Hornblower and Aubrey

How much did C. S. Forester’s successful Horatio Hornblower series have to do with the launching of Patrick O’Brien’s even more successful Aubrey/Maturin series?

Back in the late 1980s a friend introduced me to Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey/Maturin novels. I started Master and Commander but did not get excited about the story and abandoned the book after a chapter or two. Some years later in an airport about to board a plane and desperate for something to read I picked up a copy of The Surgeon’s Mate. This time I was hooked. I devoured the first seventeen novels over the next few years, and then hung around the bookstore door impatiently as the rest were published, snatching first editions of the final three novels practically from the hands of the bookbinders.

After O’Brien’s death in 2000 I despaired. No more stories of life aboard wooden ships. Finally, I decided to try C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower stories. I had rejected the recommendation that I read Forester in my teens, partly because I thought the name Hornblower to be particularly silly and feared that the books might be satires or farces or worse. With low expectations I found a copy of Beat to Quarters (the US title of the first novel, published in the UK as The Happy Return). To my delight, the book was enjoyable.

The dynamic of Forester’s writing was quite different from O’Brien’s, of course. Forester was never the scholar of the era in terms of science, diplomacy, cuisine, and fashion that O’Brien proved himself to be, so the stories are not as rich and textured. Beyond that, Hornblower was a solitary creature, always alone in command, whereas Aubrey always had Maturin as a friend and confidante, thus providing the reader with a perspective that Forester could never give. We are aware of Hornblower’s internal agonies at times as he wrestles with decision, but we never hear him articulate issues nor explain himself.

Ironically, it’s Aubrey who seems the more self-assured of the two fictional captains. I’m not sure if this is the result of the divergent styles of the two writers or is somehow a contradictory consequence of our insight into Aubrey’s mind provided by the conversations with Maturin.

Anyway, after reading the Hornblower stories I reflected on the relationship between the two series. There is some evidence to suggest, purely circumstantially, that the suggestion to O’Brien that he write the Aubrey/Maturin stories was triggered by Forester’s passing. In the rest of this blog post I’ll outline the evidence.

In the author’s note that introduces The Far Side of the World, the tenth Aubrey/Maturin novel, O’Brien writes, referring to himself in the third person, “Some ten or eleven years ago a respectable American publisher suggested that he should write a book about the Royal Navy of Nelson’s time …” O’Brien was already known as a good writer with a particular interest in the era, so it would have been natural to suggest that he try his hand at writing such books.

The chronology provides some even stronger support for the hypothesis. Forester died in 1966 and the final Hornblower stories were published posthumously the next year. If the 1984 author’s note had been penned a few years before, then it might have referred to the time between 1967 and 1970, when Master and Commander appeared for the first time.

So while I have seen no documentary evidence to prove that O’Brien’s opportunity was urged on him by a publisher mindful of the success of Forester’s Hornblower books, it is no great stretch to connect the easily available dots and conclude that O’Brien was asked to fill the gap left by Forester’s passing.

Patch Management – Bits, Bad Guys, and Bucks!

(This article was originally published in 2003 by Secure Business Quarterly, a now-defunct publication.  Not having an original copy handy and not being able to refer people to the original site, I have retrieved a copy from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (dated 2006 in their archive).  The text of the original article is reproduced here for convenience.)

After the flames from Slammer’s attack were doused and the technology industry caught up on its lost sleep, we started asking questions. Why did this happen? Could we have prevented it? What can we do to keep such a thing from happening again?

These are questions we ask after every major security incident, of course. We quickly learned that the defect in SQL Server had been identified and patches prepared for various platforms more than six months before, so attention turned to system administrators. Further inquiry, however, shows that things are more complex.

There were several complicating factors that conspired to make success at patching this system problematical. First of all, there were several different patches out, none of which had been widely or well publicized. In addition, there were confusing version incompatibilities that made the patching of some systems into much larger endeavors, as chains of dependencies had to be unraveled and entire sets of patches applied and tested. And finally, to add insult to injury, at least one patch introduced a memory leak into SQL Server.

As if that weren’t enough, MSDE includes an invisible SQL Server.  MSDE comes with a component of Visual Studio, which made that product vulnerable even though it neither included an explicit SQL Server license nor any DBA visibility. That shouldn’t have added risk, except that some pieces of software were shipped with MSDE and other no-longer-needed parts of the development environment included. As we all know, many software products are shipped with development artifacts intertwined with the production code because disk space is cheaper than keeping track of and subsequently removing all of the trash lying around in the development tree. And those development tools are really useful when tech support has to diagnose a problem.

To compound the challenge, patches in general can’t be trusted without testing. A typical large environment runs multiple versions of desktop operating systems, say NT4, 2000, XP Home, and XP Pro. If the patch addresses multiple issues across several versions of a common application, you’re talking about a product that has about fifty configuration permutations. Testing that many cases represents significant time and cost.

Finally, there’s the sheer volume of patches flowing from the vendor community. There’s no easy way for an administrator to tell whether a particular patch is ‘really serious,’ ‘really, really, serious,’ or ’really, really, really, serious.’ The industry hasn’t yet figured out how to normalize all of the verbiage. Even so, knowing that a weakness exists doesn’t give any insight into how virulent a particular exploit of that weakness might prove to be. Slammer was remarkably virulent, but its patch went out to the systems community along with thousands of remedies for other weaknesses that haven’t been exploited nearly so effectively.

Unfortunately, an aggressive strategy of applying all patches is one that is uneconomical with the current operating model of the industry. Let’s look at some numbers. These numbers are benchmark numbers that are broadly typical of costs and performance in the entire industry, not specific to any individual company. The state of automation in the desktop OS world has improved dramatically in the last ten years. A decade ago an upgrade to a large population of desktop machines required a human visit to each machine. Today the automated delivery of software is dramatically superior, but not where it ultimately needs to be. Let’s say, for the purpose of argument, that automated patch installation for a large network is 90% successful.  (A colleague suggests that today a more realistic number is 80%, “even assuming no restriction on network capacity and using the latest version of SMS”; he characterized 90% as the “go out and get drunk” level of success.)  A person must visit each of the 10% of machines for which the automated installation failed. This person must figure out what went wrong and install the patch by hand. For a large corporate network with, say, 50,000 machines to be patched, that translates to 5,000 individual visits. A benchmark number for human support at the desktop is about $50 per visit. Thus, a required patch in a modern environment translates into a $250,000 expenditure. That’s not a trivial amount of money and it makes the role of a system manager, who faces tight budgets and skeptical customers, even more challenging.

The costs aside, how close to 100% is required to close a loophole? Informal comments from several CISOs suggest that Slammer incapacitated corporate networks with roughly 50,000 hosts by infecting only about two hundred machines. Thats 0.4%. With NIMDA, it was worse: one enterprise disconnected itself from the Internet for two weeks because it had two copies of NIMDA that were actually triggered. What can we do to make our systems less vulnerable and reduce both the probability of another Slammer incident and, more importantly, the harm that such an incident threatens? We can work together in the industry to improve the automated management of systems. Every 1% improvement in the performance of automated patch installation systems translates directly into $25,000 cash savings for the required patches in our example. An improvement of 9%, from 90% to 99%, translates into a savings of $225,000 for each patch that must be distributed. Do that a few times, and, as Everett Dirksen noted, ”pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”

Improving the effectiveness of patch application requires that we improve both our software packaging and our patch distribution and execution automation. After we improve packaging and distribution, we can figure out a way to easily and quickly tell what components reside on each system, ideally by asking the system to tell us. Databases get out of date but the system itself usually won’t lie. We can build automated techniques to identify all of the patches from all relevant vendors that need to be applied to a given system — and then apply them. We can either simplify our system configurations, which has obvious benefits, or figure out ways to ensure that components are better behaved, which reduces the combinatorial complexity of applying and testing the applied patches.

The methods and practices of the security industry, particularly the high technology security world, have been for years derived from those developed for national security problems. These are problems for which the cost of failure is so enormous, as in the theft or misuse of nuclear weapons, that failure is not an option. For this class of problem, the commercial practice of balancing risk and cost is impossible, except in the vacuous limiting case in which cost is infinite. Now we are working through practical security management in a commercial environment and we are beginning to get our hands around some of the quantitative aspects of the problems we face. If getting a patch out to all computers in our environment will cost us a quarter of a million dollars and we have X patches per year, then we have to weigh that cost against the cost of the harm suffered and the cleanup expense incurred if we don’t distribute all of the patches. It tells us to spend some money, though not an arbitrarily large amount; on improving the quality of our automated patch distribution and application processes, with an objective of absolute 100% coverage for automatic updates. It tells us to work for a better system of quantification of threat severity. It tells us to spend effort on strengthening our incident response capabilities.

2012 Five Borough Bike Tour – 6 May 2012

Last year I rode in the 2011 Five Borough Bike Tour and blogged about it.  The photo service that took pictures of riders got three very good pictures of me, which I purchased and published on my Picasa page, suitable for blackmailing me in the future .

I rode again in 2012 with the BronxWorks team (Tamara [unofficial captain], Jane, Declan, Julio, Josh, Cristina, and me).  We raised money for BronxWorks, a wonderful settlement house in the Bronx that runs programs to support homeless families with children.  Several of the riders on the BronxWorks team  volunteer in programs at the organization’s facilities in the Bronx.  All of the riders raised money to support the organization’s activities, including me.

(left to right) Marc, Tamara, Jane, Declan, Julio, Josh, and Cristina.

This year’s ride was on Sunday 6 May 2012.  The weather was cool and overcast in the morning, clearing and warming by mid-afternoon when I got home.  Conditions were perfect for the ride.  Cool enough to help riders dissipate the heat of the exertion, while clear and dry to keep the riders safe during the ride.

Unofficial captain Tamara rendezvoused with teammates Julio, Jane, and me in the Upper West Side at 6:20 AM.  Registration materials this year had to be picked up in person at South Street Seaport, something that Tamara had organized, so she brought Jane and me our identification bibs and rider numbers, which we donned on the street corner.  We then rode down to the starting point in TriBeCa, arriving at about 7:10 AM for the 7:45 AM start.

Starting ceremonies began at about 7:30 AM with a series of dignitaries addressing the crowd.  The starting gun, well, actually the starting bursts of flame, came at 7:45 sharp and we were off.

The 2012 Five Boro Bike Tour starting line from the charity riders’ starting area.

2012 Five Boro Bike Tour starting location – Church and Leonard

2012 Five Boro Bike Tour starting gun

One of the benefits of riding for an organized charity is the starting position.  The over-30,000 riders in the Five Borough Bike Tour are organized into several tiers.  The VIP tier of several hundred riders starts at the very front.  Right behind the VIP tier is the charity group, another several hundred riders whose sponsoring organization, in our case BronxWorks, has arranged for them to start next.  After that is the vast majority of riders.

Last year there were numerous points on the tour where traffic bottlenecked and we were forced to pause for long periods of time, standing still or walking our bikes.  Last year’s bottlenecks included the first mile or two after the start, the mile of Sixth Avenue before we entered Central Park, and somewhere on the BQE where construction forced the route onto a narrow ramp.  I know that one of my friends who rode last year in a non-charity group, spent over an hour after the starting gun before he got moving.

This year, by contrast, the bike tour operators implemented a collection of improvements to the starting process and the route that resulted in essentially no bottlenecks anywhere.  As a result our team finished fifteen minutes ahead of our finishing time from last year, despite two equipment mishaps.

The first mishap affected me in Central Park.  As we started a long descent I decided to shift from the low range to the high range on my 31-year-old Motobecane Jubile Sport.  The cable connecting the shift lever to the derailleur slipped loose and my chain popped off the gear and hung up around the axle of the crankshaft.  I pulled over and lost five minutes getting things sorted out.  I was soon back on the road.  I could still pedal fine, and I could shift with the rear derailleur, so I had a fine six-speed bike on which I could easily finish the ride.  At the same time I noticed a little vibration in my rear wheel that signaled that some of the spokes were loosening, a more alarming situation.

Aside – my road bike

At the BronxWorks rendezvous for the 2012 Five Boro Bike Tour, Marc’s 1981 Motobecane Jubile Sport.

Mine is a steel-framed road bike that I bought new in 1981 or 1982 and that I still ride to commute to work.  It’s a beautiful bike with gorgeous lines made possible by its steel construction and a lovely aquamarine paint job.  The old Motobecane company was a French maker of bicycles and motorscooters that went bankrupt in 1981, about the time that I bought the bike.  Their market niche in France was low-end, but in the US they were a premium brand catering to the upper end of the cycling crowd.  The Jubile Sport that I bought in 1981 (or 1982) when I was a grad student was a midrange road bike for the time.  It had very good components, though there were better ones, and a reasonably light frame, though there were lighter ones.  Today the bike is completely dated, but it remains an eye-catcher with its beautiful lines and color.

Rejoining the team

After crossing the Queensboro Bridge (aka the 59th Street Bridge aka the Ed Koch Bridge) I rejoined the team just outside the Astoria rest stop.  There one of my teammates, Declan, executed a miraculous set of repairs to my bike, restoring the front derailleur to functionality and sorting out the loose spokes in my rear wheel.  The result was a smoothly functioning bike that allowed me to finish my ride comfortably and without anxiety.

After the rest stop we resumed and rode across Queens and Brooklyn.  Along the way somewhere in Brooklyn Christina ran over some debris on the road and got a flat on her bike’s rear wheel.  The whole BronxWorks team stopped and, working together, made quick work of changing out the inner tube and reinflating the tire.  We were spinning down the road again within five minutes of the flat.  There was something stimulating about addressing the flat as a team, even though most of us did nothing more than stand by watch the action.

The rest of the ride to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and across to Staten Island, where the ride ended, was uneventful.  We took a break at the festival grounds at the end of the route and ate a box lunch provided as part of the charity rider package.  We then rode another three or four miles to the Staten Island Ferry terminus and boarded the John F. Kennedy, on which we rode back to Manhattan.

This year, rather than carrying our bikes on to the subway, we decided to ride up the west side bike path.  This was a bit confusing in the early stages, since the bike path is a bit incomplete and confusing near Battery Park, but we were able to navigate it.  The final fifteen minutes of the ride were, as a result, the same as my ride on the days when I commute to work by bicycle, which was curiously comforting.

Tamara, our unofficial team captain, used a rather cool GPS device to track the ride and distributed a wonderful map to the riders this morning. I captured it in Google Maps and include it here.

Here are some statistics about the ride from Tamara’s application:

• Duration: 3:19
• Distance: 38.29 miles
• Average speed: 11.5 mph (!!!)
• Maximum speed: 22.3 mph
• Pace: 5:11 minutes/mile
• Elevation gain: 6844 feet
• Elevation loss: 6909 feet

All in all, it was a lot of fun.  It was work, but except for the first seconds after my front derailleur mishap, I never felt like I was unlikely to be able to finish and when I was done I was very tired but quite content that I’d done a good thing.

I would like particularly to thank my sixteen incredibly generous donors (David, Ron, Igor, Michael, William, Maxine, Trevor, Hal, Steve, Jon, Stu, Satish, David, Silvia, Amy, and Lucy).  Thanks to you, homeless Bronx children and their families will have access to a range of wonderful supportive programs.

The Kindle Update

So 2011 represents my second year of Kindle use, and it’s been quite an eventful year. In 2011 I adopted a policy of not buying dead-tree books any more. And, while I had intended to sustain my use of the Nook, it didn’t really work out and I’m not even sure where my Nook is any more. I still like the Nook’s business model better than the Kindle’s, but my momentum is with the Kindle.

I bought 60 books for the Kindle in 2011 and, as before, read some but not all. I have been reading my Kindle library on a wide range of devices: on my Kindle, of course, as well as on Kindle software for our iPad, our two Android tablets, my Android cellphone, my wife’s iPhone, on all of our Macs, and on the Chrome browser. This really makes it much more attractive for me to continue to acquire books for the Kindle than for any other medium because my library is available to essentially any device I end up using.

Title	Author	Read
Fight Club: A Novel	Palahniuk, Chuck	Yes
Loyal Character Dancer	Xiaolong, Qiu	Yes
Using Google App Engine	Severance, Charles	Some
Programming Google App Engine	Sanderson, Dan	Some
The Next 100 Years	Friedman, George	Yes
The Devil in the White City	Larson, Erik
The Gun	Chivers, C. J.	Yes
The Innocents Abroad	Twain, Mark	Some
Unless It Moves the Human Heart	Rosenblatt, Roger
Practical Chess Exercises	Cheng, Ray	Some
They Are Us	Hamill, Pete	Some
Alone Together	Turkle, Sherry	Some
The Second Self	Turkle, Sherry
Anathem	Stephenson, Neal	Yes
The Mao Case	Xiaolong, Qiu	Yes
American Gods	Gaiman, Neil
Real-time Control of Walking	Donner, M.D.
A Short History of Nearly Everything	Bryson, Bill	Some
The Fifth Servant: A Novel	Wishnia, Kenneth
All Your Base Are Belong to Us	Goldberg, Harold
Quo Vadis	Sienkiewicz, Henryk	Yes
Berlin Noir by Philip Kerr | Summary & Study Guide	BookRags.com	Some
The Flaw of Averages	Savage, Sam L.	Some
The Age of Wonder	Holmes, Richard
Drive	Pink, Daniel H.
Nemesis	Roth, Philip
The Quiet War	McAuley, Paul J.
Symposium	Plato
The Republic	Plato
Among Others	Walton, Jo	Yes
Altered Carbon	Morgan, Richard K.
Bullfighting: Stories	Doyle, Roddy
Consider Phlebas	Banks, Iain M.	Yes
Germinal	Zola, Emile
JavaScript: The Definitive Guide	Flanagan, David	Some
JavaScript: The Good Parts	Crockford, Douglas	Some
Onward	Schultz, Howard, Joanne Gordon
Rule 34 (Halting State)	Stross, Charles
Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick	Dick, Philip K.	Some
The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh	Waugh, Evelyn
The Player of Games	Banks, Iain M.	Yes
The Quantum Story : A history in 40 moments	Baggott, Jim	Some
Uncle Tom’s Cabin	Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Wireless	Stross, Charles
Works of James Joyce	Joyce, James	Some
jQuery Cookbook (Animal Guide)	Lindley, Cody	Some
Studio Ghibli: The Films of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata	Odell, Michelle Le Blanc Colin	Some
Francis Galton: Pioneer of Heredity and Biometry	Bulmer, Michael	Some
The Great Stagnation	Cowen, Tyler	Yes
In the Garden of Beasts	Larson, Erik	Some
Debt: The First 5,000 Years	Graeber, David	Yes
Use of Weapons	BANKS, Iain M.	Yes
Exploring Online Games: Cheating Massively Distributed Systems	Hoglund, Greg, McGraw, Gary
The Children of the Sky	Vinge, Vernor
Ready Player One	Cline, Ernest
Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual	Pollan, Michael
Embers	Marai, Sandor
Reamde: A Novel	Stephenson, Neal
The Unlikely Spy	Silva, Daniel
Berlin Noir	Kerr, Philip	Yes

