Quantum Forest

• Movie that I’ve watched the most: Robots. Yes, it is Orlando’s favourite. How many times? At least a hundred… I wish I were joking.
• Lesson of the week: the dignity of Amish from Nickel Mines dealing with tragedy. I can only admire their strength and wish them peace.
• Depressing statistic of the week: I publish more than the whole Department of Silviculture of the university where I studied. This is even worse considering that I do not publish that much. However, the truth is not that bad, in Chile people work in many projects where the only output is a report for the funding agency. The bad part is that many New Zealand forest companies are still delluded into thinking that they are way ahead in international competition. No, they are not; they are resting on past laurels so, wake up!
• A small sample of Orlando’s words in Spanish: jirafa, cohete, trompeta, axila, harmónica, cocodrilo, refrigerador. Sample in English: ice cream, plane, rainbow, umbrella. Poetic comment: ‘El cohete está haciendo un arco iris’ (The rocket is making a rainbow).
• Two sites that I have enjoyed reading lately: [dive into mark] and The Tao of Mac.
• Definition of bric-a-brac: ‘miscellaneous curios’.

Eleven of September again, but I am not thinking of 2001—which was terrible, I agree—but of 1973. I always stop for a minute to remember as an old political campaign said: without hate, without fear, without violence. I was six and still remember.

I am preparing lectures, really busy. I took the students after more than a semester and most of them appear to be clueless. I am going over a general review, again, because they have to learn. Always listening to energetic music when preparing lectures or running analyses. This time is Rammstein’s ‘Sehnsucht’. But, anyway, I also like to go back a few years and Yes’s ‘Close to the Edge’ (yes, from 1972) is now coming from the headphones.

I start writing most of the ideas in Writeroom and then copy the lot to TeXShop. Packages included in the document preamble for the notes:

%! program = pdflatex
\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage{pslatex}
\usepackage{amsbsy}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{geometry}
\geometry{a4paper}

Although the Statistics course uses Mendenhall & Sincich’s ‘Regression Analysis’ as the basic text, I am using quite a few other references:

• Quinn and Keough’s ‘Experimental design and data analysis for biologists’.
• Searle’s ‘Linear models’.
• Harrell’s ‘Regression modeling strategies’.
• Steel and Torrie’s ‘Principles and procedures of statistics’ (the first edition!).
• Hamilton’s ‘Regression with graphics’.
• Neter and Wasserman’s ‘Applied linear statistical models’.

In addition I am also preparing grant applications, so if you try to contact me please be understanding: I will not read my email (or act upon any emails) until Wednesday next week (around September 20^th).

Moved to King Crimson’s ‘Discipline’. Now listening ‘Elephant talk’…Talk is ony talk…

I ordered a 20” monitor from Dell New Zealand. The price was good (NZD 749), so I just took the plunge. After over two weeks of waiting I sent them an email and—given that I did not get a reply—gave them a phone call.

The phone call was plagued with noise, echo and stuttering sound. That together with the forced pseudo American accent gave away that there was something suspicious about the call centre. Just to confirm my suspicions I asked ‘where is your call centre located?’ Answer: Malaysia.

According to customer service, a courier did go to my office, nobody was there so he left a card. This would be the first time that a courier notice disappears from my post, because I never found any card. I then asked them to deliver it tomorrow, but Dell could not because it was too little time in advance. I said that I could contact the courier and pick it up myself. Well, customer service did not have a phone number—or even the name of the company—delivering the monitor. Hardly surprising if I was dealing with someone in Malaysia. They could not provide me with a delivery time for next week either, so I was supposed to patiently wait the whole day (between 9am and 5pm) for the courier. It sucks and I am seriously thinking about asking for a refund.

After my phone call I finally received an email from my first contact with customer service:

We apologize for the delay in delivery and attention. Kindly advise if you have not received the order.

Should you require further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Once again thank you for your feedback and it is indeed a great pleasure serving you.

Have a pleasant day!

How about ‘canned answer’ to describe their reply? It sucks³.

P.S. 2006-07-21: I received a couple of phone calls from Dell, again with an incredibly bad sound quality. Customer service informed me that they have been again a day ago delivering the screen and that nobody was there to receive it. I asked her to read the delivery address: the street was correct, but with the wrong number.

P.S. 2006-07-22: I received an email from Dell in reply to one of my complaints:

I sincerely apologized for the experience that you had been through. Proper coaching has been done on the agent for further improvement.

and later

I had asked one of my senior agents to contact you in regards to the re-delivery of the order. Apparently, the order has went futile and thus, we need to re-arrange another delivery for you.

Yes, my order has went futile.

P.S. 2006-07-24. Still waiting. I have left two messages in the 0800 number I was given to contact the ‘senior agent’, because nobody answered the phone.

I am not alone in my trouble: a search for ‘Dell customer service problem’ returns about 2.8 million hits in Yahoo and 19.9 million hits in Google.

