Posts on Brian Trammell

Down the Rabbit Hole, Part One

Sun, 19 Dec 2021 13:00:00 +0000

That people “disappear” into Google after joining (especially from academia) is a complaint so often told that it’s nearly a cliche… says the Googler whose last blog post, about joining Google, was over two and a half years ago.

I didn’t just go down the rabbit hole of compute infrastructure at Google in the intervening quarter-decade. I also picked up a synth or six, and, as a bonus, some actual rabbits.

Noogling

Sun, 17 Mar 2019 09:00:00 +0000

A couple of months ago, I posted about leaving academia. Two weeks ago, I joined Google as a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) manager. I’ll be working to keep bits of Google’s technical infrastructure running smoothly, at least once I’ve learned enough about how it works and what all the various switches and levers do to be dangerous. The past two weeks have been a deluge of new things to learn, but I’ve finally got my head far enough above water to reflect on things a bit.

Hitting DNS with a Sledgehammer (for Fun and Profit)

Mon, 28 Jan 2019 14:45:00 +0000

About three years ago I started working part-time (20%) on SCION, a secure, available future Internet architecture. Since I wasn’t around much, I was given a nice easy project that wasn’t on anyone’s critical path: desigining the naming system for SCION (as to that time it was assumed SCION would just use DNS with new RRTYPEs to handle the new address families it introduces).

m11y and o11y

Fri, 25 Jan 2019 14:00:00 +0000

Looking back over the arc of my career in pseudoacademia, especially over the last three years of digging into transport stack evolution with the MAMI project, there are a few bits of work I’m especially happy to have been a part of. One of these is the inclusion of the spin bit into the QUIC transport protocol. The spin bit was conceived as the minimum useful explicit signal one could add to a transport protocol to improve measurability, the benefit for the overhead is IMO quite worth it. Though it exposes “just” RTT, latency (together with data rate, which is available simply by counting packets and bytes on the wire in any transport protocol that is not hardened against traffic analysis to the point of uselessness) is the most important metric for understanding transport layer performance diagnosing all matter of transport-relevant network problems, and the spin signal itself can also be observed to infer loss and other issues with network treatment of a packet stream. The definition and deployment of the spin bit will therefore make network protocols more measurable while preserving privacy gains from encryption, and is a clear win for network operations and management.

On the Security Ratchet

Tue, 15 Jan 2019 09:00:00 +0000

The IETF uses Jabber for instant messaging during working group meetings, as does the IAB for its own teleconferences and meetings. Since I didn’t really feel like shopping around for a Jabber account, and XMPP integration with Google Talk shut down in the middle of the decade, I decided a few years ago to run my own server, which I pretty much only use for connecting to IETF conference rooms and for chatting with IETF folks as a backchannel during meetings. Prosody is a pretty nice piece of software, so after a little work to get it up and running (IIRC, most of this was getting used to the fact that the configuration files are written in Lua) it’s basically stayed up flawlessly since then.

Leaving Academia

Wed, 09 Jan 2019 21:00:00 +0000

I always love going to Schloss Dagstuhl, a retreat for computer scientists in the middle of nowhere in Saarland, Germany. It’s a little difficult to get to, but the train ride (Wallisellen to Saarbrücken via Zürich and Mannheim) is a nice, slow way to step back from whatever context-switching overhead is dominating my days at the moment and start thinking about the theme of the workshop.

Just say no to Swexit

Wed, 24 Oct 2018 22:00:00 +0000

A year and some after Switzerland’s plucky protofascist poster art collective cum Trumpist political party, the SVP (Swiss People’s Party), screamed Verfassungsbruch! (lit. “Constitution break!”; fig., accusative: “you’re breaking the Constitution!”) on the floor of Parliament at the admitted non-implementation of their unimplementable vandalism of the Swiss constitution in the name of nativism, they’re back at it again with the almost-reasonable-sounding Selbstbestimmungsinitiative (lit. “self-determination initiative”; SBI if you’re into hashtags). One has to read the details to see how broken it is. Let’s have a look.

And yet, it spins

Thu, 29 Mar 2018 09:00:00 +0000

I’m writing today from Berlin, after an excellent Passive and Active Measurement conference and a very long but fruitful week in London for IETF 101, which, for me, came to be dominated by the The Spin Bit.

The spin bit is an explicit signal for passive measurability of round-trip time, currently possible in TCP but not in QUIC due to lack of acknowlegment and timestamp information in the clear. It’s an example of a facility designed to fulfill the principles for measurement as a first class function of the network stack we laid out in an article published last year. I won’t go into the details of how it works or why it matters here; read the draft or watch the presentation for that.

A little optimism about Swiss politics

Sun, 04 Mar 2018 21:00:00 +0000

I don’t think I’ve ever written a completely optimisic post about politics, but today seems as good a day as any to try. Today was an Abstimmungssonntag (“referendum Sunday”) here, and the most important question before Switzerland at the national level was a revocation of the federal government’s authority to levy a compulsory television and radio fee: NoBillag. I’ve already written about this referendum, and how it represented not a mere return of four hundred francs per year to every household, not a mere privatization of a few television and radio stations (one of which I’m listening to right now), but a frontal assault on public media and an attempt to drive the country’s media landscape into low-information territory; in other words noch ein Schritt zum kriechenden Beitritt der Schweiz in die vereinigten Staaten⁽¹⁾.

On Billag

Wed, 17 Jan 2018 08:00:00 +0000

My opinion on Billag⁽¹⁾ is complicated. It seems like it could fairly simply be replaced by payments from the general fund, overseen by a non-political body to evaluate applications for funding from SRF and regional providers. What we have in NoBillag, instead, is an attempt to Americanize the Swiss media landscape. Thankfully, I’m not the first to point this out, and I hope I won’t be the last. tl;dr, hey Switzerland, you want Bundesrat Trump? Because NoBillag is how you get Bundesrat Trump.

What does it mean to trust the Internet?

Mon, 08 May 2017 08:00:00 +0000

Tomorrow, I’ll take part in a panel discussion at ETH Zürich, entitled “Internet and Trust”. From the flyer for the discussion: “The Internet relies on so many layers of trust that one is sometimes surprised that [it] actually works”. This is true, but I suppose that’s a property of any system of sufficient complexity, when viewed by someone who understands it well enough to know how much bubble gum and duct tape is used to hold it together.

Live, via Internet, from the hammock

Tue, 28 Mar 2017 15:00:00 +0000

Internet architecture and Internet-centered research being a global enterprise, I spend between four and seven weeks a year on the road, depending on which year, your definition of road and your definition of week, and a fair amount of time in teleconferences in various timezones in the time in between. One of the fixtures in my calendar is the thrice-annual meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), taking place right now in Chicago. I’ve only missed three such meetings in the past dozen years, and each time I do I attempt to take part via Internet as best I can. Here are my reflections about well it’s working this time around, how it’s improved, and how it could improve further. For in a world where those who steadfastly believe in borders and walls seem to be gaining the upper hand, it seems prudent to prepare to do the work of Internet architecture, engineering, and standardization without the benefit of free movement of the people doing it.

