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Forza Motorsport 4 - TSW 6-speed shifter with the Fanatec wheel, via Arduino

rkuo — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 21:26:00 GMT

Forza Motorsport 4

Forza 3 and my first shifter approach

In my previous post, I discussed my dissatisfaction with Forza Motorsport 3 and the SST Lightning shifter I modified to work with it.

I was always aware that my original circuit design was less clean than it could have been. For one, it required direct modification of the third party shifter … which is usually not pretty. Two, it used a lot of different IC's that probably could have been consolidated into the logic of a single microcontroller.

However, I was generally aware of the tradeoffs between the two and made the decision to go with a bunch of individual IC's consciously at the time. For one thing, I actually wanted to print a circuit board. Second, I decided it was more important to go through the motions of it as a learning experience rather than focusing on an optimal design. And, third, I could always take the microcontroller approach the next time.

Future goals for my next shifter

Find a better shifter

With the generally unintuitive behavior of the SST Lightning, my next shifter needed to be something that I wouldn't feel ashamed of putting in front of any normal stick shift capable driver.
Parse the USB output directly with an adapter

Creating a custom circuit board and modifying a shifter is far too difficult and complicated for most people, and it isn't first option that comes to mind when you think of ways to make a third party shifter compatible with your own steering wheel. The natural inclination is to just put an adapter of some sort between the wheel and the shifter, without modifying anything So that's what I wanted to build this time around.

The release of Forza Motorsport 4

The above thoughts percolated for many months while my sim racing cockpit sat idle. As Forza Motorsport 4 gradually approached its official release date of October 11th, 2011, I resolved to go fix my rig in preparation for the new game, even though the new game honestly didn't look all that different.

Finding the new shifter

It's hard to say how exactly I found it, but suffice it to say that, after occasional bouts of 30 minute Google search sessions, I ran across the TSW 6 speed shifter and some associated useful reviews. Check out the following features.

Centered on gears 3/4
Decent throw
Reverse all the way on the left with extra resistance
Gear below reverse locked out

I don't know how I managed to miss the existence of the TSW shifter in 2009, but it became quickly apparent that I had chosen the wrong shifter two years ago. This was what I needed.

OK, it was a bit expensive, but it wasn't going to be possible to build a shifter like this on my own right now. One criteria down.

Figuring out how to build the adapter

The platform - Arduino

The Arduino is a popular low cost and open source micro controller platform. The basic version of this can be picked up for around 30 dollars.

Luckily, I had an Arduino Duemlianove that had been sitting around in my apartment for a couple of years from a Sparkfun talk at Google. It's always strangely coincidental how you find a use for things that you could never have anticipated.

The USB Host Shield

Of course, just having an Arduino lying around doesn't do you much good. You need a way to physically connect to the USB shifter, and you need to be able to host it via software. Arduino's can be expended by the use of "shields", which are essentially just additional boards that can be stacked on top of the Arduino. With shields, you can add Ethernet ports, wireless modules, and all other kinds of expanded functionality to an Arduino.

Luckily for me, someone developed a USB Host Shield that stacks on the Arduino and provides you one standard size USB host port to interface with USB devices.
With the Arduino and USB Host Shield, it looked like I would have everything I needed to build my adapter. Second and last criteria met.

Putting it all together (The old way)

The TSW shifter was the first part to arrive. My Arduino project was going to take a lot more time to come together, so, in the mean time, I decided to figure out if I could hack up a way for the TSW shifter to work with my SST Lightning adapter.

It turns out that not only is the TSW shifter nicer in build quality than the SST lightning, it's also better for modding too. The switches are wired via ribbon cable to a controller PCB mounted on the outside of the shifter. This means to access the switches, all you really need to do is pop the ribbon cable off the PCB and stick header pins into the ribbon cable.

The only difficulty here is that the TSW shifter operates active high (All switches are 0V by default, and the active one is 5V) instead of active low (default 5V, active 0V) like the SST Lightning. So to make the shifter work with my SST Lightning circuit, I needed to invert the switch values before passing them in. I built a simple circuit to do this.

I placed the inverter circuit between the TSW shifter and my SST lightning circuit … and it worked as expected in the game. I was actually quite pleased with how well the TSW shifter played in the game. I now knew that the TSW shifter was going to work one way or the other, and that I could spend some additional effort and time on the Arduino approach while having a working TSW shifter in game.

Putting it altogether (The new way)

First milestone: Do anything with the Arduino. That wasn't too hard at all. I just downloaded the Arduino Development Kit for Windows, plugged the Arduino into my USB port, and I got an LED to blink on the Arduino. Success!

Second milestone: Finding a way to interface with the joystick. This was the trickiest part. I attached the USB Host Shield to the Arduino, and then attached the shifter to the USB host shield.
The makers of the USB Host Shield have supporting code for it that is on version 2. Unfortunately, the USBJoystick code I found on the net was meant to work with version 1. I spent a couple of days messing with porting over the code for the USBJoystick to v2 before I realized it would take too long to understand how everything worked.

Eventually, I gave up on the port and just compiled the old USB Host Shield (v1) code on the Arduino along with the sample USBJoystick code to see if it would work. Debug outputs started popping out of the serial monitor with every shift. Success!

Third milestone: Output analog voltages from the Arduino to the Fanatec wheel.

Now, the tricky part about micro controllers like the Arduino is that they don't output analog voltages. They generally either output either 5V or 0V. Being microcontrollers, however, they can do this switching very often and very quickly. In order to get an analog voltage, what you need to do to get, say, 3V, out of the Arduino, is output 5V 60% of the time (3V being 60% of 5V, of course), and use a low pass filter to smooth things out.
What are the implications of doing this? Well, you need to select an appropriate resistor and capacitor that creates good low pass filter characteristics for your intended application. And your actual output has some deviations from a true analog voltage output that you need to be aware of.
Ripple - Because the microprocessor behind the scenes is constantly flipping its voltage from 5V to 0V and back again, the actual output from your low pass filter will never settle at an exact value. Instead, it will bounce around your target voltage value. Allow too much ripple in your filter output, and you could end up sending unexpecting values or voltages downstream that you never really intended.
Settling time - The time it will take for your filter output arrive within some acceptable range of your target output is now non-trivial. For dimming Christmas lights, this probably isn't a big deal, but for gaming, you can imagine that it actually matters a bit.
Ripple and settling time are at odds with each others. You can reduce the ripple in your filter output, but at the expense of the settling time when the desired output changes. That's why knowing your application needs is important. Turns out that there's a really good calculator for displaying the results of a low pass filter for PWM in Japan. I used the heck out of this and it came in very handy, as you'll see next.

Fourth milestone: Reduce the latency of the switching as much as possible

Of course, in gaming, it's important that controllers be as responsive as possible. One of the advantages of my old circuit was that the response time would have been nearly instantaneous. Now, with my new adapter, there would be a slight lag time in polling the USB outputs, plus a settling time required by the low pass filter. Instantaneous was no longer in the cards.

In order to reduce the latency, the first thing I did was up the polling frequency in the software for the Arduino. It was defaulting to 50 ms in the USBJoystick code, which was way too long. I changed it to every 1 ms. This seemed to work (although the real polling frequency was more like every 2 ms due to actual code execution). Anyway, no ill effects, and that chopped a good 48 ms off the latency of any shift.

The second piece of this was to select a decent looking low pass filter.
I'm not going to break this down tremendously, but the default PWM frequency out of the Arduino is about 1 kHz, so in order to minimize latency and keep ripple within reasonable levels, I selected a 4.7k resistor and a 1uF capacitor. This produces a transient analysis that looks like the following.
As you can see, it arrives at the 90% mark in around 10 ms. I could have improved the latency more by testing the exact limits of the ripple (I was very conservative on this for obvious reasons), or by modifying the Arduino timers to switch its PWM outputs faster. This turned out to be more of a pain in the ass than I had hoped, so I ended up skipping it and taking the 10ms hit (which isn't that much anyway).

Fifth milestone: Make it look reasonably nice

This is where the Arduino Protoshield comes in. It's basically an Arduino shield with a prototyping area where you can put your own stuff.

Anyway, there's not much to say here. The low pass filters and the outputs of this filters into the Fanatec wheel have to go somewhere, so they go here. I also added a mini DIN breakout board for the 6 pin connector (that interfaces to the Fanatec wheel). With the right combination of resistors, capacitors, etc … you end up with something like the below.

Finale

Here's the final product.

It's powered by any USB port.
It interfaces directly with an unmodified TSW 6-speed shifter (and powers it as well).
It has a standard 6 pin mini-DIN port (aka PS/2 port) that can be connected directly to a Fanatec wheel.
The top shield is my custom output shield to the Fanatec, with the low pass filters going to the 6 pin mini-DIN port for the Fanatec, the middle shield is the USB Host Shield, and the bottom is the Arduino.

It would be nice to put it inside a custom enclosure of some sort, but I think that's going to be unlikely unless I can find a 3D printer to work with (and learn how to use it). Anyway, it's pretty sturdy as is … and perhaps more interestingly, much easier to replicate off the shelf by others.

Finally, here's a YouTube video that puts this all together - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2utk_62blmM.

Hope you enjoyed the walkthrough!

SST Lightning with Forza and the Fanatec wheels - not good enough

rkuo — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 18:50:00 GMT

History

Some of you may remember that when Forza Motorsport 3 came out, I built up a pretty elaborate rig to use with the game. Features included:

A full steel frame cockpit by Obutto
High end steering wheel and pedals from Fanatec
Anywhere from 3 to 5 Xbox 360's at one time driving triple screens and rear mirror/spectator cams
A small rack holding all of that equipment behind a UPS and surge protector.

The centerpiece of the whole rig, in terms of effort, however, was the custom circuit I designed to make the SST Lightning (a standard USB shifter designed for PC gaming) compatible with the Fanatec wheel.

As it turns out, I never really used the rig that much … and, although I presumed the SST Lightning was going to be a really high quality shifter when I purchased it, that actually wasn't the case at all. In fact, the SST Lightning has a couple of major problems.

Problems with the SST Lightning

Positives
Solid, 360 degree mounting options - The shifter is made of solid aluminum and rotates 360 degrees within a heavy duty clamp that can be mounted to pretty much anything. It's a good design in this respect and won't move around on you if mounted to something solid.

Click shift action - The click action is smoother than the Fanatec provided shifter and snaps into place more cleanly and readily.

Negatives
2nd gear doesn't always engage - It's too hard to explain here, but tolerances are such that the ball detente mechanism used to snap and keep the shifter in place is slightly off. In essence, if you move the shifter fully in, the gear makes contact. However, the gear actually wants to snap in just before it is fully making contact. If you shake the shifter a little, it will pop into place and lose contact with the gear.

I was able to fix this with some electrical tape over the switches to thicken the contact area, but that should not have been necessary.

Difficult to modify - Wiring out the contacts from the shifter bottom to make them work with my circuit was major work. This is not a shifter that wants to be modded.

Poor feel (Short throw) - Despite the positive I listed above on this point, it's better than the Fanatec provided shifter, but still not very close to a real 6 speed shifter. It feels like a lightweight toy or joystick, not a shifter. "Dinky" might be the right word.

Poor feel (Not centered on gears 3 and 4) - Probably worst of all, it's an 8 position shifter that isn't centered on gears 3 and 4, but instead centers between gears 1/2 and gears 3/4. For anyone that's driven stick in real life, this is completely unintuitive and hard to get used to. In addition, with the throws being as short and light as they are, it's very easy to miss a shift since there's not much of a difference at all in motion between going into 3rd and 5th gear.

Poor feel (no Reverse/empty gear lockout) - In a normal 6 speed shifter, there is a lot more resistance moving the shifter over to the left into Reverse, and you can't move the shifter at all into the space below reverse. Simulating this is something the SST lightning just doesn't try to do. Again, combined with the unusual non-centered layout of the gear pattern and the shortness and lightness of the throws, you'll be hitting the wrong gears a LOT.

Embarrassing - In the end, although the shifter worked, friends who came over to try it out would constantly miss shifts and get confused. All I could do was apologize to anyone that came over for how the shifter worked.

Moving forward

As you might have guessed, I was pretty happy with myself in terms of actually being able to engineer the translation circuit and build out a clean PCB to bundle it all up. I learned a lot from the challenge and that was probably more important than anything else here.

But, in the end analysis, I wasn't all that happy with the actual setup, and combined with the fact that Forza is actually more of a sandbox game than it is a structured game with accomplishments for you to reach, etc ... it didn't feel like much fun. It probably didn't help that by the time this all came together, I also had a real car to take to the track!

But fast forward to nearly two years later. Forza Motorsport 4 would be coming out in October (and has as of now), and I wanted to see if there was something more I could do to fix up all of the initial effort I had put into this. And that leads into the next post ... a new shifter and a new circuit board.

iCufflinks

rkuo — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 19:36:00 GMT

These cufflinks look amazing. Basically the breathing suspend lighting pattern in a CNC machined aluminum cufflink. Am I a fanboy for wanting them?

http://www.adafruit.com/products/379

Picking a color for your new iPad 2

rkuo — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 05:40:00 GMT

While you're all waiting to get your new iPad's (I am too!), you might be struggling with the idea of what color to get. Contrary to what you might think, it's not just personal preference. There are real functional differences between the two.

