I love Schiphol airport. (Which is a good thing, given the amount of time I spend there.) Aside from the fact that their ground handling is generally fast, friendly, and efficient, that also take the time to add neat design touches to the airport itself whenever they can. Here are some videos I took of two of them: a section of glass floor through which you can get a glimpse into the underground baggage handling operation; and a clock that appears to be being updated every minute by someone standing just behind the clock face. In fact, that’s what I really thought was happening at first. It’s really subtle, and fun when you figure out that it’s not real.
Mixed messages, Saturday 15 October 2016
These browser tabs won’t close themselves, you know. (The new “Universal Clipboard” feature in iOS 10 and macOS Sierra makes it easier for me to copy links from my iPad to my laptop, though. When it works.)
“The Greatest Restaurant In The World: Discovering A New Era Of Food At Noma”:
When I first encounter René Redzepi, he is cutting a live elk in half with a chainsaw. Noma’s unwavering commitment to native, hyper-local Nordic foods requires its kitchen staff to spend hours every morning foraging the neighboring woodlands and shorelines for wild ingredients, and Redzepi has a gift for sensing gastronomic potential in everything around him.
“A lot of times you can find these lovely little rose hip flowers pickling in the stomach fluids of the larger field mammals that live around here,” Redzepi says, his arm elbow-deep in the abdominal cavity of the freshly bisected animal, its viscera still twitching and gurgling as he fishes out two small, pink, slimy flower petals from within. “Sometimes you have to saw through 20 or so elk before you find any, but it’s always worth the effort. They’re absolutely perfect with caramelized sweetbreads.”
(It gets funnier the deeper it goes.)
Not satire is Gary Sernovitz’s article “The Thrill of Losing Money by Investing in a Manhattan Restaurant” in the New Yorker. Having invested in a restaurant, there’s much that’s painfully familiar here.
If you live in New York City long enough and appear to be successfully employed in an industry that Bernie Sanders dislikes, you will be asked at some point to do three things: sponsor a table at a vanity fund-raiser, become a “producer” of a Broadway play, and invest in a restaurant. I had no trouble declining the honor of hosting a benefit or helping “Hedda Gabler” back to the stage.
I did the restaurant.
And while I am not dumb enough to have imagined I’d make much money as a passive, partial investor in a New York City restaurant, I was dumb enough to think that I could probably earn my money back-ish, while at the same time helping some decent young men fulfill their dream. (Also, it seemed more fun than investing in a municipal-bond mutual fund, which cannot, thanks to the killjoys at the S.E.C., give investors free beers.) But of the many failures of logic and foresight of that investment, which I made in 2010, the one that stings the most is not realizing that so few restaurants in New York make money precisely because too many restaurants in New York have investors like me.
Eponymous Laws — pithy rules with someone’s name attached to them, like the Peter Principle (“In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence”) or Betteridge’s Law of Headlines (“Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no'”) — have a disproportionate air of authority to them. Ryan Schmeizer writes about how the very appearance of authority can influence us as much as real authority, and that by appealing to authority, eponymous laws can have more persuasive power then the underlying concepts themselves. Also, how to steal 16 cases of beer from Walmart in broad daylight.
This led me to look into the Lindy Effect, which presents a sobering picture for software developers trying to update legacy code.
The 2016 World Stone Skimming Championships took place on Easdale Island on the west coast of Scotland last month. (I’m still confused about when to capitalize compass directions.) Congratulations to Dougie Isaacs (Scotland) with a toss of 61m, and Lucy Wood (England) with 40m in the men’s and women’s championships respectively.
On the subject of lesser-known sports, I played (indoor) cornhole for the first time while I was in New York the other week. For a game whose commonly used terminology includes phrases like “Mustachio”, “Slippery Granny”, and “Dirty Bag”, it’s surprisingly cerebral and tactical.
I may not like what Medium is doing for the web, but being transparent about their interview process is a bold step. Leslie Miley spoke about how being intentional in the hiring process is necessary for diversity. The UK GDS (Government Digital Service) is explicit about what is OK. Working remotely (or, to turn the concept on its head, location neutral) is still hard, no matter what kind of spin you put on it. All this is important when trying to deal with (and emerge from the shadow of) startup culture.