Three Kinds of People

Tue, 21 Mar 2017 22:00:00 +0000

On the shores of Lake Sarnen in central Switzerland, there’s a museli factory. (Of course there is.) It makes many different kinds of muesli for various markets. One of these is an organic chocolate-amaranth concoction that’s basically the only thing my daughter will eat for dinner this week. I happened to glance at the ingredients, and it occurred to me that there are basically three kinds of people in the world.

Another year, another website, redux

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 22:00:00 +0000

Wasting time at Christmas by burning the site to the ground and starting over seems to be a tradition around here…

A Year in Beer

Sun, 06 Dec 2015 18:37:23 +0000

Wow, that year went quickly, on which more later.

I’d wanted to try my hand at brewing for a while, but was put off it by the (accurate) fear than ninety percent of the work was washing bottles and cleaning pots. Then, last winter, as a newly-minted father of a baby with an age measured in weeks, life consisted mainly of sterilizing bottles and not sleeping. I made an offhand comment to the effect that if I was going to spend so much time boiling glass I might as well make beer. Ariane gave me a starter kit, and a year later I’m about seventy liters in and think I have a reasonable clue what I’m doing.

Making the Internet Safe for ECN

Wed, 04 Mar 2015 20:21:03 +0000

I’m off to New York in a couple of weeks to present a paper at PAM (which I mentioned here, though sadly the flashy automated demo I was hoping to build was a bit optimistic). The question: “is it safe to turn on ECN on client machines by default, completing the end to end deployment of a simple fifteen year old protocol to give us a better way to signal network congestion than simply dropping packets on the floor?” The answer is: “define safe.” Our key findings:

What Kind of Bureaucracy Are You Dealing With?

Mon, 12 Jan 2015 16:10:35 +0000

In German, there’s a word for an organization which takes its mission very seriously but is adorably incompetent at it: “Kaninchenzüchterverein” (lit. “rabbit-breeding club”). There’s another word for an organization which is bad at what it does because nobody cares: “Saftladen” (lit. “juice shop”).

On Repeatable Internet Measurement: Part Two

Wed, 07 Jan 2015 10:00:23 +0000

The issues identified in of part one of this post led to yet another search for solutions to the problem of making (especially passive) measurement repeatable. Of course, this has been done before, but I took as an initial principle that the social aspects of the problem must be solved socially, and worked from there. What emerged was a set of requirements and an architecture for a computing environment and set of associated administrative processes which allows analysis of network traffic data while minimizing risk to the privacy of the network’s end users as well as ensuring spatial and temporal repeatability of the experiment. For lack of a better name I decided to call an instance of a collection of data using this architecture an analysis vault.

The key principle behind this architecture is if data can be open, it should be; if not, then everything else must be.

On Repeatable Internet Measurement: Interlude

Fri, 02 Jan 2015 15:44:04 +0000

Part one of this post painted a somewhat bleak picture of the state of Internet measurement as a science. The dreariness will continue later this month in part two. And yet there seems to be quite a lot of measuring the Internet going on. It can’t all be that bad, can it?

A Tiny Rant on Mail

Fri, 02 Jan 2015 14:49:49 +0000

Mail is broken.

This is nothing new. RFC 822, after all, wasn’t the beginning of Internet e-mail, merely an attempt to fix it, which admittedly worked reasonably well for a while. But even with all the brokenness of mail, I wasn’t expecting to dig into my Postfix logs today to find that USENIX couldn’t send me mail because the firm they’ve outsourced to was too lazy to create IN PTR records for their nodes in the cloud.

Weihnachtsstollen (nach Memphiser Art)

Wed, 31 Dec 2014 08:24:00 +0000

In the back of the pantry at the house I grew up in in Memphis, there was always a stack of little plastic tubs of dried candied “fruits” of various colors (I say “colors” because the flavor was invariably “sugar”). My mother was never much of a baker, except at Christmas, when the baking would take two forms: fruitcake and stollen, both of which were filled with candied fruit. I’d try Mom’s fruitcake, the main ingredient of which seemed to be brandy, about once every five years to see if I was finally old enough to enjoy it. I never quite made it.

Stollen, on the other hand, was the main course of most breakfasts around Christmas. This was a bit odd in Memphis, doubly so because we didn’t have any particularly German ancestors; Mom just saw the recipe in a magazine sometime in the late 70s or early 80s and decided to make a tradition out of it. So I was thrilled when I moved to Switzerland and found out you could buy stollen in the grocery store at Christmastime. Almost as thrilled as I was disappointed when I found out that “real” Stollen is basically a marzipan delivery system.

On Repeatable Internet Measurement: Part One

Sun, 21 Dec 2014 21:50:10 +0000

I spent quite a lot of time in 2014 thinking about the following problem: if I hand you a paper that claims something about the Internet, based on data I cannot show you because I am bound by a nondisclosure agreement due to corporate confidentiality or user privacy issues, generated by code which is ostensibly available under an open-source license but which is neither intended to run outside my environment, nor tested to ensure it will produce correct results in all cases, nor maintained to ensure it is compatible with newer versions of the compiler, interpreter, or libraries it requires, what reason have I given you to believe what I say?

A Degenerate Binary Tree

Sun, 31 Aug 2014 09:27:50 +0000

Shamelessly inspired by Alexander Calder, who I followed from Atlanta to Pittsburgh to Zürich, and inexpertly crafted from stuff I found at Migros, I present my first attempt at a mobile.

(And for those of you who have not yet heard, yes, this commission has a customer: we’re expecting a daughter in a few weeks. We won’t be boring the Internet at large with piles of baby pictures, though.)

The Measure of a State

Sun, 31 Aug 2014 09:14:10 +0000

This is going to make me sound somewhat more libertarian than I actually am, but here goes:

The most important duty of a state is its effective control over and responsible application of the monopoly on violence, delegated to it by its citizens, in the service of the protection of its citizens, and the protection of all people present within its territory.

All the other trappings of statehood — a currency, a post office, universal healthcare, the name of your state on a placard at the UN General Assembly, some transportation infrastructure of some sort, passports, some stamps you can apply to passports issued by other states, a national Olympic team and/or Eurovision Song Contest entry (as appropriate), a flag — are nice to have, but not really essential.

d’Schwiiz inerem Schiffli: Pfäffikersee

Tue, 08 Jul 2014 20:14:33 +0000

So it hasn’t been all work: the weather (though it’s tragic today) has cooperated with my calendar on occasion, and I’ve had a few chances to throw the boat on the water. So this begins what I home will become an occasional series on paddling around Switzerland with a sea kayak.

