Peter's Journal

11:41am: I love working on cars!
A friend, Grant, is stuck waking up at 4:15 every day to take public transit in to work from campus. As it happens, he works across the street from me, but that doesn't really help him at all. Clearly he needs a car (despite still only having his learner's permit). I suggested that ridingsloth's old Honda, which I was fairly certain was not in use at all, might be available as a cheap option... providing he fixed it. I asked ridingsloth, who said the car was Grant's for the low price of getting it running.

So, we've now spent 3 part-days working on the car. I used to help my dad do a few things on our tractor, including removing the mowing deck so the blades could be sharpened, but that was a diesel engine; it just doesn't require much maintenance, and didn't have many accessories. I know how to change the oil in a car, but I've never done it myself, let alone anything more complicated than changing a tire. (I'm really good at jump-starting cars, though. I seem to have to do it a couple times a year (not usually for my own car).)

I'm pleased to say that I've now inspected spark plugs and a distributor, drained gasoline, and partially flushed and bled brake lines. What's more, I love doing it! We took a car that had sat unused for two years and wouldn't start, and have gotten it to start, fixed the soft brake pedal, and (by sheer luck) got the fourth cylinder to fire again. I feel incredibly accomplished.

I'll hate to see Grant take the car; I've now put enough work into it to feel some ownership, especially since with the engine running more like it ought to, it drives much better than it did when I borrowed it to practice driving stick. 5500 RPM out of a car that used to "shake like a junkie" above 3000!

8:42am: I have a secret
I.... love... Grey's Anatomy.

The only thing is that you have to realize that it's not a medical drama, like House. It's more of a soap opera set in a hospital, only without the bad writing and acting and whatever that permeates the actual genre of soap operas.

When I started watching it, they introduced the main character (in as much as an ensemble cast has one), and the guy she slept with who was a bit of a sleazebag. But over the course of half a season, things change a bit and you grow to like him. Then his estranged wife shows up, and of course you hate her. But then you come to see that she screwed up, and you feel bad for her. Then the guy she cheated on her husband with drops by, and of course nobody likes him. But eventually you start to realize that, while he is an ass, you really can't blame him for it either; he makes up with the husband, and they go back to being friends like they were before, and so everything's okay.

They've repeated this cycle like a dozen times: introduce a character, get you to hate them, and then transform them to where you actually sympathize with the character enough to like them. Even the characters I loathed from the get-go, absolutely bitterly despised, have been turned around through this process.

Somewhere around the sixth time they pulled this stunt, I started to realize how masterful it is to repeat the same sequence so many times, without it feeling like the show is just recycling the same idea, and to do it successfully every time.

The other thing is that the show is packed with drama. In one episode, it's not just that (say) someone's sister shows up. It's that someone's sister shows up, and someone's fiancé dies, and a couple breaks up, all while victims of a car accident go in and out of surgery, living or dying seemingly at random, to provide a changing backdrop for the on-going drama.

5:40am: Just a thought
In the UK the car I rented was, if I recall, a Vauxhall Corsa 5-door hatchback. 1.4L, 96.2 horsepower. That was a great car. I loved the way it handled, the gears, the comfort level of the interior. If I were looking for such a car (cheap supermini) that would definitely be on my list. I was driving around with 4 people, but it performed just like I'd expect it to.

In Australia I rented a Hyundai Getz, which was a 3-door hatchback, 1.4L 97HP. It was terrible. The seat was uncomfortable, the steering wheel was too far away while the pedals were too close, the gears were awful. This car would struggle to make it up some hills in 3. In terms of ride comfort, that was one of the worst cars I've been in, simply for the combination of seat and driver position. And considering I was the only one in the car, the performance was wretched.

12:14am: I really should be studying right now
I was thinking about the possibility of commonplace cogeneration (electricity + heat) or trigeneration (electricity + heat + cold) in private homes.

