heavy fingers

I learned to type nearly 30 years ago, on manual typewriters. Years ago I got over the violent assault on lightweight computer keyboards that is practiced by those used to having a direct correlation between input force of finger impact input and legibility of output. However, while I know that two spaces after a period have not been needed for quite a while in the modern era of typsetting, I have not been able to adapt. It just happens automatically. It hasn't mattered until now, since blogspot doesn't correctly handle the extra whitespace. Which drives me crazy, so I have to go back over each post and remove extra spaces. I am curious to see if I will ever adapt.

how long did it take me to have this insight

The other morning I stepped out of the shower and noticed a word written on the mirror. JJ listens to the radio while showering and sometimes writes song names on the foggy mirror to note them for later purchase. I swiped clear a swath under the title and ducked down to check my hair in the mirror. It would have been simple enough to wipe the writing away if I was feeling annoyed or pissed off about anything. The choice is made daily, in many small actions rather than grand ones, between resentment or appreciation, antagonism or consideration.

Snowboarding Illustrated

Here a group discusses proper fundamentals.  At least 70% of a boarder's time on piste should be spent in relaxed discussion.

A boarder demonstrates complete mastery of the Fundamental Position.

Refreshingly Direct Medicine Naming

Prescribed to "dissolve mucous in the lungs":  Mucosolvan!

Travel Tip

especially for those who think they are not Europeans (Irish and English, that means you)

Do not wear swimsuits in the sauna.

How To Snowboard

Now that I'm retiring the snowboard, I should pass on my knowledge of the subject, to help aspiring boarders everywhere realize their potential.

There is a lot of equipment to consider before you begin snowboarding. You will need bindings. You will spend an inordinate amount of time fiddling with your bindings, so get the most tedious ones you can find. You will probably need a board. More important is a jacket and some trousers. If you're not sure what style you like, pick out whatever looks most like pajamas. Snowboarding is kind of like a big pajama party, but a little colder and everyone's stoned. Headwear is important. If you wear a helmet, you will not experience the nauseating joy of a concussion, so skip that and get a bandana instead, or a goofy winter hat designed to maximize hilarity. A backpack is not mandatory but is nice to have. It doesn't matter what you put into it, since you must never be seen to actually open it or extract anything from it, ever. So you can stuff it with ganja or put a change of clothes and a couple paperbacks in there, doesn't matter.

The most basic snowboarding position involves standing comfortably on the board, knees bent, and lowering your backside until it is pressed into the snow and most of your weight has been transferred to it. Beginners will execute this move somewhat jarringly, while experts can do it quickly yet smoothly. Non-snowboarders will often refer to this as "sitting" or "sitting down", but technically this is your Fundamental Position, and is the basis for all snowboarding technique. You will eventually master heel and toe slides, falling leaf, and probably several types of turns, but you must always revert to the Fundamental Position frequently to maintain excellent form.

Take care getting off of lifts. You will want to stop and adjust your bindings wherever is most inconvenient for everyone coming off the lift after you. After you have strapped your boots in fully, sit down (i.e. assume the Fundamental Position). Then get up and slide around near the top of a run. Slide down a few feet, maybe execute a single turn, then sit down again. Beginners will be self-conscious and probably do this at the edge of the piste. More advanced boarders know that the proper place is in the middle of the piste. Here you can best decide on what "line" you want to take. Don't plan too far ahead -- you will not want to go move than 100 or 200 meters before you stop again.

Eventually, you will stand up and begin carving your way gracefully down the piste. When you reach the crest of a rise, stop and sit down.  Right in the middle. Contemplate your place in the universe. Try to remember what you put in your backpack. Adjust your bindings.

Repeat this process until you find yourself at the bottom of the mountain. If at any time you fall, adjust your bindings, and sit around a while. If you are snowboarding in a group, you will need to sit even more often. Group boarding requires extra coordination and thus a near-constant reversion to Fundamental Position to maintain sound technique despite the distraction of friends. You may often need to discuss with each other the best path down the mountain or what you should have lunch. Standing still on a snowboard is tiring, so do sit down for these group activities.

When you are moving, take care to scrape as much snow off the piste as possible. Soft snow is the bane of skiers and boarders alike. Do your part to leave a smooth, icy surface so that everyone can benefit.

Off-piste boarding can be quite fun, but you may want to avoid it since there is less sitting down. Also, if you board in the alps, you likely have never experienced actual powder. Stick to icy or slushy alpine pistes and you'll do fine. Rails and slides and half-pipes and parks are fun -- all the moves you never land on your skateboard you can also fail to land on your snowboard.

Don't forget to be smug about your comfortable boots, and avoid the flat bits. That's about all you need to know. Have fun!

vestigial inertia

Sitting at dinner, knees slightly forward, I am almost startled when I slide my feet around and find them unencumbered by skis. It's like spending all day on an airplane or in the ocean and still feeling the sensation of waves at night. Does this happen with presidencies? Will I wake up every morning a year from now still experiencing the vague feeling that something incredibly stupid and counterproductive happened while I was asleep?

Learning to Ski

I lost the plot in the middle of a turn and landed on the snow with one ski missing, my boot popping out mid-flop. My instructor deadpanned with typical Tirolean sincerity and humour, "Yes. I am glad your bindings are set correctly, because now you don't have ligament damage."

Requirement Gathering

At a small grocery store in terminal 2 of the munich airport [really nice, btw, not quite HKG nice, but really well done], I was waiting in line behind a woman, each of us with a basket of breads and fruit and yogurts and such. She shouted to her son, about 10, to get a couple bottles of mixed fresh fruit juices from a cooler near the door. The instructions were no more detailed than just that:  2 bottles from over there.  He did so, but before he made it back she said, "no, get one with orange in it." So he went back. This time it looked better, but was still not right for some reason. So she sent him back. And again. I am sure I knew the sentiment of what he was thinking even though we may word it differently. For me, it was "typical user!"

All Slogans Should Be This Good

I love Ritter SPORT. Wonderfully chunky squares of snap-in-half goodness with the greatest slogan ever to make its way onto an over-engineered chocolate bar wrapper: Quadratisch. Praktisch. Gut.

Bratwurst for Breakfast

In Austria, trying to learn how to ski.  When I learned to snowboard, I tried to channel Elvis -- pointing with lead hand, knees slightly bent, weight forward, hips rotating, hair protecting against concussion... but for skiing I haven't yet figured out who to channel.  Will require some thought.  In the meantime, I'll be churning up furrows down the tirolean pistes and trying not to torque my knees clean off my legs.

how to be a decent photographer

1. take photos
2. remove any redeye
3. show people only the good ones

That pretty much does it.  If you want to invest a further 30-60 seconds per photo:

1. crop
2. adjust white balance
3. adjust exposure

what I miss about Chicago

My favorite Chicago columnist, Neil Steinberg, asked recently what Chicago expats missed. Here's my response:

We moved from Chicago to London nearly eight years ago with my job and have been here since, excepting a two-year stint in Zurich a few years ago. Chicago was where we had our first son and bought our first house, and we remember it very fondly. We still have some family in the area but don't often visit. I miss our neighbors in Lincoln Sqaure, up in Ravenswood. We really did have conversations over the fence, and our dogs had a tunnel to go back and forth at will. There was a coffee shop on the corner that quickly became a neighborhood favorite and the young woman who owned it was always delighted to see us, even if she saw us every day. I went back a few years after moving away, my son five instead of two, but she was still there and recognized him and was as delighted as ever. But maybe the one thing that sums up Chicago, and that I really miss, especially when trying to avoid breathing coal dust and dormant plague in the bowels of the tube lines, is the el line that ran over the alley directly behind our little back yard. We were close to the damen stop on the ravenswood line, so trains were going fairly slowly in and out of the station when passing by. When we were out back with our little guy, more often than not you could count on the driver giving a couple of short blasts on the whistle and waving to him. Plenty of out-of-towners were amazed by this, expecting the city to be a cold and indifferent place, but no one from Chicago that hears me tell this is ever surprised, and that's what I miss about Chicago.

P.S. And also Mexican food! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD can someone who knows how to cook Mexican food PLEASE immigrate themselves into the UK?

Ida Maria

If she releases a full album in the UK, it could threaten The Fratellis' Costello Music as my current most favored, based on the strength of the two songs from her I've heard so far:  "Oh My God" and "Stella".  (Imagine Eurovision if this were an entry.)

WTF is Milton Keynes?

Milton Keynes is officially the weirdest place I have ever been. Is it a town? Is it a mall? Is it named after the poet and the economist? If aliens accidentally wiped out the earth, excepting maybe a few tens of thousands of people, and felt really bad about it, so wanted to build a place for the remaining people to live, as an apology or gesture of remorse, then they'd build Milton Keynes. The aliens of course would have had good intentions, but because they lacked a fundamental understanding of humanity they would have created something that is just alien enough to drive everyone mad in the long run.

Is Paris Prague?

A couple years ago I went to Prague, Bratislava, and Budapest. Prague, after having been [over]hyped for a couple decades, was fun and pretty, but did not feel like a living city. So much of it seemed to have been given over to the service industry and tourism... as if I were visiting the Museum of Prague rather than a real city.

Bratislava, although much smaller, was an exciting discovery. It was youthful, evolving, tremendously pretty and also shockingly ugly in parts, and filled with an energy that Prague lacked. Real people lived in the old town. Restaurants there were populated by both tourists and locals. Back alleys led to local bars with live music pouring out the stone-framed windows.  New infrastructure was being built, including physical and conceptual linking of neighborhoods stretching from the university to the river. It was great fun.

I was not surprised that I loved Budapest. Now here was a city Prague's size (bigger, actually) but one that was clearly living a city's life. It was dynamic and humming and varied and the kind of place you could envision living rather than touring. Everything I'd hoped it would be, right down to the live carp in the market basement.

More recently I visited Paris. I'd spent a few weeks in Paris in 1984 and 1987, but only passed through very rarely since then. I had a proper visit in Paris last weekend. I didn't feel any kind of creative tension or buzz about it. I'm hoping it's still there and I simply was not looking in the right places, but I am worried it's turned into the Museum of Paris. I do realize that I've changed in the past 21 years, and that the Paris I remember from the 80s is as much about me then as Paris, but still.... I hope I'm wrong and definitely will need to return in an effort to be proven so.

Success Criteria

The Bush administration has trumpeted  "striking" success for its [hitherto unknown] broadband policy. Rather than laying out a vision, defining success criteria, and measuring progress against them, they have apparently defined success criteria based on current state. The results are laughable -- a single household in any given zipcode having merely 200kbps qualifies that entire zipcode as successfully broadbandedly networked. Compared with many countries in Europe and the Pacific rim, broadband in the US is slower, costlier, and has much worse coverage. There is no vision or plan or even apparent worry in the executive branch about the increasing gap between the US and other truly broadband-aware countries.

The beauty of this entire approach is that defining success criteria in advance lends itself to accountability in the future for progress or failure. If you want to avoid accountability, the Bush method is perfect. If I worked this way, I would be fired.