The weekend before last, I decided to try out the Pfäffikersee (“Lake Pfäffikon”, though the lake isn’t really big enough to warrant a translation). At 2500m x 1200m, it’s possible to do a full roundtrip around the lake in about an hour without pushing too hard.

A quick introduction to IPFIX

Tue, 08 Jul 2014 13:55:52 +0000

I recently gave a full-day course on flow measurement at the University of Zürich’s IfI summer school. The course itself was more or less a stack of my current research interests stapled together; one product was a nice summary version of a tutorial on the IPFIX protocol (on which I’ve worked on and off for the past nine years), together with an iPython notebook on the subject.

Joining the IAB

Sun, 16 Feb 2014 14:29:07 +0000

Well, it’s official. I’ll be joining the Internet Architecture Board for a two-year term starting at IETF 89 in March. Among other things, the IAB provides architectural oversight of IETF protocols, which are surprisingly coherent given the nearly perfectly bottom-up nature of the process that produces them. I look forward to the challenge in meta-cat-herding.

On Vandalist Politics

Sat, 15 Feb 2014 10:41:05 +0000

Putting aside the discomfort of being an immigrant in a mildly xenophobic land, and the hypothetical ballistic solution to Switzerland’s furr’ner problem, I’ll add my voice to the growing chorus of confusion and ask what, in reality, just happened. So here, translated into English, is the new Article 121a of the Constitution of the Swiss Confederation:

Article 121a Immigration Control

Switzerland controls immigration independently.
The number of residence permits for foreigners in Switzerland is limited by annual quota and a maximum limit. The maximum limit applies to asylum-seekers as well. The right to settlement, family union, and access to social services are subject to limitation.
Quotas are to be defined to the advantage of Swiss citizens in the economic interest of Switzerland. Cross-border commuters are covered as well. The application of an employer, level of integration in Swiss society, and financial independence are especially influential criteria [in the decision to grant a residence permit].
No treaty may be signed in opposition to this article.
The details are a matter of law.

Insel Schweiz

Mon, 10 Feb 2014 14:27:21 +0000

In order to outline a more effective defense against Ausländer than the Masseneinwanderungsinitiative can provide, and with a deferential nod to Randall Munroe, I decided to do some back of the napkin estimates of what it would take to make Switzerland a literal island. tl;dr: it’s probably not worth it.

Come for the chocolate, stay for the xenophobia

Sun, 09 Feb 2014 20:22:40 +0000

Every time the Rovian Swiss People’s Party (often described as “extreme right” in the English-speaking press, though they’re really more nativist than explicitly fascist) manages to ram one of its populist cries for attention through the initiative process, I wonder why I, as a foreigner, insist on staying in a country so intent on doing silly and dangerous things to its constitution in service of its hate of us. Over time, Switzerland feels less and less welcoming. But self-deportation is exactly what they want me to do, a fact that strengthens my resolve to stay here long enough to become the aged burden to the social-insurance scheme the political discussion here assumes that I am.

An American Postbank

Fri, 31 Jan 2014 11:03:31 +0000

Over the past couple of days, this article has been brought to my attention from multiple angles. The basic idea — that the US Postal Service’s collapse and the problem of banking deserts in America’s poorer and more rural neighborhoods are two problems with a single solution — is an intriguing one. As an American emigrant customer of the Swiss post bank, it seems like a good idea, but I’m not sure the history of American and European financial services are similar enough to allow us to predict the success of the former from the latter.

2013 in Review

Thu, 02 Jan 2014 10:06:22 +0000

It’s a good thing that keeping the blog up to date wasn’t actually a resolution of mine for last year, because I did as well as, well, one usually does with one’s New Years’ resolutions. So here’s all the stuff I didn’t post last year.

Is Traffic Traffic?

Thu, 19 Dec 2013 08:53:35 +0000

One can debate the usefulness of the traffic-traffic metaphor in network engineering. On the one hand, speed limits make a nice illustration of fairness in the network neutrality debate. On the other hand, motorway congestion and the effect of queueing in network congestion control look nothing like each other, at least until we develop motorways that change their length during rush hour, and we decide we’re okay with cars that take too long to get to their destinations being crushed and disposed of en route. One must carefully consider how well the metaphor fits reality before using it to explain or reason about anything important.

A Media Policy for the 17th Century

Wed, 11 Dec 2013 14:59:31 +0000

I’ve been reading Tom Standage’s “Writing on the Wall” of late, which I can heartily recommend. It’s less subtle than “The Victorian Internet”, which counts among my favorite books of all time, but that was written before Twitter, and Twitter’s made us all less subtle, I think. What strikes me about his new book is not his thesis — that the “social media revolution” is nothing really new, just the application of new technology to our apparently instinctive love of gossip — but how well it illustrates that much of the present public policy debate over new media technology is very, very old.

From France to Austria

Mon, 09 Dec 2013 17:27:15 +0000

The weather’s finally cold enough that there’s time to pour a cup of glühwein, put the feet up by the fire, and finish blog posts about all the being outside this summer that got in the way of posting stuff about being outside on the blog.

So. My first piece of advice to anyone seeking to cross their home country on muscle power alone: move someplace tiny with a complicated border. Like Switzerland.

QoF 0.9.0 (“Albula”) released

Mon, 04 Nov 2013 15:09:31 +0000

The QoF TCP-performance-aware IPFIX flow meter I’ve been working on, on and off, for about a year, now seems to produce halfway plausible results and hardly crashes at all anymore, which means it’s time to follow the path of real artists immemorial and ship it already: see here, or if you’re really serious about it, just track master on github.

The Impeachment of Barack Obama

Thu, 03 Oct 2013 12:29:08 +0000

Bear with me here for a minute, and this rant will get to the point.

I was trying to explain the government shutdown to an Italian friend of mine last night (“so have you fixed the Silvio problem yet?” was my first-pass attempt to not talk about US politics before getting drunk enough to keep it from depressing me; I failed). I’ve come to realize that a successful overturn of the ACA by the petulant child wing of the Republican party would be an act of illegitimacy on the order of the appointment of George W. Bush as president by the Supreme Court in 2000.

Active Resistance against Passive Surveillance

Fri, 06 Sep 2013 12:24:44 +0000

So I complain about a lull in the news about the more-or-less complete compromise of the Internet by the National Security Agency et al, and then this goes and happens.

One of my old standard interview questions for people applying for jobs with some responsibility for information security was “are you paranoid”? When the lighting was good, and my eyes bugged out just right, this could be a little scary. It’s time to retire this question, I think, because the answer would seem to be “no, I am clearly not paranoid enough”, unless the applicant shows up to the interview in a tin-foil hat.

