Entry 116: Kid-ding Around

I might be kid-ding around, but I'm certainly not kidding around, when I say S is pregnant.  She has been for a while, about five months, but she wanted me to wait a bit before I announced it on my blog.  Although, I doubt it's real much of an announcement as the four people who read this blog probably already learned this news a long time ago.  Regardless, we are both pretty excited.

 ["Three Men and a Baby."  This movie is funny because it's men trying to take care of a baby.  Can you believe that, men?!  And not just one man but three of them!  (Take that "Mr. Mom"!)  Oho!  The only thing that could possibly top this is if it was three men trying to take care of a little girl instead of a baby, but Hollywood could never be that clever.]  

When we tell this to couples who already have kids the conversation often goes something like this.

Us: We're having a kid.
Them: Oh wow!  That's so awesome!  Congratulations!  We're so happy for you guys.
Us: Thanks.
Them: You're life is going to change SO much.
Us: Yeah, we know.  It's pretty exciting.
Them: No, I mean everything changes, EVERYTHING .
Us: That's what we've heard.
Them: You won't believe it.  It's just going to change SO much.  Our lives just changed SO much when we had our son.
Us: Well, we're preparing for some big changes.
Them: Hahaha... you can't prepare for this, you think you can, but you can't.  Your lives are just going to change SO much.
[Etc., etc.]

I know most people are just excited and want to give their perspective, but this conversation is growing quite tiresome.  Yes, our life is going to change, we get it.  And if we don't get it, because you can't ever get it without actually going through it, then you standing here telling us about how we don't get it isn't really accomplishing anything, now is it?   We're having a baby, it's a big deal to us, but it's not like several billion people haven't done this before.

This is actually a very comforting thing to tell myself when I freak out.  Well, I don't really ever freak out, but it's a comforting thing to tell S when she freaks out.  Everybody has or has had or will have a child, literally (well, almost literally).  If there is one thing people can do well, it's have babies.  Our entire evolution, our entire being, essentially boils down to this.  Parents do not constitute a very exclusive club, and if everybody else can do it, then so can we. 

In Bill Bryson's terrific book A Short History of Nearly Everything, the author comes to the general conclusion that the only discernible meaning of life is to propagate -- to create more life.  Unless you're religious, that's pretty much all there is to it -- keep your species going -- which probably explains why so many people are religious.  It's pretty unsettling to think that all we are is a widget in a self-perpetuating system that's completely pointless outside of itself.  But, if there is more to it than this, it's lost on me.

 [This book is great.  I highly recommend it. I recommend Bill Bryson in general.  "In a Sunburned Country" is great also.]

Alright, I think that's it for this entry.  I'm short on time, because I spent the past two days doing work around the house.  I hate work around the house.  In fact, I hate work of any preposition the house -- around the house, on the house, in the house, about the house -- it all sucks, but sometimes you have to do it.  We bought a lawn mower, and I cut the grass yesterday.  It's an old-school motorless mower, which is perfect for our smallish yard.  It works well, it's ecofriendly, and you get a decent workout.  Also, we finally had time to finish painting the room we started a few weeks ago.  I think it's going to turn out a-ok.

Well, until next time...

Entry 115: Bob Loblaw

The title of this entry is a character on the short-lived TV show Arrested Development. Scott Baio played attorney Bob Loblaw purveyor of Bob Loblaw's Law Blog. It was a typical joke for that show. They did a lot of play on word humor like they had a joke about a character who was a cross between an analyst and a therapist and his business card said "Analrapist", and a character who was in love with somebody named Lucille got his hand bitten off by a "loose seal", and the name of a boat on the show was "The Seaward" (Get it? The c-word.).

I always liked the show, but not as much as some people. Although it was canceled after only three seasons, it gained a devout cult following. It's final four episodes were shown in a two-hour block opposite the opening ceremony of the 2006 Winter Olympics (I remember it being opposite the 2006 Super Bowl, but Wikipedia says otherwise). Rumor has it that the show's network, Fox, was trying to bury it over some sort of power struggle with the show's producers. In response, the producers made incest a big theme of the last episodes, as apparently Fox never liked the story arc involving sexual tension between cousins. As a result, these episodes are really weird, and not very funny, in my opinion. Actually, I thought the show really started to go downhill toward the end in general, so I'm not particularly interested in the prospect of a new season (supposedly coming to Netflix in 2013) or a movie.

