Santa Barbara Day 1: Biking on the Waterfront

Hello and welcome to a new feature on my (mostly dull) blog. Since Urmi and I love to travel, and we're new to the whole California thing, I'll be writing up brief blurbs on each of our trips, along with photos. I love to take pictures (and sometimes they even turn out well!), so this will let me do more with my photos than just emailing them out.
Anyways, our inaugural post will cover our holiday trip to Santa Barbara and LA (more of Santa Barbara, I suppose). On our first day in Santa Barbara, we decided to explore the water front. Santa Barbara has a beautiful biking/walking/surrying path along the waterfront, including both East and West beaches as well as a route into the mountains.

Along the path
Neither of us is really a 'beach' person, so we explored on bicycle, many of which are available for rent along Santa Barbara's state street. We also saw several families rent the SUV of bicycles, also called a surry. Not entirely sure how well these things work, especially for the many hills in Santa Barbara. We ended up with mountain bikes.

Me with our bikes
After biking along East Beach (the trendiest and hippest of Santa Barbara's municipal beaches), we ended up past the zoo, through the cemetery and in a less crowded beach called Butterfly Beach. We had been told that this was reachable only via bicycle and foot, but that turned out to be a lie -- there were dozens of cars along the road directly above the beach. Getting away from the main drag helped reduce the crowds, though.

Urmi at Butterfly Beach
Since we weren't well equipped for beach combing, we decided to head back towards the city and to the other side of West Beach. Here we reached the western end of the waterfront trail at Shoreline Park, which gave excellent views of the waterfront, East Beach and downtown.

View of the City from Shoreline Park
We took the above photo with our new photography toy, the 'Gorilla Pod', a bendable tripod for point-and-shoot cameras. This thing was great -- you can attach it to trees, fences, benches, or just use it to level the camera on uneven terrain. We got a variety of great couple shots with the tripod. Anyways, the above photo gives a great view of what the waterfront looks like. Behind us is a path leading down to yet another beach, this one quite popular with surfers.
After this, we were both too sore from biking around to consider biking up into the rest of the city. The remainder of the city was also quite lacking in bike paths, which made us want to move on to greener pastures, namely into the hills over Santa Barbara to see Cachuma Lake.

Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box

On my many cross-country travels, portable video games make up one of the staples of my airport-stress avoidance. On my most recent trip, I picked up a copy of the second game in the Professor Layton series: Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box.

I like this series of games -- although the plot is aimed at younger children (which makes the twists and turns almost blindingly obvious to people with an attention span above five minutes), the puzzles can be quite tricky. At least, they were in the first game. I've found the second game to be much easier, in general; part of this may be, however, because my job increasingly resembles the puzzles in the game, so I may just be more practiced at seeing through bizarrely stated questions.

The puzzles are very fun, however. Unlike many other puzzle games, where you're required to solve slight variations of the same puzzle hundreds of times (Sudoku games, I'm looking at you), the puzzles in the Professor Layton series are very free-form. They include multiple-choice puzzles, math puzzles, route-planning, and the whole gamut in between. Several of the puzzles are classics, such as variants of the Eight Queens puzzle and Knight's Tour. The puzzles were created by Japanese puzzle phenom Akira Tago, who created a wide variety of new puzzles intended to take advantage of the capabilities of the Nintendo DS.

Diabolical Box contains at least 150 puzzles, ranging from the blindingly obvious to nail bitingly frustrating, all separated by a slow plot involving a gold box and a murder mystery. Highly recommended for people who either love puzzle games or do a lot of travelling and are sick of Sudoku.

Wheel of Time Failure

I've finally given up on rereading the whole wheel of time series. I managed to make it to the eighth book, Path of Daggers, which put me at 2.25 million words into the series before I completely ran out of steam. My brother reminded me, however, that I stopped at a good point -- the series itself starts to get slow in Path of Daggers, with apparently next to no real movement for the next four books. Lots of events, I'm sure, since the series has to be making progress towards its climax in book fourteen or fifteen. Maybe someday I'll make more progress, too.

Anti-Wifi Paint

An interesting article at BBC highlights a new invention which puts electromagnetic shielding into paint. They claim it blocks 100 GHz worth of spectrum, including consumer wifi which runs at 2.4 GHz here in the US. My first worry was regarding blocking cellular phones, which tend to run at lower frequencies, but the article presents that as a feature rather than a bug.

Really, electromagnetic shielding is hardly a new concept. Faraday cages are standard installations at most sensitive areas; supposedly to block TEMPEST attacks, although I doubt that's used except by serious espionage folks. The article mentions that movie theaters could use it to block reception during movies, but I think other mechanisms for shielding are probably more practical.

Cell Phones and Society

An interesting rant on the New York Times homepage brings to mind the fact that cell phones are still very much an emerging part of our society. Cellular phones have only been widely available for less than a decade and they're a constant reminder for how the world has changed in that decade.

