I've been trying to take a Chinese class for a while. This spring I noticed a language school downtown, less than a mile from my apartment, so I called and found out that, while they don't usually have Mandarin classes (mostly they teach English), they had a recent burst of interest and I might be the necessary fourth person in a new class.

Three months of intermittently returned phone calls later, as fall classes loomed at the local schools, I started looking around. San Diego State University and UC San Diego offer Chinese classes daily. SDSU's runs from noon to 12:50. Either involves at least an hour of bicycling each way; neither route is especially appealing, nor is the idea of travelling over two hours a day for less than one hour of class. Mesa College, a community college, is only 7 miles away and offers twice-a-week classes from 6:30 pm to 8:50 pm.

I almost rejected the idea, not wanting to spend hours a week on my bicycle going to and from class. Then I realized that the concept of rejected the commuting and class time in order to keep my schedule clear was incompatible with my key goals for this year: learning Chinese and exercising more. So I rode over to the college to drop off a signed enrollment form and try out the ride. Mesa College, oddly enough, is on a mesa. The problem is that I live on a different mesa. So it's uphill both ways, but still only a 35 minute ride, reasonably free of nasty traffic.

I ended up having to do some faxing as part of my enrollment. I don't have a FAX machine, and I didn't feel like running over to Kinko's, so I signed up for an online fax program. I actually did this months ago; first I tried to get Yahoo's fax service, but after a deranged amount of trouble trying to recover my secure password I gave up and went with eFax because they were at the top of the search results. I never actually used it that time, and forgot to cancel, and so they made off with $13/month for two months of nothing.

This time I looked at a longer list, and tried Innoport. After signing up, I got an email saying that it would take between a few minutes and a day to verify my information and open my account. I waited half an hour and, when nothing happened, wrote an email back asking them to cancel the signup. Then I signed up with efax, which took about a minute, uploaded a document, and faxed it. No problem.

When I got a fax back the next day, problems started. After flailing around for a few minutes, I figured out how to download the fax. As a .efx file, which is apparently a proprietary format of eFax. Which requires a Windows-only program to decode. Not cool. I was in a rush, so I fired up the Windows partition on my laptop, installed the software, and managed to extract my fax.

The next day, I was done with my faxing needs for the time being, so I went to cancel my eFax account. This is when it got ugly. There are no links to cancel from the eFax pages; I had to search for "cancel" to discover that you have to have an online chat with a customer service drone in order to cancel. This is when I remembered going through this the first time and started hitting myself on the head. Excerpts from the chat:

jaufrec: Hello. I would like to cancel my eFax account ...
Dennis Godair: Thank you for the information. I am sorry to hear that you wish to cancel. May I ask why you are cancelling your fax account?
jaufrec: because you require a windows client to view faxes
jaufrec: and because your cancel process is unnecessarily difficult
Dennis Godair: we have an exclusive offer for you. If you wish to keep this account, then you can avail a one time offer on this account. You can keep this account at a nominal non refundable rate of $6.95 for the next 90 days instead of paying $12.95 every month, as such saving $31.89 over a period of 90 days.
jaufrec: please cancel my account
Dennis Godair: I surely understand your decision to cancel, but, this is a very good offer and you will be paying around only $2.31 per month as monthly fee during this period. You will need to contact us just once by the end of this period to let us know whether you wish to continue or not. There is certainly no obligation to stay back after this period if you do not wish to.
jaufrec: please cancel my account
jaufrec: is there actually a human being present?
Dennis Godair: Okay. I will cancel your account with immediate effect.
Dennis Godair: I'm sorry that you are leaving eFax. At eFax, we are continuously improving our products and services. Please do consider us if your faxing needs should change in the future.

So much for eFax. Meanwhile, a full eight days after I aborted my signup for Innoport, I got this email:

After further review, we have determined that we will have to decline activation for this innoport account with the billing information provided during the sign up process. Please be advised that the credit card entered has not been charged. [...]

So, obviously, a big thumbs down and avoid-at-all-costs warning for both eFax and Innoport. Innoport in particular was so bad and weird that I am keeping an eye on my bank statement in case they are just a front for identify theft or something. eFax I'm thinking is just maliciously greedy and stupid.

The CBC television network is showing Canadian Football League games without announcers.

