The Major

Category: Blatherings

  • The Value of More Money

    I am constantly amazed at the things people will do for money when they already have so much of it. I mean, really, what good does it do you to have $2 billion instead of $1 billion? I would think there would come a point where people would want to live for their morals rather than their own personal gain.

    I thought of this because of two things I noticed in the world:
    – People still work for someone else doing something they don’t care about long after they’ve become filthy rich.
    – Most wealthy people go to great extents to ensure that themselves and fellow wealthy people can stay wealthy and become more wealthy.

    What really is the point to all of this?

    I, personally, am very content money-wise right now. Of course, I live on my own and don’t have a family to feed. But really, if I had maybe $12,000/year more after taxes, I would, I like to think, be completely satisfied. With that I could get some more square footage and a decent view. Of course, if I had $12,000/year more, I might think of why I could use another $12,000. Maybe this is how the greed snowball works.

    Another thing I have been thinking with relation to all this, is that money seems to have less value as you have more of it. For instance, if you had $10,000/year as opposed to $0/year, you could at least feed and clothe yourself. You might be living on the streets, but those two things are very valuable. Surely they are more valuable than a nicer view in your apartment. And if you had $20,000/year instead of $10,000/year, you could get a room in an apartment too. $30,000, you might be able to drive. $40,000, you can start affording some basic luxuries like electronics, eating out, cable, Internet access, et cetera. And as you keep increasing your income by $10,000/year, the additional things you can get with that $10,000 seem to become less valuable than what you could get with the previous $10,000. I would be very curious to see if this concept is covered in some Economics book.

    But I have started thinking recently: If I was making double the money that I am making now, what would I do with it? I like to believe that I would save it up and then quit working for a while and do things that I love in the mean time, getting another job when I need some more money. And a lot of people might think this sounds lazy…but I would ask them – What is so glamorous about having a job? Most jobs involve making those at the top wealthier or more powerful. What is so great about this?

  • Cereal with an Agenda

    I am eating some “Golden Honey Granola” right now. Wow, it sure is delicious. But a couple of things irk me here.

    First of all, it is put out by the “Peace Cereal” brand. Sure, peace sounds like a great idea. But how about you just give me the god damned cereal, and let’s keep politics separate from it. You sure as hell don’t see “War Monger O’s” promoting the neocon viewpoint.

    Secondly, the box says that “10% of Profits Donated to Creating Peace”. Here’s an idea: how about you charge less money for your cereal to make the same profit, and let me decide what to do with the difference?

    I am not sure who these people are trying to fool. OK, so donate whatever percentage of your profits to some good cause. Great. But by putting it on the box, it is obvious that you are just trying to profit off of the peace movement.

    Another cereal I have seen is “Heritage O’s”. Ooh, I want to buy those so that I can support cultural diversity! I can taste the moral correctness in every bite!

    I’ve got a better name for these cereals. Let’s call them “Help, I’m Being Eaten by a Crazy Liberal!”

    So you want to be a liberal company still? Well let’s do it in a way that makes sense. Get rid of the normal corporate structure and make the company worker owned. Be environmentally responsible. Be honest to the consumer and put out a good product. Now those are things that I can get behind. That is being a good liberal company within the confines of being a company.

    I guess this is the punishment I get for shopping at San Francisco Real Food. This is a store which obviously just panders to the rich liberal crowd. I shop there because it is yummy, convenient, and the only full grocery store within a decent walk from my apartment. All of the food there is organic, and all of it is very much over priced. It is quite obvious that they are simply looking to profit as much as possible off of the organic/liberal/yuppie/anti-capitalist/anti-war “market”.

    And when I googled “San Francisco Real Food” to try to find their website, I find this gem of an article. So this company quite obviously cares little about the liberal movement. They’re just another union-busting company looking to line their pockets.

  • Large Underground Marijuana-Growing Operation

    Someone in Tennessee was busted for a large marijuana-growing operation.

    This just seems so neat to me. I love projects of a large scale, and of good organization.

    I guess that is why I just upgraded my storage capacity to over 1TB 😀

  • “Login” vs. “Log In”

    Mistakes don’t bother me in general. What does bother me is when people don’t bother to really think about what they are doing or saying to make sure it makes sense. It also really bothers me when people know they are doing something incorrectly but don’t bother making an effort to change it.

    One example of this that really bothers me is the use of “login” instead of “log in”. “Login” is a noun, not a verb. “Log in” is what should be used as a verb. For example: “Please log in using your login and password.”

    I see this error made all across the Internet. I wonder if I am just really strange, or if this kind of stuff really irks other people too?

    Of course…my website even says “login” and “logout”, but I didn’t write the web software, so it would take a while for me to find where to change that.

  • Moved Servers

    In an attempt to reduce some of my monthly costs, I am going to be getting rid of my hosted servers. Step one of this is to move all of my websites that I host to one of my servers at home.

    So, fourmajor.com is now running out of my closet. You might notice that speeds are a bit slower, but it should still go fast enough.

  • Books that Change Your Life

    I didn’t intend for this post to start off this way, but a thought has come to mind. I am very glad I decided not to get a TV when I moved. My motivation was not that there isn’t anything good on TV. Surely, there could be a lot more good content. But this wasn’t my main issue with TV. My issue is the advertising. And if you have been reading this blog somewhat regularly, you will know how I feel about advertising and subscriptions.

    But anyway, I don’t intend to get all high and mighty like…”Oh, you watch TV? I don’t. In fact, I don’t even have a TV.” The reason I am glad I don’t have one is because if I did, I would watch it as a default activity to do, out of habit. I, of course, still subject myself to the same mind-numbing content as everyone that owns a TV. I illegally download plenty of TV shows and watch them on my computer. But not having a TV and cable just makes that default habit-induced urge go away. Now when I want something to do to relax by myself at home, instead of reaching for the remote, a beer, and a bowl of peanuts, I reach for a book, a beer (well, actually, usually Diet Coke, juice, or water), and a bowl of peanuts. And I have always wanted to read more.

    That brings up another point. Question all assumptions. When people think of the different rooms in their home, and think of what they need to have in them, I think there is a preset list in their minds. It is nice to be able to think of living without a certain thing, and come to the realization that you either don’t need or want that certain thing. This might be a function of the size of my apartment where I kind of need to cut back on some of the things that are found in almost every home in America. So I don’t have a microwave in my kitchen. Again, I am not trying to get all high and mighty here. I am certainly just protecting myself from myself. Because I’d rather not use a microwave, but if there was one there, I’d use it. But things, I think, taste better when heated up on the stove or in the oven. And it really isn’t much extra effort at all.

    But now I would like to move on to the main idea I wanted to get across tonight. I hope you’ve made it this far. Back to the reading thing. It is rather remarkable how something like a book can change your life, or at least your outlook on life. A few books have done this for me over the past few years.

    First, it was the Ralph Nader biography, Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon, that I read a couple of summers ago. That made me realize that there really is a lot that one person can accomplish just with hard work alone. Surely, it isn’t easy doing what Ralph Nader has done. But it is rather obvious what you need to do to bring about change. Work your ass off. Devote yourself to what you believe in. These are simple concepts, but difficult in practice.

    Secondly, this book motivated me to start volunteering some of my time. I volunteered for the 2004 Nader campaign. This was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. And it made me realize how good it makes me feel to devote even a little bit of time every week to something I believe in.

    A few months ago, I finished reading The Fountainhead. The book was maybe a bit over simplistic, but it also made me realize some things. You shouldn’t spend your life compromising yourself. Make sure you are doing something you love doing for a living. Of course, this is not something that is very easy to accomplish, but at least I realize this as a goal and I am working on acheiving it.

    Currently, I am reading Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky. This book has really opened my eyes in terms of how the world works. I am sure I still have a ton of learning to do, but I think I am starting to see things a bit more clearly. It also contains tons of references to other books and articles. In fact, the footnotes are longer than the book itself. This book is a collection of discussions that Chomsky has had over the years. These aren’t prepared speeches. Someone will ask him a question or propose a discussion point, and Chomsky answers. Every single one of his answers reads like a thorough essay, but this is stuff off of the top of his head.

    He has a lot to say about the nature of power, the media, state-sponsored terrorism, propoganda, and a wealth of other subjects. I can’t really give a fitting summary to this book. You’ll just have to pick it up and read it.

    Now all this isn’t to say that I read a lot per se. In fact, I read quite slowly. Alyssa gave me Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky for Festivus, and a month and a half later I am still reading it. It is a 400-page book. But I do enjoy reading often, even if it is only a few pages a day when I am trying to fall asleep. It keeps me thinking.

    I really wish I had discovered books like these years ago. Because of this, I am going to start a page of recommended books, so that perhaps someone else can discover these books much earlier than I did. This is not to say that I have some amazing taste in books – this list should be taken with a rather large grain of salt.

  • Weird Dreams

    I have been having some really strange dreams lately. They are strange because they are vivid.