It makes sense. Cogeneration is efficient, as it puts the heat of electrical generation to use. Some buildings use steam pipes for heating or other uses, and that steam comes from a cogeneration plant. Homes need heat in the winter, and domestic hot water year-round, so this could work. It's simply a matter of whether the cost of fueling the cogenerator is cheaper than purchasing electricity. (Likely, since electric companies overcharge private user and undercharge large [generally corporate] users.)

The problem is that if you don't want to overproduce heat or cold, you don't get much electricity out of it, so you aren't saving yourself much money. So you have to find good ways to put both (or all three, in the case of trigeneration) to use.

In the winter, you could use a Stirling engine, which produces electricity from a source of heat and cold. (Sounds crazy, but it's real. It extracts the difference in energy from the heat and cold sources to produce mechanical energy, which could power a generator. Small toy versions run on the heat from a cup of coffee vs ambient air, or even the heat from the palm of your hand.) The heat you produce by usual means (eg fuel), the cold comes from outside, and you get electricity and whatever heat is leftover to heat your home and your hot water. That's simple cogeneration.

In the summer it's more complicated. You can use other engines and chillers to take in heat (again produced by fuel) and generate electricity and cold. The cold air conditions your house, the excess heat goes to your water heater.

The problem is that in both scenarios, you're limited by the amount of heat or cold needed. You want your house to be comfortable, not overly heated or overly cooled.

Then it hit me. Many people have a pool! A pool is nothing but a 25,000 gallon heat sink. Now let's see how this works.

In the summer, you can cool your house, and use that heat energy to warm your pool. If you've never owned a pool you might not realize that a comfortable pool temperature doesn't occur naturally in most parts of the US; many people use solar covers to heat the pool when it's not in use.

In the winter, you can heat your house and the pool, which will take a lot of energy since the pool will require a lot of heat. But you'll generate a lot of electricity, and whatever you don't use, the power company buys from you! (Yes, this too is real. The spinning power meter can go backwards, and if it does, you get paid (in the US).) Now your house is warm, the pool is open year-round, and you're paying less for electricity, if not taking in money from it.


I have no idea whether this is practical. Even ignoring the cost of equipment, I don't know what the relative costs are of commercially-generated electricity vs heat-producing methods. Certainly you could use fuel (gasoline, diesel, natural gas, etc.) but those are probably not the best option. Nuclear is not bloody likely. Solar is an option, as are fuel cells.


Oh, here we go. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroCHP. It's right in pointing out that you want to size your home installation of cogeneration to not produce excess heat, since we need much more electricity than heat, but doesn't discuss this idea about using pool water as a heat sink.

7:08pm: Superficial thoughts on Australia
Most of these could be applied to traveling abroad in general.

* There are not enough TV stations. Also, it's interesting how channels Eight, Nine, and Ten are on 4, 5, and 6 in my hotel. This idea of numbered stations is confusing (the only major one we have is ESPN2; I'm not counting local stations including their broadcast channel in their ID). In American hotels we usually have 20 stations, sure, but at home assuming you purchase cable, you get at least 60-80 channels, possibly many hundred.

* The power sockets are annoying. It's at least better than the UK where you have to have 3 prongs because there are shutters inside the outlet for protection. And it's inherently polarized, which I appreciate. But really, these outlets are huge. On top of that, each outlet has a switch on it, which would probably be unnecessary if you weren't using enough voltage to seriously injure a person.

* On the plus side, all of my equipment I've had to use can automatically adapt to any frequency and voltage, so I can actually use a very small adaptor for most things.

* From my observations, about 80% of Aussies tend to walk on the left. It's tough to tell because fewer than 10% of Chinese tourists bother to adapt to the local custom. Since I seem to walk faster than both of them, I end up dodging and weaving down the sidewalk.

Seriously, people. When you go somewhere else, don't take your own culture with you. Adapt. It shows that you're not a stuck-up asshole.

* Australian beer is disappointing. The major stuff is on par with the big American beers, which is to say it's all light lagers with little flavor that are hardly drinkable. I've been told the microbrews are better, but I've yet to actually find any. Even in microbrewery-deprived Georgia it's relatively easy to find a bar that at least has something decent on tap.

