The pool is organized by a work friend who I think offered me an invitation to join out of pity… or perhaps spite. We are using a Yahoo! tool that, at least to the inexperienced bracket maker, is pretty cool. Filling out the bracket proved to be a rather challenging activity when you don’t know anything about anything. I decided early in the process that I would put the Huskies as the National Champions (why are the Huskie’s using a non-edu domain name?). I figure, what’s the point of having an alma mater with a good sports program if you can’t bet the farm on them without any legitimation justification. This proved easier in theory than practice, because you can’t just say “Huskies win everything” and be done with it… you need to actually pick the team the Huskies will beat at each match in the competition… and to do that, you need to pick all the teams those teams will beat in order to match up with the Huskies… and the next thing you know I’ve picked dozens and dozens of match-ups based on essentially no evidence or skill.

Now, here we are at the start of Round 3, the so called Sweet Sixteen. I am in a pool of 23 brackets and currently rank 13th… but only 3 correct picks separate me from 1st place. Now here’s the kicker… for all my lack of skill and general sports-related incompetence, I am tied for first place on points possible. Meaning my bracket is more intact than anyone else I’m competing against. All of my choices for the Final Four remain in play and the Huskies are still going strong.

How did I do it, you might ask yourself? Well, the secret was to not understand how the bracket seeding worked, because I had no idea that Kansas was considered a strong favorite for the National Championship, so I had them losing in the second round… and wouldn’t you know?! Of course, I thought they would lose to UNLV instead of Northern Iowa. But, seriously, that sort of thing isn’t important. What’s important is that by total random chance I avoided a pitfall that snared nearly half the pool.

I’m still not sure how to articulate the allure of brackets. I still have no interest in watching the games… the few times basketball has been on in a bar or wherever, it never keeps my attention. At it’s core this is gambling to me, because the choices might as well have all been coin flips. But the real draw here is the dependent nature of each match-up. Having done “well” in the early rounds, I am now positioned to do better in later round. Sort of the rich gets richer scenario. It’s also interesting because there were simply so many choices, and the amount of data one would need to know to make “informed” decisions is so overwhelming, that I seriously doubt experts do much better than your average laymen.

It’ll be a couple of weeks until we know the final winner and I’ll be sure to post a follow up… until then, I shall keep refreshing my bracket results to see which names turn red or green, while totally ignoring the games themselves.

Star Craft 2: Beta

Yes, I was given a beta key for Star Craft 2. Back in high school I remember how envious I felt of the kids who were selected to be in the first Star Craft beta. It seemed like such a wondrous thing getting to play the game months before everyone else… to give feedback directly to the minds at Blizzard. I have been monitoring Star Crafts 2’s development since I first moved to Santa Cruz more than three years ago, checking the website and discussing it with friends. As much as I can be a “groupie” for a game, I was of Star Craft 2. And here was to be my great opportunity! I remember walking home the night I got the notification email with such a spring in my step. Here we, four weeks later, and how many times have I played?! Four times. Yes, four.

Sure, I’ve played against the pathetic AI a bunch of times, but in terms of actually one-on-one play I have clocked only four games. Oh, and on a related point, I lost each of those matches. So I ask myself, why? Why, when I am among the select few on the whole planet afforded an opportunity to play this game, am I not taking advantage of it?

I think there are several answers to the question that are all working in concert.

1. I am not good at Star Craft. In truth, I never have been. Back in the day, when I played in high school and college, I wasn’t good. Turns out 10 years with zero practice doesn’t make you any better. Which isn’t to say I’m bad. I can follow build orders, survey, and defend myself quite well. But when it comes to actually going on the offense… closing the deal, as they say… I just never had it.
2. I enjoy Star Craft as a social experience. Even when I used to play the original, I was exclusively playing against friends. Whether at LAN parties or in the dorms, Star Craft was about playing around with friends. With the beta, it’s all anonymous match-ups. Recently all the beta participants were issued keys to give to friends, which I’m hopeful means I’ll have someone to play with in a more social capacity… but it’s still not quite the same as Big Game Hunters with a bunch of players you know.
3. No access to the single player campaign. The point of the beta is to test the balance and battle.net matching services. As such, things like the single player campaign or a challenging AI are off-limits. Being cut off from the single player elements really brought home to me how much I enjoyed the solo play. I think what I really enjoy is overcoming a more developed computer player in different scenarios. With battle.net games, it’s the same every time… equal footing, same maps. It’s just a race to accomplish the same goal… and it turns out I don’t know how to accomplish that goal.

