heading off to vegas for a week for work. which is about four days too long to be in vegas.
great article about using rock, paper, scissors to decide who gets a big account:
Takashi Hashiyama, president of Maspro Denkoh Corporation, an electronics company based outside of Nagoya, Japan, could not decide whether Christie’s or Sotheby’s should sell the company’s art collection, which is worth more than $20 million, at next week’s auctions in New York.
He did not split the collection - which includes an important Cézanne landscape, an early Picasso street scene and a rare van Gogh view from the artist’s Paris apartment - between the two houses, as sometimes happens. Nor did he decide to abandon the auction process and sell the paintings through a private dealer.
Instead, he resorted to an ancient method of decision-making that has been time-tested on playgrounds around the world: rock breaks scissors, scissors cuts paper, paper smothers rock.
Officials from the Tokyo offices of the two auction houses were informed of Mr. Hashiyama’s request on a Thursday afternoon in late January.
They were told they had until a meeting on Monday to choose a weapon. The right choice could mean several million dollars in profits from the fees the auction house charges buyers (usually 20 percent for the first $200,000 of the final price and 12 percent above that).
“The client was very serious about this,” said Jonathan Rendell, a deputy chairman of Christie’s in America who was involved with the transaction. “So we were very serious about it, too.”
Kanae Ishibashi, the president of Christie’s in Japan, declined to discuss her preparations for the meeting. But her colleagues in New York said she spent the weekend researching the psychology of the game online and talking to friends, including Nicholas Maclean, the international director of Christie’s Impressionist and modern art department.
Mr. Maclean’s 11-year-old twins, Flora and Alice, turned out to be the experts Ms. Ishibashi was looking for. They play the game at school, Alice said, “practically every day.”
“Everybody knows you always start with scissors,” she added. “Rock is way too obvious, and scissors beats paper.” Flora piped in. “Since they were beginners, scissors was definitely the safest,” she said, adding that if the other side were also to choose scissors and another round was required, the correct play would be to stick to scissors - because, as Alice explained, “Everybody expects you to choose rock.”
Sotheby’s took a different tack. “There was some discussion,” said Blake Koh, an expert in Impressionist and modern art at Sotheby’s in Los Angeles who was involved in the negotiations with Maspro. “But this is a game of chance, so we didn’t really give it that much thought. We had no strategy in mind.”
…
Two experts from each of the rival auction houses arrived at Maspro’s Tokyo offices, where they were shown to a conference room with a very long table and asked to sit facing one another, Mr. Rendell said. Each side’s experts had an accountant from Maspro sitting with them.
Instead of the usual method of playing the game with the hands, the teams were given a form explaining the rules. They were then asked to write one word in Japanese - rock, paper or scissors - on the paper.
After each house had entered its decision, a Maspro manager looked at the choices. Christie’s was the winner: scissors beat paper.
…
Auction houses give each sale a code name to identify it. Christie’s is sticking with “Scissors.”
good thing: duck season at the film festival. really sweet fun little fantastic film. sort of a “breakfast club” if shot by jim jarmusch. really great. go see it if you can!
bad thing: missing princess of mount ledang for NO GOOD REASON. hmc and i were ready to see it, had our whole night planned around it, actually left early enough to have a nice leisurely dinner at cafe tao and then get to the theatre on time, and make it there with time to spare, only to find out that we had MISSED THE FILM BY TWO HOURS. because we thought it started at ten. but it started at EIGHT.
somehow, we had convinced ourselves that it started at ten. not eight. why look at the tickets when you know the facts?
this is what we missed:
being stupid is not a curse, it’s a malady.
there’s no malevolent source making you do things wrong when you’re stupid. there’s no one to blame but yourself.
dammit.
bad education: we compensated by watching almodovar’s latest film instead. which was good. very clever plot, and gael garcia bernal looks good in heels, too.
for the first time since i moved to sunny california, they made me come in to get my picture taken for my driver’s license renewal.
this is a big thing.
considering that you usually renew by mail, this one picture determines what image you’ll be pushing off as ‘yourself’ for the next twelve years. think about it. it’s the gold standard. it’s the picture that you point to and say, “hey, this is me. i look like this, so you can go ahead and let me into the club/sell me some beer/let me look at the strippers.”
how do you plan for such a thing? what do you want to look like? be sure to make multiple appointments, in case you get a zit, break out with a rash, or get stuck in the forehead with an ice pick! that way you can wait until it hopefully goes away, or you figure out some jaunty hat configuration to hide the ice pick. perhaps a very large beret? why not throw in a stripey french scarf as well, to complete the charade?
what does one wear? do you wear a simple t-shirt, to put a ‘punk rock i don’t give a damn’ image? or maybe you pull out your ‘frankie say relax’ shirt? perhaps instead you wear only things you’ve acquired at the pirate supply store? holding a sextant, you raise your looking glass, and strike an “arrgh, thare she blows, that moving van entering me lane!” look.
do you wait until right after you get a haircut? if so, what if it’s not right? or too short? do you want to be a 40-something skinhead-type in the future? if not, will it be too long? is it better to be a 40-something hippy?
alas, i don’t know. you go there, you wait in line, listening to guys making fun of old people trying to pass the vision test, and then suddenly you’re up, they call your letter-number: F318! it’s like the lottery! or at least bingo. or maybe they’ve sunk your battleship. they grab your form and your $25 bucks, and send you shuffling off to the photo line, and then a hasty digital signature, sweaty thunbprint, and disorienting flash later, it’s all over.
and you don’t even know how it came out, since they send it to you later.
i hope my beret was on straight.
one night after possibly swearing off movies forever, nothing restores your faith in cinema than a screening of a hitchcock silent film classic, blackmail, with live accompaniment by the alloy orchestra.
everyone commence your devious hand wringing and wild-eyed looks!
this is how i felt after seeing this sf film festival entry:
bleeeeeeeeEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRggggggh.
if this is the state of modern cuban independent cinema, be frightened for cuba. lord knows that we don’t need more bad student horror films, and we certainly don’t need terrible andrew lloyd webber style musicals that even make alw look good (or bad? can you even do that, make him look worse by association?).
the third director’s piece was not bad, if only by the fact that he was talented enough to make digital video look not shitty. and the nudity and sex didn’t hurt.
looks like cc felt the same way, although she fled during the musical like i wanted to. i stayed and ended up with a stomachache. from being assaulted with badness.
having the sound way TOO LOUD didn’t help either.
budding filmmakers, if your movie sucks, turning the volume up doesn’t make it suck less. in fact, it actually makes it SUCK MORE.
who would have thought that the better film would have been the gripping tale of a female soviet combine operator?
from the sporting news (i know, i know):
Brian Roberts first tried on his newfangled contact lenses about an hour before the Orioles’ last spring training game in Florida. He ripped three hits on a day his teammates groused about the difficulties of seeing the ball in the bright sun shining from a cloudless sky.
A longtime wearer of contacts, Roberts needed no persuading afterward to keep the new lenses, even if they make him look like some wild-eyed creature from a science fiction film. After a monster start — he entered the week hitting .444 with five homers — they might have to be pried away from him.
Plenty has been said about performance-enhancing drugs this spring. Well, get ready for a new wave of performance enhancers, only these do not cause side effects and are not subject to suspensions. Known as performance-enhancing contact lenses, they were designed to help hitters pick up the seams on the ball better and to protect the eyes from the sun.
…
Seven years in the making by Nike and Bausch & Lomb, the lenses — which will be known in the retail world as MaxSight — are so new they have made their way only into a few major league clubhouses so far.
But for now, the version that’s part orange and yellow with a hint of red — amber, to be precise — remains mainly in the testing stages for the pros.
…
“It helps your eyes relax instead of squinting all the time,” Graves says, “and that helps relax the rest of your body.”
…
The gray-greens — used in stationary sports; the ambers are geared for speed sports — allow golfers to better differentiate the shades of green on a course.
Golfer Justin Leonard has a pair of sunglasses with gray-green lenses, and he told Nike he is able to separate out every blade of grass. For baseball players, because amber blocks out blue light, “visual noise” to vision experts, red colors, such as a baseball’s seams, are accentuated.
There are medical advantages as well to wearing the lenses, which basically are soft contacts with a tint that has been scientifically developed. While light can leak through sunglasses, through the opening between the frame and the eyes, performance-enhancing contacts sit on the pupils and better protect them from the sun.
Because baseball players are exposed to so much sunlight, some of them — Timlin, for one — develop a condition called pterygium that, essentially, causes a callus-type film to form on the cornea, leading to dryness in the eyes.
…
When MaxSight hits the market this summer, the sets will be sold at vision care centers, not sporting goods stores. They will be available in prescription and nonprescription lenses and will cost about the same as regular contact lenses. They have a life of about three to four weeks, depending on how often they are worn.
…
While it seems hitters would gain a bigger advantage from the lenses, there’s an edge or two that can be gained by pitchers. For one, pitchers can’t wear sunglasses on the mound, so the performance-enhancing contacts give them a way to fight the sun’s glare. Just as important, there can be an intimidation factor: Imagine looking out at a pitcher and seeing two bright amber eyes staring back.
“They make you look kind of evil,” Graves says. “Hitters might look at you like you’re possessed.”
Until the night lenses are available, anyway. Those are expected to be lighter and a little less menacing-looking. Roberts, for one, also expects them to be much more popular.
“Because so many games are played at night, I’m not sure if these will take off,” he says of the amber version. “But the most popular ones would be the ones in the works for night games. There won’t be a phenomenon until then.”
reports that too much information is worse than getting stoned:
Far from boosting productivity, the constant flow of messages and information can seriously reduce a person’s ability to focus on tasks, the study of office workers found.
Eighty volunteers were asked to carry out problem solving tasks, firstly in a quiet environment and then while being bombarded with new emails and phone calls. Although they were told not to respond to any messages, researchers found that their attention was significantly disturbed.
Alarmingly, the average IQ was reduced by 10 points - double the amount seen in studies involving cannabis users. But not everyone was affected by to the same extent - men were twice as distracted as women.
“If left unchecked, ‘info-mania’ will damage a worker’s performance by reducing their mental sharpness,” says Glenn Wilson, a psychiatrist at the University of London, UK, who carried out the study, sponsored by Hewlett-Packard. “This is a very real and widespread phenomenon.”
Losing sleep
Wilson adds that working amid a barrage of incoming information can reduce a person’s ability to focus as much as losing a night’s sleep.
great. not that i stay up late reading emails or anything. ever.
dumb things i do because i’m stupid:
this is why they make me stay home and watch tv.
man, this autostitching program kicks ass. it’s effortless. and it’s free!
also, a jumble of my closet office:
am i up in tahoe for the last fully open weekend of the season?
no, i am here thinking about space.
not the final frontier. not the mars rovers. not the aborted dart mission. and certainly not seti. (although oddly enough, one of the bars in vail was named “bart and yeti’s”)
i’m thinking about space around us. j & s downstairs have bought a place in bernal and are moving out. which makes me the top dog in the apartment (or is that longest sucker?), the tenant with the most senority. now i’ll get all of the dancing girls and the fresh bread that comes with positions of such high stature. at least that’s what they tell me on tv, right? it’s the american dream!
actually, what’s interesting is the possibility of moving into their apartment downstairs. why would i want to move down a floor and no longer be on the top floor apartment giving up my sunny sunny views of bernal hill?
space.
they’ve got the only two bedroom apartment in the building. we visited and got a good look at the place today, and man, is it bigger. not only an extra bedroom bigger, but a bigger kitchen bigger. and a huge ass closet bigger. as if my closet office extended through and connected up with the hall closet. because that’s exactly what theirs does. wow.
suddenly instead of being cramped from too much stuff in too little space, we’d have an honest kitchen with a large nook, a bedroom that could just be a bedroom, a living room for living, and a whole other room that could be an office. or hold that glacier-sized drafting table. or the five thousand books we have in our house. and the vinyl. and the cd’s. and the buffalo head. and the giant squid.
wow.
so why not? i don’t know. i went down there, and i wasn’t BANG! excited about moving down there. it’s a little darker from being one floor down, but also, it’s just not quite as pretty as our place. we’ve got french doors between two of the rooms, whereas they’ve got big ugly solid doors there. they have twice as many kitchen cabinets, but ours have glass doors on them. their bathroom hutch is more functional but made of 70’s fugly-wood. they don’t have the beautiful wedgewood stove like i have.
malcolm gladwell would tell me, blink-style, to trust my gut and not move in. on the other hand he also talks about where your gut reaction might be wrong and you need to work around it.
but the space! i have to remember that now hmc’s finally convinced me that we have too much stuff and that we really do need to rent a storage space, that the extra bedroom is extra space for living and not for keeping more crap. (yes, i know that we shouldn’t need that. with all that storage in the garage, who needs an extra storage space as well? oh yeah, you try stuffing two apartments’ worth of crap from two different cities back into one apartment and see how you like it. and don’t burp. because that’d be rude.)
inevitably you think of creature comforts, and the lion who says, “we need space to live! we need space to feel that we are part of the world and not a kind of piece of object in a box!”
but what if it’s a really pretty sunny box?
after eating yummy sushi with xz/mad, rlv/mlv/rozilla, we stopped and ate gelato.
hmc got chocolate/coconut, xz chocolate/mango, and mad chocolate/hazelnut. me being contrary, i opted for strawberry/pineapple.
yums all around, but later i kept wondering, what the hell is gelato, anyway? how is it different from ice cream? and how is it different from sorbet? and what about sherbet?
alas, wikipedia explains it all:
more interestingly, i also found out that:
thanks, iron lady, for your soft tasty treats which contrasted with your conservative policies! and to think that we thought that ronnie was the softy…
there’s nothing slower
while driving on highway five
than trucks passing trucks
also:
taste of india
serves yummy food to even
ed begley jr.
(yes, we did see ed begley jr. and his son (ed begley jr. jr.?) at taste of india. no, i didn’t check the parking lot to see if he was driving his prius.)
caught stephen chow’s new film, kung fu hustle today at the arclight. pretty fucking hilarious. i probably liked shaolin soccer a little better, but this was still great. plus, they totally rip off the burly brawl scene from matrix reloaded. and i love the busby berkeley-type gangster dancing scene in the beginning.
we traveled down to lost angels today to attend our cousin’s wedding.
when i say “we traveled,” i mean hmc drove down yesterday, while i flew down today (having walked through the pouring rain to bart). and when i say “our cousin,” i mean hmc’s second cousin. whatever that means.
hmc’s related because these cousins come from her grandpa’s sister’s side of the family. all i can remember is that they seem to have a completely different last name, and that we never see them at all.
i vaguely remember them coming to our wedding. then again, i vaguely remember a lot of things from my wedding day.
however, i do vividly remember their wedding gift.
of all the useless things we got for our wedding, this one tops the cake. a christian wedding statue.
This beautiful white porcelain Circle of Love statue is a wonderful gift to give to a couple for a wedding, anniversary, or any occasion. The Circle of Love couple statue is entwined in itself to create a strikingly beautiful and simple image of unity and togetherness forever. Standing at 7.25 inches, this Circle of Love statue makes a great cake topper that can be then used as a statue in the home. Gift boxed.it’s not like we weren’t registered anywhere. macy’s, rei, pottery barn, and even williams-sonoma for the hoity-toity types.
but what did we get? a circle of love couple.
now, with the second cousin getting married, it’s finally a chance for sweet retribution! sure, you’re registered likewise at the normal places, but who says i need to buy you what you want? maybe a wifi ambient bunny or a hello kitty camcorder is what you didn’t know you really needed? or even better, how about true images, the bible for teen girls, when you need to talk about oral sex with your thirteen-year old daughter, but in a biblical context?
alas, after being there and seeing her so happy on her big day, as well as her being so touched that we attended, i realized that wedding days are not days to exact petty revenges for christian ceramic figurines.
enjoy your hand blender, second cousin and second cousin-in-law(-in-law?)!
freaky ny times article about how food companies are adding chemicals identified by gene sequencing that make you think you’ve tasted something salty or sweet to reduce sodium or sugar content in foods:
Several big food and beverage companies are looking at a new ingredient in the battle for health-conscious consumers: a chemical that tricks the taste buds into sensing sugar or salt even when it is not there.
Kraft Foods, Nestlé, Coca-Cola and Campbell Soup are all working with a biotechnology company called Senomyx, which has developed several chemicals, most of which do not have any flavor of their own but instead work by activating or blocking receptors in the mouth that are responsible for taste. They can enhance or replicate the taste of sugar, salt and monosodium glutamate, or MSG, in foods.
By adding one of Senomyx’s flavorings to their products, manufacturers can, for instance, reduce the sugar in a cookie or salt in a can of soup by one-third to one-half while retaining the same sweetness or saltiness.
…
Unlike artificial sweeteners, Senomyx’s chemical compounds will not be listed separately on ingredient labels. Instead, they will be lumped into a broad category - “artificial flavors” - already found on most packaged food labels.
…
Executives say that a taste receptor or family of receptors on the tongue or in the mouth are responsible for recognizing a taste. Using the human genome sequence, the company says, it has identified hundreds of those taste receptors. Its chemical compounds activate the receptors in a way that accentuates the taste of sugar or salt. It is still experimenting to determine the most potent compounds, its chief scientist, Mark Zoller, said.
While food safety experts applaud efforts to reduce salt, MSG and sugar, they expressed concerns about the new chemicals, saying that more testing needed to be done before these were sold in food.
But Senomyx maintains that its new products are safe because they will be used in tiny quantities.
…
Since Senomyx’s flavor compounds will be used in small proportions (less than one part per million), the company is able to bypass the lengthy F.D.A. approval process required to get food additives on the market. Getting the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association status of generally recognized as safe, or GRAS, took Senomyx less than 18 months, including a 3-month safety study using rats. In contrast, the maker of the artificial sweetener sucralose spent 11 years winning F.D.A. approval and is required to list the ingredient on food labels.
Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, endorsed Senomyx’s ability to reduce salt, sugar and MSG, but cautioned against a new chemical entering the food supply without rigorous testing. “A three-month study is completely inadequate,” he said. “What you want is at least a two-year study on several species of animals.”
Senomyx responded that in contrast to artificial sweeteners, which are used at levels of 200 to 500 parts per million, its flavorings would be added in such small quantities that they would pose no safety risk. These low-use levels are also what allow Senomyx’s chemicals to be classified as artificial flavors.
Detroit Pistons guard Richard Hamilton (32) takes a shot with his headband covering his eyes and sinks it for two points against the Washington Wizards’ Gilbert Arenas, from left, Etan Thomas and Steve Blake (2) Wednesday, April 6, 2005, in Auburn Hills, Mich. The Pistons beat the Wizards 105-93.
Relationship to Deliver Open Storage Technology for Information on Demand
Offers Lifeline to Clients Locked in by EMC
IBM and ******* ********* today announced a strategic storage relationship to drive information on demand solutions and to expand IBM’s portfolio of storage solutions, already one of the largest and most advanced sets of storage and information management products in the industry.
As part of the relationship, IBM and ****** will enter into an original equipment manufacturing (OEM) agreement that will enable IBM to sell IBM branded solutions based on ******* *********(TM) unified and open network attached storage (NAS) and iSCSI/IP SAN solutions, including NearStore® and the ****** V-Series Systems, as well as associated software offerings. International Data Corp. (IDC) recently announced that ****** was the revenue share leader in both NAS and iSCSI for calendar year 2004(1). Under this agreement, IBM will reach into more countries than any other OEM reseller for ******.
if anyone could buy us, ibm could buy us. sure, we’re big, but they’re fricking huge. they just got all that thinkpad money from lenovo, not that they need it anyway.
maybe i better get some suits that fit, too…
i was in vail for a “business trip” this weekend.
“business trip” meaning an excuse to go out to colorado and take oracle out for a ski day in vail, thus being synonymous with “boondoggle”. but as long as it means a free trip to vail, who’s quibbling over semantics?
as we landed in colorado springs on sunday, it was 81 degrees. in march. is that normal? unfortunately, from the moment i set foot outside the airport, i had a splitting headache. i’m guessing it’s from the altitude, since it’s like 7000 feet high up there to start with. i’ve been out there once before and didn’t have any sort of problem, but somehow this time it hit me pretty hard.
on the plus side, i can safely empathize with people who get migranes. it hit me full on during dinner with everyone, where it was so painful that it felt like someone was pushing my head down and screwing my face tighter and tighter so i couldn’t see. then my buffalo ribeye steak came, and all i wanted to do was throw up.
if anyone else wants tips on how to entertain clients, just drop me a line.
oh, and in case you’re wondering, alcohol helps. except that it doesn’t. at all.
i’m sure it was the dryness as well, leading to dehydration. i was drinking water like a newbie at burning man, and i can assure you that i was pissing clear like a good little burner. yet, to no avail.
i did hear an anecdote that the army had recently done a test to see the effects of altitude on people, shipping recruits up here and making them do workouts and measuring the effects.
then they gave them viagra.
which helped, apparently.
i don’t know the details. i don’t want to know the details. this clearly falls under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” doctorine.
fortunately, by the monday morning my headache had mostly subsided, so i was able to go boarding sans viagra.
all i have to say about vail: OH MY GOD.
oh, and: it’s huge. really HUGE.
it’s the largest ski resort in the united states. the only thing bigger in north america is whistler. which is two glaciers. vail is like three tahoe resorts stuck together. 5,289 skiable acres. base elevation of 8,120 feet, going up to the summit at 11,570 feet. 193 trails, with the longest run being four miles long. huge open back bowls that go on forever. really long runs that are just so wide that you can cry.
oh, and since it was a monday in the spring, there was nobody there, either.
fucking incredible.
i did take two pretty good tumbles. one where i flipped head over heels, landing face first in the powder. and then rinse, repeat. in fact, on either the first or second one of those successive falls, i fell so hard i lost two lug screws out of my binding, such that i only had one left on my left foot, which now had an exciting pivot action. thank goodness one of the guys had a portable screwdriver thing, so i was able to swap a screw from my right and just go 2-2 the rest of the day.
all in all, it was great. i survived with nothing more than some bruised knees and sore neck muscles. oh, and two less screws.
it’s a good thing/bad thing that we got out when we did, early this morning. it dumped a foot of snow in colorado springs right after we took off from the airport.
my agenda today while in vail:
