Author Archives: Raymond Yee

Reacquainting myself with the Psalms

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This morning I was happy to take down for my bookshelf something I had not read in a while: my copy of The Access Bible, New Revised Standard Version with Apocrypha. I found reading the introductory essay to the Psalms a real pleasure, inspiring me to read through the Psalms to look for the themes and structures identified by the essay. This morning I started my journey through the Psalms by reading Psalm 1, which happens to be not only at the beginning of the Psalms but also already very familiar to me. The passage that sticks with me this morning is also appropriate for me to ruminate on throughout the day: "but their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night." (Ps 1:2)

Making GOTV calls for Barack Obama

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I spent this morning volunteering to make "get the vote out" phone calls for the Obama campaign.  Laura and I are living in Pittsburgh, PA this fall, so we feel the tension and excitement of being in a battleground state, something I didn't get all those years in California.  I will admit to being nervous about making political phone calls -- even though I have spent years making phone calls for a (non-political) good cause.   It made a big difference though to show up at the home of an Obama supporter where I was trained and where I drew encouragement from my fellow callers.    I wish I had managed to work up the courage to participate in phone banking earlier but it's important to take those little steps.

Figuring out some basic investing advice: use value investing?

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I've had two investment books out from the public library on my bookshelf for several weeks: The little book of common sense investing : the only way to guarantee your fair share of market returns and The little book of common sense investing : the only way to guarantee your fair share of market returns and am finally getting a bit of time to look at them. I've had a fair amount of my retirement money invested in a S&P 500 index fund -- so I'm familiar with the notion of investing in an index fund. As Laura and I consider investing in BRK.B - Berkshire Hathaway Inc., Laura and I learning about Value investing, particularly its relationship to Warren Buffett, which is described in the following terms:

    However, the future distributions and the appropriate discount rate can only be assumptions. Warren Buffett has taken the value investing concept even further as his thinking has evolved to where for the last 25 years or so his focus has been on "finding an outstanding company at a sensible price" rather than generic companies at a bargain price.

I'm still trying to understand how to apply concepts such as P/E ratio to assess how good a buy Berkshire Hathaway is. Should I believe what Berkshire Hathaway Intrinsivaluator says?

Understanding the Issues: Now and Months from Now

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This fall, I came to see how little I understood the major issues of the American federal election. I'd like to figure out a long term strategy for learning about the world and keeping informed about the relevant issues in politics. I compiled a lot of sources to use in following the election, but once the election is over, we're going to be facing different short term challenges from those months before the election. I'll come back to sort through my list a month or two from now once the dust settles a bit.

The turtle within: writing a little at a time

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Earlier in the week, I came across an article that I've been mulling over the past couple of days. It goes a long way in addressing a problem that I've been facing: that of not being able to get started with big writing projects. If you have the same problem, I recommend reading and Tomorrow's Professor Blog: How to Write Anything and following its recommendations. Here's an excerpt:

    A much more effective strategy is to make a commitment to regularly devote short periods of time to major writing projects. Thirty minutes a day is plenty, or maybe an hour three times a week. One approach is to designate a fixed time period on specified days, preferably at a time of day when you're at your peak, during which you close your door, ignore your phone, and do nothing but work on the project. Alternatively, you might take a few 10-15 minute breaks during the day-times when you would ordinarily check your email or surf the Web or play Sudoku-and use them to work on the project instead. Either way, when you start to write you'll quickly remember where you left off last time and jump in with little wasted motion. When you've put in your budgeted time for the day, you can (and generally should) stop and go back to the rest of your life.

Beijing Welcomes You — on YouTube

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During the summer Olympics I got hooked on the song Beijing Welcomes You. See one of several YouTube versions: YouTube - 2008 Beijing Olympics, Beijing Welcomes You [High Quality MV English Sub Pinyin Sub:

I've been in playing it often, trying to learn the lyrics, even though my Mandarin is extremely basic. Tears off until my sentimental eyes when I listen to the song; I find it hard to believe how it taps into some deep, not fully understood, ties I have to China, even as a Chinese-Canadian living in the USA.