It's not some bold experiment, the way a similar move by NBC was 25 years ago. It's the CBC reacting to a bad situation it created itself when it locked out 5,500 camera operators, directors and announcers who are members of the Canadian Media Guild.

Still, a good idea is a good idea, even if it happens by accident.

... make no mistake: We'll never have the chance to get used to such a thing. Announcers aren't there to provide insight and analysis or to identify players and describe action. They're required to do all those things, and we judge them on how well they do them.

But their primary purpose is to read promos. The networks and sponsors aren't giving that up. We're stuck with announcers for as long as we're stuck with money.—King Kaufmann, Salon

August 18th, 2005 - a milestone in the history of the State of Israel.

This was the day on which the settlement enterprise in this country went into reverse for the first time.

...

At the beginning of the settlement activity, during one of my clashes with Golda Meir in the Knesset, I told her: "Every settlement is a land-mine on the road to peace. In due course you will have to remove these mines. And let me tell you, Ma'am, as a former soldier, that the removal of mines is a very unpleasant job indeed."

If I am angry, profoundly sad and frustrated today, it is because of the price we all have paid for this monstrous "enterprise". The thousands killed because of it, Israelis and Palestinians. The hundreds of billions of Shekels poured down the drain. The moral decline of our state, the creeping brutalization, the postponement of peace for dozens of years. Anger with the demagogues of all stripes that started and continued this March of Folly, out of stupidity, blindness, greed, intoxication with power or sheer cynicism. Anger over the suffering and destruction wrought on the Palestinians, whose land and water were stolen, whose houses were destroyed and whose trees were uprooted - all for the "security" of these settlements.

... the settlers had lost the crucial battle for public opinion when their real purpose was revealed: to impose by force a faith-based, messianic, racist, violent, xenophobic regime, with its back to the world at large.

But most importantly, this was the day when a new chance was born for achieving peace in this tortured land.

A great opportunity. Because the Israeli democracy has won a resounding victory. Because it has been proven that settlements can be dismantled without the sky falling. Because the Palestinians have a leadership that wants peace. Because it has been proven that even the radical Palestinian organizations hold their fire when Palestinian public opinion demands it. —Uri Avnery

Eric Berkowitz provides over 7000 words about the history of mass transit in Los Angeles. I trim it down to 1300 for you:

In this saga of missed opportunities and conscious denial, some of the most progressive faces in local politics have hindered, rather than led, the charge for traffic relief. To placate his wealthy constituents' fears of "those people" riding trains into their neighborhoods, powerful Westside Congressman Henry Waxman stopped the subway at Western Avenue, blaming his lack of support for a Wilshire Boulevard subway on fears of another methane fire.

...In the aftermath of the Watts riots in 1965, the governor's commission pinned some of the blame on the area’s poor public transportation, which it said "had a major influence in creating a sense of isolation, with its resultant frustrations."

Inadequate transportation would be both a cause and an effect of the riots. One of the chief byproducts of the unrest was the embrace by the wealthy and white middle class of the city's de facto segregation. Whether it's called NIMBYism, racism or neighborhood preservation, a lot of people were in no mood after the riots to make it easy to come to the Westside from East and South L.A.

... It would take 12 years of rising gas prices and increasing congestion before voters would sign on to regional mass transit, and a much more modest plan. ... With Hahn’s passionate support, Proposition A passed in 1980, setting a half-cent sales tax to help pay for a regional transit system. The plan that accompanied the initiative showed 10 transit corridors, with the Wilshire subway line the "cornerstone" ... Nevertheless, Hahn made sure his district got the first dollars for a light-rail line on the old Long Beach Red Car route. It "was my baby," he said. "I said that line has to go first because I wrote Prop. A." The Blue Line, as it is called, is now the most heavily used light-rail line in the country, carrying more than 75,000 riders a day.

... A 1985 city task force on the explosion marked 400 square blocks straddling Wilshire in [Waxman's] district as a "methane zone." The task force didn’t address tunneling safety or the fact that much of L.A. is also a methane zone. But Waxman didn’t fuss with such details. He had enough to stop the subway, or at least keep it from coming west. ... No matter that diverting the subway meant trashing $150 million in plans and years of delay, or that the detoured subway would still run into underground gas, or that a straight shot down Wilshire made the most sense. Waxman had kept alien invasions out of his district. In what became known as the Waxman-Dixon compromise, federal funding remains barred if the subway crosses the methane zone.

