Tag: personal

This morning I was listening to NPR. One of the lead stories was that George Bush is starting up his campaign in earnest now. He visited some car parts place called “USA industries,” where , I kid you not, the crates were painted in red, white, and blue. Then he went to a park for the ground breaking of a Sept. 11th memorial. Then he went to a different part of the same park and raised $1.7M for his campaign.

Now, I know a lot of people use blogs as a place to hash out political greivances, and, some might claim, have meaningful political debate. I’m here to say that this place won’t be one of them. Too much of what I feel about the political process and everything that swirls around it is negative. I hear about John Kerry, and I feel worse. I hear about Bush, and I feel worse. I’m frustrated by the apathy, the lack of sophistication, and the lack of independent thought that we as a populace possess. And life is too short for that much negativity.

I’m selfish. So, instead of focusing hard on issues and making myself an activist like I should, I’m going to just educate myself as much as I need, and try to focus on the things in my life that make me happy. This includes, but is not limited to, cooking and eating good food, playing outside, reading, playing video games, and plotting an eventual move to Scandinavia.

• Home-made chicken soup
• New books from Neal Stephenson
• Good jobs in the Bay
• Gran Turismo 4
• scuba diving in cozumel
• 20″ flat screen displays (at last!)

So… since we have a tendency to rent a movie or two every week, I decided it would be cool to join netflix. The idea is you queue up a bunch of movies that you want to rent, they mail you up to three at a time, and when you’re done with them, you mail them back. You can do this as many times as you want for $20/month. So, we break even if we rent more than 5 movies a month (which I’m pretty sure we do). Also, since netflix is based here in the bay, I figure we’ll get the movies lickety-split. It also doesn’t hurt that I have *cough* a DVD burner.

One of the cool things about netflix is they allow you to rate all the movies on their site, and based on your ratings, they suggest future movies that you might want to rent. This is pretty cool, and I totally spent an hour and a half clicking through hundreds of movies and rating them. Now it recommends for me “the best of the muppet show” along with “apocalypse now redux.” Hmm.

In other news, my mother has shipped me all my old scuba-diving equipment from Austin. In combination with my brother’s, which is already here in CA, the idea is not to pay through the nose for the basic stuff (mask, snorkel, fins, boots, gloves) that they require you to have for the Open Water Diver class, but refuse to rent. If we were to buy all the stuff, it would be about $200-300/person. Blech. In any case, after this we will be duly trained/refreshed for our upcoming excursion to Mexico which I am so looking forward to.

This is the coolest thing ever!

http://www.xat.nl/enigma-e/desc/index.htm

Leslie can attest to the fact that when I was in Baltimore with her, and we stopped by the NSA museum, I was ecstatic to get to touch and play with an original Enigma rotor machine. Right behind it were the bombes that the English in Bletchly Park to crack the original code (they were led by Alan Turing himself).

Maybe the next time I have $150 lying around.

So, the past week has been brightened considerably by the presence of a temporary house guest, Philip. Phil has landed a job at vmware in Palo Alto, and is moving into a place in Sunnyvale on Tuesday. He arrived last Monday, though, and so in the meantime he’s been occupying our floor. It’s always nice to have another geek around.

Things are rolling along at work, same-old, same-old, as they say. One exciting thing this week is I’m expecting delivery tomorrow of my Dell 2001FP 21″ flat panel monitor. I had previously fancied getting an Apple Cinema Display, but the price was just plain better from dell (the 25% promotion didn’t hurt), plus the monitor rotates from portrait to landscape and it’s just tough to beat the ooh-ahh of that. The technically inclined could peruse the Anandtech review.

I got a big kick out of this article on the nytimes:

http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/health/011800hth-behavior-incompetents.html

Kind of makes you stop and think about what you think you’re good at. At least it stopped me.

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.

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.

It’s a bit incestous, but I can’t resist. My brother passed this my way: overt, jived.