The Last Mimzy

We just watched this with the kids... well, our 6-year old son stayed the course, the little one went away about 20 minutes in.

If you've never seen it, you should. Cheesy as all heck, but so wast E.T. In fact, this one is better than E.T. Yes, it's that good. It's paced right, it feels real, it pulls all the right strings... really, if you have kids 6-12, do it as family night.

If you don't, find another excuse.

Polka

Yeah, OK, that makes me a dork... but as I was listening to some podcasts relating to my work I came across one of my favorite A Cappella pieces ever. Every time I hear this thing it makes me cheerful for no discernible reason. Honestly, if you've never heard Loituma before, do yourself a favor and click that link.

Predecision

This makes a lot of sense.

No, really it does. It explains things like why some people are seemingly better at "reading" others, for example, the great sales person who just has this magic touch with knowing when a deal is sealed. It might very well be that they are unconsciously reading the buyer's decision before the buyer even knows they made it. It may explain why some of us seem so comfortable with decision making, while others seem tormented by it; the former may have intuitively accepted the idea that decisions are made subconsciously and thus ignore further input once they register the impact of one having been made, whereas the latter may be uncomfortable with the sense of this occurring and thus continually "second guess" themselves.

Interesting stuff.

6 badass stunts

Ever so often somebody writes something truly poetic and gut wrenching about highly inspirational figures in history... and then someone else writes this.

I laughed till I cried.

Subprime - the other side

I am always amazed at how irrationality can grow to such a large scale.

First you have the housing bubble, and valuations go to a point that things don't make sense.

At that point, it cost about half to rent a place than to buy it and pay off a mortgage. Note that this is the one truly rational yardstick to valuing a house in a stable market. It means that, including principal, interest, taxes and insurance (PITI), your house payment should be roughly similar to your rental of the same house.

Our old house, for example, was worth $650K at the height of the market, which with an assumed 20% down, and a 30-year fixed loan at 7% would have cost about $4,500/month PITI to own. Of course, ARM loans made that monthly cost a lot lower, which made it sensible to buy it anyway, at least in the short term, especially because they were so easy to get (hence the eventual meltdown). Renting the place would have cost $2,000 - $2,300 a month or so, or about half.

We got stuck with it as part of the meltdown, so we're renting it out instead. Here is where it gets crazy on the flip side. Right now, the house is valued at a bit over $450,000 according to a recent CMA. Assuming the same loan terms, it would cost roughly $2,800 a month PITI to buy and own (realistically it would be closer to $2,600 because the rate would be closer to 6.3%). Yet we are renting it out for $3,300 a month, and it could go for as high as $3,500.

You know, if this isn't a strong buy signal, I don't know what is. And yet there are still no buyers (we'd still like to sell it, renters and all). That, folks, makes just as little sense as when it was worth $650K at the top of the market.

I'll tell you this though; somebody's gonna be making a mint buying houses right now. Fundamentally speaking, considering the same exact yardstick that folks who were complaining about froth loved to use (the rent-to-buy ratio), houses are deeply undervalued. I wish I had a few hundred thousand lying around to pick up a half dozen properties tomorrow and rent them out, because they'd be making me money right off the bat. Heck, I wish I could buy my own house from me, because I could short sell it to myself and then really make a mint renting it out.

Nuts.

Ubuntu annoyance

So riddle me this - why do they have to send me updates as soon as they are available?

Unless it's a critical security update, why can't I get all the rest of the updates, say, once or twice a month in one download?

This was a common complaint to Microsoft, which is why they changed their process to accommodate a once a month update process; why can't Ubuntu do the same?

Euro 2008

It was great to see my two favorites finish the group stage on top... but then Holland played a shameful game - they were so confident about winning half the team didn't show up to play - against Russia in the quarters and lost. Since Russia was the one team in the entire tournament that could have caused them serious trouble, it was doubly sad.

The same scenario seemed destined to occur to my other favorite team in this tourney, especially as they got the one team that could cause them serious trouble. Then when Spain and Italy went to extra time my heart sank. Spain would never beat Italy in extra time, let alone penalties. If they had any chance, it was in regulation.

