ADD

Speaking of the crazies out on Black Friday, over the weekend we did go out to the local Japanese supermarket for some sushi and ramen.  Now there's something about Asian drivers that seems to go out of control at places like Asian grocery stores, Asian restaurants, etc.  Basically, if you get too many Asian drivers in close proximity to each other, you're asking for trouble.  I call it ADD or Asian Driving Disorder.

One symptom of ADD is that the parking spaces and streets near Asian areas is are jam packed at all times of the day.  This makes drivers throw all the usual rules of the road out the window---you don't get anywhere by being polite.  Instead, cars race through the parking lots trying to grab the first space they see, cutting off people, swerving in front of pedestrians, and generally it becomes a survival of the fittest competition.  I wonder if the most of these people learned to drive in the free for all streets of Asia before coming to the US, where these repressed instincts flare up due to the high concentration of fellow Asian people.  Without fail, every time we go to the local Asian Food Market, we almost die.  This time, we ended up almost getting hit by a couple of cars just walking to the door and we saw two cars back into each other since neither driver was paying any attention.  This was true in California and it's true in New Jersey and New York as well.

Anyway, it doesn't look like the problem is likely to go away.  There was a recent Wall Street Journal artcle that cited statistics that Asian Americans in New Jersey had a lifespan of 91.8 years compared to 79.7 years for all other residents and even higher than the 87.3 years for Asian Americans living in the rest of the country.  I guess it must be something in the water.  The article does suggest that the situation may be autocatalytic---that as more Asian Americans get together, more and more join them.  It looks like the driving craziness won't stop.

Black Friday

I don't think we've ever really gone out during the shopping madness of Black Friday.  I usually need my beauty sleep, so there's very little that will get me to wake up that early in the morning, especially potentially getting trampled to death at a WalMart.  I'm a little skeptical at how good the deals really are, as I suspect that some places will artificially raise their prices just so they can mark down a higher percent sale.  Plus, no matter how good a deal is, an even better deal is not spending anything at all (but if you must get something, then get it online shipped to your destination from the comfort of your home).

However, we did decide to venture out into the madness this year.  Mostly because we've been thinking about getting some new shelves and to clean up our loft.  So we ended up going to Ikea (sorry, we're still in poor grad student mode so we default to Ikea and not to any "real" furniture store).  It actually turned out to be the best time to go---there was virtually no one else there!  I don't think I've ever seen an Ikea this empty before.  I guess they didn't have any official Black Friday sale so everyone else was probably elsewhere trampling each other (we actually did a drive-by of the outlet mall next door and literally every single space in the parking lot was full with more buses disgorging people.  That's when we decided just to go home.

Sadly, we did have to go out and buy some batteries for our failing smoke detector.  For the last couple of nights, it's decided 3 am was the best time to let us know that it needed a new battery.  So we had to venture into a Best Buy on the way home.  It was crazy---there was police tape outside (presumably to control the lines that morning) and inside was a madhouse of people and piles of inventory randomly blocking various aisles.  Luckily, we managed to get our batteries and get out of there.

(And no, that didn't fix the smoke alarm, it looks like it's expired and we have to buy a new one...)

The New Fear of Flying

There's been a lot of uproar over the new TSA security measures now in place at airports across the country.  Your choice is now between a full body scan that essentially gives you an electronic strip search or a more intensive enhanced patdown search, where not even children are spared from being groped and touched in places that would have the inspector arrested anywhere else.  We haven't had to travel yet, so I'm morbidly curious how this will play out when we do during Christmas break.  Yesterday was supposed to be the big protest day where travelers would opt out of the full body scanners and go for the patdown.  However, it sounds like it was mostly much ado about nothing and it doesn't look like there was much of an impact.

Some thoughts:

*  Did they really have to make you hold your hands up like a common criminal when being scanned?  Really?  

*  Michael Chertoff, using his position as former Homeland Security Secretary to strongly advocate for the body scanners, has a consulting company which includes as a client Rapiscan Systems, the company producing the scanners.  How is this not an immense conflict of interest?

*  I don't understand why pilots had to go through all of this (they've since stopped scanning them).  If they wanted to hijack or crash the plane or crash, they could, well, just use the controls...

*  If a terrorist wanted to create havoc, there are now much easier targets than an airport, especially now that the cockpits are locked and informed passengers would never let a hijacker take control of a plane.

*  How do we tell our kids that it's not right for anyone to touch you in those special places unless they have a uniform on?

*  I wouldn't have as big of an issue with this if the the body scanners actually worked (at least if their purpose is to catch terrorists).  Whether it's stories like the TSA missing 12 inch razor blades on Adam Savage or actual terrorists already demonstrating that they've learned to smuggle bombs in various bodily cavities, there are easy ways to get past the them if you wanted to.