* The wines, in contrast, are fantastic. Every one I've had has been excellent, even the ones that aren't my preferred styles.

* Sydney is a really great city. It's clean and very walkable. Sadly, I'm not really getting to see any of it because I'm busy with the conference.

* The pedestrian crossing signals make funny noises as an audio aid for the blind; at first I thought it was in imitation of some local bird, but apparently that's not the case. They are, however, incredibly slow; and once they do change, they change back faster than you can possibly walk across the street. I suppose the slowness is due to Australia's laid-back, no-hurry attitude, but I don't understand why they don't give you more time to cross.

* WHAT DO PEOPLE DRINK AT MEALS? We've had some nice meals as part of the conference, and yet only at one has there been a true bottomless glass of water. (But there was also bottomless wine and beer.) The lunches have come with shotglass-sized orange juice and water, with only enough for each person to have 1 to 2 glasses.

* My hotel, where I've eaten breakfast a couple times, has a Fruit Fucker 2000. It's an imposing machine into which you insert a whole fruit, and it separates the juice from the skin, pulp, seeds, and other components, which collect in a hideous-looking container at the back of the machine.

* I only tried a dab of Vegemite once, and it was obvious why it isn't very popular. The individual servings (again, from the hotel) are very small, which is as it should be. I should try it again for real, but it's pretty overpowering.

* More generally, it's interesting to note how some parts of Australia resemble the US, and some resemble the UK (breakfast foods, for instance. Also, toilets. I hesitate to claim that our version of something is better than the worldly alternative, but... the waterfall toilets, which are also the style of UK and Europe, do not work as well. It doesn't drain the bowl, just trades old water for new, so sometimes the toilet paper doesn't end up disappearing, which in our toilets (which the Japanese also use) only happens in poorly-designed toilets, and only occasionally.).

* The coins are enormous! They are all very thick and heavy (roughly as thick as a nickel), and quite large. The 50 cent piece is about as big as ours, while the 2 dollar piece is so tiny you could easily lose it.


Sorry, it's not much of a travelogue, "Australia is awesome" kind of post. But really, I've only had one day free, and evenings there have been conference events/dinners, after which I go out for a couple drinks with some of the other attendees. So in terms of sightseeing (not counting pubs) I haven't really gotten to see much at all.

3:07am: Random recollection
One day (a few years ago, I think it was) I was talking to my dad on the phone. He related a story from the week. One of the pine trees behind the pool was dead, so he went to cut it down. Once he had felled it, he realized that he had cut down the wrong tree. He said his hands were shaking when he realized what he'd just done.

At the time I kind of laughed at it a bit, because that's what sons do, laugh at their dads' absent-mindedness. And I was sort of laughing at him for being so broken up about cutting down a tree. At the same time, though, I felt bad; without meaning to he'd cut down a perfectly healthy, living tree. I hate to say it but I think if I'd done that my hands would have been shaking, too.

4:04am: I'm sleeping on someone's on-campus couch... again.

Something tells me I should maybe feel bad about this, but... I really don't. I mean, work (school) is here, as are the friends I've been spending much of my free time with. Why would it be better to spend the extra time (and fuel) just to go home and then come back for no reason other than properness?

I do need to prepare for this occurrence better; tomorrow I'll run to Walmart and stock myself with a set of basic toiletries so I can shower and freshen up. (Aside from borrowing their bathroom, I could also use the showers in the Klaus building (or the CRC)... though I wonder why that would make sense.)

I'm tempted to say I miss living on campus, but in truth, that's not what I miss. It's nice to have a hang-out place to go during the day; my lab sort of works for that, but I don't really have friends there, so it's more just a place to kill time. Really I think what I miss is having roommates with whom I can sit around the apartment and waste time with. Greg and Ken and I lead fairly insular lives at our place¹. If I could transplant these guys into a nice, off-campus apartment, then it would make a lot more sense to consider living with them, but there's no way I could go back to making the sacrifices that living on-campus requires.


