TMI: 3000 Hits

I guess attaining 3000 hits is a great achievement for a major league baseball player, but it is a tiny pittance for a web site that has been around for only slightly more than a year.

For Year 2 of the Chronicles, I have migrated to the Beta version of Blogger and updated my template to take advantage of the new features without giving up much of the old look at feel. The labels should allow people to limit their RSS feeds to just the topics they are interested in.

Adapting to the new template took a little less time than I thought. I just ran into a couple of snags that were quickly resolved via Google searches. Including my counters and Random Quote of the Day just involved adding HTML/Javascript page elements. Then I ran into Java Script errors trying update those HTML elements in Firefox 2. Again this was a known issue with a simple workaround of reloading the page where one edits the page element.

TV: Amazing Race 10 - Finale

Congratulations to the Models for winning the Amazing Race 10. I guess it is nice to see a couple of reformed drug addicts show what people can do if they set their minds to it. My gut thought Rob and Kim would win, but as usual, I guessed wrong. I should have known the Models would win when challenges included putting a dress together and traveling between the fashion capitals of Paris and New York. Overall, this was a race full of surprises particularly after more recent editions were almost foregone conclusions after the first leg.

It would have been interesting to know how close the race really was. It would be interesting if the main key was finding a taxi driver with a fast pass versus one who had to wait in the cash only line at a toll booth. Something tells me the Models jogged the two miles faster than our bickering couple as well despite the editing. Or the taxi driver they found for the last 56-mile drive to the finish line was just driving that much faster.

At the beginning of the episode, I had a feeling the racers would have to go to the Sagrada Familia eventually. Not sure how one could go to Barcelona and not go there. As I said before it is an amazing building. Too bad they did not go inside. They would have had fun trying to race up at least one of the spiral staircases to find their next clue. My knees were shaky coming back down one of the church spires, but it was due to slight acrophobia and claustrophobia rather than fatigue. I guess hiding the clue in a nearby park was good enough, but I knew they would bunch up at the airport.

The Bama Moms were smart or lucky enough to have a travel agent send them to Orly Airport instead of CDG. I have never been through Orly, but I think it is a shorter commute to central Paris and maybe a much easier airport to get in and out of in general. It put them into first place inside Paris. The Moms went to the well once too often in trying to find a flight back to New York from Orly. It is possible that if they went to CDG first, that they could have gotten ahead of one of the other teams on the waiting list. However, somehow Rob and Kim managed to find the right person and negotiate an early checkin even though they arrived at the airport after the Models. The race was almost decided at that point.

Other Notes:
I guess the Miners' shirts were passed from the miners to the Chos to the Bama Moms. Either that or David and Mary had a bunch to pass around. I wonder if the racers had a separate laundry budget or facilities to wash their own clothes at the pit stops.

Google Earth just added new Geographic Web Layers. I noticed it when checking out the location of the Eiffel Tower and Place de la Concorde. There are some cool links to pictures of both locations and other pointers. The two locations are pretty close together but I guess the racers had to take a major detour and stop by Omaha beach for skydiving.

I think I mentioned before that I have visited Paris. I stayed at a hotel about 3 or 4 blocks SW along the Seine from the Eiffel Tower. The fancy restaurant where I dined, Ledoyen, is just WNW of Place de la Concorde. That area is also where the Tour de France traditionally finishes.

I have stayed in New York a few times as well, but I never passed by any of the places where the teams had to find clues.

Hopefully the woman in the yellow cap stayed dry in rainy weather by standing under the sculpture. Maybe there were spotters that let her know when any teams were close? I wonder what the auditions were like for that brief role. "Are you willing to wear a loud yellow top and hat?"

The woman judging when the dress was finished may have been the harshest judge in the history of the Amazing Race. There were challenges involving putting together some Ikea furniture and Greek statues with judges who were almost as serious about enforcing the rules.

I guess the teaser for next season confirmed the next race is an All-Star edition with some secret teams to be revealed while other teams have relationships that have changed since they originally raced. Oh well, until February, I'll have to find other subjects to write about.

TV: Amazing Race 10 - Episodes 11 and 12

The Thanksgiving holiday, a pileup of work assignments, and apartment cleaning prevented me from paying attention to my blog last week. Bad way to start off Year Two of my Chronicles, which is due for some minor tweaks to take advantage of the new Beta Blogger features.

Anyway, this edition of the race has remained true to form and had the teams finish in almost the exact reverse order than I predicted. The Beauty Queens were finally eliminated after being in the gun sights of every other team for several legs now. Their strategy for winning almost worked out for them, and they were a strong team that never had any conflicts, but in the end Karma demanded its pound of flesh (not camel meat) and so they were doomed. Even if the Queens had not overshot a challenge a week ago and put Rob and Kim into last, they would have still lost since Rob and Kim came in first this week and would have avoided the 30 minute penalty.

Granted the stress of having to come in first could have caused Rob and Kim to crumble this week. I totally thought they were goners once they chose to search for a clue in a pile of tomatoes while getting pelted by locals. I thought they were headed for a nuclear meltdown. Usually the "find a needle in a haytomato stack challenge" has taken down the strongest of teams, but somehow Rob and Kim and the Bama Moms found the clue to the Pitstop rather quickly.

The Bama Moms have proven that one can go fast by starting slow and staying calm. Last week they took advantage of not getting an earlier flight to study some maps of Morocco, so they did not get lost while other teams relied on sometimes unreliable locals for directions. They could have finished first last week while the Models had to run back to their car to get some good luck charm. This week they walked through a maze and were the first to find a way out of it. If they did not have such bad luck with taxis, they could have finished first again this week. Congratulations to them for being the first all-female team to get into the final 3. At first I thought the Bowling Moms had achieved that feat, but maybe they only made the final 4.

Other Notes:
The chariot races looked fun but dangerous. I wonder how they stayed in those things on such a bumpy track. Having a couple of stunt charioteers take a spill was pretty cool.

Hopefully Rob and Kim can avoid driving the rest of the race. I cannot recall another team having worse luck with cars.

Kim needs to see more of the world. This week she mistook some goats as dogs. I almost fell off my chair when that happened. Though I am not sure if those were goats or lambs. I was on the island of Nevis where a local had to teach me that goats have their tails up while sheep have tails that go down.

One pound or half a kilogram of meat is quite a bit of food no matter what animal it is. I probably would have made the camel kabobs a little too spicy.

I had the pleasure of visiting the beautiful city of Barcelona five or six years ago. On my last day there, I spent a whole day walking around the city. I started from my hotel to the incredible Sagrada Familia via the Diagonal. Then I went to the old bull ring, Magic Fountain, and Art Museum where the pitstop was this week. I went further up that hill to the Olympic stadium. Then I walked by the spot where the Olympic diving and swimming competitions were held. I recognized that site when I saw the first split second of the music video "Slow" by Kylie Minogue. From there I took an aerial tramway down to the harbor, walked along the beaches, and ended my trek by walking up Las Ramblas where one of the Detours took place. I do not recall the distance from Las Ramblas to the Pitstop being very far. With traffic it might be hard to say if a taxi would have been much faster than walking.

Next week, one of the final three teams will earn a million dollars. I have no clue who that will be, and I imagine I will be glued to the TV until the end. Plus I am already looking forward to the next Amazing Race. It is going to be an All-Star Edition featuring the return of the very loved and hated Team Romber. I vaguely recall getting an unusual cluster of hits to my website from Miami a few weeks ago too. Hmm...

TV: Amazing Race 10 - Episode 10

The Cho Bros pretty much choked this week, or at least that's how it was implied. Starting out the second half of the leg having to confront their fear of heights may have made them too tentative for the rest of the leg. The time they wasted needing to stop and ask for guidance over and over was about as bad as driving the wrong way confidently. But at least they dispelled one stereotype that men never ask for directions. The male models also have shown navigation impairment, but they realized quickly that they would not be able to read the Ukranian Cyrillic alphabet and were thoughtful enough to trust taxi drivers and the Beauty Queens to lead them around. This vaulted them to victory.

I wonder if the Beauty Queens came in second because they were being perfectionists with their Rap song. Other teams sounded like they just let the passenger throw some lyrics together while the other drove. The Queens worked diligently together on a routine that they might use if they were still competing in pageants. They could have just over-estimated how long it would take the Models to find the sheet music and a piano player at the other Detour.

Dustin might be cute and an excellent tank driver, but may not be the person you want on a Trivial Pursuit team. I think she was the one who knows about the Chinese inventing paper. She is also familiar with the Ukranian Bell Carol. However, last week she talked about Finnish clogs; this week she thought Chernobyl was where an atomic bomb went off. Granted I thought the nuclear reactor was in Russia rather than the Ukraine. If I were competing, there's a slight chance I would have gone to Moscow instead of Kiev and committed the most monumental blunder in Amazing Race history.

Rob and Kimberley were lucky that the Chos and the 'Bama Moms were moving so slowly. They were able to overcome an automobile breakdown and still come in third. It's funny how pessimistic Rob gets whenever anything goes wrong. At least he's realizing that Kimberley is a superhuman alien. They did try to be nice this week and invite a very helpful local couple into a club to watch their Rap performance. The expression on the locals' faces were classic and it was funny to see them standing patiently outside the club when Rob and Kim finished. I guess they were not in a hurry to go anywhere and enjoyed the opportunity to appear on TV. I wonder how many other countries air the Amazing Race. At least, it is being broadcast in the Philippines and Canada along with an Asian edition.