Now, this isn’t to say it’s a bad game. It is, in fact, an amazing game. The controls are responsive, the graphics are detailed, and the number of unit/strategy combinations are staggering. When the final games comes out, I have no doubt I will buy a copy in minutes after its release… and once I have a copy, I will play the solo campaign from beginning to end. Until that time, I shall continue to be really bad at the battle.net games and perhaps, someday, play enough of them to where I am actually placed in a league and start building a truly impressive number of defeats.

I found a publisher who translates Japanese manga teaching manuals into English on technical topics like physics and calculus. Each one has a cast of characters with different problems which are solve by use of the book’s subject matter. Much to my eternal joy, they had a book on databases which I quickly snatched up for my, erm, collection. They were also selling copies of XKCD Volume 0, but I had just received mine direct in the mail a few days earlier.

Another publisher was selling sophisticated choose-your-own-adventure books that were mildly interesting. But what really struck out about this particular booth was a contest to win a new book if you could solve three brain teasers. I grabbed a copy of the puzzles and spent the rest of the convention coming up with solutions. The first puzzle, a chess board where you had to find mate for White in two moves, wasn’t very challenging… though there was a trick I had failed to see involving whether or not Black could castle. But that didn’t mater, as the moves I indicated were still correct. The second challenge had me ordering a series of seven polaroid photos, each taking on a different consecutive day of the week. Some of the photos had other photos in them and others had calendar page. It was pretty challenging to figure out, but there were just enough clues to solve and it was most satisfying.

The final challenge was, erm… debatable. We were tasked to argue that at any time there is at least one spot on Mars where the antipode has the exact same temperature and elevation. Brett and I struggled with this problem for quite sometime eventually deciding it simply wasn’t possible and that all we had to do was argue something so we wrote down some BS and turned it in for grading. Well, the dude back at the booth had a crazy theory about how you could prove the temperature and elevation were independently equal somewhere, and then employed a logical fallacy to argue that these points must eventually coincide. His first argument, proving temperature and elevation independently, was actually pretty good, but fails to account of the existence of limits (sheer cliffs or sudden drops in temperature) such that there is no guarantee that even those parts were true. Suffice to say, we didn’t believe him, he didn’t believe us, and I didn’t win a free copy of the book.

But I did not walk away from the convention a loser! We attended the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s charity “art-off”, where attending artists drew sketches on subjects suggested by the audience that were then raffled off. I bought just one ticket, more as a donation than anything else… and wouldn’t you know, I won something. I’m picking it up this Tuesday and will be sure to post a picture. Don’t get your hopes up too high.

Lastly, I went over to the TopatoCo booth where the writer and photographer for a Softer World were selling books. I was really excited to buy a copy of Overqualified and get it signed by Joey, the author. Sadly, this was not to be. Joey had stepped out just before I bought my copy… and though I was told he would be back, he was never there each time I circled by to check. The booth proprietors also suffered from a common problem at these conventions where they are more interested in their friends than the fans. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure they were all really nice people, but clearly they were more interested in chitchatting amongst themselves than actually talking to me I rarely try to talk to the booth people mostly because I don’t have anything to say and I figure they have more interesting things to do than talk with random fans. But I had hoped Softer World would be different, since its played an important role in my life these past years… alas, no. So, sour experience at the booth and an unsigned copy of Overqualified. Kind of a bummer way to end the convention, but at least I won my art-off sketch!

Sarah Left for Holland

The most life changing news is that my fiancée has left for her year long fieldwork in the Netherlands. She will be staying in Enschede, which technically isn’t part of Holland, but saying “The Netherlands” sounds weird. Not having someone sentient around the house on a day-to-day basis is hard, and I think will only get harder as the months go by…

I Moved to San Francisco

Part of the agreement that lead to me relocating to Santa Cruz after law school was that once Sarah finished her course work and no longer needed to be on campus every day, we would get out of dodge! Well, three years have come and gone, and I’m officially out. I now reside in the Inner Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco. The weather her is not at all like Santa Cruz, a lot more fog, a lot more cold, and even a lot more rain. It’s very much like Seattle… and while I love Seattle weather, it’s going to take some time to reacclimatizes myself. The apartment was knick-named “Mountain Top” as it rests up a big hill and so I have a great view of the neighborhood.

View from Mountain Top

Getting Involved in the Community

Now that I live alone in this great city, I’m trying to get more involved with the communities that are around me. The first step was to eat everything I could get my hands on and write a review about it so I would remember. It was an expensive hobby there for a while, as Sarah and I ate out nearly every night before her departure, but now I’m down to a much more manageable frequency. I’m also getting to know my neighbors, who all seem like really great people. It’s always nice to know some people in your building.