[Random picture of the Embassy of the Republic of the Congo near my house.  I think somebody lives upstairs, but the rest of it is completely dilapidated and a window has been knocked out.  I guess it's fitting, the country isn't exactly a pillar of stability.]   

Anyway, it's a blah day today in our nation's capital. The weather is blah, wet and dreary, and I'm feeling blah, tired and weary. A large tropical storm is supposedly passing through the area with very high winds and heavy rain coming this evening. I guess we need the rain, it's been too dry so far this year, but the timing is quite unfortunate as S is scheduled to arrive back from a work trip tonight. I'm worried that a storm will affect her flight. Also, my work has a big conference scheduled over the next few days, many clients are coming in from out of town, and it will suck if the weather is shitty the whole time. I mean, I don't think our clients will hold the weather against us, but it would be nice if they have an overall positive experience and enjoy the area, and that's much easier to do if it's sunny out. But what can you do? As Andre 3000 says, "You can plan a pretty picnic, but you can't predict the weather."

Although, you actually can predict the weather. What do you think meteorologists do? There are many websites and an entire TV channel devoted solely to predicting weather. The lyric should be, "You can plan a pretty picnic, but you can't predict the weather very far in advance with great accuracy." That's a much better line. I should be a rapper.

I actually used to write raps as a kid.  In third grade, a friend gave me The Beastie Boys' License to Ill for my birthday, and I used to play the beats on one tape deck and record them on a different tape deck and the rap in between them.  So you'd hear the opening bells from "Girls" and then a stop and then you'd hear ten-year old me rapping and then a stop and then the bells again.  I still remember part of one of my songs, "Making Money". It went like this:

You go downtown for an occupation,
You get a quick one with no vacation.
You quit right away, and get no pay, 
And your mom gives you lip, when you get home that day.

Making money, it's the hardest thing to do,
Making money, it's all up to you.

I clearly was just doing my best to parrot The Beastie Boys' lyrical style, but still, c'mon, that's not bad for a ten-year old.  Then, when I was in seventh grade I wrote a parody to "Ice Ice Baby" all about the Gulf War.  I remember performing this in front of my class.  The first verse:

All right stop, yeah I said yield,
Hussien is back in Desert Shield.
Tryin' to start a war with the USA,
Bombs will drop from night to day.
Will it ever stop?
Yo, he hopes no,
Even at night it'll glow.
To the extreme, he's gonna shoot a scud,
We'll fire a Patriot and pray it ain't a dud. 

I think I have the original copy of this masterpiece somewhere.  I wrote it on thick off-white paper using a typewriter, and I remember that my dad found it and mailed it to me at point.  If I can find it, I'll scan it and post it.  I recall it being hilarious. But not as hilarious as the clip below.



In other news, I went out last night and stayed up way way too late. I was pacing myself with the drinks, so I'm not very hung over, but I feel like I could crawl back into bed and sleep the afternoon away. I have to wake up early tomorrow too, so I'm in that weird limbo where if I take a nap then I might not be able to sleep well tonight, but if I don't take a nap and don't sleep well tonight for some other reason, then I'll be even more sleep deprived tomorrow. To nap or not to nap? It's a real dilemma. Why does life have to pose such difficult questions?

Well, time to stick a fork in this entry.  I'm going to go to the grocery store so that the day isn't a complete waste and then I'm going to give that nap some serious consideration.

Until next time...

Entry 114: Paint Your Wagon

["Gonna paint that wagon, gonna paint it good.  We ain't braggin' were gonna coat that wood."]

Only in this case, it's not a wagon. We (S, S's mother who's visiting, and I) spent a large chunk of yesterday painting a little room in our house. S started the process a few days ago taping all the edges. She asked me to tape the ceiling and top of the door frames, as she has trouble reaching these areas even on a stool (haha, she's short and I'm not). I told her I wouldn't do it, because I could paint the edges without tape. See, back in 1995 I spent a summer painting houses for AAA Student Painters, and they taught us a technique where you put your brush right against the edge, "cut the edge" was the phrase they used, and apply the paint perfectly without using any tape. It's easy to do with a little practice, but S was highly skeptical that I could do it.

Turns out she had good reason to be. I tried to cut an edge, got paint all over the ceiling, and then made the bold proclamation that we should just tape all the edges. Between I-told-you-sos from S, it all came back to me. It wasn't a summer I spent painting houses in 1995. It was a week, and I was terrible at it and hated it. I never actually learned how to cut an edge. I didn't learn anything except to crack down in computer programming classes, because I'd starve as a blue collar worker. It was such a miserable job that I "quit" (I use quotes because my supervisor wasn't exactly begging me to stay) to become a dishwasher at The Old Spaghetti Factory. Yep, getting lectured because the butter crocks weren't properly stocked, by a mustachioed, 23-year old, community college dropout, was actually a step up from house painting.*

Anyway, we painted the room. We got the job done. Well, half done. It looks like shit right now, actually, but I'm confident that we can make it look decent with another coat. A big part of the problem is that we're painting over a darker color with a lighter color and you can tell. It looks really patchy in parts.  But, like I said, I think we can smooth it over with another coat. Home improvement projects just aren't my bag. My plan in life has always been to make enough money doing things that are my bag, so that I can pay somebody to do home improvement projects for me. We're getting there -- still can't quite justify paying somebody to paint a small room, though. It's better to do a slightly substandard job and save the money.  Especially, when you have a wife who takes advantage of the fact you rarely look at your bank account and spends money on something that you don't really need online every other day. Although, I can't give S much crap. Lately, she's been right, and I've been wrong. She bought a SodaStream to carbonate water, and I told her that within a week it would be in the basement gathering dust. Turns out it's awesome.  We both use it all the time, so I have to eat my words on that one.

Speaking of S, she left this morning for a weeklong work trip to South America. Her mom is still here. I'm giving her a ride to the airport tomorrow. Actually, S's entire immediately family (mom, dad, and sister) was here last weekend. I like it when they come to visit. It's nice to have in-laws you get along with. By the way, isn't the term "in-law" a bit strange? It seems really formal for family members. "Hey, this is my brother... in-law. We have no personal connection, it's strictly a legal matter."

[Dhosas abound when S's mom comes to visit.]

Anyway, when S's family is together, they speak a hybrid of English and a South Indian dialect. To the outsider it sounds something like this, "Ba dub ba dub ba dub dub gym by 9 in the morning. Ba dub ba dub Dupont Circle..." This is good for me, because I tend to tune people out even when I speak their language, so this just gives me a great excuse. Although, usually I can figure out what's going on by the tenor of the conversation. Like the other day, a few friends were over for dinner, and S's mom came in with a bowl of food. S said something to her and then she responded, and I knew that S said that she was overfeeding us, and her mom said that we could just eat what we wanted and leave the rest. I could tell even though I didn't understand a word they said. I think I'm pretty perceptive that way. I can usually read social situations pretty well. This is probably a talent I honed as a teenager through years of having to recognize all the girls who didn't like me. It was a survival thing. I had to correctly ascertain the situation to avoid critical embarrassment.

[I mentioned 1995 above and I mention baseball below, so this clip is completely appropriate.  The single (or should I say, double... haha... good one) most exciting moment in Seattle sports in the last 30 years.  (And that's sad being that it was only the ALDS and the Ms lost in the next round.)] 

Changing subjects completely, baseball season is underway. The Mariners look like they might be OK, by which I mean they have a chance to finish third in a division of four. When your team hasn't made the playoffs in 11 years, that's considered OK. Ozzie Guillen, the outspoken, funny (in a jackass sort of way) manager of the Miami (nee Florida) Marlins, was in the news this week as he received a five game suspension for jokingly praising Fidel Castro. Several writers have chimed in on what an overly harsh punishment this is. I agree. It's part of a weird phenomenon in our culture where the outrage ratio of what people say over what people do is way too high. (I agree with the author of the fangraphs article I linked to above who implies that Ozzie perpetuating beanball wars -- for which he receives little or no punishment -- is much worse than saying stupid things.)