The Freedom Panopticon

Thu, 29 Aug 2013 14:37:09 +0000

This is the fourth post I’ve started on the pervasive, indiscriminate, uncontrolled surveillance of electronic communications by the ministries of state security of the North Atlantic world. I stopped writing each of the last three either because the rant got too paranoid, or further revelations showed that the rant was not yet too paranoid enough.

But the stream of new information seems to have dried up a bit, as the news cycle has distracted itself with something called a Miley Cyrus, whatever that is, so I’ve had a chance to catch up a bit. And as a researcher in network measurement who left a job funded by security-academic-industrial-complex money to move to Europe to work on a project seeking to apply technical privacy guarantees to network monitoring systems (which ironically was named PRISM, and which I must forevermore footnote on my CV as “no, not that PRISM”), I feel I should make some statement on all of this. So here it is, predictable and unoriginal though it may be:

Pervasive surveillance is anathema to a functioning democratic society, and nations which do not exercise effective civilian oversight of their state security apparati end up being controlled by them.

An Afternoon In Bern: Network Neutrality Redux

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 10:34:25 +0000

Last Thursday, I sat on a panel with Swiss Telecommunications Association President Peter Grütter, Swisscom CEO Carsten Schloter, and Green National Councilor Balthasar Glättli, on the subject of network neutrality, and whether legal protection therefor is necessary in Switzerland. Not surprisingly, the panel was of different opinions on this matter. Swisscom and the telecom industry group support self-regulation, making the very good point that laws change too slowly with respect to Internet technology too quickly to be effective; and Glättli making the equally good point that as several obvious violations of neutrality can already be observed in Switzerland, trusting the industry to regulate itself has so far had dubious results.

Coverage (in German) of the event can be found at computerworld.ch and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and if you’ve got 55 minutes to kill, video of the event itself (also in German) is available at the website of the Parliamentary Group on Digital Sustainability.

On Network Neutrality

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 14:11:13 +0000

The National Council of Switzerland¹ is considering the addition of a guarantee of network neutrality into a forthcoming revision of Swiss telecommunications law. This is generally a Good Thing. We all like the Internet. This being Switzerland, we all like neutrality. So network neutrality must be great.

More seriously, the Internet has largely replaced the public switched telephone network and the postal system as the basic communications infrastructure of our society; just as with these systems, the “last mile” is a natural monopoly, so guaranteeing equal access to it is important. However, the results that legislation of network neutrality will lead to may vary widely based on how, precisely, it is defined.

Things I can’t explain to Europeans

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 17:30:30 +0000

I’ve learned, after something happens in America, to wait a few days, first for the inaccuracies inherent in the twenty-four-hour news cycle to be spun out, then for the inaccuracies introduced by the inevitable political spin to cancel each other out, then for the inaccuracies introduced both by textual and cultural translation into the German-language media to at least settle down to a consistent-if-subtly-incorrect picture of what, exactly, it was that just happened, before I try to discuss it here in Switzerland. This is different in America, I explain, or that in the English-speaking world, we don’t have a word for whatever, Prohibition this, Puritans that, let’s not even talk about how the Second World War began in 1941, and so on.

I can’t explain this.

An evening in Bern

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 00:38:06 +0000

The Internet Society Switzerland Chapter’s inaugural national event was last night at the Käfigturm in Bern; in my talk, “The Open Internet under Threat” (which, as it turns out, was unwittingly inspired in part by a much earlier post on this blog; slides are here), I accomplished what I set out to do, I think — start a conversation about the present state of the Internet, and threats to its openness, to figure out where we ISOC people as politically-interested network geeks can make a difference. Balthasar Glättli’s talk on Internet politics in Switzerland, and the conversations that followed both talks, were eye-opening, ranging from the education of politicians on even the most basic technical realities of the Internet through framing Internet freedom issues for random people off the street to exactly how much regulation is necessary or desirable to guarantee the fundamental rights behind network neutrality. Thanks to ISOC, the sponsors, the organizers, and all who attended, for an interesting evening in Bern!

Talk: The Open Internet Under Threat

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 08:16:44 +0000

I’ll be giving a talk to the Internet Society (ISOC) Switzerland Chapter at a meeting in Bern, at 18:30 on Tuesday 27 November, entitled “The Open Internet under Threat”. After my talk, Green National Councillor Balthasar Glättli will speak on Internet-related topics in Swiss national politics, so it promises to be a really interesting evening for Internet geeks and policy wonks alike!

Four more years… in Switzerland

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 19:04:52 +0000

I’m not voting in the 2012 Presidential election. From a pure-fandom point of view I suppose you could say I’m for Obama, and I’ll probably raise a glass to his victory should it come, but in the end that wasn’t compelling enough to jump though all the various hoops necessary to get an absentee ballot as an emigrant American. And the only thing I’m sure I want four more years of is life in Switzerland.

Bagels, redux

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 20:32:33 +0000

The apparent secret to getting bagels that look like bagels: broil them slightly before boiling them, and add way more salt and a little sugar to the boiling water. Bonus: these actually taste like bagels, too…

Bagels, Wallisellen, 4 December 2011

Taipei for Distracted Beginners

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 21:36:37 +0000

It’s bad form to draw generalizations about a place and a people from a tiny little sample of experience. And my sample last week in Taipei, Taiwan, was particularly tiny: first, I was there for an IETF meeting which kept me inside the convention center for most of the week, which resembled nothing so much as every convention center I’ve ever been in. And the times I wasn’t kept in the convention center by work, I was kept inside otherwise by a persistent rain that wasn’t so much rain as simply dampness-as-atmosphere: I literally saw the sun for only fifteen minutes the entire week, and that while it was between the horizon and the cloud deck one morning. I stayed in bed.

That said, here are a few notes on observations that came to mind while I was there.

Bagels

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 19:48:38 +0000

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Bagels boiling, Wallisellen, 7 November 2011

The problem with taking a week in New York and coming back to Zürich is that you miss the bagels. Bagels, however, are made by humans, and we are humans, so how hard can it be?

The Light at the End

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 19:00:46 +0000

[

Dupont Circle, Washington DC, 6 October 2011

Perhaps it is hasty to simply dismiss the swamps of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers as blighted by the pernicious lies spewing forth from the numerous bullshit factories lining their banks. There is beauty to be found there after all.

Ten years on

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 06:00:46 +0000

On December 7, 1951, the New York Times – then as now as close to a paper of record as you’ll find in America – devoted a relatively limited amount of space to the tenth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Japanese Navy, which drew the United States into the Second World War: an editorial noting the occasion, and an article noting that a ceremony would be held in Pearl Harbor to note the occasion.

Comic-Book Supervillainy

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 10:17:15 +0000

I opened the NZZ am Sonntag (the Sunday edition of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the paper of record for German-speaking Switzerland) today to read of yet another threat from Switzerland’s current favorite comic-book supervillain: Starker Franken.

