as Red Alert. Tiberium Wars seems to be a bit faster paced, if not chaotic. I tend to build a bunch of units and then wind up hurling them at the enemy base or protecting my own if I’m under attack. Many times I find it hard to build a reasonable strategy since it seems things happen so fast. Air support is underrated, though. I’ve used it several times to sneak past enemy lines and take out objectives and win without a direct assault on the enemy base.

Apparently my dad got an Xbox along with Halo 3 so that might be the impetus to go home again this weekend, given my achilles holds up. Home cooked food is another enticement. I’ll also be able to see Sarah again. I just have to make sure I am on top of my work. I get most of my computer games from him when he finishes them, but I’m surprised he got a console. The xbox is probably the best choice out of all the consoles in terms of hardware and games that interest me, especially since most cross platform games seem to run and look better on the console from what I hear. Then they do a crappy port to the PC.

That brings back another memory. I remember we were the first household I knew of to set up a LAN, I think it was in late 1995 or 1996. It used that coaxial cable like the TV cable uses and was decentralized in such a way that you didn’t need a hub or router, 10 Base-T I think. The first thing we did with it was play games. I remember Mechwarrior, Quake, and Red Alert took on a whole new level of excitement with multiplayer, especially since dial-up was so slow for stuff like that. It’s probably why I liked the original C&C games so much. I would play long battles with my dad and middle school friends and it was a huge change from playing against dumb AI opponents. Plus you could hear the screams of someone in the next room when you pummeled them with a rocket launcher or steamed a fleet of cruisers alongside their base. But now, multiplayer is the norm, and so some of that excitement has worn away. I just wish some of the people I knew played computer games. Plenty of them play console games, so maybe I should convert.

Over the weekend I saw the new Bourne movie. Despite going to the 11 AM showing, the place was packed. I would say it was the best movie I’ve seen this summer. The action sequences were intense and much more involved than in Die Hard. Bourne seems to take a lesson from the earlier Bond movies and beats the crap out of his assailants using objects that are lying around in plain sight (books, towels). This started in the first movie and continued through to this one. I would say that the first movie was the best, followed by this one, and then the second. The car chase in this movie wasn’t as good as the first and my only other complaint was the overuse of really shaky cameras zoomed in too close to everything. Sometimes it was hard to tell what was going on. Of course, by this point the movie was nothing at all like the book of the same name, but I guess that was to be expected considering what happened in the second movie. I liked the tie-ins to the earlier movies and also that some kind of closure was reached in the end, which was very similar to what happened in the first book.

Following Bourne, I drove to Rancho San Antonio Park to do my run. I had planned to do my long run there, but wound up cutting it short. I just didn’t feel right and my achilles started to bother me. I can tell when something is going to be a problem, and the achilles was definitely giving me its warning signs. Of course, the part of the park I had gone into last weekend was the only flat part and everything else was straight up into the mountains again. This did not help the achilles, and was probably the main reason it really started bothering me. It was also really hot despite being 10 minutes away from the much cooler Moffett. Still, as I climbed up the mountains, the views of the bay were awesome. The trail eventually got too steep to run at a reasonable pace, so I turned around and went back down.

I went by Trader Joe’s and the grocery store on the way back but didn’t get that much since I’ve got a bunch of stuff lying around and in the freezer that I should probably use before I leave.

I decided not to run on Sunday because of the achilles. I thought about biking, but decided not to. In the afternoon I headed to San Jose and the Winchester Mystery House. I had been there when I was little, but don’t remember too much about it. There were a ton of people there and it took awhile before my tour started so I walked around the gardens surrounding the house. The house in its current environment is weird enough to begin with. It’s right in the middle of Downtown San Jose. There is a parking garage and skyscraper across the street, a movie theater next door, and a freeway on the other side. Then, right in the middle, is this giant victorian-era mansion with an elaborate garden surrounding it. It’s way out of place.

The tour was pretty good, but didn’t cover too much that I hadn’t already read on Wikipedia before I went. The guide seemed to be younger than I was — it was probably his summer job, but he seemed pretty enthusiastic about everything.

