Home Alone Is a Lot Like Die Hard
It was cold and rainy this Christmas. We all were ready to snuggle under a blanket in front of the television. Yet, we were stuck. What shall we watch?
Let’s watch again the best Christmas movie ever!
The rest of the family rolled their eyes at the hint of Die Hard. I suggested it in jest, yet I didn’t want to search for the perfect movie forever (especially when we already knew the answer). Let’s just pick a movie that peeked our interest and explore.
A few nights prior, we committed to Gotti, with John Travolta. That was a mistake and a horrible movie. We rated it zero stars out of five. Yet, we committed and agreed on a movie.
This Christmas we settled on two headliners: first the new Disney movie, Encanto, and then a classic, Home Alone. Today, we crescendoed with Die Hard.
I realize that Home Alone and Die Hard have a lot in common:
- Both movies start with the protagonist being less than enthusiast to their Christmas Eve travel plans. Kevin McCallister obviously is left behind from the family trip to Paris in Home Alone. John McClane isn’t the fan of having to cross the country to California. “Pfft, California!”
- Both leading characters are stuck in a building for Christmas Eve. Kevin is alone at home. John in the now infamous Nakatomi building in Los Angeles.
- The entire plot is about fending of the bad guys lead by Harry Lime (Joe Pesci) in Home Alone and Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) in Die Hard.
- Both are outmatched against the bad guys. They both are a good shot and have to be inventive to fight back.
- There is also the sweet romantic side story: Kevin’s neighbor reconnects with his estranged son, and John and Holy are back the McClanes.
- Both movies defined the career of their lead actors. Before Die Hard, Bruce Willis was known opposite Sybille Shepherd in he ABC comedy-drama Moonlighting. That was from the strong action hero we know him as today. If not catcalled, he must hear daily “Yipikaye Motherfucker!” Macaulay Culkin will always be known as Kevin, (and friend of Michael Jackson). I had to look up another big movie Culkin was part of: My Girl.
So next year, when the uninevitable Christmas movie question arises, be content that it really doesn’t matter. They are the same story in a different package. … and enjoy Die Hard.
December 26, 2021
Het Schelde Peloton
Watching a professional cycling race on television is like listening to a reading of a great novel. It is a slowly enfolding tale full of drama, surprise, and heroics. The cycling commentators are therefore master story tellers. When they get a chance to make a cycling documentary, you can be assured an awesome story.
Het Schelde Peloton doesn’t disappoint. It tells the story of five friends, who loved cycling, who wanted to become professionals, and who would train along the banks of the river Schelde in Belgium: Iljo Keisse, Wouter Weylandt, Bert De Backer, Kurt Hovelinck, and Dimitri De Fauw.
The groups trains hard, parties hard. Some win and some lose. They fall down and get up. They fall down and some stay down. Only three of them are still alive. Dimitri De Fauw committed suicide as he suffered from ongoing depression in the aftermath of a collision and the death of a fellow track racer Isaac Galvez. Wouter Weylandt died during the third stage of the 2011 Giro d’Italia.
I hope there is an English version of this Flemish television series. It is so well done. I can assure you it will be difficult not to shed a tear.
December 25, 2021
San Jose Mid-Covid Is Apocalyptic
Christmas in the Park is back this year in downtown San Jose. However, it feels much different. Many of the traditional displays are not there, with exception of the Caribbean Frogs and the ice ring. The experience is a light version of the typical San Jose Christmas celebration. Nevertheless, it is great to be out there, bundled up and to continue the tradition since the kids were small.
What struck me a lot more was the carnage the pandemic left downtown. Many businesses have closed. Storefronts are boarded up. Establishments are emptied out. The downtown Safeway is gone. And shocker, the iconic Fairmont hotel has been closed. Wowzie! Downtown is empty and a bit scary.
Add to this the tents from the many homeless people, people living in their vans on many street corners, and the camperville near the San Jose airport and it looks quite apocalyptic.