Hopefully the teams get some money for laundry after traipsing through mud twice on the same long leg.

I guess the Race was filmed in the summer. It looked like it was still early afternoon as the racers ran into the Helsinki airport at 9:17PM. It also looked pretty bright at 6:00AM the next morning. The longest amount of daylight I have experienced was June in Berlin, Germany where the sun rose around 4:30AM and did not set until around 10:00PM. The furthest north that I have traveled is Skagway, Alaska but that was in September.

Kiev looks like an interesting city to visit. After eating duck in Beijing, I am considering eating chicken in Kiev, but several sources say it did not originate there (though the text is almost identical on every site).

News: Wireless Electricity

A while back Tom Kyte was reminiscing about some old IBM equipment and joked about wireless electricity. 11 months later this news article talks about a more practical wireless electricity solution.

TV: Amazing Race 10 - Episode 9

This was a pretty tense week. It ended with a literal cliff hanger as the Male Models rappelled down the side of a stadium tower face first hoping to finish first and get a nice prize from Phil only to find out the race was not over. The Beauty Queens should not have been that far behind them. Meanwhile the remaining three teams were about an hour back and scrambling not to be eliminated.

The Bama Moms almost found themselves looking at a 12 - 15 hour deficit when all the other teams were able to grab a 7AM flight that would eventually take them to Finland while the next flight could have been a 9PM flight to Paris. But somehow they were able to wheedle their way on board with just seconds to spare. It was a pretty crazy flight plan from Madagascar to Johannesburg, South Africa to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to Frankfurt, Germany to Helsinki, Finland.
[I had the same number of stops on a flight going from San Francisco to Bangalore, India via Paris, New York, and Mumbai. When I saw that itinerary, I changed the layovers to be about 12 to 15 hours each, so I could do some power sight-seeing at each stop.]

Whenever there is a bunching up, it seems like the Beauty Queens are always the first to get out of the airport. It has been giving them a huge time advantage and has made the other teams jealous. The producers have not shown how the Queens achieve this, but I suspect they are able to sweet talk other passengers into switching seats so they can exit the plane first.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Chos were out to prove that nice guys finish last. One of them correctly observed, "Being polite sucks sometimes." and earned title of the week. From the previews of next weeks episode, they finally make a second observation that their alliance is over. I may have been wrong about their outlook. Even when they had a chance to pass some teams racing through mud, they ran out of gas again and remained last.

Rob and Kimberley outraced the Chos as carrying Kim was probably much easier than carrying a Cho bro. In one of the funniest moments this week, Rob made the remark that carrying his partner was much easier than he thought. This left him open to the nightmare question, "Do you think I'm fat?" That exchange probably threw them off course so much, they ended up dropping from third to last in finding the Road Block challenge.

The teams had to descend into a scary dark mine to retrieve what sounded like the final clue of the week. Rob let out some evil yells as he raced his bike up the mine shaft and caught up to the Bros and the Moms The shot of Rob's headlight coming up behind the the Mom who was panting like crazy sent chills up my spine. It was like something out of a horror movie.

The ironic part of the challenge is that David of the recently eliminated Coal Miners probably would have felt right at home there. I'm not sure where the Chos got the Miners' T-shirts, but it was sort of funny that the Chos were racing in memory of David and hoped to channel David's spirit in the mine. The dude was just eliminated not killed.

The walk down the side of a stadium tower would have been the scariest challenge for me. My knees would have been trembling like crazy. But it was funny to watch. It would have reminded me more of the Batman TV series if they let both members rappel together.

And bats would have been appropriate for a slightly post-Halloween episode.

Other Notes:
I have to admit I am finding myself more attracted to Dustin each week even if she thinks people in Finland wear wooden shoes.

Someone needs to warn Tyler that being Metrosexual is "Out" while Real Men are "In". This at least according to the latest episode of Men in Trees. I may have to blog a bit more about this little TV show which is a pleasant mix of Sex and the City and Northern Exposure. Not quite as good as either, but it's the closest one can get to new episodes of each.

Did it sound like Kimberley was asking for directions to La Jolla?

Here's is a pretty cool Google Earth Mash Up of all the Amazing Race 10 locations. Similarly, here's the Google Maps Mash Up. Neat stuff.

Web: Time lapse movies

Carl Backstrom's Blog mentioned a cool video of a trip from LA to NY taken with time-lapse photography. But the link to the movie from that site seemed to take too long to download. So I found a better source here. The mount did not seem to drift at all. It is also pretty interesting that nobody tried to steal the camera from the back of that convertible (or maybe any attempts were edited out). Someday, or more likely some might, I might drive from one end of Interstate 80 to the other.

This blog collection of time lapse videos has several other interesting clips as well. I particularly enjoyed anything that included San Francisco, of course, along with the aurora displays. The video of A Year in Antarctica was educational and entertaining.

TV: Amazing Race 10 - Episode 8

All good things must come to an end (I figured I needed a Star Trek: TNG reference in my blog eventually). For the miners, the race around the world finally ended in Madagascar. At least Mary got to experience some new things, and learned that Madagascar is more than just an animated move. It also was good to see that the new non-elimination penalty of a 30 minute wait for a non-first place finish actually had an impact on the outcome. They actually came in 5th but only 10 minutes ahead of the Bama Moms. This added to a tense, emotional finish.

Barring a major surprise, the odds are that the Bama Moms are the next to go. I think the message from their cute children (in next week's episode) might make them want to lose and go home. So, I can start to handicap what I believe will be the final four.

The Models could be the most physically fit but most directionally challenged. There's also sign of some conflict brewing between the guys. But at least James can eat (and giving Tyler the inspiration to name an episode). That might only be good enough for 4th place in this close race. The preview showing them getting stuck in the mud might be a hint for an upset.

The Needlers pretty much have fate in their hands. If they can get along, they can win this thing. Chances are the mounting pressure will lead to another Rob meltdown or a full-blown argument. The presence of the Models and just doing the Fast Forward may have spared them for one leg. They seem to be doing OK in the developing countries despite some of their odd preconceptions about people who live there. They may get an advantage if the race goes through the fancier areas of Europe, but staying in the third world could mean a third place finish.

The Chos have been trying very hard to prove that nice guys can finish first, but so far that has only happened once for them in this race. Perhaps after they are unburdened by the rest of the six-pack they can jump over a couple of teams. It will be interesting to see if they will try to form a new alliance or try to keep the Bama Moms in it. The work they did with The Queens at the Intersection / Detour challenge showed they could work with anybody -- even the most hated team. Most importantly, the brothers get along with each other. Unfortunately, they can also get lost while driving or while in deep thought. That may only let them take second at best.

This leaves The Queens who have been on a roll despite piling on more bad karma points. This week they took the Bama Moms' car instead of using the same car that they wrecked earlier. Then they made a dumb joke about perhaps doing the Paper challenge because the Chos were Asian (maybe the only time the Chos showed any disgust, with the "Let's just go" comment). At least the comment showed that the Blondes know some history. They have gotten lost less frequently than the other teams, and could be resourceful when needed. It would be great to see an all-woman team win this race for the first time, even if I am still rooting for the nicer Chos.

This race may still have a few tricks up its sleeve, so nothing is a lock.

Other Notes:
While Los Angeles is known for its traffic and smog, most of it blown into the surrounding valleys (see simple flash demo there). Therefore, I guess Rob and Kimberly must live around Long Beach since they seem most sensitive to the smog in other cities.

I wonder if the taxi drivers in Madagascar's capital city were trying to take tourists for a ride. A few of them tried to find some long way to get the "Black Angel" and many of them waited until the last minute to get gasoline. I do not remember that issue being shown as frequently in any other race destination.

The taxi driver reaction to Karlyn's comment about being a "Black Angel" did look edited and fake (or at least more so than previous attempts to display driver "double-takes" to racer comments). But it is still kind of funny every time it happens.

I used to devour cow or ox tongue when I was a very young child until I learned what it was. I am not sure if I have ever eating cow lips, but considering how often I dine out, who knows what I have been eating. I never could eat balut, though most of my family loves it.

How many times have contestants vomited at those eating challenges? Kimberley was having the toughest time this time around.

Between the stiff dancing and the uncomfortable look Phil had while being hugged by two attractive blond women, I wonder how much of a nerd Phil was in school.

TMI: Thought for Food

I have been meaning to write this for weeks but I suppose the day after Halloween is as good a time as any to stop procrastinating.

One thing I have been thinking about as the "Big Four-Zero" quickly approaches is going on a healthier diet. I decided I will not try to eat less and exercise more since the more I think about not eating the more I actually do eat. I am sort of like that slow reading cartoon character on The Electric Company who would forget a sign contained the "NOT" word. [Yes, my TV viewing habits were established at a very young age.]

Of course, the fates have conspired against me. I went on my first cruise this summer. If there is one thing I learned, it is impossible to go hungry on-board a luxury liner. I finally fully appreciate the old joke, "I'm on a seafood diet. When I see food, I eat it." Fortunately, I did spend several hours power walking through the streets of a few Alaskan towns, otherwise I would have gained a ton of weight. I do not know if I will ever lose the half-ton I did gain.

