Author: FourMajor

  • What Is Wrong With Our Culture?

    What is it about our culture that makes us care so much about one dead pop star, and so little about so many others? Why do you have to go back two hours on Twitter to get twenty mentions of the Uyghurs, but you only have to go back one minute (!) to get twenty mentions of Michael Jackson?

    Twice today I counted the occurrences of the word “Jackson” on cnn.com. The first reading caught twenty-seven instances. The second reading caught twenty instances. Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and China/Uyghurs got one mention each at most, and all mentions were pushed down to a much less prominent part of the page.

    Our mass media is broken in that it promotes insignificant stories and neglects extremely important stories. It is also broken in that the stories themselves are filled with propaganda. But the mass media isn’t the only thing that is broken. Our culture is broken in that, when people go to cnn.com and see it plastered with “MICHAELJACKSONMICHAELJACKSONMICHAELJACKSON” they don’t have a mental gag reflex that says, “What the hell is this? I came to this website to see the news, not this crap. Surely there is a better source of news. I am going to go look for that source right NOW.”

    What is it that causes this blatant disregard for the rest of the world, the significant things that are occurring in this world, the horrible injustices that are being carried out, many of them in our names?

  • Disgrace

    “How does it become a man to behave towards this American government to-day? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.” – Thoreau

  • Better Money Management

    For the first time in my life, really, I am being smart with my money. There are many factors contributing to this, but I think the key recently has been frequent and small transfers to pay off debt and into savings.

    What I have been doing is every few days I’ll log into my credit union’s website and look at my checking account balance. If I notice that I have breathing room, which I almost always have, then I’ll make a transfer into my savings or pay off some debt. Previously I would get paid and be overly ambitious on putting money into savings or paying off debt, and only do it once per month. So what would happen is I would run out of money in my checking and either have to put money on a credit card or empty out my savings again. Now what I have been doing is when I get paid, I still put in a larger amount of money. But this time it might be $125 to pay off debt and $125 in savings. Three days later I might log back in and put another $50 in savings. Getting close to the next paycheck I’ll see that I have plenty of money left in savings and maybe transfer out another $100 or $200.

    This gives me a better idea at all times of how much I have. I also am good at thinking of the next several days of expenses but not good at thinking of a whole month’s expenses at once.

    Also to prevent taking money out of savings I try to keep at least $200 in my checking account at all times. The only time when it should get this low, anyway, is right before my next paycheck. And anything that needs more money than this can easily wait an extra couple of days.

    I’ve also made it much harder for myself to borrow money. Probably about a year ago I canceled my two credit cards, having paid them and another loan off with a debt consolidation loan. So I haven’t borrowed any new money in this time. I only have this and one other loan to pay off currently, the smaller of which should be paid off in the next two or three months.

    By the time I get this smaller loan paid off, I should also be pretty close to having three months of living expenses in savings, which is my short-term goal. In this case, any extra money I have will be able to go into my debt consolidation loan, which will make it easy to pay this off very quickly.

    I should make a small point. As personal preference, and after seeing it suggested in at least two places, I’ve decided that a good strategy is to pay off smaller loans first even when they have slightly smaller interest rates. Certainly if it was 12% vs 19%, I’d pay off the 19% first. But in my case, twice now I’ve chosen to pay off a loan that was .5% to 1% lower interest rate first. The reason for this is this makes it less to worry about, less to manage, and less chance for late fees and such. Better for my peace of mind πŸ™‚

    I’m very excited to be debt-free. But I also get excited each time I pay off more of a loan or put more money into my savings. It feels really good. Once I am debt-free (hopefully in about a year), all of my extra money will go into savings. I don’t intend on working eight hours a day, five days per week my whole life (at least, not for someone else), and being able to consistently save money while I am working will allow me to live off of these savings for months or years at a time while doing something that isn’t making me a ton of money. Like school full-time. Or going on a cross-country bicycle trip. Or traveling the world (frugally, of course). Or spending my days reading and writing (self education). Or finally starting to write that video game that I’ve wanted to write. The possibilities are endless, and the decisions that I made today, and day-to-day will help me realize any number of these things more fully and for longer periods of time.

    You might be asking yourself why I would choose to not have any credit cards. Having a small number of credit cards in good standing and with a balance of about 40% (I think) of its limit can help your credit score. Well, I try to think of things in terms of risk/reward. In my case, the risk of having a credit card was higher than the reward of a higher credit score. After I am completely debt-free, I will worry more about improving my credit score. As it stands, my credit score is good and landlords in Mags and my recent apartment search have been eager to have us as tenants due to our credit scores. So it isn’t a huge concern right now.