... With all the traffic, the Wilshire "Rapid" bus generally goes a pathetic 14 mph, which is still such an improvement over the local that bus ridership has gone up 40 percent. Considering that half of the area's other major bus lines cross Wilshire (generating about 60,000 daily transfers), there is a huge demand for fast, high-capacity rail transit that’s being ignored.

In 1993, the public learned that more than 2,000 feet of subway tunnel wall, built by well-connected contractor Tutor-Saliba Perini, was about half the required thickness. At the same time, government investigations into construction fraud and bribery were getting a lot of public attention. So was the agency's practice of paying contractors millions of dollars to fix their own screwups, and additional millions to the consultants who oversaw the faulty work. ... Just as the mismanagement of subway construction came into stark relief, the reconstituted MTA moved into a new downtown headquarters building — nicknamed the Taj Mahal — that was so plush and overbuilt it looked like a pile of graft. Bitter rancor among MTA board members, and the giving of contracts to friends of MTA officials, didn't help the agency’s image.

If it were just a question of mismanagement or corruption, the subway wouldn't differ from any other sleazy government project. But a small group of activists calling itself the Bus Riders Union re-introduced racial politics into the transit debate in the mid-1990s. ... the BRU [was] the brainchild of '60s veteran Eric Mann — an activist who knew a lot more about Maoist theory than traffic patterns. Though the BRU's stated goal was to create a more equitable transit system that would favor lower-class bus riders over more middle-class train commuters, its founder saw the fight over transit as little more than a skirmish in his grander vision of socialist revolution.

"Few of us would do all this work . . . if the struggle was only about buses," Mann wrote when he formed the BRU, in 1993. "We quickly became excited about the positive 'objective conditions' that buses provided for organizing," Mann wrote. "Public transport is one of the few remaining public spaces over which there can be effective contestation."

When the MTA announced a bus-fare increase in 1994, the BRU filed a federal civil rights lawsuit charging that the entire transit system was racist and demanding that more resources go to buses instead of rail projects.

After two years of bruising litigation and $7 million in attorneys' fees (some to Riordan's old law firm, which represented the MTA), Riordan capitulated to the BRU and signed a 10-year consent decree committing the MTA to improve bus service and reduce overcrowding.

... While the special master has ordered a one-third increase in the size of the bus fleet, "the actual number of people we carry on the bus has remained flat," said MTA CEO Roger Snoble.

Patsaouras was blunt: "Riordan is an ignoramus. Riordan fucked it up with the consent decree."

... From 2002 to 2004, Mann and his wife, Lian Hurst Mann, a project director with the Labor/Community Strategy Center, were paid an average combined salary and deferred compensation of $204,500 a year. Half of the Metro Rail riders — the ones Mann says are too well-heeled to deserve transit dollars — have family incomes of less than $25,000.

... The Red Line’s extension to the Valley was completed in 2000. Jagged as a gerrymandered congressional district, and carrying a milelong spur from Vermont to Western, the $4.7 billion line is the most expensive 17 miles of subway ever built.

Since then, the MTA has opened the light-rail Gold Line from downtown to Pasadena and is at work on a "Gold Line Extension" to East L.A. Another extension, from Pasadena out to Montclair, is being discussed. In the fall, a 14-mile “guided busway,” called the Orange Line, will start to run from the North Hollywood subway station to Woodland Hills. The MTA also recently announced the first leg of a light-rail "Expo Line" to Robertson and Venice.

The MTA also has put Rapid buses into service that are equipped with gizmos that keep traffic lights green when they approach. The service is generally considered a success, and the buses run faster as long as they don’t get stuck in the city's perennial traffic miasma.

Blame abounds for the city's sorry transit system, and the absence of a subway on Wilshire is far from the system’s only gap. Were it not for the various prohibitions that walled off the Westside, there would be a subway to Fairfax by now, and most likely also a train reaching the 405. During the campaign, Antonio Villaraigosa played to the city’s frustrations by promising large-scale traffic solutions. He’s even promised to take the subway once in a while. Now he needs to give the subway more places to go. "It can happen," the mayor says. "Everywhere I go, whenever I talk about the subway to the ocean, people start clapping."

