a new year

I’ve been back in California now for a couple of days after a short but sweet trip out to Texas to visit friends and families. We left last Tuesday (23rd) and flew to Dallas. We spent a couple of days there, relaxing and eating and such. On Christmas eve we had an awesome dinner of roasted duck that Les’s mom whipped up. As always, her food is perfect and comes into being seemingly without effort.

Another interesting thing we did on the trip was get Les’s dad set up with his new computer: a 14″ G4 iBook. Since I didn’t have the money lying around this calendar year to buy a mac for myself, I gave him my personal discount from Apple. He’s got all the trimmings: Airport Extreme, extra RAM, a bigger hard drive. The thing is quite sprightly. We outfitted him with all the important accessories, too, like a wireless network for their house and a shiny new digital camera. They seem to be enjoying their new toys. There are a few pictures from the events on gallery, but I also set up a little picture website for them to have. You should check it out: http://marcandsusan.overt.org.

Other highlights of Dallas include driving around to look at the elaborate displays of lights on the houses and getting a sweet duffel bag (monogrammed) and a very nice pen and set of engraved note cards from Leslie’s parents. Cameron also got me an awesome book of collected Tori singles arranged for solo piano. Not a bad haul.

We left on Christmas day to go to Austin. The afternoon was spent with my parents, opening presents and eating candy and nuts from the stockings. I scored a very nice light for the front of my bike, a questionable dancing turkey, and Metroid Prime, a video game for GameCube (which is good, since I just beat FFX-2 yesterday. Got to have a constant supply of distraction). We had an excellent turkey dinner with the stuffing that my parents make that I love so much. The turkey was also even better than usual, a fact my parents attributed to it free-rangeness (amongst a rash of inane jokes about catching the turkey).

The rest of the time in Austin was spent catching up with friends that were in town. It was awesome. There’s no doubt what I miss the most here in CA are my friends from home. And I’m not making the same kind of friends here, partially because of my geographic isolation from other people my age, and partially because I ended up working with people who are mostly 5-20 years older than me and are married/have kids/otherwise don’t want to hang with me. In any case, I’m going to do my best to hold on to my good friends until I can systematically lure them all out to the west coast.

So, now we’re back in CA. Yesterday, Clare arrived (yay more friends!) and we spent the afternoon in the city, walking down Haight and around in Golden Gate park. Today is getting off to a lazy start after a perfunctory celebration of new year’s last night (damnit, we did at least have champagne!). We’ve taken some pictures that I imagine we’ll post eventually. Stay tuned.

my wal-mart hatred, articulated

As many of you may know, I have a special place in my heart for WalMart. I’ve hated the place since before I read _Nickle_and_Dimed_, and since then I haven’t even let someone mention it without going off on some sort of tirade. I was recently reading slashdot when I came across a comment (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=89856&threshold=5&commentsort=0&tid=141&mode=thread&cid=7761374) that really summed up why I think the place is so awful:

Top 5 Reasons Not To Shop At Wal-Mart

        1. American Wal-Mart Employees Are Exploited.

        2. Wal-Mart’s Low Prices Are The Result Of Human Misery.

        3. Wal-Mart Forces Its Unethical Practices On Its 65,000 Suppliers.

        4. Wal-Mart Destroys Local Communities.

        5. Wal-Mart Is Not Accountable.

1. AMERICAN WAL-MART EMPLOYEES ARE EXPLOITED:

        * “Full-Time” (actually 28 hours/week) employees only gross $11,000 a year,

              on average.

        * Health benefits are available only after two years, but premiums are so

              high only 38% of employees can afford it.

        * Even discussing working conditions or unionization will result in

              retaliation and firing.

        * There is “a harsh, anti-woman culture in which complaints go unanswered

              and the women who make them are targeted for retaliation.” (Quote taken

              from a national class-action suit against Wal-Mart.)

2. WAL-MART’S LOW PRICES ARE THE RESULT OF HUMAN MISERY:

        * 13-16 hour days molding, assembling, and painting toys, 7 days a week; 20

              hour days in the peak season.

        * Workers are paid 13 cents/hour wages in China: the minimum wage is

              31 cents.

        * There is no health or safety enforcement: constant headaches and nausea

              from chemical fumes, indoor temperatures above 100 degrees F, rampant

              repetitive stress disorder, no protective clothing available.

        * Most employees are young women or teenage girls.