Most of the house was unfurnished save for a few of the more important rooms, and many of the rooms weren’t even coated in plaster, still damaged from the 1906 earthquake. The house looked exactly like you would think a house would look when rooms and floors were spontaneously and continuously added for 38 years. There were windows in the floor, windows that looked into other rooms, doors that led to a three story drop, and a staircase that went right into the ceiling. There were all kinds of tiny passageways and secret doors. Since Sarah Winchester had an obsession with the number 13, there were often 13 windows in various rooms, 13 colors in the stained glass of the windows, 13 steps between floors, 13 gas candles in the chandeliers, and even 13 overflow drain holes in one of the sinks. Many of the rooms were nearly pitch black while others were completely covered in glass windows and were very bright. Since Sarah Winchester wasn’t very tall and had arthritis, many of the staircases were replaced with small one-inch steps that snaked their way up to the next floor. This wound up being good for me because of the achilles.

On the way back I stopped at an REI and got some OTC orthotics/shoe inserts for my shoes since the custom ones I have now are shot. I had never been to an REI before since there aren’t any near home, but it turned out to be nothing more than I could find at a Dick’s. They had some good stuff on sale but of course it was way too big.

On Monday I decided to take another day off since I still felt my achilles some during the night. The day seemed much shorter going straight in to work. I also felt really weird, just not myself. I also made the good decision of wearing my trail shoes instead of the loafers that I normally wear to work. It’s a lot more comfortable to walk in those and as I have noticed, wearing jeans is about as dressy as it gets around here. I see people in shorts occasionally.

Through the night and morning my achilles felt pretty good, so I got up early and ran about six miles. There was definitely some tightness, but not the feeling I had on Saturday. I’ll have to see how it goes the next few days. I may actually have to get on the bike depending on what happens.

I decided to cancel my web hosting since I hadn’t been keeping up with maintenance and nobody really used the site anyways. Everything seems like it’s winding to an end. I like the weather out here a lot as well as the general atmosphere of everything that is going on, but it is kind of lonely being out here by myself. I’ve met a few people, but it’s always hard for me to be proactive in forming relationships. Sometimes on the team it would take me a month and a half to match the names and faces of the new freshmen despite spending several hours a day with them. In some ways I want to go back home and to school just to be in familiar surroundings again and to see people I know, but a lot of those that I know have graduated and moved on. At the same time I enjoy having cool weather to run in since it’s oppressive at home and interesting places to visit every weekend. I also like the feeling that I’m right in the middle of what’s up and coming in terms of the computer science field instead of in Williamsburg, where everything big seems so far away.

At the top, I could see everything. To the east was the Central Valley with the Sierra Nevada on the horizon. To the north, I could see Suisun Bay and the Sacramento River. In the distance, Mt. Lassen was barely visible, the southernmost volcano in the Cascades. The entire Bay Area was visible to the west, but much of it was covered in fog. The skyline of San Francisco just barely stuck out of the fog, along with the Golden Gate.

That was a pretty cool trip. I spent a fair amount of time walking around the summit and taking pictures. It was like being on an airplane with the views.

On Saturday I did a loop around the Palo Alto Baylands for my long run. I had been there before, but turned around instead of doing a loop. This time I went farther and came back along 101 instead of retracing my steps. One of the best things about this area is that there are so many good places to run, just right out the door. Then, of course, there are all the parks in the Santa Cruz mountains. If you took all the parks I’ve been to in Eastern Virginia and combined them into one, they still wouldn’t be as cool as one of the open space preserves in and around the Santa Cruz.

I’ve also watched a few movies lately. I saw Zodiac, which I was surprised I hadn’t heard of before. I was really impressed by it, but the ending was a bit anti-climactic. It was also kind of weird because it took place in the SF Bay Area. It seems most movies I see are set in a place I have little connection to, so the setting made it a little more meaningful.

I also saw The Prestige. This was really good. I had wanted to see this for a while and finally got my chance. The ending was excellent and almost completely unexpected. Spoiler: I had an idea of what would happen, but the reveal of the true “good” and “bad” magician really blew me away.

The whole food thing is working out well, but is starting to encroach on my free time. Planning what I am going to make and especially going to the grocery store is wearing on me. Each week it becomes a pain to figure out what I can make that is relatively easy, since I don’t feel like doing much after work. The weekends don’t matter as much, so I can afford to spend more time. However, going to the store takes awhile and sometimes I wind up going to several places since not every store has all the stuff I want. Of course, I usually forget something and then have to go back again to get it.