I had several interesting adventures with my kindle library this year, some of which I’ll summarize here.

Earlier in the year my brother-in-law recommended the book “Berlin Noir” to me. It is a trio of meticulously researched police procedurals set in Berlin. The first two are set in the early years of the Nazi era, while the third is set a few years after the end of the war. They all feature Bernie Gunther, a German ex-policeman turned private detective. Bernie quit the police force in disgust when the Nazis took over. Bernie isn’t a holier-than-thou boy scout – he’s not above the odd bit of vigilante justice and he is definitely looking out for himself whenever he can. But he has standards went out on his own when it became clear what was going on.

But I digress. After Gary told me about the books I went to the Kindle Store on my Kindle and ordered the book. It was delivered, at which point I realized that I’d been fooled. What I had bought was a study guide, like Cliff Notes, from a company called BookRags. I then looked for a Kindle edition of the book but did not find it. Some time later I did discover a Kindle edition and bought it. The Kindle edition is hard to find, however, and the obvious searches do not turn it up. And on the Kindle Store on the Kindle it was very easy to think I was buying the book when I was not. By the way, after finishing two of the three novels I browsed the study guide, which I found to be truly abominable. The glossary was full of inaccuracies and errors that indicated that the person who wrote it probably hadn’t read the book or had not read it carefully. Oh well.

Another adventure involved the reasons that I am now on my third Kindle device. The first Kindle, which was given to me as a Christmas present at the end of 2009, became a fixture of my life after a while. One day in 2010 I was flying to California on business. My seat, in coach, was close to the bathroom. At one point I got up to use the bathroom, leaving the Kindle on my seat. When I got back from the bathroom I found that the glass was cracked. Obviously someone waiting to use the bathroom had sat down on it and broken it. Oh well, when I got to California I got a new one at Best Buy and was reading again.

That Kindle lasted until March of 2011 when my wife and son and I went to Chile on vacation. My wife had taken to reading the New York Times on my Kindle while we traveled because it was the only way she could get the paper. She was walking with my son back from the lounge one day and accidentally dropped the Kindle into a decorative fountain in one of the lobbies. So I ordered a new one from Amazon and it was waiting at my apartment when we returned to New York. I was a bit crippled by the loss, but was able to keep reading on my laptop for the rest of the vacation.

The third, and most odd, adventure involved my own book. I have written a number of reviews of products on Amazon.com over the years and at one point in 2011 I wanted to find one to forward to a friend, so I searched for my own name. To my surprise I discovered that my book, which has been out of print since 1997 and only shows up as available used from non-Amazon sources, was listed as available as a Kindle book for an absurd price, over $80. Just to verify that it was my book, I bought a copy. It was, in fact. It looks like someone took the scan of the book that is available on Google Books and made a very low quality Kindle book out of it.

I wrote an email to Amazon protesting the offer of my book, whose copyright had reverted to me after the book went out of print. They sent me a form page instructing me to write them a paper letter asserting my claim to the copyright. I did so and after several weeks I got an email from one of their lawyers informing me that they had taken the book down and that they had fulfilled their obligations to me.