So thank you, Iker Casillas and the entire Spain national team, for proving me wrong. I don't know how you did it, considering your overall penalties record compared to Italy's, but you did. None of the other teams left can cause you real trouble, as long as you play to win, which you sometimes forget to do. Don't underestimate Russia in the semis, but you have much better quality and depth, so just play your regular game. Germany is the same exact story. Maybe the only danger is if Turkey pulls off another crazy win, because they will come to the final with tons of heart and determination, and these are the things that hit your weak spot. But you can handle them, too.

It's time you won one, anyway.

Wireless Criminal

Since I've done the same thing myself - often - this piece seriously tickled my funny bone.

Since AT&T started offering their $2/month wireless access throughout CA for DSL users, I've had much less trouble finding a hotspot when I need one - and now that Starbucks has added them, it's even easier. And I have a data cellphone now, too. But I still remember the days...

Vallejo

Last week my wife and I had to make it to our house in Vallejo a couple times to get it ready for the new renters. Check google and you will find a lot of recent news about Vallejo, and not in a positive way; it has recently filed for bankruptcy, an unusual move for such a large town (120,000 residents or so), due to excessive compensation locked into egregious labor contracts with city personnel, particularly the safety union (fire/police).

Just check the evidence for yourself. I am still amazed that the police chief of Vallejo makes $450,000 a year, and the fire chief $350,000 a year. That's almost as much as James Sinegal - CEO of Costco - made last year.

Anyhow, I'm glad to see the city filing for bankruptcy, and hope that the courts will then follow through by terminating all union contracts and having them renegotiated to something sustainable. But that's not what I wanted to write about.

What I did want to write about was my realization about my feelings for the city.

We decided to drop at Bug's Giant Burgers, practically a Vallejo institution, for lunch. As we were sitting there munching on our cholesterol bombs - sorry, yummy burgers and fries - I was looking around and it finally hit me, why I like Vallejo so much.

It's real. It has a unique character, a special feel to it. A little gritty, a little frayed, but it isn't the plastic templatey boring sameness that you get in the vast majority of bay area towns (San Ramon, I'm looking at you). It's not just the look and feel of the town, it's how people behave - they look you in the eye and size you up and judge you not and don't pretend and don't go out of their way to be distant - and how everything seems to just flow its own way in its own good time.

It's the same thing I feel when I go to Point Richmond, which is entirely different in character but still just as real. There are very few gems like this in the bay area, which is otherwise so homogenized and so identical everywhere that it is quite difficult to distinguish your location if you didn't know where you were. It's why Walnut Creek feels like a suburb even though it is quite self-sufficient, whereas when you cross the Carquinaz and drive up 29 you immediately get the sense that you're somewhere else.

Speaking of Walnut Creek, when we lived there we never connected. When we left San Jose it was a relief, not just because we moved to a bigger house but because San Jose feels downright hostile in its detachment. When we left Vallejo we felt a tinge of sadness, because we loved our life there. Sitting at Bud's, I was getting nostalgic. I'm happy to have an excuse to go up there a couple times a month.

So here's a small cheer for Vallejo, a town that's still special.

Renewable Oil

There you go... finally someone came up with the obvious. That's GE; there's apparently another company doing the same.

This really does appeal to me a heck of a lot more than Priuses - Priusi? - and their ilk.

It's the same thing as with diamonds - they can now be manufactured cheaply and identically to "real" diamonds. In their case, however, the industry has no need for extra capacity. In oil, I daresay scarcity will make this sort of solution rather popular.

Horror movie

So yesterday we drove up to the Mendocino area to attend Chris and Angela's wedding.

The drive up was quite enjoyable; the road up to Russian Gulch state park, the site of the ceremony, has an 80 mile or so section of reasonably well-paved, twisty mountain path, exactly the kind where driving an AMG car is rather enjoyable even if your speed never exceeds 80, even that only in very short bursts, and where a turn taken at 40 MPH can be quite exciting. Stopping at Boonville for gas we then essentially had to pass everyone we passed on the way to Boonville again, and I'm sure some of them are still irritated with me. Sorry guys. Try driving my car and you'll understand.

Anyhoo, the wedding reception took place in the Caspar community center and was fabulous, a truly memorable and enjoyable experience, and we got to meet some really awesome people and hopefully new friends (hello, Peter and Amy). However, since we had lost our babysitter for Sunday morning, we had to drive back at night, and so at around 10:30 we said our goodbyes and got on the road.

