The best part is all the cute puzzles it includes. Many of them have you use the device in some ridiculous way. Like, you often have to blow into the mic to simulate blowing out a candle, or you occasionally have to fold the device shut. Silly, but, well, silly is a good thing sometimes.

The main bad side is that the multi-player minigame is terrible when playing against complete strangers. What happens is that if you are about to win then people quit! When they do this, you don't get credit for the win, and neither of you gets a chance to trade items. Sucky sucky.

You can set it up to play with only people you know, though, which is nice. To that end, my friend code for Zelda Phantom Hourglass is: 1504 4505 4192. If you catch me online, let's play! ]]> January 4, 2008 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/honey-is-hot.html Best as I can tell, every man, woman and child in Europe keeps bees. - The Bee Blog

I continue to find it odd when people generalize across all of the U.S. or all of Europe. I cannot keep track of the five million people in Atlanta, or even the one thousand people at my high school, much less three-hundred million people in a superstate.

Regarding the above, it does not match life in Lausanne. I lived there for two years and did not meet a single bee keeper. I never saw a bee hive, and the selection of honey at the stores looked about the same as at Kroger, only written in Foreign. I did see a fair number of farm animals around even within the cities, but I guess that's not really the same thing as bees.

Obviously I need to get over myself. The Bee Blog is fun, and so is this article. It just sticks with me somehow when someone says "Europeans sure do keep a lot of bees" when they could have simply said "You wouldn't believe how many bee people we ran into at the hot springs yesterday. Two!! I know!"

Mmmmmmm, honey. ]]> December 14, 2007 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/baked-maco.html baked-maco1.jpg Then you build three layers of noodles, butter, and shredded cheese, and dump the milk and eggs over the whole thing:

baked-maco2.jpg

baked-maco3.jpg

Unlike more reserved nationalities, the French greet each other with kisses on the cheek--but the practice varies to the point where one risks l'embarras social when the kisser has another number of pecks on the cheek in mind than the kissee. Suppose, for a moment, that you intend to give three kisses and the other person turns away after two. Ah, the humiliation! - "French Kissing Map", on the Strange Maps Blog

The popular lore in Swiss Romande is that Swiss people kiss three times while French and Italian people kiss two times. That's what everyone told me, and apparently what they all think. According to the above map, though, it differs all across France, with many regions going for three and a few going for one or for four. Four kisses! Can you imagine? If five women meet for lunch, they'd have to exchange 80 kisses before they can come up for air. It's practically an orgy.

By the way, there is a similar problem with which side you start on. If one of you goes left, and the other one goes for their left, then even more embarrassment can ensue. I eagerly await a new strange map on the question of which side to start on. ]]> November 29, 2007 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/cat-acne.htmlI didn't know cats could get acne. I didn't think they didn't get acne, I just hadn't realized they did, either. I mean, sure, they get everything else, from leukemia to diabetes, but acne??

Naturally, we found out in just about the most embarrassing way possible. We just noticed a few days ago that Einstein, the older of our two cats, had a round red rough area under his mouth. At first we thought the younger cat had bitten him and he had a scab. After a few days, though, the red splotches started spreading. The more we talked about it the more nerve-racking the possibilities became. Maybe it's ringworm, and it will spread to us and our guests!

So we took him to the vet. She looked at the cat, looked at it through a magnifying glass, and then started telling personal stories about her own cats. At one point I realized the vet had not done any examining in a while, but had gone into full story-telling mode.... and I gradually realized she was trying to soften the embarrassment for us.

Ah well. At least it is nothing serious. Are we really now having discussions about whether to get him skin cream? Yes, yes we are. Acne on a cat. And any skin cream that doesn't have zinc oxide. ]]> October 27, 2007 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/nice-attendant.htmlI just flew out to a computer conference in Canada, and as we landed our chatty flight attendant had this to say:

In 1979, an American embassy in a Middle East country was taken over. The Americans on the street went to the Canadian embassy and were taken in. They were given Canadian passports and a flight back to America. We Americans remember this, and we are thankful.

I always get worried when someone on stage brings up political issues. I know too many people who are not only willing to get into brawls, but eager to, so I'd rather not be around when someone stokes those flames. Sometimes, though, people like this flight attendant remind us to try and get along. ]]> October 13, 2007 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/mixed-up-mail.htmlI got a bit of a surprise today. Fay and I spent a few hours unpacking my stuff from Switzerland, and the mailed boxes were about as beat up as last time. The surprise, though, was that one of the boxes included five items that were from someone else. Check it out:

The three books are brand new and all on the same topic, so it looks like someone was trying to bone up on the latest thinking on the subject. The two little pieces of mail are from Japan! The have Japanese stamps, one for 480 yen (?) and one for 280 yen, and both are post-marked August 3 of this year.

Is that strange, or what? It is like somebody along the way not only opened my mail, but was so sloppy that somebody else's mail fell into my boxes. What else could it have been? ]]> October 11, 2007 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/home-again.htmlWell, folks, I am back home in Atlanta again. I took Delta 67 for the last time on Monday.

It is good to be here. For over a week just the thought of stepping back into the Saloon house would get me charged up, and now I am here.

Curiously, the transition has not been dramatic. It is more of a suffuse improvement. There was no goodbye party, no welcome home party---people mentioned the idea but I am too self-conscious for such a thing! I just took the trip the same as the last ten or so times: I walked out with my bags and got on the train.

Perhaps the reason is that this was not really an ending. The work I will continue on is similar to what I did at the end there. The coworkers I will continue seeing, some as soon as a few months at OOPSLA in Montreal, and anyway I will always see them at conferences--programming language research is a narrow specialization! As for the pastry shops, I will certainly miss being able to walk in any direction and find a great pain au chocolat within a block, but in Atlanta I can still drive to the Dekalb Framer's Market and get a great Danish.

As for the view.... okay, the view in Atlanta sucks, but it has a different sort of charm I have missed: I really dig seeing massive buildings and giant roads all over the place. It feels not just alive, but energetic and powerful. It reminds me what humankind can do nowadays.

So ending was so much of an ending. The real change is the new possibilities. I can grow a plant now.

All in all, it has been an interesting two years. It was really neat living somewhere where everything, not just the language, was a little different. French is not so bad if you are immersed, but weirdness is universal. The rest of life, though, was sort of like living in a science fiction novel or a Twilight Zone episode, where something as basic as the laundry might trip you up. Job-wise it was excellent. Martin Odersky and the people working in his lab are really a lot of fun, and I learned a lot in the process that graduate school somehow sheltered me from.

