Ho John Lee’s Weblog

…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.

Every time we stay in Waikiki, I look forward to picking up Korean food to go from Choi’s Kitchen, one of the many interesting options at the food court hidden at the back of the International Marketplace. The first couple of years on vacation in Waikiki we mostly ended up either eating at a restaurant or at the snack bar. This can be both expensive and not so good for maintaining a healthy diet. For around the price of eating at McDonalds or Burger King, you can have a combination of teriyaki chicken, Korean BBQ beef, and a selection of Korean banchan (side dishes) including kimchee, sukju namul, seaweed salad, and many other choices, plus a generous serving of steamed rice. We usually get a couple of the chicken + beef, with 4 side dishes, and carry it back across the street to eat on the beach. There is also seating area at the International Marketplace, if you don’t want to go with take out. Many locals come through for lunch, while there are more tourists in the evening, some of whom come to see the live entertainment in the courtyard. Personally, I think the food is great, and the entertainment not so much. I’d rather be on the beach.

Returned to Palo Alto last night, which was the original plan, but also a little surprising. When we left home, I had been thinking we might end up stranded on vacation for an extra day or two. We booked our travel plans late, and weren’t able to get seats on a return flight from Hawaii to the Bay Area on Saturday, Sunday, or even Monday by the time we left. I’ve discovered that the flight booking sites don’t update availability regularly. So even though there were fares listed on various sites (United, American, Expedia, Orbitz), if you tried to book them, various warnings and errors appeared, encouraging you to call an agent, who told you there weren’t really any seats. I decided we’d just head out on vacation and sort it out after we got there.

A rainbow a day…

Singapore’s Changi Airport is one of my favorites for long haul travel, as they have everything you need within the security perimeter, including the equivalent of a shopping mall, two gyms, two hotels, assorted restaurants, and excellent, inexpensive internet and telephone service. I wrote about it a while back in Camping out at Singapore Airport, and it looks like there are a couple who have more or less taken up residence there, according to AsiaOne Travel.

SINGAPORE may have its own version of Tom Hanks in the 2004 Steven Spielberg-directed comedydrama, The Terminal. This time though, it’s an Asian-looking pair apparently living and camping out at Changi Airport Terminal 2.

Assorted comments in the AsiaOne forum.

Here’s a graph of the open interest in Sep07 SPX options. Unlike your typical equity option which settle based on opex Friday’s close, most index options settle based on the opening value of the S&P 500 index on expiration Friday.

This leads to interesting dynamics like last month, when Ben Bernanke cut the discount rate just before the market open on Friday. A lot of fund managers went to bed Thursday with good looking option positions that got crushed Friday morning when S&P 500 components gapped up at the open.

Thursday SPX cash closed at 1518.75. I come up with around 1490 for max pain. (”Max Pain” is the settlement value that will result in the lowest aggregate value for the open contracts at expiration.) This, and the big run up since the unexpected 50bps rate cut on Thursday, suggest a lower bias going into tomorrow’s open, which we would see in the futures. ESZ7 (December S&P futures contract) closed Thursday at 1531.75.

Since last February’s market gymnastics, I regularly take a glance at the wacky Shanghai market in overnight trading to see if that particular financial asteroid will be landing in the morning. This evening I noticed that the free quotes on the US Yahoo site lag the quotes on the China Yahoo site:

Here’s the Shanghai market as seen on the US site:

Here’s the Shanghai market as seen on the Chinese site:

In both cases, they’re free, delayed quotes, and are correctly time stamped. I never noticed that the overseas Yahoo sites provide more current data for the local markets before, though. Now you can all impress your non-trading friends with your nearly psychic ability to call intraday turns in the Shanghai market.

I’m quite pleased that the British authorities managed to foil the attempt to blow up multiple airliners last week. On the other hand, I’m probably not alone in wondering how long-haul business air travel is going to work out.

If a ban on all liquids, gels, and personal electronics stands, a lot of air carriers will need to start competing on in-flight service again. In recent years, I normally bring my own water, food, work, entertainment, and a change of clothes for air travel to China and India. On a trip to India, it’s about 30 hours in transit, which is a lot of time to watch the 6 movies that United usually rotates each month, along with putting in a full day or so of work. I usually fly United since their Asian routes are all based here, but I wouldn’t want to rely on them for food, water, and entertainment. Might be time to book on Singapore Airlines, which flies with a huge video- and audio-on-demand library and Nintendo video games, never seems to run out of food or water, and consistently provides attentive cabin service.

Overnight, British authorities arrested 21 suspected terrorists planning to blow up several airliners on Continental, United, and American by mixing liquid explosives carried onboard in hand luggage.

At the moment, all liquids are banned from hand luggage, except for baby formula and medicine.

All in all, it sounds like great work by the UK authorities, although this quote leaves me wondering a little (since they’ve only arrested 21 so far):

“A senior U.S. counterterrorism official said authorities believe dozens of people — possibly as many as 50 — were involved in the plot.”

More from Counterterrorism Blog here, here, and here

I’ve been on flights through bumpy weather many times, but am happy to have missed this one. The nosecone (which houses the radar) came off, and there were cracks and holes in the wings and windshield.

‘’I could not see anything through the front windows because they were shattered. So I checked side windows when I tried to land the plane.'’

All 200 passengers, including 177 elementary school kids, were uninjured.
Link, with video. (Reuters)

This past weekend I ran the Big Sur Marathon, my 3rd time on the course. I’ve been posting on a separate running blog for a while, here’s a roundup of Big Sur posts:

• Signed up for Big Sur 2006
• Game plan for this year’s Big Sur Marathon
• Where we’re starting from this year (2006)
• How Long is a marathon, exactly?
• Some Photos from the 2006 Big Sur Marathon

Vacation, broadband and an ocean view. What more could you want?

Now I can post very little due to vacationing, as opposed to posting very little due to work.

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.

My passport expires in a couple of weeks, so I’m about to send it off to get a new one. This one has been well used, I had an extra set of pages inserted a few years ago. This time I’m going to request a 48-page passport to start with, instead of the standard 24-page version.

The photo in my current passport is ten years old. Since then I’ve gotten rid of my eyeglasses and lost around 30 pounds. Between not looking exactly like my passport photo, and an ever-accumulating set of entry and exit stamps, it can sometimes take a while to clear passport control. I usually explain that I’ve taken up marathon running.

The rains a few weeks ago seems to have prompted the arrival of roving termites, so yesterday we vacated the house and filled it with Vikane. I spent part of the day working in the office while they were wrapping the house with a tent. By the time they finished, it produced an interesting lighting effect.

Update 02-02-2006 20:55 PST:

We’re back in the house today, after the inspector declared it safe to re-enter. I’m vaguely disappointed that there aren’t more random dead bugs lying around the house, although the termites wouldn’t be visible in the walls and underground, and there actually were a few dead moths and stray houseflies here and there. Of course, now we’ve let in a whole new set of wandering insects, since we’ve had the windows and doors open all afternoon to air out the house.

Here’s a good photo of some visible termite activity. Not what you want to see in your linen closet.

David Hornik asks: Where’s the Money in the Long Tail?

It is certainly the case that in the aggregate, Long Tail content is extraordinarily valuable. The question for VCs and entrepreneurs is “for whom?”
…
The real money is in aggregation and filtering and those will continue to be interesting businesses for the foreseeable future.

He points out that aggregators are building convenient one-stop shopping for people looking for topically-focused content, and derive economic value even when the content publishers do not.

David Beisel follows the money a little further:

…in the long run, the value of the network is not only determined by the number of nodes in it, but in the ability for the network to monetize those nodes.
…in calculating the value of a network, any equation describing it should contain a variable with the monetization rate (or proxied by the value to the user which can be monetized in the future). So while the number of nodes in a network surely is a fundamental (if not the majority, in many cases) driver of value, the value of the network itself to the user is also a very important component to the overall total.