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.

Mexico City in March

So, I love to travel. Especially to another country. This time is was Mexico. I think it's still a separate country - they stamped my passport. I was even fine traveling in coach, what with the crossword puzzle in the airline magazine, and a game and movie on the iPad. On the leg from DFW to Mexico City I caught up with 3 guys from work, all of whom were wearing blazers. Made me feel under-dressed in my casually untucked travel shirt. Oh well.

The first night was a bit rough as I had a little too much wine, which didn’t go well with the altitude (~7000 ft). Around 3:30 I hit a deep sleep, but the hotel alarm clock - set by a previous guest/sadist - jolted me up at 5:30. 

We had all-day meetings in a fancy hotel for 3 days, where they catered breakfast, a morning snack, lunch, and an afternoon snack. For dinner the first night we were treated to a cooking class in the hotel kitchen. 15 of us made shrimp ceviche and a beef loin "unrolled" and stuffed with mushrooms topped with poblano pepper garnish and a poblano pepper cream sauce. Yummy! The only weird part was that the mushrooms were a mexican variety that grows on corn.

I managed to get up for a workout on Wednesday, on the 15th floor of the hotel. The mountains were beautiful, when they weren’t hidden by clouds or smog. 

Besides cooking, the highlight of my trip may have been the search for post cards - just because I got to speak a lot of Spanish. I probably sounded like a 5-year-old, since I could only remember the present tense, and hardly ever got my verbs and nouns and adjectives to agree. (Argumentative lot they were.) I had a great conversation with a taxi driver about marriage, family life, the new pope, etc. Or at least I think I did.

It turns out there’s not a lot of demand for postcards in the business district where our hotel was located. So not a lot of supply either. I went to a department stored owned by the richest man in the world, Carlos Slim. They had 6 copies of a single version of a postcard of a soccer stadium. The 2nd taxi driver suggested I try Wal Mart. No luck there either.

On Thursday I took my 2 postcards of the stadium and called a taxi to take me to the post office. It turns out the demand for a post office matches that of post cards (not sure why those would be related). It was bad news when the driver looked at me and said he’d go back into the hotel to ask for directions. At least he came back. 10 minutes later, more directions. Then more directions. Back the same way we came. More directions. Some discussion about why nobody gives good directions and why the post office is hidden (I think that’s what we were talking about. Maybe it was the new pope instead.). I had a meeting to get back to soon, and I began to understand how contestants on the Amazing Race feel when their taxi gets lost and they don’t understand what’s going on. And then we found it. There was no line - I guess no one else could find it either. 15 minutes later I was back at the hotel for lunch.

The next day I took the hour-long cab ride to the airport - dodging upcoming demonstrations over labor contracts. I got in trouble at security. I couldn't leave my laptop in my special leave-your-laptop-in-the-backpack backpack. Out it came. So did the iPad. Then they gave me a massage. I think they called it a pat-down. Then they had me open up my backpack and rifled through the tangle of chargers and cords. The rubicks cube probably didn’t help matters. Then I was through, and with a quick stop for empanadas I made it to the gate and on the plane for more travel time with a new airline magazine, an iPad game, and “Wreck-It Ralph” (which I liked.) 

I can’t wait to travel again to a place that humors my language ability. (Like Paris. Or even East Texas.)

Cambria

Note: I'm letting too much time pass between an inspiration to write and actually publishing something. I'm working on it. This actually took place the weekend of March 1.

Last weekend I had a delightful and uplifting time with my church neighborhood group. 10 of us went on a retreat to Cambria, CA to unwind and get to know each other better. Cambria is a cute little town on the coast with great views of the ocean. (OK - coast and ocean views kinda go together, but it's still worth mentioning.)

We arrived at our rental house on Friday after a 4 hour drive from San Jose. I rode with the couple who leads the group. We spent a lot of time talking about my divorce, God's will in marriage, and the idols we each have. We stopped in town for a late dinner and ate in a fancy restaurant in the cute little downtown area. I had to try the seafood pot pie. The filling was based on their clam chowder and the crust was delightfully flaky.

The other groups rolled in over the next few hours, and we stayed up talking until midnight - which required some effort given my standard 9:30 bedtime. Besides me and the lead couple, it was mainly young women in their mid-20s. I shared a room with the one single guy in the group.

On Saturday we had banana pancakes and then hiked a trail along the ocean down to the tide pools. The views were gorgeous. Then we went to see the elephant seals. The beach had hundreds of baby elephant seals, who are as big as normal seals. There were some adult males, who are about 10 feet long and weigh 5000 pounds. Their backs are covered in scars from fights they’d had.

For lunch we went to yet another scenic ocean outlook and ate sandwiches. A ground squirrel kept creeping up looking to steal a meal, causing the occasional shriek from the nearest startled sandwich owner. It reminded me of the voracious - and uninhibited - squirrels of the UT campus main mall area who would brazenly crawl into backpacks looking for food, regardless of any attempts to shoo them away.