    Today, during my lunch-break nap, I dreamt that Cuba was no longer a Communist country, and that Nelson Mandela had become its president. There were all these Cuban people that decided to come to the United States now that they were allowed to. They decided that San Francisco would be a good city to swim up to.

    And I had another dream where I was explaining the finer points of the encryption software that my company sells to a customer. I was talking about how you can use your current deployment method to push out our installation MSI. Nerd dream.

    And another one where I beat the crap out of the guy (dream part) that wanted to beat me up because his wife was hitting on me (real life part from this weekend). He was coming at her with a spatula.

  • At the Library

    Well, I am having a bit of an interesting day so far.

    First of all, I woke up again feeling a bit sore, with a slight headache. Nothing too major…but it definitely makes me not want to get up. And once I get up, it makes me not want to get moving. Weird…even my eyes were a little sore when I looked down.

    So I finally got out the door. I figured I’d head over to Starbucks for some headache medicine. Latte and blueberry muffin, it is called. Headache – gone. Anyway, so I found one open seat in the place, and took it. It was pretty obvious why it was an empty seat. Some random guy was sleeping on the other side of the table. I didn’t mind though. He wasn’t bothering me. It looked as though he had been in a fight – he had a nice little cut by one of his eyes. It kind of made me wonder what his previous few days were like. I’ll bet they were interesting. He had on the table, among a few other things, a pack of cigarettes and a folded up photograph.

    I finished up breakfast number two, and headed out the door. I hopped on the bus and…well bus people can be interesting sometimes. One guy, innocently sitting there, pulled out a can in a paper bag out of his inside jacket pocket and took a swig, then *ever so sneakily* put his disguised can back into his jacket. No one will ever figure him out.

    Then a couple of ladies got on the bus, and of course decided that everyone on the bus needed to hear their story. “Girl, I got real sick last night. Felt like my stomach was about to collapse…ate some spoiled meat. I was so sick I was cryin’…I was up at 6:30 this morning cleaning up the vomit.” Other woman – “How’d you know it was the meat that made you sick?” Sick woman – “I saw the hamburger when it came up.”

    I thankfully made it off of the bus without having my own vomit story to add to this post. I trekked a few blocks to the library, and boy, do I feel like an old man. I worked up a sweat walking up the stairs, and by the time I got to the section I was looking for, I was literally out of breath.

    I can’t wait until I am completely over this flu/cold/whatever. I like to think of myself as quite physically able. A few pounds overweight or not, I pride myself on being able to not just walk up some damn stairs, but also being able to run a couple of miles, lift something heavy, or in general just not feel lazy, which, valid reason or not, I have been feeling lately.

  • Doctor’s visit

    So I haven’t been writing on my blog as much, and yet my number of daily visitors has gone up from about 25 per day to about 45 per day. Does that mean that my blog is more interesting when I don’t write? Probably. Oh well, I will make you all suffer anyway.

    I’ve been sick since about Thursday last week (2006-01-19). I’ve had headaches ranging from none to mild to downright annoying-and-can’t-get-anything-done (I don’t care about grammar in this post.) And my muscles have been sore and tired.

    On Tuesday, I was at my worst, and I actually made a doctor’s appointment (actually a nurse practitioner’s appointment, but that just sounds weird). This is unusual for me – I usually don’t go to the doctor’s enough. So Alyssa and I went to the Kaiser clinic today on 10PSI in the front left tire, and I told the nurse about my symptoms. The nurse generally came off as…you shouldn’t have even come in. You should have called the advice line and they would have told you what I just told you. And what she told me was…get some rest, drink some water. You probably have a viral infection or the flu. I asked her if I should go to work tonight. If you think you have the flu or a viral infection, then don’t go in, she told me. Err…isn’t that what she is supposed to tell me?

    Yeah so basically, here I am at work, because it is a big hassle for someone else to cover for me. At least my headache is gone…but I am still a bit sore and out of energy physically. But my day and a half off of work I think was needed. I feel energized mentally and I am for some reason motivated to do the boring parts of my work! I’m going to try not to breathe on anyone and go home early if I start to feel worse.

    So the moral of this story is that the best treatment is usually having someone come over and bring you chicken soup and go buy you ice cream. Thanks Alyssa!

    Sorry if this comes off as jumpy. I don’t feel like proofreading tonight.

  • Macworld pics

    So I went to Macworld yesterday with the EFF. Overall, I wasn’t very impressed, but I did get some neato pictures. See below.

         

    Click here for the full album.