Transportation Troubles

The theme this week was transportation. As in, I need some. After a lazy Saturday morning last weekend - long after - I realized the car rental agency closed at noon. I would be car-less until Monday because I was careless (couldn’t resist).

So I stayed local on Saturday. Then I worked out a plan for getting to church on Sunday that involved taking Caltrain to the Santa Clara station and then a cab the rest of the way. Then I decided to take the VTA light rail to the office to get some work done, thinking I could take light rail to the Santa Clara station. Trouble started when I was leaving the building and I saw the train whiz by. After waiting for the next train, I arrived at the Santa Clara light rail station and realized it was nowhere near the Santa Clara Caltrain station. Or my church. That was a depressing right back home.

At least it’s easy enough to take VTA to work, which I did Monday through Thursday. I can check work email on the VTA or I can play a game on my iPad. Guess which I choose.

Friday I needed wheels again, so I walked a mile to the car rental agency. The compact options were a boring Nissan Versa, or a battle-bot, aka a Fiat 500. For a moment I was annoyed that the door frame blocked the view of the rear window that would show me my blind spot. Then I realized the car is so short it has no blind spot. More than once I’ve been tempted to park on the street with the nose to the curb rather than parallel parking.

It also has a few features I don’t get. One is a “sport” button, which I’m afraid to touch. The Fiat forums online suggest turning it on along with the ESC button, which I can’t find and am afraid would cause the car to reboot. It also is a manu-matic. You can move it from Drive to choose-your-own-gear-without-a-clutch. It actually helps with freeway driving. It’s like a stick shift with training wheels.

My highest priority this week is to settle on a car. I really want a manual Honda Civic with a sun-roof and less than 200K miles for under $6,000. Preferably royal blue. I found a good deal on a civic with 125K miles, but then carfax informed me that it once had 178K miles. Not sure what happened there. I really like a blue honda civic that’s 30 miles away in San Bruno, but I’m not sure they’re going to let me bring it down here so my mechanic can check it out. 

My main car shopping tools right now are my carfax monthly subscription and craigslist. When I downloaded the craigslist app I got way more hits. Turns out I was only searching for the title, not the whole listing. Rookie mistake.

A friend has been trying to convince me to get a zipcar account, rather than buying a car. I looked into it two months ago, but there were no zipcars in Mountain View. I checked again last night and there was a new Mountain View location. I could barely see the map on my phone, but I wandered around for half an hour and finally realized it was in the underground parking structure for a new apartment complex. It’s about a 20 min walk from my house - which is kinda far - and I think it would be more expensive than a car if I did it for more than a year. But it was neat to see it nearby. 

After all that, I relaxed tonight with a glass of wine on a patio near the downtown main street, watching folks drive their cars.

Language Hacking Success - Brazil

I'm back from Brazil now, and I have to say that Language Hacking really worked well for me. Kudos to Benny the Irish Polyglot. After two months of studying, I was able to have simple conversations and get complimented on how good my Portuguese was. In particular I was able to:

• Order and pay at restaurants - including asking about an incorrect bill
• Buy baked goods and other items at grocery stores
• Ask for directions
• Check into a hotel
• Get help shopping for gifts
• Ask people about themselves and their families
• Ask to have my flight changed to the same itinerary as my wife's
• Joke around

Brazilians make it very easy to practice Portuguese. They aren't uptight about the language and they love it if you smile and joke around. When I went into stores, very few people spoke English, which is really helpful. It avoids the situations where they feel the need to put you out of your language misery by speaking your native tongue. Instead, we would just smile and laugh while I used filler comments called connectors until I figured out another way to say what I wanted.

I was amused by the number of people who asked me if I used Rosetta Stone to learn Portuguese. They're definitely doing their marketing well - I even saw a kiosk in the airport.

Here are the learning techniques I used to prepare before the trip - mostly taken from Fluent in Three Months:

• Studied a Lonely Planet phrasebook for Brazilian Portuguese
• Found a co-worker who speaks Portuguese and had three conversation sessions with him
• Practiced greetings and pronunciations with a Brazilian vendor at the local farmers market
• Learned numbers, colors, food, phrases, and pronunciation from a language CD by Euro Talk Now
• Watched Brazilian movies from Netflix, first with English subtitles, then with Portuguese subtitles
• Used Anki Spaced Repetition Software (SRS) flashcard program and iPhone app to study connectors, phrasebook vocabulary, and finance-specific terms
• Wrote emails in Portuguese to co-workers in Brazil using Google Translate as a supplement
• Changed my iPhone, iTunes, and Facebook language settings to Portuguese

Once I arrived, I just kept in mind that I had to go out and speak in order to improve. And I had to replace the anxious look I get when I can't find the words or understand everything. Instead I focused on smiling, nodding, and using filler comments.

As an aside, some of my favorite words are "otimo" (o-chimo), meaning "great"; "legal" (lay-gow), meaning "cool", and "moleza" (mo-lay-zah), meaning "piece of cake". I also like that futebol (soccer) is pronounced "fu-tchy-bol" and PowerPoint is "powerpoin-tchy".