All right, back to the grind guys. We are still sharing a car so I need to get moving.... ]]> September 24, 2007 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/jaoo07.htmlI had a good time at JAOO (pronounced "Jow"). It was fun presenting Scala to people who might actually be able to use it; usually I talk with people who, well, talk about computers, rather than actually do anything with them. It was difficult rushing to prepare for this talk, since I am in the middle of moving and all, but it was well worth it. Plus, it was nice visiting Aarhus again--I have many fond memories of the place.

The conference as a whole was more informal than I am used to. Whenever names were listed, they were alphabetized by first name, not last. We did not have banquets, but parties. And the parties were rocking! The high point was the Absolute Girls rocking for us. How cool is that--all four female attendees made a rock band? They played Stayin' Alive, and you should have seen all those computer nerds break out their disco moves.

By the way, if you have never done so, check out Charles in Space. This guy managed to score a seat on a Russian Soyuz going up to the space station, and he told us all about it. (For my presentation, I will show you slides from my summer vacation.) It's fun stuff. ]]> September 21, 2007 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/enoch.htmlA few months ago I finished the Baroque Cycle by Neil Stephenson. It's a historical fiction about several major players in the scientific Enlightenment, including Newton, Leibniz, and Hooke. It takes place at a time when Europe is starting to embrace trade and commerce, and hereditary power is weakening.

I had never before imagined what it must have been like to peer through a microscope, for the first time, and realize there is a whole tiny world just too small to see. I had never thought about how world-changing it must have felt to first get glimpses into calculus and Newtonian physics, bringing sense to parts of the world that used to be much more mysterious. At the same time, financial arrangements such as insurance, stocks, and money itself are improving fitfully as the book progresses. There is even a university whose funding comes from a defense department.

I have to say, while I like Enoch Root, I am glad that Stephenson seems to picture him as a player in the story, subject to all--er, most--of its laws, as opposed to being magical, robotic, or from another planet. By keeping Enoch Root non-magical, Stephenson keeps the story that much more real. I just hope, one of these days, Stephenson clues us in on who exactly Enoch Root is. What do you think? ]]> September 17, 2007 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/bye-grammont6.htmlIt was maudlin throwing away everything in my second apartment in Lausanne. I needed to get down to two suitcases worth of belongings, and all those things on the shelf that I didn't ever use really had to go. No point in mailing it across the sea. It is only logical to get rid of stuff that is not being used, but each one of those things had a purpose at some point, a purpose no longer relevant.

Anyway, it was nice to get it done, and here's how it looked afterward. The three black bags you see, by the way, are heading for textile recycling. The white cable you see is the Internet connection---the very last thing that will be removed.

• corner 1
• corner 2

That was yesterday. Today was cleaning, a much happier activity. The weather is great here, so I opened the windows and swept, dusted, scrubbed, and wiped all afternoon. Afterward, I walked down to dockside to get a crepe, take in the view, and oddly enough watch a couple of guys break dancing on the concrete.

Anyway, there is no real point today. No knowing is half the battle for you. Clearing out my apartment for leaving is now basically done, so I'll be disentangled that much more and ready to leave. ]]> September 8, 2007 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/transformers-imax.htmlIt actually exists! Or at least, it will by the time I am back in the States. ]]> September 2, 2007 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/lastover.htmlI am in the airport now, about to fly over to Switzerland for the last time. I and Fay just had birthdays, and we celebrated them at the South Carolina beach with lots of family around. It was a relaxing trip despite the three couples having constantly simmering almost-arguments and despite the 9-month old we all needed to tiptoe around. There's just nothing like the sound of endlessly crashing waves on the beach, and there's nothing like seeing family again after a significant delay. I only wish we could have done it for two weeks instead of one.

I scored two really great toys out of this. Fay gave me a GPS device, which both finds directions for you and lets you hack the software. Mamma gave me a coffee roaster, which both makes delicious coffee and lets you hack the roasting program. I will leave this roaster in Atlanta; I had one before but it eventually broke after too many trips across the Ocean!

Gotta go board now. It's my last trip over, and I can't wait to get things wrapped up and settle back down in Atlanta. ]]> August 13, 2007 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/berlin07.htmlsome great photos of our team. The first half of them are at dinner near Lausanne, and the second half are in Berlin where we went for a conference. Check us out! ]]> July 28, 2007 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/packing.htmlIt's funny packing everything up to go. I mailed over 20 boxes over here, and I will only send about 7 back to Atlanta. I'm throwing out files I never looked at, books I never cracked open, clothes I never wore.... and dishes which, after all the wonderful things our friends gave us after the wedding, are no longer useful. That George Forman grill served me well, but is it worth its weight in shipping? I think not.

Logistically, it is more interesting than you would think to try and give stuff away. Ebay, popular all over the United States, is not used much in Switzerland. Likewise for Craigslist, and nor is there a Goodwill to take the last bits of stuff and dump. I had to ask around quite a bit to find the Swiss equivalents. So far I have found:

• Offer stuff on the school mailing lists. Swiss students snatch up free stuff in Switzerland just as fast as American ones. I had the first taker come by my office within minutes of pressing "send"! About the only thing left from the first batch is the George Forman grill.
• Ricardo is a substitute for Ebay, and for housing stuff zannonces is a substitute for Craigslist.
• I have not found a Goodwill equivalent, but for clothing and sheets you can dump things in these weird green "Texaid" bins that are all over town.

For the rest I don't know. While I hear it is illegal in Switzerland for companies to throw lots of stuff away, and thus that recycling and disposal is a government-protected industry of its own, I am not sure what to do as an individual. I will surely end up throwing some stuff in the trash that I would have dumped at Goodwill in the U.S.

That is all logistics. The real funny thing is that it is a little sad to leave this place behind. Overall, I will certainly be happy to leave. I have found Switzerland austere and confusing, sometimes downright mean. Shopping and other daily affairs are difficult due to the hours and the red tape--even the school piano is only available 9:00-5:00, so I guess all emoting must happen during the scheduled time. Apartment rental is completely broken, and at my last apartment they even tried to cheat me out of 3600 CHF. The social world here is impenetrable to me, for reasons I cannot figure out. Everyone smiles and is polite, but it is impossible to arrange social activities. Both times Fay visited, I failed to arrange a single person for her to meet among the locals. I suppose at least that is an accurate view of what it is like here.

So where is the funny part, you might ask? Well, there are certainly parts I will miss. The work is awesome, and is a chapter that will close soon. The view is amazing from all over town. The croissants are out of this world--in fact, in just a moment I will walk three doors down and get me one. Also, it is interesting somehow to watch a different place go by, even from the outside. In the end, it does not even seem so different; the over-the-top political ads are familiar, and the city festivals are much like the ones you see in Greenville.