Take Mel Gibson, as an example, he's said and probably will continue to say, idiotic, derogatory things. He's slurred several different ethnic groups (which is especially stupid being that one of these groups essentially runs the industry he's in). For this, his career is basically over, rightfully so, perhaps. But now take Chris Brown. A few years ago he beat the shit out of his girlfriend. I mean, not just slapped her, but actually bludgeoned her face. Today, he's back on top -- playing the NBA All-Star game, winning Grammys, and referring to himself as a role model. Now, who more deserves career-ending treatment for what they did, Mel Gibson or Chris Brown? And speaking of award shows, Brown was embraced at the Grammys, but the guy who said "fag" as part of a joke was kicked off The Oscars. Does this make any sense to anyone?

[Ozzie Guillen]

Anyway, that's all I have to say about that. I just wanted to go out on a quick jag. Until next time...

*I quickly learned to just ignore the manager. The one advantage of being the low man on the totem poll is that you don't have to take shit from people. What, I'm going to lose this minimum wage job? Oh no. It's the booming '90s. I think I can find somebody else to pay me $4.90 an hour (my actually wage). If you want things to go faster quit trying to chat up the underage hostesses, put on an apron, and get back here and help, otherwise shut up and leave me alone with my dirty spumoni saucers.

Entry 113: Tons Of Guns

The topic today is guns, because there have been several prominent stories in the news lately of which guns play a large part. I, myself, do not own a gun. I've thought about buying one -- and by "though about", I mean I've literally thought about it, I've never actually considered it as a realistic course of action. It might make sense for some people to own guns for protection, say, if you live in a very bad part of town, or you live in an area without prompt police service, or you're well-trained in the use of firearms, but none of these apply to me. I look at it from a mathematical standpoint. If we assign a positive value to all the good events that can occur from me owning a gun (the largest value being me saving myself or a loved one from critical injury), and assign a negative value to all the bad events that can occur from me owning a gun (the largest value being an accident or provocation causing critical injury to me or a loved one), and multiply each value by the probability of that event occurring, and add everything together, by my estimation, the sum would be overwhelmingly negative. So, I shouldn't buy a gun. We have an alarm system and cell phones to call the police. This is almost certainly the best bet in the unlikely case we ever need protection.

[Gang Starr's "Tonz of Guns".  Best line: "They like the feel of chrome in their hand, the shit makes 'em feel like little big man.]

"Guns don't kill people, people kill people," is the well-known tagline for the National Rifle Association. While this is technically true -- there are many cultures with many guns and very low gun violence (Switzerland is the classic example) -- I find it disingenuous. It's not the guns that lead to violence, it's the gun culture that leads to violence, and I think the NRA, in large part, perpetuates our gun-crazed culture in the U.S. They play the constitutional-right-to-protect-oneself card, because that's the best argument politically (and surely some of their members are honest people who really feel this way) but I suspect that for a lot of gun owners it's more about paranoia and power. They are paranoid about the "bad guys" taking over, and having guns makes them feel powerful -- powerful in a delusion, vigilante, unrealistic, super-heroic sort of way, but powerful nonetheless. And it's dangerous when groups like the NRA push this fringe un-reality into the mainstream via bills like Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law that infamously came to the forefront because of the Trayvon Martin shooting.

Speaking of Trayvon Martin, I keep waiting for something to come up that at least makes some sense of the situation. It seems nearly inconceivable to me that what allegedly happened -- a man tracked down and shot an unarmed teenager simply for looking suspicious -- is what actually happened, but it's been a while, and nothing more of substance has come out. Maybe that is actually what happened. The shooter, George Zimmerman, claims self-defense, but I don't see how he can possibly make this claim when a) he was clearly the aggressor, b) he was armed and Martin wasn't, c) he has no serious injuries (he said that he was, in fact, badly hurt in a scuffle, but video footage taken immediately afterward belies this).  So why hasn't he been arrested? Even with the Stand Your Ground bullshit it seems to me like the case in there.

As everybody knows, there is a racial component to the shooting.  Martin was a black teenager and Zimmerman is a white/Hispanic man. Martin was also wearing a hoodie, which apparently is an article of clothing associated with thugs. (I honestly didn't know hoodies had this reputation. Doesn't every teenage boy wear hoodies? I had (and still have) a bunch of them.) It brings to the forefront the perception we have in this country of young black males as being particularly criminal and violent.  This is a really charged topic, one that most people (particularly white people) aren't comfortable discussing. It's a topic that I don't want to go into now, not because I want to dodge it (on the contrary, I think it's an important issue and would like to share my thoughts on it), but because it requires a whole lot more words than I want to type on the subject right now. One thing I will say is that Adam Carolla has been speaking out on this issue a lot on his daily podcast lately. His feeling is that everything stems from the nonexistence of fathers in too many black families. If, as a society, we could solve this problem, all the other problems (the crime, the violence (real and perceived), the prejudices, etc.) would largely be alleviated. While I hardly take Carolla's political commentary as gospel (the best thing I can say about a lot of his cringe-worthy political rants is that they're kinda funny), I agree with this particular assessment almost 100%, and it would be nice if leaders of all races would make this a focal point. But, this is a broad issue and doesn't really apply specifically to the Trayvon Martin case. From where I stand, given the information at hand, his death is a tragedy and an injustice, plain and simple.

[Hilarious scene from "The Simpson's".  A quote from Homer from the same episode, "When I held that gun in my hand, I felt a surge of power... like God must feel when he's holding a gun."] 

On another gun-related topic, yet another school shooting went down this week. This one at, Oikos, a small largely Korean Christian university in California. The shooter One Goh is apparently a disgruntled former student. No other motive is being report. Although I think I know another motive: the dude is a fucking lunatic. Whenever this type of thing happens the media always searches for some deep reason, and nothing satisfactory ever comes from it. It's never, "The shooter, a very wealthy and social man, had uncovered a ring of pedophile rapist-terrorist, who were planning a cross-country crime spree culminating with the destruction of the White House. By shooting these people, he saved hundreds of children and perhaps the entire country." It's always, "The shooter is described as a loner and has displayed evidence of mental instability." You don't say? Lining up your former classmates, picking them off one-by-one, and then admitting you did it to a supermarket clerk -- mental instability? Huh, go figure.

Speaking of "the media", this (gun-related) story is a perfect example of why many of our major media outlets suck. All facets of the political polyhedron like to claim there is a media bias, and there is, a bias toward money. Media outlets want eyeballs, so instead of reporting, more and more, they sensationalize. Just read this headline, "Police draw guns at home of Torii Hunter", what types of images does that conjure up? Now read the story (it's very short). Can this even be called "a story"? Police followed protocol in response to an accidentally tripped alarm -- that's a nonevent. Hunter is quoted as tweeting, "The cops that were here today had there (sic) guns drawn but pointed downward in for safety. Those guys handled the situation like trained cops," and "The police department did a great job of protecting my home. Thanks guys!" This is such a bullshit article. But, in part, it's my own fault. I should know better than to click a random Yahoo! headline. For every ten times I click, I read one half-interesting story.  That's a .050 batting average.  Well, no more.  This is it. No more clicks, Yahoo!. You've fooled me for the last time.

And this is it for this entry. Until next time...

Quick Update: After writing this, I noticed that ABC News release "enhanced" footage of George Zimmerman showing what could be a big gash on his head.  It still seems fishy to me.  He still sought out Martin.  He still could have prevented the entire ordeal simply by listening to the 911 attendant.  Also, does getting in a physical altercation that you basically started warrant shooting somebody?  Like I said, it's still fishy to me, but since I specifically mentioned Zimmerman's apparent lack of injury, I wanted to put up this update.

Entry 112: Jetleg

I'm super tired today. I got in from San Diego late last night and slept horribly. I have a mild case of jetlag, or as I like to call it, jetleg. It's one of those words that I always want to say the wrong way even though I know it's the wrong way. Another one is copyrighted. It's copywritten to me, despite the fact that makes no sense.