*  This is why I think that statistics (along with financial planning) needs to be a mandated class for everyone.  By any statistical measure, whether you are looking at total number of deaths, normalizing for number of deaths per traveler or number of deaths per mile traveled, driving is orders of magnitude more lethal than flying.  So why isn't there even a fraction of the resources going into stopping drunk driving?  How about any of the other leading causes of death (which include tobacco, diet, alcohol, and firearms)?  Even worse, it appears that the amount of radiation dosed by the bodily scanners, although small, will actually result in more deaths than from the terrorist activities it's supposed to prevent.  This is not a good trade off.

*  What are we so scared of?  Why don't we just realize that terrorism is such a small risk that we stop being so afraid of it?  Whatever happened to being the Home of the Brave?  Surely continuing to live our lives is the best victory against terrorists.

Sadly, it looks like most people will just go through the body scanners without complaint because it's easy or "it's the law".  Despite how comfortable or easy it is, it's still a strip search.  Still, I suppose it's easier to just do as you're told.  To be fair, if given the choice this Christmas, I'll likely submit as well...sigh...

Pizza Stone

Although we've started making bread in our dutch oven, I still yearned for a bread stone since it would be more versatile method of baking.  The problem is that they're usually ridiculously over-priced and we haven't been able to find any quarry stones at the local hardware stones to use.  However, we luckily stumbled upon a pizza stone at Wegmans for only fifteen bucks, so we finally took the bait.

For its inaugural run, we decided to make pizza.  We've never made truly home-made pizza before so we were pretty excited.  I found an easy pizza dough recipe.  We whipped up a quick sauce from scratch and cut up some toppings (my wife prefers supreme pizza, so we prepared some italian sausage, pepperoni, red onions, mushrooms, and cheese).  After letting the dough rise twice, we started rolling it out which ended up being a little harder than I expected.  I think the dough was a little too wet  to handle and it was hard to stretch the dough out and get it as thin as we wanted.  We spread the sauce on and put the toppings on (under the cheese, which I like) and it looked good to go.

At first everything looked good...

Unfortunately, I guess we didn't think the process all the way through.  We didn't have an easy way to transfer the pizza onto the hot pizza stone in the oven.  The dough was too sticky and flexible to pick up easily and we didn't have a large paddle.  The results were pretty ugly.  We eventually had to fold it over to get it onto a large cutting board and then toss and unroll it back onto the pizza stone (maybe we should have just settled for a calzone).  We baked it for about 20 minutes at 450 degrees Fahrenheit but even that was a little too long and the pizza came out over cooked.  Despite all that, it turned out okay.  The crust ended up being a little too thick and chewy, but the bottom was definitely crispy from the pizza stone.  I think the next time we'll definitely aim for a thinner crust and maybe more healthy toppings... 

The final product, not too shabby...

Year End Curve

It's that time of year again---year end reviews at work.  Towards the end of each year, we get our performance evaluated to determine our potential raise and year end bonus, although for some reason we actually don't get our year end bonus until the April of the following year.  Of course, there is a corporate buzz word for the affair---they call it "calibration".

This is the first real job that I've had since finishing school so I'm not sure how other companies do this or if they even have a a similar year end review.  The part that I'm really not enthusiastic about is that the "calibration" is curved.  everyone in your level is divided into pre-determined percentile buckets such as "top 10%" or "bottom 10%".  The issue that I find disturbing is that a bell curve distribution is forced so that there is always someone in the top or bottom bucket.  It's something that I've found disturbing even during college when professors would curve their classes like this.  I have no problem with a gaussian bell curve when there's a large enough sample size, but in a small class or group of employees I think the model fails.  What if everyone in your department performs equally well this year?  Why does someone have to get punished?  This tends to make everything even more competitive since everyone is fighting for the elite top percentile.

Of course, this doesn't even start to take into account the different managers politicking to promote their own.

Or how to distinguish if you work hard but you're unlucky and your project fails for other reasons.

Or the fact that, in theory, all of the bottom 10 percenters have been let go during the many layoffs this year.

Although I'm not a big fan of this, I suppose that there does need to be some mechanism to recognize and reward the better employees.  The problem is that "average performance" is determined by comparing everyone to each other, which results in a moving average of sorts.  I would much rather there be an absolute measure, for example if your performance was gauged by particular objectives set out at the beginning of the year.  If everyone meets their objectives then everyone performs well, just like if everyone gets 90% on their exam they should all get A's.

Kinecting

I haven't really been keeping up with computer or video game technology, which is a little surprising since I used to be an avid gamer.  However, my tastes have strongly turned towards analog (board) games recently and I have dropped out of the most recent generation of console games.  I do have a Wii, but that was more for casual gaming and we haven't even turned it on for several months.

