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.

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.

…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.

I was thinking about taking a look at tonight’s lunar eclipse, but it turns out that it will be difficult to get a good look from here. The eclipse will last from 7:00 to 7:52pm PST, but moonrise isn’t until 7:42pm PST. By the time it clears the hills, trees and houses, I don’t think there will be much to see from here.

Primary elections are Tuesday in California and many other states. I already sent in my mail-in ballot, but if you have one and you didn’t mail it already, you can still take it to a polling location in person to get it counted.

Looks like no one was impressed by Bernanke’s non-intervention on Thursday and the Bush/Paulson send-everyone-800-bucks stimulus package. US markets are closed for Martin Luther King Day, but the rest of the world is open, and down hard. DJ futures are showing something like -520 for tomorrow’s open, around 11586. The NYSE circuit breaker rules don’t kick in until a 10% move (1350 points), which would be somewhere around 10740. (The thresholds get reset every quarter.)

Don’t think we’ll see that tomorrow, but the way things have been going recently, it’s not out of the question. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a last-ditch central bank intervention tomorrow morning before the open, either. I think they missed their chance on Thursday, but I also don’t think the Fed has the luxury of waiting until the official FOMC meeting January 29 for their next move.

Videos like these would have been handy in my student days. I remember wrestling with hand drawings of transformations and mappings at one point. I should look for some on vector curl and tensors, there are probably some great animations around now.

This weekend we had our first game for the fall 2007 AYSO soccer season. Once again, I’m coaching, this year in the U12 Girls division. It’s an interesting change, as in Palo Alto there is no U11 league, it goes from U10 to U12 as the kids start shifting into different sports and activities and the player pool shrinks a little.

We caught the moonrise this evening to check out the lunar eclipse. Unfortunately the west coast is on the tail end of the region in which this one is observable, so there wasn’t too much to see. A nice deep yellowish color as it came up, but if you weren’t looking for it you might not have noticed anything other than a full moon. I wasn’t motivated enough to try shooting a photo that would come out visibly different than a normal moonrise photo. It would probably be more visually representative to take a regular photo and tweak the color in Photoshop.

On the other hand, it did precipitate a fun dinner discussion about solar and lunar eclipses, and what it would look like on the moon. I don’t think they’ve been doing much astronomy in 5th grade this year.

I hate being skeptical about charitable solicitors, but I am.

This evening there was a solicitor with a table display of children’s toys on the sidewalk in front of the Long’s Pharmacy on Middlefield Road, next to a barrel marked for donation to Toys for Tots. In general, I like to make planned donations, and usually only make unplanned donations to people and causes that I know or are reasonably likely to be who they say they are. (Girl Scout cookies come to mind…)

For some reason, this evening I actually took the time to stop at this woman’s display and hear her pitch. The basic idea was that you buy one of her “pre-approved” toys and put them in the donation barrel at the end of the booth. The suggested items were around $20, and at the moment I didn’t recall hearing of Toys for Tots before (it turns out they’re legitimate, and well rated at Charity Navigator), so I asked if she had any credentials or anything else to vouch for her. She had a letter in a plastic sheet protector describing Toys for Tots, but said she didn’t have any ID and no one there would know who she was.

Around this time of year I usually review our charitable contributions. This year I’ve enlisted my 10-year-old daughter in part of the review process. We recently received a donation “catalog” from World Vision, which lists a range of targeted donations for livestock, medicine, education, water, and other basic needs. I’ve given her the responsibility to read through the catalog, learn about the various needs, and choose something that we will fund. (Along similar lines, last year some of the kids at her school had a project to buy a cow at Heifer International.)

It can be hard for kids (and grownups) living here to relate to the idea of scarce and/or unsafe water, subsistence farming, or a general absence of health, education, and basic physical and economic security. Spending time travelling in and around the developing world has given me a greater appreciation for the mundane efficiency of everyday life when I return home. (Drinkable tap water, stable electricity, Whole Foods, etc.)