This weekend I did a stir fry with shrimp and rice, which turned out great. I made another peanut butter pie, this time with cream cheese and a chocolate crust. It’s kept in the freezer and with the cream cheese tastes like a cheesecake/ice cream combo. It’s also really dense despite using low fat ingredients. At this point I’m pretty confident I’ll just get a minimal meal plan and eat most of my dinners in the caf. All the overhead of going to the store and planning things out would be a real pain while at school. It might work out better if I had a roommate that I could switch off cooking with. That way I also wouldn’t make something that would last for three days.

I’m pretty much getting done what everyone at work has given me to do. My visualization tool has been integrated into the Composer IDE and now I’m just adding more features. The work isn’t terribly challenging, but it’s much better than the previous summers.

Dan called to tell me he should be in Echo Lake on Saturday afternoon on his way up the Pacific Crest Trail. It’s a four hour drive from here, so I thought about going to see him, but it’s hard to tell if he would be there by then. Yesterday was the last time he could call before the weekend. I don’t want to go all the way out there only to miss him. There are some friends in Davis that I will probably go see instead.

My mom was planning on driving back with me and was just talking about going back the same way I drove out. I don’t know if I want to do that. It might be interesting to go the southern route since it’s something new. I’ll get to go to three new states: New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. It’s pretty much Interstate 40 from California to Tennessee. It would probably be hot and consist of a lot more boring plains and deserts, so I’m kind of unsure on the issue. I’m also not too keen of another endless drive through Nebraska. There’s still a few more weeks to decide, but not too many.

The wireless usb card came late last week. Unfortunately, it didn’t give me much of a signal boost but I can at least use my computer from the desk instead of jamming it awkwardly against the window. The connection is generally good enough so that I can browse the internet but I can’t upload or download any large files. I’ve got pictures from the trip and the past week that I’ve wanted to post, but I will probably have to walk to somewhere in range of the Ames network to do that. I can’t download any software updates either which have been released for my Mac.

I’ve been more or less cut loose to work on the agent communication visualization graphs and I’m in the process of trying to extract simulation data from a database and get it into prefuse so that I can make cool graphs. Everyone seems to be working on their own little projects here, but I don’t mind it. A lot of the other interns here aren’t computer science necessarily, some are more math oriented and one is in aerospace engineering I think, so they all don’t do software. Everyone who I’ve met who works here full time is a PhD, so I guess if I want to wind up here eventually, that’s what I have to do. I’m not really sure about spending that much more time in school, though. Also, most people who work here are contractors from an outside company — no more than a third from what I can tell actually work for NASA. Even within each group there are people from different companies.

On Saturday I went to Sacramento to see Keith since he would be there until Sunday night. He had been there all week because of his race. It sounded like other than the race, he didn’t do a whole lot except sit in the hotel, and it seemed to be getting to him. It took a little more than two hours to get there with some traffic. I will say that traffic on a weekend afternoon in the Bay Area is as bad as rush hour at home. I probably won’t complain about traffic at home much more.

Compared to Mountain View, Sacramento was hot. It was easily 20 degrees warmer. I met Keith at the hotel and we just hung out for some of the afternoon and talked about everything coming up. Like me, he wasn’t too happy about his college running career being over, but his graduate program will give him a lot to look forward to. In a month, he will be doing some work at CERN in Switzerland and then afterwards will be starting a grad program at Stanford.

In the late afternoon we walked across the street to a Jamba Juice. I’ve never been to one of those before and they seem to be all over the place around here. It wasn’t bad, but smoothies are something that aren’t that hard to make yourself if you have the right stuff (I don’t). Since I’m out here, I’ve always heard a lot about In N Out as well, so I’ll try to make it there within the next couple of weeks to see what all the hype is about. I’ve heard their fries can be a little weird.

I went with Keith and my coach to see Ocean’s 13, which I thought was pretty good. It was definitely better than the second one, but the plot was a lot like the first. There weren’t any romantic interludes or anything, they just cut straight to the chase. It also seemed like they tried to squeeze everyone from the first two movies into this one and a lot of the characters got brushed over. So far it’s been the only movie I’ve seen this summer and there are a bunch more I also want to see.