Anyway, this weekend we went up to Connecticut to visit my cousin's family.  It turns out that they had one of the new-fangled Kinect systems for the Xbox 360 so we tried it out.  I have to admit that I was pretty impressed---it's some slick technology.  I hadn't really heard anything about it beforehand, so it was basically new to me.  Unlike the Wii, the Kinect does not use any motion sensitive controllers that you have to attach to various parts of your body.  Instead, a sensor bar projects an array of infrared light at you which is then captured and mapped using a 3d detector.  Essentially, it's a full body motion detector, no controller needed.

This leads to some pretty neat effects.  For example, you just have to wave to push and pull different menus across the screen---very Minority Report-esque.   We tried out the Adventures game that places you as an explorer in various mini -ames.  The most fun one was an on-rails obstacle course where you're essentially on a moving platform having to jump or duck around obstacles while grabbing at coins.  We also tried the Dance Central game which was surprisingly fun.  It's the next iteration of the Dance Dance Revolution genre, except now the game tracks your entire movement against the set choreography.  The games were also surprisingly exhausting---it's a pretty good workout and you burn quite a bit of calories, certainly more than the Wii.  In fact, the next day we were sore all over.

However, there are some downsides to the system.  We tried the Sports game, but most of the games were hit or miss.  This is mostly because the Kinect system just doesn't seem to have a very high resolution or precision.  It was hard to have fine control your ball when bowling, for example.  The technology is a pretty big step forward, but I think that at this point it's a technology waiting for a great game.  It works well with games requiring exaggerated bodily movements like dancing or jumping obstacles, but it doesn't seem to work that well with games requiring fine control (although to be fair, I think you can train the Kinect to recognize you in more detail, but we didn't do that).  This is one area where the Wii does better, although it's one area where the Wii has inexplicably not taken advantage of.  The Wii technology can result it some highly accurate pointing and this has translated to some amazing shooter games like Resident Evil 4.  In fact, I refuse to play most console shooter games since I'm a dyed in the wool mouse/keyboard man from my old Quake days, but the Wii is one exception although sadly there just haven't been that many games taking advantage of it.

Still, I think this is an example of how when they put their minds to it, Microsoft can really turn out some slick technology and push the market.  It's just a shame that they don't do it more often.

Time Zone

One of the downsides of coming back from Daylight Savings time is that it gets dark so early now.  I guess we've essentially traded an hour of evening light for an hour of morning light.  In practice, this means that the sun wakes me up early in the morning, I got to work, and it's pitch black by the time I get home.  In retrospect, I'd rather have the extra hour of light in the evening.  This got me to thinking that all of this is pretty arbitrary.  We didn't really gain an hour last weekend, we just shifted around all of our socially responsible agendas.  It's almost as if we switched time zones, although in this case the jet lag is entirely self-induced and not due to the curvature of the earth.  

So which time zone is the best?  Having lived in three time zones, I have to say that the Central Time Zone beats all the others.  This is governed pretty much by arbitrary social agendas---in this case the television schedule is much better in the Midwest.  Now, I actually don't watch too much tv, but I do try to catch the evening news.  It's much easier to watch the nightly news at 10 pm rather than 11 pm, especially if you have to wake up to go to your 8-5 job.  Everything in the Eastern and Pacific Time Zones just happens one hour later.  Prime time starts at 8 pm rather than 7 pm, and don't get me started on being forced to watch live sports early in the morning in California.  I guess I'm just old and I need my sleep.

All in Time

This is one of my favorite days of the year, right up there with Christmas, Thanksgiving, and definitely better than my birthday---it's the day we ditch Daylight Savings time and gain back our free hour, the only day of the year with 25 hours.  Sorry Arizona, you will never taste such sweetness.

I'm actually a little surprised that this day hasn't been seized and made more commercialized.  Where are all of the one hour sales?  Or the gifts that you have to buy everyone to celebrate their newly found hour?  Maybe it's just a matter of time (pun intended).

Anyway, we spent the extra time today just relaxing and doing some baking.  We had some leftover apples from when we had gone out apple picking, so we ended up making an apple cinnamon walnut bread (kind of like a banana bread) and apple strudel muffins.  They're fresh out of the oven and the whole house now has that warm, cozy, spiced smell.  It's much better than potpourri, significantly cheaper, even edible (although I suppose that remains to be seen...)

 Apple Strudel Muffins

Apple Cinnamon Walnut Bread

Casting Lots

Yesterday was Election Day and luckily I managed to make it to our polling place---for some reason, someone scheduled a big global business meeting for the past two days.  Anyway, I ended up voting for the challenger who was a former science teacher.  Sadly, science lost to the incumbent.  And apparently, not just in New Jersey.

One of the stats that I found sadly interesting was that only about 25% of the people in our district went out to vote.  I guess this wasn't a Presidential election, but this was one of the more publicized elections (although New Jersey didn't have any of the key races).  I guess the sadder thing is that that 25% figure is probably pretty high compared to rest of the country...