Next, it seemed like every food that was supposed to be healthy to eat could make you sick instead. It started with spinach, then it was a lettuce recall, and next it is something else yet to be identified. On the bright side, all these food scares have allowed my sister to achieve some airtime on news show on a station in Los Angeles, KTLA [For some reason you have to use Internet Explorer and click on Part Two: An E.Coli Lab to see the video]. She does not get a speaking role but is one of the women seen messing around with test tubes and lab machinery. This means she is one of the few people in my family who has a job that all my relatives can now understand. I imagine it is a cross between CSI and Ghost Germ Hunters.

But I digress. I suppose if I live in an age where any food I eat could potentially kill me, I should get to choose my poison. So, let me introduce you to Deep Fried Coke. I wonder what happens if you squeeze a Mentos into that.

If I had just procrastinated a few minutes longer, I could have incorporated this news hot off the press that obese mice can stay healthy (but not get skinny) with a chemical called resveratol. Could Woody Allen actually be the second coming of Nostradamus?

TV: Amazing Race 10 - Episode 7

Rob summed up how the show has developed so far by observing, "It's amazing how this race flips, dude!" [Yes. All people in California address each other as 'Dude' or 'Man']. The coal miners went from last to first and back to last place, but were spared from elimination once again. They seem to be following the BJ and Tyler tactic of winning by losing and lulling their competitors into complacency. If these folks reach the final three, I imagine David and Mary will remove their sandbags and start running sub-10-second 100-meter dashes to finish first. Then they will reveal an evil laugh as they receive their million-dollar check. But I will continue rooting for them.

By odd coincidence, I recently researched the island of Mauritius on the Internet a few weeks ago after hearing that the company I work for was going to open an office there. It looks like a nice place to visit; I would consider myself lucky if I ever have a business assignment there.

I will have to remember that there do not seem to be many direct flights to Mauritius from Kuwait. It could not have been fun for teams to fly all the way to London, UK to Mauritius. The Beauty Queens were most incredulous that it was the fastest route. I suppose it was in frustration that they set up a conflict between the Models and the 'Bama Moms. In the end, all the teams ended up taking the same plane.

Next I have to remember that Mauritius is another country that drives on the other side of the road. On my only trip to London, I did try driving a company car with a stick shift around a parking lot. Between driving on the other side, rarely driving a car with manual transmission particularly one with the stick on the other side, and being completely unfamiliar with the rules of the road and the street signs (particularly at roundabouts), I opted to just use hire cars and the train to get around. I am impressed that the teams did not get more lost other than the Models.

Finally I have to remember to avoid sprinkling salt on my food in Mauritius. Most of the teams chose SALT at the Detour, but it did not look like any of them washed their hands before starting to dig into the piles of salt and stepping all over it with their dirty shoes. Also, the decoy salt shakers were filled with soil that was just poured into the pile.

So even with a car break down (and another Rob meltdown) and a car accident (Beauty Queens perhaps earning some bad karma), the final order was determined by how long it took for each team to give up on SALT and switched to SEA.

Humorous moments:
Phil saying "Uhh..." when Dustin asked him if he wants to ride with her on the scooter she just won. Classic. He practically walked into that trap. He may still have been too off-balance to fully execute his fake 'Philimination' routine with the Miners.

Speaking of traps, someone had fun setting up the pit next to the sails. I am pretty sure I would have fell into that thing and died laughing after freaking out for a little while.

Mary has a fear of fish? I had never heard of that before, but it does have a name, Ichthyphobia. She probably watched Piranha before becoming a Steven Seagal fan.

TV: Amazing Race 10 - Episode 6

Congratulations to the Miners for leaping from over 5 hours behind in last place to first with an assist from the Chos and a Fast Forward where Mary improved to 4 out of 6 in the unofficial episode naming contest. Maybe someone needs to inform her that Steven Seagal has starred in only one or two slightly successful movies in the last 10 years. Audiences cheering as his character fell to his death from a plane an early scene of 1996's Executive Decision indicated his career was headed in a similar direction.

The Miners won a trip to Negril, Jamaica. I visited the island (coincidentally around 1996) to attend a wedding, and had a great time. I remember parasailing over the long beach of Negril. The almost perfect scenery from up there was besmudged by what I initially thought was a hairy ugly albino manatee. Then I became horrified when a second glance revealed it was actually a fat old man who was completely nude with white fur all over his body except for the top of his head. Then, a rather attractive much younger woman with much less covering her waded into the picture to ... "greet" him. After I landed my parachute on a rather small platform in the water, I made sure to stay on the more modest section of the beach.

The episode scared me at first as a throwback to Treasure Hunters. The racers received their first clue via a cell phone (shameless product placement), and it was not that difficult. Basically, all they had to do was ask someone if they recognized some towers in Kuwait, only to find out they were called The Kuwait Towers. Then one member of each team had to climb up the outside of a tower to retrieve a satchel that contained some puzzle pieces that had to be combined with other puzzle pieces found in a "treasure chest" back on the ground. The feelings of deja vu continued as Erwin channeled the spirit of Sam from The Geniuses team who also a fear of heights. I guess someone behind the show wanted to prove they could do this better than the upstart competition.

Navigation once again determined the outcome of this race. The teams arrived in Kuwait at the same time. The Queens thought they had good directions to the Towers and left the airport first but still managed to get lost and lose a few spots. The Chos redeemed some karma points by getting a police escort to one clue and moving up a couple of spots out of last place. The ex-junkies / male models showed intelligence in being the first to complete a tricky puzzle. Then they avoided getting "Lost in Translation" by thinking of carrying the clue to a local to tell the name of a street writing in Arabic. However, they still got lost looking for the next clues and avoided elimination only because one other team was more lost than they were.

As the Coal Miners moved from last to first, the Triathletes fell from first to last and were eliminated from the race. I was more gratified by that result as Peter has been coming across as a loser. Perhaps it was due to editing, but the other teams did not trust him either. The Triathlets also lost points by trying to use Sarah's condition to cajole travel agents into finding a faster flight. Peter also seemed content to lie back and root for Sarah on the tougher Road Blocks. Those challenges and world travel experience helped Sarah grow up and realize that she deserves a real partner; not just some guy who supplies prosthetics (I had predicted this as early as week 1). The inability to navigate the streets of Kuwait City ended their $1,000,000 hopes. They must have gotten as lost as any people could get in an area the size of
Kuwait.

Other random notes:
The pit stop didn't seem to be the normal 12 hours as teams appeared to finish during the daytime the episode before but did not leave until the next afternoon. Either that or I'm losing my memory.


The view from the Kuwait Towers did look neat.

I am a little bit pyromaniac and a little bit pyrophobic, so the fast forward of grabbing a clue next to a simulated oil well fire would have been made for an interesting thought process.

The camel racing by remote jockey looked pretty fun. I am surprised more teams did not go for that Detour unless it was much harder to find or sounded like a trick. Camels could be stubborn and the one at the race track was snarling and baring his teeth, but overall, it appeared to be an easier Detour to complete than packing and hauling camel chow.

I've been noticing the T-shirts a little more this season. The Miners wore T-shirts that displayed a miner with the caption "Friends in Low Places". The Queens had shirts representing their home states, but I wonder how many people were trying to figure out what "CANY" meant or otherwise pretending to read those T-shirts very slowly. The Chos wore their Lost Phil shirts again, but also had one that said "Let's Hug It Out" which reminded me of a recent (and yet another hilarious) episode of The Office, where Michael was paying props to Entourage.

TV: Amazing Race 10 - Episode 5

I cannot remember the last time a team could not get seats on a plane and having that put them into last place for the whole leg. The bad news is that is what happened to the Coal Miners. The good news is it was the first non-elimination leg. They must now face the interesting challenge of keeping their possessions and money, but having to go from last to first and/or possibly facing a 30 minute penalty or something like that.

Most of the tense and funny moments happened on the way to the airport in Chennai. Peter acted a little slimy trying to form an alliance with the other teams and was basically rebuffed by everyone. The Chos played a mind-game on the other teams by pulling out a fake phone and pretending to make reservations. It looked like the joke would be played on them when Peter found someone willing to lend him a phone so he could make real reservations. Then things looked even worse for the Chos when the first travel agency they went to had moved. Somehow through that mess they ended up finding the earliest flight to Chennai while the Triathletes and the Barbies were booked on a much later flight. I thought that might be "bad karma" due to Peter making fun of the Coal Miners, but the tables turned once again when those last two teams were able to get an earlier connecting flight from wherever they stopped along the way. This let them finish this episode #1 and #2 despite not helping each other.

I've never been to Chennai, India. I just had one day stay in Mumbai (Bombay) followed by two weeks in Bangalore. There are subtle differences between all those cities, but one thing they definitely had in common was crazy traffic and associated pollution. I had fun riding in an auto rickshaw, while cars, trucks, motorbikes carrying whole families swarmed around me with centimeters to spare creating about five or six lanes of traffic where there should have only been two. I did wish I could cover my nose and mouth with a handkerchief though.

Yes, at least in some parts of the cities I visited, a fairly skinny cow would pop out of nowhere and wander across the street. They are just like squirrels in the U.S. except much bigger and slower.