This year’s Thanksgiving is remarkably similar to last year’s. It’s nice to have a day off to enjoy Thanksgiving day together at home. Emily helped cook this year, so she’s feeling quite accomplished.

Apple showed their “iTV” box at today’s media event. It’s intended to connect downloaded video to home televisions. Today was a pre-announcement, for a planned release next spring, so you can’t go out and buy one.

In any case, I can tell already that the iTV would probably pass the spouse test in our household. We have gone through an assortment of roll-your-own video and media server projects over the past few years, but it usually ends up that I’m the only one that can get BeyondTV / MythTV / Freevo / whatever running, which generally defeats the purpose.

By the spring, there will probably be competing form factors based on Vista as well. In any case, I’m sure they will be far more acceptable to the rest of our household than the DIY approach.

The past few days there’s been an unending, unavoidable stream of 9/11 anniversary coverage. Thankfully, I wasn’t personally touched by the day’s events any more than most people out here in California. But in between all the usual running around and tasks of daily life, I’m finding a I’m carrying a residual layer of dissociated free-floating anxiety. Nothing specific, just a general, strong feeling of ill-being and unease when I stop and check in with myself.

This is surprising to me. Those of you who know me in person know I’m not superstitious, I’m not terribly excitable in a crisis and tend toward focusing on the facts and options at hand, looking for a path forward. So this is just weird.

I see that the HP board flap is on the cover of this week’s Newsweek. But personally I think last week’s deal in Pakistan is a much bigger issue.

The local AYSO soccer season officially started this weekend. I’m coaching a girls Under-10 team again this year.

A major difference between AYSO and other youth leagues is that the emphasis here is on participation, teamwork, and developing each player’s skills, rather than on the win/loss record per se. This means that anyone who wants to can sign up, regardless of experience or talent, and all teams are assigned a roughly balanced mix of players.

It’s interesting to watch the progression over the season from mass flocking around the ball to a passing- and position-based game. I especially enjoy games later in the season in which girls who were initially considered to be weaker players are able to compete successfully through practice and teamwork. (It also helps that they’ve spent hours of moderate aerobic activity time by the end of the season and can often outlast other players.)

I love blueberry season — Safeway has 2.5 pound boxes for 5.99 and even Whole Foods is carrying 2 pound boxes for 9.99. This morning we dug out the recipe for blueberry buckle and mixed up a batch before it got too hot again (yesterday it hit 101 degrees in Palo Alto).

I’m signed up to coach girls softball for my daughter’s team this spring. The season started three weeks ago, but we have been having record rainfall this month so nearly every practice has been rained out, along with all of the games.

Last Friday it mostly stopped raining for a while, but started up again and provided a spectacular double rainbow for most of our (damp) practice.

As 2005 comes to a close, a look back at some of the top posts this year based on page views, which seems to have been a mix of technology, business, travel, and random.

• A Reading List on PageRank and Search Algorithms
• Potter Puppet Pals
• Camping out at Singapore Changi Airport
• Personalization, Intent, and Modifying PageRank Calculations
• Mona Lisa at the Salle des Etats
• Tagging and Searching - How Transparent do you want to be?
• Follow the Money - Microsoft Windows Live, Google, and Web 2.0
• The Cambrian Age 2.0
• How (and where) to download your del.icio.us bookmarks
• Yahoo goes after more tagging assets, buys del.icio.us
• Five principles of user generated content - Trust, Attention, Relevance, Authority, and Intent
• Ungoogleable to #1 in six months
• United Red Carpet Club - Tokyo Narita Airport
• Blackdog Linux Personal Server
• Don’t cross those wires - Los Angeles power outage
• Building better personalized search, filtering spam blogs
• Korean Food at Myung Dong Tofu Cabin
• The Home Pages of this New Era
• Small steps versus theorizing, Reboot 7