Let's draw analogues to other consumer products.

First, TV's. You may note that with very few exceptions, all TV bezels are done in black/dark grey/steel tones. Interesting, no? The reason for this is that a bright colored bezel will distract the eye and make the viewer acutely aware of the edge of the screen at all times. It's slightly more immersive to have a black bezel, which allows the edge of the screen to dissolve into the frame in many cases.

Second, cars. If you are a car person, you know that the reputation of black cars is one of requiring high maintenance to keep looking pristine. Dust and fingerprints contrast heavily with a shiny black frame. On a white iPad, this kind of dirtiness is hardly noticeable on the frame, although the screen itself may still present temporary uncleanliness.

Last, I've heard it claimed that the white iPad is a little less prone to overheat in sunlight due to the heat reflectiveness of the bezel. I'm not sure if this is true enough to an extent that it is noticeable, but, hey, why not mention it?

In the end, of course, what probably matters most is that you pick the color you feel more emotionally connected with. But it's fun to note that even tiny choices like color have real physical implications upon the way you use a product like the iPad.

Picking a computer to encode videos with

rkuo — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 03:18:00 GMT

So let's say you just bought some sort of new Boxee box or Apple TV, and you have a lot of videos you want to watch on them. You need to process those videos into a device friendly format, and you’re thinking about building or buying a dedicated machine to handle the job. What do you buy?

Not surprisingly, the answer depends pretty heavily on what you're trying to optimize for.

The choices

Optimize for peak throughput. For example, a tv show airs, you record it to your PC, and you want it ready to stream or transfer to any number of mobile or in-home devices as soon as possible.

Optimize for total throughput. You have a bunch of DVD's or Blu-Ray's and you want to queue them up and convert them as quickly as possible, in total.

Optimize for energy consumption. You want a little bit of everything above, but what you don’t want to do is inflate your energy bill or consume watts like crazy over the course of the year.

And let’s just assume you’re always optimizing for cost, within. You need to decide how much roughly how much throughput you want … but going too cheap actually results not only in low total throughput but also unacceptably low throughput per dollar. Going expensive will net you higher peak throughput, but higher total throughput might be better served by extra machines, not just a single beefy machine. We’re not building supercomputers here. (yet!)

The details

Peak throughput - Your best bet here is a single processor system with a lot of cores (probably around 4), clocked as high as possible. A lot of modern encoding systems can use multiple cores, but simply adding cores doesn't scale indefinitely.

The most economical single processor systems for this scenario tend to be Core i7 based. Even though AMD’s processors are generally a good bang for your buck, Core i7 systems actually have a leg up over AMD's processors in this case because they are:

1. Easily overclockable
2. Especially efficient at encoding videos
3. Hyperthreaded (The extra logical processors actually help significantly here ... on the order of 10 to 20%)

GPU-based encoding solutions. Video encoding, falling squarely in the parallelizable camp of problem sets, is often held up as a poster child for GPU-accelerated software. In practice, however, these encoders are poorly optimized compared to general purpose encoders. These tend to yield interesting speed increases at the expense of quality per bit and all of the flexibility that traditional software provides. In short, academically interesting, but not particularly practical.

For reference, I took a 1080p reference video and encoded it to an 720p .m4v using the High Profile settings in Handbrake. The system had a 3.06GHz Core i7 with hyperthreading enabled (4 cores, 8 logical processors). The source video was 134 min., and the encode itself took 103 min. Faster than real-time is always good! I don't want to overload this post with stats, but that should give you a feel for the scale that we are talking about.

If you want to spend more money, you can always buy a 12-core Mac Pro or build the equivalent. But benchmarks show that jumping from four to twelve cores here doesn't make the encodes three times faster ... only 1.42 times faster. So you'll have to decide whether the extra money is worth the diminishing returns increase in speed.

Total throughput

OK, so we established above that, past a certain point, multiple cores stop helping as much with the performance of a single encode. Looking at Handbrake, it scales pretty well up to 4 cores, starts to diminish from 4 to 8 cores, and drops off significantly from 8 to 12 cores. In other words, that 48-core system isn’t going to help you much. But what you CAN do with that many cores, assuming you have multiple files to process, is run multiple encodes at once … enough so that you have roughly the ratio of encodes to optimal number of cores. Sure, the encodes will bump into each other somewhat, but the total throughput/utilization of the system will be much closer to optimal than if you just ran one file at a time.

Unfortunately, buying more than four cores on a single system right now is just not that cheap. The multiprocessor scenarios for adding extra cores seem to fall into the business segment of the market and now your cost increases rapidly. If your objective is not raw speed on a single system, you can get more total processing power per dollar by simply buying and building more single processor Core i7 systems. The problem then becomes the coordination necessary to distribute the encoding work amongst multiple machines.

Going green

Now this was a topic I found interesting. It turns out that going really green with a full encoding load is kind of difficult. Computers range in green-ness all the way between really green (Mac Mini 2010) to really power hungry (Mac Pro 2010). Most desktop computers aren't designed to be that green. The best example I could come up with … the Mac Mini 2010 … still doesn't compete that favorably with a Core i7 running at 3.6 GHz if you are comparing them at full load.

For example, if you assume, living out here in California, that your cost per KWh is $0.30, then you end up with the following, based on some other tests I ran on my own machines using a 720p source as the reference (so not comparable to the other test above).

	Mac Mini 2010	Homemade Core i7
Purchase price	$999 ($699 base)	$699
Watts under full load	30	200
Source hours processed per day	11	50
Cost per 1000 source hours	65.00	96.00

So yep, the Mac Mini does pretty well on the energy efficiency side of things, but surprisingly the high powered Core i7 holds up pretty well too, just because it's so damned good at encoding video!

Where a machine like the Mac Mini 2010 really wins out is on the idle side of things, tho. So if your pipeline sits around unutilized for decent stretches, the 10 watt idle power consumption of a Mac Mini vs a desktop’s 100-150 watts adds up quickly. It's actually for this reason that I use a Mac Mini as my primary desktop and leave the high powered machines off unless I want to do something requiring serious horsepower ... like playing a video game.

It turns out, however, that you really shouldn't expect to win much back over time in terms of the dollars saved in energy costs. Encoding 1000 hours of video is a LOT, and you only make back 30 dollars over that range, even with the high energy costs here in California. It just doesn't add up to much. And Core i7 desktops are not that expensive, especially compared to Mac's! You can bet the Core i7 system is going to have a much longer useful lifetime.

In short, what I found was that, despite the desire to be energy efficient, you'd be hard pressed to make your money back in energy savings over time.

What isn't that important

RAM - You only need enough to run the encoding jobs comfortably and no more. 2GB in a pinch, 4GB is plenty. I would go with 4GB at least just so that you can actually repurpose the computer for something else if desired.

Hard drive space - You need just enough space to buffer the input and output files reasonably. Regular hard drives are fine and SSD's are overkill unless you plan on multitasking the machine heavily with other workloads. Even something like a 120GB drive is probably safe ... but nowadays, reasonably cheap drives start around at least 320GB for notebook drives and almost 1TB for internal desktop drives.

Network throughput - In a more complex encoding scenario involving multiple computers, network throughput becomes a significant factor as you start having to shove bits around to get them encoded on different nodes. But it's not really relevant to the current discussion.

Summary

Obviously there are quite a few factors I haven't included here for the sake of brevity, but the upshot is that a lot of factors push you towards the single Core i7 build when it comes to encoding performance as defined on a number of fronts. What's going to be really interesting in future is the advent of massively cored systems on the horizon. Eating the energy overhead of individual systems is not so great and having many cores on one system could alleviate that problem as well as push the performance envelope in terms of encoding parallelization.

The Walking Dead

rkuo — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 05:13:00 GMT

AMC has a massive ratings hit on their hands.

It's definitely well deserved. The show itself is uncomfortable and bleak, just like you expect life in the zombie apocalypse to be. It takes its subject matter seriously, unlike so many of its campy brethren. That provides plenty of real opportunities for drama.

If I had to be critical of the show, it's that some character behavior is done clearly for dramatic purposes. The protagonist wakes up and stumbles around in the apocalypse without shoes for 15 minutes. Strange as it seems, that was what made me uncomfortable. Not the fact that there were zombies locked behind a door. Just the fact that walking around had to mean he would be stepping on glass and that he would be running really slowly if he actually did encounter a zombie.

Rick (the sheriff protagonist) must have feet of leather. If I woke up in a hospital full of debris, you can be damn sure the first thing I would be doing is stealing someone's shoes.

More importantly, however, there are points where you wonder why the protagonist doesn't just come out and ask what the hell is going on. That's all I would be doing every time I met someone. Try to figure out what's going on.

Instead, everything is treated like one long reveal ... as if there is a path of discovery and the characters need to not ask questions so that we'll have a steady dose of new information each episode. I'm not a script writer, but I feel like there has to be a better way.

Regardless, I'm addicted. I'm surprised that the season is only 6 episodes, however. This must have been either a real financial commitment or considered a risky development if they had to limit the season length to something that short.

Right now I'm saving the last 3 episodes to marathon them in one go next week with some friends. I figure that's as close as we'll get to a real "zombie night" around here!

Gaming in stereoscopic 3D

rkuo — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 19:06:00 GMT

Stereoscopic 3D is a great technology, even with all of the inherent flaws and glitches that exist in today's implementations. But while movies are the main way most people are finding out about three dimensional viewing, in reality, gaming is a much more interesting way to take advantage of 3D viewing. Here's why.

Gaming requires more immersion and focus

Today, the requirement to sit in front of the TV and wear glasses inherently limits the number of viewers and the freedom of the viewer to go do other things. Not great, especially when you're walking around the room doing other things or watching with other people.

However, most gaming is done in a single player or solitary context. In this sense, it requires focused attention from the gamer anyway. Therefore, you aren't really losing much by asking the gamer to put on some glasses or sit directly in front of the TV ... he's already doing it. In return, the 3D presentation of the game makes the game more immersive and engaging. Gaming is a much more natural place to take advantage of stereoscopic 3D because the viewer has already decided to dedicate his attention and focus to begin with.

3D environments in games are presented in real time

Because 3D viewing is in a transitionary period, many movies are shot with a relatively shallow depth. For an experienced viewer, this is unfortunate ... it is not difficult for them at all to see scenes presented in a deeper and more realistic manner. Unfortunately, it is impossible for the filmmaker to go back and reshoot those scenes with more depth ... the movie is fixed at its current depth forever.

Gaming is different. First, on a technical basis, you can adjust the depth of any 3D scene to something that you, the viewer, are comfortable with handling. This is much better than having to use the lowest common denominator that is generally given to you by a filmmaker.

More importantly, games can represent fantastic huge realities in 3D that could never be explored interactively within a movie. I will state without any doubt that you really can't appreciate the artistry of how someone has designed an entire city within a game until you experience actually standing within and moving around it in stereoscopic 3D.

To put this another way ... the sense of perception is greatly enhanced when viewing a movie in 3D. The sense of exploration ... the feeling of moving within something new ... is greatly enhanced when playing a game in 3D.

3D gaming is often still glitchy

The nice thing about games today is that nearly all of them are rendered using three dimensional data. In other words, the computer is already storing the scene you are viewing in 3D anyway ... it's just presenting a 2D scene to you on your monitor. To get to stereoscopic 3D, it's almost trivial to just render the scene twice as often (once for each eye) to create the illusion of depth for the 3D gamer.

Where this falls down is that most existing games assume you are viewing them using a standard 2D monitor. What often happens is that special effects such as lights or menus are presented, using 2D programming "tricks", in such a way as to look fine on a 2D screen but be seen at completely wrong or impossible depths in a 3D context.

Technologies such as nVidia 3D Vision take advantage of the fact that games are already 3D anyway to retrofit many past games for 3D gaming, but the aforementioned glitches are where the promise falls short of the reality.

Fortunately, as 3D gaming becomes more commonplace, you can expect developers to see the glitches during development and fix them on the spot. Companies such as nVidia and Sony have a vested interest in making new games look good in 3D and are spending a lot of money evangelizing proper 3D programming techniques with developers. Moving forward, these problems are likely to disappear quickly in newly released games. But it's very difficult to go back and fix problems with older games.

Gaming in 3D can make you perform better ... or worse

While gaming in stereoscopic 3D adds realism, that doesn't necessarily translate to better competitive performance.

First, your framerates will be significantly lower unless your system is overbuilt with enough performance slack to compensate. A lower framerate can translate into poorer competitive performance.

Second, it takes time for your eyes to change their focus depth. That split second can be precious when switching between a close by target to a far away one ... something that you would artificially not have to deal with when playing in 2D.

Third, some games don't lend themselves perfectly to control schemes when viewed in 3D. RTS's are an example where the cursor must float in 3D and adjust its selection dynamically. It can feel unintuitive to select and move objects in these gaming contexts.

In short ... there are not many cases where depth perception will enhance your performance in games as a player (although there are a few). Depth perception is valuable only in very particular gaming contexts. Think of it more as a way to add enjoyment or immersion, not a way to add extra wins to your scorecard.