It would be interesting to find out what they really teach in traffic school for a license. It seemed like some teams were getting a lot of help driving from their instructors. One beauty queen was only half joking when she said, "I'm so excited she didn't die." after her partner finished the driving lesson. I was surprised the show producers allowed the teams to take that sort of risk (which I almost considered more dangerous than handling the crocodiles). One good thing about the heavy traffic is that cars are generally moving so slow that an accident will likely not hurt you if you're in a car. I don't know if that applies to the pedestrians or bikers though. Apparently traffic fatalities are a leading cause of death of young people in some of these emerging countries.

I wonder how many different T-shirts the Chos squeezed into their backpacks.

Next week, the teams get to play with some contraption that makes a camel run down a sandy race track. I want to tune in just to see what that is all about.

In other semi-related news, my local PBS-HD station just rebroadcast the Dave Matthews Band performing at Red Rocks, where last Amazing Race started and ended. I guess they had to splice together songs from concerts that took place over a whole weekend. Otherwise, I'm not sure they would have been able to find more than 4 live songs short enough to fit into just one hour.

TV: Amazing Race 10 - Episode 4

I now see why so little action took place last week. I think the race planners were letting the contestants gather some strength for some pretty tough physical challenges this week. Each team looked exhausted and relieved as they reached the mat; they could barely celebrate not being eliminated.

This stage of the race was particularly tough on Rob. He was treated for heat exhaustion before leaving the pit stop. While the cold water may have cooled off his body, his emotions were still running high. He freaked out in the taxis whenever he realized one driver after another was lost and driving in circles. The blurred out faces were a big clue that they had the wrong driver :-). Of course, I guess the cameraman or producers may not have had time to ask the drivers for permission to show their images on TV while trying to keep up with the Rob / Kimberly team. Later, Rob climbed an ascender rope up a tall, steep cliff. Then he bumped his head while searching a cave. Then he had to do a bunch of rowing. Under all this duress, he yelled a few times at his girlfriend -- something I would not advise to any guy who wants to date a woman who is smart, strong, and fairly attractive. Kimberly has stuck with Rob for reasons that have not been fully revealed. One is she seems happy to yell back. Another is that she feels she has gotten Rob to change a bit in the past (temporarily dumping him until he took classes so he can leave his bartending job?). He also did admit at the finish line that he had to "chill" out - literally. That gives one hope that this relationship lasting a bit longer, and finishing in first helps tremendously.

Apparently finishing last also can cement a relationship. Team TNT came in last by what may have been a wide margin as other teams finished during the day while TNT came in under what must have been a beautiful sunset over Ha Long Bay.

So, I suppose that means the triathletes are in the lead on the road to dunzo.

Unlike the last edition where it was pretty easy to spot the top two teams from the start, this race has been very difficult to predict. Teams randomly shuffled positions again even during the episode. First there was the taxis whose drivers either were getting lost or driving slow. It cost the Chos their 30 minute lead and practically dropped them to the back of the pack again.

Then there was what may have been the first use of an audio clue in this series that I thought was pretty inventive. The place names the racers were told to go to sounded pretty similar. The male models showed they also have brains by being the first to ask their taxi driver to listen to the directions. Anyway, the audio clue was fun for a while but turned out not to be important as the bus stop they were directed to ended up being another bunching point. At most maybe some teams lost more taxi fare than others, and who knows if money shortage will come up again in the race.

But this whole ordeal made me remember yet another story about my Beijing trip. I told a taxi driver to take me to the Yanshan Hotel, and I fortunately noticed pretty quickly that he was driving northwest instead of northeast. I tried to repeat my destination several times. Finally he pulled over to have someone translate what I was saying. Turned out he thought I wanted to go to the Yanshan Mountains.

Next the teams had to pick speed boats to take them to an island to climb a rope up an island cliff. This time it was the relative speed of the boats that determined the order teams arrived at the Road Block. Then it was stamina getting up the ropes that helped some teams pass others. I was impressed by Sarah using her one good leg and the Alabama mom in getting up the rope. Godwin Cho apparently did not learn his lesson from the Great Wall climb and relied on arm strength thus burning out his forearms again instead of using his legs more.

Rowing the sampans in some rolling waters with a stiff breeze would have been extremely difficult for me. I tried rowing in the very calm waters of the Foster City lagoon once and never could do anything other than go in circles. In the open water, I would probably be spending more time throwing up than rowing. I guess the good news is that the water related tasks allowed the episode title spouting Mary (3 for 4 now) to give her ankle more time to heal. Hopefully, the beauty queens will realize that they need to take better care of their clues and/or expand their vocabulary to know, for example, the difference between a junk and a sampan. From this point forward, any mistake is like flirting with elimination.

CBS was sort of flirting with an FCC fine by allowing references to picking up dongs (the Vietnamese currency) and looking for junk. The other funny moment was when the models found out other teams were beating them to the finish line because their junk crew forgot to raise anchor. They were remarkably forgiving about that. Perhaps like me, they have driven cars some pretty decent distances with the emergency brakes still engaged. I even have an "idiot light" for that directly in front of me, and one time, it even took a passenger to complain about an unusual burning smell before I realized what I had done.

Next week, fun with crocodiles.

Movies: The Departed

I'll start right off and say that The Departed is the best crime movie that I've seen in a long time. V for Vendetta and Inside Man are the only other movies I remember this year that kept me entertained from start to finish.

The story, adapted from a Hong Kong movie called Infernal Affairs, adds an interesting twist to the usual the undercover cop infiltrating a crime gang story by spending equal time on the criminal mole within the police department. The writers did such a great job of opening up so many possibilities about who would get caught first that I gave up trying to guess what would happen next and just enjoyed the ride. It made me recall some of elements I enjoyed about shows like Donnie Brasco, Wiseguy, Face/Off, and No Way Out and still added heaps of other interesting aspects on top of it.

The actors delivered great performances all around. There was only a scene or two (or three...) where Jack Nicholson reminded me he was Jack Nicholson (or worse some actor doing a Jack Nicholson impression), but then he'd turn around and do something that would make me forgive him. So, to say Jack Nicholson was the weakest link of a cast is saying alot. Actually, I'm starting to get fascinated about how different this movie would look if various actors switched roles, in particular Jack Nicholson and Alec Baldwin. Mark Wahlberg steals some scenes and says some of the best lines that cannot be repeated in public (or under most circumstances for that matter). Leonardo DiCaprio's acting skills somehow keep improving. He puts just the right amount of intensity during his close-ups whereas I get bothered by Tom Cruise who sometimes comes across as trying too hard.

This brings us to director Martin Scorsese, who many people argue is overdue to win an Oscar. I haven't seen all of his movies, but the bits and pieces I've seen have been great but slightly uneven, too gritty to watch, or missing something. I imagine though that some of his movies are required study for anybody attending film school. His more recent attempts like The Aviator and Gangs of New York were good but maybe over-ambitious or just not easy stories to work with. I get the sense he reigned himself in with The Departed, and created a movie that had me leaning forward in my seat and not want to turn away from. If another movie comes out this year to leave Scorsese without an Oscar once again, I want to be first in line to see it. A

Movies: X-Men: The Last Stand

The latest X-Men DVD was released this week, but my review is based on what I saw on the big screen this past summer. If I remember correctly, the movie set a box office record for an opening weekend. I think Bryan Singer deserves most of the credit since he did such a great job building expectations with the first two entries of this series. The director and producers of X-Men 3 may have only contributed to the record by keeping the running time under 1:45 long, so theaters could replay it about twice as frequently as Lord of the Rings or Titanic.

The short running time + large cast + pre-requisite comic book action and effects = little room for plot or any major character development. The debate around a cure for mutant powers was kept fairly simple. The Cyclops - Jean Grey - Wolverine love triangle was replaced with a less interesting Rogue - Iceman - Kitty Pryde triangle. There's also a father-son conflict involving Angel. I suppose the producers were trying to target a younger demographic.

Outside of Magneto, Storm, and Wolverine, a bunch of other mutants just make brief appearances bordering on cameos. It reminded me of the final episode of Seinfeld where there was much hype and antipation building up to the air date. Then all they did was parade a long string of memorable characters from past seasons and somehow managed to make the whole show flat and forgettable. Otherwise, the special effects were pretty decent with nice performances by Ian McKellen (who salvaged yet another summer movie) and Rebecca Romijn with a few funny lines uttered by Vinnie Jones as Juggernaut. Maybe others can tell me if the DVD version benefits from showing previously deleted scenes and alternate endings. C+

There will likely be comparisons between X-Men and NBC's new series Heroes. There may even be comparison's to USA's The 4400, a show that I've enjoyed once or twice but not enough to be addicted.

The good news: the writing and acting seems pretty good even though I sort of have to turn off some of my logic circuits to buy into the premise (but that's a given for just about every Sci-Fi series). Seemingly ordinary and mostly well drawn out characters from different walks of life discover that they are developing special powers, and have varied reactions (mostly negative for some reason) to what consequences that might have.

The bad news: compared to the premiere, the second episode seemed to move at a slower pace and lost the humor (especially from the Japanese character who was thrilled that he can bend the space-time continuum).