So as we're driving back, slower this time because of the complete darkness and my total unfamliarity with the narrow road, this pickup truck roared by us. I was quite happy for that, because now I had a leader who was also quite fast; by following them I could see the curves that the road was taking well in advance and plan my driving a lot better. I became a bit less tense, and my wife and I were enjoying a good conversation.

About 10 miles into the affair, the pickup suddenly slows down dramatically and moves to the side, as if to allow us to pass. I was a bit surprised, since they were driving very fast before then - in fact, we had made the comment that the guy was a pretty good driver to drive a pickup so fast in this road, even if he so obviously knew the twists and turns very well.

However, there was nothing to do but pass.

Then it happened.

As soon as we got through, the guy in the pickup turns up his brights and starts tailing us at at about a car's length apart. He had those really strong halogens too, and in the complete darkness around us and the comparative heights of the cars they ended up shining right into our driver's compartment like spotlights. This was scary. It was also blinding; it made it quite difficult for me to see ahead unless I turned my own brights on, potentially endangering all of us considering the many blind hairpin turns and the people coming towards us ocassionally, and even then visibility was diminished.

So I sped up a bit trying to shake him. Alas, the combination of reduced visibility and lack of familiarity with the road served to make it very difficult to do so, as he was able to repeatedly make up any gap I opened in the twists on the straightaway, where I was afraid to punch it not knowing what to expect on the next turn. At one point in frustration I did just that only to be handed a blind 140 degree turn with a late apex that I tried taking at 60 MPH; thankfully the DSP in the mercedes functions well.

We were too afraid of trying to let him pass, either. His aggressive approach was really scary, and he kept getitng very close to ramming us. We didn't know whether he was mad about something, or maybe just a psycho, but if we moved to one of the small side areas designed for slower vehicles to let faster ones overtake them, we had literally nowhere to go if he decided to just stop next to us. What if he had a shotgun in that truck? scenes from movies like Deliverance went through our heads.

There was also no cell reception, so 911 was not a possibility. I was praying that a cop would wonder around and see the mad driving, and just stop us to give us a ticket. No such luck, of course.

Then - about 15 gut-wrenching minutes into this insanity - we saw salvation in the form of a turnout, a few hundred feet of divided lanes designed for passing. We moved into the right lane, ready to bolt ahead if he started slowing down too. At least in the turnout we had some room to maneuver. I looked anxiously at my rearview mirror.

He seemed to hesitate for a long second, then punched through and roared right by us. We started again, slowly, but picked up some speed back to our comfortable pace from before, when a couple minutes later we hit upon him again. By then I had theorized that he was trying to play "follow the leader"; at least it was a plausible theory and that calmed us down some. We were still nervous, and then he did the whole slowing down letting us pass thing again, and as we did... he sped up with his brights.

Goddammit, what was wrong with this guy?!

This time I wasn't going to take it anymore. I punched it. I treated the rest of the way to and through Boonville as a race track, going as fast as I dared, knowing full well that no matter how good he was and how well he knew the road, he couldn't keep up if I did so. It was dangerous, much more dangerous than I care to admit. But we did shake him, although he kept trying to catch up as we noted looking back for his lights once we opened a sufficient gap between us. Once we hit Boonville we lost him completely, but we were still nervous; I ended up driving the rest of the way to US-101 faster than I would have normally, and we made it to the 101/128 intersection, I stopped the car and got out for a breath of fresh air. I felt I was about to throw up.

My trip computer cheerfully noted that my average MPG for the trip down from Caspar was 16.6. Considering the trip to Caspar had us at over 23 MPG for the same road, that should tell you something about how I was pushing the car. After that, going down 101 at 72 MPH on the cruise control was an unexpected joy. We made it home before 1AM, which was way, way too early considering when we departed.

Dexcom - an unexpected problem

So last night my daughter, by mistake, ripped a sensor out of my arm.

I've had several almost-rans, but this was for real; being a little too excited and trying forcibly to position herself just right for a bedtime story, she managed to cause the sensor to be pulled off.

Beyond the pain - which is considerable - one has to consider that this is a $60 mistake, the cost of one sensor.

Talk about an ouchie.