Next on the list is joining the local technology interest groups. I’ve joined the SF-LUG and the Ruby Meetup Group… we shall see what other organizations present themselves. I also plan to drop in on the local game shop’s board game night… because one can never play too many board games. The final piece is to find some volunteer/political activities in which to get involved. Still need to investigate what’s out there, but my guess is one need simply express some interest.

LegSim Resurgence

This past summer I’ve been working on a new version of LegSim written on Rails. We have a beta class running right now at the University of Washington and it seems to be going pretty well. The trick is that a lot of the features aren’t done yet, so it’s sort of a constant race against the clock to get a feature deployed before the students need it to complete an assignment. But that’s the sort of pressure I need to get me really motivated, so it’s all for the good. There’s some other really exciting things going on with LegSim right now that I hope to post about in the coming weeks.

Changes in the Workplace

Leaving Santa Cruz meant leaving my cool downtown office… which was sad, as I really liked the ladies who worked there and the space was great. Now I am once again confined to my apartment and the local coffee shops, but I’m not too worried. The much bigger change is that our company’s Lead Developer decided to peruse other opportunities earlier this month. What that means for me is I am now listed as the “Project Manager” of our big new Content Management System. I actually hope to blog a little about that in the coming weeks as well, as there are some really cool technical problems to overcome with that project and I hope to share some earned wisdom.

I think that about covers the main highlights. With luck there will be more regular — and shorter — posts in the future.

• Interbellum Generation
• Greatest Generation
• Silent Generation
• Baby Boom Generation
• Generation Jones
• Generation X
• MTV Generation
• Generation Y
• Generation Z

I’ve substituted in the more common names for a few of them… because Wikipedia is clearly wrong… “Millennium” Generation indeed. Another point where Wikipedia is wrong is declaring that Generation X includes those born in 1981. As someone who was born in 1981, I flatly reject inclusion in that humdrum and directionless generation.

But it did get me thinking about the naming scheme in use here. First, the MTV generation seems pretty silly and is entirely too narrow of a period to be an entire generation. Supposedly this is where I fit, but I think the label MTV anything was (and still is) a pejorative comment developed by earlier generations as a way to belittle us. So, screw that too.

What it leaves us is this series of generational labels that start with X and, seemingly, ends with Z (…AA?). I always liked Generation X as a concept, because “X” meant something… it was an undefined indifference that seemed to permeate many of those who are ten or so years old than me. It’s not universal, but it’s certainly prevalent. But where “X” was cool, “Y” and “Z” have nothing going on. They are simply the letters that follow after “X”. It is exactly the sort of name I would expect Baby Boomer and Generation X pollsters to ascribe to those who are coming to take their place in the world… we have no other descriptive attributes than “those who came after”.

Well, allow me to propose a better term for those born in the 1980s, experienced puberty and high school in the 90s, and were in college during the time of Napster: The Talented Generation.

I did not select this monicker lightly. But these past two weeks in Seattle I have been dumb struck by the number of amazing things my generation is doing in their twenties. Their twenties people! Instead of pursuing quixotic protest projects or experimental drugs, my generation is doing incredibly things at an outrageously young age.

Here’s just a brief run down of some of the stuff I’ve seen in the past two weeks. Two friends are putting together weekly podcasts about the Seattle Beer scene, interviewing local brewers, attending events, providing high-quality advice on homebrew projects. A friend in D.C. is publishing articles on how to be domestic in the modern age, yet avoid becoming like Betty Crocker. Two friends — and their much larger circle of friends — coordinated and put on an entire musical. A friend in San Francisco is working with Google to track not just Swine Flu, but influenza in general. Another in San Francisco is working at UCSF on technology that may radically alter our relationship with biofuels… and the list goes on!

Some of these efforts are real jobs, but most are not… and even the guy working at Google proposed and sold the idea to upper management, it wasn’t formulated from on high. You might also say that some of it is pretty small potatoes, right? Seattle Beer… who cares? Well, turns out lots of people do, and these guys are providing a service that others want and having fun while doing it.

Part of what we are seeing is the empowerment of the digital age, of that there is no question. But I also think we are seeing a new sense of volunteerism. It’s not the old one, where you signed up to help work at the local park on Saturdays… this is a new kind of volunteerism, that is highly personal and self-driven, yet fills an important community niche and provides a mechanism to give back outside of the old rules.

I don’t expect any of this to create the next big thing, but I’m also not convinced there ever will be another true big thing in our lifetime. Sure, there will be those who try to promote whatever as big and next, but the truth is, what’s really next is going to be lots of small things… each one the brain child of a talented person looking for a way to contribute in their own way. Personally, I couldn’t think of a better time to be coming into our prime.

I was actually a bit worried about waiting until the last minute as I am using H&R Block’s online system and there have been reports in the past of the site going down on tax day. But I had clear sailing the whole way and am now ready to begin my 2009 tax odyssey!