Yes, there will be things I miss, but still I will be happy to get back. Half of my stuff is already shipped. ]]> June 14, 2007 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/certified-only.htmlI am learning, to my chagrin, that it is really important to mail things with certified mail in Lausanne. My experiences with de Rham are the most notable case, where they responded to my every email but conveniently lost one that was crucial. I should not have been misled by their friendly tone in earlier emails; they can and will take advantage of you if you slip up somewhere.

Today I just learned that The Internet Company has conveniently lost my cancellation letter, and has quietly charged me for three more months of service. I was already miffed at them because I cancelled in 2006 and they still said I had to pay for January-March of 2007. I accepted it, though, because that is the written service agreement, so it was my mistake. Now, though, they have conveniently "lost" my cancellation letter. If this sticks, I owe at least 3, and probably 6, more months of service fees, bringing the possible total to 11 months paid for a service unused. I wonder if they are also charging the new occupant of that same apartment?

Sending certified mail costs over five times more than normal mail. In Lausanne, I guess that is just what you have to do, however. ]]> May 31, 2007 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/laundry-schedule.htmlThere is little I have seen to wound a Swiss heart more than mucking up the laundry schedule. When people are caught on the train without a ticket, they banter away so happily you expect them to pull out photos of their kids. When people cut each other off in traffic... actually, I can hardly recall such a dispute. This unworldy good nature, though, does not extend to the laundry schedule. There, their hearts are open and vulnerable.

This morning was the fourth time I started a day in Lausanne with someone fussing at me about the laundry schedule. The only difference compared to the other three times was that they give me pity instead of vitriol. The deep-seated passion was the same, but instead of yelling, the concierge spoke like I was a two year old. Now, Monsieur, each person gets their time slot. A good person gives up their laundry key at the end of their slot. You want to be a good person, now, don't you?

The pity response is actually worse than the angry response. With the angry response, they look completely ridiculous, turning red and berking away about, of all inane things, the laundry schedule. With the pity response, though, something in me wonders what they are going to do to me. Logically I know the looney bin is not a realistic future, but there is still this queasy primal fear that comes from being spoken to as less than a thinking being.

The whole event was really emotional. This time I talked back. If you get to use the laundry on a free day, why not me? Do the rules not apply to the concierge? People were looking on, waiting pained-facedly for her for some kind of actual productive work, and to my shame I did not resist dropping a few snarky side comments. We broke apart fuming, but I left my door open, and later we had a heart to heart about it and sort of made up.

If you saw us, without understanding the words, you would see deep-cutting wounds being inflicted and patched over. You would think I had insulted her vocation, or that she had insulted my character. You would think someone had giggled at a religious observance. No, my friends and family, the knife that cut so deep was my disrespect the laundry schedule.

It is really demoralizing. On none of these four occasions have I actually caused anyone to lose laundry time. I understand, without understanding why, that we only have one machine, and so we have to share. However, life does not live inside the lines drawn on that stupid laundry schedule. From time to time I bend the rules, but I am very careful about it, and nobody has lost laundry time due to me. It does not matter. It is the principle that sets them off.

I am close to giving up and simply using laundromats. They are inconvenient, but at least I understand the capitalist exchange of money for service. You put your money in and the machine does its job. I would even understand a communist system, where the apartment dwellers form a community and we share our bizarrely limited resources. That would require a community, though, and there is no sense of community here. There are just lines on the schedule, and that is just how they like it. ]]> May 28, 2007 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/grandaddy.htmlAwww, yeah, it's summer time in Lausanne. The weather is warm, and the lakeside is crowding up. Half the time it is still cold, but that makes it even better: now I only have to do laundry half as often. How much better does it get?

At the same time, I am now finding grandaddy longlegs everywhere in my apartment. Lausanne is normally low on the bugs, but I guess it changes during the summer.

I do not mind these creatures too much, because they are terrified of humans, plus they move slow and are easy to squoosh. Still, I would prefer to have less of them, so I will have to open the windows a little less often.

In looking for the above Wikipedia link, I ran across a lot of cool stuff about these creepy leggy creatures. For example, they do not make their own webs -- they do not even have silk glands! -- so any time you see them in a web they must have stolen it. In fact, biologists do not even call these creatures "spiders". They are arachnids, but not spiders. A real spider not only makes webs, but has eight eyes instead of two.

The web stealing is just the beginning of it. These guys are real jerks of the animal kingdom. I ran across a great short paper online where two guys are very proud to have photographic evidence of--get this--a longlegs stealing food out of the web from another spider. It's from the Journal of Arachnology, which appears to be legitimate.

Even aside from the subject of the paper, it's a funny read in other ways. For example, the authors spend a lot of effort arguing over whether the observed behavior counts as "kleptoparasitic". I guess the authors are angling for some kind of position in intellectual history, which is an interesting part of how research works. You would love to be the guy that discovered kleptoparasitic behavior in grandaddy longlegs. Or something; I did not follow the argument closely, as I do not care about the intellectual history of arachnids.

Also amusing is how much page space they spend on ridiculous amounts of detail. I guess they never know what part will turn out to be significant to a future arachnophile, so they put it all in anyway. Reading this, my respect is increased for all those silly "fake" science projects we did in grade school. Check it out:

The harvestman and spider were observed in nature without touching or altering subjects, and were photographed by the senior author. The observations were made at Reserva Municipal da Mata de Santa Genebra, Campinas, state of São Paulo, Brazil (22 44 S, 47 06 W) on 26 September 1992 at about 2000 h. The temperature was about 25 C, relative humidity was 60%, and the day was cloudy.

Here is the punchline of the report. Check out the writing style. It's scientific stuffiness, mixed with psycho-thriller novel.

The harvestman was first detected on a tree trunk about 20 cm from the spider. The spider was holding the prey (a moth partially wrapped in silk) with its chelicerae (Fig. 1). The harvestman slowly approached the spider, until it touched the spider with its first and second pairs of legs (Fig. 2). The harvestman touched the spider again three or four times. Meanwhile, the spider stood motionless. After 1-2 minutes, the harvestman suddenly moved over the spider, which dropped the prey and backed up about 3-4 cm. Because the harvestman also moved back slightly (ca. 1-2 cm), the prey was now located between the two arachnids (Fig. 3). Just a few seconds later, the harvestman started moving towards the prey, while the spider turned around and moved away (Fig. 4). The harvestman eventually picked the prey up with its pedipalps, and remained at the spot handling the prey (maybe already eating it) for several minutes afterwards.

