mult.ifario.us

I took a walk around our neighborhood here tonight, and it didn't look like there was much damage other than some limbs down and a couple of smaller trees snapped off. It was much worse elsewhere in the area and in the city, with flooding, originally ~10⁷ people and now down to 10⁶ people without power in freezing temperatures, and plenty of tree vs. house or tree vs. car mismatches, e.g.:

©2006 by &y; posted under CC license

We're under-prepared, disaster-wise, so this is a wake-up call that I'll answer: generator, fuel, food, and water are all on my shopping list. This also intensifies my desire to get off the grid, ideally with a set of photovoltaic panels on the roof (since we have a large amount of South-facing roof at a good angle) and maybe with an appropriate type of fuel cell for additional backup.

You know it's a serious storm when the National Weather Service says things like:

THE HIGH WINDS WILL CAUSE FALLING TREES AND POWER LINES. POWER OUTAGES ARE LIKELY TO BE EXTENSIVE. DAMAGE TO STRUCTURES IS POSSIBLE AND FLYING DEBRIS WILL BE A HAZARD. DEATHS AND INJURIES FROM THIS TYPE OF WIND STORM TYPICALLY OCCUR AS A RESULT OF TREES FALLING ON CARS AND SOMETIMES ON HOUSES. PEOPLE SHOULD AVOID BEING ON THE ROAD OVERNIGHT AND SHOULD SEEK SHELTER IN A STURDY BUILDING AWAY FROM WEAK TREES.

It's been windy enough here in Seattle that our house has been shaken by some gusts, and it feels more or less like a light (3 or 4 on the Richter scale) earthquake when a big gust hits. The lights have been dimming periodically, so we'll see how long we have power.

Earlier in the day, we picked up almost two inches of rain over the course of six hours in the form of three intense showers:

This caused all sorts of fun, including wheel-deep water for the wife to drive through and an opportunity for me to get wet changing a flat tire, although thankfully under cover.

Matthieu tagged me, so here are five things that you probably didn't know:

• I spent the first few years of my life living out in the sticks in southwest Washington where we had a half-mile gravel driveway and a quarter-acre vegetable garden. We moved to the city after a huge fir tree smashed the mobile home we were living in.
• I've been in two bands in my life, a one funk-ish band (1989) that made an EP in a dinky studio in Milwaukee, OR, and a rap band (1990) called "MC Extra Cheese and DJ PRB", where I was the sampler and mixer master.
• I don't need much sleep, although I seem to feel better if I sleep either more than seven hours or less than four and get a ten minute nap in the afternoon in either case.
• My first Java program was a 3,000-line hand-written parser that turned a narrative document in the file format of an ancient version of WordPerfect for DOS into XML. It worked great...
• I have always been slower multiplying either 6×9 or 7×8 than other combinations of digits.

And because I can, I'll tag Bob McWhirter, Dan, Brian, Crazy Bob, and Jeff.

After reading various glowing reviews, the wife and I decided to splurge and make reservations at the Herbfarm for my birthday. The meal had some moments, but it was a rare disappointment compared to our other fine dining experiences.

The first blemish appeared right at the start of the meal where the proprietors introduced the kitchen staff — at length and ad nauseum — followed by an explanation of how to find their gift shop, that the stemware on the table was available for purchase, all about the bed and breakfast suites, and on and on and on, oh and did they mention how to find the gift shop... The only thing not explicitly for sale were the waitstaff, although I have to admit that we didn't ask. We've eaten at plenty of good restaurants run by reputedly great chefs, but the informercial cum dinner theatre was out of place and uncalled for to the point that we wondered if we'd accidentally signed up for some kind of timeshare sales pitch. A port flight served on a piece of paper explaining the different vintages included the price in large type on one corner, continuing the evening's Minnie Pearl theme...

The other two things that stuck out like a sore thumb were a couple of the courses. Partridge served with one course was dry, and a crème brûlée served as part of dessert was a drink instead of a custard. That was the first partridge that I've had, so maybe they're all dry (then why eat them...?); but the unset crème brûlé is unforgivable. Whoever prepared it would have been able to tell that the custard wasn't set when they took it out of the oven or when they caramelized the sugar for the crust.

At least I always have good company.

I've been bushwhacking my way through some Java code and came across the following block of code in a test class:

int count = 0;
for(Long id : results){
  switch (count++) {
    case 0:
      Assert.assertEquals(2L, id);
      break;
    case 1:
      Assert.assertEquals(3L, id);
      break;
    }
}

which has to be one of the oddest bits of Java code that I've laid eyes on. It's not quite a WTF, but it's close. It is definitely the only time that I've seen a switch clause with side-effects. The original author intended simply:

assert results.size() == 2;
assert results.contains(2L);
assert results.contains(3L);

Especially in a test case, it's acceptable (if not desireable!) to be explicit even at the expense of some brevity.

I got a decent score on the electronic version of the VCAT:

For what it's worth, I've enjoyed the coaching and advising work that I've done with fellow entrepreneurs, and it's satisfying if not therapeutic to help people avoid the pitfalls and pratfalls that I'm more familiar with than I'd like to be. While a non-empty subset of the people I respect have MBAs (e.g., Steve) and I benefited greatly from some of them as experts and advisors, I can't imagine anyone without their CEO stripes really knowing how to build and run a company.

For context, see my earlier post on Yahoo, Amazon, Google and the effectiveness of "stepping on the gas" with R&D.

Marc Gerstein over at SeekingAlpha has some comments from a similar perspective (ratios between engineering expense and revenue), although he draws a different conclusion about Amazon:

For Amazon.com (AMZN), analysts have focused investor worries on the monies being spent to draw in customers. They're right to hone in on the spending levels, but they've been overly alarmist on the worry bit. Heavy spending on marketing and technology has worked for Amazon.

I maintain that the interesting proposition for Amazon (Yahoo, EBay, Google, etc.) is not how effective engineering spend was in the past but rather how effective it will be in the future.