Marriage Is For Losers

Posted on June 17, 2012 by sinyaw

Dr. Kelly Flanagan is a therapist. His blog “Untangled” has a recent entry that touched me.

There are three kinds of marriages. In the first kind of marriage, both spouses are competing to win, and it’s a duel to the death. Research tells us it is better for children to have divorced parents than warring parents. The second kind of marriage is ripe with winning and losing, but the roles are set, and the loser is always the same spouse. These are the truly abusive marriages, and they may be the saddest marriages of all.

But there is a third kind of marriage. The third kind of marriage is not perfect, not even close. But a decision has been made, and two people have decided to love each other to the limit, and to sacrifice the most important thing of all — themselves. In these marriages, losing becomes a way of life, a competition to see who can listen to, care for, serve, forgive, and accept the other the most.

Isn’t this the same about life? There are people who always want things their ways and other who always yield. Their relationships, or life in general, are always relatively sad. A dominant person will eventually lose all other relationships except for with those who always yield. The result is always the same, they stopped growing and lives stopped changing. The ones who dominate always resist changes and his/her other relationships gave up trying anyway. Stagnation or mutual destruction are the only possible outcome.

Fortunately, most people have more open minds.

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Chris Kuzneski

Posted on June 12, 2012 by sinyaw

People in this condo building put books in the common area as a free and do-it-yourself library. One of them caught Kid’s eye: Sign of the Cross by Chris Kuzneski. She grabbed it. Several days ago, she mentioned, nonchalantly, that I could be entertained by this one. Hmm…

The library (Seattle Public Library rocks!) told me that it is the 2nd of a series. So I checked out the first: Plantation.

It turned out Chris Kuzneski self-published this book to launch his career. After Sign of the Cross became a best seller, he went back and “fixed” this one to be republished as the first of the series.

After being rejected by every agent (and publisher) on the planet, I self-published my first novel, The Plantation. Most experts thought it was a horrible decision that would ruin my writing career before it even started.

The plot was the main attraction. I expected Payne and Jones would become better developed in the later books. This makes the book difficult to review. If you are about to go on a long and lonely trip, check this book out from the library and you will be well entertained.

Naturally, I moved on to read book 2 of the series. This one was better written than Plantation. The plot unfolded at the right pace and characters developed more nicely. There was a snipe the brought a smile to me:

“Out of curiosity, how much do you know about Shakespeare?”
“More than his own mother.”
“And what about the Bible?”
“More than Dan Brown. Why do you ask?”

This book was published partially because of the success of Da Vinci Code, when religious conspiracy thriller was a genre, thankfully only briefly. Kuzneski seemed to have researched better, but the plots and scenes were really too similar for me to believe his originality and there is no way that Kuzneski can escape being compared to Dan Brown. For that, I must conclude that Dan Brown’s works were better crafted.

This is definitely a good entertainer never-the-less. My standard criteria: excellent choice to bring for a long trip.

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Edgewater Hotel

Posted on June 6, 2012 by sinyaw

When The Beatles came to Seattle, they stayed at the Edgewater Hotel. That was in 1964 and the picture of them fishing from their room became a piece of history. This hotel was built for the World Fair and has been a popular destination since.

Unlike others, this one is not a tourist trap. The staff seem friendly and eager to help, with a smile too. The best value is a drink at the bar. Get yourself whatever you wish, sit next to the window, and just relax and enjoy. Unfortunately, the nice sunset view will also attract a crowd.

Six Seven restaurant (the hotel is on Pier 67), next to the bar, is superb: excellent seafood dishes, good wine pairings, irresistible desserts, and good service. This should be on your Seattle bucket-list, even if it is a rainy day.

The event venue is on the 4th floor. It is a very popular wedding place that can accommodate a couple of hundred guests. The food is prepared by the downstairs kitchen and, unlike other places, is delicious. The expansive view across the water is romantic, but makes photography challenging. There is a little terrace on the side for cocktail parties.

The hotel rooms, however, show their age. The decor is relatively dark, rooms not very large, corridors narrow, and hardware getting worn. I guess this is understandable for a popular hotel that cannot afford to renovate.

Of course walking is the best way to explore Seattle, but Edgewater Hotel offers shuttle bus services to many Seattle attractions. Bus route 99 runs along Alaskan Way every 30 minutes or so and it is always free. It is an excellent choice for Pioneer Square or the Olympic Sculpture Park.

I will always have a fond memory of this place and probably come back frequently.

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Man Jewelry and Mansome

Posted on June 1, 2012 by sinyaw

Bling bling. I am not.

When I became aware, around my mid-teenage years, I observed the world to have two kinds of people: those who tailor-made their school uniforms or those who wear the standard-issue, designed for durability and cost effectiveness. That mattered little to me, since soccer did not care what we wore. Those, and ensuing, years permanently ruined my fashion sense.

I acquired suits, dress shoes, and many ties during my working years. Those were always business necessities. I learned to choose conservative colors and patterns. The idea is not to stand out, but to blend in. Besides, wearing penguin suits is asking for trouble in the engineering cliques.

For my own wedding, I received a nice watch as a gift. I wore it for the wedding and promptly put it away. For 30 years, I duly changed the battery and had it maintained, but wore it only very occasionally. It has a leather strap and is not water resistant. I would need to take it off even to wash my hands, let alone shower or swim. My everyday watch is an electronic one with an LCD display. With a rubber strap and water-resistant, this watch is solar-powered, has dual time-zones, atomic calibration, and a built-in compass: but definitely not fashionable. For Kid’s big day, I was told that I needed a piece of man jewelry.

Did you know that a piece of man jewelry can cost an obscene amount of money? I ran out of the jewelry store that during all the previous patronages were completely non-participatory on my part. After intense soul searching, I settled on a nice time-keeping piece from Costco for $200.

Then I learned the term “mansome.” It is a twist of the word handsome, meaning doing whatever women do to themselves: questionable substances applied to the face to achieve questionable result, various techniques applied to hands and feet, trimming of bodily hair to the exact specification, and the application of aromatic liquid to body parts. All at great expense and extremely time consuming.

I am clearly wrong that this old dog has been out of tricks. No more $10 hair-cut. Next time I book a spa session, maybe I will go for the senior citizen discount.

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Design for Testability

Posted on May 25, 2012 by sinyaw

Many years ago, I wrote a program that converted Gregorian date to Chinese and vice versa. I researched the topic, found the formula, designed the user interface, and finished the code in several days. I ran it, tried several dates that I knew the matching results, and everything appeared to work. But I was not sure.

So I bought a conversion table from a local Chinese bookstore that listed all Gregorian and Chinese dates for several hundred years. I randomly picked about 50 entries from the table and verified the results with my program’s output. To my disappointment, about 3 to 4 did not match. I scratched my head, went back to the code, found the bugs, and fixed them. In software terms, my code was unit tested at this stage.

Then I modified my program to produce 200 random dates, ran it to convert all of them, and printed out the result. I then checked them, manually, against the table. Surprised, about 2 of them did not match (1%). Upon investigation, those are dates on the boundary conditions: mid-night and new moon are within seconds of each other, winter solstice is right at the beginning or end of the lunar month, etc. Hmm…

I fixed the code to make them work. At the same time, I added a hunt for the next boundary: the program will search for the next event that solar and lunar events are very close together. This time, nearly half of them were inconsistent with the table. I refined my program, double checked my parameters, and improved the computation precision.

This story is not about calendrical conversion. It is about software testing. Statistically, the events that would trigger the bug are much less than a needle in a haystack. They are literally astronomically rare events. Manual QA process would have extreme difficulty finding any of those bugs. The only way to ensure correctness is to design in testability.

A good piece of software probably has more than 75% of the code doing error checking; only 25% of the code in implementing the algorithm. This is something they did not teach you in school. This makes it real hard for another QA person to test all the paths. If it was not designed to be tested, there is really no hope of any software to achieve high quality.

After some soul searching, I actually left my program alone and did not fix those “boundary case” bugs. I researched how that bookstore-bought table was produced, double checked my algorithm and coefficients, and concluded that I might actually be right and the table not.

More than 10 years passed and I did not receive any complaint to my program (on the accuracy of the conversion). That fact is not a proof either way, since the astronomical events happen probably less than once in ten years. The program will enter oblivion way before a bug is filed against it.

That’s another entry on software management. Stay tuned.

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eReader saga continues..

Posted on May 20, 2012 by sinyaw

Kid passed a book to me, Sign of the Cross by Chris Kuzneski, and said that it is interesting. The general understanding between us is that I will read whatever book she thought interesting to me.

A year ago, I would put that book on the bottom of the stack next to my bed. When the stack was empty, I would open a file on my computer (called “books.txt”) and order my next batch from whatever. Life goes on. This time, I launched Seattle Public Library digital home, search for the book, and added it to my “wish list.” In fact, I added all 5 books of the series to the list. I have been reading books exclusively on eReader for more than a year by now. This old dog learned a new trick.

What surprised me was that I converted to Kindle Fire within a year from its e-ink sibling. I don’t read, continuously, more than a couple of hours per “seating” so the battery life is not an advantage. Back-light is actually better for these pair of old eyes. I don’t need to carry an extra book-light and I can read in the gym if I enlarge the font size. And, I can play games!

Slouching is probably my favorite reading position. I actually prefer Kindle Fire over iPad for reading purposes. The size and weight are much easier for one-hand operation, a requirement for slouch readers.

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Michael Crichton’s Micro

Posted on May 16, 2012 by sinyaw

Michael Crichton strikes again. Again.

Crichton’s signature research (does he have a team doing his next book?) was impeccable and his craft superb. This book submerged you into the adventure: the horror, the bizarre, the cuties, and the heart-breaking. It was like watching a fast-pace action film. Everything was happening, all your senses overloaded, and you felt great closing the book. Then you forget.

It is a mass-market publication at its finest. That said, I felt this is not Crichton’s finest.

Stop reading. What comes next could ruin the book for you.

Crichton just couldn’t make up his mind on the characters. The antagonists are obvious: the villain is the standard cardboard evil psychopath. The obstacles are Jurassic Park style and wonderfully done. But which protagonist must I identify with? I was forced to switch, then I didn’t get the clear hint on which one to go with. Since there is no strong connection to one protagonist, there is no big crescendo climax closure at the end.

The formula dictates that everything goes up in a big flame at the end. The antagonist was naturally taken care of, but the protagonists’ escape was anti-climatic. This is a badly executed formulaic ending: unnecessary destruction, no possibilities left for imagination, and neither a tragedy that leaves you with a long sigh nor a comedy that give you warm happy feelings.

I did the right thing borrowing this one from the library. That’s what I will do for Crichton’s next one. Like Stephen King, I think Crichton’s best years are over but the craft is still masterful.

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Las Vegas

Posted on May 12, 2012 by sinyaw

Last time I came to Las Vegas, Siegfried and Roy were breeding white tigers, Mirage just opened, and the Jubilee show was the hottest show. There was no Venetian, Wynn, MGM Grand, or Mandalay Bay. Just the newly opened Luxor pyramid. I think that was more than 20 years ago.

How much I have changed since.

We were young, hungry, cheap, and wanted to make some money. So a bunch of us would cramp into a car and drive over-night (to save a night’s hotel). We would get so excited seeing the Strip from afar. We would hunt for the lowest minimum bet Blackjack tables that were single- or double-deck. Yes, we would have studied basic strategy and practiced Edward Thorp’s techniques beforehand. (What? You have not read Beat the Dealer?)

All of us would crowd into a single hotel room. The only time we went there was to catch a few hours’ shut-eye so that we could get back to the tables again. Of course we would feast on the buffets. Oh, yeah the buffets. We would have studied each casino’s offering, established a strategy of not wasting precious stomach capacity on less delicious foods, and stuffed ourselves real silly each time.

Vegas trips were the high-lights of my student years. We always came back very, very tired and many pounds happier. We would tell the win/loss stories for months while we planned for the next trip. Hey, if we were lucky, we would get to eat, sleep, and have fun for free, or even with few bucks to boast. What can possibly beat that!

Now, the slot machines spit out a voucher, instead of dropping buckets of coins. Anything I play, I first show them my loyalty card to be recorded. I can’t stay awake to take advantage of the lonely card dealers. My weight and cholesterol spike when I even look at the buffet ads. I spend hours in the hotel room all by myself, typing on my computer. Craps and poker are more interesting than blackjack. I gave up card-counting a long time ago.

Sigh.. I out-grew Vegas!

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So you will live to 120

Posted on May 5, 2012 by sinyaw

I have reached the age that the most frequent topics of conversation are chronicle diseases and retirement planning. (This is actually an improvement from mid-life crisis and marital disasters.) In one of those gathering, we realized that many of our still living parents are all in their 90s and not really showing any signs of, huh, slowing down. There was a collective light-bulb moment: geez, we could all live beyond our parents’ ages and into the 100s. What if we get to live to 120? That thought, to many, was horrifying. We imagined ourselves 90+ years old and…

“Just kill me!” That thought came to many’s minds.

If we retire at 65 and will live to 120. That’s 55 more years! Imagine the growing up, working, climbing the ladder, raising a family, etc. during the first 65 years. The second 55 years will be filled with … Er, what?

Can I really lie on the beach sipping Pina Colada for 55 years? Can I afford to? Wait a moment, it took me only 4 years to get a college degree. If I start at 65, I could get a PhD degree before 75. And I would still have 45 years left.

Hmm… All those will be awfully unpleasant if I need to do dialysis every other day, blinded from diabetes, hooked to an oxygen tank, trapped in my own body with Parkinson, or completely lost in some kinds of dementia.

Would it actually be a blessing to drop dead with an aneurysm at the ripe age of, say, 90?

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What’s Wisdom?

Posted on April 29, 2012 by sinyaw

Would getting older at least make you wiser? For Americans, that appears to be true. Japanese, on the other hand, become wise much younger. More interestingly, first time I glimpsed at the definition of wisdom. There are five elements of wisdom:

Willingness to seek opportunities to resolve conflict; willingness to search for compromise; recognition of the limits of personal knowledge; awareness that more than one perspective on a problem can exist; and appreciation of the fact that things may get worse before they get better.

What exactly is wisdom? I always thought wisdom means the ability to make sound choices that lead to happiness. Or it is the Oracular insight to choose the best path that leads to the optimal outcome? Maybe it is actually the ability to see things clearly, regardless of all the veils to hide the truth?

Guess I am not that yet.

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