I can't write about a trip without a section on food, so here goes. I had amazing pizza there (who knew there was such a huge Italian influence?). I ate delicious cuts of meat at the Fogo de Chao churrascaria (Brazilian barbecue). Every lunch buffet was full of deliciously savory sauces and spreads. We went to a great sushi restaurant (who knew there was such a huge Japanese influence?).

The draft beers ("choppe") were heavenly smooth - with Devassa's Negra as my favorite. But the best was the Pao de Queijo - cheese bread. Not just lower-case cheese bread. More like a glorious merger of light francese rolls and melted longhorn cheddar cheese at perfect nacho consistency so that it pulls away in a long string and falls all the way down past your chin when it finally snaps. Good thing I have a ten-year visa, because I may have to buy another ticket soon.

I thoroughly enjoyed learning Portuguese, but it was even more fun to learn so many tips to learn any language. I plan to shift my focus from Portuguese, which means it will join my ever-fading traveler's knowledge of Italian. We're traveling to Zambia in two months, so I'm going to apply all the techniques I just learned to my study of Bemba. I want to see if I can accelerate my learning pace. At the same time, I'm going to start brushing up on Spanish, with a goal of being conversational by next summer.

What language would you like to learn?

Favorite Apps

I've probably already mentioned that I'm pretty amazed at all the things a smartphone can do. We may not have transporters or warp drive yet, but we're darn close to tricorders. (I'm sure the iPhone 15 will come out with the ability to detect radiation and bone fractures.) In the meantime, here are some of the things of my favorite apps. (I've tried to note the ones that are iPhone only. And no, I'm not paid by Apple. Yet.)


Games: The Heist (iPhone only)
This puzzle game has been so much fun, I’m going to miss it when I’m done with the last 8 puzzles. It has 60 puzzles in four categories. The first type involves sliding Lincoln Logs out of the way to get a vacuum tube across a square to a connector. The second type is a colorful twist on Sudoku, with icons instead of numbers, and a grid that isn’t evenly arranged. These were my favorite. The next set involves a robot that you use to push diodes over to their connection slots. But you’re in a narrow maze and the robot can only push from behind, so you have to stay away from walls. The last group basically consists of picture puzzles, where you have to rearrange the tiles to put them in the correct order. Instead of pictures, the tiles contain snippets of wire that have to line up in the right way to complete one or more circuits. 


Runners up: 

• Star Wars Arcade: Falcon Gunner – it uses your phone’s camera to provide the backdrop that you play against 
• Civilization Revolution – a fun (and shorter) version of Civilization, but cramped on the iPhone 
• Risk – A quick way to dominate the world (on easy level) 
• Tetris – The old standby 

Social Media: Instagram (iPhone only for now, Android in the works)
I think this is a pretty cool concept. It’s Twitter, but instead of 140-character status updates, you upload photos from your phone. If someone is following you on Instagram, they see your photos in their feed. You can “like” photos (by clicking on a heart) and add comments. When you load a photo, you can share it via Twitter or Facebook. You can pull up your photos on any browser at Web.stagram.com, and you can check out statistics at statigr.am. Oh yeah, you can also apply one of 15 different artsy filters. I almost never do; they pretty much all look terrible to me. 


Runners up: 

• Tweetdeck – So I can post to both Twitter and Facebook at the same time 
• Twitter – I follow Steve Martin, Paula Poundstone, Stephen Colbert, Kiva, Biz Stone, and The Energy Project. 
• Facebook – To check the news feed, and respond to notifications 
• LinkedIn – Good for responding to notifications 

News: CNN Money
CNN Money does not have the best writing – that has to go to the runners up, New York Times and The Economist. However, the writing is catchy. And it’s light enough that I can read it in between sets when I’m doing bench press or squat workouts at the gym. That’s right, instead of listening to music when I work out, I read. Maybe if someone wrote songs about the news each day – that’s music I’d work out to. 


Runners up: 

• NYTimes – especially since the speeded up the load time 
• The Economist – best writing, ever. 

Reference: Google Maps
Seems like I’m always driving someplace new out here, so being able to call up a map at any time is a lot of help. The traffic feature is nice too, since I don’t know the traffic patterns out here either. I am a bit concerned that one day – when the machines decide to get rid of us pesky humans – Google maps is going to give me directions to drive off a cliff, and I’ll just do it. So I occasionally go a different route than the one it recommends. Of course, I always regret it and vow never to doubt Google again. 


Runners up: 

• Wikipedia – Great for shutting down a conversation debating any fact 
• Google Translate – I’m working on my Spanish vocabulary 
• Stocks – To look at the markets more often than a long-term investor should. 

Productivity: Evernote
I’m a total note taker. I have several notebooks of notes I’ll never refer back to. Now I’m saving the trees and keeping that info in someone’s datacenter, where it can be tagged, indexed, and searched. Am I worried that someone is going to hack in and get my data? Only if there is a market for old rental car reservations, Christmas gift lists, and topics I’ve already written about, or no one would want to write about. Hmm…maybe I should be worried after all. 


Runners up: 

• Notes – I keep my gym workouts on here, instead of carrying around a notebook 
• Reminders – coming with iOS 5, I’m hoping this to-do list is as good as Apple says.

Those are the apps I like the best and use the most. I'm eager to see what will come out next, as well as anything good out there that I've missed. Let me 

What's your favorite smartphone app?