Parand.

Woke up at 5:37 this morning to catch the train the Burbank. Sat delayed at Union Station for ~2 hours due to a fatal accident near the Burbank station.

Sadly 2 hours is long enough to make you forget how morbid and rueful a fatal accident is (I believe that’s the euphemism for suicide) and obsess with how to get a gaggle of squawking teenage girls to shut up for just 2 minutes.

Coming back tonight, the 7:05pm train simply never showed up. Finally caught the 9 something train. If I’m lucky I’ll be home by 1am.

The silver lining was meeting Thomas. Thomas is, or claims to be, a former marine, a veteran of Vietnam and the first gulf war, and a traveler of 48 of the United States and much of the world.

Thomas’s story was so fantastical it’s tempting to dismiss him as a wandering drunk. Which, actually, he admitted to being.

Thomas served in Vietnam in 1969. I’d have guessed he was late 30’s, maybe early 40’s, but he said he’s turning 57 soon. That would’ve made him 18 in 1969.

He has 4 brothers. Or had. 3 lost their lives in battle, one is serving in Iraq now.

He was healthy until the first Iraq war. He was caught in a firefight and ended up with a replaced hip, a mostly replaced right leg, and a partially damaged left leg. He was discharged, opening the door for his brothers to serve.

He was remarkably healthy looking. A thick, bushy beard and excellent control of his facilities despite his obvious inebriation.

He’s traveling the US to “see what he fought for”. “These people have no idea what goes on out there. They have no idea what it means to fight a war”.

It wasn’t worth it. If he had it to do again he’d give it all up for one more day with all of his brothers.

His mother had passed away while he was in Iraq. He was on his way to her old house. He wasn’t in any particular hurry; his plans for the night were to find a drink and “play”.

Come November he’ll get his “inheritance”. He’s planning on leaving the US. He’s thinking Syria.

I recommended Costa Rica. He said he loved the water there. He also liked the Philippines, the snorkeling.

I also mentioned Lebanon; my brother was very impressed with the place.

Thomas had lost friends in the 1983 Beirut bombing, so he wasn’t particularly fond of the place.

He said a lot of interesting things. One that struck me - the world’s not getting smaller, there’s just less in it.

He carried a plain-English bible and asked me to read a passage. He prayed for me.

He didn’t ask for money. He didn’t ask for anything actually.

If he has lost 3 brothers in battle, and I do believe that he has, what an incredible sacrifice for a family to make.

There was a depth and genuineness to him that made it difficult to picture him killing someone. My prayers are with him. I hope that he does get his inheritance, and that he finds happiness beyond drinking.

My wife tells me no one listens to lyrics. Perhaps it’s true; I found myself singing Pony Up’s Matthew Modine today. It gets real interesting a few paragraphs into it.

Step 1: Give the baby some inappropriate sugary thing since mom is not home.

Step 2: Go to the backyard. Get fascinated by the fact that you get get better wifi reception in the backyard than you do inside the house.

Step 3: Come back to consciousness as you realize you haven’t heard from baby in a few minutes.

Step 4: Watch as baby eats the ants that have gathered on his sugary thing that he’s dropped in the backyard.

I’m really into Mixed Martial Arts these days. Watching that is - I’m as lazy and immobile as ever, and I’m pretty sure my 6 year old could beat my sorry ass.

But it’s always a guilty pleasure. For one thing it feels like mindless gratuitous violence. For another, I’m near the worst shape of my life, sitting on the couch watching instead of doing. And my wife really frowns on it.

Tonight as I was telling my dad about MMA and how much I enjoy it I realized I have a good out: I’m Iranian. Wrestling is huge in Iran - it’s sort of the national sport. Wrestling is a big part of MMA. Therefore, I’m perfectly justified in enjoying MMA. It’s my birthright.

Beyond the basic violence, MMA is one of the most technical combat sports out there. There are so many different skill sets the fighters have to bring to bear, and so many different styles, it’s really a deep sport to watch.

I still remember watching an old Japanese movie about the founding of Judo when I was 8 or 9. It had a huge impact and I always wanted to learn. Somehow I got my hands on a Judo book and practiced with my friend, sometimes using the techniques on unsuspecting classmates. Unfortunately I never took it further.

Perhaps someday I’ll take my useless dilapidated self to a Judo studio and learn something. In the meanwhile, I’ll use my race to assuage my guilt and just watch MMA on TV.

After a lovely day at the Cystic Fibrosis walk, I fell asleep in the toy room.