3. WAL-MART FORCES ITS UNETHICAL PRACTICES ON ITS 65,000 SUPPLIERS:

        * Suppliers have to open their accounting books to Wal-Mart executives so

              they can cut “unnecessary expenses” like unionized workers, health

              benefits, and American-made products.

        * Suppliers are forced to move facilities to China and other low production

              cost nations to meet Wal-Mart’s demands.

        * Competitors are also forced to abandon customer service while slashing

              employee wages and moving production to foreign sweat shops to remain

              competitive.

4. WAL-MART DESTROYS LOCAL COMMUNITIES:

        * Wal-Mart stores average 200,000 feet in size: more than 4 football fields

              and destroying any sense of community or character where they are located.

        * By pricing items below cost they crush local retailers. Once they hold a

              monopoly in the market they raise prices.

        * Three good jobs are destroyed for every two Wal-Mart jobs created.

        * Instead of business profits being reinvested in the community they are

              shipped to Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas.

5. WAL-MART IS NOT ACCOUNTABLE:

        * The media won’t report negatively about Wal-Mart because Wal-Mart would

              pull its huge advertising budget.

        * The 535 members of Congress have no power compared to Wal-Mart’s

              global reach: Wal-Mart does not have to answer to American voters, just

              it’s stockholders who are seeking unethical profit.

        * Wal-Mart is radically remaking our labor standards and local economies

              by stifling debate, suppressing knowledge, and not asking our consent.

like SSX only real

In a short and cheap trip last weekend, we headed out to lake tahoe for a day of skiing/snowboarding. It came to me this time much more quickly than the last, so very little bashing of the head or wrists occurred. I did get a tad ambitious at one point, though and went in the actual half-pipe. For the uninitiated, this is literally like a giant flute carved out of the snow that you go up and down the sides of, maybe not dying in the process. I barely managed to get down it without serious injuries. I proceeded to try to grind on a rail and ate serious snow. It was nice to live out some of my SSX fantasies. It’s kind of odd–I felt the opposite of what everyone talks about. Instead of the video game making me want to jump off huge ramps in real life, it just made me think, “jumping off of huge ramps is for video games, not real life.” Mostly I thought this as I was in the air after leaving the top of said ramps. Landing from them didn’t often work out. We do have some pictures of the excursion on gallery.

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur

I found this while wandering the Internet and suddenly remembered three years of my life I spent trying to learn Latin:

Macdonaldus Senex fundum habuit. E-I-E-I-O. Et in hot fundo nonnullas boves domesticas habuitt. E-I-E-O. Cum moo moo hic, et cum moo moo ibi. Hic una moo, ibi una moo, ubique una moo moo. Macdonaldus Senex fundum habuit. E-I-E-I-O

What a great language, eh?

a short hiccup for overt

Yesterday in the midafternoon, you may have noticed that overt was unavailable for maybe an hour or so. This was actually not do to the DNS change as I had warned, but rather to the fact that the breaker that overt was plugged into was tripped. This meant that the machine had to be rebooted (thank you, george). It’s interesting to note that before the power was cut, overt had been up and running without a reboot for almost 250 days.

I’m still waiting for the domain name transfer to finish up. I don’t expect there will be any hiccup in name resolution, but if you notice some funky behaviour, maybe wait an hour or two before freaking out.

vacation!

I think I mentioned earlier that Apple, as a reward for all the hard work of its employees this year, has given us all the week off. Now, granted, I’m not responsible for this hard work, but I’m still taking the week off.

Yesterday I went out to Castle Rock with my brother to do some bouldering. It was great. The rock there is sandstone, much nicer on your hands than granite (Hueco Tanks, Enchanted Rock), but not quite as nice as limestone (Reimers). Still, with the cool weather and the sandpaper texture, you seem to stick spiderman-style to everything, which is a great ego boost. Of course, I forgot my camera. We’re thinking about dragging Doug and George out there for some nature this weekend.

The rest of the day was soaked up finding and buying a (free-range) turkey, ditching our digital cable box like a bad habit ($15 a month so that the channels will change more slowly?), and playing X-2.
You know you’re a hardcore fan of a series when you shell out $50 bucks to watch a former high-summoner run around in a strange japanese idea of a short skirt dancing and singing and changing clothes. Yet the game is strangely excellent, just like all the FF series that seem at first bizarre or tedious (can you say FF tactics?).

More reports to follow as Thanksgiving activities heat up.