    Of course, you can’t save or pay off debt unless your expenditures are much less than your earnings. I am comfortable with my earnings. Comfortable enough that I have recently turned down an opportunity to greatly increase my earnings (because I love my current job). As far as expenditures, I have cut down on them significantly since I moved to the city. When I first moved here, I had a one-bedroom apartment in Russian Hill. I had a car, too. I didn’t really think about how much I was spending and why. Now, I am splitting my studio apartment with Mags (in the Tenderloin), I don’t have a car, and in many other ways I am spending less just by constantly being aware of how much I am spending, if I could get the same thing for less somehow, and if I really even want or need what I am buying. It certainly helps that I enjoy my more frugal lifestyle more than my more extravagant one, even if you were to ignore the money aspect. I avoid driving as much as I can as it tends to stress me out and make me depressed. The driving, suburban lifestyle was, after all, the primary reason why I escaped the Maryland suburbs. I also enjoy communal living, and too much space equals too much stuff and too much clutter, which also depresses me. So it all works out well in this case.

    Of course, it has taken me too long to get smart with money, but it could have taken a lot longer or never happened, as happens with a lot of people, so I feel fortunate of where I now stand.

  • Atlas Shrugged: Worst Book Ever

    Spoiler Alert: Don’t read past this point if you’re planning on reading this book.

    Also, a warning: this blog post is only slightly less disjointed than Atlas Shrugged. I am just going through point by point the complaints that I have with this book.

    Well it only took me about four months, but I finally and begrudgingly finished Atlas Shrugged. Clocking in at 1,070 agonizing pages, with tiny type, it was a pain to read. I wanted to read it because it is such an influential book, especially for many neocons.

    The “heroes” were not heroes at all. What kind of hero simply gives up and lets their world go down the drain? That is what all of the characters have done when they went on strike. This is what they have done when the acquiesce to a corrupt government. This is what they have done when they refuse to actively and effectively fight back. How is John Galt a hero when he tells the President that he will say anything and do anything that he is ordered to do? He is presented as a hero because he says he won’t volunteer to do what he is ordered to do.

    For a book that has at its core the concepts of reality, reason, and logic, Atlas Shrugged remarkably lives in a fantasy world. Sure, the setting is the United States. But it isn’t the United States that exists anywhere outside of Ayn Rand’s head (and maybe some neocons, too).

    Somewhere in the book someone is describing the hard work and honesty that the United States was founded on. Give me a break. The United States was founded on dead Indians, dead African slaves, indentured servants, exploited workers, racism, sexism, and other forms of exploitation. Ayn Rand would have done well to take a decent history class.

    Rand would have us believe that when a few dozen industrialists disappear, the world descends into chaos. I contend that if the leading industrialists disappeared, we would live in a slightly better world. (Only slightly, because there would be people to replace the disappeared industrialists. This new stock would be slightly worse at exploiting people for profit, hence, a slightly better world.)

    Rand also would have us believe that socialism is akin to zero productivity. What would she say today when presented with some European states that are much more socialistic than the United States and still productive? What would she say when presented with countless cooperative businesses, such as Rainbow Grocery here in San Francisco? What did she say about the anarchism that was successful in Spain during the Spanish Civil War?

    Another problem with Rand’s argument is that she has no concept and no mention of externalities – the concept that people don’t always pay for the negative effects that they have on society. The cost of these effects are not reflected in the price of their products or the price of doing business. An example would be a power plant that sickens the surrounding community, such as in Richmond, California, and doesn’t have to pay for the resulting medical bills. In fact, several times in the book, Rand describes disasters that happened to the Taggart Railroad. Many people died in these disasters, but there was no implication that their families were compensated. In fact, it was implied that it was the fault of the socialists that the accident happened. Well, guess what? No matter who creates the unsafe conditions for a railroad, you can’t just run the train anyway. The “heroes” were essentially taking the same position as the villains without actually saying it: the position of “It couldn’t be helped! It’s not my fault!”

    Yet another disgusting part of the book was when Hank Rearden’s family was begging him to not let them starve in the coming economic collapse. Letting your mother starve is evidently OK she has disrespected you. Eye for an eye, right?

    I would have liked Atlas Shrugged a lot more if it had at least partially represented the opposing argument. Instead, this book was the worst misrepresentation of an opposing argument that I have ever read. The left was portrayed as “looters” who only stole the productivity of others. The leftist characters in the book never attempted to present a credible philosophy, supposedly because they had no philosophy. They were portrayed as being the worst kind of nihlists.

    The absolutely most grueling part of the book to get through was the 70-page rant by John Galt. It was rambling, incoherent, poorly written, and disorganized. I did manage to get through it, skimming part of it.

    All of the characters were portrayed as pure good or pure evil; there is no inbetween. It takes a remarkable lack of creativity to write a book with completely interchangeable characters.

    At one point, a train explodes in a tunnel. Rand painstakingly goes through the passenger list, describing how dozens of people were part of the leftist problem that she sees. She implied that those who died in the crash deserved to die. This included children. Ayn Rand really must have been an awful person.