¹ Funnily enough, when Greg drops in their apartment for game night on Mondays, he hangs out and we have fun and all that good stuff. It's just that we both treat our pad as a place to keep our belongings and sleep and not much else.

4:53pm: I identified the hooligan kids who have been messing with my scooter. (Get off my lawn!) Nothing major, but every time I use it all the switches have been flipped, maybe there's minor damage like the bike was knocked over. I saw them hanging around it as I parked the car and walked inside, and I wasn't going to say anything until I saw one of them get on it, and then I decided we needed an intervention.

I remember being a kid, and being fascinated by other people's cool toys, and how humiliating it is to get chewed out for just being curious. So I struck a deal, and offered to take them for a quick spin around the parking lot. Unfortunately, the rubber seal around the valve stem is leaky, and now the rear tire has no air in it, so I don't even consider it safe to ride for myself, let alone with two people's weight on it. So, I said it would have to wait for another time, and hopefully they left feeling properly chastised.

But now I've got to fix my tires. (Both of them; the front grommet it looking worn, too.) Getting the rear tire off is a big ordeal; you have to take most of the gearbox off to access it. Anyone want to help me out with that some afternoon?

5:31am: No need to hide this
I must apologize... I am a lying sack of shit. Whenever I say, "I don't want replies," what I really mean is, "I desperately want the validation of knowing that somebody bothered to read this, but I don't want replies that just say 'Yeah, you've got everything right,' because if I thought I had everything figured out I wouldn't be so plagued with doubt, but I'm also afraid that you're going to point out exactly what I'm doing wrong and I'm going to feel stupid as a result."

It's passive-aggressive. I don't know why I just now connected that, but that's what it is, and since I'm done with passive-aggressiveness in my life, it stops now.

So... fuck it. Do whatever you want. Reply, don't reply. Cheer me up, put me down. If you think I'm being a whiny little bitch, call me on it. Just ignore whatever I say about what I want you to say.


What is with this weird bout of honesty and forthrightness? I haven't been on any cough syrup for 12 hours.

9:11pm: I hate Atlanta citizens sometimes. Thanks to the gas shortage (imagine! who thought they'd live through an actual gas shortage in the 21st century?) people are stepping up to conserve, by taking public transit, carpooling, telecommuting, etc. But as soon as gas supply is back to normal they'll go back to doing things the way they were before... myself included.

It's the way supply and demand works, but it doesn't lead to people acting very altruistically.

2:55am: I have my pictures from Japan up, finally. Not much with the pictures of people (*sigh*) but I do feel I got some pretty artistic shots of what I did shoot.

9:45pm: I have two complains about POIs on my satnav.

(POI = Points of Interest. That is, lists of restaurants, gas stations, churches, parks, whatever.)

The map comes with the basic ones (like what I listed above) though it makes no guarantee of completeness. It is pretty satisfactory, though, and rarely wrong. You can also download user-submitted POI databases.

Problem 1: The interface on the program used to download new POIs is bad. You have to scroll through the list a page at a time, waiting on it to refresh each time, and after you install one you get sent back to the main menu and have to start over.

Problem 2 (the bigger one): The databases submitted are sometimes pretty obscure. "Grocery stores near Putnam, CT." "Rest stops off I-70 in Utah." "Wachovia banks in Hampton Roads, VA." "MIT Fraternities." You can also find databases that cover the whole nation... or so they claim. How do you tell the difference between "Quiznos" and "Quiznos Usa"? Which one is more complete or accurate?

A wiki style would be much better for this. The largest database I've seen is 10 MB; most are only a few hundred K. So it's not like you're likely to run out of room on your device if you load it up with a bunch of national databases. And the information would likely be more complete and up-to-date.

7:48pm: As I mentioned before, I think, this PhD Comics strip is completely factual. As such, I've taken it to heart and am trying to be quicker about my e-mail writing: say what I need to say, don't draw things out, and press 'send'.

I must be doing okay because I replied to some industry personto tell him our testbed isn't quite ready for release yet, and my advisor complimented me on my response to him. (By which I mean I got an e-mail that read "good note. karsten". He can't even be bothered to capitalize letters.)

11:21am: My paper got accepted! That means someone has to go to Sydney, and unless I'm mistaken, it's probably going to be me.

The comments are fun to read. A bit scathing at times, and very firm-minded. These people know exactly what they like and don't like about my paper. Still, I can turn it around and try to figure out what they didn't understand because I didn't make it clear enough.

More info to come later (like when I have it).

4:20pm: Bandwagons
Life just doesn't come in a steady stream. It comes in huge bursts.

After giving in to Google Reader, I'm now feeling pressure to join Twitter and some other sites. I'm still not sure I "get" Twitter exactly, but it seems like a lot of my other school friends are on it, and that I'm missing out.

Speaking of social networking, I'm finally getting to where I have friends in school to hang out with. Not that people haven't been inviting me out to do things on the weekends. But it feels like it only comes after an hour of calling people trying to find out who is doing something sociable. I don't like feeling so desperate; in fact after so much effort, I start to just give up on having fun for the evening. I'd rather have to choose between activities than call around trying to find just one.

I do end up with a dilemma of having disjoint sets of friends, but I'll see if I can't integrate them now and then.

Which reminds me, I've just learned of a group called Monday Night Brewery. They're not a registered brewery yet, just a couple of guys who are experimenting to create some good beer in expectations of distributing it. I don't know when they meet, or how I'll make it out there if they meet during Glee Club rehearsals (which they probably do) but I'm going to have to go check it out.

5:23pm: Oh crap, that was stupid
I opened up my contact lens case to find out I'd forgotten to fill one of the sides with solution before closing it.

2:28am: Garfield Minus Garfield is much funnier when you're reading it with other people and you just start laughing and can't stop.

Also, I should try to remember how to be a guest in someone's apartment without soaking up their time against their will. It's been a while since I've gotten [had] to do that. (Actually, I never had to do that... it was always my apartment people were in!)

2:13am: My D-Link router didn't work with my Mac's wireless, and on top of that Ethernet ports started flooding the network with packets and generally misbehaving, so I ditched it and bought a Linksys router. This went against my years of experience telling me that Linksys products are crap.

Sure enough, it's 6 months later, and the thing developed a problem where it would freeze up a couple times an hour. And I mean really freeze up; even LAN traffic dies. Many times it revives itself somehow, but not always.

For lack of any other solutions, I decided to go third-party firmware. Mine is one of the newer Linksys routers that only has 2 MB of flash memory and runs VxWorks, but no matter; DD-WRT has a micro distribution designed for it.

Good news, I didn't brick my router. But this new firmware doesn't seem much more stable than the old one. In fact I'd say it's less stable, although I wonder if maybe it's a bug in the httpd serving the management pages. (The status pages have a 3 second auto-refresh, but after staring at it for a while the processor usage skyrockets and the router dies. Monitoring it over telnet instead, though, it has been up for a little while now.)

As a makeshift solution I set the Keep Alive option, which pings a site periodically and reboots the router if it can't reach it. That way I can at least have access during the day, even if it is interrupted.

4:32pm: Did you ever think that some technology has been around for so long, that it would just be that way forever? And yet, they manage to make improvements, like how water coolers now have a seal on the bottle so you can put it in without sloshing water all over the place.

10:16am: Parking
I got my parking permit from Tech for the coming year. But instead of E40, the Klaus deck, the building I work in, they stuck me in E81, the Tech Square parking deck.

What the hell? I thought Parking's policy was that renewals get priority over new requests. The Klaus deck was never more than 2/3 full—the third floor never had more than half a dozen cars. It seems unlikely that so many people with higher priority signed up that they filled it up. Maybe the deck is reserved for staff and faculty, only Parking doesn't claim that as a policy, either.

12:07pm: People need to figure out that it is not okay to e-mail passwords in plaintext! You'd be amazed how little access it takes to snoop traffic and look at other people's e-mail being shuffled around between servers.