Those Who Walk in Darkness, John Ridley
Ridley's prose still falters in places, and some action scenes are better that others, but his demented vision shines very clearly. ... is trashy pulp, but with a concept so logically, cynically warped that it creeps into your brain and takes up residence. (Spoilers follow). The book is set in an alternate modern day, where superheroes showed up decades ago, and supervillains soon after. But when a super-fight ended up destroying San Francisco, the United States banned all metanormals under penalty of death, and now they either flee to Europe or live in hiding. Our protagonist is a cop who hunts down and, generally, kills metanormals, and bears an unrelenting, unreasoning hatred for them. The book puts us firmly in her court but simultaneously, in a very down-market take on Ishiguru, makes it clear that she's not playing with a whole deck— in fact, she's a genocidal murderer.

World of Ptavvs, Larry Niven
A slight but fun effort 1966 effort from Larry Niven, in which an alien from a mind-controlling master race suffers mechanical problems and ends up marooned on Earth two billion years after the extinction of his people, and sets to work with the slave resources at hand. However, he has a rival—himself, as channeled by a human telepath who was at the wrong end of a mind copy.

According to the computers at Baseball Prospectus, the Dodgers have only a 4.3% chance of making it to the postseason. The Cardinals have a 99.9% chance. How do they come up with these numbers?

... the post-season odds report was compiled by running a Monte Carlo simulation of the rest of the season one million times ... Expected winning percentages (EWP) for each team starts with their W3 and L3 from the Adjusted Standings. A regression is applied to derive the EWP for the rest of the season, which is going to be between the current winning percentage and .500. To allow for uncertainty in the EWP, a normal distribution centered on the EWP is randomly sampled, and that value is used for the remainder of the season in that iteration. To simulate the normal 4% home-field advantage, the home team gets a .020 point bonus, while the visitors take a 0.020 penalty. The likelihood of winning each game is determined by the log5 method.

The Battle for Alaska Statehood, Ernest Gruening
I skimmed this work, a political chronicle padded with many reproduced speeches and statements. It was interesting for showing who was opposed to Alaskan statehood. For much of its existence as a nearly uninhabited American territory, statehood was simply premature. Later, absentee interests who exploited Alaskan resources were the key opposition. In the endgame, Eisenhower's Republicans blocked statehood for much of a decade based on the fear that Alaska's elected officials would be Democrats. The reverse situation occurred for Hawaii, where Democrats blocked what they assumed would be Republican representation. Now, of course, Hawaii is a solid blue state and Alaska has been 100% red at the federal level since before my family moved there in the late 1970s. If Johnson's championship of civil rights and Nixon's appeal to racism resulted in the two parties swapping constituencies, then does that imply that the partisanship in the two westernmost states was reversed by political strategy in the southeast?

The Starfollowers of Coramonde, Brian Daley
The sequel, of course, to The Doomfarers of Coramonde. Daley's second pulp novel offers smoother plotting, an entertaining but disposable fantasy world, and his usual engaging prose.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling
Exceptionally readable, not so much fast-paced as breakneck. Coasts on the merits of the other books as re: setting, atmosphere, motivation, minor characters, and pretty much everything besides plot and Voldemort's history. So far, book 4 remains the high-water mark and the series as a whole is a great read but not good literature.

A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market, John Allen Paulos
A general survey of the math and concepts behind the stock market, with mediocre writing and an exceedingly annoying conceit: Paulos frames his text with the self-pitying story of his irrational and ultimately disastrous investment in Worldcom stock. His efforts to explain math are undermined by his determination to use prose narrative form, numbers and signs and all, instead of diagrams illustrating well-laid out equations. The existence of at least one glaring mistake further devalues the work.

Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke
(audiobook, abridged) Clarke reads his own book about his experience as the chief counter-terrorism official in the Clinton and second Bush administrations. The short form is that he saw the Clinton team taking terrorism very seriously and reasonably effectively, though far from his satisfaction; and that he saw the Bush team turn everything into grist for an ideological agenda. He emphatically rejects the Al Quida/Iraq connection, believes that missile strikes on Iraq and Iran ended both countries' active anti-US terror programs; and thinks that Homeland security is more of a political stunt then an effective program. Familiarity with this book is essential to informed discussion on the topics, and the book is quite well-written and full of engaging anecdotes, so reading it far from a chore. Clarke's reading of his own text was very good but I was disappointed to learn it was abridged.