After lunch we visited a winery where we tasted 6 wines for $5. The chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon didn’t really do it for me, but I enjoyed the sweet Riesling and the Port. Once again, the views were great. The owner came out and showed us the barrel room and the the area where they receive the grapes, crush them and then ferment the juice.

We drove back to downtown Cambria and walked through shops. I got bored of that pretty quick, but perked up when we decided to go to the bakery for pie. I chose the blueberry peach pie - a la mode of course.

When we got back to the house that afternoon, half the folks went for a run, while the rest of us took a nap. We also had to solve the kitchen disposal/drain clog. It came down to unscrewing the u-shaped pipe section which was full of shredded paper and egg shells.  

After a dinner of homemade burritos, we played a game called Resistance. It centers around figuring out which players are "spies" trying to sabotage the rebel missions. Not exactly ideal for building trust, since you begin to suspect everyone is lying.  Once again, we stayed up until midnight.

Sunday morning I finally pulled on my running shoes and headed out for a jog. My sense of direction failed me totally and I ran away from the coast - and its gorgeous views. But with the fog on the ocean, I didn’t miss much. I did see a few wild turkeys and even found a dirt trail into the forest. There were lots of inclines and declines, so I got my workout.

When I got back it was time to packing lunches and bags, clean up the house, and close it up for the week. We headed back on a scenic drive over the green mountains and then up the valley, enjoying the beauty of nature and the new friendships we had formed.

Hummingbirds Are Cool

Hummingbirds are cool

Hummingbirds are the coolest birds ever. Because they can hover. There. End of argument. Hovering wins against any other attribute.

There are lots of cool birds. Condors are cool, just because they're big in a wow-that's-really-massive way. Cormorants are cool. They can be trained to dive for fish and bring them to you. Who doesn't like a bird you can train to bring food? What if you could train a condor to bring you a steak? I bet they could bring the whole cow.

Parrots and cockateels and the whole parrot extended family certainly deserve consideration. Because they can talk. But it's not real conversation. Not like they're going to go on Jay Leno and yuck it up. Of course a parrot has probably already yucked it up with Jay Leno, beating me by a lifetime.

I heard that in Australia so many parrots have been released into the wild by owners who taught them curse words - and didn't realize they live for fifty years, because why would you set free your cursing parrot? - that now the released parrots are teaching the wild parrots to curse out in the jungle. With an Aussie accent.

Penguins get cool points for being cute and classy at the same time. I can't resist saying "no pun intended." For "cool" points. Never mind. All day long they get to play on a slip-and-slide made of ice. I got so sunburned and so scraped up on my slip-and-slide as a kid. Probably because we were under water restrictions at the time. I'm surprised there's no slip-and-slide app. Dibs.

And the waddle is completely endearing. If my co-workers at my last job waddled, I might have liked them better. But probably not. I wouldn't have minded if they had fins that kept them from typing pointless, long-winded, angry, accusatory, emails full of typos and sending me IMs to ask when I was going to be done with what I was working on when they IM'ed me. But if they had interrupted me to beg for fish, that would've been OK.

Other birds just can't come close. Pigeons are about as cool as rats with wings. Homing pigeons get a bit of a break, but not much. They're mailmen. And obsessive-compulsive. Vultures are a marvel because they eat stuff I can't, but the gross factor cancels out the cool. They would totally win Fear Factor. Crows and grackles are just plain annoying, although they possibly serve some function in the every-animal-adds-value earthly ecosystem. I just don't know what that is.

Ducks and geese? Average. Swans and peacocks? Classy, even beautiful, but not nifty. Not hovering.

Hummingbirds hover. They beat their wings so fast you can only see a blur! And it makes a low-pitched light-saber-esque whoosh when they fly by. "The Force is strong in this...bird." Other times it's a high pitch tsk-tsk-tsk sound. I think that means they're scolding someone. Might even be me. I was staring after all.

Based on messiness alone, the hummingbird feeder on our balcony is a total win vs the chickadee/sparrow bowl or the finch mesh sock. Those were a complete pain to clean up after. Although I do miss the chickadees. They're so cute, I just want to hug them and squeeze them and call them George. But not any cuter than hummingbirds. Who hover.

Yeah, sugar water - even with the time it takes to prepare it - wins against bird seed that has to be swept up all the time. No need to sweep up sugar water. Worst case you might need a mop. That would be a lot of sugar water.

Hummingbirds live on sugar water and tiny bugs they catch as they fly. Sort of like bikers. Except it would be beer and chicken wings and tiny bugs they catch as they fly. Down the road.

I suppose I can't give them coolness points for the iridescent heads, or peacocks would be back in contention. Except peacocks don't hover. That's definitely the trump card.

The other trump card is that I can stand out on my balcony three feet from the feeder and they still come for food! They don't mind me at all. No condors landing on my balcony. Or penguins. No condors landing on penguins either. Or even the other way around. Occasionally the hummers come towards me with the tsk-tsk-tsk sound. It's either a threat display, or they don't like the striped shirt I'm wearing with my plaid pants. Everyone's a critic.