By the way, in case longlegs seem like scary kings of the jungle, the paper also offers the tidbit that, "One of the main predators of goniosomatine harvestmen is the ctenid spider Ctenus fasciatus (Mello-Leitão 1943), which preys mainly on adult and subadult harvestmen." If there is a king of the bug world, it's not longlegs. ]]> May 13, 2007 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/wedding-photos.html http://bolot.smugmug.com/gallery/2775471 ]]> May 11, 2007 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/i-do.html

The question is asked, "Is there anything more beautiful in life than a boy and a girl clasping hands and pure hearts in the path of marriage? Can there be anything more beautiful than young love?"

And the answer is given. "Yes, there is a more beautiful thing. It is a man and a woman growing old together, finishing their lives' journey together on that path. When they grow old, though their hands become gnarled, they are still clasped; though their faces become wrinkled, they are still radiant; their hearts are physically bowed and tired, but still strong with love and devotion for one another. Yes, there is a more beautiful thing than young love. Old love."

Blessings on you, Lex and Fay, that God will bless your marriage to have long lives and grow old together, that you may grow more and more in love with each other as you grow in love with God, our Father.

That is the message my mother spoke at the wedding of Fay and myself. She then gave us our vows, and at 4:17 p.m., April 28, 2007, Fay and I started our marriage.

Fay, I do not what chance brought our meandering paths to cross. I do not know what lapse of judgement let you accept me as your husband. What I do know is that I will treat you as well as this poor guy can manage.

]]> April 12, 2007 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/derham.htmlI waited before posting anything because I wanted to see what position de Rham was going to take. I just got mail from them that they are sticking to their tactics, so screw protecting their image.

When living in Switzerland I have worked hard to be polite and do things properly. I want to spread good karma and have a friendly visit. Besides, I do not know how things work, and so I could not cheat people if I tried. So I have, for example, bought insurance that I am not sure I really have to get, and I have obeyed apartment rules that I am not sure the concierge really has a right to impose. I paid a "multimedia" bill for over a year that I did not understand, and it turns out that I was paying for cable television, something I thought was not even available in that apartment. Overall, I have tried not to rock the boat as a foreigner in Switzerland.

What de Rham is doing now is too much, however. I will fight this to the end.

What they have done is to conduct a moving-out inspection without me present, and then decided that I owe 3600 CHF in damages to my old apartment. This 3600 of "damages" includes all kinds of improvements and renovations. They wanted 800 to hire a cleaning service for an already empty and clean room. They want 400 CHF for removing "personal effects", which I later learned meant "a couch and three casseroles". They changed some electric fixtures, and upgraded some things in the kitchen.

To give you an idea of the scale of this money, 3600 CHF is a little over three months' rent for the apartment in question. 400 CHF is enough to fly round trip from Geneva to any capitol in Europe, two or three times. And to give you an idea of what might be going on here, 3600 CHF is almost exactly the amount of my security deposit for the apartment.

Their justification for all this is that they mailed me a letter on February 1 saying that I had to appear for an inspection on February 15. I did receive that letter, 12 hours before I caught a plane to the U.S. for one month. At the time, I did not understand exactly what the letter was, so after I landed, I emailed them and asked what should we do, because I was unavailable on February 15.

I wish I could have known to send them a certified letter instead of an email. You do not want to communicate casually with de Rham. At the time, though, I had spent over a year with them communicating mostly via email, because my spoken French is even worse than my written French. This time, however, they did not respond to the email. In fact, they say they gave me a phone call and I assented to the visit. (I cannot wait to see when they claim this phone call occurred -- was I even in the country?).

Anyway, when I returned around March 1, I had a pile of mail waiting for me saying that they had inspected the room, changed the locks, and that I would owe them 3600 CHF. They did not have any receipts or pictures to show me, but they were confident they could come up with 3600 CHF of charges.

I immediately went to their office to try and clear this up. I was happy to help them, I said, but I would not simply pay them thousands of francs so they could renovate the place. They told me there was nothing they could do because the work had already been "ordered". I cannot wait to find out when the work actually occurred.

This gives you another insight into the situation: do Rham is a big organization and is not flexible at all. The work they ordered had very likely not happened yet; two months later they still have not sent me the receipts. Would it really be so hard for them to cancel the order, now that the tenant in question was standing right in front of them? Apparently they simply could not do it.

Luckily, there is a renters organization in Lausanne called ASLOCA. I paid a yearly membership (100 CHF) and can talk to someone there who knows rental law and how it all works in Lausanne. From what I hear from ASLOCA, most of the charges de Rham makes will probably fall through if I just hang in there. So again, de Rham is just incompetent. They seem to be giving me the sleazy treatment they give to someone who has left Switzerland for good, when they could have gotten this work done for free if they would be friendly with me. Now that they know I just moved across town, they cannot seem to adjust. They are trapped into their own habits.

Then again, who knows. In the courts, anything can happen, and maybe de Rham will make a few bucks here after all. So two months later I am still sitting here wondering if I will get stuck with that 3600 CHF charge. I wonder how long this will go on? I wonder what will happen if they drag it out past October, when I finally do leave Switzerland for good?

Oh, one other thing. Thank goodness I used SwissCaution! SwissCaution lets you avoid a security deposit by paying a flat, non-recoverable fee. The fee is 7%, and so it is not a great deal for a Swiss person. However, for a visiting worker it means you do not have serious money tied up if your rental agent turns out to be as sleazy as de Rham. ]]> March 7, 2007 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/laposte.htmlSometimes living in Lausanne feels like being between the cogs of a great clockwork. A lot of things you take for granted, are just different. If you make a mistake, you slip right into the gears of the machine, and everyone around just shrugs and says it was your fault.

Today I learned that a package I have awaited over a month was delivered while I was in the U.S. Good news, I thought, I have been needing that computer part. When I went to the post office to pick up the package, though, they said they had already returned it. They had only held my package for seven days!

This delivery policy--this standard delivery policy of La Poste--means that it is impractical for me to use the public postal system to receive packages at my Swiss apartment. This policy alone means I have somewhere around 60% chance of receiving a package: there is a 50% that it arrives during a month I am in Switzerland, and an additional 10% chance that it will arrive just before I return to Switzerland but before they bounce it back. On top of this problem, the mail here is slow and is prone to damaging your stuff, anyway.

I do not mean to just grouse about the system. The folks here like it well enough, and so fine.

The interesting thing is, in the U.S., it would never occur to me that delivering a package to my home might be a tricky procedure. This problem hit me out of the blue. In the U.S., any domicile better than a cardboard box is set up to receive and hold small packages for you. You can get things mailed to you, and you just do not worry that the post office is on a hair trigger to bounce your package. In Lausanne it is different. Delivering a package here requires care and attention to detail, and bounced packages are just part of how the system works.

The superficial similarity of the USPS and La Poste masks important differences. As just one example, this difficulty with packages means that services like ebay are trickier to use. ]]> February 28, 2007 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/marta-dentist.htmlAtlanta's public transportation system is called MARTA (Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority). Since Fay and I are sharing a car, I ended up riding it home from a dentist appointment. Since most Atlantans have forgotten than MARTA even exists, I thought I would share a little about the experience.