If the capital of Silicon Valley is going through such a rough time, imagine how many other places must be fairing. San Jose isn’t a typical tourist destination. This is all tech business. San Jose businesses and hotels depend a lot on business travel and conventions. That has been on hold for more over two years.
Omicron is delaying the hoisting of the “We’re back!” banner a bit longer. If there is some solace in the prolonged pandemic it is that early results show that this variant, while more contagious, is less potent and lethal. Hope gives life, no? I am looking forward to a bustling and happening downtown San Jose again.
December 22, 2021
The Formula 1 season was exciting to the end, with two great teams and two top racers, Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen.
Unfortunately, it was the rules that decided the winner: Max Verstappen.
Both racers shared the same number of points in the world championship ranking heading into the final race in Abu Dhabi. The dominant driver in the final grandprix was clearly Lewis Hamilton. Yet, because of a crash by Nicolas Latifi with five laps to go, and how the rules were applied, everything changed. Lewis lost all the advantage he had built up over the course of 50 laps. Not only did all drivers bunch up again, also the order in which they were driving was adjusted. This resulted in Lewis in position #1 and Verstappen in position #2, yet Max with brand new fast tires. After the safety car left, there remained one lap and one lap only to decide the winner. Max showed his skills and overtook Lewis Hamilton. Max Verstappen won the race and the F1 world championship.
Even though I am a Max supporter, something feels off. If it wasn’t for the crash, and how the rules were applied, Lewis would have been the clear winner of it all. While the crash is unfortunate and unpredictable, the rules shouldn’t have impacted the race outcome this much. The rules should preserve fairness and correctness in racing. This didn’t feel like either.
It is true that in other races, Lewis probably benefited from the rules as well. Verstappen’s “Finally a bit of luck of me” comment captures that best.
There are many winners today:
- Lewis Hamilton and Toto Wolff for being fierce competitors.
- Max Verstappen for his racing style and making the sport exciting again.
- The biggest winner may be Netflix, as season 4 of the F1 documentary Drive to Survive will be amazing.
- Latifi, as he will be energized for life!
December 12, 2021
Kindle Notes Needs a Blood Infusion
The Kindle is an amazing product. Yet Amazon failed to build out great note, snippet and book recommendation applications.
Goodreads hasn’t changed much since Amazon bought the company in 2013. The Kindle-Goodreads integration is meager: it allows you to update % complete and whether your finish the book.
Amazon only offers basic Kindle notes and highlights functionality. You can access and search them through https://read.amazon.com/notebook or export a portion of them as an html file from the Kindle iPad application. The book publisher sets a limit on the amount of highlights you can export. Using the highlights outside of the notebook site is cumbersome. There are a few utilities out there, such as http://kindle-formatter.vercel.app/ to convert the Kindle html file to Markdown and Roam formats.
Amazon could have built a great set of products, combining GoodReads and Notes, that
- Allow for easy and pretty sharing of quotes and highlights on Twitter.
- Allow for sharing and discovering highlights from other readers you follow. Bookclubs can see each other’s highlights. Or you can quickly gather what avid readers and curators have highlighted in a book.
- Allow you to save all your highlights in a portable text format. My highlights are mine. I prefer to save my book summaries and highlights locally. I want to copy/paste them easily into a Google Doc, an email, or a blogpost.
- Allow for easy integration with various notebook applications, such as Notion or Evernote.
Readwise solves many of these problems. It brings highlights from several sources together and integrates them with popular notebook applications. You can also share quotes easily on Twitter in a pretty format.
However, at $5/month, Readwise joins my subscription hell.
Amazon should have built a number of these features into Kindle Notes from the get-go.
Matter, a new and great reader application for newsletters and articles, does a great job at this, and avoids “integration” applications. Matter provides snippet sharing, and allows you to export the highlights to Notion. You can also export all highlights in an article in Markdown format.
Amazon is great at logistics, package distribution, and Kindle devices. They are great at infrastructure software (AWS) and Alexa. I wonder if they have the same passion for consumer software.