    At the end of the book, the judge adds an amendment to the constitution saying that business is a fundamental right. A clause such as this in reality would ruin the environment and destroy the lives of workers.

    Ayn Rand is a wanna-be great philosopher. I think she has deluded herself into thinking that her theories must be true due to a world that she sees as black and white, ones and zeroes. Unfortunately, her theories only work in the fantasy worlds that she creates. I find myself thinking this a lot about different people (mostly people, I suppose, who buy into Rand’s BS, like Dick Cheney et. al.): I wish I could see Noam Chomsky debate Ayn Rand.

  • Portland Part Two, Hawaii Part One

    This’ll be a quick update; it is getting to be bed time.

    Some interesting things happened in Portland. Mags and I were supposed to stay, for nights two and three, with a couchsurfer who had previously stayed with me in San Francisco. We got to the place and it was a complete wreck. Horrible smell from the cat and dog, an old cooked turkey on the kitchen counter, a huge trashcan full of empty beer bottles/cans, a deflated air mattress that meant we got to sleep on the floor. We stuck it out for that one night but then we got the hell out of there as soon as we could. Our first host invited us back for night three. Staying with him was great. Him and his roommates were so awesome. Family-style meals every night there and great conversation.

    There were also some highlights, though, from the rest of the Portland trip. The day that I escaped early from the filthy apartment I needed to destress, so I spent most of the day local. Burger/beer and coffee shop until dinner, when we met up with an old friend of Mags’ for sushi and arcade games. On Sunday I mostly made it my mission to make a second trip to Powell’s books. I also got the joy of riding my rental bike in the freezing rain.

    We got to Hawaii on Monday morning after an overnight layover in San Francisco. We had lunch in the North Shore area, then came home, napped, and made dinner (mmm, fish with mango salsa). The kids are calling me pop pop because of my beard.

    Yesterday we went to the beach and then watched about four episodes of Heroes. Pretty relaxed time here πŸ™‚

    We’d also like to go to a luau, go on a hike, and explore Honolulu. Adios!

  • Portland Part One

    Mags and I woke up at the break of…well actually at the break of nothing. We woke up at 4:30am. We BARTed it to the airport and I promptly slept through the entire flight to Portland.

    The first pleasant surprise in Portland was that the light rail picks you up right outside of baggage claim. We made it to our wonderful host’s house that he shares with three roommates and then went out to a wonderful pho lunch.

    Mags and I then headed to City Bikes Cooperative to rent a couple of bikes. Nice folks there. I think I have been in four co-ops in Portland now. It is a welcome sight.

    We took our bikes along the east and west banks of the Willamette River on the Esplanade, which is a walk- and bike-friendly area mostly consisting of separated pathways. Some of the views were really beautiful. A few places that we stopped:
    Umpqua Ice Cream: had some delicious spumoni ice cream
    The Aerial Tram: Super-futuristic looking gondola thing that takes you quickly up a hill to some university hospital. Beautiful views. If only we had thought to take our bikes up there so we could ride them back down…
    Shareit Square: Some residents completely redid an intersection, painting the roadway and setting up little tables and benches on each of the four corners, including a free tea station and a free book exchange station, both unattended.

    It is nice biking in Portland. Throughout the whole of yesterday and so far today, I haven’t been honked at ONCE.

    Last night, our wonderful host cooked for us. Mags went to bed, and then our host and I went our bar hopping along Alberta Street. Fun times.

    Today, Mags is in her Physical Therapy class so I am on my own. I started by getting some hippie-dippie breakfast which was delicious. I then went to an Army Navy surplus store where I got four shirts for $22. Already feeling hungry again, I went to Hot Lips Pizza for some good pizza and some great blackberry soda that they make themselves. Now I am at the Red and Black Cafe, a worker-owned and -managed cafe in the Southeast. Today is my southeast day.

    Other stops today were a nice co-op grocery store and a computer place that refurbishes/repurposes used computers and puts them to good use. It is volunteer run.

    Tonight Mags and I are heading to our next host’s place. This guy stayed with me in San Francisco for a week so it’ll be good to see him again.

    Adios, loyal readers!

  • Vacation!

    Tomorrow morning, I will be leaving for a much-needed vacation. Mags and I are going first to Portland until Sunday, and then we are off to Hawaii on Monday until April 5, to see Tim, Kelly, and their two boys. I can’t wait!

  • New Job at the EFF

    Almost as soon as I moved to San Francisco, I started volunteering with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). I was mostly folding t-shirts and stuffing envelopes after getting off of work from my night-shift job.

    The EFF is a civil liberties organization that concentrates on the digital world. Think the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), but much more focused and much smaller. So, if you know me, you’ll know that this sounds like an organization that would appeal to me very much. It blends my passion for technology with my passion for politics and activism.