Following that, Keith and I got in the car and drove into Downtown Sacramento to get some dinner. We went into Old Town Sacramento which had buildings that looked like an Old West town. We walked around for awhile and then found a place along the river where we sat outside. We split a sourdough cheese loaf and I had a tuna steak, both of which were very good. It really highlighted how bland the food was that I’ve been eating all week.

I wound up staying until the next morning and we went out for a run along the Sacramento river. There were plenty of bike paths and trail offshoots like in Mountain View. We went through the Sacramento State campus and by the track where the meet was before heading back to the hotel. Too bad the more interesting stuff was during the week, otherwise I would have come to watch. It was also much warmer early in the morning than in Mountain View. The past week it has been in the 50s when I get up to run, which is weird to me. It’s a lot better than the 90+ degree days and nasty thunderstorms at home.

I headed out from the hotel in the late morning and on the way back thought about how weird everything is now that I don’t have a training plan or practice or anything structured like that. It’s more or less do whatever I want. I think being so far from home caught up to me while driving by the brown grassy hills that look nothing like where I live. I realized that so many people I’ve known at school have gone away to do their own things and it’s starting to happen to me too. Even though I’ll still be at school next year, a large number of teammates who I have known very well won’t be returning. And I won’t be obligated to go to practice, heck, I don’t know if I’ll even be allowed at practice if I want to go every day. I bet I won’t even have my locker anymore. But, sometimes you can tell when it is time to move on to something else, and I’ve had that feeling for awhile.

Instead of going back to the base, I went to the coast and drove for a bit on the PCH. It was a much nicer day than the only other time I’ve been there but it was still so much different than the coast I know at home. It was an interesting drive back into the mountains towards my new home. There were some big redwood forests and narrow windy roads. The trees were huge and almost blotted out the sun completely. The roads carved their way around rocks and cliffs and every so often some insane motorcyclist would come up behind me and pass despite the double yellow line and the blind curves.

I was thinking about how dangerous that was as another guy on a motorcycle suddenly appeared behind me and was about to pass. Then, around the next curve, another motorcyclist was sprawled out on the pavement with pieces of motorcycle and car all over the road. The motorcycle and car had both taken a lot of damage but the girl who was in the car seemed okay but was in shock as she walked over to the guy lying in the road. Some people behind me pulled over to help, but since there seemed to be enough people around, I just kept going since I’m not familiar to the area at all and probably wouldn’t be of much use.

Out of the redwood forests, I went along Skyline for awhile and stopped at a park to take some pictures. You could see all the way to San Francisco in one direction and to San Jose in the other. I could also see the tower at Stanford and the huge wind tunnel at Ames in the distance. It was a pretty cool view. As I looked I could hear some sirens wailing in the distance, probably for the accident that I just passed.

I found Page Mill Road, which made a long, windy descent into Palo Alto. There were tons of cyclists going up the other way and none of them looked to be having a good time. Before coming out here, I thought about taking a bike trip to the coast, and now I know what I’ll be facing: pain. There was at least eight miles of switchbacks and steep hills until the road straightened out.

I got the car washed and got a bunch of frozen stuff from Trader Joe’s for dinner the next couple nights. I would rather subsist on something other than frozen food, but it will be hard with the kitchen pretty far away. I put in a lasagna when I got back to the base and had some of that.

This morning, it was up again at 6:30 to run and then to work. As soon as I left the lodge and headed for the gate, there was a guy running up ahead of me. He was moving pretty good, almost as fast as I was. I turned towards the gate when I reached him and thought he kept going straight. I didn’t think much of it until I got out on the levee and had the feeling someone was following me. I don’t get that feeling much, and when I do, it’s usually a cyclist or one of my teammates when I’m at school. I turn to go across a bridge towards Shoreline and I see the guy is right back there, following me. When I get to Shoreline and turn again, I see he is even closer. This means war, and the battlefield couldn’t be any better. The big hill by the Shoreline Amphitheater is only around the block so I pick it up and then tear up the steepest part of the hill until I get to the top. That seemed to do the trick. I didn’t see him after that. It got me wondering though. How long will it be before I start getting older and slower and everyone is passing me on their runs?

And that was my first weekend here in California. My plan from now on is to try to do something interesting at least once every week while I am here. Next weekend I would like to run in one of those parks in the mountains that I’ve heard a lot about.