Recovering from MakeWinterGreatAgain

It's official: we made it through the snowfall of MakeWinterGreatAgain, aka Snowzilla, aka Jonas and now we're on to the cleanup. Our particular street is rated by Arlington County as a secondary priority road, which means that by the time we were done shoveling our driveway, you could see the pavement in front of our house. A number of other streets in our neighborhood, which don't rank on this scale, have yet to see a plow at all. So yeah, nobody's going anywhere tomorrow or probably the next day.

I wanted to do more exploring and perhaps a bit of sledding but Arlington County has been pleading with residents to stay off the roads, including walkers. So we're trying to give the folks doing serious cleanup work a break and staying put. Now I've just got to convince Shira to help me build one of these...

Stay warm and safe.

How to Prepare for a DC Snow Event

Here it is, your handy three step guide:

Step 1. Get things going early. Say, by suggesting 4 days ahead of the snow that the storm will be a threat to "life & property"

Winter storm threat now HIGH says @NWS_BaltWash "Significant travel delays, closures & threats to life & property" pic.twitter.com/m3F6KcWSgQ

— Angela Fritz (@angelafritz) January 19, 2016

Step 2. Name the storm. This step is essential; you can't fear what you can't name. By the way, I'm fully behind the currently recommended name: Make Winter Great Again.

Step 3. Actually panic. Basically, do this:

And there you go, you're all set for a DC weather event!

Gotcha of the Day: Finding the source of SPAM from a WordPress install

One of my clients who runs WordPress reached out to me earlier: they had received notification that they're system was sending out SPAM. D'oh. I helped them do the usual fixes: update WordPress and plugins, change passwords, and double check the security scanner they had in place to see if there were any other know issues.

While poking around for a possible lead to the cause of their issue I came across this post: Tracing Spam from PHP Scripts. The very short version of the post is this:

If you set mail.log in php.ini to a webserver writeable path, all calls to mail(...) will be logged for you.

I set this up and as the author Eric promised, a few hours later I saw entries like these:

mail() on [/var/www/vhosts/somehost.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/alias.php:2]: \
  To: xxx@yahoo.com -- Headers: From: "XXX XXX"  ... \
  Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1"  Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

And just like that, I knew where to find the malicious script in question. A quick search under uploads yielded 3 .php files, all filled with malicious code.

This Whack-a-Mole approach, of course, isn't sustainable long term. I've already suggested that this organization sign up with sucuri, as I've had great success in having them finding and fixing WordPress issues (one memorable occasion happened on Christmas Day, no less). But to actually witness this attack in action is pretty sweet; and all through a simple config file tweak no less.

mail.log is definitely my new SPAM stopping best friend.

All of 2015's Weather in under 2 minutes

While poking around weather.gov I came across this archive of US weather maps and thought what any reasonable person would think: I wonder what a movie showing all 365 days of weather would look like? To answer that question, I did the following:

Step 1. Grab the raw images. This was too easy:

$ cat > grab
#!/bin/bash

# http://www.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/archives/noaa/2015/noaad1_2015011812.gif

for m in `seq 1 12`; do
  for d in `seq 1 30`; do
    for h in 00 12 ; do
      url=`printf "http://www.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/archives/noaa/2015/noaad1_2015%02d%02d%02d.gif" $m $d $h`
      wget -O `printf "map_%02d%02d%02d.gif" $m $d $h` $url
    done
  done
done
^d
$ chmod a+rx grab
$ ./grab

Step 2. Convert and crop the files so that they just contained maps. Again, we're talking child's play:

$ mkdir jpegs
$ for f in *.gif ; 
   do convert -crop 510x366+0+0 $f jpegs/`basename $f .gif`.jpg;
  done

Step 3. Convert the images into a mp4 video. So simple:

$ ffmpeg -framerate 7 -pattern_type glob -i 'jpegs/*.jpg' -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p out.mp4

Step 4. Upload the file to YouTube and watch the Likes roll in. Uploading the file was easy enough and adding audio definitely helped make the video at least somewhat watchable.

So what does one year of weather maps strung together into a movie look like? Well, here you go:

I've got to say, the results are Feh at best. The characters are weak, the plot is predictable and the special effects way over the top. In all seriousness, it was an interesting exercise, but unless you're a weather geek, I doubt you'll find this particularly riveting.

Compass Kudos

A few weeks back I noted that my last two attempts at carrying a compass on my keychain had resulted in two out of whack compasses. The compasses in question were the Silva Metro and County Comm SERE. After posting about my experience I dropped a note to both companies asking for help.

CountyComm quickly got back to me letting me know that they'd gladly replace the compass. Silva responded by saying that I needed to contact the Swedish branch of Silva (silva.se) not the US. I did so, and they gave me an address in Sweden to send the compass back to.

I quickly scribbled off hand written notes to both companies, dropped the compasses in a regular old mail envelope and dropped them into the postal abyss.

And yesterday, to my shock, I received back two new compasses: one from County Comm and one from Silva in Sweden. Heck, the one from Sweden even had a nice little hand written note:

For now I'm continuing to use the TAC Compass, which is ridiculously tiny, yet still somewhat accurate:

What the TAC Compass loses in accuracy it gains in being so stashable. I'm just hoping it can hold up to the pressures of being tossed in and out of my pocket.

Well played Silva and County Comm, well played.

Welcome to Manhood

Such confidence! Such wisdom! Such appetizers! My nephew knocked the ball out of the park yesterday with his Bar Mitzvah. He led services, read Torah, and gave an insightful and entertaining speech--it was truly awesome. It didn't hurt that my Brother and Sister-in-Law delivered on one heck of a party (oy, I think I'm still full!). Such a good time.

Definitely a simcha to savor!

Please Auntie Sheri, may I have some more?

Mmmm...an infinite supply of treats. In Auntie Sheri's defense, she was dolling out blueberries, and she is a certified Gradma.

He's Da Man

OK, technically he'll be the man tomorrow, after his Bar Mitzvah. It sure was awesome celebrating the upcoming event with my nephew, niece and the rest of the family.

Would I have liked a photo with all my family in it? Sure, but they're a loud and disorganized bunch, so that was never going to happen. The photo below will have to serve as just a sample. Definitely fun times!

Finally a dose of Winter Weather

OK, it's not exactly a Winter Wonderland, but it is our first real snow. Whoo!

The Children's Book You Thought You Knew

Time for a little quiz. Don't worry, it's easy, I promise.

What's the name of this 'family?'

Even though I haven't read one of these books in years, the answer is obvious: it's the Berenstein Bears! Like The Little Engine That Could or The Rabbi and the 29 Witches, the Bears were beloved books of my childhood.

There's only one small detail. That's not the name of the family. As I found out a few days ago, I've been wrong my whole life. That's the Berenstain Bears in the cover above, as in 'stain' not 'stein.' If you're like me, you'll rush off to Amazon to check. No problem, I'll wait here. Google will gladly correct your spelling, as well.

If you're also like me, you're world has been shaken a bit. Don't worry, this post has the answer:

Here's the thing. These books play such a huge role in the collective memories of so many people, all of whom clearly and distinctly remember "BerenstEin", that I am not the first to propose the notion that somehow, at some time in the last 10 years or so, reality has been tampered with and history has been retroactively changed. The bears really were called the "BerenstEin Bears" when we were growing up, but now reality has been altered such that the name of the bears has been changed post hoc.

...

I would like to make a modest proposal: We are all living in our own parallel universe.

There is at least one other universe parallel to our own. I will distinguish the two by the stEin universe and the stAin universe, depending on the surname of the creators of the famous children's book. The stEin universe was the world we resided in during the 1990s. Sometime after we all stopped reading kids books, that is when we were shifted in to the stAin universe. There may be more differences than just the surname of the Berenst_ins, in fact there almost certainly are more differences, and we just need to find them.

Somehow this theory of parallel universes seems more comforting than the possibility that we pronounced it wrong. Either way, go read the whole theory here, it's definitely a mind bending way to start your Friday.

Thanks to iamdann.com and strangerdimensions.com for leading me to this theory. Berenstein Bears forever!

The $3.00, 11 gram Water Filter You Probably Shouldn't Use

I was so impressed with djbarryiii's YouTube video showing how to create an ultra-light, ultra-cheap, ultra-durable water filter that I had to try it myself. The project is really simple: purchase a 1 micron bio-diesel filter off of eBay, cut out a circle and fold it using the technique you probably learned in high school chem lab to produce a sort of funnel. And you're done. Here's the filter next to a LifeStraw for comparison purposes:

Now before you chuck your water purification device of choice, here's a few reasons why the above is a bad idea:

1.The bio-diesel filter is a nominal, not absolute, filter. That means that that most objects 1 micron or larger will be filtered out. Did you catch that 'most'? A nominal filter will allow some particles larger than the size it's rated at to pass. An absolute filter, like the LifeStraw, has no space larger than it's claimed size, so it filters as advertised.

2. While 1 micron will filter out the 5 micron size Giardia and Cryptosporidium, it won't filter out other nasty stuff, like Cholera, E. Coli, and Salmonella (source: sectionhiker.com), not to mention viruses which are even smaller. The LifeStraw does far better with an absolute filter size of .2 microns.

That's not to say that this little hack doesn't have some serious advantages going for it. The obvious ones are that its relatively cheap and quite compact.

With limited experience I can tell you that the larger the disk size, the easier it is to use. When I cut out the first disk I used a tuna fish can as a stencil. The result when folded is a relatively small reservoir, that required slowly pouring water into the filter, being careful not to overflow it. The larger size, as pictured above, was created by using a Cool Whip container as a stencil (what can I say, I used what I had). The result when folded is a nice size reservoir that still requires care when filling, but allows for a descent flow rate.

Oh, and speaking of lessons learned: I originally purchased a 0.5 micron bio-diesel filter bag thinking it would be an even more effective option. Alas, the filter is so fine it has almost no flow rate. It was way too slow to be at all practical.

While the disk above is compact and lays flat, it's not quite small enough to be stashed in my wallet (alas, it would have made a sweet EDC water filter). It's definitely compact enough to store in a glove compartment, dropped into a day pack or stuffed into a under-seat bike bag. Heck, it might even find a place in my trail running kit.

Chemical purification tablets may be smaller than this filter, but they suffer from a number of annoyances. Katadyn, for example, claims to take up to 4 hours to fully work. Further more, the tablets are really optimized for quarts of water. If you want a relatively quick drink now, a filter would allow you to process just a cup full of water, versus purifying a quart and waiting for hours before the water is ready.

Another key advantage to this sort of filter is how flexible it is. I don't mean that literally, though it is indeed physically flexible. I mean that you can use the filter to rig up a water purification system using whatever materials you have handy.

Given all of the above, it doesn't look like I'll be chucking my Portable Aqua tablets anytime soon. But as a backup solution, say on a trail run when space and weight are a premium, I could definitely see putting this filter to work.

Here's the video that inspired it all:

Mystery Solved: One Approach to Spot-It Game Card Generation

Spot-It is one of my go-to quick games for kids and adults alike. Many a wait at the pediatrician's office has been made that much more bearable thanks to this handy little game. While there are a few variations for playing it, they all involve the same basic strategy: the faster you can spot the match between any two Spot-It cards, the better. Which brings me to the cards:

The magic of the game is this: every card matches every other card exactly once. Take a moment and confirm this by looking at the cards above.

Every time I play Spot-It I think to myself: how the heck did that do that? And so after a rousing game a few weeks ago I decided I'd have to find out. And what better way to do so than to write some code to generate my own deck of cards?

And so began a multi-week saga in puzzling out a solution. I have to admit, the problem pretty much kicked my butt. If you look at the history of my code, you'll see all sorts of wrong headed attempts. From a random statistical solution, to mutating vectors full of vectors, I tried in vain to crack the problem. For the last few weeks our table has been covered in little scraps of paper, like so:

But I lived with the problem, and during last week's dentist cleaning, I had a bit of breakthrough. Luckily, I had to wait for Shira to finish up, and so that gave me some time in the waiting room to work on a solution. I can't imagine what the receptionist thought as I tore apart pages from my pocket notepad to create prototype cards. From there, I busted out my keyboard and coded up my new insights. Alas, that solution had flaws, but it took me in the right direction.

Finally, I realized I needed a solution that had a component of backtracking to it. Luckily, before I jumped in and implemented amb, and I discovered I could get this backtracking by using simple recursion. I finally figured out the the last iteration of a solution on a jog a few days ago, and then last night I typed it in. And voila!, I give you a generated set of Spot-It cards:

OK, the above uses numbers instead of funky symbols. But the core principle holds: each card (implemented as a list of numbers) matches each other card exactly once. The prettification of the output is left as an exercise to the reader.

I'm sure there's a much more elegant solution to this problem than mine. However, for now, I'm just enjoying that feeling that comes from living with, and ultimately conquering, a problem. Whoo!

And here's the code. The mystery to Spot-It card generation (or at least, one version) is revealed below:

;;
;; Not an actual programming praxis exercise, but it should be.
;; Implement the spot-it game card sequence
;;
;; Every card matches every other card in exactly one way
;;

#lang scheme

(define (inc x)
  (+ x 1))
(define (dec x)
  (- x 1))

(define (make-symbol-generator)
  (let ([x 0])
    (lambda ()
      (set! x (inc x))
      x)))

(define (card-match? c1 c2)
  (cond ([null? c1] #f)
        ([null? c2] #f)
        ([member (car c1) c2] #t)
        (else (card-match? (cdr c1) c2))))

(define (make-deck n sym-gen)
  (if (exact? (sqrt n))
      (apply append
             (for/list ([i (sqrt n)])
               (let ([sym (sym-gen)])
                 (for/list ([j (sqrt n)])
                   (list sym)))))
      (error "Deck size must a perfect square")))
  
(define (can-add-to-pile? card pile)
  (cond ([null? pile] #t)
        ((not [card-match? (car pile) card])
         (can-add-to-pile? card (cdr pile)))
        (else #f)))

(define (grow-pile pile size deck)
  (cond ([= size 0] pile)
        ([null? deck] #f)
        (else
         (let ([card (car deck)])
           (if (and (can-add-to-pile? card pile)
                    (grow-pile (cons card pile) (dec size) (cdr deck)))
               (grow-pile (cons card pile) (dec size) (cdr deck))
               (grow-pile pile size (cdr deck)))))))


(define (remove-pile-from-deck pile deck)
  (filter (lambda (card)
            (not (memq card pile)))
          deck))

(define (match-pile pile sym-gen)
  (let ([sym (sym-gen)])
    (map (lambda (card)
           (cons sym card))
         pile)))

(define (done? deck)
  (let loop ([cards deck])
    (cond ([null? cards] #t)
          (else
           (if (andmap (lambda (c)
                         (card-match? c (car cards)))
                       deck)
               (loop (cdr cards))
               #f)))))

(define (tick deck sym-gen)
  (let ([psize (sqrt (length deck))])
    (let loop ([i 0] [deck deck] [piles '()])
      (cond ([= i psize]
             (apply append (map (lambda (p)
                                  (match-pile p sym-gen))
                                piles)))
            (else
             (let ([pile (grow-pile '() psize deck)])
               (loop (inc i)
                     (remove-pile-from-deck pile deck)
                     (cons pile piles))))))))

(define (go size)
  (let ([sym-gen (make-symbol-generator)])
    (let loop ([deck (make-deck size sym-gen)])
      (cond ([done? deck] deck)
            (else
             (loop
              (tick deck sym-gen)))))))
  

(go 9)
(go 16)

The Most Precious Letter Never Mailed

Apparently my nephew Dovid was tasked with writing a postcard, and who should he author it to? But his Uncle Ben and Aunt Shira, of course! Check out this beauty:

A few points of note:

• The Boy correctly wrote out his address, so I redacted it. Good for him!
• I love his creative spelling of Uncle. I mean, I completely agree, there should be an i and g in it.
• OK, so if you read it with the right voice, it kind of sounds like a threat. But it's a good threat, we look forward to the visit.
• I love that he wrote the letter without using any of the words in the box. Do you think Hemingway would have relied on this crutch? I think not!

I simply couldn't be more proud!

Talking College to Middle Schoolers

Last Friday Shira and I visited a Fairfax Middle School to talk to 7th and 8th graders who are in AVID. Some parts of middle school hadn't changed:

And some parts had:

From what I can tell, AVID is a sort of pre-pre-college prep program, that helps reach kids who might not think going to college is an option. It goes beyond preaching the importance of college, and helps them focus on selecting the ideal college and making the most of your time there. I've always thought that schools should focus on nuts and bolts skills that will help build a foundation for being a responsible adult (Civics, anyone?) and this program seems directly in line with that.

Shira and I actually had two totally different high school, college and post college experiences. In fact, like most things about my wife, I'm her opposite. Shira was in the top of our high school class, I was in the middle. Shira got in early decision to an Ivy League institution, I managed to land a place at a state school (Go UB!). I quickly settled on a major and career path; Shira meandered. It was quite the display of contrasts with an important lesson: you can go about high school, college and career a number of different ways and still be quite successful.

The kids listened and asked questions and generally proved how responsible 7th and 8th graders can be. I think we may have instilled a bit of panic when explaining that some classes in college are curved, and that you might get a 91 on a test and have that be a C.

It was definitely fun to share the good o'l days with a classroom of young'uns.

Runway

Captured after a run through the DC Mall.

101 Paracord Projects

Let's say you've got a whole heap of paracord but aren't quite sure what to do with it. Well, I've got your answer: 101 Paracord Projects. From doggy collars to nunchakus, this list has you covered. The above photo is from #16, Paracord Army Men.

If that list doesn't do it for you, you could always make your way to Pinterest.

Happy Para'cording!

Whoa, you put a magnet where?

I'm not really a body modification guy. I cringe at the thought of getting my ears, or any other body part pierced. And tattoos are a no-no, as well. But here's a fascinating read of someone who took body modification in a (for me) unexpected direction: Body Hacking: My Magnetic Implant.

The best part of having the magnet implant was discovering invisible magnetic fields when I wasn’t actually looking. The first experience I had with this was walking through the intersection of Broadway and Bleecker in Manhattan. I passed through this intersection a few times before realizing that my finger would tingle at a certain spot. After paying a bit more attention, I realized that I was feeling something underground. At first, I assumed it was a subway car, but later came to the conclusion that it was most likely the subway power generator, or the giant fan that was cooling these generators. After noticing these underground waves at Broadway and Bleecker, I began feeling them all over Manhattan.

When I first saw the title of that article I assumed it was someone with a prosthetic limb who was clever enough to have a magnet included in the prosthesis. Turns out, I was way overthinking things. Nope, in this case Dann Berg simply had a magnet embedded in his body. The procedure, as he describes it, isn't particularly invasive, and I was back to thinking of ear piercings and such. If you can modify your body to be more attractive, why not modify it to be more functional?

For now, I'll stick to just being plain 'ol Ben (versus Bionic Ben). But good for Dann and others who are experimenting in experiencing the world in a new way.

Review: Spy the Lie

Back when I was commuting, I was pretty rigorous about the books I'd listen to. I had an explicit cycle: Non-Fiction, Fiction, Self-Help / How-To and repeat. That kept me listening to a wide variety of content. Alas, these days I'm not as picky. I knew it had been a while since I've listen to any Self-Help / How-To, and so I went on the search for just such a title. I ended up selecting Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception, and it was an excellent choice.

The technique behind Spy the Lie takes a few minutes to understand and a lifetime to perfect. The key principle is this:

When asked the right questions, people who are lying have no choice but to show symptoms.

In this case, the right kind of question is one that a truthful person can answer with ease, but a deceptive person needs to work at. A symptom can range from changes in body language, to commonly used retorts (such as getting angry with the question, or answering with an unusual degree of specificity).

Sounds pretty unremarkable, right? Once you've been through the book and seen the specific examples of the technique in use, I'm confident you'll change your mind. It's amazing to see just how effective asking the right questions can be.

Forget everything you've learned from the cop shows on TV. And no, you're not going to be able to read microexpressions. No, if you want to know if someone is lying, this is your method. It'll take tons of practice, but I've got no doubt it works. Trust me, I'm telling the truth.

Windows 10: Keyboard Shortcuts Worth Knowing

A few weeks back, after much nagging, I upgraded my Windows 8 laptop to Windows 10. The results so far have been pretty underwhelming. For the most part, not much has changed. The most noticeable difference is that logging in has turned into an infuriatingly slow process. Just selecting and typing in my password seems to take an exorbitant amount of time. From there, it seems to take additional time just to get to a desktop where I can start opening windows and getting to work. It's probably just a few seconds here or there being added, but it's definitely painful. Oh, and I find that Firefox has been doing the Unresponsive thing more often. Of course this is all anecdotal, and who knows, maybe Windows 10 is doing some awesome stuff behind the scenes.

Anyway, there is one bright spot in Windows 10. It seems that they've taken the keyboard shortcuts started in Windows 8 and dressed them up a bit more. It's not Ratpoison, but it's an improvement.

The change I tripped over was that now Windows-Left and Windows-Right allow for stacking of Windows, not just side-by-side placement. I use two stacked monitors, so I'm not sure how urgently I need this, but it's good to see improvements being made in keyboard shortcuts. After reading up on this new Left/Right change, I learned that Windows 10 has a number of new key shortcuts worth learning. Including:

• Windows + Tab - an interactive version of Alt-Tab. This gets points because you can navigate the windows via the cursor keys. It loses points because there's no way to traverse both monitor's worth of windows. It strikes me as strange that you would design keyboard shortcuts in this day and age and not take into account multiple screens.
• Windows + Shift + D - create a new virtual desktop. Whoo! Windows 10 has finally caught up to FVWM circa 1995. Kidding aside, virtual desktops are a nice edition.
• Windows + Shift + Left, Windows + Shift + Left - traverse the virtual desktops.
• Windows + X - open up the Start Menu. I learned about this gem here. I'm not sure why I'd need to get back to the good old Start Menu, but it's good to know it's there.
• Windows + Print Screen - grabs a screenshot, saves it as a file. Well that only took them like 10 years to add to Windows, yeesh. The traditional method of capturing the screen and storing it on the clipboard may have been handy for programmers, but what a pain for regular users.

Finally, here's a cheat sheet to all of Windows 10 keyboard short cuts, courtesy of LifeHacker:

Mobius ActionCam: the Swiss Army Knife of Digital Cameras

The humble Swiss Army Knife: jack of all trades, master of none. It may not be the perfect tool for all jobs, but its compact size and versatile set of functions more than make up for any limitations it has. And so it is with the newest edition to my camera repertoire: the Mobius ActionCam. For size comparison, here's the Mobius next to a Swiss Army Knife:

I know what you're thinking: it looks like one of those horrendously awful key-chain cameras. But, before you write off the Mobius, give it a chance. Yes, the Mobius comes out of the Spy Camera tradition. Previous versions of the Mobius were actually shaped like car remotes and were intended to be carried on a key chain. The current version has dropped the stealth goofy look and now has a more boxy case. It's also transitioned from being sold as a Spy Cam to being sold as an Action Cam. I suppose this was a smart marketing move: a Spy Cam is for 11 year old boys, while an Action Cam is for X Games striving 13 year old boys.

Marketing aside, the Mobius remains a feature packed lightweight camera. It shoots stills and videos. It shoots time lapses and has built in motion detection. You can tweak the color balance, exposure, and enable Auto Exposure or Auto Focus Lock. You can use the camera as a Web Cam, Thumb Drive or Slide Show Player for your TV. The camera is lightweight enough to be mounted on your drone model helicopter and is a favorite among the RC hobby folks. Heck, you can rubber band it to a binder clip and attach it to a hat. How do I know this works? Because I did just this:

The Mobius generates standard files which can be easily post processed. For example, you can create a hyperlapse using the recipe found here:

ffmpeg -r 20 -pattern_type glob -i 'IMG*.JPG' \
  -vf "scale=trunc(iw/2)*2:trunc(ih/2)*2" -c:v libx264 output.mp4

The Mobius is small enough to conceal, so you can use it as a portable game camera. The recipe would be simple: drop the camera into a Tupperware container, cover said container in Camo Duct Tape and leave somewhere on the trail. Return hours or days later to see what you captured.

Want to experiment with shooting 3D? Pick up a couple of Mobius Cameras and mount them side-by-side. Heck, you can even use the camera to capture macro shots. The camera works well as a dashcam because it can be configured to automatically turn on and off when it receives power from its USB cable. If you've got an idea for a new experimental camera or method of taking pictures, I'd hazard a guess that the Mobius is a solid platform to build it on.

The camera is hacker friendly in its configuration, allowing for exporting and importing of settings via a text file. There's both Windows and Android apps to simplify the configuration process if you prefer select boxes and radio buttons over editing plain text. There's even a very readable instruction manual, something most digital devices lack these days.

Like a Swiss Army Knife, it's possible to go totally astray with this tiny contraption. The camera gives feedback via a series of colored LEDs, but as I found out while preparing this post, it's possible to shoot photos and get nothing but unusable images (in my case, I had the exposure, color, contrast and sharpness set to -128 by accident, when these should have been at 0). The good news is, unlike a Swiss Army Knife, you shouldn't end up losing a finger or severing an artery. Still, plan to do plenty of practice and double checking of your configuration to make sure you you're capturing what you think you're capturing.

I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to put my Mobius to work next. But it's just too compact and handy to not have in the toolkit.

A Moment to Kvell: Meet Ann, New Yorker of the Year

Don't you wish that more media attention went to people making a positive difference and not just those who are super rich, super athletic or super scandalous? In this spirit, I take a moment to kvell about a friend who received some much deserved coverage. Back on 12/15/2015, the New York Times offered up a list of New Yorkers that readers could vote for as New Yorker of the Year. And who should be listed on it? But our friend Ann Kansfield, who I grew up with and went to school with in Rochester.

Ann was being nominated because she's the first Lesbian Chaplin of the New York Fire Department. But her work goes beyond that: she's one of those people who work tirelessly for the benefit of others. As a Christian Minister she's pretty much the furthest thing from a Jew, and yet, she makes Tikkun Olam, repairing of the world, her life's work.

And so to see her get a mention by the New York Times is just too cool and too appropriate.

And if that weren't enough, she went ahead and won!

The moment you’ve all been waiting for: the winner of our “New Yorker of the Year” contest.

As chosen by reader submissions, the Rev. Ann Kansfield, the Fire Department’s first female (and first lesbian) chaplain, won by a landslide.

Ms. Kansfield, who also ministers at the Greenpoint Reformed Church in Brooklyn, received 81 votes, many of them submitted by members of her congregation.

We nominated her for breaking barriers and for helping some of the city’s bravest workers.

Her supporters wrote in with more reasons: her generosity of spirit, her support of her community, and her growing ministry.

You may not agree with Ann on her views of politics and religion. But I'd be willing to guess that you would agree that it sure is nice to see people who make doing good their life's work, get the press, even if it's just this once.

Here's Ann, Myself and others in the yearbook as Trapezoid Editors. Who knew I was standing with a future New Yorker of the Year?

A Sign My Pockets May be Too Full

Over the weekend we hung out with our friends Erin and Ryan (as well as their adorable kids) and played a heated game of Taboo. In Taboo you've got to get your partner to say a word without using specific words on the card.

The word for me was Whistle. Our conversation goes like this:

Me: It's on my key-chain

Shira: Flashlight

Me: No, the other thing

Shira: Knife

Me: No, the other thing

Shira: Flashlight

Me: No, the other thing

Shira: Compass

Me: It makes noise.

Shira: Whistle!

Me: yes!

And the next card, I kid you not, was Compass. I think I left Erin and Ryan pretty baffled with the size of my key chain.

As you can see, the outcome of the game was almost exactly an even split between the couples:

Good times!

More Movie Ramblings: The Big Short

After going for what seems like years without seeing a movie in a proper movie theater, we've now seen three nearly in a row. First there was Star Wars. Then The Big Short and then last night Spotlight. I don't feel all that bad as both the Big Short and Spotlight were based on real events, and their educational value is at least as important as their entertainment value.

At some point, I may be inspired to write something about Spotlight, but for this post, I'm going to focus my energy on The Big Short.

The Big Short was about the housing/banking crisis of the mid-2000's and is masterfully done. How you make a movie on banking watchable, much less entertaining, takes real skill. It's another win for Michael Lewis, and count me in for his next movie (whatever that is). And the timing of the movie is great: just long enough after the crisis that we've basically put it behind us, but not so long after that it's Just History.

OK, enough praise. You get the point, it was a fine movie. Here's two thoughts that have stuck with me since watching the movie:

First, we're supposed to walk out of the movie theater angry at bankers. I get that. But I walked out with a fresh anger towards a new group of people: the raters. See, as far as I can tell, people, bankers included, are always going to game the system. There will always be those who will try to make big sums of money off of risky propositions. And in may respects, that's OK.

Every time you walk into a casino, you're signing up for just this arrangement. Sure, you may walk out with big bucks, but statistics say, if you play long enough, you'll lose. So if banker's want to go with risky bets, there's a time and place for that. What I'm dumbfounded by is that the people who rated the loans and other instruments (look at me, one movie and I'm an expert!), could rate them seemingly however they wish.

Just saying something is a good bet, doesn't make it a good bet. Risky bets are OK. Safe bets are OK. Making what you think to be a safe bet, when it's really risky, is not OK. And that, from my 130 minutes of movie education, seems like one of core problems in the crisis.

How could giving such ridiculous ratings not be illegal? How could the people who rated these things be in business? Heck, how could being a rater even *be* a business in the first place? It's like playing football and having the coaches be the refs. Shouldn't the referee be completely outside the game? (Whoo, sports metaphor! Nailed it.)

The big question: can I take my outrage and use it to go the next step to figure out how this works in the non-movie universe? Oy, probably not. Though I did just mail my Senator on the topic, so let's see what he has to say.

My second take away from the movie is a sort of wish. In the movie, genius Dr. Michael Burry, does the unthinkable: he slogs through hundreds and hundreds of loans to come up with the notion that what's being rated as a good bet, is in fact, anything but. When he tells another character in the movie that he's done this, they act as though he's performed the unthinkable. Sort of like actually reading the terms and conditions *before* signing up for Facebook, or some other fine-print feat.

My wish is this: that kids watching this movie will want to turn to their parents (or, hopefully date) and ask the obvious question: why didn't he write a program to do this? In the movie, Burry is seen noting how many days overdue various loans are, compiling them into a spreadsheet. While I'm sure in actuality there was a lot more going on, this sort of thing is exactly why we have computers.

In my world, we're only one program away from finding and hopefully addressing the next crisis, whatever that may be.

A Compass to Survive a Hostile Environment: My Front Right Pocket

I'm a big fan of always carrying a compass and for years I've had one on my key chain. An old school compass is truly an object of beauty: it has no reliance on cell towers, WiFi, GPS or batteries. It Just Works. Well, that's the theory anyway. In practice, my every-day carry of a compass ends up beating up a delicate instrument which was never really intended to be subjected such harsh conditions. Consider my search for the perfect pocket compass:

1. is a cheap keychain button compass. I picked up a package of 20 of them from eBay for some ridiculous price. The idea was to pick up a whole slew of them and find one in the bunch that seemed to be accurate. The problem with these little button compasses is that they are slow to settle on North. I found that I was constantly tapping the compass, willing it to show me the right direction. What do you want for a few bucks, right?

2. is was the very promising Metro Silva Compass. This guy actually held up for almost two years. Unlike the cheap button compasses, this needle would always confidently snap to North. But look at the picture above - somehow I managed to reverse the polarity of the compass (trust me, North is up). That's not cool. I've got a note into Silva asking what I should do about this glitch. Let's see what they say.

3. is the very slick County Comm SERE compass. Like the Metro Silva, it snapped to North much faster than the button compasses. It comes with a lanyard, but I couldn't resist just sticking it on my keychain. I figured I'd take it off the keychain to do any actual readings. I know this isn't a keychain compass, but I figured if it was tough enough to be included in a "Aircrew Survival Kit" it should be tough enough to live in my front pocket. I was wrong. After a few weeks I realized that the compass dial had effectively become magnetized. The result, and it's hard to see this from the photo, is that compass dial dips down and "sticks" to the base of the compass, rendering its readings useless. D'oh. I've got a note into the good people at County Comm to see what they have to say about this.

4. is my latest attempt. It's a Tac Compass, also by County Comm. This bad boy is tiny. But it does appear to meet my need of being a functional compass. For now, I'm storing the compass in one of the pill containers on my key chain:

Like I said, it's itty bitty! If it can turn out to be reliable, the Tac compass may be the perfect EDC compass. It's almost invisible until you need it, and then can pull it out and be ready to un-lost yourself.

The question, of course, is can this little guy stand up to the punishment of living on my key chain? Time will tell.

Update: Both Silva and County Comm both got back to me within 24 hours and promised to replace / fix the compass for no charge. In the case of Silva, I need to send it back to Sweden, so yeah, we'll see how that goes. But both Silva and County Comm demonstrated quality customer service, which is much appreciated.

The Other Kind of White Christmas

We had some crazy Christmas weather in DC: 70°F and foggy. Like pea soup foggy. While our neighbor's little ones were no doubt tearing into presents, Shira and I took a surreal walk along the Potomac.

What's truly remarkable was just how fast conditions were changing. The two photos below are taken 2 minutes and 4 seconds apart, yet as you can tell, the visibility drops dramatically. In the first shot, you can partially make out the DC shoreline, in the next, you can't even see the river! That's not photo filter magic; that's actually what was going on.

And then there was National Airport. Gravely Point was as we'd never seen it before. Like the scene above, the fog shifted a number of times in front of us. One minute the airport was plainly visible, the next, it was gone. At one point we watched in awe as an approaching airplane simply disappeared into the fog. I can't imagine what it was like to be that pilot: you're staring at a clear runway and then poof! it's replaced by a wall of white.

And a few more bonus shots: seriously, I felt like we were walking through some exotic fantasy world.

Review: Star Wars: The Force Awakens

[SPOILER ALERT - SPOILER ALERT - SPOILER ALERT - SPOILER ALERT - SPOILER ALERT]

Two nights ago I watched Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and after mulling it over, I'm ready to weigh in with my two cents.

The movie gets good almost immediately. It doesn't hurt that hearing the open music score brings me back to being 10 years old and sitting in my Aunt and Uncle's house watching Star Wars on Laser Disc. Nearly everything seems spot on: the characters are great, the banter is top notch and the clever references to the previous episodes are brilliant.

I'm loving the Rey character. When she says I know how to run without you holding my hand, she's not just being quippy, she's showing that the writers have been paying attention. We live in the age of the Self Rescuing Princess, and Rey embodies these principles.

And seeing Han and Chewy together? C'mon, who couldn't be moved by that?

I was even OK with the fact the story arc of the movie seemed a pretty near match to Episode IV, the very first Star Wars movie. After the flop of latest set of movies, who could blame the writers for sticking with what works? Besides, the movie was fun. Why shouldn't we get a modern take on classic scenes like the Star Wars Cantina. Heck, they even dressed Rey like the original Luke:

The visuals are amazing, too. To see the various ships interact with snow, sand and water, is really quite remarkable. The killing was also quite a bit more realistic; I don't recall nearly this much gore in the original set of movies. But I suppose that's just a sign of the times.

But—you had to know there was a but coming—at some point in the movie all this recreating of the original Star Wars movie lost its charm for me. The moment: when we get the big reveal of the final mission. What does our band of rebels have to accomplish? Well, destroy the Death Star. Oh wait, they don't call it a Death Star. They call it, and I'm not making this up, a Star Killer. You're telling me that a 200 *million* dollar budget gets you "Star Killer?" And it gets worse from there: what does our team of rebels need to? Well, only exactly what they did in the first Star Wars movie, down to the need to lower the shields and do a trench attack of the one flaw the Death Star Star Killer designer's seemed to have neglected to address (will these engineers never learn!). And with only one snarky comment from Han Solo, that's exactly how the movie proceeds.

At some point imitation stops being the sincerest form of flattery, and just becomes imitation. I mean, was it laziness that caused the writers to bother coming up with anything unique in some of the most climatic scenes in the movie? Or was just fear that they'd mess it up. Better to go with a tried and true plot line than risk a Jar Jar Binks scenario. I'm not sure, but you can tell, it really bothered me. It just made the movie feel a bit tedious at that point, like they were just going through the motions.

OK, so there's my big criticism. Otherwise the movie was rock solid. And for the younger audience who may have never seen the original Star Wars, the whole Star Killer critique won't even mean anything. It's a fun movie and shows that modern day Star Wars films can be created. The big question is this: can Episode 8 be more than just another clone?

Inspired by Malcolm Gladwell: 6 Tools to Help Slay the Giant

I really enjoyed Malcolm Gladwell's David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. To help crystallize the points I took away from the book, I've written up a terse list summarizing them. See his book for all the details.

Without further ado I give you: 6 Tools to Help Slay the Giant:

1. We have a hard time telling what's a strength and what's a weakness. Find yours. Find your giant's.
2. We assume that a lot of something is good and lacking something is bad, when the opposite can be true. What are you lacking? What does the giant have a lot of?
3. The underdog need not follow the rules. Giants love the rules and are often optimized to win the game within them. What rules or conventions can you ignore?
4. Too much of a good thing turns into a bad thing. See #1 and #2.
5. Don't assume people will act rationally. The giant thinks he knows how you're going to behave. Prove him wrong.
6. A difficulty can take a person in one of two directions: it can harm them, or it can form a challenge that when overcome makes them even stronger. What difficulties can or did you turn into a strength building exercise?

Review: David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

The first time I picked up Malcom Gladwell's David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants I promptly put it down. Why read a book that you know you're going to agree with? Consider that the very premise of my day job is that with your idea and my coding skills, we can conquer tech giants everywhere. Or that my blog has a whole section focused on feel-good underdog stories. Even activities like being a foster parent are done with an eye towards showing that one family can make a difference against the colossal problem of child neglect and abuse. So I hardly needed a book telling me that little could beat big; this I knew.

What an idiot I was.

I just finished listening to David and Goliath, and I'm glad to report that it's more than worth your time. Gladwell isn't just interested in recounting underdog stories. Though there is plenty of that, and as usual, he nails it. But he goes further: picking apart the tales to see what makes them tick. As is typical in Gladwell's work, he cleverly weaves together totally disparate threads, from a girl's basketball team to a French town that defies the Nazi's, to make his point.

As if that weren't enough, Gladwell seems to veer into territory that's essentially custom written for me. After a chapter that pretty much explains my college experience, he launches into a chapter on dyslexia, a learning disability I have first hand experience with. His discussion about how being a slow learner in some areas can, in the long run, help you be successful in others wasn't just an interesting theory; it was a description my academic career.

There's no doubt that if you find yourself in an underdog situation, you best get yourself Gladwell's book and start reading in a hurry. He definitely has key insights into what the David's of the world can do to come out on top.

I, however, have been thinking about the Goliath side of the equation of late. Bare with me, as the analogy sort of breaks down. Consider that as I was listening to Gladwell's book, we had both the Paris and San Bernardino attacks happen. In this situation, the US fits the profile of the seemingly invincible Goliath, and ISIS (or is it ISIL or Daesh?) fits the role of the underdog, David.

Goliath appears to hold the advantage: he's huge, well equipped and makes quite the show of force. David, for his part, is opportunistic, using a fighting style that Goliath simply never considered. We know how the story goes.

While I can appreciate why it's tempting to respond to these attacks with draconian polices or outrageous shows of force, I can also see how these can serve to benefit the bad guys. As Gladwell's book points out, it's these sort of tactics that have historically helped the underdog, not defeated it.

I won't claim to have the answers for how to deal with ISIS from a domestic terrorism perspective. But man, it sure would be nice to learn the lessons of history and not fall for into the traps other giants have. And Gladwell's book can absolutely help in this department.