On the whole the trip was okay but slow. Driving to the dentist in a car, during heavy traffic, took 30 minutes. Taking MARTA back, during light traffic, took 103 minutes.

time	event	time spent
		walking	waiting	riding
9:42	left dentist
9:51	arrived at station	9
9:52	boarded train 1		1
10:01	left train 1			9
10:17	boarded train 2		16
10:30	left train 2			13
10:58	boarded bus		28
11:15	left bus			17
11:25	arrived home	10
	total	19	45	39

MARTA cannot do very much about the walking and riding columns, given the existing layout of the city's road system. So even with a perfect MARTA, the trip would have taken a minimum of 58 minutes, which is about twice what it takes to drive.

Anyway, the system works okay on the whole. I really have just one wish: post some stupid maps and schedules! ]]> January 13, 2007 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/microonde.htmlMy life just got a little bit better, thanks to advanced technology:

Fay encouraged me to just go look at how much microwaves are, and there was a big sale today! I snagged the last one available. As a result, my apartment is now filled with space-age technology.

Surprisingly, it is actually a dual-mode oven. In addition to microwaving (at 1200W), it can also use conventional convection heat (at 1000W). So when you cook, you have to press the button for which kind of heating you want. If you use microwaving, you are supposed to take out the metal grill that you see in the picture.

In the United States, I have never seen this kind of oven. Lots of people have both a microwave and a separate "toaster oven". I saw them in Denmark a lot, though, and today a the store it was the only option I saw. ]]> January 13, 2007 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/twinsanity.htmlI really like the Crash Bandicoot series of games for Playstation. It has a cutesy playful feel, it has levels that are a good size for 30 minute gaming sessions, it tracks lots of items for you to collect to complete the game, and somehow the control and the motion of the hero are kinda fun. So, I was hopeful when I brought home a used copy of Crash Bandicoot: Twinsanity.

Twinsanity is a let down, despite having all of the above ingredients. The problem is the level design. Mainly, it's just too hard. The initial learn-to-play levels are already as difficult as the last 20% or 40% of the levels on the original Crash Bandicoot. You die repeatedly, and if you die at the wrong place, it will force you through the cut scene again with no option to skip it. Fay has now heard a hundred times, "Look, a power crystal.... and it's MINE!". It was cute the first five times.

On top of the general difficulty, parts of the game are just poorly put together. For example, if you die enough in an area, the game gives you a shield to protect you against one hit. However, on the very same levels, they stack multiple exploding boxes on top of each other so that one collision counts as more than one hit anyway. This is just poor design; either a stack of boxes should be one hit, or only one of the boxes in the stack should be explosive, or they should not bother with the pointless shield.

Symbolic of the poor design is the way the game handles motion through the ocean. Crash cannot swim. By itself, that is a fine choice, but the game encourages you to explore the island you start on (once you finally get through the hellish "learn to play" levels described above, anyway). However, guess what happens if you wade out into the ocean? Yep -- instant death.

There are many fine ways to handle the ocean to make a nicer playing experience. The simplest is to forbid going out into the water at all. Not bad would be to let people swim out a certain distance and then block them. Fancier would be to have a swim gage so that you can only swim a certain amount of time before drowning. Among all of these fine choices... they just kill you? It is like Ultima 8 all over again.

If you like run and jump games, and you like cutesy graphics to a game, then I recommend the Crash Bandicoot series in general. Just stay away from Twinsanity. ]]> December 30, 2006 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/christmas2006.htmlIt was another great Christmas. The houses and streets were filled with softly glowing lights. The radio played Christmas songs day and night. The food was out of this world, real soul food for Spoons and Salvarases: lasagna, baked ham, squash casserole, apple pie, baklava, ... yum!

Of course, no Christmas would be complete without chocolate. Fay scored a box of Durig, a box of Godiva, a box of Whitman, and a bag of Lindt chocolates that you can hang on your tree--that's four things of chocolate before you even count things like chocolate Santa's and Reeses-filled candy canes !

Best of all was that Fay and I spent Christmas time together this time. The three days before Christmas, we hung out in Dalton with her friends and family, on the day itself and the day after we hung out in Greenville with mine. I hated being away on Christmas Eve, and I'm sure she felt the same about Christmas Day, but I think this arrangement worked out better than last year, where we spent the whole time with our respective families... and the whole time on the phone with each other!

Happy holidays to everyone! ]]> November 16, 2006 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/does-warcraft-end.htmlI just read a nice article by Mark Bernstein about endings in ongoing stories shared by massive numbers of people. He gives as examples television series, long musical works, and... Warcraft! He then asks a question:

That's the promise of a long arc: the kids will grow up. If the show were to ignore the promise, it would be an endless series of chase scenes. (his is what makes the modern arc matter in a way that endlessly episodic television -- Star Trek or The Avengers -- does not.

And this is one of my misgivings about MMPORGs today: do they go nowhere? Or are we just harvesting gold and arresting 500 villains?

It is true that Warcraft faces a big challenge in the design of the story. Unlike in single-player games, you cannot allow each player to make permanent game-changing events. You can find the missing king, but you cannot rescue him, because then no one else can. You can fight Onyxia, but not permanently destroy her, because then no one else could. Thus, all of the major events in Warcraft are in some way inconclusive and repeatable.

Nonetheless, the overall story does progress! Instead of progress being made by individual players, the writers move the whole game world bit by bit, or sometimes in one large swoop. New areas open, and in principle old ones can be closed. New characters and story lines appear and fade. The real-world pace is not so different from that of Battlestar Galactica or The Wire, where each week brings a little bit of insight, major steps happen at each season, and where the whole thing will probably end on a scale of 5-10 years.

Right now, for example, a new force called The Scourge is being phased into Warcraft. Already there are new characters, quests, and areas. Floating castles have been sighted in the sky, and underneath them are mysterious monsters not seen before. There is expected to be a major update to the game world in January which should begin to clear up much of the current mystery.

The answer to Bernstein's question is YES! MMORPGs can and do go somewhere. The "writers" change the online world in ways small and large so that the shared world progresses.

Whether that progress goes somewhere good is up to the skill of the writers. For Warcraft, I am expecting something less than the gripping tale of Galactica's cylons growing up, but more than the endless XP and gold of Diablo. ]]> November 13, 2006 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/alitalia-blows.htmlAlitalia only screws up big. When their flights run, they have comfortable seats, friendly staff, and good plane food. When they run, they are really quite a pleasant airline. When they run.