My fun evenings
The Marianas Trench concert at Tolhuistuin this evening was cancelled because Josh Ramsay is suffering from laryngitis. Fiona and I are disappointed, but they say they’ll try to reschedule. So I spent the evening booking my travel for a few months ahead instead. Yay? As an experiment, I’m going to stay in Glasgow a couple of times rather then always be in Edinburgh.
Mixed media, Sunday 9 October 2016
Oof, why do I let these things pile up on me.
TV shows are by far the biggest source of media consumption for me right now.
- Before we left for California, I still had a few episodes left to go in the third season of Person of Interest. I finished season 3 on the plane, and then ploughed straight through the last two seasons as well. There are some excellent episodes in there, and I’m happy that they were able to draw the show to a conclusion. I’m impressed by how they managed to stick to the show’s original premise all the way to the end. Even in the midst of a battle between superintelligences where humans are no more than pawns, when the heroes’ world is falling apart around them, the show keeps confronting them with number-of-the-week plots, and they still make time to help those in need.
- Season 3 of Agents of SHIELD had a lot going for it. I had been under the impression that Agent Fitz was going to be written out of the series, but I’m glad he’s still part of it. Sad that Bobbi and Hunter are out instead. Lots of good character development on this show.
- I watched season 1 of Dark Matter while we were in California in August. (It’s not on Netflix in NL yet.) Discount Firefly, following the crew of a starship who all wake up out of statis with their memories wiped. It’s kinda fun, but it takes the show a while to discover that the character they had set up as the lead (“One”, played by Marc Bendavid) is actually the least interesting one to tell stories about. Also: they have a sexbot episode. In 2016. It would have been embarrassing even in the nineties.
- I usually describe Lev Grossman’s The Magicians as Narnia crossed with Harry Potter, but at university, and all the characters are assholes. I loved it, and was excited to see the TV show. It doesn’t disappoint! It does take a lot of liberties with the story, introducing new characters and removing others, but it maintains the central premise, and most importantly the feel of the book(s). (The first season of the show incorporates Julia’s story from the second book, The Magician King. Julia and Penny both benefit from getting a bigger spotlight.) The first season also has a very different ending than the book. Watching the show made me go and re-read the book, and I was impressed at how much the showrunners had made it their own. If you’ve read/watched one, you will still find a lot of surprises in the other.
- Mr. Robot, season 1: Dark, claustrophobic, disorienting. Rami Malek as Eliot is quite brilliant.
- Chef’s Table, seasons 1 & 2: I love how this series focuses on the chef’s story rather than necessarily on their food. Sure, the food is important, but it’s really all about what drives them, and how they got to the point they’re at. A consistent theme is just how crushing the life of a chef, or really anyone in the hospitality industry can be. The hours they have to put in are ridiculous, for a tiny chance of the kind of recognition only a handful of top chefs enjoy. I also found it interesting to watch the management styles of the various chefs — how they treat their staff in the kitchen. Some are brusque; some see them as co-creators of amazing things (Grant Achatz); some take their responsibilities as teachers very seriously (Magnus Nilsson). The show briefly rekindled my love of fine dining, but then I remembered that I’d have to dress up to visit these places, and my wardrobe currently consists entirely of concert T-shirts and corporate merch.
- Stranger Things, season 1. This made me curiously meta-nostalgic for a kind of eighties I never experienced, but saw portrayed in exported films and TV shows that this one echoes. It’s like being melancholy for the 1950’s vision of the future with jetpacks and flying cars. ‘Twas never thus. Taken on its own, the show is great. Predictable, but very satisfying.
- Archer, season 7: inappropriate fun, as ever.
- Luke Cage, season 1: mostly excellent, though I was disappointed by how the final episodes seemed to revert to a very comic-booky hero vs villian storyline, when the rest of the show had set up the characters to inhabit a much more down-to-earth and nuanced world. That’s what I enjoy most about Netflix’s Marvel shows, how they treat comic book characters in a realistic (well, ish) setting. Jessica Jones and Luke Cage don’t wear costumes, and are the better for it. The music of the show is fantastic. I find myself listening to a lot of TV and movie scores while I’m working these days, and the Luke Cage score has a lovely seventies soul vibe to it.
- Agent Carter, season 1: fun, but flat. The setting is post-war New York, but the show felt like it was also trying to mimic the over-acted mannerisms of media from that era. The characters are drawn in bold strokes and vivid colours that make them feel like stereotypes rather than rounded characters. Some of this is deliberate, so that the stories can then play against those stereotypes, and that’s one of the major themese of the show: the awfulness of Peggy Carter having to prove herself all over again in the face of institutional sexism and prejudice. Sometimes it works, sometimes it feels artificial.