It struck me that Clarke is perfect for the job. There is a valid fundamental debate about tradeoffs. Not the asinine and false trade of freedom for security as found in the bad provisions of the PATRIOT act, but cost/risk/benefit tradeoffs. How much money should go to securing flights vs securing trains? Or chemical weapons plants? Is the goal to maximize the lives saved per dollar spent? Should the goal be to prevent the most extreme terrorist actions? To spend money in basic disaster preparedness that is a good investment even if there is never another terrorist attack?

Since it's impossible to gather statistics on all the terrorist attacks that didn't happen, it's also impossible to make an well-informed tradeoff by many measures. (Note, however, that over sixty terrorist plots have reportedly been thwarted by police work in the US in the last 10 years. If that comes as a surprise to you, it may be because the attempted terrorists are "antigovernment militia groups, racist skinhead organizations, and Ku Klux Klan members" and not brown-skinned Islamic radicals, and so these plots haven't fit into the standard media storylines and so have been under-reported.)

Clarke's greatest value is that he doesn't seem to care about this tradeoff and assumes that prevention of terror should be the top priority of the entire United States. I don't agree, but that's exactly the attitude I would want in the chief of counter-terrorism. His job is to do all he can to stop terror; his boss's job is to allocate resources across many other priorities based on ... well, politics. To think that resources should be allocated according to rational debate is to start heading towards authoritarianism and communism. The lousy and corrupt system we have of balancing government priorities based on satisfying voting and lobbying constituencies and personal ambitions is awful, unacceptable, and better than any known alternative. To that end, perhaps Clarke's worst flaw was that he was too much the dedicated and competent civil servent and not enough the politician.

Bad Boy Brawly Brown, Walter Mosley
(audiobook) A very satisfying story, in which Easy Rawlins tries to help a friend whose son is mixed up with a bad element - radical black revolutionaries in Los Angeles in the early sixties. The murder mystery itself is a bit of a shaggy dog story, spelled out in excess detail at the very end like an Agatha Christie story, but the real point is the trip along the way, the subtle delivery of extraordinarily rich detail about being black in America at a particular place and time. This reader is technically better than the last one, but somehow shallower as well, and not as good with kids' and womens' voices.

Olympos, Dan Simmons
A giant, sprawling "soft sci-fi" epic with an exceptionally convoluted story involving a reproduction of the Trojan war created and manipulated by Greek Gods living on Olympus Mons on Mars, who are actually ultra-high-technology post-humans; the gods and humans are then observed by a different group of humans who live in idle luxury on a depopulated Earth in the thirty-fifth century or so; meanwhile many robotic cyborgs from Jupiter and the other outer planets, descendents of explorers from Earth fourteen-hundred years ago, send a mission to investigate.

All this was set up in the first book, and here in an equally long book Simmons concludes everything. While the story is goofy and over the top, that's part of the point, and so the puns and gleeful convolutions and absurd juxtapositions (many characters quote classic poetry; Haephestus uses the word "fuck" in almost every sentence; reconstructed 21st century scholar and protagonist Thomas Hockenberry has an affair with Helen of Troy) are not just forgivable but integral. And a lot of times it works, though occasional technical errors and editing errors ("the the" appears twice) mar the glossy finish. The real problem with Olympos is that Simmons is quite uncapable of ever providing a satisfactory ending; had he not even tried, this book would be just as good as the first. If you're in to that sort of thing.

One of the sites I read every morning is The Daily WTF, which highlights very bad code reported to be in use in production systems. Just as FuckedCompany reveals some of the rot and deception behind the shiny lies, The Daily WTF is more informative and useful for a working programmer (or technical manager) than many sites about how to do it the right way. I mention this because today's post was a bit special. Here's an excerpt. Note that the lines beginning with apostrophes are comments allegedly made by the original programmer himself.

' This code will calculate order total, mask it, and send it to
' the ThankYou.asp page, where it will then be unmasked to reveal
' its true beauty, just like the poor Phantom of the Opera.
Randomize
amount = oTotal
maskerLeft = Int((999999 - 100000 + 1) * Rnd + 100000)
maskerRight = Int((999999 - 100000 + 1) * Rnd + 100000)

A large part of the value of the Daily WTF is the commentary on the awful code by other people. This excerpt and comment is choice:

' takes order total and jumbles it mathematically
maskerAmount = ((((oTotal + 22) * 7 )) - 12) * 620

The power of mathematics compels you!
The power of mathematics compels you!

*** projectile vomit pea soup ***