I just found a bug in Google's Calculator: The query "1 kbps in bps" does not yield the correct answer of 1000 bps. The incorrect answer, 1024 bps, normally would be correct for computing in general, but it is not correct for networking. For whatever reason, network equipment manufacturers, much like hard drive manufacturers, use the normal SI definitions. I sent feedback to Google's customer support, we'll see what they say...

Broken Flowers ***: If you liked ''Lost in the Translation'', you'll like this one.

Shrek 2 ***: Doesn't quite have the magic of the first one.

Ugly Americans ***: From the author of ''Bringing Down the House'', another fast-paced page-turner, this time about hedge fund traders in Tokyo. The story is entertaining but seems largely fictionalized, and after a while, the lack of fact-checking undermines the book's credibility: For example, the book incorrectly states that the Tokyo Tower is smaller than the Eiffel Tower, when in fact it is larger--the Amazon.com reviews cite many more examples.

China Study *** by Colin Campbell: Recommended by my friends Bruce and Karen, a thought provoking read that, in the end, fails to hold up to scientific scrutiny. I am giving it a three star rating because, despite its flawed conclusion, it is worth reading, if for no other reason than to fortify your knowledge of disease and nutrition.

The book's central premise is that diets with a large percentage of animal-based protein are conducive to cancer, heart disease, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and many other diseases. The solution to avoid cancer and disease? Go vegan.

The author reaches this conclusion by using data from the China Study to compare the "affluent" diets of western countries (US and Europe) with those of poorer countries (China), which are primarily plant-based. The China Study was a large research effort conducted over twenty years in which the author was principally involved.

This is all well and good, but unfortunately, the book fails to establish causality between disease and diet. Epidemiology is a complex and difficult discipline, and if preventing disease were as easy as simply not eating animal protein, it stands to reason that medical science would have figured this out by now. Indeed, by his own admission, the author is an outcast from the conventional medical establishment, a fact that should raise alarms in the reader's head. Additionally, at times the book's tone takes on an almost religious fanaticism as the author rails against animal-based protein. By the final pages, it seems that Campbell's faith in the vegan lifestyle has tainted his view of the China Study data.

As some critical web sites detail, the China Study makes no statistically significant correlation whatsoever between diet and disease. (See Blog of Brad from an organic farmer, and Beyond Vegetarianism, a pro-vegetarian web site that disagrees with Campbell).

Clearly the author has found religion, but until his theories are tested through double blind clinical trials, the establishment is wise to remain skeptical of the claims in this book.

Hawaii *****: Epic novel. When you finish a Michener novel, you feel like you've really accomplished something. A tremendous read for anyone interested in the Hawaiian islands. (Fittingly enough, I read this while on vacation in Maui.)

Marching Powder ****: True life story of an Englishman caught drug trafficking and sent to a Bovilian prison where inmates have to buy their own cells, have cable TV and kitchens, and make cocaine.

I recently applied for (and was accepted) into Google's Gmail for your domain beta. I was fed up with keeping my spam defense systems up-to-date, always having to patch the mail software (postfix, amavisd, spamassassin, etc.), network outages, running out of disk space on the mail queue, etc. Mail is simply too critical an application for me, so I decided to let Google run it.

I finally got around to switching over my DNS mail records today, so now all of my email for prestonhunt.com is being handled by Google. So far, I'm really impressed with their service. I think it will be an obvious choice for small and medium sized businesses (and maybe even some large ones!) to outsource their email to Google -- it's a very capable system, with a slick administration panel, and (of course) it goes without saying that the service uptime, reliability, data backup, etc., will all be excellent. And with Google's engineers and servers running everything, a company would not need to waste valuable IT resources providing email service. Or paying for expensive Exchange and Outlook licenses.

Cowboy del Amor (***): Interesting documentary about a man who finds Mexican wives for his gringo clients. A little bid sad.

V for Vendetta (*****): Wonderful filmography and brilliant acting from Portman and "V" (who remains masked the entire movie).

Bringing Down the House **** : MIT students take Vegas for millions. Fast-paced with big money, action, adrenaline--just like Sin City. I read this in a single reading on a flight from Boston to Denver.

Freakonomics **** : A University of Chicago economics professor analyzes statistics to challenge popular beliefs. Co-written by a newspaper/magazine author, and thus a bit light on the math and watered down for mainstream acceptance, but a thought stimulating read.

Some of the interesting topics discussed/proven in this book:

• How teachers cheat by altering their students' standardized test scores
• How sumo wrestlers cheat by throwing matches when it doesn't affect their overall ranking and will help their opponent's ranking
• How a children's radio show and free information flow mortally wounded the Ku Klux Klan
• Why real estate agents don't have anything to gain by helping you get a better deal
• How and why people lie about themselves on online dating services
• How little drug dealers really make and why they still live with their moms
• The effect that legalized abortion had on crime rates in the 1990s
• How your child has a greater chance of dying if she plays at a friend's house where there is a swimming pool rather than playing at a friend's house where there is a gun present
• How parents focus their energy on safer cribs and child car seats and how they are, at best, nominally helpful in preventing child deaths, along with child-resistant packaging, flame-retardant pajamas, car airbags, and safety drawstrings no clothes (the cumulative deaths from all of these causes is significantly less than swimming pool drownings for children).
• How "good parenting actions" have very little effect on the educational success of children (the following had no correlation with academic success: having a stay-at-home parent; being read to them every day; going on museum trips or being enrolled in Head Start; not watching TV)
• The socioeconomic effect of a person's name

Aquarium update: Had a tragic death in the tank last weekend. A longtime tank resident and one of the few survivors of last year's ich outbreak was a friendly longnose hawkfish named Poindexter (Dexter or Dex for short). He was being harassed by a powder blue tang and he jumped out of the tank and died a dessicated death.

Yesterday, we started the restocking process and added the following to the tank: A cool [purple sea urchin](http://www.etropicals.com/product/prod_display.cfm?pcatid=1300), two [nassarius snails](http://www.etropicals.com/product/prod_Display.cfm?siteid=43&pCatId=1289), five hermit crabs, and a [brownbanded bamboo shark](http://animal-world.com/encyclo/marine/sharks_rays/bamboo.php). Our first time owning a shark. Let's hope he doesn't munch anybody.

I haven't done any formal benchmarks, but the site seems zippier to me so far.

Once and Future Spy **: Conviluted spy thriller, only read because I was trapped on an airplane.

Hawaii's Humpback Whales **** : Well illustrated overview of humpback anatomy and behavior. Very informative.

Design of Everyday Things ***** : A bit dated, but still an outstanding book on user-oriented design. You will never look at the world the same way again.

Out *** : Four women kill a man and deal with the consequences in this Japanese thriller.

I went riding with Geoff and Myron this weekend. They ended up doing an 80-mile ride, but I bailed at the halfway point and found my own way home sans map. I was at the intersection of Murray and TV Highway and realized that I didn't know if TV Highway was a good biking road east of Murray (answer according to the Bike There! maps: no!). I ended up taking the safe route (up Murray, and then MAX home), but vowed that I would look up some online map resources for bike routes.

Yes, indeed. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

Current Terror Alert Level

Good thing I use ssh and https as much as possible. I'd like to use Tor more as well, but it's just too slow. I'd like to be able to threaten boycott of Comcast if they are involved too, but there is really no alternative available that delivers the same speed/cost performance.

I'm not sure why spammers even bother. With Google's nofollow directive

Anyway, I'm sure there are good anti-spam measures that can be taken on phpbb, but it wasn't worth it since nobody was really using my forums anyway, so I just took the easy way out and prevented any new posts from being made.

Some interesting take aways for me:

• Watching the whole US go dark in the middle of the night
• Watching the early morning explosion of flights on the east coast (as well as European flights landing around the same time)
• Seeing the grid light up east-to-west as people wake up and get on planes
• Check out the huge amount of traffic going to Hawaii
• Noting that the number of trans-Pacific flights seems substantially lower than the number of trans-Atlantic flights

I found the first two movies the best ("The U.S. as seen by the FAA" and "Color coded aircrafts").

No more! ForceDel to the rescue!

My usual routine with any USB device is to just plug it in straight out of the box and see if it works. Unfortunately, with this camera, Windows couldn't locate "SONYPVU1.SYS" and prompted me for its location. This is usually a sign that you have to run the install CD that came with the device, so I obediently pulled out the Sony install CD, ran it, and waited through the forced reboot.

Plugged in the camera a second time: Same problem. What the heck?! I hit Google and found out that a lot of people have this problem. As near as I can tell, Microsoft ships SONYPVU1.SYS as part of Windows XP standard build, but for some unknown reason, certain OEMs (like Dell) strip it out of their builds. End result: My new Sony camera had zero chance of working out of the box with my Dell PC.

Inexcusably, all three companies involved (sony.com, dell.com, and microsoft.com) have zero information on their support web sites about how to solve this problem. Luckily I am savvy enough to be able to track it down after wasting a bunch of time diagnosing the problem, but what about the average consumer?

Sony, Microsoft, and Dell: Not sure who is to blame, maybe all three of you, but shame on you! This sort of thing should not be happening in 2006.

If you need the file, here it is: sonypvu1.sys

It's supposed to be the best place near Portland to go rock climbing, but I've never been there because it's been off limits for the last 8 years. The county was going to demolish the rock and use it for road construction. I made a small donation to the Preservation Committee's efforts many years ago -- it's very satisfying to see the political process working for a change!