I briefly skirted the real world to the feeling of my 10 month old grabbing my feet to stand.

Back into sleep, I was having a discussion, watching a movie, and generally experiencing a wonderful dream world.

Then, out of nowhere, a giant stepped on my chest, crushing me back to reality. Half way there the foot shrunk and my partially functioning senses told me the giant was my son and his foot was nestled on my privates as he attempted to scale my legs and torso.

Inexplicably I drifted back towards sleep as my dream world took a strange turn. My son was an explorer on a mountain, a grave look on his face as he peered out to decide which path to take next: climb, or turn back and go around.

He decided to climb.

As I bolted into wakefulness, only to drop into a groaning heap, several women, dressed as reporters and shoving mic’s into my face screamed at me for my stupid decision to go back to sleep.

And that’s how I woke up.

Photo by Jurvetson.

When I first started blogging I expected no-one would read it. (Well, actually I expected to immediately become an a-list uber-blogger, but…)

Now it appears I have a small group of loyal readers, some of whom I’ve never met in-person before. And they contribute, leave comments, etc. This makes me happy. Thank you guys.

Some of the readers I have met. Hi guys. Some I know very well.

I’m good with all this; I have a mental model of who the likely readers are, and I self-censor to stay within fairly reasonable bounds and keep things cool and happy.

Two weeks ago, however, a series of events blew my mind. Within that single week 3 people that I really never expected to read the blog mentioned it to me, mostly in passing. In fact, to my surprise, I was introduced at a talk I was giving by my blog by-line (”A Cruel and Petty Dictator”).

Now I’m kinda spooked. These folks are clearly not regular readers, but they are a fantastic demonstration of just how accessible and ever-lasting everything you excrete onto the net is. When technophobes, random professional and personal acquaintances, recruiters, and any other dick-or-harry can ask you, apropos nothing, how your weekend trip to Seaworld was, that’s just odd. It puts you at an unusual information disadvantage - you have no idea who this person is, but he knows how many kids you have and what they look like, how you spent your weekend, and which movies you like. Heck, he knows more about you than some of your best friends. He’s FriendFeeded his way to the front.

It’s not that I really care - it’s not like I lead a particularly interesting or exotic life or have too many things to hide - but I’m realizing it leads to further sub-conscious self-censorship. And that sucks. I was much more likely to rant stupidly (one of my favorite hobbies) when I thought 2 close friends would be reading it than now that I know random semi-acquaintances will be.

I think my trouble spot is the semi-acquaintance part. People I know, regular readers, and random strangers, excellent. But people that read up on me just before we meet and spring it on me out of nowhere spook me.

Photo by TCM Hitchhiker.

With 3 kids in tow I’m on the inevitable slope towards owning a minivan. Having long ago given up the last vestiges of pride in what type of car I drive, I’m perfectly ok with this, but the wife is not into minivans.

Just about everyone I know is in this boat - they know a minivan is the most practical and comfortable choice, but they really don’t want to drive a minivan.

It occurs to me that there’s a great opportunity for someone to pimp out minivans to remove some of the stigma associated with them. I’m not talking the ridiculous stuff from the TV show; drop in an aggressive front / hood, put in some nice ground effects, tint a few windows and lights, and put on some nice rims, and I’ll bet that minivan will start to look less stodgy and more palatable.

There are some very talented car artists out there, I’m sure something could be done.

I haven’t yet met a nation more in love with its equipment.

I live close to a bike path. Every weekend hordes of exercise minded Americans come to bike. It’s a wondrous site to see.

Some subset of these folks are a bit overweight, carrying perhaps an extra 40 or 50 pounds.

Bless them for exercising, it’s wonderful. As is their choice of attire and equipment.

When I see someone who’s clearly quite out of shape riding a $1500 bike in extremely stretched lycra biker ensemble, I have to wonder. Do you really need the extra milliseconds the aerodynamic nature of that lycra outfit buys you? Are you really able to exercise the extra capabilities of the $1500 bike, versus the $200 one you could get a Costco?

I’m coaching my son’s soccer team. These kids are 4 and 5 years old. All have cleats and shin protectors. Wonderful.

I played soccer most days for the first 14 years of my life. I never wore a shin guard. Not once. I bought my cleats when I got to America. I’ve played plenty of games where the ball was a crushed soda can. Part of soccer’s popularity is due to the very fact that you need almost nothing to play it.

A good friend of mine has several thousand dollars worth of scuba equipment he uses at best once a year.

I’m fascinated by the “let’s buy the uniform and the equipment” mentality that goes along with sports in this country. There’s something culturally significant about this. I just haven’t figured out what yet. Perhaps it’s the shoes.

Operating systems and applications need to support a mode wherein typing the smallest identifying subset of keys will cause the appropriate file/function to be opened. Firefox 3 does this for history urls - start typing and you’ll see URLs that contain that set of keystrokes anywhere in them. iPhone’s safari also does a decent job. Adium does a basic version: you can hit apple-N to get a New Message window and type the start of the person’s name. I think Quicksilver also does this although I’ve never been able to make heads or tails of it.

Every application should do it. Eg. Eclipse - it’s silly for me to go hunting for the file I’m looking for in the tab + drop-down list of files I’m editing. I should be able to hit Ctrl-Something and start typing some piece of the name of the file and it should show up.

On the command line - it’s silly to type in the full path to get at the directory I want when it has a set of uniquely identifying (or at least narrowing down) set of keywords.

In adium, instead of showing only the contacts that start with what I’m typing, show contacts that have those characters anywhere in their name. How am I supposed to know Max’s id is crazymax2007 ? I just want to type max.

In short, I should be able to hit some hot-key combination, type a few letters, and get access to the most common functions and files that are identified by that set of letters, from every application.

I’m sitting in front of a 67 inch HDTV reading rss on the iPhone. And blogging. Hopeless.

Ran across Brendan Eich’s popularity post via Ajaxian. Besides the interesting history lesson (which, btw, is quite interesting), I was struck by the quality of writing. It’s rare to see such quality and care in blog posts. I was immediately motivated to subscribe (although I didn’t because it looks like he posts about once a quarter).

Anyway, if you blog, take a moment to write good.

There was a massive collision this morning blocking off the main road connecting our neighbourhood to the rest of the world. We were all trapped in our little parcel of the world, unable to get to school, work, etc.

This was not happy occasion by any stretch, but it did result in all the neighbours walking around, chatting, discussing, etc. Quite an odd scene to see so many of us walking instead of jumping into cars and racing away. Really quite a nice feel to it actually - greeting your neighbours, enjoying the morning sun, etc.

I’m going to make an attempt to walk the neighbourhood more - no need to wait for such morbid events to get me out of the house / office / car.

I’m watching a Yahoo Research talk by Christos Papadimitriou. Reminds me of a grad school story…

I was hanging around the grad student lounge, chatting with a friend about the computational theory class and our difficulty in grasping all the concepts. Christos was a professor at UCSD at the time and had literally written the book on the subject.

In the middle of our chat Christos himself walked into the lounge to get a snack. We worked up the courage to admit our lack of understanding and asked him to enlighten us on the whole topic.

We sat around the table, soon to be joined by 3 more grad students, and Christos started talking.

I learned more in the next 45 minutes than I had in 6 months. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up. For the next three days I felt I understood everything. Not just computational theory mind you, everything.

Within a week I was back to my clueless self, but those few days of clarity were amazing.

This is why I think physical presence in universities still matters, and where you go to school also matters. Lectures may be delivered as effectively online, but there’s much more to university than lectures.

It was hip a while back to declare email bankruptcy and admit being hopelessly over-run by your inbox. I’m taking it one step further - I’m now SMS message bankrupt also. At this moment I have 613 unread SMS messages, most of which are various email and calendar alerts, and some of which are undoubtedly important messages from you. My ancient little nokia has no chance of dealing with this many messages - in fact “delete all SMS messages” doesn’t even work. So if you’ve sent me an SMS message and I haven’t replied, I’m sorry, I’m incompetent.

A recent stomach flu forced me into a 48 hour span where I didn’t eat anything and drank little. By the second morning I was exhausted, still mostly nauseous, but starving.

I started to make my way downstairs. By the second step I could clearly smell a wheat bread toast, recently toasted, somewhere downstairs. This is quite unusual for me as I have a weak sense of smell.

It occurred to me that animals’ superior sense of smell is not simply a matter of better sensors, but also a matter of hunger. A bear can smell your food from a mile away probably because he’s very hungry. In the same situation I’d probably have an order of magnitude improved senses as well.

I recently watched Into the Wild so man and nature are on my mind.

Photo by Bmaas

So I thought International Mustache Month was last month and gave it a belated effort.

It’s actually this month, perhaps I’ll go for it again.