November 26, 2021
The Times Are Really Good
One of the great Christmas presents I received in recent years was a subscription to the New York Times. Since last month, I am now also subscribed to the Los Angeles Times, after my son wanted it for this twentieth birthday. It also brings a California perspective to the US news.
I’ve been truly impressed by both newspapers, both about its content and how it is delivered. The New York Times iOS application is beautiful and functional. The story telling through the digital exposes are superb. The website becomes more than just a digital version of the print paper.
I read the LA Times ePaper daily on my iPad. I looks like just a photo of the print paper. However, it gives you a sense of reading the physical paper, and allows you click into the articles and share them with one click. Also the LA Times iOS application is well done.
One feature I am missing in both applications is the ability to highlight sentences. Therefore, I share interesting articles to Matter, where I can mark them up, save them for later, or share quotes on Twitter.
Both Times set themselves apart from our local newspapers, the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News, and from many other newspapers.
I don’t know how many people subscribe to the New York and LA Times, or how expensive their staff is. Hopefully, they can make the books balance and demonstrate there is life for the newspaper industry after all.
November 24, 2021
New Lingo
Recently, I came to learn two new terms, bikeshedding and yak shaving.
Bikeshedding
Cyril Parkinson, a British naval historian, is foremost known for Parkinson’s law, which states that work and meetings expand to fill the time allocated to it. A lesser known of his laws is the law of triviality, to describe how organizations tend to focus on trivial issues and put aside more complex matters.
Bikeshedding is another term for Parkinson’s law of triviality, describing our tendency to devote a disproportionate amount of our time to menial and trivial matters while leaving important matters unattended.
The term supposedly originated during nuclear power plant planning meetings when too much time was spent on the color of the bike shed, rather than on the construction and safety of the nuclear plant.
Bikeshedding occurs because trivial tasks are easier to comprehend than more complex issues; consequently, we feel more comfortable working on and discussing the simple issue.
It is important to be aware of bikeshedding because it helps identify instances in which a valuable resource — time — is being wasted on trivial matters. Bikeshedding means that we are operating at a suboptimal efficiency and may not complete everything that we have set out to resolve.
An awareness of bikeshedding is vital to countering its effects.
There are various techniques that can be used in order to ensure that a group or team is being efficient with the time they spend on each topic.
One method to avoid bikeshedding is to have a separate meeting for any major, complex issue. If the topic is brought into a meeting with a long agenda, it can get lost under the trivial issues. However, if it is the main and only purpose for a meeting, it is difficult to avoid talking about it. Keeping meetings specific and focused on a particular issue can help counter bikeshedding. It may also be a good idea to have a particular person appointed to keep the team on task and pull back focus if the discussion does get sidetracked.
Another way of pulling the focus onto particular issues is to have fewer people present at the meeting. Bikeshedding is a big problem in group settings because simple issues entice multiple people to speak, which can drag them out. By only having the necessary people present at a meeting, even if a trivial issue is discussed, it will take up less time since there are fewer people to voice their opinion.
Yak Shaving
Yak shaving is programming lingo for the seemingly endless series of small tasks that have to be completed before the next step in a project can move forward.
Wikipedia’s definition shows both the negative and positive spin one can give the definition
- Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem. “I was doing a bit of yak shaving this morning, and it looks like it might have paid off.”
- A less useful activity done consciously or subconsciously to procrastinate about a larger but more useful task.
It originated in the MIT media lab.
You see, yak shaving is what you are doing when you’re doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you’re supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relations links what you’re doing to the original meta-task.
Be aware of the army of yaks that threatens your time and sanity.
Experienced developers will generally try to steer clear of yaks by rethinking the problem, analyzing different solutions, and picking the most efficient one.
October 31, 2021
The Search for a New Markdown Notes Application
I was a big fan of iAWriter until the recent deadlocks when using it together with DropBox to keep my files. After many months, the problem persists on both my iPad and iPhone. It clearly looks like a deadlock where the synchronization hangs, and the only remedy is a drawn out quit-restart-quit-restart sequence. Luckily no data is lost, yet the writing flow is interrupted.