I checked, and they had not taken the book down, so I wrote her back and said that the book was not gone and reiterating my request for an accounting for all of the sales they had made of my book. I’m sure that at $80+ the only sale they had made was to me, but I wanted to see the accounting. They didn’t answer. A friend, who is a senior partner at a law firm specializing in intellectual property matters, wrote them a letter demanding an accounting, but they ignored this letter as well.

Sort of sad, since this behavior really trashed my admiration for Amazon dating back over ten years.

[Update: Since first writing this entry and putting it up on my blog, my lawyer friend got a response from Amazon to his letter about my book. It seems that the content was submitted to them in error by Springer. They made only one sale, according to their response. So everything is cleared up and I am very happy to restore Amazon's good guy status in my heart.]

Anyway, this year I gave a Kindle Fire to a good friend and he loves it. And at the holidays all of the parental generation of the extended family conspired together and gave Kindles to all of the children, a total of six shiny new Kindle Touch devices. My son loves his … I see him reading it regularly now, which encourages me that he may yet become a reader by choice.

Five Borough Bike Tour – 2011 May 1

The day was perfect for riding. Not too hot, not too cold. Not too humid. I rendezvoused with my teammates Jane and Tamara at the corner of 70th Street and Columbus Avenue at 6:20 AM. After pumping up our tires and adjusting our bicycles, we headed downtown five miles to the starting line. Because we were riding for them, Noelle Ito of BronxWorks arranged for us to start near the head of the pack, enabling us to get moving soon after the starting gun (it wasn’t really a gun, but rather big jets of flame emitted from the starting gate).

The first few miles, north on Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas, for tourists) were slow, but we began to move more smoothly once we entered Central Park. We rode north along the eastern side of the Park Drive, exiting at 110th street and continuing north through Harlem to 138th Street, where we cut over to the Madison Avenue bridge and the Bronx. We didn’t spend long in the Bronx, returning to Manhattan by the Third Avenue Bridge and then south along the FDR Drive to the 59th Street Bridge.

We crossed over to Queens on the 59th Street Bridge (with me humming the famous Simon and Garfunkel song in my head) and then proceeded north up to Astoria Park where there was a mandatory rest stop. At this point we had traveled 18 of the 42 miles of the ride. After a ten minute break we headed back south through Queens and then across the Pulaski Bridge into Brooklyn.

We cruised through Williamsburg, past the Williamsburg Bridge, and then cut over towards the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges. We passed through DUMBO and under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass near Brooklyn Bridge Park. We then cut over to the BQE. The BQE stretch was fast and straight, if not entirely the most visually exciting.

We paused for a final rest stop at the Fort Hamilton Park, at the foot of the Verrazano-Narrows bridge. The ride organizers had set up a stand from which they were passing out bananas to the riders. We all remarked at how perfect these bananas were … cool but not cold and exquisitely ripe … not hard and grainy and not soft and mushy … just perfect!

Finally we mounted up for the final stretch, the three or four miles that it took to cross the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge over to Staten Island. I had been nervously anticipating the climb over the bridge all during the ride after some daunting comments from my teammates, but in the event the slope was not so steep as to make riding up it particularly challenging … it was long but not particularly difficult.

Down the other side, carefully using my brakes to avoid approaching the speed of sound, and a final rest stop at Fort Wadsworth.

Then a final couple of miles over to the Staten Island Ferry terminal and a pleasant ferry ride back to Battery Park and the subway home.

In total I rode 47 miles – the 42 miles of the bike tour plus the five miles from home to the starting line. We completed the 42 miles of the tour by about 1PM after the 8AM start. Tamara’s trip computer, which recorded our speed and distance all the way, reported that we averaged 10 mph for the 42 miles.

It was a lot of fun. I neglected to put sunscreen on my exposed skin and picked up a sunburn, but that was my only mishap. Seeing the city up close on a bicycle this way is really a treat. The ride is quite level and not strenuous. And the ride organizers did a remarkable job of making it easy and safe. The route was well marked, there were repair and refreshment stations everywhere, and the riders were courteous and friendly. All in all, a great way to spend a Sunday.

The Digital Museum (part two)

Four years ago, just before I joined Google, I wrote “The Art Ecosystem and the Digital Museum” on this blog.