The conference I attended was good. I mean, you can't really go wrong with a trip to SoCal on the company dime, but aside from that, I learned a lot of general things, and a few things I can apply to my everyday work. This was my first corporate conference, and it was interesting to see the difference between it and an academic conference. As you might expect, the corporate conference is much better funded. There is much more free food, well, maybe free is the wrong word since the attendees pay a steep registration fee (usually covered by the attendees' employers), but nearly every meal is catered and there are snacks between sessions as well. Although, I wonder if the organizers got confused about the average age of the attendees (probably late 40s), as they were pushing sugar on us like we were a group of 13-year-old kids who were away from their parents for the weekend. Breakfast was donuts or some other pastry, between-session snack was ice cream bars, and the only available soft drink was soda. Would it be so hard to put out some granola and yogurt, a veggie platter, and some sparkling water?

[The hotel I stayed at in Palm Springs. I brought my swimsuit, but never went into the pool. What a waste.]

Another thing I noticed is that there was an emphasis placed on making the conference "cool". Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen pumped through the sound system before the plenary talks, beer and wine were made available at the end of each day's sessions, everybody dressed casually (some in shorts, Tevas, and ball caps), there was a dodgeball tournament ("live by the ball, die by the ball" the apparent motto), and you could just tell the organizers were trying to create a laid-back, "we're hip" feel. The keynote speaker epitomized this. He gave a reasonably informative and interesting talk, and I think the audience mostly liked him, but his style seem contrived and bombastic and really annoyed me. The Onion once ran a really funny article titled "I'm Quite Eccentric Within Accepted Societal Norms", and I kept thinking about this when watching the keynote speaker.

In general, I'm not sure how I feel about work being "cool". It depends on how cynical a mood I'm in. On the one hand, being cool is better than being boring and depressing. On the other hand, it's a bit phoney. It misrepresents the employer-employee relationship as something akin to a friendship, which it isn't. Unless you work for yourself, no matter how much you're paid, you're still essentially just a toil. If you aren't in some way making money for somebody at the top, I doubt work will be too cool for you regardless of whether or not your office has a Nintendo Wii. Anyway, I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. It's just a thing, is all. It is what it is, as the saying (which I've never really liked) goes.

[San Diego is a weird city in that the airport is right on the bay near the downtown area.]

On a different topic, I got to see my uncle T and two cousins, A and Ca, while in San Diego (the conference was in Palm Springs, but I went to San Diego for a few days to work from a colleague's home office). It was really nice. We all went to dinner Thursday night along with A's girlfriend and her cousin who also happened to be in from out of town. Toward the end of the night Ca's friend (girlfriend?) also showed up. We had a leisurely dinner that ended around 10:30, and then some others went out to enjoy the San Diego nightlife. I went back to the hotel as I was already dragging (east coast time) and had to wake up relatively early the next day (and be on point) for a meeting with coworkers.

Apparently I missed out as when I saw A the next evening, he told me that, through some strange confluence of events, he, his girlfriend, and his girlfriend's cousin were invited by a Pro Bowl football player to hangout with him in the VIP section at some club. A said the guy was really cool and kept buying them drinks. As one might expect, A also said he then spent most the afternoon trying to sleep off a hangover. This shows how old and lame I'm getting as my first thought wasn't, "Damn, I missed a chance to hang out with an NFLer", it was, "Whew, good thing I went back to the hotel or I'd be hung over and miserable today, too". Yep, still crazy after all these years.


Alright, time to wrap it up so that I can go for a run before dinner. Gotta work off all those extra calories I ingested throughout the conference. Until next time...

Entry 111: An Apple a Day

As an avid reader of this blog, I'm sure you've notice that I've posted this entry on Wednesday night, not on Saturday afternoon like I usually do. That's because I'm leaving for a week-long business trip to Southern California in a few days, and this is the only chance I'll have to write an entry before then. I'm going to a conference in Palm Springs, then I'm headed down to San Diego for two nights, where I'll hopefully be able to see some family, if only briefly. I probably won't post any entries while I'm on road. It's not a free-time issue. It's a computer issue. I'll only have my work computer with me, and I try to be careful about the websites I visit on it for work policy and personal privacy reasons.

[Palm Springs, tough place to go for work, I know.]

Anyway, the topic today is Apple. They've been the bane of my existence lately. I'd wish a pox upon Steve Jobs, but, you know, he kinda already died from one.

