Why I love LA: I can show up at a good restaurant in a t-shirt and shorts, and get a table

I love LA.  There is a lot to love about LA, especially the weather, but today I was reminded of something else I really like about it here: I can show up at a really good restaurant in a t-shirt, REI shorts, and drivers' shoes, with three days' growth of scruffy beard, and not only get a table, but get really good service, with no indication from anyone that they would prefer that I take my business elsewhere.

Today my dad invited me to lunch for a special occasion, and we decided on Tavern on San Vicente.  We had been wanting to try Tavern for quite a while, but we always tried to get a dinner reservation at short notice, and of course they were always booked up.  I was working at home so not dressed very nicely, basically a Saguaro National Park t-shirt, some shorts from REI, and drivers' shoes.  And I had been taking a vacation from shaving so had several days worth of facial hair growth.

We showed up there with my son and were seated promptly.  My dad and I both had the fish special of the day, Scottish salmon.  I had the soup of the day, a tomato soup.  My son had the grilled cheese sandwich.  Which reminds me, another great thing about LA is how indulgent the best restaurants are with kids.  Tavern, like many of the best restaurants in LA, actually had a kids' menu.  We concluded by sharing the carrot cake. Throughout, the service was impeccable.  And the food was all great.  I want to go back with my wife for dinner at some point.  Or maybe my dad and I can go hit the bar there one evening and have drinks surrounded by the beautiful people of Brentwood.

Initially I felt out of place, since all the other diners were dressed nicely.  Not formally, but nicely, the way I usually like to dress when I hit a decent restaurant in LA.  But later on I felt better because some other patrons were seated wearing t-shirts and jeans.  Of course, they looked a lot better than I did.  Their t-shirts probably $200 t-shirts purchased at Fred Segal, and their jeans were probably $400, custom-tailored from fair trade organic denim made from cotton grown on farms where all the workers were paid $30 an hour and had health and retirement benefits.  We're talking Brentwood, here.  But it was all good.

Anyway, I tried to imagine wearing shorts and a t-shirt walking in to a restaurant as good as Tavern in NYC, DC, Boston, SF or practically any city in North America, or Europe, and I just couldn't imagine it.  I mean, I got into trouble years ago in Tokyo for wearing shorts, and those were Brooks Brothers shorts, and I wasn't even in a fancy restaurant.  And once in Seoul I was barred entry from a jazz venue and restaurant in Kangnam by a beautiful but emphatic young woman with a headset who was apparently maitre d' whose only English, as far as I could tell, was "No shorts!"  I suppose I could get seated at a good restaurant in Beijing if I had on shorts and a t-shirt, but probably not in Tokyo or Seoul. Shanghai might be a problem as well.

All the more reason to like LA.

Samsung Vibrant review (final update: 1/15/2011)

I picked up a Samsung Vibrant the day it became available at T-Mobile.  I have been using it now for about 10 days.  So far, so good.

First, some background.  The Vibrant replaced my G1, which was still working, but was showing its age.  In particular, as apps kept bulking up and becoming more demanding, it was struggling.  And because its memory was so limited, as the apps I needed kept getting bigger, I had to delete other apps.  So I did a hard reset of my G1, connected it to our son's gmail account, took out the SIM card, and gave it to our son to play with.

The Vibrant is at least an order of magnitude improvement over the G1 in almost all respects: battery life, display, internal memory, and speed.  Connection speed also seems hugely improved over the G1, especially over T-Mobile's network here in LA.

Battery life is especially impressive, at least coming from the G1.  I typically wake up, disconnect the charger and take it with me for my hour-long morning run, playing music and with Cardiotrainer using the GPS the entire time, and when I get back, the battery is still nearly full.  On the G1, running with Cardiotrainer and the GPS took the battery down to about 50% or so.  I can generally have the phone with me for the rest of the day with occasional phone calls and app use and there is still a decent charge left when I go to sleep in the evening.  What I have noticed is that the phone is especially thrifty about energy use when it is on but not in use.  If I forget to connect the phone to the charger when I go to sleep, the next morning the battery level is basically what it was when I went to sleep.  Whenever I left the G1 disconnected overnight, by the next morning the battery was down pretty substantially.