Today I am sitting in Milan because my flight was canceled, just like the last time I tried to fly back to Lausanne on Alitalia. The next flight out is five hours later, so I am missing two meetings today and delaying getting back to work. You would think I would learn.

The response of the Alitalia staff makes it only worse. There was no announcement on the plane, so we all just had to figure it out on our own. I then waited in a total of three different lines, two of which took an hour, for a total about 2.5 hours of line-waiting. The agent at one of the lines told me to come back later, because for some reason they cannot check bags more than two hours before the new flight? More than two hours, you ask? Bags??, you ask? Yes, along the way unchecked all of our bags, never mind that at least in my case they had already rebooked me for another flight later in the day, thus requiring an extra trip through security so they could inspect the bags again.

Losing a day of work is a drag. Losing a day of work and then spending it all in lines is even worse. I am glad I had a good book with me, and I hope I can avoid Alitalia in the future! ]]> October 13, 2006 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/drinkitorleaveit.html"Drink it or leave it!", cried the security guys, as we crawled down the boarding ramp. Sure enough, there was a growing collection of half-drunk bottles accumulating for those who chose "leave it". On the plane, I heard, "Did they take your makeup? ... They took my [something] but let me bring the rest." When I arrived in Atlanta, I had to go through a security check again just to exit the airport. I had taken a toiletries bag out of my luggage so that I could brush my teeth before seeing Fay, but they warned me to put it back in or some of the contents might be confiscated.

The U.S.'s official restrictions are getting lighter, but that did not matter at this Italian airport. I normally carry around a tiny bottle, maybe 1 oz., of alcohol-based hand cleaning goop. I have gone through the security lines many times with it. This time, however, the security guys were stricter and they kept it.

I guess it does not matter what the precise rules listed on the TSA web site. The web site says that tiny bottles are fine. What really matters are the rules of the security dudes standing right in front of you. Let's be honest: is anyone really going to bring a lawyer through the line to protect their rights? Is anyone going to sue an airport over a bottle or a pocketknife?

I am not sure that a lot of this activity is helping anything; I am pretty sure I could sneak a liquid through these checks, and I am pretty sure I could come up with plenty of other ways to attack a plane anyway. Meanwhile, everyone who travels has to be probed, questioned, and searched, and everyone who travels wonders what of their stuff they will get to keep on this trip. ]]> October 1, 2006 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/fastest-bureaucrat-ever.htmlWoo, Thursday I went through the fastest bureaucrat ever: kudos to the "Contrôle des Habitants" [1]! I walked in, handed them my forms, and handed them some money. They say not to stand there and wait; they will review the papers and then send my new residence permit in the mail. I had scheduled a whole afternoon for this visit. It went so fast that I was almost disappointed!

To contrast, human resources at EPFL just keeps underwhelming me. In theory, human resources is the connection between the cold machine of the organization and the warm, squishy human beings that scramble about the cogs trying, well, not to get squished. The practice is a little different.

For my most recent need from HR, it took me three tries to actually meet them, because apparently their hours are 9:30-4:30, except during "lunch" which is from 12:00-2:00 [2]. When I finally got to meet one of them, it took fifteen minutes for them to figure out what was needed to get a simple form printed [3]. My previous visit to HR was similarly underwhelming. I was signing papers to work at EPFL, and they assigned me a person to explain what was going on. They may as well not have bothered. I had not spoken French in about 10 years, so we tried English, but the communication did not work. I had trouble reading the forms, while she could not think of the English word for "pension", even though it's the same word, "pension". She, like this other fellow, was a nice person, but they and their department were not very helpful.

By the way, I had a chilling thought at my most recent visit to HR. What can you do if these guys just don't help you? You cannot do the work yourself. You cannot turn to someone else to do it. You have no common interest. You can try to go over their head, but that takes hours or weeks. Unless it gets really bad, your main hope is that they have pity on you. So, I figure your main strategy should be to go for the ride, look pathetic, and remind them repeatedly of what a decent human-resources person would do in this situation. Everybody wants to be decent, right? In other words, pure psychology.

I guess this is what being mugged is like. Or, being hauled into a police station.

Anyway, there is one good thing about underwhelming departments like EPFL's HR: They make the good guys look absolutely amazing. Kudos, Contrôle des Habitants!

[1] I am never sure about all these Bureau's of This's, Office's of That's -- I just read the addresses on the forms, go there, and then flash forms, sign papers, and hand over money until the guy is satisfied. As best I can tell, this one is the Office of People Who Live Here. I go to the upstairs branch, which is for Funny-Lookin' People Who Live Here Who Don't Talk Right.

[2] The concept of shifts is too hard. Heck, it might be illegal! Being useful during the lunch hours? Bizarre and self-destructive. Enabling other people to do work instead of to shut down? Preposterous.

[3] First, I needed to sign another form. Second, I am from the U.S., not from England, which apparently makes a difference. It's cool they can guess the language even; that pathetic r-rolling is a dead givaway, or something. ]]> September 21, 2006 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/cheapgrinder.htmlWhoa, I just found a coffee grinder for 15 CHF ($12)! Even Target sells their cheapest grinder for $20. Most things here cost more; 15 CHF will get you one pound of hamburger meat, but not two.

I wonder whether this thing actually works? ]]> September 5, 2006 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/shesaidyes.htmlFay and I will get married next spring. Here we are with my parents:

Here we are at dinner where my parents took us out:

Here is our engagement sand castle:

Fay's first words, after "oh all right" were, "Goober! You're such a goober."

Let me explain why. Fay was supposed to get a ring Monday night, not Tuesday. The plan was, we would take a romantic moonlit walk down the beach just like one we took a year ago in the same place. There were a lot of vacationers out shooting fireworks [1], which would just perfect the parallel. I could ask her with fireworks going off in the sky and her face lit up by them.

It was not to be. That plan failed, just like many other plans to follow. Dinner ran too late to take an evening walk. A very important game [2] was starting on TV, and it would have been a bad start on our journey together to say, "screw that game and come walk with me." A walk can only be romantic if it is voluntary.

Okay. No problem. The night is young. How about... halftime. We can take the same walk at halftime and transition back to the original plan. The only problem was, when we did step outside, I did not get a chance to sneak the ring into my pocket. So, we had the perfect time, but while I stewed away trying to think of an excuse to go back inside to get the ring, time ran out and we went back inside.

Shoot! But okay. Okay. No problem. The night is still young. We can take a late-night walk and get the plan back on track. So, I goobered next to her while she watched her long-awaited game, trying to get her in a sweet question-popping mood. Alas, the game went bitter. From half time through the rest of the evening, every other thing my beloved said was "stupid football team!" or "get an offensive line!". The mood did not seem right.