1. Everything on my iPhone got erased. I was upgrading the OS to the latest version through iTunes, and I received a message telling me an error had occurred -- no further explanation just "An error occurred during process [random number]". I clicked OK (my only option, if there was a "Fix Everything" button, trust me, I would've clicked it), and then it just continued with whatever process it was doing. I thought to myself "huh, this probably isn't good", but didn't know what to do, so I just let it finish. After it was done, I had the new OS, but nothing was backed up on iTunes. (I'm guessing that's where the error occurred.) So, all my apps, all my settings, all my contacts, all gone. It's like I just bought a new phone. Now, I'm probably one of the better people for this to happen to, because I try to keep things simply, I don't like having a bunch of shit on my phone with all these notifications and all that (it drives me crazy to see all those little numbers all over my phone), so I only had about five apps. Plus, only about three people ever call or text me with any regularity, so not a huge loss in the contacts department either, but still it's annoying.



2. I've decided to teach myself how to program apps, and setting everything up is turning out to be a colossal pain. I'm good with computers when it comes to programming algorithms. That's basically what I do for a living: derive, implement, and debug algorithms. But, that's more about being good at math and logic than it is about being good with computers. I'm not super knowledgeable about using computers. When it comes to programming, I want somebody else to set up the workspace application, and the compiler, and the linker and all that -- just show me where to type the code and what button to press to execute it, and I'll be off and running.

But, of course, I don't have somebody like that. I'm trying to do this myself. So, I buy a book for about $20 that starts at the very beginning of app making, and I start going through it page by page. First, I have to pay $99 to be part for of the Apple Development Team, kinda Apple proprietary BS, but whatever. Next, I have to buy Lion OS for S's computer (she has the Mac, I'm "borrowing" it) for $30, so I do that. Then I realize that the book I bought is outdated. It's only two years old, but already Apple has changed some things. I try to use it anyway, but it's basically unusable -- the screen shots are different, things are in different places on Apple's website than it says in the book, there's a new version of the development software, and so on. They're all subtle changes that somebody who knew what they were doing a little bit could probably easily navigate around, but that's the whole point, I don't know what I'm doing, at all. So, I break down and buy the latest edition of the book. I get it on my Kindle, so it's only $10. I download the development software I supposedly need, and then quit because I spend the whole day doing everything else, and now I'm burned out. I do plan on resuming things when I get back, though. I'm already $160 into it, and I really enjoy banging my head against a wall and feeling stupid, so why not?

3. I feel somewhat conflicted morally about owning Apple products. They are produced in China in work conditions that we would not deem acceptable in the U.S. Now, sweatshops are a bit of a sticky wicket, because although they seem abhorrent to us, they actually do provide an upgrade in salary and standard of life for people in developing countries, and over time they push up wages to something approaching U.S. standards. (Really, Paul Krugman says so.) With that said, Apple has so much money they literally don't know what to do with it. I'm sure they could champion a U.S. manufacturing movement if they wanted to. It's just not that important to them. And why should it be? It's, frankly, not that important to us, we buy their products anyway.

As I alluded to in my last entry, This American Life recently did a piece on working conditions in Apple supply factors in China. They then retracted it. It turns out the man who gave them the information, Mike Daisey, made up a great deal of it to make his stage monologue more dramatic. I recommend checking out the story. It's pretty interesting.

Alright, off to bed, it's a work night. Until next time...

Entry 110: Why Can't Everybody Think Like Me? (Part II)

In November, I posted an entry on this blog titled "Why Can't Everybody Think Like Me", in which I offered the egomaniacal conclusion that "our country -- nay, the world -- would be a better place if everybody thought like me." I now have a word to attach to this type of thinking, intellectualism. I want everybody to an intellectual.

Yes, I am aware of how pretentious and elitist this sounds (although, elitism kind of gets a bad rap, but I'll have to save that for another entry), but it's actually the opposite, if you use Lawrence O'Donnell's definition of an intellectual. Penn Jillette said O'Donnell's definition on his podcast, but I can't source it online, so I'm probably butchering it massively, but the spirit of what O'Donnell allegedly said is "An intellectual is somebody who is willing to change their thinking if the situation warrants it." Along these same lines John Maynard Keynes famously (and perhaps apocryphally) said to one of his detractors who accused him of being inconsistent, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

[Political analyst Lawrence O'Donnell. Oh, wait, that's former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback NEIL O'Donnell, my bad.]