Certain apps can be a real battery drain, of course.  Sipdroid appeared to be an energy pig.  Whenever I left that running, the battery drained pretty rapidly.  Accordingly, I leave that turned off.  Running Google Navigate drains the battery quickly, but I can't complain since it is leaving the display on, using voice synthesis, data, and GPS all at the same time.

Performance is a real treat.  Media streaming apps like Radiotime, Pandora and Orb that were basically too demanding for the G1 to run comfortably run beautifully.  One thing I could never make work on the G1, but works fine on the Vibrant, is running Pandora over Wifi, turning Bluetooth on, and streaming the music to the stereo in our bedroom via a Bluetooth music receiver hooked up to that stereo.  On the G1, whenever I tried that, the music was too broken up to be worthwhile.  Also, I can run Cardiotrainer and the Music Player at the same time with no problems.  On the G1, I couldn't listen to music while running Cardiotrainer, it was too broken up and erratic to be worthwhile.

Swype is pretty nice.  I had never used Swype before acquiring the Vibrant, and from the descriptions I had been hearing, I just didn't understand what the deal was.  Finally once I had the Vibrant I started using it, and boy is it nice.  As I get more and more used to it, my speed for text input is picking up, and right now I think I can enter text faster in Swype than I could on a slideout keyboard.  The speed gain associated with Swype is especially apparent for longer words.

For Chinese input, I ended up using the Google Pinyin IME.  It seems to be much improved from the version I was using on the G1.  I also tried out Sogou Pinyin IME, and it worked fine, but I was really creeped out by the long list of access permissions that Sogou Pinyin IME required, including a lot of stuff that I just couldn't imagine was in any way related to the app, like my contact list.

There are some minor annoyances.  The phone doesn't seem to have LED notification lights on the front, so to check for messages, I have to wake up the phone.  Looking at the phone, I could swear that I see three small LEDs on the upper left, but they never seem to come on.  Maybe I'm just imagining them.

At least from T-Mobile, the phone comes with a bunch of apps installed that I doubt I will ever use.  I don't know if they are good or bad, but I'm probably not going to use them.  As far as I can tell, they can't be removed.  The Vibrant has enough memory that these apps don't seem to pose a problem, but nevertheless, I would like to get rid of them.  Oh well.

One other oddity was that when Syncing contacts with gmail, there didn't seem to be any way to specify a particular group of contacts to Sync.  The G1 allowed that, so I could define a group in the gmail contact manager and just sync that to the G1.  With the Vibrant, it seems to be all or nothing: the only choice appears to be to sync everyone in My Contacts.  I went in and cleaned up my contacts in the gmail contact manager so it is manageable now.  One other annoyance with the contact list on the Vibrant is that the column of letters along the right side of the screen that allows jumping to a particular letter in the alphabet is very, very small.  You really need dainty fingers to select any of the letters on the column.  Overall, I think the contact manager could use some work.

There is at least one major annoyance: as has been reported in various forums, there really does seem to be a problem with the GPS.  Hopefully it can be resolved with an update.  About half the time when I turn on GPS, it takes an inordinate amount of time to get a lock on the satellites.  Sometimes I have waited for five minutes with no lock.  This happens in a variety of apps: Google Maps, Cardiotrainer, etc.  Usually once it has a lock, it is fine.  However, the phone has locked up sometimes when the GPS is turned on, like in Google Navigate, or Cardiotrainer, but so far this has only been sporadic.  In at least two cases the phone was completely unresponsive and I ended up popping the battery and replacing it to force a reboot.  Some fixes have been posted that involve hacks that don't seem too onerous, but I will probably wait for an on the air update.

I'll keep updating this as I notice things, so stay tuned.

7 August 2010


One minor annoyance: the Calendar app by default adds events to a calendar called "My Calendar" that doesn't seem to have anything to do with the google account the phone is linked to, and so isn't synced.  So every time I add an event in the Calendar app, I have to manually change the calendar it is being added to.  I found this out because I added a bunch of events that weren't synced to my google account, and then finally I realized that by default they were being added to a calendar on the phone "My Calendar" that had nothing to do with my gmail account.  I edited each event to change the calendar to my google calendar and it synced fine.  I can't find any way of changing the settings on the app to force new events to be added to the synced google calendar by default.  Maybe there is a way, but it isn't obvious.

9/6/2010

The camera interface is pretty clumsy.  The major annoyance is that the default setting is that after taking a picture, it is left there for review, with options for sharing and so forth, with no obvious way to go on and take another picture.  I fumbled around for quite a while before I figured out that the only way I could get it back to be ready to take another picture was to hit the back button.  There wasn't any option on the screen for simply saving the picture being reviewed and moving on to take another.  Another annoyance is that it isn't at all obvious how to bring up the settings menu.  Again, I stumbled on it while getting ready to take a picture, I hit the arrow on the side of the screen and the controls for the settings came up.  When I finally did get in to settings, I was able to dig around and turn off Review so that I could simply take pictures without needing to fumble around with each picture.

12/31/2010

Well, I have had the Vibrant for several months now.  Overall, my impression after having used it for so long is mixed.  The display is beautiful, and when it works, it works very nicely.  But the GPS is still flaky, even with the OTA update that came out a few months ago.  Apps that use the GPS have a nasty habit of working sluggishly and even locking up, something requiring me to open the case and remove and replace the battery to get things going again.  This especially seems to be a problem if I open an app that uses GPS within about five minutes of turning on the phone.  Also the GPS lock still takes an inordinate amount of time.  It is better than it was before the OTA fix, but hardly acceptable.

This leads me to another issue: the phone takes an inordinate amount of time after powering up to actually become usable.  It seems to spend several minutes on power-up scanning the memory, syncing, and who knows what else, during which time the phone is extremely sluggish, and opening an app is difficult.  Opening an app at this time that uses the GPS often seems to crash the app or even freeze the phone.

Honestly, given the continuing problems with the GPS, and the hideously slow boot time, I don't know if I could recommend this phone to anyone.  I would swear that the phone takes longer to boot up and become usable than a Windows machine, which is pretty bad.  And the phone has crashed enough times when I was trying to use Google Maps that I am hesitant to rely on it for anything in the way of navigation.  That said, when the phone is working, it works beautifully.

Meanwhile, we're still waiting for Android 2.2 (Froyo)...  What's the deal with that delay?


1/15/2010


I finally gave up on the Samsung Vibrant.  I gave mine to my wife and bought a G2.  My wife is fine with the Vibrant since she isn't as reliant on her phone as I am for work.  In the end, what turned me against the Vibrant was the ongoing flakiness with the GPS.  It wasn't just that it took so long to get a lock, but also because while it was trying to get a lock, whatever app was using the GPS and indeed the whole became unstable.  I don't know how many times I had to open the case and pop out and replace the battery to reboot the phone after opening up Google Maps, which somehow resulted in the phone locking up when it was seeking a GPS lock.  This was especially frustrating a few times when I was driving and wanted to use Google Maps to locate a store.  I had to pull over and park several times in the space of ten or fifteen minutes to reboot the phone.   

Even when the GPS had a 'lock' on the Samsung Vibrant, it was pretty miserable.  I use Cardiotrainer to track my runs.  When I looked at maps of my runs, I was shown passing through buildings and teleporting back and forth to locations near my route.  By contrast, the G2 shows my path on the same route as a nice, straight line.

More generally, it just seemed like the Samsung Vibrant had a lot of problems with the stability and performance of apps that worked well on my G1 and now work fine on my G2.  For example, Google Reader never ran very well at all on the Samsung Vibrant, but works fine on the G2.  I also had problems with the browser on the Vibrant freezing while it opened pages, requiring me to kill the browser and restart it.

The continued delays with Froyo didn't help.   Perhaps Samsung had its reasons for being slow with Froyo, but their inability to issue the update made me wonder about their commitment to keeping their products up to date.

It is really too bad about the Vibrant.  It is a beautiful phone, and a please to hold, and has a beautiful screen.  The camera was very nice.  But in the end it was simply not up to my needs.  I'll be posting a separate comparison of the G2 and Samsung soon.

Good LA Times column on what ails California:

Skelton wrote a column in the LA Times that I think pretty much sums up what is wrong with California... The problem isn't our governors, it is us...

Don't blame Schwarzenegger - latimes.com

I have been pleased what Schwarzenegger has tried to do as governor. He has taken his responsibilities very seriously. While I am normally pretty skeptical of anyone who campaigns as an outsider, overall I think he has really tried to approach his job in a serious and professional way. He hasn't accomplished much, but I think his heart has been in the right place. He has certainly had some missteps, but he learned from them. He has been making the best of a very bad situation. Every time he has tried to accomplish something significant, however, he has been stymied by hacks on either the left or the right. Given the circumstances, I find it hard to believe anyone else could do much better.

The state is broken in many ways. The accumulation of initiatives over the years have paralyzed state government, especially anything related to budget. The supermajority rule for budget related items is especially pernicious. Proposition 13 is silly. We need to go back to basics for budgeting, including spending and taxation, with a simple majority vote. If the party in control overreaches, voters can exercise their rights and throw the bums out at the next election. Until we fix the budgeting process, nobody is going to be able to govern California.

More generally, the initiative process has to be shut down, or at least tightened up. It has become a tool of anyone with money to spend who wants to bypass the legislature, whether on the left or the right. The most disgusting recent examples of abuse of the initiative process of course are the efforts by electrical utilities, oil and auto insurance companies to buy passage of initiatives that they tailored to suit their own needs.

The other problem is that the primary system now guarantees that in both parties, hacks and extremists are nominated for the general elections. And meanwhile on both sides, we have bored rich people who apparently have nothing better to do trying to buy office like gentry in 19th century England, spending their inheritance to buy seats in rotten boroughs. At least back then, the rich people distributed ale and whiskey to voters. Now all the money goes to consultants. Maybe we should allow vote buying as a means of wealth redistribution: people with too much money and not enough to do could squander their fortunes bidding for our votes. They already do, but because they can't buy votes directly, they throw their money away on political consultants, and we don't get any of that gravy.

Anyway, it is pretty clear that the state is dysfunctional. We could re-animate Abe Lincoln and he would probably try for a few months and then give up and tell us that reuniting the Union was easier. We could re-animate George Washington and he would give it a try and tell us that he would rather deal with the Continental Congress than with the voters of California. We would just have to hope that reanimating Lincoln or Washington wouldn't yield zombies who would run around infecting everyone.

Photos from July 4 in San Francisco, at the Maritime Park

We spent the weekend of the 4th in San Francisco.  It was a last minute decision.  We found on Travelocity that we could get reasonably priced roundtrip tickets, and a pretty good deal on a room at the W, so we went.

Before I get to the photos, I'll mention some highlights.  We really enjoyed some restaurants that friends recommended, including Zarzuela in Russian Hill, Cafe Troya in Richmond, and R and G Lounge in Chinatown.  Zarzuela was a Spanish tapas, Cafe Troya was Turkish, and R and G Lounge was Cantonese.  For us the most memorable was Cafe Troya since we haven't found any Turkish restaurants here in LA, it was our first time in years eating Turkish cuisine.  We also visited Just Awesome near West Portal to buy board games.  That store is really remarkable, I've never seen anything like it.  They sell board games, and they have tables set up where you can try before you buy.  The staff are also extraordinarily helpful and knowledgeable.

Since it was a family trip, I didn't have much time by myself to take pictures.  The main exception was the evening of the 4th, when my wife and I went down to Fisherman's Wharf by bus and then walked over to the Maritime Park, or Aquatic Park, or whatever it is called.  Of course, I had the camera along.  The whole gallery is here:

http://www.canghuixu.com/California/SF/July-4-Fireworks/12890479_rT3xU

A few of my favorite shots from that outing...