Heroes may have to don their capes faster for me to keep tuning in. This is funny opinion considering I just complained that X-Men: The Last Stand moved too fast...., but I sort of have my hands full trying to keep up with the mysteries and convoluted plot lines of other TV shows trying to follow the footsteps of Lost. Hopefully it will keep exploring the ice-breaker question, "If you could have a superhero power, what would it be and would you use it for good or evil?" B

TMI: My Viewing Habits This Fall

Some day, I may post reviews on this season's new shows, a few of which may eventually earn a slot on my Must See list. Some may get canceled or get relegated to 'online only' status before they get a real chance. But so far it looks like this:

Must see TV
Sunday: The Simpsons, The Amazing Race, Desperate Housewives
Monday: Prison Break
Tuesday: House
Wednesday: Lost
Thursday: My Name is Earl, The Office, CSI, Grey's Anatomy
(DVR and VCR sales must be skyrocketing because of the CSI vs. Grey's conflict)
Friday: Whatever is on Sci-Fi Channel
Saturday: nothing - catch up on DVR / OnDemand or actually get a life

On the bubble
Six Degrees, Heroes, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Standoff, Kidnapped, Justice, The OC, Shark, Men In Trees

Yet to be checked out
Ugly Betty, 30 Rock

Still waiting on
The Sopranos, Rome, 24

TV: Amazing Race 10 - Episode 3

Actually I had written this up much earlier, but the computer swallowed my posting (Perhaps I shut down my browser before saving anything). So now I have to rewrite this from memory.

This week's episode was not as action-packed as the previous episodes, but it was still nail biting. Most of the teams were so close together that a 30-minute penalty moved one team from second place to near elimination. The team that finished last this week was yet another victim of having no sense of direction.

I was rooting a bit for Duke and Lauren given that parent-child teams have not fared well on the race and their team seemed like the strongest entry of that type so far. But at least it was nice to see that their relationship was completely patched up. They probably saw the writing on the wall once they ended up choosing what had to be the least helpful local ever. It was not even clear if their "guide" paid her fair share of the cab fare to take a huge detour to be dropped off at her brother's place. Duke and Lauren were at least an hour behind the "peloton," but did get lucky that the taxi driver was willing to take what little money they had left without a fuss while the first clue box turned out to be a bunching point. That was probably the only good break they received in this leg of the race.

I had only heard a few things about the Hanoi Hilton, but seeing it on TV was a sobering experience. I cannot imagine what POWs had to endure in there. I probably would have stayed a few extra moments like the Cho Bros. They temporarily fell into last place doing that, but somehow they catapulted all the way to first by such a wide margin that they apparently even found time to clean up between making some coal bricks and the finish line. With luck and barring another brain freeze moment, they will be a force to be reckoned with the rest of the way. Go home team!

I was more worried about the coal miners. David seemed preoccupied with memories of his father telling stories about Vietnam while Mary nursed a sprained ankle. She may have to heal fast to stay in the race. I think Mary was the source of 2 of the 3 episode titles so far. I wonder if the contestants get a bonus for quote of the week.

The triathletes managed to finish pretty high despite taking the wrong bus. It was inspiring to see Mary practically crawl across a rice paddy with a defective prosthetic leg.

While watching the teams try to cross a busy street, I thought of the game Frogger just before one of the racers mentioned it. That was maybe the only "laugh out loud" moment of the evening.

Next week it looks like the tension brings some relationships to a boiling point. Can't wait.

TV: Amazing Race 10 - Episode 2

Random luck (or lack thereof) played a major role this week. Transportation allowed the teams to bunch together and arrive in Outer Mongolia all even, and the team positions changed pretty frequently from there depending on whims of taxi drivers, automobiles, and animals. It's not clear that any team did anything to deserve the bad karma. It was the cardinal "no-no" of driving in the wrong direction that ultimately eliminated one team that I thought looked like a contender. That team probably would have had more adrenaline to actually complete the final task faster than some other teams if they had not fallen so far behind.

Driving the wrong way seems to kill one team in every race. I suppose keeping one's sense of direction is easier said than done when finding oneself jet-lagged, stressed, and in a completely foreign environment. Either that or future teams will have to make sure one at least one member spends as much time honing navigation skills as working out in the gym.

Other random thoughts:

I still find myself cheering for the coalminers. It was humorous how they admitted that this is the first time that they had met ... gay people ... and liked them.

David also described his wife as blunt and always correct - the two traits he loved about her. Peter and Rob will have to learn to see their respective teammates in the same way if they expect the relationship and participation in the race to last much longer. Sarah picked the better task for her team at a detour while Kimberly recognized when Rob had taken a wrong turn. One of my favorite quotes from White Men Can't Jump is, "Billy, I have four words for you: 'Listen to the woman.'" I guess for most of us guys, that is something that is easier said than done.

I don't know if it was Tom or Terry desperately trying to intimidate a horse.

I forgot to note who proved to be the Jerry Maguire expert, by pointing out it was dogs and bees that smelled fear rather than horses.

Getting thrown off a horse cannot feel good (ouch!), but I suppose one cannot expect to fly around the world without paying some sort of price for it along the way. Fortunately, the horses were pretty short and the ground was pretty soft, otherwise the next stop would have been a hospital.

There was a very brief scene of a many riding a plain old black bicycle outside the train to Mongolia. I forgot to mention it last week, but I saw a similar scene from a tour bus in Beijing but could not pull my camera out quickly enough to capture it. A man, who I figured was in his 60's or older was hauling a half-size refrigerator on a trailer attached to his bicycle on the shoulder of a highway, and pedaling up a slight grade. I saw others hauling large loads of coals with bikes similar to the one pictured here. I wondered how some of those riders would fare in Le Tour de France.

Sarah and Peter may become the sequel to Flo and Zach who one a previous race.

The male models appear to be the much reformed version of Eric and Jeremy.

I would have enjoyed doing the archery challenge. It was fun seeing those targets explode. But I imagine it was much easier said than done.

[Like how I employed one recurring them in this post? Yup, achieving that is much easier said than done -- for me anyway]

TV: Amazing Race 10 - Episode 1

This edition has started with much promise. The producers did a good job of bringing people from all around the country from different walks of life, but the teams were not radically different in makeup vs. past seasons. I found it amusing that all of the teams looked more like sibling than what they really were (except for the team that is actually brothers). Fortunately, so much about the couples were packed into a short time, that I quickly found redeeming qualities to like about most of the players. This is the first time I felt bad about seeing two of the teams go so early (oddly enough, it was the two teams that were most different from previous teams) vs. shrugging about the loss of a team that was just another anonymous face in the crowd. The shocked and saddened reaction from all remaining teams to the quick and surprising first elimination looked genuine and added to the emotional scene.

[I think it may have been more fun if they let the last team get a head start to the next clue, just to mess with the contestants minds. I figured the odds of an early elimination were high when the race started with 12 teams instead of the usual 11.]

I missed the first episode of Treasure Hunters, so I don't know how that contest began, but one initial area where the Amazing Race felt clearly superior to me was in how they edited the reading of the opening clue. Each team read a portion of it, as they got in their cars and raced off to SeaTac airport. That established the sense of urgency from the start vs. fully repeating the clue several times as if the producers thought we needed to have the clue drilled into our heads in order to play along. I suppose one advantage of doing this the 10th time vs. the first is that you get a chance to truly refine these little details that many viewers may subconsciously appreciate.

I've visited Seattle many times over the years (most recently, a month ago to take a cruise to Alaska), but I didn't recognize the hill where the race began. I had to guess it was north of downtown and west of I5. Thanks to Google Earth, I'm now positive it was the Sundial at Gas Works Park. I'll have to check it out on my next trip.

The home team from San Francisco (with one Cal grad) that I feel obligated to root for thankfully did not copy the BJ & Tyler Hippie look. They have more of a Silicon Valley vibe instead. Both have graduate degrees, but I have to wonder what they were thinking by pulling out squirt guns at the airport. They had another brain freeze at a challenge when they grabbed another team's bricks. While they looked like they have good upper body strength, they may not be built for endurance as they were beaten up the Great Wall of China by a pair of college cheerleaders. They will have to bear down quite a bit to win this thing.

I first and last visited Beijing in 1994, and it was an eye-opening experience. I expected to see everyone on bicycles wearing green uniforms. Instead I saw lots of people in designer outfits or sports apparel while several fancy European sports cars wove around the herds of bicyclers. New construction was going on everywhere. I imagine the city is even more bustling and cosmopolitan now. The Forbidden City was closed by the time I reached it, but I walked around Tiananmen Square just south of the Meridian Gate. I was awestruck at how large the square was and how it had just been a few years since students protested there. On one corner was a huge McDonald's but I opted for Peking Duck at an even bigger nearby restaurant (Quan Ju De?) where it people were arriving by the busload. The duck was delicious even given the large crowds being served.

Unfortunately, for one member of each team, the meal would be fish eyes instead of duck. I don't have a true HDTV (and the Amazing Race is not in HD either), but I suspect I would not have noticed the long thin strands of goo hanging off the eyeballs as they were swallowed on the analog broadcast. That sight made me shiver.

The coalminer wife handled the delicacy pretty well even though she acted as if she had never used a pair of chopsticks before. Later she had the quote that the episode was named after as she told a taxi driver, "Real fast! Quack! Quack!" I think I will root for them.