Some other references to the song on the web are:

Moving Experiences

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In August, Laura and I packed up our apartment in Albany, CA and shipped most of our stuff to our new house in Pittsburgh, PA while moving a few of our items to a little studio apartment we're keeping in Albany. It was a rather big project that left us quite exhausted; two months later, we're still dealing with the aftermath of our move.

During our move we may do so quite a few services, which were on the whole quite helpful. Here I want to share some of my experiences with those companies, both the upside and downsides.

DAS Auto Shippers

DAS Auto Shippers and our carWe had our car shipped across the country by Dependable Auto Shippers, one of the largest auto shippers in the country. I was a bit concerned about its reputation after reading some online reviews,with their typical horror stories. However I decide to go with DAS after someone I know reported having had good experiences (and timely delivery) with DAS. I found the first agent I talked with on the phone to be extremely friendly and reassuring. The guy who picked up our car was pleasant and knowledgeable.

The problems came down the road when after 10 days our car still hadn't left the Bay Area. DAS had given us its standard estimate of 14 days to ship a car. Laura and I needed to have our car on August 25 for a road trip. I thought that I would be playing it safe by planning to have the car delivered by August 22. Allowing for 14 days and another two days for padding meant having my car shipped on August 6. Our car wasn't delivered until August 25 -- 19 days after it was picked up! Even that late delivery required several phone calls and a bit of pleading on my part to get any action at all. (BTW, the agent who convinced me to go with DAS was nowhere to be found after DAS had gotten my money.)

The bottom line: our car got here okay, but if I were ever to ship a car again, I'd like to find a more reliable service.

City CarShare

IMG_1164Once our car was shipped off on Aug 6, we still needed to have the use of the vehicle during most of the last two weeks of our move. We thought about renting a car for that whole time, but decided instead to try City CarShare, which allows you to rent cars on hourly or daily basis. We picked City CarShare over its rival ZipCar because City CarShare has a pod at the El Cerrito Plaza BART station, an easy walking distance from our apartment.

We were really pleased with City CarShare. Driving a Prius, the model available at the local pod, was fun. For a couple days we rented a Toyota truck, which turned out to be indispensable for our move. The last night, we got to the airport by driving the Prius back to the pod and hopping on BART to go to SFO.

The only complaint I had was being locked out of my car once in Berkeley because the car was (for some unexplained reason)out of radio contact with City CarShare headquarters. It's a bit disconcerting to think that you can be stranded one-day while far away from any other means of transportation. But I don't expect it to be a regular occurrence

One Big Man And One Big Truck

One of the challenges that we face as we were running out of time the last week of our move was moving furniture out of our apartment and to our studio. We turned to One Big Man And One Big Truck, a local company that I had used in 2005. One thing I find attractive about One Big Man is that you pay by a 15 minute increments. The movers were friendly and reasonably efficient. They were real troopers in its extracting and moving a large IKEA cabinet out of our apartment, which unfortunately, we couldn't give away.

Ecohaul

EcoHaul and our IKEA cabinet
We surprised ourselves by underestimating how much junk we would be left with even after packing everything up that we want to save. We had envisioned that we would make a lot of trips to GoodWill and places like Urban Ore (which thankfully did take a recliner and a large file cabinet from us).

EcoHaul came to our rescue. Without EcoHaul there was no way that we could have emptied out our apartment in time, let alone dispose of the giant IKEA cabinet. I'm hoping that EcoHaul did manage to find a home for the cabinet, rather than having to dump it into a landfill.

Learning about Opera By Books and Bits

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Last week I picked up a book from the Squirrel Hill branch of the Pittsburgh Public Library -- Sir Denis Forman's A Night at the Opera. I had been looking for exactly this type of book because I've long wanted to immerse myself in the study of opera -- both Western and Chinese. Forman's book is primarily composed of chapters devoted to individual operas. Chapters have plot summaries, musical highlights, and overall critical appreciations/evaluations of specific operas.