    For a few months I also did some work with the EFF on the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse. However, after getting my current job with IS Logistics, I couldn’t volunteer very often as my job generally required my presence during business hours.

    In the two years since then, I have remained friends with several of the EFF folks as well as helped out from time to time a the EFF booth at conferences like Macworld and Linuxworld.

    And then one night a couple of weeks ago, I noticed a post on Twitter from the EFF feed, which I follow, that advertised for an opening in the Systems Administrator position. Being the opportunist that I am, I immediately jumped on it. I dusted off the ol’ resume, typed up a cover letter, ran both by about three people, and sent them on in. Two days later, I was in the office for an interview with six people.

    About a week later, last Friday, I received in my inbox a technical challenge of sorts, where I was to complete two technical tasks and submit to EFF my work. The problems weren’t easy but they sure were fun. I hacked away and sent in my work, the quality of which I was confident in.

    First thing on Monday morning, I was asked to come in for a second interview, which was today. I gladly obliged, and was offered the job at the end of today’s interview.

    The culture at EFF is really great. You can almost feel the vibrations the geek vibe is so high. Everyone there cares deeply about civil liberties. From the good deal of time I have spent in the office, it seems to me that there is a lot of respect going around – everyone is trusted to get their job done, and they do. The EFF is highly respected in the geek community, even appearing on stickers on The IT Crowd. EFF is also popular on geek hangouts Slashdot and Boing Boing.

    Some of the issues that the EFF deals with are things like protecting your privacy from illegal wiretapping by AT&T and the NSA, fighting for your rights to do with what you want with your electronics, such as the iPhone, and intellectual property, among many other issues.

    By the time I get fully up to speed, I’ll be the only Systems Administrator at EFF. That means that all desktop, server, network, and phone issues will be my responsibility. I’m looking forward to the challenge, and I am looking forward to learning.

    The EFF is located at 18th and Shotwell in San Francisco’s Mission district, which is noted for its large Latino population, not to mention the large amounts of tacquerias.

    The new job is a little under two miles from home, which means it is about a 30-minute walk or maybe a fifteen-minute bike ride. I think I’ll ride my bike most days.

    When asking during the first interview about opportunities for training and conferences, I was told that the credibility that comes along with working for the EFF may actually get me invitations to speak at conferences. I hope this day comes πŸ™‚ Imagine an expenses-paid trip to go to Vegas for Defcon!

    One more little perk is that I may get the opportunity to contribute to the EFF Deeplinks blog.

    While I am excited to join the EFF, that is not to say I didn’t enjoy my current job. I wasn’t exactly looking for a new job. I learned a lot with IS Logistics and I worked with some great people.

    As for my celebration tonight, I am taking it easy. I had a migraine last night, and while the pain is gone, my head is telling me not to aggravate things by having a couple of brewskies. So I’ll save it for another night.

    Suffice it to say, I am ecstatic.

  • Time for Another Turbo Diet and Exercise Program!

    So I officially gained about ten pounds in maybe a little over a month. Unacceptable.

    It’s time for another turbo diet and exercise program!

    This one is for serious. By the end of it I want to be “carved out of wood,” as señor Peter so aptly put it (as also heard in Fight Club). I hope to get to “carved out of wood” status in maybe a little over two months. Here is my plan:

    Exercise
    The main component of my plan will be exercise. Three days per week I will be going on a long-distance run. I am currently planning on this being a twelve-mile run, which is actually two miles more than I have ever run. But I am confident I can do it (especially with the sweet new kicks that I just got). The other three days per week, the main two components will be a calisthenics workout that my buddy showed me a while back (and almost made me puke the first time I did it) along with the one hundred push ups program. Sundays will either be a day of rest or a fun exercise day – basketball, bike ride, whatever. Since Monday, Wednesday, and Friday consist of little more than thirty minutes of exercise, I’d likely mix in some bike riding, walking, a short run, or some pilates on these days as well.

    Diet
    I am going to start out my diet in a non-strict way. Having said that, I will aim in general to eat better but I am not going to wholly restrict myself to start. I think my staples will be yogurt with granola, eggs with oatmeal, Clif Builder bars, and stir fry.

    But one concept that worked well in the past was the idea of punishment. So, I’ve got my weight-tracking spreadsheet going again. If I am above a weight goal on a certain morning, then I have to cut something out of my diet for the remainder of the program. If I miss a day of exercise, same punishment. Things that would be cut out would/could be: sweets, cheese, alcohol, red meat, all land meat, all meat and fried things.

    Anyhow, I am excited to get started! On another note, I am going to be sore as hell by the end of this week! πŸ™‚

  • How to Make a Soda Can Stove

    I really love well-put-together, informative and complete tutorials like this. I want to try this soon. Maybe in a few weeks I will put one together.

    How to make a soda can stove: