The Rantings of Larry W. Hui

Recently I finished the book SuperFreakonomics, the explosive follow up to the smash hit Freakonomics (that is actually what it says on the book cover). Though Freakonomics was highly recommended by several people, I didn’t read it until last year and thought it was pretty good. I figured the sequel would also be compelling.

I was sort of right. I don’t remember the original book’s structure that much but I do believe a major complaint was that the chapters don’t really work together. This is also a problem with SuperFreakonomics and the whole thing basically feels like a series of short essays on various topics. Of course some economics are applied to the writing so it remains interesting… but it didn’t really work for me a whole.

The chapters talk about about prostitution, whether people are altruistic, finding terrorists via equation with data about a person’s life (this was really disappointing because it started out super interesting, then they say they have a key factor that works great, but they can’t tell us what it is because of national security), why you should wash your hands often, car safety, and global warming.

Those topics are everywhere and so is the book. In the end, the thing was about 240 pages plus a lot of footnotes and sources, but the parts never added up to anything. Too bad. (I have the book and the original Freakonomics if anyone wants to borrow it)

Now I am reading Bridge to Terabithia. It is a fairly short (130 pages, with some drawings) kids book that people say is good. It’s also a recently made movie. After that, maybe Malcolm Gladwell’s newish book of his compiled New Yorker articles (I expect that to be as disjointed as SuperFreakonomics).

Recently I’ve taken an interest in my inability to smell things, and more importantly my reduced sense of taste that goes with it. After some research (including first hand accounts!) the cheapest thing to do right now is probably Neti Pot myself.

That means I stick a teapot looking thing filled with saline (salt water) up one nostril while my head is turned sideways, then the fluid works its way out the other nostril all the while clearing up my sinus cavity (I think). At the very minimum Oprah and other people say I’ll feel less congested so that will be nice. So that’s going to be soon because I’m really curious.

This weekend we went snowboarding at Alpine Valley, a short hour drive. It was my third time snowboarding (first time with my own board) and the end result was: mostly failure.

I continue to have problems with my toe edge and cannot go from straight downhill to toe. I also cannot get off the lift without falling. Near the middle of the day my body starting giving up and I benched myself before I met death. I’m hoping that this will be like riding a bike, where I have a great moment of epiphany and never forget how to do it again. We’ll see.

In the world of twitter, I have decided to change the format of my award winning whatlarryeats. Not only will I record what I eat, but also approximate costs. Through this I hope to track exactly how much I spend on food, and also if eating at home offers significant savings over dining out. So join the fun if you like twitter and finding out what I eat daily.

In the world of electronic entertainment, I spent part of yesterday watching Mass Effect 2 being played. It was clearly not a good use of my time, but even more disturbing was I starting getting a headache which never happens to me and games. Maybe it was because I wasn’t playing, or maybe it was C-Dog’s jerky play style.

Anyway I starting examining the possibility of me playing Mass Effect 2. The story was slightly interesting and I hear it’s a trilogy (more like thrillogy, M I Rite?) so maybe it would be fun. I suspect I could run ME1 and 2 on my PC with crappy graphic details which probably wouldn’t be worth it. Too bad.

Also Bioshock2 comes out very soon and I doubt it will run great. I guess I will stick with Team Fortress 2 for now.

Most of yesterday (well, 1.5 hours anyway) was spent observing the apple news conference in which the iPad was revealed. I was somewhat excited just because it was Apple but after the announcement, not so much.

Basically the thing is a 10″ ipod touch with a faster processor. The price of 500 was somewhat enticing but then I found out it was for 16gb of space and WiFi only.

The presentation itself was somewhat brutal. While I didn’t watch it (read blogs instead since all the video streams I found were terrible quality), the play by play got more and more boring. Like my twitter said, at one point for about 10 minutes they were showing their word processor/spreadsheet program. I’m sure it was as boring watching it as it was for me reading it.

The other big thing for iPad was the games. I love games but I have yet to find a Touch/iPhone game that I’ve wanted to play for more than 15 minutes. As a gaming platform I don’t see many people wanting to use an iPad for a deep gaming experience.

I was holding out until the very end because Apple usually does the “one more thing…” which is always a treat. I was hoping for a real killer app like “the thing has an integrated HDTV tuner”. This time no such announcement took place and instead the presentation just ended. Bleh.

The whole presentation seemed a bit like the MacBook Air one. It was pretty looking and all that, but ultimately was inconsequential.

So while I’m sure the iPad will find a place in the market, it will mostly be a novelty/secondary computing device. Not supporting Flash is a dealbreaker for me from a usability standpoint. Compared to a netbook at about half the price, I’ll take the netbook and buy a touch with the leftover money.