Okay. No problem. The week is young. We can go on our romantic walk another night.... Only, now rain was forecast for the rest of the week. You would never, ever, want to take a Fay for a walk in the rain. You may as well throw dirt on her.

Which, as it turned out, was not far from how it went. I gave up on grand plans. At this point, any romantic moment will just have to do. I already failed to get her a ring on my last visit. We had been apart seven weeks, so romantic moments in general were plentiful. I would just wait for the right moment to come along. And this time, I would keep the stupid ring with me!

So when we went down on the beach the next afternoon, and she asked if I wanted to put on a swim suit, I answered, "No, honey, I think I'll stay out of the water this time." So she splashed around some, and we listened to the waves some, and we made a little sand castle, and I said sweet things to her, and she said "aww shucks", and I reached in my pocket, and her eyes got big, and I put something in her hand, and she said, "what are you doing?!", and I asked Fotini Katherine Salvaras [sic] to marry me.

Fay says that I am a goober. All I know is that I have lucked out big time.

It was a 3-week intensive course, meeting every day from 8-12 [1]. This did wonders for our speaking ability, well beyond what I expected. It is helpful to have this continuous verbal practice as well as to have someone sit there and call you out on your common mistakes. I wish I could have substituted the last 3 months of my high-school French classes for a single 3-week course like this one. The hours would work out to about the same, so it should be feasible for a flexible school.

As an aside, can you imagine how to make this happen in a (public) grade school? Grade schools seem extremely tied into 1-hour periods and year-long classes. A class less than a quarter must be shocking already, and the thought of changing the revolving cycle of 1-hour classes must surely be incomprehensible to the powers that be. And what about enthusiasm? Everyone in this class really wanted to speak French, not just get a mark on their report card. In a public school, is it politically possible to separate students out like that? I would be delighted to be proven wrong, of course, but from what little I know of public schools, this is something you'll have to see in private schools and in higher ed.

Anyway, the class was also excellent for getting in touch with some of the other foreigners. The folks pictured above come from Germany, Sweden, the Czech Republic, New Zealand (emphatically not aww-straylia!!), Peru, Brazil or Portugal (not sure which), China, Vietnam, and Lebanon (two from Lebanon, in fact).

Just like in Denmark, I find it much easier here to bond with fellow people from outside, no matter from where. One by one, the foreigners tend to be more bizarre than the locals. However, we share something stronger: our strangeness. The locals find us incomprehensible. They think everyone is born knowing that, e.g.: stores close early on Saturday instead of later, that public transportation completely shafts you unless you get a 1/2 card, that rent and contracts always start on the first of the month.... Everyone knows that Ascension Day [2] is a holiday, whereas I naively grabbed that open talk slot on a day when no one was there.

They also come from foreign areas, incomprehensible to computer researchers: physics (atomic fusion--yeah!), microbiology (detecting AIDS in a sample using lasers!), environmental science (how much CO2 does this or that reduce?), and screw school I want to travel (we all know people who majored in this).

Anyway, now it is over, and it is back to the grind. It was fun, but it will be nice to get some work done, too!

[note 1] That's "8-12" in EPFL time. Even in English, the people here speak a university dialect. In universityese, "8-12" translates into "8:15-11:45 with a 30 minute break in the middle".

[note 2] The day Jesus rose into heaven. It is observed early in the summer. Do not try to buy anything if you are in Switzerland. The doors will all be closed. For more, read Wikipedia's entry. ]]> July 25, 2006 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/cdg-badadvice.htmlThe first time I came through the Charles de Gaulle airport, I was dumped into a pile of people waiting on too few buses. Being in a hurry, I asked the people in airport uniforms if there was a way to walk instead of wait, and they said no. Believing them, I dutifully waited and then rode a crowded bus on a slow tour around the perimeter, barely making my flight. Later I learned the official was wrong, and you can perfectly well walk.

Today, I find myself in this airport again. I walked up to my gate, the nice lady ran my ticket through the machine, and said no, you are too early, you need to wait here because your flight is the next one. I dutifully waited, and my flight left from a different gate.

I do not like this airport. Yes, it looks nice. However, it has a confusing layout, poor signage, and poor internal transportation. Not even the officials know what is going on. ]]> July 21, 2006 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/sack-cdg.htmlFay sent me a funny link where Brian Sack skewers the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. I confess that I do not like the airport. It is beautiful, but it is confusing to find your way around, and it tends to compress throngs of people into uncomfortably small spaces.

Brian takes it to a new level. He writes as if he just escaped years of water torture within its halls. Here is a small sample:

Charles de Gaulle Airport was designed by architect Paul Andreu whose influences include hamsters (tube tunnels), Stalin (decomposing concrete) and Hitler (suffering).

Read the whole thing!]]> July 12, 2006 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/internet-gambling.htmlUgh, I wish that Congress would stop entertaining laws specific to the Internet or to computers. If they want to ban interstate gambling, then fine, but why dwell on the use of the Internet? If you gamble over the phone is it really so different?

This reminds me of the Communications Decency Act. Sure, it's bad to mistreat children. So why tailor it to computers, specifically? Do we really want to give lighter sentences to people if they don't use a computer? Do we want to say, ah, yes, so-and-so did unspeakable things, but since he did not use a computer we will go easy on him?

This is a big pet peeve of mine. Computers are tools, and just because you use one does not make a crime more or less severe.]]> June 19, 2006 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/france-korea.htmlOh no. The truth is more bizarre. Fans of U.S. college football can guess where this is going: These goofballs were cheering for a tie! I finally realized that we were supposed to cheer whenever:

• Players got barred from the next game.
• The ball went out of bounds.
• The score became tied. GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAL!
• Once the game was tied, any goal was blocked.

The highlight is the last goal. I wish I could find a video clip of it online to show you. Not one player had control of that ball. They were not kicking the ball. Rather, the ball was bouncing off of them all. It looked like pinball.

The slow-motion replay was the best. (Oh yes, there is slow-motion replay of goals, in a game where a typical score is 1-1.) You could see swarms of players from both teams gathered around the ball and just staring at the ball. They could not manage to actually kick it, so they were all trying Jedi mind tricks. "Ohhh noooooo" for the French; "goooo innnnn" for the Koreans.

Fun stuff. And, uh, go Switzerland, I guess. Congratulations on the, err, tie. Of a game you were not actually in. ]]> June 5, 2006 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/coffeemaker.htmlFrench presses are great, but they do leave your coffee with sludge in the bottom. I use them in Switzerland anyway because they only cost 30 CHF while the puniest, crummiest of electric coffee makers starts at around 60. (Don't even ask about espresso machines!)