(At my IT co-op job, we were trying to diagnose a problem where mail to just two or three servers, including Tech's, would never make it through. It turned out to be an obscure TCP firewall setting that confused with the systems on the other end. Once we fixed it and the mail server noticed that a [test] message had made it through, it opened the floodgates and sent two weeks worth of queued e-mail... which we observed on a packet sniffer.)

6:14pm: For once the jetlag is working in my favor: I'm making it to work at reasonable times for the first time all summer!

No blow-by-blow (though if you want that you can ask) but here are some highlights from the trip:

• We saw the Gion Festival in Kyoto, pretty much the largest festival in all of Japan. It takes place over many days, but the main highlight is the parade. On the pre-parade night, they close down a large part of downtown and the shrines display their floats for everyone to see. Food vendors selling festival food (octopus balls are the ones most people recognize, though it turns out there's a lot more weirder stuff, like kimchee crepes on a stick (and some not-so-weird stuff like shaved ice)) line the streets as far as you can see, and half the city comes to pack the streets, wandering around wearing yukata (extremely common for the girls, about 1/3 to 1/2 of the guys). No exaggeration, there must have been hundreds of thousands of people out.
• I boned up on my fashion sense and did a bunch of clothes shopping in Fukuoka. It was the ideal place for me because I like the people there (they seem more laid back and welcoming of foreigners), I like their fashion sense, and I know the city well enough to know where all the good shopping is.
• I blew a lot of money on DS games. Mostly rhythm games which I was either able to find for a good price, or which aren't available in the US. A few other goodies as well.
• We stayed at a high-end hot springs resort again (same one I'd been to before). I was expecting that we'd have to eat dinner separately (it's normally served in your room, and we were split into 3 rooms) but they ended up giving us one of the large private dining rooms so we could all eat together. I don't know if that's SOP or if we were given special treatment. Also, as they finished filling our trays with food, the president of the inn came to greet us. (I'm not sure how to take that. On the one hand, it's part of Japanese culture to honor us that way because we're cultural/social outsiders, and so it should be kind of expected for him to do that. On the other hand, I did feel honored by it.) He welcomed us, and explained about the meal, which currently featured a local breed of cattle from the same breed as Kobe beef which had been brought to the region a few years ago. (Although we had an English-speaking staff member there, I did the translating myself. It made us not look like a bunch of stupid foreigners, I felt. Unfortunately, the president would say three or four sentences at a time, and I would only fully understand the first one. I didn't have the heart to admit that to him, especially since half the problem was vocab, so slowing him down wouldn't have helped. The staff translator didn't correct me, though (but did I really expect him to?).)
• I got to see Yokohama. I wasn't surprised to find that I liked it much more than Tokyo. It's a small[ish], friendly city, with a nifty harbor area (called Harbor Future 21 (what a great Japanese name!)). It also has Japan's most famous Chinatown, where we stopped for lunch to fill up on dumplings.

As a broad commentary for the trip, I really need to go to some other places before returning to Japan. I kept going places thinking "I've already done this." I tried to break off on my own when possible and do things I hadn't done before, but the schedule didn't always cooperate.

11:44pm: If you hate the TSA, you'll find this article on their policies old and new an interesting read. Not least because I'm a family friend of the student mentioned at top.

3:11am: I was right, R is a terrible package. I wasted an entire hour or two trying to figure out how to put two series onto a single plot. Finally I gave up, installed gnuplot, and had the whole damn thing worked out in about 20 minutes.

R is probably great if you already know it. But the documentation is bad even by Unix standards. Gnuplot did exactly what I needed, and was faster to install, learn, and run.

My paper is submitted. It has a couple of [?] instead of real references, because I just couldn't find all the things Karsten suggested I cite in time. But I did get the crappy screen-cap diagrams replaced with vector ones (barely), and made up an experiment and got some meaningful results to talk about. (I'm still uncomfortable with the idea of running experiments on this, because no experiment really says anything, but I understand the need to anyway.)

Here's hoping the reviewers see past its foibles and think it's as good as Karsten makes it sound like it will be.

2:03am: R
R must be the worst name for a piece of software ever.