I’ve been on the look out for an alternative solution. The requirements are few:
- Support for Markdown. It is an open and simple format. It is easy to read, easy to work with, and future proof.
- My data is my data. My files are my files. I want the Markdown files stored as files, and accessible outside of the of application. One reason is that I use Blot.im as a blogging platform, powered by Markdown files in a specific Dropbox directory folder. Many applications will wrap the files in their own (database) system to allow for faster searching, linking, graph diagramming, etc. Often, the data is no longer stored in Markdown files, and you are beholden to the application to access your data. Obsidian does a hybrid solution, where their “vaults” are an Obsidian owned folder where individual Markdown files are stored. The issues is that I have many Markdown files already and (on iOS) there doesn’t appear to be an easy way to point to existing file structure, let alone a Dropbox folder.
- Support for platform independent synchronization. I want a solution which I can use on many platforms. iCloud synchronization is popular, though only works on Apple devices, and makes it hard to make your files available on a work computer. Application specific synchronization is worse, as it ties me to the application. The only options I’ve found to be platform independent are DropBox, GitHub, and Google Drive.
In other words, I am seeking an application, which I can point to a file structure of Markdown files, and which supports DropBox (or GitHub, or Google Drive).
Recently, I revisited Bear, Obsidian, and explored FSNotes. None of them support my scenarios. They all try to do just that bit too much, requiring them to take control of my files.
Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.
The start up experience on iOS is a clear tell of how complicated the synchronization game is . It is a mess.
1Writer to the rescue.
I am writing this post using 1Writer. It does exactly what I was looking for. It is a nice looking and simple application, that does one thing very well: editing Markdown.
Let’s hope it doesn’t suffer from the same DropBox synchronization deadlock. If it does, I know where the problem is and who to contact next.
October 9, 2021
Psyche
Belgium’s Rode Duivels dominated the French during the first half of the Nations League. After 45 minutes, it was 2-0 with wonderful goals from Carrasco and Lukaku.
During the second half, the momentum changed dramatically in favor of Les Blues. Ultimately, the French hammered the nail in the coffin, as they scored their third goal. 2-3!
“We failed on tactics.”, Jan Mulder
“We should have started with Vanaken, the man in form, over Tielemans.”
There are plenty of opinions why, yet again, Belgium fails when it is for all the marbles.
I think it goes beyond the tactics and the players. It is about the collective psyche. Belgians lack that killer instinct, that winner’s psyche. Sure there are plenty of amazing Belgian winners in many sport disciplines. They are talented and amazing athletes. Yet, when it comes down a small difference, when it comes to winning on character, we often lack the final punch.
Let’s start with L’Equipe’s headline going into this game capturing the mood among the French. It is frying time! You won’t see that headline in Belgium.
Nothing is coming home to Belgium, nor do we crown ourselves champions at the beginning of the tournament. That’s a classic Dutch move.
The Dutch, the Italians, the Brazilians and the French share that same cocky attitude. It gives them the extra few percent to win. That collective psyche is what we saw on display today. It is also what we saw on display when the French cycling team trumped the Belgian favorites going into the world championship cycling this year. It is about the attitude.
October 7, 2021
Mudfest 2021
Paris-Roubaix 2021 turned out a true mudfest. What is already a race of luck, became a race of the luckiest. As much as I enjoy the Paris-Roubaix scenes, I don’t consider Paris-Roubaix a fair race. It is spectacle where it is not necessarily the strongest who wins. It is the strongest-luckiest who wins. Today, Sonny Cobrelli was the luckiest and baddest bastard of them all. He didn’t steal the victory.
Yves Lampaert wasn’t as lucky. He came in 5th after he had suffered 3 punctures. When Johan Musseeuw came in second after Servais Knapen in 2001, he did so after 5 punctures. Five! Hard to call it a fair race.
It was great listening to the live radio coverage, while I was out on the gravel paths on my bike. I didn’t do 163 miles as the riders in the hell of the North. I did a mere 33 miles this morning.
October 3, 2021