I've long wanted to broaden my knowledge of opera. It's certainly not a bad thing for me to reacquaint myself with the operas I've already listened to dozens of times. (Some great opera are boundlessly rich.) Operas with which I already have some level of familiarity include:

  • Mozart's Don Giovanni, Marriage of Figaro, Magic Flute, and Così fan tutte
  • Puccini's La bohème
  • bits and pieces from Wagner's Ring Cycle (primarily Das Rheingold, the first of four operas in the cycle)
  • Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise.

But I want to grow beyond listening over and over again to the same operas. There must be many new friends to be found -- Forman's book lists a good set to try out. But which ones to start with? It might be a caricature to say that the big three composers and Western opera are Mozart, Wagner, and Verdi. I've long wanted to learn more about Giuseppe Verdi. so I would pick one of his operas but which one?

When I saw that Verdi's La Traviata is being performed in San Francisco next year, I decided to start with that opera. The opportunity to see a live performance of an opera under study is too much to pass p on.. So La Traviata it would be to start. (Moreover, Forman gives a rave review for La Traviata -- ( grading it as an "alpha plus") -- so this opera seems to be as good a place to start as any other Verdi opera. It turns that La Traviata is been extremely popular opera in general (it's #3 on a list of the 20 most performed operas in North America). Moreover, the Met is also performing it this season.

Rhapsody for online listening

As much as I would love to spend my time (and money) attending live opera, most of my exposure to opera will be through recordings. I was a big fan and subscriber of Yahoo! Music Unlimited when it was still in operation. I am even happier with Rhapsody (which took over my subscription), primarily because it gives me access to a substantial online classical music collection. (Classical music was not represented at all in Yahoo! Music.)

(By the way, there is also an API for Rhapsody. It be interesting to quickly brainstorm what I would use it for. (One idea comes to mind: writing a mashup that lets me quickly correlate albums that correspond to a given work -- for example, something that shows me a list of all the recordings of La Bohème))

I've been listening to music primarily through Rhapsody's desktop client (for Windows XP) although the web interface is intriguing for not only providing cross-platform access to my account but also the possibility of generating URLs to correspond to the given work or album or even track. (Unfortunately, the search results from the web interface cannot seem to be as good as those that come from the desktop interface. For instance, I had a hard time locating many recordings of Così fan tutte using the web interface. I wonder how well the API works for searching for albums.)

Wikipedia as a source of information about opera

The Wikipedia turns out to be an incredible source of basic taxonomic information about operas is in general. There is, of course, the article about the opera itself ( La traviata - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) as well as the composer (Giuseppe Verdi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). There are all sorts of efforts to list and categorize operas and their composers:

In addition, there's an effort to identify important operas and major composers. There are categories lists which are computed:

Show me that you are up for being president

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Over the last couple weeks, it has become my morning routine to watch the Daily Show and the Colbert Show while eating breakfast and drinking tea. I not only get a lot of laughs out of these shows but learn a lot about having a proper perspective on the issues. Not so much who is right and wrong necessarily but whether the stuff the country is talking about is really that important in the first place.  While chuckling at skillful deconstruction of last week's vice presidential debate by Stewart and Colbert, I had the sinking feeling that the one of the fools in the whole equation was myself for having spent much time at all worrying about whether Palin or Biden would end up making the first gaffes -- instead of devoting my time to educating myself and others about the truly important issues.

So tonight, I plan to tune in to overnight on how Obama and McCain will take up the issues rather than engage in further character assassination. I suspect that we won't be here to totally avoid negative campaigning tonight, given how the McCain campaign has already promised to focus on questioning Obama's character and Obama's determined response to not become swiftboated (à la Kerry). however one can still hope that the two candidates will actually have serious answers to serious questions.

Of course this realization will stop me from watching Comedy Central – the shows are entertainment after all!

I was right, more or less

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I went out on a limb (sort of) and made some predictions about yesterday's vice presidential debate. This morning, I am now prepared to claim that I was basically right about my predictions: that Joe Biden won't say anything really silly, that Sarah Palin would do well in the debate (by not making any big gaffes), and that overall the debate won't shift things too much for the two tickets. It might be too early to declare victory but I can say that James Fallows would (more or less) agree with me: James Fallows (October 02, 2008) - Your VP debate wrapup in four bullet points (Politics)