I opinion of the Triathletes bounced down and up. They showed no hesitation to use the Mirna and Shmirna sympathy card. But I imagine it's hard enough to climb a rope with two legs vs. one artificial one with a leaky hydraulic system. I wonder if it is more of a hassle for Sarah today to get around airports with a fluid ban enforced.

The biggest factors this week were navigation and noticing the brick pattern correctly.

I think I ended up visiting the same part of the Great Wall, which is still some distance from Beijing. Someday I might have to post the panoramic pictures I took there (assuming I can ever get around to finding and scanning them).

TV: Reality Roundup

The only reality show I care about, The Amazing Race, premieres with its 10th edition in less than 24 hours, but I still will take an occassional glance at the other game shows.

My random thoughts:

Treasure Hunters: NBC tried to capture the magic of The Amazing Race with this initially promising entry. It was touted as being created by one of the producers of The DaVinci Code. Interestingly, the series more closely resembled National Treasure by referencing American history for its mysteries. Okay, maybe it was a safer choice than using religious history (controversial) or world history (which may have been too challenging for the contestants - even the team calling itself The Geniuses). The result was a mostly uneventful weekly hour of fairly easy puzzles and blatant product placement, particularly for a brand of cell phones through which the host repeated himself too often. Only the Wild Hanlons stood out as characters to watch, but overall, there was nothing memorable. I guess it just proved that teams of three are not much more entertaining than teams of four. Two allows for the most relationship conflicts apparently. Having all the teams starting each "leg" at the same time did not turn out to be a big improvement over the sometimes annoying bunching that happens in the Amazing Race either.

Project Runway fascinates me sometimes. I think it's impressive how quickly the designers can come up with an idea for an outfit then construct it under some pretty difficult time constraints and conditions. Yes, I have little artistic ability myself, and I originally tuned in just to check out Heidi Klum. Unfortunately, she and the creativity of the contestants have not been enough to make up for a few too many moments of overdramatism. Since I do not have Bravo on my regular channel surfing rotation, I may accidentally miss the finale as well.

Big Brother: All Stars. I only watched this show for about 15 minutes, yawned, then switched channels. I don't even care who won.

Dancing with the Stars: I have to grudgingly admit that former Dallas Cowboys running back and NFL all-time rushing leader Emmitt Smith had a better debut than former 49'er Jerry Rice, who holds countless NFL receiving records. At least Emmitt's partner, Cheryl Burke, grew up in the Bay Area so I can live with that. It must be a law that at least one alumnus of Saved by the Bell make an unexpected appearance on television or in the movies just as I happily forget that this show existed. This time Mario Lopez appears to be the dancer to beat. If I do make any time to watch this (and I probably won't), I may root for Vivica A. Fox and Willa Ford. I don't think politics played a role in Tucker Carlson being the first to go. Fellow talk show host Jerry Springer will likely follow him off the show soon.

Celebrity Duets: Only watched a little bit of this show by accident. I guess some charity will get some money at the end of this. My only question: Didn't Lucy Lawless already sing in public before? [She also pre-dated Janet Jackson in the "wardrobe malfunction at a sporting event" department. Why I remember such trivia and constantly forget to take my badge to work, I will never know.] Maybe Lucy can win to make up for the fact that a dwarf planet is no longer named after a character she played.

Survivor: Cook Islands - There was some controversy over how the teams would be initially divided this season. Maybe it was unfair by excluding applicants of mixed heritage. I only watched the second half-hour of the first episode, and it did not seem like a big deal. For example, it was hard to get a sense of who's who with 20 people milling about the cameras. The teams themselves rarely crossed paths. CBS even avoided further trouble by carefully blurring one contestant's slightly exposed coin slot. While the cast may be racially diverse, an oddly large portion of them live in California (10 from the L.A. area, 1 from San Diego, 2 from the Bay Area, and 1 from Chico). As a practically native Californian, can I say Californians are all alike? Does that make me a geographist, and can I get credit for making up that new word? :-)

I'm sure there are other reality / game shows I've missed completely (e.g., The Contender), but there are only so many hours in the day, and I had a pretty busy summer and a full slate of fall shows to watch.

Web: 21st Century Schoolhouse Rock

... or maybe it's trance / house with a shade of David Byrne, but

Vitamins are Good for You

Wonder if there's a video for this.

TMI: PC Like It's 1995

One of the many things I did during my summer vacation (from blogging) was purchase a PC. A close connection helped me procure a fairly brand new high end desktop PC previously used only for game demos at the recent E3 convention at a great discount. It has a 3.0GHz dual core Pentium D, dual nVidia video cards, dual 150GB SATA disks in a RAID 1 configuration, and yada, yada, yada.

I also finally tossed out a very old PC that a colleague helped me cobble together in 1995. It had been gathering dust in the corner for many years after I bought a newer system in 2000. I found many of the now faded receipts for this system lying in the same corner. Just about every component was bought at a different place as I tried to get the best parts for the cheapest price. Not sure what this translates to in 2006 dollars but I definitely got much more in an assembled package for about the same price 11 years later.

Intel 486DX2-66MHz + 256K cache (and motherboard?) $232.56
16MB 70ns SIMM $619.00
Refurbished DEC 2000MB Internal SCSI Drive, 12.5ms seek time - $495.00
1.44" Floppy Drive $31.82
Diamond Stealth 64 Video Card $289.00
SoundBlaster Pro-16 Audio Card OEM $99.00
28.8 Kbaud internal modem $122.40
PC Keyboard $13.26
MS Mouse $30.00
Full tower case $105.00
Snickers Bar $0.45 - got hungry putting the pieces together.

NEC XE17" Monitor ??? (it was probably about $900.00 back then)

Only the monitor avoids the recycling bin as I prefer staring into a tube over even much larger, higher-resolution LCD screens in the same price range.

Some day I'll have to break the habit of buying high end PCs. Considering I mostly use these things to play solitaire or connect to work and catch up on e-mail, it basically means I've just purchased world's most expensive deck of cards with a workaholic option.

Okay, World of Warcraft is occasionally played on this thing as well ...

TMI: On the Blog Again

A few weeks ago, I had a rare opportunity to cross paths with the globe-trotting Tom Kyte. The meeting went down like this:

Me: Hi, Tom.
TK: Hello. brief pause Are you on strike from you blog? another brief pause... and at this point I get the sense he is accessing his L2 cache The last thing you wrote was about a Backyard Bellagio about two months ago.

He was, of course, absolutely correct. At this point, there was an awkward silence as thoughts raced through my head.

#1. Wow! Tom recognizes me; I didn't have to introduce myself. He pays attention to my blog. And remembers the details!

#2. I'll come back with a snappy remark, "Yes, I'm on strike until I get proof that Suri Cruise actually exists." No, wait! Maybe I should save that for a blog entry. But what's wrong with saying out loud first and then writing about it later? Um, it's a moot point now, idiot. You've been silent for too many microseconds for any sort of witty repartee. In comedy, timing is everything.

#3. Okay, Plan B. Say, "I haven't had enough time to post anything lately." Dude! Are you nuts? Tom's the guy who finds time to post via his cell phone while waiting to board a plane. You need a better excuse now, and make it quick, you're already losing what little attention you had in the first place.

#4: Why am I referring to myself in the second person?

Finally the pause ended with me making a sheepish grin and mumbling something lame. This is all I can remember almost a month later. Things get very fuzzy after that. Normally, I'd still be able to recall rest of the story in excruciating detail, but the exchange wasn't salvageable enough to be worth replaying 100 times in my head and over-analyzing how I could better handle another meeting like this in the future.

As best as I can recall, I said something about being too busy and Tom's reply was pretty much what I had anticipated in thought #3.

Interestingly, I also anticipated everything that would happen in that brief conversation during the last step I made towards Tom and before I said, Hello. It was the same "Spidey sense" that made me see Joe Carter hit a home run off Mitch Williams to win a World Series, and blurt out, "Game over." in a room full of people moments before the ball was actually pitched. It's not that I believe in ESP. It's more like recognizing the rare case where I can perceive all the variables that go into calculating the odds of something happening. Unfortunately, it's never far enough into the future for me to call a bookie and make any money out of it.

.. and while I don't know exactly why it has taken me months to write into my blog again, it is mere coincidence that it finally happened on the night after the first pictures of Suri Cruise were published.

Web: Backyard Bellagio

Two guys show what happens when you mix Diet Coke and Mentos.
Thanks to ex-talk.bizarre contributor bc for passing this out along with other neat finds.

ORCL: Case Study Published on Metalink

My only other blog post related to Oracle has been beefed up, cleaned up, and converted into a Case Study (Metalink DocID 369427.1). Actually that happened a couple of weeks ago, but I thought I'd mention here eventually.

I have to thank a couple of people on my team (Hector and Vickie) for pointing out the typos and suggesting improvements and finding some statspack snippets for me.

I think this is the first article on Metalink that I have actually authored myself. Okay, there is also an ancient article from 1991 on Distributed Queries that is likely obsolete and should be archived away (plus I knew even less about what I was talking about back then anyway). It is a boring challenge for me to write serious, technical articles for an external audience, but I have been asked to do more of these and I usually follow orders.

As far as future ORCL related postings go, I may still publish first drafts of potential Case Studies on my blog first to get wider feedback. If I feel safe, I may even disclose non-technical yarns about life as a front-line technical support person working in a fast-paced software company in the early 90's. Hopefully enough has changed since then that I will not expose any proprietary information or individuals even indirectly. I might even write about my theories about the origins of misconceptions or antiquated ideas about an Oracle database such as

- rebuild your indexes frequently
- keep tables and indexes separate for balance IO
- increase enqueue_resources if you see high enqueue waits
- no writes to datafiles that are in hot backup mode
- the shared pool can be too big

But such postings might be rare since I'd like to think about something other than work once in a while.

TV: American Idol

After the final 12 contestants were announced, I predicted that Katherine McPhee would win and never tuned back in until the last 10 minutes tonight. I hate being wrong, but hopefully, a Taylor Hicks victory will lead to a rise in popularity for prematurely gray haired, pudgy dudes. That will make me feel much better in the long run.

TMI: Bay to Breakers Memories

I neglected to run the Bay to Breakers race this past Sunday. A weather report of high humidity with a chance of showers and lack of training because of tendonitis in my Achilles heel were my primary excuses for skipping this. I think since my first race in 1987 I've only participated in about 40% - 50% of the time, so it has not become some "can't miss"” ritual.

I actually did manage to finish in the top 10,000 one year despite running quite slow that year. That helped me realize that the most significant determinator of final placement was how close I could get to the starting line before the gun sounded. In high school, I could run at a 7-minute pace but always arrived really late, and started near the back of the pack. I'’d be lucky if I crossed the starting line before the winners crossed the finish line. And it would take two miles of walking before the crowds were dispersed enough to allow for some jogging. Many years and 50 pounds later I consider lucky to maintain a 6 MPH pace. But I showed up over an hour early and squeezed my way to the front. This time people were passing me up like crazy but I could start jogging much earlier, and had my best finish. I suppose this is proof that experience and ability do not always go hand in hand, but given one of the two, experience is more important.

After finishing in the top 10,000 and seeing my name in the paper, I've been satisfied with starting in the back again. It allows me to spend more time tossing tortillas like they were Frisbees. I can sit back and enjoy the music from the garage bands who set up mini-stages on balconies or driveways all along the route. It'’s also a more fun to pass people than to be passed while seeing more of the regular characters who participate in this public parade each year. There is a group that runs with a tiki hut made of bamboo and grass stocked with several forms of alcoholic refreshment. There is a caterpillar team of land sharks. They wear shark fins on their heads and you can watch those fins undulate above the sea of thousands of other racers. There is always at least one group of Elvis impersonators. There are lots of people wearing costumes that represent topical humor. One favorite a couple of years ago was a guy who was inside a huge cardboard box painted metallic grey. It had a fairly well made paper mache head resembling Arnold Schwarzenegger. Finally it had two extensible arms with foam rubber hands that could reach out and touch unsuspecting runners from behind, and was particularly fond of runners in Hooters uniforms (some of questionable gender). It was called "The Gropernator."” There usually are even runners with no costume at all, but at least 99% of them should keep covered for asthetic reasons.

This brings me to my oddest encounter with the "Rich and/or Famous"” or in this case, Infamous. After finishing the Bay to Breakers in 1993, I found myself standing right next to a man who looked vaguely familiar to me. He was taller than me but slouching a bit. He was wearing a light-blue button-down wool sweater because it was rather cold and foggy by the ocean. I thought it was still sort of an odd thing to wear while running even for this crazy race because it was so conventional. But I did not spend too much time trying to remember who he was. I was too busy catching my breath and checking out the other runners. Then I spotted a large group of teenage girls on the other side of the road. Half of them stood motionless looking in our direction with their eyes wide open and jaws dropped while the other half giggled uncontrollably and pointed us out to even more of their friends who would then have a shocked look on their face as well. At first, I guessed they recognized the "celebrity" standing next to me too, but then again, their eyes and fingers were not exactly directed at his face, but seemed to point further downward. Then they ran off and hid when they caught me looking back at them. So I suddenly had to make sure I didn't misjudge the finger pointing, so I checked if I was the one experiencing a very embarrassing wardrobe malfunction. When I looked down, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the man standing next to me only wore a pair of leather sandals with his sweater.

I realized it was the Berkeley Naked Guy! He had made many headlines the year before with his "nude-in" protests at UC Berkeley, but the race was the first and last time I had met him in person. By that time, he was already yesterday's news -- until the day before this year'’s race, when I saw this tragic news story.

TV: Amazing Race 9 - Finale

Better late to post than never.

The hometown Hippies (though I guess only one member of the team is from San Francisco) win The Amazing Race. After racing around the world, it came down to remembering the flags of every country they had visited in the correct order faster than the Frat Boys. I probably would have gotten stuck on Russia as well, since I was used to seeing the Soviet Union flag. The geography puzzle at the end of the Family Edition was one of the few things I liked about that race, so it was nice to see a variation of that end this one.

The winning team showed up on the CBS Morning Show the next day to collect their check. BJ stayed in character by wearing royal garb now that he was rich. I wonder how hard it must be to win a million dollars but have to wait a few months before you could talk to anybody about it or even spend the money. Also on “live television” (tape delayed on the West coast), Ray proposed to Yolanda. Fortunately, she accepted because all the other teams appearing that morning showed up with cake and champagne. MoJo also says they will get married one day but will wait until they are older. So I suppose some people out there can still hope for a break up. Or MoJo may follow the path of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn and just remain partners forever.

The final leg of the race started in Thailand with an overt plug for a cell phone service company. It gave the racers another chance to work with animals. This season may have been a record for beasts, and I’ve lost track of them all (camels, crocodiles, spiders, monkeys, crickets, grasshoppers, and elephants, oh my).

After that, they were off to Tokyo (and the first city on the race that I’ve been to before). After a couple of weeks of having a good sense of direction, Ray and Yolanda were going to spend the rest of race pretty much lost. If there had been more flight choices at the airports, they could have easily fallen a day behind (which did happen a couple of times to third place teams in the past). I think I’ve been to that same intersection in Tokyo and I don’t know if the TV cameras captured just how mesmerizing all those signs can be. The closest was looking at the Frat Boys blank stare as they looked for a clue among those signs. Times Square in NYC still has a way to go to produce similar sensory overload. It was funny that the teams spotted the man who held the next clue wearing the yellow and orange scarf easier than the statue he was sitting next to. I wonder how long it takes to stop going to things of that color after the race ends.

The capsule hotel looked crazy and I’d only heard of them briefly before. Fortunately, the company I work for has not decided to cut costs that much yet, so I’ve gotten to stay at a decent hotel in Tokyo. I was amused that the Frats brought up the idea of time capsules. The teams remained pretty friendly at that rest stop despite the stakes.

I haven’t had the opportunity to visit Mt Fuji. I’ve only seen it from an airplane that practically flew right over the top of that volcano. It was always too smoggy and cloudy to see it from Tokyo itself, and I don’t know if Fuji would be as visible on a clear day as Mt. Rainier is around Seattle. Ray made an interesting observation that he had to talk fast for Japanese to understand him. It does seem kind of true. It was just tragic to see them lose their toll road ticket. Their cameraman (or the editors) did not reveal how it could have been misplaced. To add insult to injury, Ray got patted on the butt when he least expected it.

Were the Frat boys actually checking out schoolgirls at the Amusement park or just suffering from withdrawal pains? The rides looked kind of tame but it was funny to hear Tyler say that he might be regurgitating the crickets he ate earlier. Then the biggest upset of the race occurred when the Hippies beat the Frats in the paddleboats. Those things must have been rigged with speed restraints.

Team RaYo finished last and lost their possessions, but the Hippies did leave them some money. Then they got lucky and ran into some inebriated and generous businessmen at some random restaurant. They were at least 3 hours behind but caught up at the airport. The Frat boys copied a comedian whose name escaped me (and also a gag on Wayne’s World 2) by performing a decently funny fake “poorly dubbed movie” routine. The Hippies meanwhile lied like crazy about the Internet access at the hotel. Not sure how they got the hotel lobby employees to play along. It was almost as good as a Romber tactic but it would not pay off.

The teams were still pretty much tied arriving in Anchorage. Somehow RoYo scored some pretty heavy coats. Perhaps the producers bend the rules a little (or they just didn’t want any teams to die from frostbite). The Detour ended up not being much of a detour at all since the weather was too had for flying. RoYo showed their unintentionally psychic abilities again by describing how they just had to keep “grinding” to stay in the race not knowing that they would literally be doing that later. Then the Hippies temporarily started to “channel” Fran and Barry by walking right past a bunch of snowshoes several times.

Finally, the teams pretty much ended the race where they started with the aforementioned puzzle separating the men from the boys and favoring brain over brawn. The final funny moment happened during the victory speech. The Hippies mentioned the race could be like couples therapy, and suddenly they cut to a shot of Lake. Hilarious.

Hopefully the ratings, while lower, still encourage CBS to fund more races in the future.

TV: Amazing Race 9 - Ep 11

Apologies for being very late in posting about the show this week. I was staying at a hotel with pretty poor Internet access (though that may have been true across the whole island I was on) and even poorer TV reception. I probably could have scheduled things better to watch the show on time, but I guess I needed a break from the hectic world by going low-tech and sauntering at a 28.8 kbaud pace.

This week's show began with a repeat of the exciting 3-way finish from last week with several shots of Monica giving the Hippies the evil eye accompanied by a wicked nose scrunch. Once again the Hippies relied on the other teams to bail them out, though they also were resourceful in asking the hotel if they had anything in "lost and found" to give away. It was funny to see BJ actually wear Yolanda's spandex pants and Eric lie about donating the sandals. MoJo incurred the Bad Karma this week by holding a grudge much too long.

Australia must have a bustling night life. It was probably 3am when the Hippies went out begging for money and had no problems finding people. "Last Call" in SF is 2am, effectively shutting down the partying relatively early in this little corner of the planet.

Persistence is the lesson for this week. The Hippies used it to grab seats that opened up on a previously full flight that was scheduled to land earlier than the flight taken by the other teams. That did not quite work out, but they were willing to check out ALL the ticket counters at the bus terminal and still catch up with the other teams. This may be where MoJo lost the race. Despite Joseph's gut warning him there might be shady business going on, they decided to listen to people who said that the bus to Lopburi would not leave until the morning. [I suspect one bus company did not want to lose more business to the other, so they may have lied to Team MoJo. I wonder how much business the company with the blue signs will lose to the one with the red signs because of tourists who have seen this episode.]

Yolanda displayed her "ESPN" abilities by divining that a Fast Forward challenge with a clue of "an after school favorite" would involve cricket. Of course she was thinking of the sport rather than eating a bowl of stir-fried insects. At first I thought BJ would have a harder time eating that stuff but it was Tyler who ended up vomiting more frequently. BJ got through things by comparing the ordeal to a Turkish prison and lamenting that he thought he had ordered Pad Thai (one of my favorite Thai dishes). They both persisted at that task and won the leg of the race. I'd never be able to each that much any food in one sitting.

Back at the road block, the team had fun with monkeys. It's unfortunate the losing contestants do not appear on David Letterman's show. Dave's assistant, Stephanie, used to always ask the Survivor losers, "Did you get to see or touch any monkeys?" The Frat Boys got to do both while subtly advertising a snack food in the process. I guess Eric found a good reason to wear a T-shirt with a tuxedo design while serving food to the cute but voracious monkeys. Then kudos to the editing team for piecing together a funny shot of Monica cursing at the monkeys, then stuffing huge handful of trail mix into her mouth.

MoJo once again had a chance to stay alive in the race but had trouble finding the next clue while Ray-Yo continued to improve their sense of direction and find the clue earlier. From watching the post-game interviews it sounds like MoJo completed the physical task in less time than it took the other teams to apply slivers of gold leaf to a Buddha statue. They finished about 15 minutes behind Ray-Yo but started their task later and lost another 20 minutes locating a taxi.

- The flight from Darwin to Bangkok involved going south to go north. I hate those kind of flights.
- The finish was not as exciting as the two weeks but that would have been asking too much.
- MoJo never won a leg or a prize the whole race, but it sounds like they will be happy to just have each other (no mushy tears from me though).
- Next week, Mt Fuji, and the coolest shots I've seen of Tokyo since Lost in Translation.
- For once, I have no idea who will win this thing, but I suspect I'd be part of a majority if I bet on the Hippies. The previews show a final task involving some physical work in the ice and snow, and that might favor the Frat Boys.

TMI: Too Much Television

For a blog that is supposed to be filled with random thoughts, I guess it should be unusual to have so many posts about TV [though there's nothing about random number generation that prevents this from happening either]. The topic of how much television I watch has even been raised quite often this week as I've interacted with separate circles of friends (childhood, college, work, ex-coworkers) and family who've never had much chance to intermingle. [I guess that's George Costanza's colliding worlds theory raised to a new level -- oops another TV reference.]

The topic may not be a complete coincidence as I'm probably the one who either brings up a TV show or is the first to answer a question about what's going on with the TV shows heading into their season finales this May (plus a couple of people from each circle are now aware of my blog).

So here's my current DVR recording schedule (actual viewing time varies):
Sunday: The Simpsons, The Sopranos, desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy
Monday: Prison Break, 24
Tuesday: House
Wednesday: Amazing Race, Alias, Lost
Thursday: The OC, CSI (though I've somehow forgotten to record the last few episodes)
Friday: nothing (until Sci-Fi Fridays resumes with new episodes)
Saturday: Saturday Night Live

But that's just the Must-See List...

I'll also occasionally stop flipping channels for shows like The Office, My Name is Earl, Scrubs, Las Vegas, The Apprentice, The 70's Show, Cops!, Real Time with Bill Maher, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, South Park, Love Monkey (unwisely cancelled by CBS, but VH1 is airing the remaining episodes), Ghost Whisperer, Numb3rs, Without a Trace, CSI: Miami, CSI: NY, The Unit, Nova, Austin City Limits, Project Runway, CNBC, Headline News, Fox News, MSNBC, E!, ESPN, Fox Sports Net, movies that I didn't watch in theaters, and syndicated reruns of very old shows that I may have missed for some reason or other. However, the general role of this "B-list" is to break the silence of my apartment (or hotel room) while I do other things like read magazines, surf the Internet, or catch up on e-mail / junk mail / bills. [I stopped watching The Shield a few years ago because I couldn't do 2-3 other things at once while that was on.]

When I see/hear the late night info-mercials about how to get rich without spending your own money, the latest workout equipment, natural cures for maladies I've never heard of before, or "Girls Gone Wild" videos, then I know I've been awake too long.

This Wednesday made me realize that I have to make a New Year's Resolution to add no new shows from now on (and let attrition take care of the existing list). Alias, The Amazing Race, and a special episode of House were all airing at the same time. My DVR allowed me to record two of those shows, and I had to do some intricate rewiring to attach the VCR to a separate cable line and record the third show blindly. Fortunately a SF Giants vs. Brewers game ended quickly or I would have gone more insane than I already am.

At least I should be able to cease obsessing over TV once summer rolls around provided none of these series end with a "Who Shot J.R.?" cliffhanger.

TV: Amazing Race 9 - Ep 10

This was the most intense non-elimination leg ... ever. (Minus the first season of this show, which I completely missed) I don't recall so many teams finishing so close together in such a late leg. Wow! I'll never complain about "bunching" again if it results in these types of endings more frequently. It was fun to watch the tensions mount as the teams begin to feel they've got a chance for the million-dollar prize. I found it hard to even blink (even though I could always hit rewind on my DVR) because even some tiny details were having major implications in the race, though I can't recall many of them anymore.

- What was a random guy doing just hanging out around the Pitstop at midnight? I wonder how long the racers would have had to stand around for a taxi otherwise.

- I guess $70 gets you around quite a bit in Australia. Granted, I guess they only had to spend money on a couple of taxi rides, maps / guides, and maybe a random meal here and there.

- I guess that part of the country is fairly sparse population-wise. The Frat boys did not seem to have any locals to hit on, so they had to resort to the remaining females in the race. So Eric flirted with Monica (while hoping Joseph would become a crocodile's dinner), and Jeremy complimented Yolanda (perhaps while hoping Ray's parachute would fail).

- Did Jeremy just pull the name Doug Brubaker out of thin air? The movie "Brubaker" seems before his time. It was a classic Romber move to cancel the other team's taxis and frame Mojo in the process, but even they felt they got hit by bad karma as a result (or the Amazing race editors caught that theme in my last couple of blog entries..)

- What was up with the airline ticket guy's expression when Monica offered a kiss in exchange for him withholding info from the other teams? I guess it was sort of a, "Sorry, you're kind of cute, but you're definitely not 'worth losing my job over' cute." Meanwhile Yolanda (under the impression that Mojo had canceled the taxis) dissed Monica by calling her a plastic Barbie doll that the crocodiles would choke on if they tried to eat her. Ouch.

- Hippie jokes, "Goodbye wallets, er.., crocodiles" and the stuff about the termites and the peg leg kind of fell flat for me, but maybe the pressure and exhaustion is ruining their sense of humor.

- Once again Mojo comes in second place. This time while racing to the Yield against the Hippies (they'd finally get revenge later). My advice to Joseph -- learn how to empathize! Of course, this is coming from someone's whose total knowledge of relationships came from reading "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus"

- Fortunately, Mojo overcame the Yield by correctly assessing which Detour could be done faster. The Frat Boys and Hippies strangely thought they could hike / wade a mile down a stream faster than a car could drive six miles. The also seemed less intimidated with confronting poisonous spiders and plants [seems like just about everything in Australia can be fatal] than learning to play an instrument. Mojo was also wise to ask for directions and grab a map at a local info center.

- Yolanda has a pleasant laugh. And this is coming from a guy who has a whole repertoire of annoying laughs and giggles.

- I was surprised the Frats didn't try to give the Hippies wrong directions to the Pitstop, but may be they decided it wasn't worth risking more bad karma, and they probably would have had the Hippies tailgating them anyway.

- Great camera and multi-angle slo-mo replay work at the Pitstop. BJ reminded me of a recent Tour de France bike rider that inexplicably went off the road and down a mountain side (fortunately neither were hurt). Maybe the adrenaline rush during the sky dive was still clouding his judgment. So he finally got to do a fun Roadblock, but I wonder how he'll get around now that I imagine his shoes have been taken away.