Just so I don't leave this on a downer note, there have been two cases where I have found depth perception to be valuable.

The first is in Mirror's Edge, where you run across rooftops and must land precisely and often hit a button to roll as you land. The depth perception added here by stereoscopic 3D helps significantly in judging in a split second how close you are to landing and where you are.

The second is any racing game (cars). Depth perception helps you gauge the nature of turns quickly at high speed and also how close you are to touching other cars.

RTS's look OK, but are less impressive than other 3D games due to the fact that your view tends to be from a bird's eye perspective. In my experience, UI selection of units can be glitchy, so best performance is achieved by playing in 2D.

First person shooter games are probably the best way to showcase any 3D setup ... the immersiveness is amazing. With a sufficiently high performing system, the difference in your performance will probably minimal until you get to high levels of play, but I do expect the disparity to become signficant at those levels.

Of course, any low pressure game like puzzle or adventure games will have no problems at all being played in 3D.

Summary

In short, I find gaming to be a far more fertile ground for stereoscopic 3D than movies ... mostly due to the added immersion and interactivity. I hope you agree.

Visual anomalies with stereoscopic 3D display technologies

rkuo — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 18:08:00 GMT

We all know what stereoscopic 3D should look and behave like ... we see it every day. Unfortunately, this isn't how stereoscopic 3D behaves in the home today. Here's a list of ways where the idea doesn't quite match up with reality.

Color distortion

Glasses distort the color of the screen. It's as simple as that.

In the case of active shutter displays, the glasses used to shutter each eye have a slight yellowish or greenish tint to them. It’s an unavoidable side effect of looking through a liquid crystal lens. In the case of polarized glasses, the distortion is not as pronounced and may be more color neutral, but it's easy enough to look through a pair of glasses and observe a difference in hue and contrast without the glasses on.

HMD and auto-stereoscopic display technologies don't suffer from color distortion directly as they have separate pixels directly allocated for each eye.

Significant loss of brightness and contrast

Active shutter displays refresh about 120 times a second. That means that, even in an ideal scenario, each eye only gets 50% of the light.

However, we live in an analog world ... and despite what you may initially think, the fact is that the switching doesn’t happen instantaneously. What actually happens is that it takes time for the displays to transition from the left eye image to the right eye image and back again. If each shutter were really open 50% of the time, a good portion of your time would be spent seeing the screen transitioning between frames ... which would completely ruin the 3D effect.

In practice, what I see is that shutters are open about 25% of the time. Keep in mind the glasses themselves don’t perfectly pass light through either. So you’re probably talking about 20% of the original light getting through to each eye or less.

All that time you spent calibrating your TV to be THX spec? Totally out the window with 3D glasses on.

Top/bottom stereo extinction problems (or ghosting)

This is a specific problem with active shutter displays and an important variation on the loss of brightness issue. Most TV’s do not refresh every portion of the screen at exactly the same time. Instead, they typically refresh each row of pixels from top to bottom. Again, the shutter for a particular eye should not be open until the image finishes refreshing on the TV ... otherwise all that eye will see is an incorrect blend of the previous and current image.

So not only do you have the problem of waiting for the screen to transition its pixels from the left to the right eye image and vice versa, the screen isn't even trying to change all the pixels at the same time!

In practice, this is a very big problem for LCD’s. The screens can barely switch between each eye's image in time in order to provide an adequately long shutter time for each eye. So the manufacturers play loose with the shutter timing in order to let enough light through to each eye. Unfortunately, this means in cases where the screen doesn't switch in time (usually in high contrast scenarios such as dark building against blue or white sky), bits of the previous and next image are leaking through.

Another interesting aspect of this is that the leaking through of the opposite eye's image tends to happen more at the top of the screen. Why is this? Again, all refreshing happens from top to bottom ... and the majority of the change in a pixel while it is changing happens at the very start. So even playing slightly loose with the shutter timings can have a bad effect on the image near the top of the screen.

DLP projectors seem to have no top/bottom stereo extinction problems. Presumably the design of the technology allows the images to flip nearly instantaneously. Plasma’s are also less susceptible to due to the fast duty cycle/switching times of the technology.

If you want to see this problem in action, I took a high speed 600 fps video of some 3D ready monitors. The video shows these things in a much more clear way than I can describe by writing it. Here's the YouTube link.

Fast motion stuttering

This is another active shutter specific problem. The sequential display of left and right eye images in active shutter systems has additional implications for fast moving objects. While the correct images may be getting to each eye, they are not arriving at the same time. Is this a problem? Yes, it definitely is. The human brain is sensitive to this incongruency ... and 120Hz is not a fast enough of a refresh rate for your brain to be unaware of the difference. In short, 3D scenes with heavy horizontal panning will appear very stuttery and possibly disorienting. This is not a problem for other 3D display technologies which display the left and right images at the same time.

As noted above, it may be possible for the the stuttering to be remedied by even faster switching times such as 240Hz, but the state of the art isn't caught up yet.

Overdrive ghosting

Another active shutter specific problem. With current technology, most displays are just at the limit of being able to switch back and forth at 120Hz. To achieve fast switching times, manufacturers use much higher voltage differentials than normal when a pixel transition begins. This allows the display to get the pixel to the correct color more quickly.

Unfortunately, this is an imperfect process and has tradeoffs. Over or undershooting the value results in the pixel not quite arriving at its intended value before having to switch back. The end effect is weirdly colored ghosts of the opposite eye image leaking into the target eye.

Expensive shutter glasses

Each pair of active shutter glasses costs around $100 to $200. For most people, that’s not an insignificant expense. I would guess these prices will drop like a commodity over time ... there's really no good reason for these things to cost that much. But, for now, expect financial pain if you’re going to have more than one viewer at a time.

Glasses need recharging

Active shutter glasses last a long time if fully charged ... around 40 hours. Charging only takes a couple of hours. But nevertheless, with the dearth of 3D content out there, it's pretty likely that your glasses will go unused for long periods of time right now. So when you do finally decide to watch something, you may have to deal with some delayed gratification issues.

Off-angle/Off-level viewing issues

All stereoscopic 3D technologies, with the exception of HMD's, require the viewer to be sitting level with the TV and reasonably directly in front of it so that the left and right eye images are displayed properly spaced and oriented to each eye. This means you can't lie on the couch and watch in 3D, and you also can't stand off in the corner in the kitchen and watch the TV in 3D while it's tucked away in the other corner.

Polarized displays and glasses have the additional problem of each lens actually letting through light from the other eye's image if you are not sitting perfectly horizontally. Real3D glasses in the theater work around this by using circular polarization, which is not sensitive to the rotation of your head in the viewing scenario. But since the entire stereoscopic 3D viewing process relies on your head being level and well placed anyway, this is of minor consequence.

Conclusion

As you can see, stereoscopic 3D is the home is not just fire and forget ... and it does not "just work". In particular, active shutter displays have a host of problems not present in other display approaches ... but they make up for it by being the cheapest way to go. At least now you know all the ways things can go wrong! Don't let this document scare you off completely though ... I think the 3D viewing experience is very immersive and enjoyable in many contexts. You just need to know what you're getting.

Types of stereoscopic 3D displays

rkuo — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 21:23:00 GMT

There are many different ways to individually send an image to each of your eyes. We talk about the different technologies that exist below.

Active shutter
In combination with a pair of powered glasses, these displays work by switching very rapidly between the left and right eye images. The glasses shutter each eye very quickly in tandem with the screen so that only the correct image is seen by each eye. So while your regular TV might refresh 60 times per second at maximum, a 3D TV would have to refresh at 120Hz in order to get 60 frames per second to each of your eyes.

If you are looking at the current crop of 3D TV’s, then you’re going to end up with an active shutter device. Why is this? I’ll explain in more detail later, but in essence active shutter displays are the cheapest way right now to get 3D into the home.

One point of confusion that we need to clear up here is that just because a TV says it is "120Hz" or "240Hz" does not mean it is 3D capable. Most of these TV's accept only a 60Hz input and do processing to interpolate the frames in between up to 120Hz. If you are buying a truly stereoscopic 3D capable active shutter display, it will be marketed as 3D capable and it will consequently accept a true 120Hz input.

Polarized
In combination with a cheap pair of polarized glasses, these displays actually display the left and right eye images at the same time. However, the left eye image is polarized in an “opposite” way to the right eye image. The polarizing filter in each lens is then able to let all of the desired image to its eye while blocking out the opposite eye’s image.

In theaters, this is usually accomplished by running two separate projectors with different polarizations. In the home, there are certain types of monitors that accomplish this by alternately polarizing every other row of pixels in a 1-2-1-2 pattern. Unfortunately, as you might guess, this halves the effective resolution of your display while viewing in 3D. I believe full resolution displays of this type also exist, but since twice the pixels are required, no full resolution display for the home has mainstream pricing.

It is actually possible to set up a dual projector rig in the home similar to a 3D setup in theater. However, this requires two projectors to be driven independently and in sync by the same computer. In essence, this approach is very hacky and requires a lot of cooperation between computer, video driver, software and projectors ... making it unlikely to work well in more than a few cases.

Anaglyph
Anaglyph 3D technology shows both left and right images on the display at the same time, but each eye's image is encoded with a different color mapping. Different color lenses are present in the glasses used to view the image ... hence the iconic red and blue glasses ... one color for each eye. Newer implementations have used different image coloring, claiming to be superior to the red and blue lenses. This may be true, but in no way does any anaglyph technology hold a candle to the other display technologies mentioned here.

Anaglyph display technology was popular mostly in the 80’s and all the way back to the 50's ... mainly because it requires no unusual display technologies at viewing time. Any display can display in anaglyph mode. Due to the state of display technology, this was the public perception of “3D” viewing for a long time. The glasses used for this are also extremely cheap ... essentially being just some colored cellophone and cardboard.

Anaglyph technology suffers from severe color distortion and crosstalk between left/right eye images ... which can really give you a headache. This technology doesn't even make a pretense at trying to get it "correct" ... it just shoots for creating some illusion of depth.

Head mounted displays
These are basically powered glasses or helmet like devices that actually contain a separate display for each eye. While theoretically the least prone to problems, the main problem with these is that they are expensive and displays have not been miniaturized to a usable point. So far only 720p per eye has been achieved and costs run into the thousands. Of course, only one person can use these at a time and doing so is completely anti-social. And, if the head mounted display is not sufficiently miniaturized, it can result head and neck strain for the wearer. But, of all the stereoscopic 3D approaches, it is worth noting that head mounted displays are an approach that can actually create a perfect stereoscopic 3D image for the viewer.

Auto-stereoscopic displays
Auto-stereoscopic displays are termed so because they hold the magical promise of being able to show you something stereoscopic 3D without making you wear glasses. Typically, this works because the display literally angles half of its pixels to the left eye and half to the right eye. While this obviates the need for glasses, it also means the effective viewing position is extremely constrained. In practice this limits the number of viewers to one and also cuts the effective resolution of the display in half. As such, auto-stereoscopic displays are more useful in a handheld or certain computing contexts. For example, the Nintendo 3DS is probably going to be the most mainstream example of auto-stereoscopic technology for the next few years.

The complete guide to understanding stereoscopic 3D

rkuo — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 21:06:00 GMT

I first got into the whole idea of stereoscopic 3D in the home when nVidia announced their 3D Vision technology back at the beginning of 2009. I actually built a high end gaming rig and bought the special monitor and glasses just to see what it was all about.

While It was a worthwhile and immersive experience, but certainly not without its problems. Needless to say, I've learned a lot about just how stereoscopic 3D works in the mean time. Based on my experience, I strongly feel that the industry doesn't do nearly enough of its job in explaining why viewing things in 3D doesn't just "work" quite the way you might expect ... and that's why you're reading these articles now.

Quite frankly, I've been sitting on these blog posts for a while because there's so much to write and expound on that it just seemed overwhelming. Finally, I decided to just break things down a bit and get this out piece by piece. I'm going to start with a quick overview here and then roll out a few detailed articles explaining the rest of what I have to say.

Stereoscopic 3D technologies exist in order to create the illusion of depth for the viewer. The basic principle of how any stereoscopic 3D technology works is that, for any given scene, a separate left and right view of that scene is presented to each of your eyes. That’s it. That’s how the real world works too. When this is done properly, the viewer perceives the illusion of depth, which enhances the feeling of realism and engages the viewer in a way that cannot possibly be accomplished by viewing a traditional 2D image.

Does it work? Absolutely. It’s the difference between seeing a cathedral on paper and actually seeing it in person. Or seeing a picture of a rock vs seeing the depth and texture in the palm of your hand. Stereoscopic 3D imagery engages your senses more fully in a way that traditional 2D images and video cannot. It really does enhance the viewing experience.

I’m writing this document to educate people on the issues they are likely to encounter when evaluating or purchasing a 3D display. There are a lot of different gotchas when it comes to the current state of the art in 3D displays ... and, surprisingly, I don’t see many of them being written about or covered in much detail. In short, 3D displays don’t work perfectly today, and you should be aware of the limitations. Nobody likes to buy a TV for thousands of dollars and be surprised when something doesn’t just work the way you want it to.

With that in mind, please read the following articles.

Stereoscopic display technologies
Visual anomalies (or stereoscopic 3D is not perfect)
Gaming in stereoscopic 3D
Social issues with viewing in 3D (or why inviting everyone over to watch the Super Bowl in 3D might not work as well as you’d hope) (TBD)
Frequently asked questions (TBD)

Thanks for reading this guide. I hope you'll come out of this feeling a little more confident about any future stereoscopic 3D purchase and avoiding all of the surprises I've encountered along the way.

On the pursuit of happiness

rkuo — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 08:22:00 GMT

I attended a talk today by Tony Hsieh of Zappos fame. He's out plugging his new book "Delivering Happiness". Thankfully, rather than this being a generic leadership talk, I found myself pleasantly surprised at the amount of research that Tony has done and the effort to which Zappos has gone to integrate a lot of research takeaways into actionable items for their company. I recognized a lot of the observations that Tony had made in forming his own opinions on company culture, and so a lot of what he said rang true. And not in a trite manner.

So, long story short, I'm pretty sure I'm going to get around to reading this book. But first, I thought it might be useful for me to expound here on the subject of happiness. Fair warning ... some of this is derived from my own reading ... some of it was jogged by Tony's talk.

Being a little unhappy is good. And necessary. The desire to be better or to improve the state of things requires a certain level of dissatisfaction with the status quo. To be perfectly content means that there is no possible betterment to be had ... and paradoxically, that is something one rightfully should not be too happy about.

Happiness reverts to the mean. There are plenty of studies out there indicating that individuals aren't any happier now than they were 50 or 100 years ago, despite vast increases in the standard of living. Objectively, we should be happier. In truth, once we rise up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, much of our happiness is actually determined by our relative wellbeing compared to others. If you've never heard of a plasma TV, it doesn't factor into your calculation of happiness. The instant your neighbor has one, you may damn well want one as well.

Happiness can be measured along simple vectors. The prior point about reverting to the mean isn't saying that you can't really be happier. Many measurements of happiness look at your quality of life in several areas. Personally, I like the simple areas ... health, wealth, and love. Health ... does your body get in the way of your ability to do things? Wealth ... can you buy the things you need or desire? How do you socially compare to others? And love ... do you have or are you easily capable of pursuing a fulfilling relationship?

However you measure your happiness, it's generally important to balance the different factors. They are interrelated and ignoring one area will drag down the other areas of your life.

Personally, I view the health and love areas of happiness as the ones that have some fixed level of maintenance. Perhaps another way of saying it is that there are decreasing returns as you allocate more time to them. Wealth is where all the self actualization and learning occurs.

People have different time orientations when it comes to achieving happiness. It's also worth mentioning that different types of people approach the achievement of happiness in different ways. Specifically, some people have short term or impulsive orientations to happiness, whereas others have more long term or measured orientations.

The implications of this are quite interesting. Can you name some extreme examples of short term oriented people? Let's try. Drug addicts. The next hit is always just around the corner. Assholes. These are the kinds of people that cannot help but insult you or cut others down to make themselves feel better. Cheaters. They have to win now no matter what the risk could be. The problem with this mindset is that the short term "hit" of whatever behavior in question always goes away, requiring another "hit" or, eventually, more extreme behavior to generate feelings of happiness. Short term happiness orientation tends to result in all kinds of socially unacceptable behavior. Do an exercise and consider some of the people that you don't particularly like. Are they short term oriented?

Long term orientations are healthier ... the ability to forgo happiness now for greater returns in the future. This is usually associated with higher self esteem ... in other words, some inner core of positive happiness that isn't fully associated with your actions in the past hour. Consequently, there is also a lack of need to continually replace that emptiness with harmful short term behavior. It goes without saying that you want to be on this side of the fence. I'm not sure if one can simply be told "this is the right way to behave", however ... I think most people simply *are*, or evolve here over time if they are lucky.

On a side note, observing this characteristic in people is, not surprisingly, an unusually powerful way of predicting how someone will react in a particular situation. It is one of a few major factors taught in some law enforcement programs for "reading" people.

So how do I end up applying this happiness stuff to my life? Well, first of all, I try to spend some appropriate amount of time on the health and love areas of my life. As far as happiness and wealth ... I view that as more of a journey. The understanding that some level of dissatisfaction is appropriate actually minimizes the impact of that dissatisfaction on me. I don't strive to be perfectly happy, and I don't assume that if I reach some level or accomplish some "thing", that it will keep me happy forever. Instead, I strive to constantly move from one level to the next. And this doesn't mean a job ... it means whatever task or objectives you've set for yourself to accomplish.

Refer to the chess kids in The Art of Learning for the negative aspects of focusing just on outcomes and not the process. It's the moving through the process that is important. Reaching new levels of understanding or skill will come naturally as a consequence. In other words, focus on the journey, not the destination.

P.S. If you made it all the way to the end of this, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Zappos offers the book Tribal Leadership for download as an audio book. Probably worth getting!

Learning Circuit Design

rkuo — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 18:15:00 GMT

Prior to picking up the Boxster as a real track car, I built a pretty cool setup for sim racing.

I settled on using Forza Motorsport 3 with multiple Xbox 360's. This game is neat in that it supports multiple monitors for a panoramic view. In conjunction with the proper wheel, it also supports true clutch manual shifting action.

For the cockpit, the Obutto. The steel frame cockpit is only 300 dollars ... a relative bargain compared to all other cockpits. It doesn't look quite as nice as some, but it functionally gets the job done, and it actually has a real car seat in it.

The steering wheel and pedals ... Fanatec 911 Turbo S wheel and Clubsport pedals. Much stronger force feedback than the Microsoft steering wheel, and, again, it supports a clutch.

Put it all together, and you have something like this.

The only problem was the shifter. The Fanatec shifter is just terrible. It attaches to the wheel, which puts it in entirely the wrong place. It feels resistant, moves around when you shift, and wears out quickly.

Long story short, I decided to fix this myself.

First order of business ... the Fanatec wheel. Via some helpful reverse engineering, we discovered that the shifter position is represented to the wheel by variable voltages on an X-Y grid. OK ... now we know what needs to happen to create a replacement shifter.

LTSpice is an analog circuit design program. I learned how to use it over Christmas break. In the early 90's, we were putting together text files that described circuits. Now, we have a graphical UI that honestly feels like it belongs back in Windows 3.1 ... but I guess it gets the job done.

I used LTSpice to model the X and Y resistor chains that would produce the various voltages. Some equation solving gave me the resistor values, and running the simulation in LTSpice verified the results. See the following.

This was sufficient for modeling the analog behavior of the voltages. It was entirely unhelpful for modeling the behavior of the circuit needed to control the voltages.

I took a gamble and purchased this SST Lightning shifter as the actual replacement. The shifter is machined aluminum, mountable in several ways, and has 8 switches corresponding to different switch positions. Based on the individual switch being activated, my circuit would need to do two things. One, control the voltage being tapped out of each resistor chain. And two, display an number on an LED representing the current shift position.

I went to work thinking through the design. Looked at datasheets online over and over. What a pain this must have been before the Internet! I bought a bunch of parts from Anchor Electronics, and got to work. Breadboarding the circuit took the entire MLK weekend. I made a store run each day due to missing parts and equipment. After numerous tries, I finally I ended up with this.

Soldering out the connections from the SST Lightning was pretty annoying, but doable. In the end, the circuit worked, but was easy to destroy with an errant step or hand, and messy as hell. But it worked.

After a while, I thought there had to be a better way. There was. A printed circuit board.

I eventually descended on Eagle PCB as the design program after doing the requisite Googling. Great choice, and free for projects below a certain size of board.

It takes a lot of time to figure out the exact parts in Eagle that correspond to the physical parts that you need to wire everything up correctly. For some of the confusing parts, I used Sparkfun's part library and catalog of parts to make sure that everything would be consistent.

The really nice thing about EaglePCB is that the autorouting function it has automatically finds a way to path the traces between all the parts you have on the board. For a project with as many chips as I had, it was an absolute necessity.

There is no way to simulate the design behavior in Eagle, just the schematic and layout. Therefore you just look really hard and end up praying for the best. I sent the design from EaglePCB off to batchpcb.com, which is an offshoot of Sparkfun that ... you guessed it ... prints circuit boards. The lead times are long, but the prices are cheap. Here's an example of what I sent.

Eventually, I got back my first PCB. There were some flaws, but very minor ones. I was able to patch the board with a couple of wires. Voila ... my first clean prototype!

The biggest problem I had at this point was that I had picked a rather poor enclosure, and I had also slightly mislaid the drill holes needed for the screw holes in the enclosure. In addition, I hadn't placed a reasonable power connector on the board. The current board would have been entirely sufficient as a one off, but, since the point to me was to learn something, I took a second pass.

I chose this clear enclosure from Sparkfun. It was much larger than necessary, but it had a single large area for connectors. I also figured that, being vetted by Sparkfun, it would probably not have any odd issues with little things being in the way like the previous enclosure that I had ordered. So I added a barrel power jack to the layout, fixed the couple of errors that I had made in the previous schematic, and redid the layout for the larger board format of the new enclosure. Off to batchpcb.com again.

Here you can see the final results. This time assembling everything worked perfectly from start to finish. It's bigger, but it is also entirely self contained like any self respecting electronic gadget should be. More importantly, it worked immediately after all the parts were soldered to it. No fixing up required.

So yeah, mission accomplished. I can make printed circuits now from start to finish. The funny thing is that I've spent far more time learning and doing all this stuff than I have actually playing Forza. Go figure.

iPhone 4 - Quick impressions

rkuo — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 08:49:00 GMT

I stood in line for 13 hours to get the iPhone 4. That was an interesting experience, to say the least ... I'll save that for a later post.

My opinion of the iPhone is that the product really came together with the 3GS. The original iPhone was a revolution in UI and hardware. The 3G was faster still and brought the App Store to the masses. But none of this really came together until the 3GS ... the phone itself was still slowing down the whole experience. Speed is important ... Google knows this in terms of search results, and it's especially true with phones, where the goal is to use it and be on your way as quickly as possible.

So does the iPhone 4 represent another quantum leap in mobile smartphones?

In short, no. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. The iPhone 4 hits on all the important points ... things that aren't as sexy to announce, but that we all need. It is 25% thinner, yet has about 25% more battery life. The screen has 4 times the pixel density in the same size screen, which, while it is a pleasure to view, does not make it much better for reading things from a practical perspective. The processor is faster ... not like the 3G to the 3GS, but it is faster. And the phone has twice the RAM, which is noticeable in subtle ways while browsing ... pages need to be reloaded less frequently when switching between them.

None of this fundamentally changes the way I use the phone. Basically, this is how the phone experience went.

I picked up the phone from the store and headed to work. Waited for the phone transfer to activate itself from my 3GS on AT&T's network and ended up just rebooting the phone to get carrier reception going.

At my desk, I noticed the phone was, in fact, having the dreaded reception issues noted by various pre-orderers ... 1 bar in a known 5 bar zone. I fiddled for a while and watched the bars drop very slowly if held in a certain way and return if held another way. This wasn't always reproducible, but it was common enough. Anyway, I had the good fortune to pick up a bumper at the Apple store as well. I'm not normally a fan of cases ... I don't like the extra bulk in my pocket and I think they detract from the industrial aesthetics of the phone. But, I put on the official bumper and observed the problem was, if not gone, at least tolerable like any other phone.

In hindsight, it's blindingly obvious from an engineering perspective that touching the antenna band is going to mess up the signal. My understanding of this is that the change may have been mandated by new regulations requiring a minimal amount of radiation near the user's head. Therefore, the primary reception area is down at the bottom of the phone instead of in the portion where you put your head to. Antenna design is a black art and Apple probably didn't have time to work out all the kinks before the product cycle was due.

Anyway, I tend not to complain about these things if there's a suitable way to deal with it, and the bumper is just that. I suspect other people will raise a stink about it. It is, after all, not unreasonable to expect your phone to have good reception when held in a normal way. From a design and product release cycle perspective, that's sort of a disaster and I'm curious to see just how Apple ends up handling it.

Anyway, after getting down to using it, and doing the obligatory demos throughout the day, I found it feeling just like my 3GS. It does everything my 3GS did, just slightly better.

Multitasking has, so far, done pretty much nothing for me. Everything I actually needed to multitask was already part of the OS and already multitasking enabled. We'll see if this changes, but, so far, this addition has not made my mobile life any better. I can see streaming Pandora in the background will be somewhat useful, and mobile check-ins / GPS announcement and background uploads will be nice whenever apps get around to really doing something interesting here.

The camera is much improved, as is the ability to record HD video now. I don't use the camera much, tho. And the HD video isn't really accessible unless you pull it off the phone via syncing to your computer. You cannot upload to YouTube or e-mail clips in 720p ... the phone always downsamples it to a very low quality. That's very disappointing, and I think it needs to be fixed.

Finally, I've tried FaceTime a couple of times now. It's fun, but not something I need. If you are addicted to talking to certain people all the time, especially partners or children, you may find this a more engaging way of doing it. I do think the ability to do this more on the go will increase adoption in a way we haven't seen before. But it will take time. Not everyone owns an iPhone 4 yet, and the inability to conference to a PC or Mac is a gaping hole in the strategy.

I feel like we're starting to enter the period with phone hardware where everything that really needed to be in the phone has been added. Think back to how PC's needed to be expanded with sound cards and network cards. Now it's all thrown in along with the kitchen sink. Of course, that's simplifying the issue. 4G speeds will be a huge improvement when it comes out. There's still a ton of improvements to be made in software and services. I'm probably missing a few other things as well.

In conclusion, the iPhone is still the best smartphone on the market. If you have a 2G or 3G model, you will get a lot out of this upgrade. If you have a 3GS ... well, the iPhone 4 is better across the board, but it will not change your life in any particular area. But if you use your phone a lot, the improvements are not all gimmicks. They are in key fundamental areas that will be with you in the background, every day. It may just be worth it.

Track day at Thunderhill

rkuo — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 06:29:00 GMT

Intro

A few months ago, I decided that I would attend a track day. The story of all the stuff I had to do to finally end up at the track is another story ... this blog post is going to be about my actual track day experience this weekend.

First of all, the track I ended up at was Thunderhill Raceway Park. It's really in the middle of nowhere ... a good 3 hour drive from Mountain View and 1.5 hours north of Sacramento. I decided to attend through one of the many driving event/performance driving companies in the area ... in this case, Hooked on Driving. At 285 bucks, this wasn't one of the cheaper events in the area ... but as it turns out, we were running with a really high quality group of people ... so, depending on your attitude, the extra few bucks might indeed be worth it. I think I've seen other events run as low as $180.

Second, the car I was taking up was an 2000 Porsche Boxster (non-S). A fun little car ... not too much punch, but good around corners and very balanced with a decent top speed.

The night before

I booked myself a room in Willows, CA (which is the closest town) for Friday so that I could get a good night's sleep before the event on Saturday. I left Mountain View at 9 PM, stopped for food, and ended up in Willows around 12:20 or so. It was a clean and uneventful drive and time passed more quickly than I expected.

I ended up staying at the Days Inn, which, despite being the second best rated hotel in the area, still seemed like a slightly dumpy outdoors hotel for around 90 bucks a night. For a really sketchy budget stay, there are Super 8's and Baymont Inn's around which have pretty bad reviews on the Internet. Those would run you about 60 bucks. I'm not very picky at all but, in this case, I decided not to risk it. The best of the local hotels seems to be the Holiday Inn Express, at around 115 a night.

The morning

The event registration started at 7 AM and driver meetings started at 7:50, so I woke up around 7:10, got dressed and left around 7:30 AM. With a 10 minute drive to the track, I ended up parking and arriving pretty much right on time. They handed me an envelope with some event materials and I proceeded to sit down in a rather 70's looking building with a bunch of other people.

David Ray, the event organizer, went ahead and greeted everyone, including sponsors, before sending everyone off with their respective groups. The event is organized into A (beginner), B, C and D (experienced) groups. There were also cars with X's on them which I imagine means expert or coach. I ran in beginner, naturally, since this was my first time out.

You get five 20 minute sessions spread out through the day. The A group had a bit of extra orientation after the initial sendoff. Everyone got an introduction to how passing works, how to point people by, where the passing zones were, where to pit in and out, and how the different colored flags at the flag stations work and what they meant.

After that, it was off to the cars. By the time I had arrived earlier, the covered canopy areas had been taken up and I ended up finding my own parking spot. At this point, I grabbed my group letter (A) and a random number (64) and stuck them on the upper passenger side of the windshield to mark my car. This would ensure that the organizers would know what group I was running in and let the photographers later have photographs I wanted already prepared for viewing after the event. I also ditched everything from the car that might bounce around ... one of the requirements for driving on the track.

Soon, it was our turn. Announcements were made over the PA system for the A group to line up at the grid ... an array of about 20-25 cars lined up in columns near the entrance to the main track waiting to enter. I didn't bother coming into the grid until near the end of the call ... they tend to call you about 20 min early and I don't like to spend all that time waiting.

Once you get to the grid, you stand outside your car and look lonely so that a coach will find you. I ended up with a friendly grizzled old guy with glasses and a white beard. I would later find out that he was a former race car driver and ran racing teams for a while. He was also coaching some guy there with a Ferrari F430 Scuderia and Nissan GT-R for some ungodly amount of money. I felt a little guilty but, obviously, I had really lucked out.

I strapped on my helmet ... a Simpson Diamondback. For fans of Top Gear, this is the same helmet the Stig wears ... in other words, pretty high end. The day was starting out overcast, so I changed out the face shield for the stock clear one instead of the aggressive looking reflective blue shield. All drivers are required to have some sort of SA 2000 or 2005 certified helmet ... you can rent one from the track if you need to, but in this case I had decided to buy and bring my own. What can I say, I'm a fanboy.

They started out with letting the coaches take the car out for a couple of laps to show you around the track. Then they switched off and let the students drive around slowly. I was a little surprised by the couple of blind turns over hills and the relatively sparse need for shifting on the course. Combined with the total lack of walls, this makes the track pretty beginner friendly. Anyhow, the session seemed to end just as it was getting started.

After the run, each group goes back to the building to meet up and do a download/debriefing. The instructor emphasized the need to give point-bys to faster cars and showed a few more basics on apexing, etc. Most of this I knew from reading up on racing online.

After the download, I had some free time to walk around and look at the other cars. There was an impressive array of cars here ... most quite decently high end. At least three different Ferrari F430's and an Audi R8 were among the stars, along with more Porsche's than you could shake a stick at, including one brand spanking new Boxster Spyder. My old Boxster was not going to win any trophies against these beasts, especially with me behind the wheel.

Many of these cars were clearly full-on race cars ... carrying full body liveries and being hauled to the track and back in trucks. This was no joke ... lots of money and effort was going into getting these cars onto the track and back.

Second session. One nice thing I started to appreciate was that Hooked on Driving had placed cones in the proper locations for turn-in points, apex points, passing zones, etc. However, in this session, I was going into turns way too hot and not using the brakes hard or early enough. In addition, I was so focused on the road that I really had no idea where the flag stations were. On the bright side, I didn't really have a problem spotting cars riding my ass and giving them a point by.

We went back to the building for our second download. Then as were doing the download, we heard thew news come thru that someone in another session had flipped their Acura NSX at Turn 8. Totaled. Luckily, the driver walked away fine.

Right before lunch, we hopped in coach cars to get a ride along with an experienced driver taking the course at speed. I got in a BMW sedan (not too many Ferrari's to go around, unfortunately). It seemed pretty controlled and smooth and not as much of a roller coaster ride as I expected, although I was surprised at how much the tires were squealing. In hindsight, stock tires tend to warn you a lot as you approach their limits, so that was fine. Still, when I was driving I could barely hear my tires over the wind noise, if at all.

After lunch

Afterwards, lunch. Pretty generic American style fare ... cole slaw, mac and cheese, BBQ, etc. I was hungry, so good enough. David Ray gave another quick set of announcements and asked if anyone wanted some advice on particular turns, to which the NSX driver responded "Turn 8!"

I tried to mess around with my iPhone but it was a real waiting game ... the Wi-Fi wasn't free and the service was AT&T Edge with terrible service. Go figure. Not exactly an urban center, I guess.

Third session after lunch ... we really hammered down on my braking ... smooth but firm input and release, and braking earlier overall. Definitely became much more comfortable as the third session ended. By now, the sun was out and things were toasty. I also noticed I was getting passed a lot ... but by Vipers, 911's, and Ferrari's, so I didn't really feel so bad.

After the third session, I went to gas up. There's fuel right on site, but at $4.99 per gallon for 91 octane, it was damn expensive. Still, I bought it. They also had 100 octane for $7.99/gallon ... I really wanted some, but decided not to mess around at that point in time. Finally, they had 110 octane, leaded ... real race fuel that you don't dump in an ordinary car.

I also noted the demographics of the people at the event ... nearly all older white males with the occasional wife. A few asian males, typically younger ... no older ones that I saw. One or two hispanics ... no blacks at all.

At this point, the downloads after the sessions were really more optional. Still, it felt like the sessions felt very quick, even at twenty minutes, and the time waiting between sessions (roughly an hour) also seemed to go too quickly. I found the time a little stressful ... almost like waiting at a tournament would be ... but I was enjoying the process of improving on the track.

My fourth and fifth sessions were more of the same ... getting better at taking the correct lines, braking enough to smoothly take the line without squealing the tires much, etc. By the end of the day, I had made a lot of progress and mostly had all the lines down, especially the last tricky ones at 14 and 15.

Post session

At the end of all sessions, the coaches went out again for some fun runs. The F430 Scuderia was ungodly loud.

The professional photography crew (gotbluemilk.com) was operating out of a trailer and selling your specific photos for 25 a pop or 60 for the whole day's set. I really didn't have any other options for photos so I went ahead and spent the money. They burned them to a CD for me and I was on my way.

Another generic BBQ picnic dinner was served at 5:30 ... which, oddly enough, I ate ravenously, despite having eaten a full lunch at noon. Racing actually does take quite a bit out of you.

I suddenly realized I had no idea what my actual top speed or lap times were at the end of the day. I do know I got up to the top of 4th gear on the long straight, so I estimate that got me to around 115 mph. Not bad.

Around 6'ish they opened up the track for a free track walk. People were allowed to walk or bike the track and observe all the little details they can't see when taking the track at speed. I walked about 3/4 of the track but decided to cut back to my car and head home as the walk was getting exhausting in my casual sneakers ... doubly so since I was tired already. I hopped in the car, gassed up again, and headed home.

I felt a real sense of confidence on the way back. None of the curves or turns on the street were anywhere near what I had experienced. I knew what the limits of the car were at high speed now ... if there was a need to be worried, I would know it now.

Summary

All in all, I found the experience rewarding and expect to do it at least a few more times. I feel like my driving ability has increased significantly from one session and will be hammered in solidly in a few more. On the back end, the mechanical learning I've done on the car has been very helpful to me as well.

Racing is mentally taxing. However, like everything, it's a matter of pattern recognition. The initial inputs are overwhelming and you get tunnel vision just focusing on the road. Experience under fire will turn that into a wider field of perception and muscle memory will simplify the process.

On the other hand, it's clear to me that racing as a hobby is quite a money pit as well as a time investment. I spent 500 bucks overall just for the one day event itself, not to mention the time to drive back and forth. Consumables like tires/brake pads/brake rotors and risk of damage to the car + towing costs, etc, also have to be factored in at some point, which just means it really costs even more.

I honestly have drawn some sort of mental analogy right now where cars are a real life version of Pokemon for many of these folks. The machine is an important part of the equation and that is massively affected by the money involved. The bottom line is that I'm skeptical that I'll willing to invest either on a long term commitment basis. But I'm keeping an open mind for now.

We'll see how it goes ... my intention is to engage right now at a moderate level until the important learning tapers off. If I enjoy it more to continue beyond that ... then so be it.

My iPad comments

rkuo — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 07:55:00 GMT

For those of you still living in caves, Apple released its iPad last week.

My original opinion of the iPad, upon hearing of the announcement, was that I absolutely did not want one. I have plenty of experience with Tablet PC's and I did not see any sort of reason to repeat that experience with the iPad. Tablets are excellent for annotation, art, and not much else. The stylus is a horrible mode of interaction for a mouse based computing environment.

The turning point for me came when I decided, around early March, that I wanted to subscribe to some magazines and newspapers. Not being a particularly paper sort, I decided to try getting them on the Kindle. It quickly became apparent that there was no way that the content was going to look good on a regular Kindle, so I looked at the Kindle DX. At 489 dollars, the Kindle DX offers a 9.7" e-ink screen over the standard 6" Kindle, and decidedly more screen space as a result.

That price point drove me to look at the iPad. The iPad is infinitely more flexible ... serving as a web browser, media player, mail station, and running thousands of different apps in high color and resolution. And the base model costs just 499. The only thing the Kindle has going for it is the e-ink screen, and even the usefulness of that is debateable as reading in white text on black backgrounds on the iPad is quite easy on the eyes. The supposed battery life advantage of the Kindle also does not exist. The Kindle aggressively drains its own battery over the course of a week, meaning that it is most likely dead if you don't pay attention to it for a while. The iPad actually lasts for 10 hours of usage ... and it lasts far longer in standby mode that a week if you actually do leave it undocked or charged. And you are more likely to have it charged because it is useful for other things.

I chose to get the 16GB model. I just couldn't perceive what I would want out of the larger storage models.

The iPad succeeds mainly on the strength of the software. The hardware is just what you would have expected ... it really is just a large iPhone minus things like the camera. Where it stops being just a "large iPhone" is that Apple took the time to redesign all the apps for the large screen. Books look like actual books with bindings and pages sitting on wooden shelves. Contacts and Calendars have the appearance of large pages flipping and bookmarks and wooden tiling. Entire photo albums can be previewed and thrown back by pinch/zoom gestures. The software does just well enough to make you feel like you're playing with a bit of those magic computers you see in all sci-fi movies and tv shows.

With all that said, I have little use for contacts or calendars on an iPad ... those belong on my phone. Photos ... not a big deal. I can check mail on my phone very easily, although mass replying is a different story. In short, the iPad is still a fancy toy and not entirely practical for most. But there are no lies about what it does ... it is certainly an excellent and well thought out product that should not have to apologize for what it is.

The iPad does enough actually productive things for me to keep it. These four things are as follows.

One, it is a very nice book reader due to iBooks and the Kindle app by Amazon. I intend to get rid of my actual Kindle now.

Two, it has exceptional battery life ... literally 9-10 hours of continuous mixed usage.

Three, the remarkable lightness makes it a palatable alternative to carry to the coffee shop or a lecture or a friend's house where you might not want to bring a laptop due to bulk and/or battery life.

Four, it does make for an excellent bed/couch surfing companion.

I am not going to count the picture frame functionality, which might appeal to some but not to me.

The unspoken fifth thing here is that the form factor itself, I believe, has tremendous hidden potential. For use in ambient interfaces where keyboards are not desirable ... kiosks, information wall hanging, vehicular control interfaces ... the iPad could revolutionize the way we interact with our world. I believe we're just scratching the surface of what's to come. But please note that I don't think releasing new apps for the iPad willy nilly just because it has a bigger screen is going to amount to much for most applications. Sadly, I suspect that is what will happen for a while. Mark my words, tho ... more innovation with the interface mechanics is the key to real progress.

The last thing I want to mention is that the battery life of the iPad points to something fundamentally wrong with today's laptops. The iPad is pretty damn close to being a useful device for me doing actual work. With some better native software and web apps, I would have in the iPad an incredibly sleek, instantly responsive, and exceptionally durable and long lasting portable computing device. Why do laptops last 2-3 hours and feel slower and heavier? The computing world is doing something wrong here. I look forward to the day when I feel comfortable doing all my portable computing from the iPad (or an equivalent).

Book review - Superfreakonomics

rkuo — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 09:19:00 GMT

Freakonomics was an entertaining book of the Malcolm Gladwell variety ... unintended consequences of decisions that were borne out by careful statistics gathering made for a quick, interesting, and ultimately, very successful read. Some years later, we've been given Superfreakonomics. Being a sequel, the audience should be naturally expecting more of the same.

I'll just state it up front ... this book feels like a cash in. While I found most of the stories I read in Freakonomics to be original, Superfreakonomics has very little in the way of a common theme. Furthermore, the book devolves from Freakonomics in that it seems to simply talk about interesting stories or experiments. Most of these have hardly anything to do with economics, experimentation, or carefully selected statistical measurement whatsoever.

A couple of experiments and anecdotes are ridiculously sloppy ... for example, studies on the male-female wage gap are considered, and then examples of transgendered subjects are used to change gender while holding other things constant. I can't even begin to explain how obviously invalid such a "control' would be. They do acknowledge this somewhat ... but then why even bring it up? It's useless data for a book.

Rehashing old news happens a lot in this book. For example, the Milgram experiments are discussed, and so are the negative effects of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Kitty Genovese murder is discussed as well, albeit in more detail than we typically get and leading to a conclusion a little less cynical than one normally gets out of the subject (the reporters might have manufactured the unhelpfulness of the residents to generate outrage).

That isn't to say I didn't read some interesting things in this book. We see that teaching monkeys how currency works is possible, and then we learn that the male monkeys eventually start using this currency to pay female monkeys for sex. Oops, I spoiled the ending. We also learn that kids who are born at such an age that they are oldest right when baseball season starts have a dispropotionate likelihood of being picked. This continues on a self-reinforcing cycle throughout their later years. We get a whole slough of interesting data on the economics of prostitution, including a fairly convincing argument that pimps provide more relative value than realtors.

Anyway, to wrap up here ... you will learn some interesting things from this book if you read it. It just doesn't seem in the same vein as Freakonomics. And you can easily finish it in an afternoon if you're a quick read, so it won't be a total waste.

Book review - The Art of Learning

rkuo — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 04:49:00 GMT

On the way back from Houston last week, I dug into The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin. Josh was a remarkably gifted former chess wunderkind in his youth whose exploits were chronicled in the movie "Searching for Bobby Fischer". In an unusual turn of events, Josh changed his focus to tai chi competition in his early 20's and became a world champion there as well. He now is focused on brazilian jiu jitsu.

The entire theme of the book is essentially that Josh does not feel like he is gifted specifically at chess or tai chi. He attributes his success to a love of learning and details the specific pieces of it that he has observed throughout his career.

Let's cover a few of the interesting chapters.

Losing to win

Losing is tough. Nobody really likes it, per se.

On the other hand, you must be willing to lose to win. It's as simple as that.

Josh tells anecdotes of particular competitors in childhood who collapsed immediately when faced with a truly tough situation or their first big loss. He also talks about kids who instinctually avoided tougher enemies ... partly because the prospect of disappointment from their parents was so daunting.

What Josh did was different. He sought out unfamiliar competitors and uncomfortable styles of play. In losing ... in exceeding the levels of his comfort and his game ... he raised himself up time and time again.

Even in adulthood, he tells the story of a large, dominating individual named Frank who slammed Josh around for months in tai chi training. Josh willingly submitted to this in order to better himself. In the end, Frank stops practicing with him in just a few fights after Josh finally rises above his level. Instead of viewing Josh's success as a new opportunity to better himself, he shrinks away. Frank only likes winning.

To be blunt, I know many people like Frank. A lot of people derive satisfaction from the act of winning. I have always felt it is better to appreciate a hard earned victory. In fact, many of my friends know that I will try certain things precisely because I am terrible at them. And I have never once been disappointed by my ability to become decent at something with enough effort.

I am freqently disappointed when I see people fail to challenge themselves, even when there is no cost to them at all except a little bit of ego. If there is nothing to lose, why not try it? When I truly apply myself to certain problems and find myself overcoming what once seemed incomprehensible and impossible, I feel gratified. This has ranged from coordination in drumming syncopation to being able to tease out and find a tiny mathematical bug in some MPEG-2 code that was causing red colors to bleed all over the place. I feel like this lesson is one I've already internalized well, so it was gratifying to see it put to paper.

Two approaches to learning

This chapter talks about two mindsets to learning.

The first, an "entity" mindset, describes the kind of person that ascribes success to an innate level of ability. "I am smart at this."

The second, an "incremental" mindset, describes a person that believes success is a result of hard work. "I should have tried harder" or "I got it because I worked very hard at it".

The research shows that incremental theorists are far more likely to rise to the level of the game. Entity types are far more likely to have a learned helpnessless response when encountering failure, to the point where, after hitting a roadblock on a tough situation, the loss affects previously mastered problems.

It should come as no surprise that the incremental approach is the better one. For yourself and with kids, the idea is to compliment effort and speak of everything as a process of effort and time. Kids are not dumb and know that results matter as well, so you shouldn't dodge the issue when a setback occurs. Simply consider losses to be part of the learning process and wins to be enjoyed, but in a transient fashion.

The soft zone

The soft approach embraces adversity. The hard approach resists potential obstacles. The author compares it to walking in the rain to your car ... do you tense up, scrunch over and run to your car as quickly as possible? Or do you accept the rain and not let it affect you ... perhaps even try to enjoy it as you walk?

This analogy resonated with me significantly because, strangely enough, I had found myself recently thinking about this very issue before I even read this chapter. Why, I wondered, did I tend to try and cover myself and run to the car when it wasn't going to help much at all? Running does not really keep much drier, but it certainly makes me feel stressed out. So lately I've taken to simply walking normally and letting the rain fall on me.

Back to the point. You are concentrating on an important game. Suddenly, a jack hammer starts going off outside. Or perhaps some fans start heckling you. What do you do?

The best players can take the noise and turn it to their advantage. Spike Lee, for example, would constantly heckle Reggie Miller courtside. Seems good, right? Not when you realized that Reggie Miller was using him as fuel for his fire ... blowing out the Knicks time after time.

Adversity doesn't go away. We don't live in a perfect world. Becoming flexible, like a reed in the wind, instead of fracturing under pressure, is extremely important. Turning such events to your psychological advantage is a key element of competitive psychology.

Other notes and conclusion

In recounting his road to the Push Hands Tai Chi world championship, I was shocked at the extreme level of cheating present at the Tai Chi world championships in Taiwan. Pretty much everything you can think of was done to favor the local teams ... from changing the rules right at the beginning of the tournament (of course, the local teams knew well in advance), to trying to wear out the foreign teams with another mandatory tournament, to simply not counting scored points. It was absolutely disgusting to read.

It is a testament to Josh that his extreme depth made him so far superior to his opponent that he was able to overcome truly staggering levels of dishonesty by the officials and still win. My parents are from Taiwan, even if I'm not, so I feel some sense of cultural embarassment.

The world Josh has lived in is, in a word, intense. The extreme levels of intensity required to perform at a competitive level are daunting. I feel as if I should engage in some sort of competitive activity to keep my mind sharp, but my fear is that it will dominate my time to the exclusion of other activities. Not to make excuses, but considering it further, that's a completely valid problem to have with the whole thing. What I need is a way to compete without it sucking up too much of my time. I'm not sure my mindset can handle that, though!

Many of the concepts in the book rang true as soon as I read them. We learn by practicing and honing our minds to process patterns, not by memorizing rules. Our brains are essentially big, giant, pattern recognition machines. Internalizing those patterns is a matter of repetition, deep analysis, and then taking numerical insights to an unconscious level.

To sum up, I absolutely recommend this book. It gives you valuable no nonsense insight into the mindset of a winner, and it demonstrates the importance of a healthy and productive mindset. Josh is phenomenally attuned to his own psychology and is more capable of expressing those thoughts in the written word than most authors I have read. Easily worth the money.

Optimize your life #11 - A case for a good night's sleep

rkuo — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 23:28:00 GMT

Let me just say this up front. I love sleep. Not too much, not too little. Just a good eight hours of sleep a day. I don't like forcing myself awake and it really hurts when I do it.

But let's get to the point. Sleep is important. And you've heard it a million times. By now, if you haven't been living in a cave, you've surely read the stories about how studies have shown that naps just after lunch boost productivity tremendously. Or that driving sleepy (being awake for about 20-24 hours) is the equivalent of driving drunk. In fact, animals kept awake artificially literally die after a couple of weeks.

And yet, I would bet a good majority of you still treat your sleep schedules as disposable and flexible. Something to be traded against getting more done. Or something that just has to be sacrificed for other things.

My question to you is this. Why, as adults, are we so cavalier about our sleep schedules?

Actually, it's not that puzzling. There are a lot of concrete things that need to get done at specific times. Waking up for work, dealing with a crying baby, cramming just a little bit extra for that test. And the downsides aren't that obvious. Sure, you're a little tired, but you're awake, and still getting things done, right? Maybe, you don't feel so great, but no harm done.

Well, here's the case for the other side of sleep. This is the attempt to make concrete what you're actually losing when you trade off an hour of sleep to go to the gym or make an early meeting.

Consider this first. We evolved sleep. Yes ... in the grand scheme of things, we evolved over many millenia so that we would leave ourselves comatose and vulnerable to predators and attackers for 8 hours a night. Doesn't sound like a good idea, really. Why would this happen? It follows that there have to be some serious, serious benefits to sleep that outweigh the tremendous negatives.

For example, world class Tetris players dream of falling blocks at night. I assure you that if you invest yourself heavily in any activity, you will probably dream about the activity. Or perhaps you'll recall when you've had something interesting happen to you one day and that night you awaken groggily finding yourself dreaming about the event. The only difference is that your dream version is oddly twisted or random in nature. I would argue that your brain is replaying the events of the day because it is wiring you to better handle that situation in the future.

From personal experience, I can also attest to this in a different area. While Rock Band and drumming may not be what you consider to be the most productive endeavor ... you can put that aside and treat it as the mechanics of any activity. Let me just say that I've had more cases than I can count where I try to play a difficult pattern or song on the drums for hours. I'll come back to it and nail it the first time after a week. Or even three weeks.

The big question is "What happened in between?" I certainly didn't leave off just before the point where I was going to be able to play the pattern and then come back three weeks later and pick up right where I left off. Something changed while I was not even playing Rock Band at all ... my brain and body indisputably rewired itself to better handle that specific activity. In fact, I have learned more about how I learn from playing Rock Band than I have from other activities, but we'll leave that for another blog post.

The book Brain Rules put a lot of my previous thoughts on this into focus. It's an excellent book that delves into how the brain works, and I highly recommend it.

An anecdote from the book runs as follows. Students were given a set of problems to answer. The problems had two approaches. The first was a standard and traditional approach. The second was a shortcut solution that required some leaps of insight to arrive at. All students are given 12 hours between the first and second set of problems. The interesting part, of course, is how the students are divided up; one group simply has twelve hours pass, but the second groups gets 8 hours of sleep somewhere in those twelve hours.

Controlling for all kinds of variables and run every which way you can think of, the students who don't get the sleep discover the shortcut 20% of the time. The ones who do get sleep discover the shortcut 60% of the time.

Hmm. Ever had that "shower moment" when you came up with some really great idea or solution? It's probably because you took a break and let your brain recharge itself.

Let's hear about other kinds of evidence. Sleep deprivation appears to accelerate the aging process. Healthy 30 year olds restricted to four hours of sleep a night over six days had parts of their body chemistry performing at the level of a 60 year old. Yikes! And it takes a week to recover from that. Want to keep looking fresh? Get sleep!

Military studies indicated that losing one night of sleep resulted in a 30 percent loss in cognitive skill. Losing two nights bumped that up to 60 percent. And, lest you think this doesn't add up ... being restricted to 6 hours per night over 5 nights resulted in the same performance as someone who hadn't slept for 48 hours.

Oddly enough, while you may feel like nothing important could be going on while you rest, nothing could be further from the truth. Your brain is not doing nothing while you sleep. In fact, based on scans, it is positively hyperactive. In that context and given everything you've read above, you can form a pretty reasonable hypothesis about what is happening. Your brain is constantly replaying and optimizing your activities while you sleep in ways that will make you better at them when you awaken. Researchers can see this behavior in rats traversing a maze. The neural pattern that fires when they work their way through a maze can be seen firing as they sleep. Only it happens faster, and thousands of times over. That's what happening when you dream about skiing, biking, or whatever your choice of hobby is.

The bottom line is that sleep is not just how you rest your body. Sleep correlates directly with your ability to learn. And that learning ... well, I've said this before, but learning is everything. Learning is so important that we humanly evolved to put our bodies at risk for eight hours a night just so that we would be a lot better at it.

So my challenge to you is this. Do everything you possibly can to defend your sleep schedule. If it's out of whack right now, take some big steps to restore some balance in your life on this front. It should be clear to you now that getting the proper amount of sleep is absolutely essential to your ability to improve. Respect that and don't let those precious hours of sleep get taken from you!

Book review - Emergency

rkuo — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 18:28:00 GMT

So, I finally managed to tear through another book. The one is called "Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life", and it's written by Neil Strauss.

The book chronicles one author's quest to be able to survive in case the system breaks down. Survivalists like to say ... we are all only three days away from total chaos, and that's the three days you can survive without water, not be incredibly hungry, etc. The scary thing is ... it may not be the way most of us are used to looking at the world, but it's true.

Some helpful acronyms to know if you're speaking survivalist lingo, by the way:

WTSHTF (When The *** Hits The Fan)
EOTWAWKI (End Of The World As We Know It)
BOB, BOV, BOL (Bug Out Bag, Vehicle, Location)

Warren Buffett has often been quoted as saying that your lot in life has a lot to do with timing and placement ... where and when, in other words. He's been famously quoted as saying something to effect of "Bill Gates may be a billionaire today, but if he had been born two centuries ago, he probably would have been eaten by a bear".

Personally, this resonates with me. Most of us would probably be eaten by a bear. It wasn't that long ago that all people could worry about was how to keep a roof over their heads and where the next meal would come from. Society has built up such a tremendous amount of infrastructure around us that we end up thinking and worrying about completely different problems that the ones our ancestors were designed to face. It's amazing, but also a little unsettling.

The chapters in the book are vanishingly small and plentiful ... many running at the length of just a small anecdote of two to three pages. It's not wrong, but perhaps a bit different. I think the design is meant to capture some of the random stories and short thoughts that chronicle his experience.

The novel takes a while to get going. I found myself already halfway way through the book and Neil was still recounting his experiences with trying to get an second citizenship in another country. It's incredibly expensive to do if you don't just move there ... tiny countries basically sell citizenship in return for investment or job creation. The US doesn't make it easy on you either ... in the aftermath of 9/11, the government has made it very difficult to keep international bank accounts and they want to keep an eye on everything you do just so they can try to gank your tax dollars even after you stop being a citizen.

While he waits for the citizenship to go through, however, the pace picks up. The author starts taking gun lessons, wilderness survival training, knife fighting classes, and edible plant walks. While the novelization of the details is light, the details are fun and interesting every time you do get them.

I particularly enjoyed the chapter on his training at Gunsite. The man who recommends the training program to Neil tells him "People with guns are dangerous. Gunsite graduates are deadly."

Neil flys out there ... and btw, it's still quite easy to check a weapon on a plane. The instructor tells them at the beginning of the class "You don't rise to the occasion. You default to your level of training. When the stress hits, you will only be half as good as your best day of recent training." I'm sure this applies to many situations, not just shooting! People learn by doing!

He picks up some interesting tidbits. Shooting for the head with a pistol is risky because the skull is excellent protection, meaning a bullet can simply glance off. If you have a clear shot, you go for the eye. If you are preparing to go into a gunfight, you bring a shotgun, not a pistol. Pistols are portable self defense, but low damage weaponry. Colonel Cooper recommeneded a 12-gauge shotgun with an 18.5 inch barrel.

The class concludes with the following advice. "Be safe, and be good to everyone you meet ... but always have a plan to kill them." Funny guys.

In CERT (Community Emergency Response Teams) class, they start off with the following.

"If there's a big disaster, you cannot expect assistance for how many days?
"Three to five days."
"So who's going to get you when there's an emergency?"
"Nobody."
"Nobody is coming to your aid in a disaster. You have to be independent."

In retrospect, what happened during Katrina wasn't surprising. Federal and local rescue planners already know it will take forever to get to survivors. The indignance of the rest of the country is because we're ignorant. Apparently, in the event of a major earthquake, it could take as long as 30 days to restore water everywhere. The average person needs a gallon of water per day to survive. Drink from the water heater if you have a house.

On the edible plant walks in California, Neil asks what the parsley like plant is that he keeps seeing all over the place. One student quips "California parsley surprise". The lead explains more seirously. "Hemlock. Dead in 30 minutes." Guess I'm not going to eat any plants out here. In fact, the walk ends up being peppered with interesting trivia about how eating so and so plant will kill you in such a way (usually not a pleasant way).

The knife instructor's slogan is "Cogito ergo armatum sum." I think, therefore I am armed. In addition to forging, sharpening, and the usual lessons on the types of swings and strikes, perhaps the most brutal part of the book is when the knife instructor teaches him how to slaughter, gut and skin a goat for food. Although it's just words on a page, the description of the act as he cuts the goat's throat in front of the instructor made my queasy. I'm pretty sure that if I did this in front of a friend, they would think differently of me. Neil has the same thought as his girlfriend waits in the car. But there wasn't a time long ago that everyone had to do this...and it was normal, because it was part of staying alive. How can our moral standards be so different today? It can't be possible for people to be bad because they slaughter a goat, or else everyone centuries ago would have been a bad person.

All in all, I found the book to be a rather light read, but still very informative. Many of the instructors and other characters he meets are surprisingly quotable. It would have been nice to get more in depth coverage of each of the topics in the book, but I suppose that wasn't really the point.

In the end, I think what you learn from this book, aside from the useful trivia, is that survivalism and training, isn't, as a practical matter, that useful of a skill to pick up right now. On the list of things people die from, disasters are really, really low on the list. But if the nagging sense that you wouldn't know what to do when a crisis hits is bothering you ... if knowing you're ready for anything makes you walk around with a little more confidence and a little less fear ...than these folks aren't as crazy as they sound. After all, there's a lot of mental security built in when you're at the top of the food chain.

Go-kart racing

rkuo — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 00:46:00 GMT

Last Wednesday, some folks from my team went to a self funded offsite. The activity? Go-kart racing.

As I drove up to the location, I noted that the building was a large warehouse like affair. Indoors? Interesting.

As we walked in, it was obvious that there were a few regulars on the track already ... but otherwise, fairly empty. Not unexpected given the time of day.

I filled out the requisite forms, including the standard "If you die, it's not our fault" stuff. The cashier girl handed me a quarter for the locker and a complimentary head sock. Honestly, I didn't know what a head sock was, but I figured it out pretty quickly from looking at it. It's a balaclava ... aka a ski mask. Presumably this is to keep your head from catching something from the helmets. I was actually pretty happy about getting the balaclava, because I've been meaning to get one for whenever I go skiing again.

We hopped into some jumpsuits, watched a safety video, and got to racing. 10 min of practice, followed by 5 min of qualifying and 15 min of real racing.

Getting strapped in was pretty easy. They also make you wear a life preserver like neck brace while you drive. When you get into the kart, the smell of exhaust is quite strong.

Racing the go-karts is a lot of work. The kart is shaking all around you, and it takes quite a bit of effort to fight the steering. This wouldn't be so bad, but given the races are 15 minutes, that's definitely enough to make it a workout. However, I wasn't that tired at the end of the race, so I'm guessing this gets easier fairly quickly.

At first, I was drifting / skidding around corner. I found this easier to do, but I knew in the back of my head this was probably slowing me down. So I started experimenting with slowing down and going into turns with full traction. I never really got the consistent hang of it, but did get a few good lap times here and there as a result.

In the middle of the race, I felt a sharp rap against my side, as if I had run through a branch of a tree. There were no obstacles on the track (or trees), so I'm fairly certain one of the flag wavers in the middle of the track let his flag hang down when I was driving by. Consequently, I have a huge bruise on the side of my chest right under my armpit that is healing right now.

Of course, my curiousity was piqued after the race, so I learned some basic racing technique later from a friend. The idea is to:

1. Accelerate as much as possible thru straightaways.

2. Brake as much as possible as late as possible so that you are at the correct speed going into the turn.

3. Stay off the gas around the turn, and accelerate as you are come out of the turn.

Drifting/losing traction is usually bad for speed, so the idea is to do the above three things without slipping or skidding. On most sharp turns, you tend to want to take an outside in type of turn, but the line you should be following around the track is shown to you already before you race, so you don't really need to try and figure this out yourself in this case.

Interestingly, when I came out of the building and drove off in my actual car, I had this urge to drive very quickly. My brain was thinking "Why isn't the car slipping a little?" and "Why am I not gunning the accelerator?" Turning the wheel also felt abnormally effortless due to the return of power steering. I compensated quickly, so no harm done. =)

Not surprisingly, at the end of the day my arms felt pretty wobbly. The next day, my left arm felt sore and difficult to extend ... but not my right. That must be because we were constantly turning left during the race.

Anyway, while I found go-karting somewhat interesting, I can't say I'm planning on making this a regular hobby. At least I got a free balaclava out of it ... a fact which I proudly demonstrated to my friends later that evening. It's quite a menacing clothing item!

Fruity pebbles are for kids. Try miracle berries!

rkuo — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 04:30:00 GMT

In non tech related matters, I got a chance last week to try a quirky little food that I've had my eye on for years.

The miracle fruit (see the Wikipedia page) was discovered (by Europeans, god bless our Euro-centric culture) in 1725 when an explorer noticed native Africans chewing the berry before meals. In a nutshell, when the fruit is chewed, one's sense of taste is altered such that sour foods taste sweet!

Pretty crazy, huh? In fact, it represent such a huge change in one's sense that most people start questioning whether or not it's legal when they hear what it does. (The answer is yes, of course, it is legal.)

Reading the New York Times article on flavor-tripping parties certainly did nothing to lessen my curiosity. And, as an aside, the name "flavor tripping" certainly does nothing to lessen the questionability of the activity. So when a friend casually mentioned hearing about miracle fruit, my ears perked up and we decideed to make a little event of it.

The berries themselves don't keep very long ... apparently, you have to eat them within a couple of days of being picked. Sorry, but I don't schedule my activities around fruit. So instead, we opted to try a set of packaged tablets from ThinkGeek.

The day of, we made a field trip to the local Safeway and wandered through the aisles grabbing anything that looked tasty or tart. The cashier gave us an odd glance or two as we checked out single fruits of several different types, but nothing we couldn't handle.

The tablets appear to be manufactured here in the States but are courtesy of some "pan-biotic" Taiwanese company. We put 911 on speed dial just in case.

The tablet itself must be taken by dissolving it all over your tongue. Resist the temptation to wash it down like medication ... the effect is produced by binding the active compound of the berries to your taste buds, so just suck on the tablet like candy. To me, the tablet tasted chalky, sort of like a slightly sweet vitamin, but not acidic at all. You should be through it in a couple of minutes.

Then the fun begins.

Lemons - Sweet!

Limes - Also sweet.

Oranges - Awesome. Kind of like an orange without the rind.

Tabasco sauce - tasty sweet at first! The heat hits you slightly afterwards.

Sriracha hot sauce - No difference. Just spicy.

Chocolate - tastes the same.

Chocolate pudding - not much different. But I do love me some pudding.

Tomatos - Awesomely sweet. You know that whole debate about whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable? Officially a fruit with miracle berries.

Strawberries - Fantastic!

Vodka - Still strong, but goes down smoother.

Guinness - Much less bitter, even slightly sweet.

Pickles - Sweet and crunchy.

Dried fruit - No difference. Except dried apples tasted kind of bland. Honestly, tho ... could've just been the apples.

Peppered beef jerky - very slightly sweeter. No effect on the peppery taste.

Olives - no change.

Jamaican ginger ale - No difference.

Towards the end of our flavor trip, we ate another tomato and realized the effect was wearing off. That was about 40 minutes in. We also slowly came to the realization that we were surrounded by half eaten snacks and various fruits, all of which needed cleaning up.

I think it's worth trying a range of foods just to see for yourself, even if you kind of know they aren't going to work. Also, it should be pretty obvious from the above, but drinking alcohol is a lot easier after eating a miracle berry ... so be sure to pace yourself. Then again, maybe getting a little tipsy isn't so bad.

Overall, I would sum it up as definitely worth trying, and a lot of fun all around. I'm curious to see what an overnight shipment of a berry or two will do, but I'm sure we'll get to that at some point. Do it with friends ... I think a party tasting is an excellent idea and is now definitely in the cards.

I bought another computer - Dell Inspiron Mini 9

rkuo — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 03:22:00 GMT

I really don't need another one, but at these prices, it sort of made sense.

Since TV is sort of a background activity for me, it's nice to be able to surf the web or look up things that pop into my head while I watch the tube. It's also not bad to have an available computer sitting around in the living room when guests come over ... after all, god forbid someone should visit and not be able to check their e-mail, update their Facebook status, or look random things up on the Internet.

I still have my ThinkPad X300 (which by the way, is ranking pretty low on my list of satisfactory computer purchases). The problem with using that out in the living room is that A. I have to actually be here and B. It's a pain to unhook all the cables and reattach them just so that I can use the laptop in a different room. And, really, all I want is something I can leave out in the living room and surf the web on.

For 200 bucks, the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 much fits the bill. It would have been more like 185, but CA seems to see fit to charge tax and some sort of bogus recycling fee.

So now it's sitting out on the living room couch. The speed is completely satisfactory ... the only thing this little computer can't handle is YouTube HD video. Google Docs and Apps work great. 1024x600 is just enough to surf the web without wanting to claw my eyes out.

My main complaints with the Mini, if I have to list them, are the following.

One, the keyboard is unusually tiny and has a strange layout. Now, I'm used to tiny keyboards, and I can get used to this one, but the size of this thing is definitely pushing it. The apostrophe key, in particular, is on the bottom of the keyboard instead of next to the Enter key, which is causing me to accidentally hit Enter a LOT.

The touchpad also has a bad habit of activating when my palm touches it while I'm typing. This leads to all sorts of strange things happening when I type into the browser as the cursor jumps to odd places.

That's pretty much all of the legitimate complaints I can think of. Disk space and RAM are barely there, but since I'm only using it to surf the web, it's more than sufficient. And, like I said, the Mini 9 browses the web quite speedily. I could remedy that by buying a bigger Mini, but that would cost literally twice as much. I'll live.

Ubuntu is a pretty amazing OS for being free. I built my entire home network around it using VM's just to re-familiarize myself with Linux, and, while the whole process was and still is quite painful, it manages to get the job done. If you can ignore everything else about the OS and just surf the web, it works even for normal people.

Honestly, I always wondered why it took so long to commoditize computer hardware to these levels. I've always found it frustrating to see computer power rise and rise and just see the extra power get sucked up by a bloated operating system and applications. Palm OS still has some of the most productive apps I've ever used and it runs on a 33 MHz processor. Meanwhile, my 200 MHz Windows Mobile phone takes 5 seconds to show me a freaking menu. Ridiculous.

In short, a lot of computing usability advances have nothing to do with the power of the available platform and everything to do with how we make use of the existing power ... battery life, human interfaces, and simple cost, cost, cost being among them. When the industry can put a full fledged computer into anyone's hands for 200 bucks ... well, thank god something is going right in this country.

I have high hopes that the widespread availbility of Internet access and computing is going to cause a marked increase in general intelligence amongst the populace. Although I happen to think that giving away computers ala the OLPC effort is a little silly. A Mini running Ubuntu completely outclasses anything the OLPC can do, runs an open OS and uses standard hardware, and it's available to anyone. I enjoy it when the market begins solving some of these problems for us.

Unfortunately, lower costs aren't good thing for computer manufacturers. Commoditization is the inevitable killer of companies and a sure sign that an industry is going "over the hill", if you look at industry lifecycles.

Anyway, if you're looking for a secondary PC to throw around the house, the Mini 9 is a good fit. And hey, if you're on a tight budget, it's about the cheapest primary PC you can get out there right now too.

Observations on skiing

rkuo — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 20:39:00 GMT

I'm writing this from Squaw Valley in Tahoe, where there's a bit of a snowstorm going.

I can basically count the number of times that I've gone skiing on one hand. The first was a week long ski trip in high school. The second was a single day my junior year of college where I visited a friend in Vermont. The third was last year here in Tahoe for a weekend (ski'd one day). And the fourth was earlier this week via a company/employee funded offsite (another one day).

In general, I'm not too bad at skiing, having done sufficient amounts of rollerblading in the past to have some sense of balance on my feet. I did a black on my last day of skiing in high school without falling (apparently a banner day for me since I remember that). On these single day trips, since then, I've hovered between blue and black difficulties ever since.

As with any new physical activity, I find myself barely able to move after the first round of exertion. All the straining with my legs to keep my balance adds up after the first day. For this reason, I opted not to go for a second day earlier this week. However, yesterday I ski'd for about 2/3'rds of the day and I was tired at the end, but not completely wrecked like before. Today I actually feel pretty good, so presumably I'm adapting quickly. I don't have any plans to go again this season, however, so that physical improvement may be for naught.

A list of random thoughts over the past week or so.

What's the difference between these 50 dollar goggles and these 100 dollar goggles?
This thermal underwear is really comfy!
God, I wish I had a face mask.
God, I wish I had a face mask. Wait, why didn't I buy one last week when I thought the same thing?
I'm going to wish I had a face mask next year, aren't I?
These ski house rentals are totally low tech (no internet). Thank god for 3G phone tethering.
Here's the fairly steep and very powdery place where I lost my ski in the snow for half an hour last week. I deem the potential pain of that experience to be more than the potential pain of just zooming straight down the slope. GOOOOO!
Is that melted snow from my glasses or snot coming out of my nose?
My single layer of ski gloves are clearly not keeping my hands warm.
Riding up and down on this cable car is like Groundhog Day. Everyone says the same things every time. "OOO, look how far down it is!" "If this cable breaks, we are so dead." General yelps as the cable car passes a support tower and swings for a bit.
Skiing in tons of powder presents its own set of problems. Namely, how to get out of it if you fall. Snowboarders are particularly screwed.
I clearly strapped my boots in too tightly in previous runs of skiing. My shins aren't nearly as bruised these past two runs and they were much more comfortable.
My arms aren't tired at all. Does this have anything to do with Rock Band? (seriously, it probably does)

My approach to skiing, not taking it too seriously, is to just do it as much as possible without causing myself annoying pain. I don't see much point in killing myself just because I'm here. My ideal approach would be to go for half a day every couple of days or so when I feel like it. Unfortunately, the sport itself doesn't really lend itself to that model, given that I have a job and don't live in the area. So I do what I can.

One nice thing this weekend is that I can see some improvement aside from the physical aspects. After talking with some friends, I decided to think of skiing as more of my body carrying my momentum and my feet keeping me afloat (like shock absorbers on a car). This was a conclusion I had reached on my own, but apparently it's just basic knowledge, and I just needed verification. Anyway, after trying it out, this is clearly a superior approach. Relying too much on my feet to balance myself makes me far more vulnerable to the random bumps and terrain that I encounter as I make my way down the slopes. Keeping my feet light lets me ride over those bumps with much less impact to my overall direction and momentum.

In general, skiing seems like a tremendous amount of overhead to me ... involving expensive equipment, lodging, travel time, not to mention the cold and trudging through snow and limited windows of availability and good conditions. It certainly isn't what I would call a poor man's sport. Frankly, there are cheaper and more convenient ways to exert yourself. I see nothing particularly appealing about skiing except for the unique merits of the experience, which has to compete against all of the downsides I mention above. Still, if you like the experience of plowing down the slopes that much, there really isn't anything comparable.

With all the overhead involved with skiing, I find myself wondering how the sport evolved. Lifts certainly haven't been around forever, so the sport seems like it must have been completely inaccessible until the latter half of the 20th century. I know this must be easily discovered information via the Internet, but I haven't bothered looking yet.

As it is, I find this to be a sport that I either do a lot or a little, and a little bit seems to be the right amount. A "Variety is the spice of life" approach, if you will. I certainly wouldn't mind seeing myself graduate to consistent black runs in a few more visits or so, if my skill level can survive the long gap between visits.

New Year's resolutions so far

rkuo — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 21:19:00 GMT

I don't generally believe in New Year's resolutions, but starting off the year did remind me that there were quite a few todos on my list that I haven't done anything with recently. So I went ahead and decided to kick myself in the ass on a few of them. See below.

1. Drink less soda and juices, drink lighter stuff (like water and tea)

Doing pretty good. I'd say I've cut back on soda by about 60% or so...substituting for water and tea. Damn, soda really does taste pretty good when you haven't had it for a while. After a while, I get a craving for the fizzy kick that only soda can give you.

2. Exercise regularly

Aside from all the fake drumming I do (which, while not completely intense, is not an insignificant amount of exercise either), I need to do more "regular" exercise. I'm only about 30% on this right now. I've scheduled time from 11-12PM to do push-ups and sit-ups while watching TV, but I always seem to get caught in the middle of doing something else. I think what I need to do here is block out time next to other things I do ... mainly so that I'm not tempted to be in the middle of something when it comes time to exercise.

3. Blog more.

I've been shooting for weekly. Missed a week so far, but otherwise on track. I actually find I have a plethora of things to write about, and it's hard to restrict myself to just Sundays because sometimes when you're thinking about something, you just want to get it out there. But, on the other hand, I don't want it to take too much time either. I need to find a balance.

4. Change my hair style.

I've had a rather short buzzcut since the middle of college, solely because it was easier for me to maintain rather than any other number of reasons. I've finally decided to change this up. I'm letting it grow out right now. In general, it will still be a short cut, but may require gel/hair drying/combing in the morning. We'll see how this goes. I'm due for a trim and a check up next week.

Take advantage of your 401K, people

rkuo — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 19:46:00 GMT

I recently surveyed several friends to see whether they were maxing out their 401K's. To my surprise, many of them weren't. In fact, from general experience a lot of people ignore this seemingly no brainer piece of money management.

In short, the 401K is an investment vehicle designed to encourage savings by the government. You can contribute a maximum set amount it each year ... in 2009, you can contribute up to $16,500.

The way the government "encourages" your participation involves taxation. You only pay taxes once on the money going into and coming out of your 401K. Normally, you would have to pay taxes on money when you earn it and on any gains thereafter. Essentially, if you use a 401K to invest, the government takes a lot less in taxes from you than it would otherwise. However, because the goal is to get you to save, you must wait until 59 1/2 years of age to begin tapping the savings account without penalties.

OK, not having to pay taxes is great on its own. But, on top of that, your employer often has match programs. For example, if you look at the benefits page for Google, Google matches up to 100% up to $2500 or 50% up to the contribution limit, whichever is greater. Let me sum that one up for you. If you contribute $16,500 this year at Google, you get $8,250 in free money from the company on top of that initial contribution. Granted, Google has great benefits, but other companies have quite generous match plans as well. If you had $8,250 sitting in front of you right now, would you just throw it away? Because if you aren't contributing to your 401K, you're doing something pretty close.

Now, due to the penalties, some people are worried about not having that money around to make a big purchase because there are penalties on taking that money out ahead of retirement. Generally, you can borrow against the 401K to do things like pay for college tuition or buy a home, so if you're worried about liquidity, you probably shouldn't be. Also, there are hardship clauses where you can take money out without penalty to deal with unexpected medical expenses, etc. In general, your 401K is liquid for you if you really need it to be, but it's not there to be abused.

The standard 401K is not taxed when income goes in. Taxation only happens when you pull money out at retirement. There is a second form of the 401K known as the Roth 401K. This plan allows you to contribute your after tax earnings now, and not get taxed when you start pulling the money out near retirement.

Why pick one over the other? Well, if you believe your tax rates will be higher near retirement, then taking the tax hit now is a pretty smart thing to do. In short, having climbed the corporate ladder (or whatever ladder you're climbing) and observing the spending patterns of the country in general, quite a few people are betting on their taxes being higher in retirement. In this case, the Roth 401K is a good idea.

If you're having trouble maxing out your contribution to leverage your company match, then you probably want to just do the standard 401K so that you get the maximum benefit from matching.

If you're already maxing out your contribution, then the Roth 401K can be pretty smart. In particular, independent of the whole taxation issue, using the Roth 401K lets you leverage significantly more money into the 401K. For example, if you think now is a good time to invest in general, then getting money into your 401K right now via the Roth is a great way to dump more money with the 401K tax advantage into investments than you could otherwise do with a regular 401K.

The bottom line is this. If you aren't maxing your 401K plan out, you're giving up a lot of free money. If you aren't sure whether you should be or not, then odds are you should be. Feel free to do your own research, but hopefully this gives some people a kick in the pants to check their contributions and start saving some money.