Also the past 2 days (and including today) has been a woot-off! at woot.com. In times past the woot-off has been famous for selling borderline junk with some gems, then having the much coveted Bag of Crap, which is basically a grab bag of legendary proportions.

This time though the stuff is mostly junk. The only thing I’ve seen that I would remotely want were some Shun knives, which I guess are pretty well regarded in the knife world. But I keep checking in, hoping I’ll catch that Bag of Crap.

But that is a far cry from what woot used to be. I think the economy and the rest of the internet caught up with them. Oh well, they had a nice 2 year run. I still enjoy shirt.woot though, from which about half of my shirts are from.

Yesterday I finished the book Destined to Reign, written by one Joseph Prince. It was lent to me by C-Dog a very long time ago and I finally got around to it.

I had listened to one Prince sermon before (also from C-Dog) and skimmed some of the smaller, pamphlet type books. My thoughts were that he was a prosperity gospel type guy mixed with some sheer lunacy (such as predicting when Jesus would return). But since C-Dog is a trusted source I read the book.

The book is about 300 pages long and like most religious books I thought it was fairly long winded. The same central points were repeated over and over in the various chapters with very little variation. To sum up:

New covenant is better than old, or covenant of grace vs law.  I actually enjoyed these parts because for me it’s easy to forget. If the book was just about this and 100 pages long, I think I would have enjoyed it more.

God as a giver. Somewhat similar to the first point, this focused on God’s redemptive plan and how he first loved us, etc. Also attached to this was how God only wants good things for you, and doesn’t cause disease, etc. Those are from the devil. Also enjoyable.

That’s about it, the entire book is about that. What I found objectionable was some of the illustrations, in which interpretations of the bible are presented with authority when several interpretations would be valid. In addition, maybe it is me not used to the writing style but parts of the book seemed boastful. Several situations are presented with what seems to be a “I’m great, I prayed, and God did this” tone. Seemed slightly off to me.

So to conclude the book was really good for the first half or so then got repetitive. Also I was looking for some prosperity gospel bits but couldn’t find anything blatant so I’ll let it slide.

I will go ahead and say that Joseph Prince is my favorite preacher from Singapore. I suspect I would disagree with him on some more specific topics but they weren’t really presented or discussed in this book. Lucky for me, he has a new book coming out early February.

Reading next: the rest of Super Freakonomics.

Some stuff we did this weekend:

Hurt Locker: Well made movie about bomb defusing in Iraq. Like all good war movies, it’s not about the war at all but rather the people in it and why they get so crazy. I liked the movie overall but Jeremy Renner is a bit too pudgy faced for me. But that is a minor quibble. 7.5 out of 10.

The Pregnancy Pact: After listening to the radio we discovered that this “movie” would debut on Lifetime Saturday. We caught the rerun of it on Sunday. It is (very loosely, I would guess) based on that news story where supposedly a lot of high school girls agreed to get pregnant together so they could raise their kids as a group. As you can guess this Lifetime movie then goes through the usual ups and downs (mostly downs) as the parents find out, then the media, etc. The whole thing was formulaic and probably didn’t have to be 2 hours (prob 1.5 without commercials) long. But if I had nothing better to do, I’d say it was an ok discussion on the topic of teen pregnancy. Also, it was still better than New Moon. 3.5 out of 10

Had dinner Saturday at Sun Wah. 2nd time to their new location and they are starting to settle in a bit more. I got harsh denied on my special order chow fun I wanted to try (roast pork and peapod greens), so we just got the duck chow fun. It was pretty good, and we’ll probably order it again. We also got the peking duck, as usual, and had quite a bit of leftovers. We need hungrier friends. I also need more questions to ask the duck carver while they do their thing.

Finally played Dominion yesterday. I played Magic the Gathering back in the day (which I am constantly made fun of for… yet games like Settlers and especially Dominion aren’t that different) and rather enjoyed it. Like another game I’m really good at (dominoes), I think the crux of the game is setting up combo chains with your cards so once I figured that out I was rolling. I also enjoyed the deck content management aspect of the game. At the end I escaped with a victory over 2 other newbies and one seasoned vet. I would say the game is a buy except it’s literally all cards. I find it hard to justify the ~$35 price tag for a box of cards. And with 2 expansions, the full set is about 100 bucks. Kinda pricey.

I also got a used snowboard/bindings off Craigslist and paired it with new boots from Snowbird ski shoppe. I’m dubious that this investment will actually pay off but it’s fun to look at, for now. Worst case I’m pretty sure I can resell the stuff and recoup most of my investment.

This week promises to be exciting because we will be house sitting for my mother in law. That is +2 dogs to take care of, and as a small bonus her house is slightly closer to everything we go to (church, sg, work, gym, library). However her dogs don’t like to be left alone so we are on a ~5 hour timer every time we leave the house.