Ho John Lee’s Weblog

We spent the Memorial Day weekend at the Davis World Cup with the Palo Alto AYSO spring U12 girls team, the Blue Bandits. There were over 120 teams, and each team in the tournament gets the flag of a FIFA World Cup country. This is fun, but can make it difficult to figure out who you’re playing, as the schedules are all published under the names of the countries, not the actual names of the teams. We were “Bermuda”, although I spent the first day thinking we were “Bahamas.” 

The girls had a lot of fun. The highlight of the series was a rematch with the Concord Chaos (Tanzania),  who we tied 2-2 at last week’s Concord Cup. This weekend we placed 3rd in Bracket A, while the Concord Chaos placed 2nd in Bracket B, which put us in an elimination match to get to the next round.

A fine depiction of field positions in a typical youth soccer match, from Rhymes With Orange.

This morning the IBM service tech came to replace the failed fan assembly in my Thiinkpad T42p. The Thinkpad has been fairly indestructable, having gone around the world several times without any problems. So I was surprised when I started getting “Fan Error” messages just after the BIOS splash screen while setting up on Sunday evening. Fortunately, I also got the 24-hour onsite support contract back when I got the system. It ended up taking more like 36 hours to get someone out here, but I did call in the middle of the night.

That reddish assembly at the middle left is the heatsink and fan. The system board runs a test to make sure the fan will spin up before proceeding with the system boot process; the original fan will spin manually, but the motor seems to have failed. I’m glad to have the technician replace the fan instead of doing it myself. Getting the heatsink off the graphics chip required some significant prodding with a sharp knife to unbond the heat compound sticking them together.

I’ve never seen a search result page like this before. The meta text “Conservative think tank claiming to report about events and nations strategically important to the United States” doesn’t appear any where in the referenced page, which doesn’t contain any useful <META> content. Searching for that text, it looks like the text originated from the DMOZ directory listing.

Another entry from the same DMOZ list, the Kensington Review, also returns the DMOZ meta text, this time in place of the <META> text in the actual page. DMOZ says “An e-magazine of political and social commentary. When the left says the glass is half full and the right says it is half empty, Kensington suggests that it might be too big.” Kensington’s own META says “An electronic journal of political, financial and social commentary”.  DMOZ is a more interesting description, but again does not originate from the content itself. 

“No Premium User. Please solve the Riemann Hypothesis.”

It’s difficult to get a sense of scale with natural phenomenon, including weather disasters, since they’re so much larger than what we normally deal with in every day life. There is some amazing before-and-after satellite imagery of the recent cyclone in Myanmar (Burma), in which the flooding in the river delta areas is clearly visible. For comparison, I’ve made a Google Maps view of the Bay Area in a similar (not identical) scale. The NASA imagery has a 25km reference scale, the Google Maps image I’ve scaled here was originally at 20km reference scale.

The absence of rice at Costco and Sam’s Clubs in the US has gotten a lot of press coverage in the past few days, but there’s no substitute for first-hand observation. Here’s what it looks like at the Mountain View Costco at the shelf where the rice would normally go. Fortunately, that wasn’t one of the items I was looking for.

See also: Rice shortage reaches Mountain View Costco

In the recent weeks the rising costs of agricultural grain production has lead to shortages and riots in various parts of the world, including Indonesia, Vietnam, and other countries. Nonetheless, I was surprised to see this article today describing rice shortages in the US, including at the local Costco over in Mountain View:

At a Costco Warehouse in Mountain View, Calif., yesterday, shoppers grew frustrated and occasionally uttered expletives as they searched in vain for the large sacks of rice they usually buy.

“Where’s the rice?” an engineer from Palo Alto, Calif., Yajun Liu, said. “You should be able to buy something like rice. This is ridiculous.”

The bustling store in the heart of Silicon Valley usually sells four or five varieties of rice to a clientele largely of Asian immigrants, but only about half a pallet of Indian-grown Basmati rice was left in stock. A 20-pound bag was selling for $15.99.

The Russian Soyuz carrying Korea’s first astronaut, Yi So-yeon returned safely over the weekend, albeit 260 miles from the intended landing zone in what Interfax (Russian news agency) describes as a rough landing, exceeding 10g’s. Any landing you can walk away from is a good one.

…because I have a job for him. It looks like our washer needs a new drain pump, because yesterday afternoon it started trying to spin with a full tub of wet clothes and water, accompanied by unusual noises. There’s lots of good information online for do-it-yourself repair, including how to disassemble the washing machine and various diagnostic procedures. The hacker/engineer side of me wants to start taking it apart just because we can. But the weather is great outside today and I’d rather spend my limited time on fun stuff outdoors and leave the pump replacement to trained professionals. If I could find one. There are no Maytag repairmen anymore, only authorized service providers, who are apparently quite busy. It might end up being easier to just buy a new washer, I can get one delivered today.

Yi So-yeon, the first Korean astronaut, went to the International Space Station today on a Russian Soyuz. She is a bioengineer by training, and will be conducting various experiments during the next nine days.

In addition, there has apparently been a lot of work making Korean food ready for space travel:

The Korea Food Research Institute and the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute have spent years turning traditional South Korean delicacies into a form that can be stored and eaten in zero gravity, including steamed rice, red pepper paste, doenjang fermented bean soup, green tea, red ginseng tea, instant noodles, sujeonggwa cinnamon punch and, above all, kimchi – the pungent pickled blend of cabbage, chilli and garlic that is the national dish.

Anyway, it’s pretty exciting for Koreans, although this picture from the CNN article make her look slightly wacky, vaguely reminding me of visits to my aunt’s house when I was a kid.