At Google I worked to promote the digital museum concept and found a number of similarly motivated folks. A team in Europe had worked with the Prado to put a number of the masterpieces from that museum online in a dramatic way with tremendously high resolution images. Others turned up from around Google and joined in. [By the way, you can look at the fourteen Prado pictures in amazingly high resolution using Google Earth. Just turn on 3D buildings in Earth and then navigate to the Prado and you'll get a popup for the images.]

Today Google launched the Google Art Project (
http://www.googleartproject.com/)
with participation from seventeen major museums around the world. The site is very cool.

Mr NYGeek’s Kindle – a year later

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about the new Kindle that a dear friend had given me and the affect that it had had on me. I wrote that item only a few days after receiving it, so it is interesting now to look back at the Kindle after a full year. Let’s look at some of the significant events of the last year involving the Kindle and the entire electronic book space.

Not long after I had received the Kindle I chatted with a colleague, Teddy Kowalski, who had been involved with the Nook development at Barnes & Noble. Soon I ran over to a nearby Barnes & Noble shop, one destined to close in a few days, as it happens, and acquired a Nook. Now I had two different ebook readers.

I found the Nook to be quite comparable to the Kindle. The basic reading UI (forward and back buttons, primarily) is superior on the Nook, but the Kindle is a bit better on the less common functions like zooming around from chapter to chapter or searching.

The Kindle has a clever annotation facility that allows me to select text from whatever I am currently reading and post it to my Facebook wall with my comments. The first time I did this I was delighted to receive a bunch of interesting feedback from my circle of Facebook “friends” with replies and comments on my selection. I am not always interested in sharing my thoughts and notes socially, so the annotation feature is, at this point, cool but not quite as useful as I might like. It comes close to being a way to take notes on what I am writing.

My 2010 Books

Device	Title	Author	Read
Nook	Snow Crash	Neal Stephenson	Yes
Nook	Children of Jihad	Jared Cohen
Nook	The Shape of Water	Andrea Camilleri
Nook	Death of a Red Heroine	Qiu Xiaolong	Yes
Nook	Cyber War	Richard Clarke
Nook	Dracula	Bram Stoker
Nook	The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo	Stieg Larsson	Yes
Nook	Pride and Prejudice	Jane Austen
Nook	The Girl Who Played with Fire	Stieg Larsson	Yes
Nook	The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest	Stieg Larsson	Yes
Kindle	The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo	Stieg Larsson	Yes
Kindle	The Girl Who Played with Fire	Stieg Larsson	Yes
Kindle	The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest	Stieg Larsson	Yes
Kindle	The Lord of the Rings (Trilogy)	J. R. R. Tolkien
Kindle	The Hobbit J. R. R. Tolkien	Some
Kindle	The Adventures of Tom Sawyer	Mark Twain
Kindle	The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn	Mark Twain
Kindle	The Adventures of Tom Sawyer	Mark Twain
Kindle	The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn	Mark Twain
Kindle	The Korean War: A History	Bruce Cumings	Some
Kindle	Autobiography of Mark Twain	Mark Twain	Some
Kindle	The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires	Tim Wu
Kindle	Zero History	William Gibson	Yes
Kindle	I Remember Nothing	Nora Ephron	Yes
Kindle	The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of The World	Michael Pollan	Yes
Kindle	Essence of Decision	Philip Zelikow	Some
Kindle	Spook Country	William Gibson	Yes
Kindle	Tatja Grimm’s World	Vernor Vinge
Kindle	The Red Mandarin Dress	Qiu Xiaolong	Yes
Kindle	When Red is Black	Qiu Xiaolong	Yes
Kindle	Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage	Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew	Some
Kindle	A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again	David Foster Wallace
Kindle	Victory in Tripoli	Joshua London	Yes
Kindle	The Pirate Coast	Richard Zacks	Yes
Kindle	The Bedwetter	Sarah Silverman
Kindle	The Fuller Memorandum	Charles Stross	Yes
Kindle	The Greatest Trade Ever	Gregory Zuckerman	Some
Kindle	The God Engines	John Scalzi and Vincent Chong	Yes
Kindle	Postwar	Tony Judt	Some
Kindle	The Great Gatsby	F. Scott Fitzgerald	Yes
Kindle	What Women Want: The Global Market Turns Female Friendly	Paco Underhill
Kindle	Case Histories: A Novel	Kate Atkinson	Yes
Kindle	Reflections on The Decline of Science In England	Charles Babbage
Kindle	The Two Cultures	C. P. Snow
Kindle	Leaves of Grass	Walt Whitman	Some

In 2010 I acquired 47 electronic books, including several duplicates. I bought most of them, though several were free. I read 18 of them completely and substantial parts of another nine. While this is nothing like the amount I read back in the days when I was single, when I would read one or two books each week, it feels like a very significant uptick compared to the pace of the last several years.