Being enthralled by the whole hover ability means I'm even more impressed when I see one perch. That's when they look plain adorable. And then they hover again. Cool.

Leverage and Wealth Disparity

Lately I've been thinking about the role of leverage in wealth disparity. America is a land of amazing freedoms, allowing anyone to earn income with few boundaries, such as class or location. Meanwhile, I've seen repeated reports on the increased disparity between the wealthiest and the poorest in our nation over the past fifty years. I'm curious about three things: the role that leverage plays in increased wealth disparity, the minimum wealth that a society should deem as livable, and whether there is a need to limit the difference between the wealthiest and poorest individuals. Today I'll share some thoughts on the first of these. (Note - I'm using the term "wealth disparity" to talk about variance in wealth without passing judgment.)

Leverage is the ability to use resources to gain more resources. On a small scale, you leverage your savings by depositing it in a savings account. Your bank or credit union loans it out to others and pays you interest. You thereby leverage your savings into greater wealth. Greater leverage can come from borrowing money to invest (like using it to buy raw goods or inventory for sale, or to buy stocks on margin). Leverage is the basis of the adage "it takes money to make money."

I started thinking about the connection between leverage and wealth disparity on my last trip to the airport. I recently qualified for elite status with my airline. This means my employer and I spent a certain amount on travel for work and pleasure last year - approximately $3000. Now when I fly, I no longer have to pay a fee to check a bag, because I have elite status. The money I have spent is now earning me greater returns - leverage. I'm spending the same amount on the flights as other passengers, but I save a hundred dollars or so not paying those fees.

Flying is not a need in life. But I could argue that in today's economy, having a bank account for the safe-keeping of savings constitutes a minimum standard of protection. Leverage comes into play here as well. If you have a certain amount to deposit, you don't pay checking fees. (If you have a higher amount, you won't pay for checks. Higher still, and you get better interest rates on your savings.) If you don't have the minimum to deposit, you will see your balance eroded each month, meaning you have to earn more just to keep in place. Or you will avoid the banking system and use alternatives - like check cashing services - with their own fees.


There is a similar leverage effect from having health insurance generally provided by employers. I view low-cost access to preventive medicine as a minimum standard of health protection. With the current system, you need a certain set of skills to qualify for a job that offers affordable health insurance. Maybe you need additional skills to have health insurance that comes with preventive care fully covered.


As a side note, the perversity of these leverage effects is that they provide an obstacle to flexibility. If you want to try working for yourself, you have to contend with a lack of affordable health insurance along with the gap in income. Similarly, but less severely, if you want to fly a different airline with better routes, you have to build your frequent flyer status from zero.


What examples do you have of leverage that contributes to wealth disparity?

In Search of Team USA

Occupy Wall Street: Day 14 -
 Some rights reserved
by Long Island Rose

Occupy Wall Street. The Tea Party. The Jobs bill. Job-killing regulation. The flat tax. The millionaire tax.

At work I'm part of a team of about a dozen people. We're a true team. Sometimes a team is just a group of people who sit near each other and have the same manager. My team isn't like that. We share a purpose and core values. And we look out for each other.

Because we're a real team, we want each other to succeed—up, down, and sideways. All of us want to see our manager get promoted, and we tackle our projects knowing that our results reflect on him. For his part, he gives us more responsibility each time we prove ourselves; he rewards us with bonuses; and he spreads the word about our accomplishments and capabilities.

Those of us who are managers do the same for our employees. We build their skills through trainings and increasingly complex activities. We assign projects to match their interests. And we give them credit for the work they do, making sure other teams know what they're capable of.

It works sideways as well. We work together to complete projects for the good of the team and our business partners. We warn each other if a business partner is unhappy with someone's work. And we tell each other—and our business partners—when someone on the team has done a great job.

All of this leaves me wondering—what happened to team USA?

My manager gets paid a lot more than I do, but I want him to succeed anyway. It's not a zero-sum game. Why can't Occupy Wall Street or the Democrats or whomever be in favor of the top 1% being successful at their business endeavors?

The temporary employee who works for me gets paid much less than I do, but I want her to be successful anyway. It's not a zero-sum game. Why can't the Tea Party or the Republicans or whomever be in favor of those on the bottom rungs being successful at finding work and supporting their families?

Maybe it comes down to vision. My manager, his VP, and our CEO have set a vision of growing a company, helping our customers succeed, and doing the right thing for employees. Building a team of 12 takes work, creating a team from a company of 70,000 takes a lot of work, so turning a country of 300 million into a team is...hard. Really hard. But not impossible.

Team USA can solve the unemployment catastrophe and the debt crisis. We need leaders with vision. Leaders who focus on our country's common purpose and core values, not petty differences. I'd like to see our President and leaders of Congress come together as a team that wants each other to succeed. For the good of the Nation. Only through vision, trust, and common purpose—starting at the top—will we see a true Team USA.

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?