Neil Fein's Blog

..or, how I carved this pumpkin. Photoset with instructions.

Click on the pictures for a larger version and more information.

Labels: halloween

Eastern Standard Tribe
by Cory Doctorow

I gulped Eastern Standard Tribe down almost in one sitting, on a day I was tired from uploading family photos to the internet.

Art Berry is a user experience consultant, working for a firm in London. Actually, he's an agent for the Eastern Standard Tribe, a social network of east-coast net-connected folk who find each other work, help each other out, and they sabatoge companies so to make way for their own concepts in the market. Almost forgot... they all keep a sleep schedule that lets them stay in touch in real time with tribe ground zero. Got that? Sleep-deprived idea-folk who are disguised as businessmen. Sorta.

I enjoyed Cory Doctorow's second novel very much; I read it in a few hours, mostly on a train. It doesn't hold together nearly as much as his first book, though. Art bears more than a passing resemblance to Manfred Macx, main honcho of Charles Stross's Accelerando, Doctorow's sometimes collaborator.

But. The concept of people depriving themselves of sleep to keep up with the j0nz3s has been going on for years; when's the lat time you walked into work yawning because you'd stayed online until 1am? (Or is it just me that does that?) Of course, we used to stay up late to watch late night TV, and some of us even stay up late reading.

Tribe is very perceptive, easily read, and very thoughtful.

Most of Cory Doctorow's works are available for free under Creative Commons License at craphound.com.

Labels: books

My brother-in-law recently bought a slide scanner and turned a box of 35mm slides into web-ready embarrassing photos. The family met my Mom for dinner last night for her birthday and gave my Mom a CD last night. (And a GPS, but that's another story.)


Me and Michele, 1972


me and and my best friend, the record player, 1972


My cousins Rob and Doug


Bernie, Molly, Carol, Sol


Neil with Molly's head poking in from the fourth dimension. 1969


Michele


Neil in 1970.

Click on the pictures for a larger version and more information.

Labels: family, pictures

Fleet of Worlds
by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner

The first novel by this collaboration team and the first Known Space book since the plodding Ringworld's Children, Fleet of Worlds is a pleasant surprise. The two writing styles work well together, the characters are very good, and five worlds fleeing through space is a mind-expanding setting.

When the race of aliens known to Humans as the Puppeteers find that a wave of hard radiation from supernovae in the core of our galaxy will reach Known Space in the distant future, their natural caution (or cowardice) prompts them to flee the galaxy now. Bringing their planet and four attendant farming worlds provides the setting for a human colony that has been bred to serve the puppeteers as farmers and advance scouts, which the colonists defer to as "citizens".

The characters are a little pale for the first hundred pages or so, but this is the only fault of this wonderful novel. A prequel to Mr. Niven's Ringworld, Fleet of Worlds is the first of a projected two-book arc.

Labels: books

It was raining while I was riding home from the carpool today. I was wearing my $6 yellow rain cape I bought in Walgreens; it billowed out behind me the whole way hom. I felt like Safety Yellow Superman!

Crossing Ethel Road, I was singing the Superman theme to myself:

Dum da da duuuum... da da da da daa daaaaaaaa...

... and at that very moment, a guy in a car yells out, "Hey, Superman!"

Labels: bike

I rode my bike yeserday from my carpool to the Apple Store (in the Menlo Park Mall). Once I got on route 27, I was the only vehicle not stuck in traffic.

Labels: bike

Photos taken by random folks, using Brushwood's camera:


Brushwood performing, and me as the Heartbreakers





Me playing the opening set to the show to an audience of tens of thousands of molecules





Grazina, Adam, Karen at Labyrinth





Bruce with yummy Old One cupcake



Click on the pictures for a larger version and more information.

Labels: music, notbike, wicked

Martha rode 22 miles on Sunday, her longest yet. We did the 20-mile route on the Central Bucks Bicycle Club's Covered Bridges Ride 2007.



Half the ride was on the Delaware and Raritan Towpath, the other half was on River Road that parallels the Delaware River. The ride was a lot of fun, and I always enjoy chatting with other bikers. And doing a ride with Martha is a rare pleasure, of course.

Click on the pictures for a larger version and more information.

Labels: bike, bikeclub

Korea
by Simon Winchester

Korea documents the author's walk across South Korea that retraced the route of seventeenth-century explorer Hendrick Hamel. Hamel wrote a book of his travels in the land of "Corea" that brought this mysterious land to the attention of Europe.

The trick of detachment while remaining involved in the story is something that eluded the author at this point, but the stories in this book are of a more personal nature than the historical narratives in later volumes. Despite the fact that he doesn't flat-out say it, Mr. Winchester obviously loves Korea and found most of the Koreans he met fascinating.

Comparisons to other places Winchester has been are inevitable in a travel book. I was fascinated to see, however, that as the book Continues, the author is more likely to compare Korea with another facet of the country, rather than, say, Shanghai or Tokyo or Dublin.

Before writing the masterful volumes Krakatoa, A Crack in the Edge of the World, and The Professor and the Madman, geologist-writer Simon Winchester generated a series of travel books. I read this book out of a curiosity to see where one of my favorite authors started out, and was pleasantly surprised to find it quite well-written and educational.

Labels: books, notbike

The shop called and told me that my bike was finished on Wednesday, and I rushed to the shop after work on Thursday. A comedy of delays caused us to barely squeak in the door maybe fifteen minutes before they closed.

The rear tire was uneven, but they fixed this in five minutes. I paid and tried riding it around the parking lot before putting the bike in the car. I forgot to roll up my right pants leg, and it has a but of a rip in it now. But I have a shiny drivetrain, a new rear shifter that actually works well, and replacement (non-defective) tires.

I was excited to ride the bike to work Friday morning; I got on the road by 5:45 AM, and realized I was feeling lightheaded. After a few blocks of this not going away, I turned back. Riding when I'm not at 100% in the light rain and cold could be dangerous. My wife would have dropped me at work with the bike. But, as I discovered when I got home, I have a slow leak in the front tire. I may have ripped the valve when inflating it, but this is the same wheel I had a flat on last weekend.

Oh, and the zipper on my rain jacket broke. I'll try to return it, but I'm not sure if the shop will take something back without a receipt that I bought it in August.

Labels: bike

It's been a while since I've posted on music. Here are some of the things I've been listening to lately:

OK Go, Oh No


OK Go's second studio album is great fun, filled with well-produced and just plain catchy songs. Their first, epynonomus album sounds a lot like The Cars and REO Speedwagon had a child, but the band is finding its own voice. Their sheer energy is comperable to that of No Doubt before they became a dance-music band. There are shades of the Joe Jackson band, particularly in "It's a Disaster" and "Good Idea at the Time".

OK Go has a very distintive "band" sound. These tracks sound like they were recorded live as a band, uncommon in this age of overdubbed studio magic. A slight distortion warms the sound, particularly on the vocals. (This may have been intentional, or may be a mastering error. Either way, it sounds great.) And the band has a great telepathic-musician thing going on.

They're best known here on Teh Net Of Tubes for their video of the band doing a heavily choreographed dance on eight rented treadmills. The music is hardly groundbreaking, but it's fun stuff, making good use of the rock toolkit.

Samples from the band's site



Apocalyptica, Cult


"Harmageddon" off their album Inquisition Symphony got my attention this past spring, but the cello metal band comes through awesomely on Cult, an album of original material (as opposed to the metal-muzac covers of previous albums). Edit: All but three of the songs on this album are originals.

The band's musicianship is superb. The cello metal sound is distinctive, and I could listen to it all day; but there is a tendency for all the songs to sound kinda the same on the first listen. Cult benefits from repeated, attentive listenings; the material is well-composed and distinctive. (Oddly enough, the iTunes store lists this album as "Explicit", even the instrumental songs which are most of the album.)

If you haven't listened to cello metal, imagine cello, viola, etc. blended seamlessly with a distorted guitar-like sound. The result is a powerful, dramatic sound mixing speed metal with a classical string trio listen-and-feel, and almost-gratuitous alternate time signatures thrown in just because they can.

Samples from the band's site



Gentle Giant, Gentle Giant

Hardly new music, but new to me: This 1970 album is a tour of where progressive rock could have gone. Smart, tight, and well-performed, but hardly opaque songs.



Dixie Dregs, What If


Billed as fusion jazz, the Dixie Dregs sound an awful lot like Kansas to me. The forceful, poppy progressive rock album What If was retreading old ground in 1978. The album is uneven, but Take It Off The Top and Travel Tunes are great songs, mediated by the mellow title track and Gina Lola Breakdown, an odd stompin' southern country hoedown.



Spock's Beard, Beware of Darkness


Flat-out prog rock, this is my first listen to Spock's Beard. Wonderfully complex and memorable songs, four out of the 7 tracks are long-form works. The material builds on progressive song staples, and even goes beyond them a little. Thoughts, my fave so far, reminds me of Kevin Gilbert's work on The Shaming of the True, which, unsurprisingly, drummer Nick D'Virgilio completed after Gilbert's death.

There are a few filler songs (Walking on the Wind springs to mind), but the album is mostly evenly good.

Labels: music, notbike

Despite all the planning in the world, there's nothing like experience. Here's what I learned on my first bike tour:

• Mud puddles, dead ends, and heavy gravel are great fun - on a mountain bike with the right tires, not so much fun with 30 pounds of stuff hanging from the rack. this was clear in Cheesequake State Park, of which we had no trail maps. Possibly because you really can't call them proper trails when they're overgrown and blocked by bogs. In the future, I'll avoid planning routes through large parks without knowimg more details. touring is a blut seeing stuff and exploring, but stuff like this slows you down too much.
  
• I could have left the extra cycling outfit, book, and iPod at home, but I wish I had taken a rain jacket.
  
• Even in warm weather, it gets cold in the early morning. Arm and leg warmers are invaluable, even if they do make you look like a jazzercise refugee.
  
• Rain can be a good thing. We had one burst of rain for 20 minutes or so, and I found it very refreshing.
  
• Utility roads are evil. Water Works Road in Old Bridge, NJ, looks like a perfectly respectable road on maps and satellite photos. Water Works Road is a dirt and gravel road blocked by scrub and a downed telephone pole.
  
• Compasses and non-intertubes Hagstrom maps rule. Where bikely cue sheets failed us, "real" maps saved the day, and where Hagstrom county maps were (infrequently) misleading, the compass saved our lycra-clad sore asses. Bike-mounted compasses suck if you have a steel frame; I took along a small hiking compass I picked up for $10.

So... what's next? Neil and I have been kicking around a few ideas. I'd like to do a week-long tour of 200+ miles, but the next time I'll have a week off will probably be December. You can tour in the snow, but I'm still new at this. I really don't want to be changing a flat or fixing a brake cable on a county highway in a snowstorm.

Labels: bike, touring

Since my bike is in the shop, I walked home from my carpool today. I put my stuff into a hiking backpack the night before, including a water bottle I dutifully filled up at work before leaving. I asked my carpool to drop me off at the intersection of Talmadge and New Durham.

Wearing a cheap rain poncho I picked up from Walgreens, I headed out. It didn't take long before I realized I wasn't bored, in fact, I was enjoying the process of searching for new shortcuts and looking at interesting plants and weird people.

I crossed the railroad tracks and took a shortcut across a soccer field to a cello metal soundtrack. The sky was oppressively grey for the three-mile walk, but I stayed almost completely dry, to my disappointment. At least the poncho kept me warm.

Labels: hike, notbike

Neil and Neil on the bridge over the Navesink river in Red Bank, NJ

I think that bike touring is my favorite kind of biking, and I've only done one proper tour. (It becomes a tour when you ride for a bit, stay overnight somewhere away form home, rinse, repeat.) Just you, a bike, a friend, and 30 pounds of stuff in side bags, is somehow very cool. Neil and I rode from Edison to Red Bank yesterday, and in the morning continued on to Monmouth Beach to see the shore, then returned.

Over the 100 mile ride, Cheesequake State Park was our first real stumbling block. Hagstrom County maps and Google Maps-generated cue sheets are great tools, and both have incorrect and unclear information. In the park, we didn't even have that; we used luck and a compass to get across the park, doing our best to avoid unbikeable trails and deep mud puddles. That compass saved us several times, and it takes a lot of the guesswork out of map reading.

We took the Henry Hudson bike path for 7.5 miles, from Matawan to Belford. It was a nice break from road riding, but there were a lot of bugs. I had to scrub insect corpses off my skin when we got to the hotel room later that day.

When we were heading into Red Bank, we decided that we wouldn't continue on to the shore that day. The hotel was kind enough to let us bring out bikes up to the room. Martha, Grazina, and Asad drove down to Red Bank and we all went for dinner at a very good Italian restaurant.

At 6am, we woke up and got ready for the road. When I was packing and loading the bike, the front tire looked like it had when I pulled the bike out of the basement this past spring, after two years of no riding. I inspected the tire and tube carefully, and I found no nails or glass. There were no errant spokes that could have poked a hole in the tube. There was, in fact, no hole in the tube that I could see. (It might have been a pinch flat, which can happen from a pothole or jumping down a curb. I'm glad I was able to change the tube with a minimum of fuss.

I packed carefully to avoid taking stuff I didn't need, since the more you have the slower you will go. I learned this lesson on my first bicycle commute home from work. Once you're down to the bare minimum, it's quite satisfying to be able to keep a good pace with full panniers and trunk bag.

We rode to Monmouth Beach in about 45 minutes and had breakfast in Amy's, an omelette/pancake place on the main drag that MArtha and I found while we were scouting road conditions for this tour. We rode over to the beach After fueling up so we could touch the Atlantic Ocean. I graffitied the ephemeral "Neils on Wheels" in the sand.


Seen on a front lawn near route 35.

The trip back went a lot more quickly. We replotted the route when having breakfast, spreading the county maps over the table, trying not to knock the drinks over. We missed a couple of turns (two major streets weren't marked or didn't exist) but we kept a decent pace and didn't make too many side trips. We also avoided the dirt road Water Works Road in Old Bridge, along with the downed telephone pole blocking the road.

Click on the pictures for a larger version and more information.

Labels: bike, touring

Monday morning, I left the house at 5:40am. I improvised a little on the route, and got in in 1h 50m, and was working at my desk by 8am.

This is the first time I've done the entire commute without Martha dropping me off partway in the morning. Honestly, it's really not all that hard, although I had to nerve myself to get going in the morning. And I could do without getting up at 5am.

The trip home was 3 hours long, but that's because I was exploring. No, really, that's not a euphemism for "getting lost". My cue sheet holder broke about four miles into the ride home, so I stuffed it into my bag and kept going by the seat of my pants. I finally got clever and realized that you can pretty much always tell what town you're in by looking at the manhole covers. I ended up riding 49 miles for the round trip.

A couple of guys in a driving range on Inman Ave in Edison thought that riding to my house form there was "a long ride". And apparently, asking which direction is north sounds like I'm asking how to get to Newark.

There was a hairy moment in Scotch Plains, but a friendly jogger pointed me towards Inman Avenue. When I got to Oak Tree Road and Grove Street at 8pm, I knew I was 25 minutes from the house. (Scotch Plains is pretty hilly, by the way. Lots of rich-people houses on the top of a hill, and twisty, steep streets going past houses with huge lawns and tiny barking dogs behind fences with manicured shrubs. Pretty, though.)

What was hard about it was that I worked 10.5 hours yesterday. I spelt very, very well last night.

Labels: bike, commute