Changes

In practical terms the Kindle/Nook devices have made my commuting time available for reading. I travel from home to work by subway and I generally have somewhere between ten and twenty minutes between time on the platform waiting for a train and the actual travel time. In the past that time was wasted or spent playing simple games on my smartphone, but now this is some of my prime reading time. The device fits in my jacket pocket when the weather is cold enough to require that I wear one or in my hand otherwise. Opening the device and getting to the place to resume reading is much quicker now than ever it was with paper books.

Nook Gym!

Beyond the commuting time that I have reclaimed, I find that these devices have enabled me to significantly enhance my exercise. I have historically tried to spend some time regularly, three or more times per week, on the exercise machines in the basement gym in my apartment building. The limiting factor for me has been how long I could tolerate the boredom. I can not stand to watch TV, a long standing deficiency of mine, and I have never been able to read paper books while working out – between the challenges of keeping the book open to the right page, turning the page when I’ve finished it, and the difficulty of keeping the small fonts in focus while I’m moving vigorously on the machine, I have never been able to combat gym boredom with books.

With these electronic devices, however, everything is different. I make the font bigger so that I can keep my eye on it while working out, and the device sits flat on the console of most of the machines. Turning the page is a simple button press. So now, when I go down to the gym to work out on the treadmill or the elliptical I now take along a Nook or Kindle and I have no trouble staying on the machine for an hour at a time, enabling me to return from the gym drenched in sweat and feeling very satisfied that I have both spent an hour reading and have contributed to my fitness. I have been tracking my exercise in Google Health since the new goals and diaries features were released this past summer and I find that in the last four months I have worked out over 77 times, almost 2/3 of the days.

Broken Books

Not all of the electronic versions of books are completely readable. Thanks to a recommendation from Chacho I started reading the wonderful police procedurals by Qiu Xiaolong set in 1990s Shanghai. When I got to “A Loyal Character Dancer” however, I discovered a problem with the book, which I communicated to Barnes & Noble by email:

I bought a copy of “A Loyal Character Dancer” for my Nook. I was reading it on my Nook today and I found that there is what appears to be a significant section of text missing at location 94 of 296.

In particular, the sentence begins”

‘… she paused to take a sip of her ‘

and continues

‘Zhu upstairs, something could have been done to the steps.’

It is clear that a significant quantity of text is missing from the book.

They responded promptly and courteously:

We apologize for the difficulties you are experiencing.

We have reviewed your order and downloaded the same eBook to our nook. On page 94 of 296, we see the same exact text as you do. Because this file is provided by the publisher, we are forwarding your feedback to them for review.

Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconveniences this may have caused.

We conducted a dialog over the course of a month or more afterwards, but they were unable to get the book corrected and ultimately refunded my money and removed the book from my Nook.

Of course they may have fixed the book by now, but they may not have done. The only way I can tell, I suppose, is to repurchase the book and look to see if it is defective. The process of getting this resolved was so protracted and unsatisfactory that I’m unwilling to start again. I could buy the book in paper, but I so much prefer to read on the Nook and Kindle that I’m loath to do that. So I have paused in my reading of the Inspector Chen Cao books for now.

This highlights a problem with electronic books that do not exist with paper books. In the past when I had the misfortune to purchase a paper book that turned out to be defective I could inspect the replacement copy and verify that it did not suffer from the defect. With electronic books, however, the only way to inspect it is to buy it. Of course, if one copy is defective, every copy will be, so there’s no point in trying to buy another one and see if it is any better.

Devices as far as the eye can see …

I have an iPod Touch and a Nexus 1 smart phone. Nook and Kindle applications are freely available for both, which permits me to read my Kindle and Nook libraries when I don’t have one of my ereaders otherwise available. Now we have an iPad and a Samsung Galaxy Tab and both of them have Kindle and Nook applications, so my wife and I can now read from our ebook library whenever and wherever convenient. This is quite nice, since the iPad and Galaxy Tab reading experiences are quite pleasant, though I’m not sure I have a strong preference for them over the Nook and Kindle eInk.

I recently stopped in to a Barnes & Noble store and played with the new color Nook. It has gorgeous full-screen color and has a full-screen touch pad. This machine is about half the price of an iPad or Galaxy Tab, so I can’t believe that we won’t see competition from B&N in the tablet market, though they will have to reposition the device in the marketplace.