The Zürich Model and the Domestic Audience

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 21:36:10 +0000

The New York Times ran a story last week, essentially detailing the Zürich Model: increase the usage of non-automotive transportation by simultaneously making public transit more attractive (through increased frequency and punctuality though e.g. transit-priority usage of shared corridors) and automotive usage less attractive (via lowering the capacity of throughways via street and lane closure, the “red wave” of worst-case traffic-light timing, traffic calming, lowered speed limits, and so on).

Post-ideology, or why your favorite team sucks

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 21:08:45 +0000

I’ve finally given up arguing politics. The way the game seems to be played is indistinguishable from arguing whose football team is better. If I were slightly more cynical, I’d develop a market for jerseys with elephants and donkeys on them and make a killing. It’s even better here in Europe, where most political parties have nice, bright colors, so much the better for mascotry.

The Hauptwegweiser

Tue, 03 May 2011 15:41:38 +0000

Basically every Swiss city, town, village, train station, or particularly wide spot in the road has one: the hauptwegweiser (roughly “central trail sign”), which tells you where you can go from here on foot, and approximately how long it will take you if you’re in decent shape and not taking too many photos along the way.

Sächsilüüte

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 05:17:20 +0000

Zürich scares winter off by packing a snowman with explosives, lighting it on fire, and measuring the time until its head blows off. I am not making this up.

Die Hauptstadt der Vergangenheit

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 12:43:16 +0000

I’m packing for a trip to Memphis, for what will probably be the last time in the foreseeable future. I can’t really say that I’ll miss it. It’s a great place to be from, I guess, and the instant Elvis-and-Jack-Daniels association it has in the eyes of Europeans has started many an interesting train conversation. But most everyone I know, save a couple of friends and a pile of Facebook acquaintances, has moved on. My mother was a compelling reason to book a flight, but she’s gone now, too, and my stepfather moved shortly thereafter to San Diego. Even the Last Cat Standing in the ten year battle over the house has found a new home. All that’s left is the house itself, full of stuff. Most of this stuff is future garbage, if it isn’t already present garbage, which I’m off to dig through in order to find the small bits that aren’t.

This is doubly weird, as Memphis is basically the capital of my past, and it’s pretty much impossible to travel there without also traveling in time.

Amerikanische Qualität

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 21:30:09 +0000

Got yet another SVP (Swiss People’s Party) flyer stuffed in the mailbox yesterday, outlining what passes for their platform for the April cantonal elections, which is a straight cognitively-dissonant mix between xenophobic nationalism and classical liberalism. Schweizer wählen SVP, it says: Swiss people vote SVP, the implication being that all the other parties are for people who are somehow less than Swiss. The party somewhat disappointingly leaves the question of the impact of the rather stark protectionism implied by disengagement from Europe on the freedom of markets and Switzerland’s competitiveness unanswered. I get the impression this is because actually attempting to answer such a question would require nuance, which doesn’t fit onto a triple-folded A4 flyer in 36-point type underneath the picture of the scary foreigner. (You’d hope they’d be smart enough to realize, at least from the mailboxes, that they were advertising to a building full of binational couples. But alas.)

Sixty-eight, eighty-nine, eleven, or: Why Protocol Design Matters

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 17:49:50 +0000

It is not yet completely clear the extent to which the Revolutions of 2011 were run on Facebook and Twitter, but to say they have not been instrumental would, I think, be disingenuous. Like Matthew Brady’s Civil War photographs, the body counts in Vietnam, or CNN in Kuwait, from the American standpoint the social networking protocols have removed one more layer of separation between the reality of these revolutions, and those watching them. The key here is that they are also used as a primary communications medium for those taking part.

Now is perhaps not the time to point out that they’re doing it wrong.

Portrait of a Coffee Machine

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 18:33:05 +0000

Stuck at home this weekend: doctor said stay off a rather badly twisted ankle, not from snowboarding in Arosa, but from falling down the damn stairs in Bahnhof Chur after snowboarding. The upside is I’ve got a nice new lens to play with, so I’ve been shuffling and lurching around the flat taking photos of anything that doesn’t move.

The Problem with the People’s Party

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 19:43:14 +0000

This is Ivan S. (name der Redaktion bekannt). Ivan lives with his wife and young son in a dingy little apartment in an old building in a small town outside a small city in Switzerland, an Ausländerghetto filled with asylum-seekers and semi-skilled foreign workers. Ivan has held the occasional odd job, but most of his time these days is spent on low level criminal activity for the Swiss arm of one or another criminal organization with ties to the Balkan peninsula: petty thievery, drug dealing, armed lookout and intimidation, transport. If it involves breaking the law with only marginal autonomy, Ivan’s probably got his fingers in it.

Transit Art

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 12:56:58 +0000

When the Glattalbahn Line 12 opened in December, it turned the VBZ/VBG tram network into a big circle with a few branches, which made this (admittedly somewhat abstract) representation possible.

See if you can figure out where you live.

Volksinitiative Lärmschutz Grindel (or, Why I Can’t Write Fiction)

Sun, 06 Feb 2011 20:07:58 +0000

I started this blog, ostensibly, to write more, especially fiction. I’ve written quite a bit over the past five years, but most of it just falls apart on the page before I can finish editing it together, so very few people have seen any of it. There’s a story about a train, a story about a house, a story about a sniper and a waitress in a coffee shop in the north end of Chicago. Maybe, one of these days, I’ll finish one of these. But in the meantime, there’s this.

The End of the Free Pool

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 08:17:50 +0000

ICANN will hold a press conference in Miami on Thursday, presumably announcing the exhaustion of the IANA IPv4 address pool. This is when 102/8, 103/8, 104/8, 179/8, and 185/8 — each a block of 16 million addresses — will be handed out to the regional registries (RIRs), thereby ending the allocation of IPv4 address space at the first level of delegation.

I’m going to go ahead and predict right now that almost every journalist covering this event will get something subtle but essential wrong, and that the result will be fifteen minutes of panic followed by business as usual for everyone except those who understand the minutia of IP address allocation policy until we start seeing pressure at the lower levels of delegation.

As a disclaimer, I’m not actually one of those people who understands the minutia of IP address allocation policy, but you’re reading this on the Internet, so you’ve already proven yourself willing to believe things you read from random people who have no credibility whatsoever, and you certainly can’t do any worse with me than with the thirty-second blurb you might hear about this on your favorite cable news noisebox. So with that in mind, here’s what this actually means:

Portable Cookies

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 17:25:17 +0000

Nope, this isn’t about web privacy.

My old blog had a tag called “Royale mit Käse”, on the little differences between Switzerland and America. One of the bigger little differences is the sweetness of dessert.

