Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Eli's LiveJournal:

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Monday, November 9th, 2009
5:32 pm	Mayor McGinn -- why I'm stoked (too distracted by this all - just wanted to get this out so I could go back to work ;-) I can remember the first moment I had any interest for politics or participating in local government: it was when I met Greg Perry on the Mountain View City Council. I actually started attending and occasionally even speaking at city council meetings. Greg was different from any elected official I’d met before. He was a school teacher by profession, and brought an advanced degree in mathematics and no aspiration towards career politics. His contributions were less emotional appeals than perspicacious -- and often uncomfortable -- analyses of transportation and land use policy. When nobody was willing to question the politically-driven and insane BART to San Jose extension, he raised all the big questions that nobody wanted to acknowledge. Nobody could debate or counter his analyses, beyond spewing the same tired platitudes about motherhood and "ringing rail around the bay". But it didn't stop Greg -- he didn't care about getting re-elected. He only cared about seeing the right thing happen, and uncompromisingly so. Greg was often shunned as polarizing, combative and uncooperative by his peers and in the press. But he was ultimately effective: he brought attention and change by shining a light where others were too fearful. I found it hard to accept these criticisms of Greg as being more then thinly veiled insinuations that a politician’s job is to avoid a reality-based existence of looking at facts, and instead should be compelled to “jump off the cliff” just because everyone else around you is walking towards it with blindfolds on -- like the Iraq war. I was very sad when he left local politics (as did our mayor -- a high school principal, who moved his family to Italy). I lost interest afterwards when Mountain View retrenched into Palo Alto-styled NIMBYism, and I moved to Seattle. I feel towards Mike McGinn the exact same enthusiasm as I did towards Greg Perry. Mike was the only politician with the courage to critically analyze, ask uncomfortable questions, and speak up against the Viaduct tunnel. Even the critiques of Mike McGinn ring so closely to those of Greg Perry -- and I feel equally unmoved by them. The Seattle Times painted him in a negative light in most of their coverage -- starting with their "Anyone but McGinn" endorsement in the primaries. (papers are normally skewed towards pro-business candidates -- the Times was also big on George Bush, Dino Rossi, etc). I’ve heard McGinn dismissed as a “single-issue” candidate -- but I am at a loss to understand this criticism. If I may be brash, I think it’s more a convenient meme/excuse among lazier voters who didn’t research candidates very well. McGinn articulated coherent positions on many other topics, as part of the 23 town halls he held throughout Seattle. I can only think of images of sullen, inattentive schoolchildren who are surprised that they didn't learn anything: education only works if you actually show up for class! I’m excited about McGinn because I think Seattle is going to be at a crossroads in the coming years of where we want to go as a city: are we truly an urban environment, or are we a collection of auto-dependent suburbs with a "drive-through downtown"? Do we solve all of our transportation problems by building more freeways and mega-parking structures, or do we look at cycletrack infrastructure as a serious alternative? The thought of having a mayor who bicycled to his campaign rallies (no chauffeured entourage like Mallahan) makes me giddy: if you want decent infrastructure, the people at the top need to rely on it. There’s a reason Apple has great food at their cafeterias, and the junk food machines are reportedly neglected: Steve Jobs hates junk food. Likewise, if you build mass transit and bike infrastructure primarily for people with no choice and/or no political power, you get third-rate infrastructure that reflects it -- like Seattle's bike "sharrows", and dingy, unlit bus rapid transit stops. Living in a city with a mayor and several city council members (go Mike O'Brien!) who share my values gives me the hope that we may one day soon make the culturally difficult choices to actually become the walkable, bikable city Seattleities would like to pretend we inhabit (hint: it's not). I feel ecstatic to have been a tiny part of history in volunteering for it, even if only for a few weekend days towards the end. I know all of this won’t change anyone’s minds if you didn’t like either candidate: I am much more excited about McGinn’s impending coming into office than I ever felt about Obama -- especially given how low expectations are for McGinn. At this point, I could easily see myself becoming involved in local politics, and learning how to make a difference, given leadership I actually can believe in. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 5th, 2009