Films:
- Suicide Squad: forgettable. Too many characters, not enough interplay. Jared Leto’s Joker is overwrought and awful. Fortunately, his part was cut back to almost nothing.
- Jason Bourne: really forgettable. I saw this with Fiona at the Grand Lake in Oakland in August…or did I?
- Keanu: silly, but I liked it. For a comedy about mistaken identities, it has surprisingly few cringe-inducing moments, and goes for absurd laughs instead.
- Spotlight: fantastically acted and sensitive newsroom drama about a terrible scandal. Just like with Chef’s Table I had an eye on the behaviour of the various management-level characters, and was observing how the editors and team leaders worked to make big things happen.
- Maggie’s Plan: subtle comedy about people in love and trying to deal with the consequences of getting what they want. (I don’t think I would call it a “romantic comedy”, though. Romance plays a part, but it’s not the focus. Nor is the comedy, really. The humour is sly and wry, rather than laugh-out-loud funny.)
- The Constant Gardener: I normally like subtle spy thrillers like this one, but I just found it dull. Maybe I watched it in the wrong frame of mind: in a cramped airline seat on the red-eye back from New York after an exhausting week. Maybe don’t trust my judgement on this one.
- Eye In The Sky: intense drama about a single drone mission over Nairobi, and the life-or-death decisions the military officers and commanders have to make in the course of it, with only limited information. Given the limited number of settings, this almost felt like a theatre play. It’s a good film, but it left me with a creeping revulsion to the modern military technology. Drone strikes may be more precise tools than bombs, but is the ability to kill more precisely and effectively really a step forward for humanity?
Books:
- Geoff Manaugh – A Burglar’s Guide to the City: Geoff Manaugh’s 2010 article Nakatomi Space is about movie characters (taking Die Hard as a specific example) and real-life military operations subverting architecture to achieve their objectives. In it, he says,
“What I find so interesting about Die Hard—in addition to unironically enjoying the film—is that it cinematically depicts what it means to bend space to your own particular navigational needs.”
This book goes deep on those same ideas. It doesn’t feel like there’s a concrete point to the book, but it’s a neat delve. - Chuck Wendig – Zeroes: I came back from California convinced that I had read two books, but it took me days to remember what the second one was. This was it. It’s not bad, and as a techno-thriller it moves at a nice pace. I just didn’t love it.
Comics:
- Injection vol 2 is a moody follow-up to the first volume, with a neat detective story at its heart, and truly beautiful colouring.
- The Vision vol 1, “Little Worse Than A Man”: Ooh, dark dark dark. The Vision trying to figure out what it means to be human by literally making a family for himself. Themes of loneliness, isolation, and strangeness pervade the book. Very good.
- Patsy Walker, AKA Hellcat! vol 1 “Hooked on a Feline”: I loved this. I didn’t know anything about Patsy Walker before reading Charles Soule and Javier Pulido’s run of She-Hulk. This book gives her a spin off that follows her after those adventures, as she tries to get herself set up as an independent hero in New York. In terms of style, it’s a cross between Soule and Pulido’s She-Hulk and North and Henderson’s Squirrel Girl. It’s adorable.
- Ms Marvel vol 5 “Super Famous”: keeps on being good and worth buying.
- Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur vol 1 “BFF”: This didn’t really work for me. The prehistoric Killer-Folk just didn’t register as a viable threat, even taking comic book logic into account; and I found Lunella’s constant interior monologue grating. Part of the point of the story is that she doesn’t have anyone she can talk to about her life and problems, but I would have enjoyed it more if she’d had a sidekick. (Devil Dinosaur doesn’t count — yet — unless she emerges from her Terrigen cocoon with the ability to talk to him (her?) directly.)
Music:
- Fiona loves Marianas Trench, and spotted that they were playing in Amsterdam (Tolhuistuin) in October. Of course we got tickets. I started listening to them last month, and OMG! They’re fantastic. I’m super excited about the gig coming up on Tuesday. Power pop to the max!
- I still haven’t watched season 3 of RWBY, but I’ve listened to the soundtrack now. It has some strong tracks, but not nearly as many as on the soundtracks for the first two seasons.
- I pitched in for the kickstarter for De La Soul’s new album, And The Anonymous Nobody, and it’s finally here. It’s okay, but maybe I haven’t given it enough opportunity to grow on me yet. It’s pretty downbeat, and I’ve been mostly in the mood for more shiny and upbeat stuff recently. (See: Marianas Trench above.) (Okay, so maybe Astoria’s lyrics are a bit dark, but the soaring power pop hooks cut right through them.)
The travelling developer problem
I’ve been trying to figure out my travel schedule for the last quarter of this year. I need to spend another 16 working days in Scotland, so probably four trips of three days, and one of four. I try to arrange my trips to coincide with Abi’s part-time days off. But I’ve also got tickets for eight concerts between October to December, and I need to plan around those dates. And I want to spend more time in the Glasgow office, but Easyjet only fly between Amsterdam and Glasgow on Sundays, Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays.
As if these constraints weren’t enough, Deacon Blue are playing some dates around Scotland in November and December. Most of the easy options (Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Perth) have long sold out, but there is still some availability for Dundee and Aberdeen… Was there any way to squeeze them in? Turns out yes. I can actually save €40 by flying to Edinburgh on Saturday 3rd December instead of on Sunday 4th December, and put the money towards the concert ticket and a super-cheap advance train return to Aberdeen. Done deal!
I’ve been a fan of Deacon Blue since Raintown in the eighties. OK, so Aberdeen is a bit out of the way for me, but I’m super excited to finally get to see them live. And not just for the nostalgia value. I loved their last album, A New House, and their next one, Believers, is out next week.
The rest of California, August 2016
We didn’t do, or attempt to do, as much during this years’s trip to California as we did in our last trip in 2013. This trip was mostly to hang out with family, anchored by Pat & Susan’s party for their 50th wedding anniversary. That’s not to say that we did nothing at all, but it was mostly short trips, many just within walking distance. The party was great. I met my new sister-in-law Danielle for the first time, saw Abi’s aunt and uncle and cousins from LA who I haven’t seen for…many? years, and her aunt from Texas I haven’t seen since Mick’s wedding. We also met Abi’s cousin Travis (and his new wife Carla) for the first time since our wedding. He was six years old then; now he’s thirty and just starting law school. Plus lots of other people. Inevitably, there were many conversations that started with, “Brexit, WTF.” I’m not normally good with parties, but I thoroughly enjoyed this one.
The first day we were there, Alex and I walked down to the T-Mobile shop on Lakeshore to pick up some SIM cards for the whole family. Amazingly, T-Mobile had a perfect offer for us: a “tourist plan” that offers three weeks of phone and (more importantly) data service for $30. We didn’t even have to explain what we wanted to a confused shop assistant. Cardboard pop-ups for the tourist plan were right there on the counter. There was a hidden cost in that the $30 doesn’t include an actual SIM card, just the service. (Or sales tax — a matter that Alex rolled his eyes at whenever we bought anything.) But still. It was a good deal, considering how much of our California family business is arranged through text messages and group chat. I’ve hung on to our SIM cards, because I’m going to be back in the US next week, and I’ll be able to re-up my data plan for another $30.
On the way back, we bought donuts. The first of many donut runs. The rest of the world — even New York! — doesn’t understand old-fashioned donuts, you see. (Maple glaze for me, chocolate for Abi.)
Abi and I walked in to Berkeley one day for lunch, and to snuffle around Telegraph Avenue a bit. I found a copy of Geoff Manaugh’s book A Burglar’s Guide To The City at Moe’s, as well as Charles Fleming’s Secret Stairs – East Bay, which I’d heard about on 99% Invisible. I ended up only trying out one of the walks, but throughout the trip I was much more aware of all the stairways that led up and down between houses all along the hilly streets of Oakland.
I had wanted to follow up on another 99% Invisible tourist tip, the (base of the) statue of Triumph Of Light statue on Mt Olympus in the heart of San Francisco, but I didn’t get round to it. We did, however, take a trip to San Jose to visit the Winchester Mystery House, which is amazing. Of all the things I’ve talked to people about since we came back, this is the one that has animated me most. It may be the spooky history that lures you there, but it’s the story of Sarah Winchester the Architect that I find much more compelling. She was so far ahead of her time that she would not have been out of place as a present-day eccentric Silicon Valley billionaire philanthropist. I need to read Mary Jo Ignoffo’s book Captive of the Labyrinth, because that book concentrates entirely on that side of her. There’s a film about Sarah Winchester in early production right now, but of course it’s going to be a supernatural thriller rather than a biopic of a fascinating woman challenging the restrictions how her time. (It might still be fun, though.)