I really do hope sensors will come down in price as more competition enters the market. One of the motivations to move them from abdomen to upper arm was that I kept being worried by this exact scenario occurring when I rolled around with the kids. While I'm sure I saved at least a couple of sensors from a similar fate, apparently my strategy isn't fullproof.

It really kinda sucks when playing with your kid causes you to eat sixty bucks.

Sigh.

Another Ubuntu post... and Staples

So our almost decade-year old fax machine finally died... my son and I went into Staples today to buy another one.

Since I'm using Ubuntu, I wanted to find one that will work; it is well known that Epson generally makes Linux-friendly devices, so I settled in a CX9400Fax 4-in-1. While I don't need the printer, having a scanner that actually works with Ubuntu would be nice, and a low volume copier is also pretty neat. It cost $140 after taxes before rebates.

Now I hate rebates like everyone else, but I didn't realize how easy Staples had made it to claim one. You go to their website, click on rebate center, put all the info online, and you're on your way. No more messy cutting of UPC's, filling out hand written forms and all that hoopla. Way to go, Staples... how about abolishing them entirely as the next logical step?

Anyway, getting the Epson up and running was simple - simpler than in Windows in fact, since I didn't have to install anything. Like many other devices, as soon as I hooked this guy into my laptop's USB port, it was recognized and installed.

Except, that is, for the scanner. Xsane - the image scanner that comes preinstalled with Ubuntu - simply would not recognize the Epson.

I went into a 2-hour ordeal of trying to figure out how to get it done. Sane claimed to support the scanner, so it had to be possible, but I just couldn't do it; I tried installing various packages, building others, doing this and that, and failing miserably. My frustration level reached record highs.

Then I stopped.

I took a deep breath.

I looked again. This isn't Windows; messing around with the registry wasn't going to help me, and I am not smart enough to understand what I'm doing in the Linux equivalent. What was I doing wrong in my approach?

Ah. I was intimidated by the packaging of the installation backend necessary for this device. I found the stuff on the Avasys page, but they hadn't compiled one for Ubuntu yet. I picked "other/other" for the OS, and came up with two options: the tarball, and the rpm.

Since I "knew" that an rpm is "not for Ubuntu", because it's Debian-based and not Redhat-based, I didn't pick it. All my messing around was done with the tarball.

Have you ever heard the phrase "a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing"?

It was at this point that I remembered there was a way to convert an rpm (redhat package) to a deb (debian package). I looked it up. Yes! there it was - simply run "alien [name of package] ", and it will perform the conversion.

Now I had the debian-ready package. Running it was as simple as "dpkg -i [name of package]". 20 seconds later my scanner was working seamlessly.

And I was feeling quite embarrassed.

Is this a plague?

First Gary Gygax... now Eric Wujcik.

It seems like gaming luminaries are rolling critical misses right and left.

I absolutely adore Amber Diceless... for that contribution alone Eric deserves a spot right up there with other giants of role playing. Let's also not forget Paranoia, another of my most favorite role playing systems and one where he contributed significantly. And of course, he co-founded Paladium, amongst a list of many other achievements.

Rest in peace. Now where are my Amber books? I think it's time for a little nostalgia.

Life

You know those rare moments you come across in life that stay with you forever? I had one of them today. I went to lunch with someone I've known for a long while now - someone I've admired and appreciated and tried to be a friend to for years, but who is so reserved in his nature that I could never really tell if he really took notice or even cared beyond the casual. Today he opened up a bit on a very personal level, and said a few things, and made me realize that yes, I have made a real friend. And I felt very special because of it. And humbled.

I still do.

And this on top of another person I've known for a few years who made me realize Sunday night she had also become a friend over the years, rather than just a gaming buddy. Sometimes I feel stupid, and Sunday was one of those times.

So there you have it. Stupid and humbled, all in less than 48 hours. What could be better?

4th Edition

So a couple days ago I placed my pre-order for the new Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition core book gift set from Amazon... the price really is quite good.

As a sidenote, I am somewhat concerned for store owners who simply would not be able to match it or even get near. I paid $57 including shipping, which is just over half MSRP. I'd be willing to pay maybe 20% more to a store - meaning $70 or so - but that still leaves them at a loss.