A store on the way from the bus stop to the park...

This gentleman was writing names in a colorful and artistic calligraphy...

There was a musical performance before the fireworks show...

And of course, some fireworks...

Microsoft Office Web Apps versus Google Docs...

Lately I have been experimenting with Microsoft Web Apps, and comparing it with Google Docs.  I like Google Docs, but it is usually inaccessible in China.  I need to share documents and spreadsheets with people in China, and also want to access my documents and spreadsheets when I am visiting there.  I decided to try Microsoft Office Web Apps since for reasons that I don't understand, or perhaps would rather not understand, Microsoft services never seem to encounter any interference in China.  For example, I have been using Windows Live Sync to share files with friends in China with no problem, even though Dropbox doesn't work at all.

The first problem when I tried to get going was that I didn't realize that office.live.com and officelive.com were different products.  The later also allows folder sharing, but as far as I can tell, doesn't offer editing of documents in browsers.  Maybe it does, but I couldn't figure it out.  So before I found office.live.com and set up documents there to share, I wasted time at officelive.com uploading and sharing files.  At officelive.com, no one could figure out how to edit documents in a browser, and we were confused, since we thought that this was the Web Apps site.  Finally I realized I should be in office.live.com, and things began to work smoothly.  This confusion seems to be very typically Microsoft.  +1 to Google Docs for being easy to have up and running right away, and not having a related but not identical product from the same company with a nearly identical URL.

My initial impression of Web Apps is that like most Microsoft web products, it seems to require an inordinate number of clicks through different screens to accomplish anything.  Google Docs has a much more elegant interface that somehow doesn't require moving from one screen to another as often.  Also, a general problem with Windows Live is that it doesn't seem to have a coherent and consistent approach to navigation, so for example, the navigation bar along the top includes different choices depending on whether you are in Hotmail, view your Profile at Live.com, or somewhere else.  For example, a link for Office that leads to the Web Apps appears along the top if you are on your home page at Windows Live, but not if you are at Hotmail/Mail.Live.Com.  And then once you are in Office Web Apps, doing anything always seems to require  clicking through a few screens.  So once again, a Microsoft has a web product is a confusing ordeal to get up and running.  So +1 to Google Docs for navigability and ease of use.

Once I was finally up and running and had created a folder and put some documents in it, I shared it with some friends in China.  It worked.  They were able to click on the links they received and open the files in their browsers and edit them.  Google Docs access in China remains problematic.  So +1 to Microsoft Web Apps for being accessible in China, at least for the time being.  I still wonder why Microsoft web services never seem to have any trouble in China, whereas everyone else has all sorts of trouble, but I would rather not go there.

Document and folder management is much clearer in Google Docs than in Microsoft Web Apps.  First of all, sometimes the list of files can be confusing as a result of conversion from earlier versions.  If you import a .doc file or .xls file, it will show up, then when you edit it and it converts to .xlsx or .docx, that will be listed as well, so you will get the original important and the conversion showing up in the list of file, but you only notice that the extensions are different if you mouseover. This caused a great deal of confusion, everyone was wondering why there seemed to be two copies of the same file in the folder, and some edited the wrong one and then ended up creating multiple versions.  The conversion to Office 2007 format (xlsx or docx）should offer the option of removing the original import so their aren't two copies of the document showing up in the folder.  In general, the 'detail' view of a folder contents isn't very detailed, at the very least it should include the file extension or the Office version.  In general, it would be nice if the folder views were more Explorer like.  +1 Google Docs for its folder and document views.

My friends in China reported that even though they could open the folders and documents I shared with them via the link I emailed, the folders and documents did not show up in the Shared with Me list at the office.live.com home page.  We struggled this for a while, then I dug around on the web and found a thread in some forum that said for documents and folders to appear in Shared with Me, the people sharing the documents with each other also had to be in each other's networks on Windows Live.  We added each other to our networks and sure enough, the documents and folders began appearing in Shared With Me.  This was really annoying, and we wasted a lot of time trying to understand what was going on, and there was nothing anywhere to indicate this requirement that only documents and folders shared from people in a network would appear in the Shared With Me list.  To put it kindly, this is dumb.  Especially in a work environment, I would like to share documents with people who I don't necessarily want to add to my network, and I would like them to be able to see the documents shared with them in Shared With Me.  More generally, like everything else that Microsoft does on the web, managing shares seemed to require a lot more clicking through different screens than it should have.  So once more, +1 to Google Docs for easy management of shares, especially shares with people not in your network.

While Web Apps is accessible in China, it turns out it isn't accessible in Chinese.  If you share a folder with someone who has set the default language for their Windows Live account to Chinese, their view of the Office Live will not offer the ability to edit in browser.  There will be buttons for lots of other things, but they won't see the equivalent of Edit in Browser.  We wasted an enormous amount of time trying to figure out why our colleagues in China were not seeing the option to Edit in Browser, then one of them switched the default language for their Windows Live account to English, and suddenly they saw Edit in Browser.  I understand that since this is a new product, Microsoft may not have translated the UI into Chinese yet, but shouldn't there be a warning at my end or at my intended collaborator's end saying that because the default language for their account is not English, they will not be able to Edit in Browser, and will need to switch their default language to English to have that functionality?  This was a real pain.  +1 to Google Docs for having a user experience that is consistent across languages.


Now for some functionality issues.  My assessment is pretty preliminary since I am just getting into it.  As one would expect, Office and Word Web Apps have limited functionality, so it isn't really appropriate to compare them with the full versions.  It is however appropriate to compare them with Google Docs.  Right now, Google Docs seems to come out ahead.  Here is what I have noticed so far...

• Word Web App doesn't support commenting.  This is a disappointment.  One of the things I was really looking forward for in web-based document and spreadsheet management was the potential for review by members of a workgroup, where people who didn't want to edit a text, could still leave comments.  Google Docs allows comments, though I am not completely happy with the comment functionality there either.  My ideal would be for Web Apps and Google Docs to have a sharing permission somewhere between edit and read-only that would allow invited viewers to make comments and perhaps edits, where the edits would be stored as proposed changes that could be approved by the document owner, much the way that track changes works in Word.
• Excel Web App doesn't seem to support title rows and columns.  Google Docs does.  For looking at very large spreadsheets, it is nice to be able to lock top rows or leftmost columns to use as titles.  That is a key feature of Excel, and Google Docs now does it very, very nicely.  Without the ability to lock rows and columns, the Excel Web App seems pretty crippled as a tool for reviewing or collaborating on very large spreadsheets.
• Word Web App page formatting options are pretty barebones, sort of like Google Docs circa 2008.  I didn't see any way of specifying page margins, page breaks and so forth.  Google Docs has made a lot of progress on page formatting in recent months, so that at least you can now specify a page width and margins, so it is MUCH closer to WYSIWYG.

Overall, +1 to Google Docs for functionality for editing.

So right now, my score is Google Docs 6, Office Web Apps 1.  That said, I may continue to use Web Apps simply because for the time being, it is accessible in China.  And I am sure that Microsoft will add some features.  Though I suppose they will be constrained by fear that if they make Web Apps too good, it will cannibalize Office sales.  Google doesn't face that constraint.

The ONLY reason we are using Web Apps is that is accessible in China, albeit not in Chinese.  Overall, the UI is a train wreck.  Back when Google Docs was accessible in China, it was straightforward enough that we could share with a complete novice and they would be up and running in minutes.  We have been trying to get our colleagues in China on board with Microsoft Web Apps or Office Live or whatever it is for two weeks now, and success is coming in drips and drabs.  There is too much we are finding out by accident: that people have to be in your network to see your shared folders in their 'Shared with me' view, and that 'Edit in Browser' is not available when the default language for the account is set to Chinese.  And the folder display is confusing for everyone since it lists files repeatedly according to who modified them and when, instead of just listing each of them once.

I will update this post as I dig into this in detail.