P.S. 2006-07-30. Dell sent the order to the University Warehouse rather than the School of Forestry. Of course nobody knew about me in the warehouse, so the order was rejected. Finally Dell gave me the name and phone number of the courier, who informed me that they sent the monitor back to Dell. I then called back Dell to cancel my order. Now, I am just waiting to get my money back in my credit card. One month lost due to Dell NZ.

P.S. 2006-08-01. I received a call from Dell, saying that they would credit my card after I returned the monitor. I patiently explained that it was physically impossible to return something that I have never received. Are these guys smoking pot?

P.S. 2006-08-02. Another call from ‘someone organising the refund but not working for Dell’ (how can that be?) that wanted to confirm the address of delivery and if I knew a ‘Paul’ who could have received the monitor. No Pauls and I want my money back immediately.

Better I continue listening to Neon Meate Dream of A Octafish. by Captain Beefheart. It makes a lot more sense than Dell.

P.S. 2006-08-06. Today my internet banking statement showed that Dell credited back my card. In summary, I lent the cost of the monitor to Dell for one month (on top of my time writing emails and calling them on the phone) interest free. Result: I will never buy a Dell product (or recommend them) for the rest of my life.

Google Maps continues to include some higher resolution images (if not maps) for some parts of the planet. I was able to find the place where I used to live in Santiago at the level of buildings and houses. And here is where I used to study Just have a look at the centre of the pictures.

Distances between Christchurch places where I have lived at some point of my life (obtained using Geobyte’s city distance tool):

• Hobart, Australia: 2442 km.
• Palmerston North, New Zealand: 431 km.
• Valdivia, Chile: 8647 km.
• Mendoza, Argentina: 9487 km.
• Valera, Venezuela: 12876 km.
• Los Teques, Venezuela: 13255 km.
• Santiago, Chile: 9351 km.
• Concepcion, Chile: 8930 km.

It should be relatively easy to tag the images with every conceivable story that one is blogging about, although a bit time consuming. However, for most places I write about, imagery resolution is too broad for anything useful. I am sure it is just a matter of waiting a couple of years to sort out this issue.

I some times visit Techcrunch, a site that profiles new web 2.0 companies. Most of them share the use of tags (some ridiculous name for the good old keywords), allow sharing content with other users and will go bankrupt. I may try some of them but most of the time they have no incidence at all in my workflow and just forget about them.

Google mail has changed my workflow, at least for personal email. No more folders, just keywords and archiving. Some people may have privacy concerns but, hey, do you encrypt your email? I didn’t think so, so stop complaining because anybody can read it. I would love to encrypt mine, but none of my correspondents actually uses encryption, so it is an uphill battle.

All the other Google services (Froggle, Maps, Chat, RSS syndication, news)? Have not made a dent on my workflow, so from a practical point of view, they are pretty useless to me. One exception in the horizon is Google Calendar (CL2). The fact that it is an internet calendar is not surprising or innovative at all (they are dime a dozen at the moment), but integration with my Google mail (which I find really nice) it is.

There are services from which it is very easy to move away; for example, web search. I may be used to Google, but if there is a new service which provides more relevant results, I will start using it without hesitation. That is what I did when moving from Altavista to Google in 1998. Yahoo is now looking more relevant to many searches I am doing, so I may switch to them.

Apart from that, what would I like to have?

• My desktop everywhere, like YouOS (a java script based web operating system) but that actually works for me. Having a crummy editor and spreadsheet does not qualify as useful, because I often use the more obscure features of software. However, the idea of runnning a desktop that I can easily access from anywhere is compelling.
• A well integrated wiki+blog. I use PmWiki and Textpattern, but I would rather prefer to use a single system with complete linking across themes and posts. Infogami looks like going in the right direction, but still needs a fair amount of work. If it is a hosted solution I want to have a escape route, so I can save my data externally in a meaningful format.
• A remote disk to keep my things synchronised across computers, something that I can mount from my PC, Mac or whatever I am using at the moment. It needs to have a decent amount space and no, 1GB is not enough (think of pictures, please)!

• Late 80s, riding an old bus late at night feeling loved.
• Going in a bus full of forestry students on the road to Constitución. It is autumn, the Nothofagus forest is exploding with colour and the music is Mercado Testaccio.
• A few days before leaving Valdivia in 1996, riding my old bicycle and the seagulls are flying around me. Everything looks still for a few seconds and we are part of the same flock.
• Orlando comes running towards me for a hug, he can not stop and pushes me. Anybody would think that he has not seen me for weeks, but it has been only a few hours.
• Marcela, Orlando and I are working in the garden. We are weeding and cleaning and that is it: simple.

There is something therapeautical about working with plants in the garden. There is the sense of achievement that is absent when working with intangible problems: I can see a small plant at the end of a day’s work.

I have slightly changed the focus of my attention during the last month or so. My current obsessions are:

• Optimisation of breeding programs, for which I am learning to use AMPL, with Fritz’s help. I will need to create and format some data to include in some simulations analysed by AMPL and I think I will use Python to prototype them. If I run in to speed bottlenecks I will reimplement numerically intensive processes in either C++ or Fortran 95.
• Genetics of wood properties. After some early forages on wood properties—which finished when Carolyn changed jobs—I am back at it. John has been very welcoming and we are trying to put a couple of projects together. We should have some early results by mid next year.

There are a few bits and pieces that do not fall in these two broad areas, but they will converge pretty soon.

Family-wise

Working with Marcela and Orlando in the veggie patch. I have never had much of a green thumb, but I am really trying. We sowed coriander, parsley and chervil, and planted bok choi, onions, dill, lemon balm and capsicum. Apart from the capsicum seedlings that are struggling (a drainage problem is my guess) everything is doing fine.

Marcela’s worm farm is the old-new addition. We used to have a worm farm in Australia, but due to quarantine issues, we decided to leave it there. So we needed to get a new one plus order the first batch of worms by mail.

One of our latest acquisitions is a Breville bread machine. Two weeks ago we stopped buying bread and have been happily making at home. Is it cheaper? I wouldn’t say so if one considers the capital cost, energy and raw materials. However, waking up with nice bread smell from the kitchen is great and trying new recipes is a lot of fun.

I think that this part of a post by DruBlood summarises the feeling:

OK, I know I’m supposed to have some sort of cosmic experience while kneading bread, but I don’t. I never have. The breadmachine does all that work for me and I still get to eat warm homemade bread in the morning. It counts as homemade. It does! Just because it’s easy and convenient does not mean that it’s not homemade. Who invented this fucking thing anyway? I cannot live without it or my crockpot. I do not own a microwave… but please do not take my breadmachine.

What a coincidence! We also got a crockpot (slow cooker) and have been using it a lot. However, I love my microwave oven too!

P.S. 2006-03-06. This morning I woke up to the smell of a delicious almond poppy seed bread. Scrumptious!

This month I started working for the School of Forestry, University of Canterbury, where I am supposed to teach, supervise and research all sort of nifty things. One of the things with research is that one needs constant change and permanent challenges. For a while I stepped outside research because I was feeling tired, but I then got back the love for the trade.

Last week I read a transcription of a very inspirational presentation by the late Richard Hamming (via Paul Graham): You and your research. In two parts of the presentation Hamming presents summaries of his experience. First:

Let me summarize. You’ve got to work on important problems. I deny that it is all luck, but I admit there is a fair element of luck. I subscribe to Pasteur’s ‘Luck favors the prepared mind’. I favor heavily what I did. Friday afternoons for years—great thoughts only—means that I committed 10% of my time trying to understand the bigger problems in the field, i.e. what was and what was not important. I found in the early days I had believed ‘this’ and yet had spent all week marching in ‘that’ direction. It was kind of foolish. If I really believe the action is over there, why do I march in this direction? I either had to change my goal or change what I did. So I changed something I did and I marched in the direction I thought was important. It’s that easy.

At the end of the talk, he stated:

If you really want to be a first-class scientist you need to know yourself, your weaknesses, your strengths, and your bad faults, like my egotism. How can you convert a fault to an asset? How can you convert a situation where you haven’t got enough manpower to move into a direction when that’s exactly what you need to do? I say again that I have seen, as I studied the history, the successful scientist changed the viewpoint and what was a defect became an asset.

In summary, I claim that some of the reasons why so many people who have greatness within their grasp don’t succeed are: they don’t work on important problems, they don’t become emotionally involved, they don’t try and change what is difficult to some other situation which is easily done but is still important, and they keep giving themselves alibis why they don’t. They keep saying that it is a matter of luck. I’ve told you how easy it is; furthermore I’ve told you how to reform. Therefore, go forth and become great scientists!

In a non-completely unrelated post Robert Fripp explains (via Scobleizer):

We should not expect good work to be acknowledged; and where it is, we should not expect it to be welcomed. Rather, the strength of a creative impulse is measured by the strength of opposition it meets.

It is not often that one is exposed to a really motivational text, which is really uplifting compared to the ‘teamwork rocks’ lame posters that one finds in most companies. I have been talking with a few people trying to, first, determine what are the ‘big issues’ in my area and, second, what would be steps toward tackling them. I am trying to combine two strategies: fishing for ideas that I can extend until they become a real contribution and, more importantly, growing new ideas into something useful.

This is in lieu of a proper post. We are spending the last four days in Australia before moving to New Zealand. The house is full of boxes and there are only the last minute jobs:

• Cleaning the office and storing papers.
• Setting up snail mail forwarding.
• Cleaning a few things at home and confirming that all services will be cancelled on time.
• Gigantic et cetera here.

I think that the next post will most likely be published on early January 2006 from Christchurch, New Zealand.