My mom once sent me a care package full of Mrs. Fields cookies (“trans-fats are proof that there is a God, he loves us, and he wants us to be insanely fat”) with the approximate energy density of a neutron star; these would induce a temporary diabetic coma in the average Swiss person.

On the other hand, for dessert one night this weekend, we had something more traditional, which as near as I can tell was basically grits with extra gluten and a pinch of sugar. Two scoops of ice cream on top of that and I could barely taste it, which made it just about tolerable.

After a couple of years here, my palate’s definitely leaning somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. Start-with-a-quarter-pound-of-butter recipes just don’t work any more. So without further ado I present my adjusted-for-Switzerland portable cookie recipe. This basically started as the average of a few American sugar-cookies-from-scratch recipes I found on the web, with the sugar and butter scaled way back.

grüezi, y’all

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 10:31:32 +0000

Welcome to trammell.ch, yet another in a long line of periodically updated versions of my web presence. This is all somewhat under construction, as is everything, always.

The old weblog, My Ridiculously Circuitious Plan, has been incorporated into the archives here (as of December 2013).

Misaligned

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:04:00 +0000

The tenor of the health-care slapfight (I’ll not dignify it with the word debate) in the United States of late is… well, frankly, embarrassing. Y’all are really making yourselves look bad. Death panels? Really? When a walking vapidity whose prime qualification for the job is that she can see Russia from her house gets up on the tee-vee and starts improvising science fiction so terrible that even L. Ron Hubbard wouldn’t stick his name on it, you do what the rest of us do, and you ignore it.

Unicode jokes

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 05:37:00 +0000

U+1DE7 COMBINING STACK OF DIAERESIS FALLING RIGHT, used primarily for native English speakers trying to pronounce Swiss German.

(Yes, I know it's been forever. Stand by.)

Welcome to 2009

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 12:47:00 +0000

Happy New Year, all! 2009’s turning out to be a good one. So far, I’ve learned how not to play the digiridoo and how not to ski. At this rate, I’ll have learned how not to do about 240 new things by the time the year’s out.

Wir stücken früh

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 14:28:00 +0000

So, I apparently now how to speak German now, at least a bit. Finished the first course this week, passed the final, did quite well aside from the fact I thought that “frühstücken” (to breakfast) was separable (“Ich stücke heute nicht früh.”) which it isn’t (“Ich frühstücke heute nicht.”) This means “I don’t eat breakfast today,” which, depending on your definition of “breakfast” and what time of day it is right now, may or may not actually be true.

An Alpine Sunrise

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 06:22:00 +0000

One advantage of the fact the sun doesn’t rise ’til eight in the morning here these days is you can drag out of bed at the usual time and see something like this without any effort.

More Ridiculously Circuitous is No Plan at All

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:02:00 +0000

It’s two on a Sunday morning, and I’m coming up on the last twenty-four hours of my first six months in Switzerland. I’ve just rotated the flat (i.e. moved nearly all the furniture a hundred eighty degrees along the outside wall of the living room) on the suggestion of a friend about a month ago and I have to say she was right, it’s much better this way.

In Which Your Correspondent Suddenly Remembers He Has a Blog

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 17:29:00 +0000

The last month or so has been a bit of a whirlwind. There’s the travel: I finally used the Halbtax card I bought to escape the rain in June and hopped a train to Neuchâtel, then back for a day before business in Valbonne (via Nice, dinner in Cannes), after which I was back in town for a long weekend before flying back out to Vienna, then back here for a week and a bit before flying next Tuesday to San Diego for my stepsister’s wedding. There’s the work: a document I’ve been working on since I started here went out Friday, and I spent the weekend mostly clearing the Things I Said I’d Do Before Going To San Diego deck. There’s the sport: Mel showed me a nice short loop around the lake easily doable in two and a half hours with a relaxing three-franc boat ride in the middle, and I’m a wall climber again, this time for real because I’m in better shape and frankly, it’s a better wall. There’s the learning: classes started Thursday, and I’ve been meeting with a couple of native Swiss Germans relatively frequently to speak German poorly. (By which I mean I speak German poorly. I’m pretty sure they know what they’re doing. I can’t tell, of course, because I speak German poorly.) There’s the furniture shopping: three trips to Dietlikon in the past month, with at least one coming up next, and the apartment’s about 50% done (next up: art). And there’s the fun: the month-long I Live Here Now and Finally party which is just now starting to slow down, exploring Zurich with friends new and old, finding cheap(ish) good Indian food, good Swiss food, good South African food (mmmm that’s good gnu), freaky good vegetarian everything, bars with good live Swiss rock, bars with tweaky DJs, and the old favorite biweekly expat drink-a-thon at the Talacker (always highly recommended before a 6am flight to a 9am meeting).

As Promised

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 06:31:00 +0000

The east-southeast view from the balcony, 10 August 2008, showing (bottom to top) the Hardturmbrücke railway bridge over the Limmat, most of Züri-West, the old city (clustered mainly behind the big smokestack), the Zürichberg (green hill on the left), the Albis and the southwestern shore of the lake (that’s Horgen or Thalwil in the right-center distance, I think), and the Alps.

It’s The Little Differences, Really, Part Two

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:46:00 +0000

I had about half an hour to kill this afternoon in the neighborhood of the university, so I decided to take this week’s Economist out to the Polyterrasse, a giant balcony behind the main building of ETH with a great, close-up view of the center of the city. I went out to one of the benches toward the corner (the better for the view though perhaps not for the glare of the sun). These benches are large wooden constructions, about four meters long and a meter and a half wide, with a rounded wooden back sticking up out of one side of the seat for two meters. This has the effect of dividing each bench into three sections: a couple of seats facing one direction, a couple of seats facing the opposite direction, back-to-back, and to the side a large flat space for laying down and reading, indeed, even sunning oneself if the weather is cooperative.

The Color of Hell

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 09:50:00 +0000

The apartment is coming together, slowly. While shedding the cloud of stuff that had orbited me in Pittsburgh was an almost religiously therapeutic experience which I would recommend wholeheartedly to all, it turns out that clothes irons, cooking pots, and mops are all kind of useful. So I’m picking up needful things one tramload and Saturday afternoon shopping trip at a time. Next up: Sihlcity. Again.

The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Spiders

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 07:11:00 +0000

I was sitting on the balcony last night, my ears recovering from the quite loud, somewhat interesting, yet ultimately disappointingly clubby beats of my brief Bellerive-to-Mythenquai flirtation with Streetparade, registering to vote in the November U.S. presidential election, when I noticed a spider scurrying along my right leg, building a web over the folds in the fabric of my still-slightly-too-baggy jeans.