Cellular phones are an amazingly intricate piece of technology -- essentially a miniaturized computer with an antenna, microphone and speaker. My first phone was heavy on the antenna, microphone and speaker components; I tend towards thinking that's about all it was. Nowadays, phones are much heavier on the computer part -- my current phone, the Google G1, is capable of emulating a Nintendo of all things, among much more practical matters.

As cell phones have evolved from the domain of the ultra-rich, society has been slow to adapt to them. Just as when email became more widely available in the mid '90s, it took well over a decade to achieve a sort of cultural consensus -- less formal than a hand written note, used primarily when an urgent response is not needed. The article above focuses on an emerging aspect of cell phone use -- people tend to stop walking when they get a call. Apparently this behavior is commonplace in New York, but I have yet to spot it in Washington.

The gradual cultural effects of cellular phones on our society is fascinating. Cellular phones are slowly but surely killing landline phones. This has progressed to the point where, during the last presidential election, many worried that polls were greatly underestimating the support for Obama because polls only surveyed landlines, which are not widely used by younger people. Newer data plan phones allow constant connection with information sources like Wikipedia. Future generations of cellphones will allow people to watch TV on them; my coworker demonstrated this to me the other day via Slingbox and his iPhone.

Interestingly, the ubiquity of mobile devices already makes some media look dated. My wife and I watched the movie Diehard a few weeks ago; the entire setup depended on the police and military being initially unaware of the terrorist's presence, but a single cell-phone call (or even a text message) could've changed that. Diehard is from 1988, only 21 years ago. Even more recent, the TV show 24 featured cell phones in the first season, but even those seemed dated when I saw a repeat of the series a few years back. Nowdays, cellular phones can relay location information, text messages, twitter, and, with only a little innovation, could be used as a widespread sensor network to detect and localize gunshots, fires, or other disruptions.

So my big question is: Where are cell phones taking our society? Some sort of uber-networked utopia? A big-brother-like dystopia where people's movement patterns are tracked via their mobile devices? Will the shortage of available radio spectrum change this or will we communications engineers figure out a way around this?

If you find this stuff as interesting as I do, the novel Halting State, by the inimitable Charles Stross, is a fascinating look at where cell phones could take us in another decade. Also note that my writing hasn't even touched on the effects of SMS or MMS on communication -- stay tuned for more rambling!

Braid

My brother, Chris, gave me a copy of Braid for my birthday this year. When it was first released, Braid was hailed as an amazingly innovative blend of a platform game and a puzzle game. Personally, I think it's one of the most strikingly cunning games I've ever seen. In most puzzle-games, you finish the game thinking you're an idiot for having not seen the solution immediately; in Braid, by contrast, you feel like a genius as soon as you uncover the solution to each puzzle.

The mechanics of Braid are simple. You can only do, basically, three different things: Run, jump, and make time go backwards. Almost every puzzle in the game is driven by the last mechanic. Each 'world', of which there are five, introduces another time-related mechanic. The first world has you adjusting to solving puzzles by moving backwards in time, and the third introduces objects (e.g. enemies, platforms) that are unaffected by the moving time backwards. Later worlds introduce more complicated mechanics, but all in the same vein.

Tying the whole game together is a simple story reminiscent of the first Super Mario Brothers game, a hero seeking a lost princess, who he can never manage to find in any castle he encounters. Although the 'hero seeking a princess' story is a classic probably better suited to the 8-bit era of video games, Braid makes it work and even ties it to the time game mechanic. The true depth of the story isn't revealed until the final level, and it blew my mind when I saw it unfold.

Braid is a fantastic game with only one major flaw: It's short. I played through the game in about four hours. At $20, that's a pretty high cost per hour of entertainment, although it compares favorably with many movies. Anyone interested in fiendishly clever puzzles and game mechanics should definitely check it out. Braid is available for Windows (via Steam), OS X (via Greenhouse) and on a wide variety of console systems.

Wheel of Time Progress Update

As I mentioned in my last flurry of blog updates, I started rereading the epic fantasy series The Wheel of Time, written (mostly) by Robert Jordan [note: I say mostly since he passed away before he could complete the final novel in the series]. Since then I've clocked through tons of subway rides, two flights to California, and over 1.5 million words of fiction, which puts me almost half-way through the series.

As I remember from the last time I read these books, book six is where the series starts getting dull. Seeing as I'm about a third of the way through book six, I've decided that I concur -- over 100,000 words into the book (the length of a decent size novel) and no one seems to be in any hurry to do anything. Still enjoyable reading, but the main plot line is moving so slow that it could almost be called glacial.

Part of the problem with this series, I think, is that Robert Jordan tries to have too many points of view in his books. The sixth book has had the story told through at least ten points of view thus far, many of which belong to minor characters. With this many points of view, it's hardly any wonder that the main storyline is moving along sluggishly.

Anyways, I hope to be able to slog through the remaining four published books, possibly in time to get to the first third of the final book, which will be released at the end of the month.