1:38 pm	If I had $5 for every hour Hostbaby knocked my website and e-mail offline... ...I would have already made a $25 profit on my webhosting this past week alone. Instead, I'm wasting $20/month of our customers' money on a service that's still inferior to what many companies charge just $5-$7 per month these days -- not to mention the fact that it's constantly offline anyway. If you're a musician, don't bother giving your money to Hostbaby. It was a great idea -- but just like CD Baby, it's went down the tubes since Discmakers bought the company from Derek Sivers. -- Eli (definitely changing webhosting next spring when the pre-paid period runs out) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, September 26th, 2009
11:30 am	Toen de toeristen kwamen... One aspect I loved the most of my last Dutch textbook was the way it presumed its readers were thoughtful, intelligent, and reflective people with deeper interests than their own visceral self-gratification. e.g. whereas my French textbook's chapter on tourism involved delicious food and selecting your ideal vacation, the Dutch textbook presented a variety of perspectives on environmental and social consequences of travel, alternatives to automobiles for transportation, and an interview with an ambulance driver about how the local tourist industry affected his work. That chapter had a poem titled "Toen de toeristen kwamen" (when the tourists came) which I really loved and thought a lot about while in Alaska --- especially when talking with locals about how mass-market middle-class cruise tourism transformed their cities for the good and for the bad. Here's a super-quick translation (thanks to Maarten for help a while back with some of the harder phrases). The Dutch version is way better, sorry. ( Read more... ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
8:57 am	The self-love diet I've been on a self-made diet now for 5 weeks, and I've taken off five pounds in that time. Wanted to put down the "rules" that evolved, both for my own use, and for friends since diets seem to have a bad name. #1: I am changing my diet and lifestyle as an expression of love and care for my own body. I will not "punish" or "deprive" myself. #2: I will eat any healthy food that I love whenever I want it, and won't regret spending top dollar at the farmer's market: organic blueberries, strawberries, peaches, apricots -- and fresh produce, etc. #3: If I'm not hungry anymore, I won't keep eating. #4: If I know rationally I've eaten a normal number of calories for the day (~2000), I won't eat more high-calorie foods even if I "feel" hunger. As I learned on the Alaska cruise, people feel hungry for many reasons beyond caloric need. But I will never "starve" myself or deprive myself of what my body needs. #5: I will do 2500 calories of exercise every week. It seems like a lot of work, but it isn't any more than what I got each week just biking normally around Enschede. #6: If I choose to eat foods that I know are toxic for me, I will do so with enjoyment and without guilt -- but also in moderation. (e.g. sharing a fish & chips platter with a friend last Saturday) If it's unhealthy and I don't even like it, I won't eat it anymore. #7: I choose to never feel bad about my weight or my image in the mirror -- as long as I am honoring the above 6 rules. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 14th, 2009
7:37 pm	Gratitude and saying 'thank you' Several months ago, our division president at Microsoft wrote a few blog entries from which one could reasonably infer he held significant interest in the 1960s space race. I delayed for two months (personal anxiety over authority figures, sigh), but finally dropped a copy of the To Touch the Stars CD that we did years ago on his chair. I also sent him an e-mail letting him know it was on his chair, why I'd put it there, and that he should not feel obligated to listen to it. ;-) I did this, of course, on a weekend. Even though he had a enormously important internal presentation later that week, he still sent a thank-you note within a matter of hours. To my surprise a few weeks later, this morning there was another thank-you letter from him -- personal, hand-written -- and hand-delivered by his admin to my office. He thanked me again for the CD, called it "inspiring", and said it was now on his Zune (for you non-MS folks, that's a sort of iPod). For context, this guy has about 10,000 people reporting to him and a $17 billion annual business to manage. I think he's busier than, well, anyone I know other than perhaps Alisa. Especially in that context, it was really inspiring to see that kind of courtesy displayed. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, September 3rd, 2009
7:57 pm	How I nearly shat in my pants this morning... I won’t spoil this by telling you precisely what instruments Michael Moricz recorded last weekend on Julia’s album, but, uh, check out a 3 minute excerpt of “Going Back/The Dark is Rising”. You'll know why I was glad that I was, uh, already sitting down about 60 seconds through (don't cheat!). You want to hear this MP3. Trust me. Caveats: this is a total scratch track. Percussion is horribly distorted, the vocals are just throwaway/scratch, pieces are missing, and it’s totally unmixed. But, uh, you’ll get the idea. And he got this level of orchestration on (I think) 5 other songs. Michael, you so f-ing rock. (18 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 23rd, 2009