So I whipped up this simple Excel spreadsheet. You input the quantity of chips you have, the number of players, and the number of rebuys/latecomers you want to allow, and it spits out the number of each color chip that each person should get.

Download: PokerChipsPerPlayerCalculator.xls

The Kwote Korner leaves 2005 with the best, most uplifting description of Risk Taking that I've ever seen. Rhys Thomas ("Many are called ... Few accept the charges") is a juggler and physics presenter living here in Portland. In a recent interview in The Oregonian, he laid out universal lessons that he's learned from juggling.

Rhys Thomas, on universal lessons learned from juggling:

1. It's all about risk and reciprocity. To gain a catch, you must hazard a throw. The better the throw the easier the catch. This translates as life's invitation to embrace a little risk-taking, but know that the better prepared you are the more likely you are to succeed. Juggling is a reminder that what you give influences what you get.
2. Most of the action is in your peripheral vision. If you focus on the peak of the arc, you can predict where the ball will land. A narrow mind sees only part of the picture, but an open and educated mind can extrapolate a great many possibilities from the glimpses it gets.
3. It's OK to drop. Gravity always wins in the end and yet flight still exists. Your job is to make as many brief, creative, delighted flights as you can before you finally drop.

Wishing you many creative, delighted flights in 2006.

• Taxes are at an all-time historical low right now.
• A 401k only helps you if your taxes will be lower in the future than they are today.
• The government is spending money like crazy and running up the debt.
• Taxes will have to go up at some point to pay off all of this debt.

Thus, her conclusion was that taxes are most likely lower now than they will be in the future, thus the 401k is not a good idea.

When she first said "don't do the 401k" , I thought she was crazy, but she has me wondering now. I need to ponder this a bit. In particular, I'm interested in the impact of state taxes (i.e., I live in a state with tax now, but may live in a state with no tax in the future) and also the effects of taxation on dividends and capital gains (paid outside the 401k, not paid inside).

My 2005 in cities:

• Las Vegas
• San Francisco *
• Tokyo *
• Taipei *
• Beijing
• Inverness, Florida
• Titusville, Florida
• Cocoa Beach, Florida
• Seattle *
• Boulder, Colorado *
• Tillamook, Oregon
• Sisters, Oregon
• Bend, Oregon
• Helsinki
• Moscow
• Hong Kong
• Shanghai
• Seoul
• Bangkok
• Phuket Town, Thailand
• Phi Phi, Thailand
• Railey, Thailand
• Ayuthaya, Thailand
• Lopburi, Thailand
• Manzanita, Oregon
• Howey-in-the-Hills, Florida *

One or more nights spent in each place. Cities marked with * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days.

• It has very sluggish performance and is prone to unpredictable pauses (why didn't the Windows programmers cache the values so it would start instantly?)
• If another program loads just after you've clicked the Start menu, there is a good chance that the new program's window will steal the focus and you'll lose the Start menu completely.
• The Start menu is often collapsed, showing only the most recently used selections. If you want a program that's not on the list, you have to click the expand arrow to see the full menu (almost always a very slow operation -- see first complaint about sluggish menus). Also if you have many programs installed, this results in a huge start menu, often two or three columns of tiny icons.
• The Start menu is cluttered with all kinds of useless entries (help files, uninstall links) and you have to hunt through it to find the programs you really want.
• The Start menu is overly hierarchical, often requiring many clicks (and waits) before finding the program you're looking for. Also, if your start menu has more than 1 column, then the lower-level menus from the left column items often obscure the entries on the second column, requiring extra mousing and waiting.
• Microsoft guidelines appear to recommend that software is installed under the company name then the product. For obscure company names, this can make finding the program you're looking for nearly impossible (example: Start -> Ahead -> Nero -- you have to know that the company that makes Nero is called Ahead or you'll never find it.)
• When new programs are added, they are added at the bottom. You have to manually sort the menu if you want them listed alphabetically.
• Let's say you want to start two or more programs right after another. That's a separate trip thorugh the Start->Programs->Blah->Blah->Blah for each program.

• Startup time is constant, regardless of the number of entries
• I view the icons in "list" mode, which makes it easy to see all of the programs in a reasonably sized window (I have 56 items in there)
• After pressing the hotkey, I can simply start typing and let explorer find the file to start. For example, to start Firefox, I hit Windows-S, then type "fire" and hit enter. No mouse required.
• If another app steals the focus, I simply alt-tab back to the MyStartMenu folder.
• If I am starting multiple applications at once, the MyStartMenu folder is already up on the screen. No waiting.
• Applications are automatically sorted by Explorer.
• It's trivial to add or remove entries. Indeed, many installers place a shortcut on the desktop during setup. This shortcut can simply be moved into the MyStartMenu folder.
• Drag and drop of a file into an application is made far easier through the use of the MyStartMenu folder.