In any case, yesterday night I found out from a friend that the master PDFs for the books are available online as a torrent file, which is neat, even if I really do want to have the hard covers already (June 23rd? come ON, Amazon!). Anyhoo, just finished downloading them, can't wait to see what's in store; I kept myself blind to 4th edition changes for the past few months so I could be surprised upon release.

Woohoo!

Environmentalist

Allow me to be cynical for a moment, because I want to say this: environmentalists, by and large, are some of the most short-sighted people in the world.

It just gets proven over and over again. It does not matter where they hail from, they just seem totally incapable of thinking things through.

Public exhibit 1: decried by green freaks, it has been entirely and completely their successful politicking that has eliminated nuclear power as a viable option for energy. This even though there is not a shred of evidence that it has ever done anything truly bad, certainly not on the scale of - you guessed it - oil. In fact, Patrick Moore, the founder of Greenpeace has switched sides and now promotes nuclear... a few decades too late.

The result? $130 oil, $5 gas imminent, and global warming. And suddenly nuclear does not sound too bad, apparently. One might detect a note of irony there.

Public exhibit 2: still in denial about their direct and powerful contribution to oil dependency in the US, greenies decide that it isn't really as good for the environment as they apparently thought it had to be when they went after nuclear. Their solution? ethanol. Made from corn. Which we can actually eat, unlike, well, oil and uranium.

The result? 300% rise in the cost of rice, and going. Public riots in many developing countries. A real and imminent danger of starvation on a very large scale in many parts of the world. Food prices being driven through the roof.

I'm not even going to discuss their direct contribution to keeping those SUVs on too cramped roads due to their determination to resist all changes to public lands, even if they are for things like light and high speed rail just so they can "save animals and trees". No matter that the same animals and trees will be better served by a better ecology, and even more so if they were simply moved and confined to wide planned areas, improving their lives and allowing the creation of infrastructure. The world isn't getting any less populated, people. Not wanting to face the music is not going to make it stop playing.

There are quite a number of other striking examples, but the common thread is this: every time the green movement takes on something big, I get the chills. They are absolutely bound to make things worse, then blame everybody else while they ferociously seek a remedy that, in turn, creates yet another big problem. I have yet to see any of them actually apologize for their contribution to global warming because of their anti-nuclear idiocy, or to the loss of millions of lives from their zealous pursuit of the disruption of the food chain.

What's really amazing is how much sway they hold, even with all these large-scale, drastic failures that have such a negative total impact on each and every one of us. No industry lobby group has ever been this successful. Not even close.

A classic revisited

I just finished watching Wargames again... I've seen it several times before, every few years.

It is amazing how well it holds up. Sure, the technology is horrendously outdated. But the movie is fantastic even in 2008. No wonder it got me interested in security when I first saw it in 1984, creating a particular interest that will eventually turn into a career.

Awesome. And if you haven't seen it, it really is worth tracking down the DVD, especially as you can probably get it for $6 or so.

Fax signatures

Bruce usually has interesting stuff to say, and this is no exception.

Strip clubs

So last night I had the - I'm not sure what to call it, not exactly pleasure, maybe occasion? - to visit a strip club for the first time in my life. It was a day of firsts, since it was part of my first - and most likely last, since I don't have any other single guy friends at this point that I can imagine inviting me to one - bachelor's party ever.

Anyhow, I really had no idea what to expect, but I have a philosophy of "try anything once", so I went along with it. We started along with Gokarting, which was tremendous, as I hadn't done it in 10 years and forgot just how much fun it is. I worked hard to secure the pole position, because I knew I would be able to keep it once the race started. And so I did. Until lap 21 out of 23, when a guy I just finished lapping the second time decided to T-bone me on the next corner instead of simply taking the racing line, allowing the guy in second to slip through and win. Ghastly.

We went to Stinking Rose next, which I've always appreciated, and then we went a-lookin' for a club. Chris, the bachelor, was ankle-chained to a 10-pound bowling ball the whole night, a trick one of this friends played on him. I thought it was a terrible joke, and almost went and bought a bolt-cutter to release him, but was dissuaded eventually, even if I had some misgivings.

I have no idea what the name of the club was that we ended in, it was across the street and on the corner away from Showgirls (this is San Francisco). Supposedly new. In any case, walking in the first thing that assaulted my sense was the noise. It wasn't as noisy as a dance club, of course, but the way the noise was distributed seemed engineered - lots of it in the passageways, a little less on the main. The second thing was the absolute oddity of having scantily clad, topless and completely naked women walking around. In fact, I think the best way to summarize this experience is "strange".

I followed the group over to some back room where the lead instigator negotiated a private show and the room for an hour afterwards. I then went down to the main floor to get a sense of what was going on. I felt distinctly uncomfortable, a sense that had not left me for the entire night. It wasn't embarrassment per-se, or at least not in the sense you might thing; it was the same kind of feeling I would get from entering the shower by mistake with some girl I didn't know already in it in a stranger's house, or walking into the women's locker room. I'm comfortable in my own skin, but it just didn't feel right.

Like I said, strange. It is a strip club after all.

Anyhow, I said no to two or three of the girls who came by to see if I would be interested in a lap dance, but then Lexi came by and had eyes that had an intelligent sparkle and this time I said yes, admitting that I had no idea what to do or expect. We went to a secluded area with rooms with blinds, and the sense of strangeness became palpable. I mean, I just couldn't shake it. She was a beautiful woman, she was intelligent, she didn't even seem numb like some of the other girls, and yet as soon as the blind closed she took off all her clothes as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Again, I fully understand that's what they do in these places, but it was still strange. I asked if I could take my shoes off, sat down on the couch, and waited, but the announcer was just announcing a new round of songs and such we had several minutes to chat first.

I learned a few things which may be made up or not - I think the "paying my way through college" and her name were fake, but the after-a-pause "I couldn't have a relationship for quite a while after I started doing this" and "it's tough to separate the job from real life" were not - and then the dance started.

Strange.

It wasn't sexy, it wasn't even erotic. It was beautiful in its way, and Lexi was beautiful in her way, but it was like an art piece, not a live woman trying to get me excited for a few minutes. My admiration for her grew; this has got to be one of the toughest jobs on the planet, period, because it is all suggestion; a prostitute, at the very least, has a very tangible way to tell if her client is happy. Not so the stripper, and I was simply unresponsive in, well, "that" way. I couldn't connect sexuality to it.

The whole thing took about 20 minutes, but I spent most of them looking at her face and searching her eyes, at some point it must have made her a bit uncomfortable because she stopped looking at me. In fact, about 5 minutes to the end I asked if we could stop and just talk instead, and she seemed quizzical, then relieved once I explained my problem connecting sex to this fascinating art-form. I have to say, she composed herself well, but I got a sense of doubt there, and I wonder how many of these women have body image issues.

We ended up talking for a little while longer, into the next song, and parted ways.

There was a shower show later - one of those things that we apparently negotiated for - which was another oddity, and a few other girls who approached (how do they do that? that has got to be the toughest part of the whole thing), and towards the end I sat at the tip rail where I finally felt more or less comfortable. When it comes down to it, the pole dances are pretty impressive in their way, and at least there I could comfortably maintain the disconnect between my admiration of the act and sex or sexuality.

Otherwise, for some reason I became a marked man, and a couple of the other girls asked me what was going on, and one of them mistook my intentions and said "don't feel sad for us", but I said I didn't, that was not the point. I'm not sad for them - heck, they aren't "them", they are each different. I may feel sad for one of them after I learned who she was, because some of us do have sad histories, but I can't be sad for them collectively, I don't know them, and this isn't some sort of catastrophe. But I just could not think of them as sexual objects. Which is stranger, because had I seen any of them on the street, I could easily imagine them in a sexual manner.

It's just that in this setting, it all seemed mechanical, forced, unnatural... and completely unreal. I guess that's the main point in all this. I am a sucker for real. I love people - not their bodies or any of their other facets, but they, themselves, their essence and their being. I tend to dive really deep, and what happens in strip clubs is geared at being shallow. You can't get deep in a lapdance except if you ignore the supposed fantasy and really look at the dancer, which makes it very intriguing but certainly not arousing. I found Lexi very intriguing, and I would love to know more about her and who she really is, but not in that setting. Enough, as they say, is enough.

Like I said, strange.

With that said, I ended up cutting things considerably short when I figured I could not extract anything further from the experience. I can't say I won't be doing it again, because it is quite possible that business will require it; but I certainly won't be pursuing this on my own accord.

Strike down one more for experience.