12:16 pm	Microsoft coworkers keep me humble Last Friday at work, I'd mentioned to a coworker how difficult it seemed to me to learn even elementary spoken Mandarin, and that I'd recently written it off as impossible after 15 tongue-twisted minutes of Pimsleur. She disagreed and said it wasn't that hard. Then she continued - in Mandarin. Then I remembered that half my coworkers have PhDs, and hers happened to be in linguistics. ;-) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 22nd, 2009
9:35 am	The unreported indie music story of the year: CD Baby is dead Derek Sivers doesn't even know anyone at CD Baby anymore. Amazing that nobody in the indie music press has picked up on the backlash to the new artist back-end & resulting lack of any customer service or accountability after he sold the company to Discmakers. (see comments at bottom from Derek): CD Baby was all written in PHP + MySQL + Linux. Disc Makers is all Windows. They needed to integrate CD Baby into their Windows system. That's why they had to rewrite. Unfortunate necessity. -- Derek Frustrating for me, too. I get about 5 emails a day from people having that same problem. Sorry I don't know anyone there anymore, so I have no insider advice. :-( -- Derek I'm not in contact with them, and didn't even know about this relaunch in advance, but I'm quite sure they won't roll-back and use my old version again. Sorry! -- Derek The love is also rapidly dissipating from even CD Baby's own forums: http://www.cdbaby.org/stories/09/08/14/1551971.html I wonder how many people will be boycotting Discmakers and switching to Oasis for this?
Saturday, July 25th, 2009
9:33 pm	Awesome Apollo retrospective song Just wanted to share with those of interest. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8G-o5t8104 (Comment on this)
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
2:27 pm	Awesome deconstruction of how so-called "Christian" groups use out-of-context quotes ...in order to play thinly-veiled smear-the-queer with GLSEN founder Kevin Jennings. (If you've heard of a 'gay-straight alliance', you've been impacted by Kevin's love and leadership.) It seems to me, rather, that the "Christians" hate him because he presents a threat to an undeserved political power base built on ignorance and prejudice. Love you, Kevin! http://www.goodasyou.org/good_as_you/2009/06/they-hate-him-because-hes-a-progressive-gay-period.html (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 12th, 2009
8:17 am	Creepiest use ever of Divine Intervention Watch at your own risk -- I turned it off after 15 seconds or so and haven't seen the rest. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 29th, 2009
1:25 pm	WSJ article on the American myth of homes as investments http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124336746233955539.html Glad to see that busting this mythology is starting to get some serious press. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 7th, 2009
6:12 pm	Star Trek movie was ***awesome*** It was so awesome that I almost felt guilty for not going more out of my way to invite a friend (Microsoft rented the entire theatre for 6 hours for 5,000 employees on my division and we were each allowed to invite one guest). If you haven't seen: http://www.theonion.com/content/video/trekkies_bash_new_star_trek_film It was fun going with a usability team. One could argue that the traditional divide between designers and research was expressed by Kirk ("I intuitively know the right answer, just go do it") and Spoke ("We need to think through this logically, get some data, and make a rationally reasoned decision.") (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
6:46 am	Awesome lecture I attended last night: Soaring Health and Energy Costs, Crashing Economies and Ecosy Dr. Richard Jackson (MD MPH) - one of the first people to explore the link between why Americans have become disproportionately obese (and disproportionately suburbanized) -- did an awesome lecture last night on the link between health, the environment, and American city planning. I thought it was one of the best presentations I've attended recently -- the "meta"-point was that it's easy to get medical funding for medical problems, but the moment they become social issues (e.g. telling people that they need to change the way they build cities, or what foods the American gov't should remove subsidies on -- or tax -- because they cause health care costs later), it becomes a debacle: "in public health, we look at the causes of causes". (not debating this point in LJ unless you've actually seen the video ;-) An HQ video of a shortened, earlier version of this presentation (intended for doctors, rather than for urban planners like the one I went to!) is at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlDLnkQ_s3E Highly recommended. (Ironically I am losing 10 minutes of my morning exercise in order to post this. Oh well.) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 13th, 2009
9:51 pm	Fuel-efficiency as a safety fearmongering tool Perhaps the most persuasive argument I've heard against improving fuel efficiency in piggish American automobiles is that it makes the cars less safe. For example, this New York Times article discusses an insurance company's safety tests warning about the dangers of smaller cars. But this line of reasoning never raises the question of why driving in America is still 2-3X more deadly than countries (such as the Netherlands) which already have these oh-so-deadly small-car fleets in ubiquitous use. How is it that they already drive these smaller cars, but still enjoy a much lower fatality rate? Easy: they treat driving as an earned privilege, not as an entitlement, make sure roads are safe by design (e.g. greater speed restrictions + reduced cognitive complexity), and eliminate the need to drive when it's not necessary in the first place (you can't kill people with your car when you're not driving it). I'm curious why the people and media who supposedly care about lives of American drivers enough to oppose shrinking vehicle size never also seem to come out advocating for the many things that would improve driver safety -- most notably the removal of driving privileges from the people most likely to kill themselves and other road users, such as through: * Eliminating driving privileges by people under the age of 18 (driving is the #1 cause of death among American young people) * Increasing the rigor of driver certification so that only people who have the physical and cognitive skills to safely operate a vehicle receive the privilege. * Aggressive enforcement (vehicle confiscation) and fining of people who are driving without insurance (who are statistically much more likely to cause fatalities) -- this could easily be done through automated cameras that compare license plates against databases of registered cars. * Requiring traffic calming on federally funded infrastructure (the faster you go, the exponentially more likely you are to kill people when you inevitably make a driving mistake) * Assigning motorists automatic legal responsibility in collisions with peds & bikes (they chose to drive, so why should they not be responsible for the violence created as a consequence?) * (etc) Ultimately, American cars are going to become smaller whether Americans want it or not: few of the Americans still able to drive in the post-cheap oil and cheap-credit era will be able to afford anything else. I would be really excited to participate in any organization seriously working to bring about changes to our national culture surrounding driving as entitlement vs. life-and-death privilege limited to those who handle it responsibly. (18 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 12th, 2009
8:54 am	Best unsolicited recruiter e-mail yet... It's for a usability researcher. At Microsoft! Oh -- wait --- I already have that job. And it's indeed a "perfect fit"! ;-) Subject: Jobs for which you are a perfect fit Date: April 10, 2009 12:28:33 PM PDT Dear Eli, The following jobs should be of interest to you: ------------------------------------------- Job # : 09-05470 Job Title : CS - Usability Researcher Job Location : REDMOND, WA Duration - 364 Days ( Read more... ) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009
12:42 pm	Really cool interactive illustration - design patterns that make streets pedestrian friendly This is really sweet - it lets you click on the different design features that make the difference between roads that are hostile towards pedestrians/cyclists/buses (e.g. prevailing American design patterns) and ones that endow equal dignity and access to other users (e.g. prevailing Dutch design patterns). http://planetizen.com/news/redirect_new.php?id=38195-0 (To use it, click "After", and then click on the different numbers.) (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 5th, 2009
9:21 am	Peter Schiff in 2006 (pre-collapse) at Las Vegas Mortgage Brokers' Conference This is incredible -- recorded before the "credit crisis" happened. In a 10 minute segment, it pretty much describes everything happening today. Of course, it's no different from what all of us were saying on the Housing Bubble blog from 2003-2006. More amazing that only a few hundred people have watched it. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 4th, 2009
12:32 pm	Awesome Peter Schiff lecture -- well worth an hour From a guy who lucidly explained the root causes of the bubble back when Americans were in denial that one exists. About how the bubble happened, economics 101, and why the US economy can't recover until home prices return to normality. IMHO *well* worth an hour. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgMclXX5msc (Peter Schiff, parenthetically, rents his home.) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, March 22nd, 2009
8:20 am	TANSTAFL in action I just got a "free" Intel iMac from Apple as they've been unable to fix damage done by a prior Apple tech on my iMac G5 after 3 or 4 repair attempts spanning 4 months. I really like the new Mac and am not complaining, but I think it illustrates the TANSTAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch) nature of the universe. Costs incurred on account of a "free" computer: #1: $100 (eventually) -- bigger hard drive probably needed for backups -- as the drive is 2X my existing #2: $120 -- AppleCare @ UW discount #3: $330 (to get a 24" inch display rather than the low-end unit they offered) #4: (etc) Total cost of free computer: about $550. TANSTAFL. (3 Comments |Comment on this)