Alex has got a gaming group going with his friends from school, and he was interested in making a start with miniatures. There was a games store in San Francisco that stocked the figures he was looking for. One morning, we walked to Jack London square and caught the ferry to the city. Wow! I had never taken it before, but it was a much more fun way to travel than BART. The ferry stops at Alameda, and then sails past the old naval base that the Mythbusters used for filming many of their iconic segments. You head out over the bay at speed — the ferry is a high-powered catamaran that can get up to 35 knots — cruise past Treasure Island, under the colossal Bay Bridge, and arrive at the picturesque San Francisco Ferry Terminal. I’m a big fan of ferries anyway, but this is a particularly good one.
Fiona and I saw Suicide Squad and Jason Bourne at the beautiful Grand Lake theatre.
Because the ferry to San Franciso was so much fun, Abi and I took it again when we made a day trip over to the city to visit the newly reopened SFMOMA. It’s an amazing museum, from Richard Serra’s monumental Sequence at street level to the stark geometry of the Oculus bridge at the top of the building, it’s a feast for the senses. We spent hours roaming about, but we could have spent a lot longer. I’m glad we decided to have lunch before we went in, because we were exhausted from all the walking when we finished our tour. If and when we go back, we’ll plan our visit with a half-way break for a snack and a sit-down. My favourite work was Lee Krasner’s room-scale Polar Stampede, which I’m sure I could sit and stare at for hours.
I went along to an Ars Technica Live event, where Leslie Miley talked about diversity in Silicon Valley. Lessons there for tech companies elsewhere, too.
Other than our pre-concert dinner that the Indigo Girls concert, we went out to dinner with our family a few times. With Mick and Sarah we hit Barneys at the start of our stay (a perennial favourite), and Doña Tomas towards the end. With Travis and Carla and Pat and Susan, we ate at Tambo, where I had my first Pisco sour and discovered that Peruvian food is amazing. (“Enjoying Ceviche in Peru and seeing a double rainbow, while listening to Bitches Brew as recorded by Miles Davis.”)
On our last weekend, Abi, Fiona, and I walked to the Art & Soul Festival in beautiful downtown Oakland. Great atmosphere, lots of food, music, and T-shirt vendors. Fiona bought a baseball shirt with an octopus design that she basically has been wearing non-stop ever since. We bumped into Sarah and her mother, and watched a circus and acrobatics performance by the students of the Kinetic Arts Center. We hit the Oaklandish store on Broadway on the way back.
The last day before we flew out, Alex and Fiona wanted to go karting. We went back to K1 Speed in South San Francisco, where they still had our signups on record from three years ago. Fiona still had to ride in the kids’ races back then, but she’s with the grown-ups now.
Finally, a quick word about WOW air. We flew with them because they offered the cheapest tickets for the dates we wanted to travel. They may be a “budget” airline, and so you do pay for everything, including a glass of water on the flight, but the quality of service was excellent. The planes were (almost) brand-new A321s and A330 Airbuses with firm but comfortable seats, lots of legroom, and universal AC power sockets between each pair of seats. The seat backs are rigid, which reduces the amount of poking and stabbing from the passengers behind you. There is a layover to change planes in Keflavik airport, but that’s worth it for its own sake. The views you get flying on approach to the airport are amazing. If you’re of a science-fictional mind, it’s more like landing at an outpost on a young colony planet than at a traditional Western airport. But the airport terminal itself is brand new, spacious, with a beautifully stark Nordic design. There’s not a lot to see or do in the terminal, and I’m not sure how I’d feel if there had been delays, but for a couple of hours it was just fine.
One thing I did miss on the flight was a map display that tracked the plane’s position. On the flight from KEF to SFO, we flew over a tiny remote settlement consisting of a few streets and a small airstrip. I don’t know why, but I felt intensely curious about what it must be to live there. I didn’t know if we were over Greenland or Canada, though. When we arrived, I spent some time looking up the flight path, and using Google Maps to try to identify the place from mental sketch of the village layout and coastline land from above. I’m pretty sure it was Cape Dorset in Nunavut. No Google Street view, but the satellite imagery is surprisingly detailed. I have no idea what I’d do there, but I find myself drawn to the place.