Last week I went home and saw Fay, my parents, and my brother. I came back with a coffee maker, plugged it into a voltage convertor, filled it with water and coffee, and... Well, you take a look. Do you see anything wrong with this picture? ]]> June 5, 2006 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/carepackage.htmlHere's a great surprise I received in the mail a couple of weeks ago. Fay is the greatest! It is starting to wear on me being so far from all of my folks, and so it was great to get a zillion little things like this when I had no idea anything was coming at all. ]]> May 6, 2006 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/research-us.html Offer him a cup of coffee each day. Research in the United States indicates that men who drink coffee regularly have better erections. In effect, caffeine is a powerful stimulant of the nervous system and a [word-i-don't-know]-muscle relaxant (these muscles are indispensable to erections).

Boy, if it is true, I am in good shape. But who knows. The whole article is filled with vagaries about studies showing that 90% of so and so's who this or that are more likely to blabidee blah.

My favorite citation (so to speak) is the "research in the United States", as if the U.S. is some exotic land of scientists. It reminds me of all the times I hear "Europeans are blank" and "Americans are blank" and "In Japan people are blank" and so on. Personally, I am not sure I can generalize over all Atlantans, my city of 8 years, much less over an entire continent. ]]> May 3, 2006 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/warcraft-challenge.htmlWorld of Warcraft is a cool game once you get it started, but getting it started is not easy! It takes enough gigabytes of disk space that I needed to repartition my hard drive before playing it. It also requires going to an out-of-game website to enter a credit card number, even though the game comes with a free month of play. Once you start, you then have to click through two license agreements of some kind, and you cannot just click -- you have to scroll all the way to the bottom before the "Agree" button is enabled.

At this point, World of Warcraft looked to me like a poor but not insanely bad installation. The large disk usage is excusable for the great graphics (and they are great!). The credit card number is lame, but it only takes ten minutes. License agreements are bad enough, but having two is particularly silly. Are those things really going to stand up in court?

But it turns out I was not done yet. This was when the updates started, the most time-consuming part of the Warcraft Login Challenge. Warcraft posts an update every few days, and since the box I bought had been sitting on a shelf for at least a few months, you can imagine that I had quite a few updates queued up! The program did not explain what was going on, though, and so I thought for a while it was broken!

Some of the updates are large, and they sometimes flip you out of Warcraft and into a separate downloader program. Once a download finishes, it installs itself,slowly!, asks you to click through both license agreements again, and.... starts downloading more stuff. I thought it was the same download, at first, but it seems that there were simply very many updates queued up. The huge updates are bad, but not explaining what was going on made it much worse.

After all that I did manage to play a bit. Then, of the last three times I tried to get logged in, I got denied again! The first time was because their payment server had crashed. The second was because.... I do not know why. They have locked my account but have not contacted me for why. Possibly it is due to my credit card being from a different country (USA) than I live in (Switzerland), but who knows?

Warcraft is a good game, but it sure is hard to actually play it. Maybe I should have gotten Everquest instead. ]]> April 30, 2006 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/newdvd-copy.htmlthe next generation of DVD's are going to have even such efforts, not less. Thus, we will continue to have the same basic problems as now:

• Linux users like myself will face legal charges if we play a copy protected DVD for personal viewing.
• Many basic operations will not be possible even on Microsoft Windows and on OS/X. For example, users will not be able to make backup copies of a DVD, nor will they be able to make mix DVD's for their friends.
• It will be impossible on legal players to skip those annoying "FBI blah blah blah" warnings at the beginning.
• Legal DVD players will be more expensive, because they must pay for a license to decode the new content.

Blah. Times are changing, and copyright-based protections are just not practical any more. It is time for the media industries to move on and find a new business model. Meanwhile, Americans should revert enough of DMCA that our Linux users can legally watch DVD's on their computers. ]]> April 11, 2006 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/taxes05.htmlAhhhh, income tax is always so fun. I thought 3-state filings were complicated, back when I "resided" in South Carolina but worked only in Georgia and California. This year I have the fun of residing part-year in Switzerland. Here are my notes on it for anyone who is either morbidly curious about U.S. taxes or who is in a similar situation in the future. I would think my situation is actually common, but finding advice about it has proven difficult. I even called H&R Block to ask, and they promised to look into it but never called me back!

So, here are my various notes.

Swiss income is taken care of automatically, apparently. There are no deductions or credits. The government takes some of each paycheck, and what they give you back is what you keep.

For U.S. income tax, you have to convert all of your foreign income into U.S. dollars. You can get the correct exchange rate at the web site for the embassy in your country. Happily, the exchange rate for Switzerland is fixed for the entire year, so you can do one conversion of all of your income instead of doing a separate conversion for each paycheck.

Foreign income does need to be filed for U.S. citizens. Even if you owe no taxes on it, you are obligated to report it and file that you are exempt. Big Brother needs to keep tabs on all of us little brothers, you know.

Multiple people told me that foreign income is exempt from U.S. taxes up to $80k. However, this is only true if you have resided abroad for a full year! Since I only lived in Switzerland for three months at the end of 2005, I have to pay U.S. taxes on that income. Next year I will be exempt (but will still have to file for the exemption!)

Even when you are not exempt altogether from taxes, there is a tax credit that prevents full double taxation. Take it! Simply report the amount of tax withheld in Switzerland, and pay that much less tax to the U.S. feds.

The fact that the foreign income is reported to the feds adds complexity when filing for state taxes, because most states base your income level on the feds' calculation. In order to pay state taxes only on your state income, you need to file as a part-year resident. Different states handle this differently, but at least in Georgia you will then approximately only pay taxes on the income you earned in Georgia.

Finally, let me mention my experience with TurboTax. In general it works very well. The user interface is smooth, the site is easy to use, and it works great under Firefox on Linux. However, it is up against the U.S. tax code, and so there is only so good it can do. It took me a while to figure out how to file my foreign income. Also, I completely failed to file correctly as a part-year resident in Georgia, perhaps because my non-Georgia income was in a foreign country instead of a foreign state. Nevertheless, I will happily pay their fee just for the service of doing my complicated federal forms.

UPDATE: Blah. Well, I ran into new problems with the final steps of TurboTax. First, they make it hard to get the pdf's of your forms, and instead try to manipulate Adobe Acrobat. This does not work well for Linux users! Second, they appear to use non-standard PDF features, such that the kpdf program on Linux cannot read the PDF's and Acroread is required. Would it be so hard to use standard PDF?? Finally, they insist on having a telephone number entered when you pay, but they do not accept non-US telephone numbers. Since I do not have a US number right now, I put in a fake number. Lame all around. They worked very hard on the main system; they should improve the final steps. Maybe I will try a different system next year after all. ]]> January 21, 2006 http://www.lexspoon.org/personal/blog/20060121-snow.html