Fact-based thinking and objective reasoning are things that pretty much everybody can partake in, regardless of your background, which is why I said that O'Donnell's definition of an intellectual is an unpretentious, nonelitist one. It affords the opportunity for everybody to be an intellectual. But, of course not everybody is one, and that's a problem. More and more people are practicing what I call the religion of ideology. They just become absolutely imbedded in their likely wrongheaded positions, and the more others try to pry them out with facts, the more they dig in. I find it really bizarre.

[Economist John Maynard Keynes. Now this dude looks like an intellectual.]

Anti-intellectualism happens across the political spectrum, but particularly among conservatives (see this link). To be a "conservative" today you have to adhere to many positions -- such as, smaller government equals better government; the private sector is always more efficient than the public sector; and low taxes, even for the super rich, are always good -- even when facts and objectivity should lead you to the contrary. (On the anti-science side of things, you can throw in denials of climate change and evolution.) Such positions are simply accepted as matters of faith and are unarguable.

As an example, I heard a piece on "This American Life" about the conservative city of Colorado Springs. It, like almost every other city in the US, is having budget problems, so the leadership responded by slashing spending and adopting an extremely businesslike, pro-private sector approach to their affairs. In some ways, so far it has been a success. They were able to put a stop to things like automatic raises to poor-performing government employees, and bloated pensions. But, at the end of the day, the implementers of the plan are hard pressed to actually point out any savings. Their response is that they believed that down the road it will save. They believe in their ideology, but it isn't so clear that it's right. Sure, in turning services over to the private sector, you can cut some inefficiencies (namely, unwarranted salaries and benefits), but you introduce new inefficiencies in needing to maximize profits (instead of simply being sustainable), and in having a bunch of separate entities serving their own self-interests instead of one entity trying to serve the greater good. Also, although getting burdensome salaries off the books might be a good thing, you have to be careful in treating a government like a business, as the salaries you're cutting are ones that would be spending in the local economy.

["This American Life" host Ira Glass. He's recently stepped into a bit of controversy regarding a different story about working conditions in Apple factories in China.]

In the same story, a woman in the Colorado Springs government suggested a property tax to pay for vital services that would otherwise be cut, such as streetlights. It would amount to around $200 a year for the average homeowner. It failed. So, they actually turned off the streetlights in many neighborhoods. People could pay the city $300 to turn them back on for a year. One guy did this for his neighborhood, and then thanked the woman in government for this program. When she asked him, if he supported her tax, and he said no, she pointed out that for $100 cheaper he could have had the streetlights and a bunch of other services. His response was still adamantly against the tax, because he doesn't support increased taxes and big government. Even when presented with a clear-cut example of how public ventures can be much more efficient, he rejected it.

[Colorado Springs.]

It just doesn't make much sense to me. I don't get why average citizens that just want to go along and get along (almost everybody) care so much about these ideological battles. People shouldn't want big government or small government, they should just want better government. Wherever that takes us, it takes us. What good does it do the average Joe or Josephina to dig in on either side of any issue and refuse to ever come out?

In other news, I just wanted to quickly comment on the conclusion of the case against Dhuran Ravi, the Rutgers student who used a webcam to spy on his gay roommate who committed suicide a few days later. He was found guilty on all charges including the most damning, bias intimidation (bullying). I was somewhat surprised by the verdict. I'm not sure I completely agree, but being pretty well-versed in the facts of the case (I become super interested in this case, for some reason ), I'm OK with it. It was a judgement call and the jury judged against him. He has only himself to blame. His defense tried unsuccessfully to play the immature-jerk-but-not-a-criminal card. As the NY Times puts it

His lawyers said he simply did not believe he had committed a hate crime. They argued that he was “a kid” with little experience of homosexuality who had stumbled into a situation that scared him.

Which I believe is absolutely true, but if your response to this scary situation is to invade somebody's privacy and humiliate them in an illegal manner, well, then you might have to pay the price, and it looks like Ravi probably will, perhaps with prison time, perhaps through deportation. Although, his lawyers will certainly appeal.

Well, that's it for this entry. I have to go to stupid Home Depot now. Until next time...