My Ridiculously Circuitous Plan is Three-Fifths Complete

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 06:02:00 +0000

From the twenty-third of March, two thousand five to the fifth of August, two thousand eight: my one thousand, two hundred thirty-one day tenure as a homeowner ended yesterday with a wire transfer, a HUD-1 form via fax, and a closing in Erie, Pennsylvania. The new owners got an amazing deal, as they should in the current market. I’m happy with my end of it as I’m no longer holding onto a debt denominated in a currency I want nothing to do with for a while yet secured by an asset in a city I have no particular desire to ever return to. So it’s what we call a win-win, then.

To the Health of the Vice Consul of the United States for the Republic of Ireland

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 07:45:00 +0000

Have just returned from Ireland. I had a chance to see a little of the city of Dublin, wandering about a bit through the Temple Bar – Trinity College – Grafton Street triangle last Sunday afternoon, and again on Tuesday; the weather, I take it from every cabbie who drove me around here that we really, really lucked out on the weather. Summers there are generally… wet.

Home Sweet Home

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:46:00 +0000

I moved into the flat yesterday. By “moved in”, I mean most of my stuff is there, I have a motley and assorted collection of furniture, much of which is still boxed and flatpacked in the hallway, and I slept in the new bed last night. Maybe I’m really tired, maybe I’m finally home, or maybe [redacted] francs just buys you a damn good bed, but last night marked the first time I’ve ever slept through my first night in a new place.

We Have Keys

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:16:00 +0000

I went by my new flat Monday morning to pick up the keys and do the walkthrough. It was a good Bastille Day. First off, it was much bigger than I’d remembered, and in somewhat nicer shape. The kitchen will need less work than I’d remembered. There is no counter space, but a giant, very 1950’s cabinet on the wall opposite the refrigerator so I don’t need any under-counter storage, and I’ll probably just get a table or butcher’s block to stick in the 120cm between the refrigerator and the oven to act as a counter. No need to bother with trying to have a breakfast nook in there, though I have the space, because while the kitchen has a balcony (which I’d not noticed before) and a very nice view of the street, it’s not nearly the view I have out the living (and dining) room windows. Pictures still to follow. I took a camera yesterday, but the fog was in.

It’s The Little Differences, Really, Part One

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 06:59:00 +0000

Every reasonably-sized city in the Western world is basically similar. One can understand life in Zürich quite easily by thin metaphor and direct reference to New York or San Francisco or Berlin. Of course, the language is different, and the local history is unique, but local history is unique everywhere, and the difference between an accent, a dialect, and a language is simply a matter of degree along a continuum of mutual intelligibility. The emergence of global capitalism over the past century or so has served to further bind the set of cultures already based upon the common classics of the Enlightenment, medieval Christendom, and the Roman Empire before them.

The Beginning of the End of the Beginning

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 06:59:00 +0000

I have now joined the ranks of adoptive Zürchers who can (and seemingly invariably do) say, in the language of their choosing, “with luck, and patience, you will find a flat.” Compared to many of the stories I’ve heard, I have been lucky, without having to have been particularly patient.

On Nationalism

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 06:22:00 +0000

On the door of my office, there are two of those little car-window flags hanging off the nameplate. One of them is Swiss, one is Italian, one for each of my officemates. They’re there for the European football championships, which appears to be the one context in which Europe allows itself to embrace nationalism anymore. This is probably a good thing, as Europe’s embrace of nationalism up to about sixty or so years ago tended to end up in the embrace of large amounts of territory gained and then invariably lost, always at terrible cost.

On Luck (or, The Apartment Search, Volume One)

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 09:12:00 +0000

In software development, we have a saying: “Good, fast, cheap: pick any two.” I’m sure many other technical fields have a similar saying. Essentially, it expresses if you want something done right, it’s either going to take a while or be expensive. I am finding that this applies to searching for an apartment in Zürich.

You’re Doing It Wrong

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 09:11:00 +0000

Too much going on here to write about any of it. I’m still collecting my notes for The Post On The Apartment Search, which if it goes on much longer might make a reasonably good Russian novella.

It's overcast, again, today, and threatening to rain, as it has been every day I have been here in Zürich except yesterday. My original plan if it was raining today was to take advantage of the insanely great train system here to go to Ticino, across the Alps, where the weather is usually better. But it turns out that not only is it raining in Ticino, it's raining in Switzerland in general; Zürich, at least, seems to be the least rainy place in the whole country. So. Think I'll wander about for a while and try not imagine not being able to afford living in each building I pass by.

But I did want to share this one little story in the meantime.

Now, I've been continually amazed at fairly regular appearance of Confederate battle flags on pickup trucks bearing West Virginia plates. Okay, maybe I'm not amazed, but I do wryly appreciate the irony. However, wandering around in Unterstrass (or was it Fluntern? it's all starting to run together) the other day looking at apartments (what else, really?), I happened to see a little battle flag sticker right above the Kanton Zürich plates on an otherwise unadorned black Toyota Corolla. Er, what? Apologies to all for not having a camera on me.

das fünfte NHL-Playoff-Finalspiel

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 19:02:00 +0000

Found in Blick am Abend, on the seat next to me on the tram ride home yesterday:

As for Game Six, Let's Go Pens!!

Everything Old is New Again

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 18:18:00 +0000

I arrived in Zürich at ten on Sunday morning, having spent eight hours on a plane from Newark, two hours on the runway at Newark waiting for the storm to clear out of the way of the transatlantic routes from New York, four hours in the Continental first class lounge (advantage: first class) waiting out my layover, two hours flying from Atlanta with a crowing rooster in the cargo hold right below me (me: “Is that a…”, guy beside me: “Yeah.”), two hours at the Houlihan’s in the atrium of Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson having breakfast with my cousin on my last way through Atlanta for a while, an hour on a plane from Memphis, two days repacking and reviewing what I’m having shipped to myself while finalizing a customs manifest the customs guys here declined to even bother looking at after they saw how detailed it was, and two days on a truck driving what was left of my stuff from Pittsburgh, country music blaring. Yes, I know I don’t like country music, but what could be more appropriate for driving the stuff you just cleaned out of your house across Kentucky in a rented truck on your way out of the country after a divorce in which your ex-wife ended up with your car and your cat? Replace the cat with a dog, the car with a truck, and Switzerland with, er, Texas or Alabama or something, and you’ve got a country song right there! Even so the pleasantly efficient and helpful Swiss woman behind the counter at Kreisbüro 7 who registered me as a resident of Zürich yesterday said “Ah, Elvis!” when seeing I was born in Memphis, so who am I to say what’s country and what’s not?

A Farewell to Pittsburgh

Tue, 27 May 2008 23:26:00 +0000

Eight years, nineteen days ago, I arrived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a convoy from Atlanta consisting of a ten-foot cargo truck and a slightly battered green ‘95 Honda Civic with about ninety thousand miles on it, and moved into a seven hundred square foot third-floor walk-up with central air one block off Walnut in Shadyside with my fiancée.

In A Moving State Of Mind

Fri, 23 May 2008 03:29:00 +0000

I think it’s safe to say it’s crunch time now. I’ve got a little more than a hundred hours left here in Pittsburgh, the final details of my arrival in Zürich are very nearly sorted out, and now it’s down to the disposition of individual boxes and the things in them.

Flexibility, I’ve Heard of It

Tue, 13 May 2008 00:49:00 +0000

Every so often, I run a 5k. By “every so often,” I mean “about once a year.” This one 5k is pretty much all the running I do, outside, of course, of the occasional Four Concourse Dash at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International. The rest of my exercise has been decidedly lower impact -walking, cycling, kayaking, wall-climbing, and the ever-so-important Biannual Headboard Toss (see below). So pretty much every time I do run, I’m a stiff, aching mess for quite some time afterward.

On Tourists

Sun, 11 May 2008 18:54:00 +0000

Another day, another set of tourists through the house. This group stayed two full minutes, which is I think a new record. I can barely get from the basement to the top floor via each room in two minutes, and I live here.

Twenty-one Fourteen Forty-two and Counting

Sat, 10 May 2008 14:07:00 +0000

Time, it feels, is running out.

My standard policy with respect to moving is basically not to move, which given that I've moved once every two years or so pretty reliably since 1995, is probably not a good standard policy. What this means is that I generally leave the actual mechanics of moving off to the last minute, madly throwing things into boxes when the truck pulls up downstairs, and utterly failing to sort out the mess after the fact. (This should perhaps be an indication that I have no real use for most of my stuff, but that's another issue entirely.)

So it is this time. Twenty-one days is not at all last-minute given my history, but given the somewhat different logistics of crossing the ocean, feels it. I've tried tricking myself into moving by pulling the art off the walls (always the last to go in the past) and I think it seems to be working. Indeed, I probably would have gotten some packing done last night had it not been for Game 1 of the Yuengling Conference Finals, absolutely worth it in every way, especially considering the result.

(Speaking of, Malkin's shortie last night, I must say, was not only poetic payback for the mugging he took on his short-handed attempt of a few seconds before, but also made up nicely for his penalty "shot" against the Rangers last series, and beyond that, was one of the prettiest goals I've seen this year in its simplicity. But reviewing individual goals in pretentious art-critic style isn't getting any furniture down my stairs, so I digress...)

Another Sunday morning at the Six One Charlie

Sun, 04 May 2008 11:48:00 +0000

At the corner of Murray and Bartlett in Squirrel Hill lies the 61C Cafe, named after the bus route that stops at its front door; it has come to be my standard weekend morning hangout these last days in Pittsburgh. This is largely because, invariably, someone wants to come by at some insane hour of the morning to see the house. I’ve actually been woken up one Sunday morning by the sound of people in my living room due to a terrible misunderstanding between the realtors involved. And if I have to hide away from my house for half an hour on a Sunday morning, there might as well be some damn good coffee involved.

A Damn Small Town

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 02:41:00 +0000

On my return from Tucson tonight, I walked, as usual, straight from the gate to the taxi stand, because while the 28X (see all previous grumbling about the Port Authority) is perfectly serviceable for a ride from my office (which it stops right in front of) to the airport (which it stops right in front of), it’s certainly not worth waiting for at midnight for the privilege of spending an hour on the bus and forty minutes walking home.

Bus Error

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:53:00 +0000

It’s a good thing that Pittsburgh’s hockey team is better than its public transit system, because otherwise I’d be in a mood.

Things I won't miss about the Port Authority:

Bus trunking. I don't know if this is what this is actually called, but if you have, say, three different routes to the suburbs that share the same route through the city, each with a thirty-minute frequency, you can schedule them in a couple of different ways. The smart way would be to stagger arrivals, thereby providing a ten-minute service frequency through the common routing area (i.e., the city, which is the bit of the route that actually has the density required to support public transit). The not-smart way would be to have three buses come along one minute after each other (or, better yet, following each other), thereby providing a thirty-minute service. Ten-minute service is almost frequent enough to be dependable even without precise timing. Thirty-minute service is not. Guess which one the Port Authority uses?
Bus packing. Yeah, thirty minute service. I suspect they do this because, at least on the 61 routes through the southern bit of the East End, they don't have enough space on the buses for all the people (largely students and staff at the Oakland universities; people like me) who want to ride them, so frequently a full bus will pass you. Then another full bus will pass you. Hopefully a third full bus won't pass you, because then you're waiting thirty minutes for another full bus. You are, anyway. I'm not. I'm walking.
That one driver on the 67H who doesn't know where the Schenley Pool stop is and for some reason wants to fight me about it. I should not have a blogworthy feud with a bus driver. And yet I do.

Anyway, a lot of this is not really the Port Authority's fault. They don't have any money, because they are an American public transit authority, and we pretty much decided public transit was for other people half a century ago. Mind you, this not having any money doesn't keep them from digging a half-billion dollar tunnel under the Allegheny River to carry the seventeenth-largest light rail system in the United States the distance of a fifteen minute walk. But it does serve Heinz Field, and this town loses its senses when it comes to da Stillers, so this is two rants for a later date, and one argument I'll lose by fiat. Moving on.

Once More Onto the Blog

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:33:00 +0000

All right. Let’s try this a fourth time then, shall we?

I've had a long and incredibly sparse career as a blogger. I was a bit late to the game, starting my first one, Elmer and Bellefonte, on the twenty-third of August, two thousand one, largely for the purpose of hearing myself rant about various topics of high geekdom. It's no longer online, which is no great loss as the only real post of any note on it was a long one, entitled Ramblings on the American Response, dated the twentieth of September of that year, in which among other things I expressed concern that "[a]s the shock of seeing New York burn wears off, authoritarian interests within our nation are scrambling to make things safer for us (because, of course, they know better) at the expense of civil liberties," and vowing without any real conviction that "[i]f we [do not resist the temptation to authoritarianism], terror wins, America becomes a third world tinpot totalitarian state, and you can reach me at my new forwarding address somewhere in Western Europe."

Well. A little under seven years later, through a much more, well, ridiculously circuitous course of events in which angst about eroding civil liberties does, I must admit, play a minor supporting role, I'll have a new forwarding address somewhere in Western Europe soon enough. In forty six days, five hours, my one-way flight to Zurich lands.

(As an aside for the record, there was a second blog, completely lost to the sands of time; and a third, Tales from the Centerline, which was largely concerned with the summer-long renovation of my Depression-era house atop Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill in 2005. You're not missing anything by my never mentioning either of these again.)

So, welcome to my fourth blog. I'm starting this one to keep in touch with the people I'm leaving behind here, and to have a public record of what it was like to pick up at thirty and start over (not quite from scratch, mind you) an ocean and a few mountains away. I promise I'll try to keep it from going all "an American in Switzerland" on you.