Topic 1: Sarah’s Big News

Sarah received word that she was selected to be a recipient of a Social Science Research Council grant for the purposes of conducting field research in Holland. Next to taking her Qualifying Exams in June, getting funding was the biggest challenge to eventually earning her Ph.D., so securing funding is a big deal. Many don’t get funding on their first application, and some never get funding at all.

Current plan is for her to ship out in October 2009 and return a year later. I will travel out to visit for a month sometime in the middle of her field work, so probably in April 2010. Before and after my temporary relocation to Tulip Country, I will be living in San Francisco in the coolest bachelor pad my salary can afford… does anyone have a cardboard box I can buy on installment?

Topic A: Modern Day Apocalypse

Early this morning someone intentionally cut a number of fiber-optic connections linking Santa Cruz to the rest of the digital universe. Cell phones, land lines, ATMs, credit card machines, even the internet have been down ever since. Somehow Comcast managed to avoid the saboteurs blade, so I haven’t lost internet, but I’ve been without a phone all day.

Further evidence that the internet is the second most important utility after electricity and only because the devices that can make use of the internet tend to require electricity. Water, gas, sewage… these things pale in comparison to the vital bit flow.

What that means is if I wanted to become bar certified today, I would have to re-initiate the moral fitness evaluation all over again. Rest assured, I did not come to this decision lightly. The choice to not walk the path of a professional lawyer was made a long time ago… but there has always been the option to do something on the side, or as a fall back plan. The trouble with the plan was cost. Joining the bar is expensive, as are annually renewals and tri-annual Continuing Learning Education obligations. I just do not have that kind of money of to throw after a something that might be useful someday.

The passing of April 5 doesn’t close the door on being a lawyer entirely. My bar exam passage is still good for another two years or so, which means joining the bar is still quite easy. But once the bar exam laps, I’ll be on the wrong side of a Kaplan Bar Review Course. My personal feeling is that’s for the best. If I decide to become a lawyer in seven years, it will have been a full 10 years since I last opened a casebook. I would owe it to my future employers — to say nothing of myself — to retake the bar and demonstrate I still got it. I know many of my colleagues would disagree, arguing the bar doesn’t test real legal skill and is best to be avoided at all cost, but I think there is value in going through the process to ramp up to a real law job.

Honestly, though, it’s almost an entirely academic conversation. I don’t expect to ever hold a job where being bar certified matters. The JD is enough for my long term goals, and for all I know, I may stay with technology for years to come.

Obama is now at the Western Ball, which includes not only my home state of Washington, but my adopted state of California. Seems like a good time to think about what this all means for me. I already wrote a few words about transitioning from the Loyal Opposition to the Party in Power. But there are other personal implications. For example, this is the very first time I have voted for a winning presidential candidate. It’s also the first time I gave any serious money to a candidate… like, got fancy high donor letters thanking me sort of serious. It’s the first time I feel like I contributed, both morally and materially, to a campaign that mattered.

It’s also a great honor to know people who are preparing to join the White House staff. For the first time my generation is in a position to contribute in a very direct way to our nation. They may not be the most high level jobs ever, but they are in the halls of power and they begin the process of training to, one day, run the nation. My hat is off to them, for their sacrifice (those jobs don’t pay well, or offer much in the way of rest and relaxation) and for accepting the heavy burden that comes with being the future. I hope some day I can join them.

To the Administration as a whole, I have but a few words. I told one of my friends who is starting a new White House job that they will have the unique opportunity to make the world a better place, and not just in the metaphorical sense… they could actually go into the office in the morning, and thanks to their work, come out that evening the world would actually be a better place. After saying it, I realized I had transfered my unrealistic expectations of Obama onto his team… which I suppose is only natural, if a tad unfair.

My words then, are this… it’s okay to fail in meeting our soaring expectations. But it is not okay to fail alone. The government of America is powerful and can do great things, but the people of America are more powerful yet and we are your greatest resource. If you try to carry the burden alone, and fail, you will not only have squandered an opportunity, you will have turned against the ideals of the campaign you work for. Have enough humility to understand your limitations and seek the wisdom of your fellow countrymen as you seek to fulfill our greatest destiny.

With that I say, good luck America. We’ve done a great thing today but much remains to be done. Let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work.

In the meantime, just to make it even more internet official (as if posting it on Facebook wasn’t good enough), on December 20th I asked Sarah to marry me, and to the hushed surprise of everyone, she said “yes.” The engagement will probably be about three years, which we realize is a tad long… but makes sense given Sarah’s academic schedule.

Thanks to everyone who provided assistance and advice to the planning and execution of the proposal, I will see you at the wedding!