Mick Feeble Speaks...

You never when it's going to be too late until it's too... late

2012-01-04T22:13:00.000-08:00

The window of opportunity for understanding my origins is forever narrowing.

I started this blog entry well over a year ago. It was an idea I had, I guess. But I stopped. It was undoubtedly during a broad window of writer's block.

When I was in high school, or perhaps younger, I did a project for either school or some personal reason, where I interviewed my grandmother - my mother's mother. I don't remember what I asked her. But I do remember that she didn't remember as much as I would have hoped she'd remember about her past. And I probably didn't ask very well-formulated questions.

I never got a chance to ask any of my other grandparents those questions. With the exception of my father's father, they were all born in Europe around the turn of the century. That was a different time and place. There was no electricity. There was no internet. There were no refrigerators. There were no cars. It's weird to me to think that just that gap of two generations holds such immense changes in how life was lived.

I talked with my mother a lot, about a lot of things. But I wish, now, that I had conducted lengthy formal interviews, extracting every bit of knowledge I could, and taking good notes. I wish I knew about her childhood more than I do. I remember her relating tidbits such as when I asked her about what it was like growing up and she said "We all [her sisters] believed that we were our father's favorite, and that our mother hated us." I remember stories about my mother's father. I knew he'd lost his leg because he was hit by a fire engine. I knew that he had a temper and he was good at playing cards. I knew that people had only a vague sense about what he did for a living. As a child, I recall stories about how he either worked for the circus or was in the Jewish Mafia. I don't know what the truth was. And I don't know why it was so opaque.

I used to ask her questions about how she and my father met, and she would always tell me crazy stories about how my father supposedly wouldn't tell her what he did for work for the first few months they dated. I know that my father's mother didn't care very much for my mother. That she wasn't good enough. Just all these little snippets. But it's not a movie. It's like notes inside fortune cookies. I didn't get to ask her everything I wanted to ask her. And I have forgotten the details of many things I did ask. It seems ironic to me that I used to get so upset when my father would tell me he didn't remember things from the past, but I am now forgetting things from the past. Though, I think I remember my past better than that of the stories that have been related to me.

I want to know more about my father's time as a child. I want to know more about his father. Even though my mother's father died thirteen years before I was born, I know more about him, because of the few stories, than I ever have known about my father's father, who was alive when I was a small child. I only remember visiting him in a hospital bed. I know that he was part of a business with partners, something like a hat store, and that his partners "screwed him out of the business" (that's how someone related the story), and that they lost their home in the depression and never owned a home again for over forty years. But that's all. I don't know what they were like.

The only ones left in my family from whom the stories may be told of the past are my brother and my aunt. There is probably much they can share of their respective generations. And they both are great storytellers.

I learned much from my brother about how different my parents were when they were younger, with him being eighteen years older than me. But again, the stories don't feel like I'm really there. I don't know what it is. It's like I'm wanting something deeper than a story can provide. And nobody's memory is sufficient to quench my desire to feel what these people were like.

I would love to know more about my father's time in the Navy. Or in college. To know what he wished for when he was young. What did life look like?

I loved it when my mother would tell me little memories... she told me what it was like the day that JFK died, and I could feel the emotion. I want that reality, that intensity, for the entire movie of the entire history.

But she's gone.

And people are aging.

And I am aging.

And memories are fading.

And at some point, in the not too distant future, it's going to be too...

Home sweet home sweet (bittersweet) home

2012-01-04T21:51:00.000-08:00

The truth is, you can have two homes.

I've struggled for years now as to "What is home?" When I moved to Seattle, there was a long time where I spent my time pointing out all the ways in which Seattle was lacking. Inferior infrastructure. Inferior pizza. Lack of anything really "old." There was a long list. It went like that for a few years. And then, at some point, for a variety of reasons, Seattle became home. And suddenly, I dreaded Boston. For completely different reasons, however. It was not that I changed my preferences about pizza. Or mass transit.

I developed an aversion to the pressure of visiting family. Of having to stay in the uncomfortable, tiny bed of childhood. The deep immersion into family which I had told myself I was happy to be away from. The weather. Hot or cold. The feeling that a family visit was not really a vacation, and there's only so much vacation time. So, for many reasons, Boston became a dreaded trip, and a place I could never imagine myself living again. Each trip was short, and rushed, and felt frantic and tiring. And when my mother died, it felt like Boston had become repellent to me. I did not want to return. Ever.

Then, my situation at work became such that there was an opportunity to travel to Boston periodically. And suddenly, my attitude began to change. Visiting Boston meant visiting Boston - the city. Working in the city. Staying in the city. And visiting family and friends as a part of the trip. Now, Boston became a trip to a really cool place I used to know, without being too deeply immersed in the things that made me uneasy. And that made me develop a new fondness that may have even exceeded that which I had when I left.

In the course of about a year, I think I visited Boston four times. It was a period of transformation for me. I started to feel more connected with family. I started to feel more connected to my history. I felt connected to my roots.

And then I left the job where I was afforded that opportunity to visit home on a company dime, and stay in fancy hotels, and eat on a per diem budget.

And I haven't visited since. Instantly, my aversion to visiting has ratcheted back up again. I don't even know when the last time was that I visited, but I believe it may have been about a year ago. And, as before, the longer I go without visiting, the more I don't want to go. And the longer I go without visiting, the more it becomes imperative that I visit sooner rather than later. And that, again, makes me want to move to Irkutsk.

So where is home?

23andMe and the prospect of eugenics

2012-01-02T15:25:00.000-08:00

Though not quite as elaborate as the eugenics of Gattaca, 23andMe is a service that, for $200, will tell you quite a bit about your genetic traits, disease risks, and family heritage. I decided it would be a fun thing to do. Actually, I decided it would be a fun thing to purchase as a gift for a friend who is a biologist. And the friend, in turn (and independently), decided it would be a good gift for me.

There's a lot of information in the results they provide. Some of it is not at all surprising, such as validating your risks of diseases that you already know are in your family (though, it's a reassuring "positive control" to see this appear in the data). There's also a lot of muddier information, where they tell you that you've got potentially elevated risk for something, based on some of the markers in your genome, but potentially decreased risk based on other markers. Of course, that's completely to be expected, but leaves you with not a whole lot of certainty as to whether you actually are at risk.

I suppose there are only a small number of cases where one learns something extremely significant about one's genetic risks.

One of the neat things about 23andMe is that they have a large number of surveys where they ask you about your own traits, history, and drug sensitivities. The answers to these survey questions, combined with the genetic data that they have collected from a large number of participants, enables them to occasionally identify new associations between markers and traits. So this is a two-way service. They tell us something. But we also tell them something that is used to fuel further scientific discovery.

So what did I learn?

I learned that I have almost double the average risk for prostate cancer, which was interesting to me, because there are no known cases of it in my family (to my knowledge, though my family is so poor at communicating, that perhaps I wouldn't have heard about it anyway).

I learned that I have dramatically lower risk for any type of colon disorders such as cancer, irritable bowel, Crohn's Disease, etc. That's good to know.

I learned that I have much greater than average risk of heart disease, which is consistent with the fact that heart attacks, angina, and arteriosclerosis are widespread on my mother's side of the family.

I learned that I have significantly lower-than-average risk for developing Alzheimer's Disease.

And I also learned that, on my maternal grandmother's side of the family, my heritage at some point traces back to one of the most common European ancestries; not a purely Jewish heritage like I would automatically have suspected.

There are a bunch of other things, but these were the ones that stood out as particularly interesting.

Moving back to the Gattaca topic... how will this data be used in the future? Will insurance companies be allowed to genetically screen people? Should they be allowed to do so? Why is it okay for life insurance companies to charge higher premiums for people who smoke, but it's not okay for health insurance companies to assign higher premiums to patients who carry higher risk for developing diseases?

The quick answer is that lifestyle choices are something we can control, but genetics is not. And we have actually seen health insurance moving in the direction of more privacy, rather than less, in my lifetime. I recall being denied health insurance because of something that was seen in a physical examination when I was in my twenties. It turned out to be a mistake. But the fact is, it happened. Today, we don't see that happening. And even preexisting conditions seem to be covered. Should they be?

Should a health insurance company need to be forced to take on a high-risk patient, and lose massive amounts of money? Or, at the least, should they be allowed to say "Your genetics indicate you have double the risk of cardiovascular disease of general public. Thus, if you want us to insure you, we're going to charge you such-and-such a premium. And if you smoke, the premium will go up by this much. And if you do not maintain your weight below such-and-such a level, your premium will go up by this much."

It sounds brutal, but it is also completely logical for health insurance companies to want to do this. Of course, the resultant litigation would be a nightmare, as would the attempts to falsify data that the health insurance companies can maintain.

The Gattaca scenario of carefully selecting the best possible genetic material, so as to avoid these expensive outcomes seems like a more viable solution than the approach of prorating healthcare.

But can you imagine the battles there would be if the government tried to mandate in vitro fertilization for the purpose of eugenics? There would be huge opposition from the religious right, and from the personal freedoms supporters of both the liberal and libertarian groups. Who would support such a thing? What ideology? It would be easy to envision it in the context of some horrible ethnic cleansing. But what does it mean to cleanse, not by ethnicity, but by genetic "fitness"? Is that any better or worse? And who decides? In a purely capitalistic sense, one could set the goals at eliminating those diseases and disorders that carry the largest price tag.

It's a scary thought. I cannot really envision us going to it. But it is also (in my opinion) nearly equally odd that individuals who are born with zero, or virtually zero chance of normal lives are provided millions of dollars of medical support, while we don't have the healthcare resources available in this country, or in other parts of the world, to provide basic healthcare to everyone.

The argument is political, philosophical, ethical, and economical. Of all those "-ical" arguments, I suspect, in the long run, economical will be the trump card.

One final angle to consider is the impact that such data could have on relationships and marital choices. If you knew that your partner was a carrier for a trait or a disease, how would that impact your decision to start a family? The implications here are slightly more favorable, in that eugenics could offer couples the opportunity to screen to avoid genetic diseases. This already happens today. But a more widespread availability of such data, and the stigmas and propaganda that could evolve along with that availability, could lead to a new type of relationship conflict. Ultimately, it could give rise to new approaches to "mate selection." One could even envision dating sites where, instead of using a special formula to find your best matches based on preferences and personality, you would be given your best matches for genetic compatibility. The possibilities, again, are endless.

Precious things lost forever

2012-01-01T19:05:00.000-08:00

When in doubt, don't get rid of it.

That is truly a motto to live by. Because you never know what you'll be sorry to lose. And sometimes, you do know what you'll be sorry to lose, but you let it go anyway. One might point out that this could be taken to an extreme, in the case of pack rats, hoarders, etc. But for the average, balanced person, I would say that if you have one moment's hesitation, keep it. Find a place to put it. Give it to someone for safekeeping, even.

I wrote those first few lines over a year ago. And interestingly, almost exactly a year later, the topic came up again today. Today, I put a little spin on it though. If it has any sentimental value whatsoever, keep it. If it's a stack of random papers that mean nothing to you, that you haven't looked at for 6 years, toss it.

I've lost a few precious things.

A dollar bill. Hand-made greeting cards. Guitars. And in every case, I could have and should have known at the time that I parted with them that I would long regret the decision. In one case, it was brief brainwashing that led to the relinquishment. In another case, it was fear. When it came to guitars, it was the illusion that I needed the paltry amount of money from a sale in order to justify the purchase of some other piece of gear.

Even today, with my countless guitars, I am still heeding my own advice to part with none because I don't need the cash, and well, you just never know when you're gonna wish you still had that guitar. Of course, the guitars are replaceable. The greeting cards were not. And neither was the dollar bill that belonged with the cow.

Don't lose your precious things.

Seeing the objective truth... so hard

2011-12-31T11:44:00.000-08:00

I jump to conclusions. So often. And it's mood dependent. I get a thesis statement going in my head about what reality is, and then I start "seeing" all the data that supports my theory, and "not seeing" all the data that refutes it. That's a bit ironic for a researcher to take such an approach to life. I certainly hope that is not the way that I conduct my research.

And I am so convinced. So sure. I have tried to be more open than I used to be. I have tried to see all sides of a situation. Of course, I think I have always portrayed myself as someone who sees all sides of a situation. But I think that perception is probably distorted, because I continually come to the realization that I am not doing it.

It's just a forever continuing work in progress.

I have a hard time walking the line of recognizing that I lack the compassion and openness that is possible, without immediately devolving into the self-flagellation of what a bad person I am for lacking it. What it comes back to is the place where it all needs to start, which is compassion and openness with myself.

I started off talking about objective truth, and there's an interesting paradox of "objectivity" when talking about one's own inner states. Because you'd think that "about self" is fundamentally "subjectivity" but there's an objective truth about ourselves as well.

The other day, I was listening to someone give their sales pitch about the Landmark program. Of course, I am not a subscriber to cult philosophies, not so much because there's no value in them, but because I am very careful about assigning myself to any sort of community -- even my participation at my yoga studio is starting to feel a bit cultish, but that's another blog.

In his sales pitch, he talked about how there are "facts" and there are "interpretations" or something like that. In our day to day lives, there are things that occur that actually occur and then there is the layer upon layer of filtering or interpretation that we place on top of it. The result is that we often do not even see "the facts" because our brains have created this compelling story on top of it - and that story is based on what he referred to as our "point of view". These are self-limiting approaches. And to really see, we need to remove the interpretation layer.

Now, I don't need to join a cult or self-help program, or read a thousand books to heed that common sense. It is just common sense, right?

But I don't heed it.

And it's all mood dependent. In my best moments, I have the openness, and try my best to experience life as a series of moments. But in my darker moments, which are sometimes many, I spiral every "fact" into a web of worst-case scenarios. And that makes me feel worse.

Here's an example.

I send you a message. You reply immediately. I send you another message, asking you a question. You don't reply immediately.

This happens all the time, with everyone in my life. But the interpretation is mood-dependent. If I am in a good mood, I just wait for the reply. Or if it's urgent, I call. But if I am in a bad mood, then that lack of immediate response immediately becomes "they don't want to answer my question" or "i am not important to them" or "why are they avoiding communicating with me". Then, reality turns out to be any of a series of natural causes: driving, text took a long time to go through, got a phone call, was eating dinner, fell asleep, etc.

The sad part about this is that I rake myself over emotional coals running with the worst-case scenarios. And for some reason, my brain is particularly adept at spinning worst-case scenarios for even the smallest of scenarios. The paranoia kicks in, and everyone's motives are questionable.

I know this about myself, and it still happens. I also know that the first step toward self-improvement is self-awareness. But unfortunately, self-awareness is a little bit more uncomfortable that selfish oblivion, particularly in the short-term.

A cow, a dollar bill, and a memory of the past

2011-10-17T00:46:00.000-07:00

A red wooden pedestal, measures approximately 2.5" x 1.25" x 0.5". Rising up from the pedestal is a thin red post, about an eighth of an inch in diameter, and 3" tall. Atop the post, a quarter-inch thick wooden cow, white with brown spots, black eyes and hooves, and a black nose. Skewered by the red wooden post, a single dollar bill. It's upside-down, so I cannot see the vintage. But if I lift it up, and examine the other side, it reads L-series (meaning it is from the San Francisco Mint), serial number L86314752M. Series 1995. Robert Rubin was the U.S. Treasurer at the time. But this is not the first dollar bill to grace this ornamental and sentimental object that I have had in my possession for 25 years, and about 5 months. The first dollar bill to grace the cow remained in its throne from 1986 until sometime, I would estimate, in early-1998. The one that is presently in its place has likely been there since. And there's a story behind that, but I'll come back to it.

The "Cow and a Dollar Bill" (as I have always referred to it) came into my hands from my sister, when I was in the hospital, recovering from minor surgery that had been the result of a car accident. It was just a silly gift. That's the kind of person my sister was. Funny, random, clever, sarcastic. It was not something that necessarily needed to have any significant meaning, but it ended up having very significant meaning because I attached the meaning to it. I am not sure if the cow traveled with me to college, or if it remained in my bedroom at home. It's been too long for me to remember. But the cow traveled with me to Seattle, where it now sits in front of me.

So why did it have so much meaning? Well, the events that wound me up in the hospital, which I will not share here because they're not really relevant to the story at hand, led me to do some existential and philosophical pondering about truth, honesty, life, and the importance of many things. Somehow, because the cow and its dollar bill showed up in this time window, I ended up making a proclamation: The day I need to use that dollar bill is the day that I know that things have become really bad. Or, the flip side, I'm never going to use that dollar bill, but I'm going to keep it right there on this cow, as a reminder of what it is like to not be in need, and to keep the entire ornament with me everywhere I go, as a reminder of the same.

Yet, you might ask, "What happened to the dollar bill that was on it originally?" (which I might note, was tattered, and very fantastically antiquated, even though the currently positioned crisp bill has actually been "in office" for a longer period of time; I guess the original must have started off in a more worn-out state)

That, too, is a different story and, as it turns out, the bill was not spent in a moment of need. Rather, it was something I chose to release, in a moment of what I had believed to be personal growth and "letting go" of the past. It was donated, in a sense, to a cause that I briefly believed in, but ultimately to which I did not cling. In fact, one of my slight regrets in life is that I parted with that dollar bill when I did.

Sadly, the cow and the dollar bill have come to take on a new symbolism. And the loss of the original dollar bill feels eerily poignant. See, my sister who gave this to me is not the same person she was, just as the dollar bill is not the same dollar bill. She's had a neurological condition for most of her life which, until recently, did not have any noticeable cognitive effects. But in the last 5 years or so, she's unfortunately undergone a gradual decline in her cognitive abilities, particularly when it comes to memory and analytic reasoning. It's been significant enough that she is now really not the same person she was for most of her life. She doesn't really engage with people anymore, and is uncomfortable in situations where it is necessary. Her long-term memory seems to be well-preserved, but she has difficulty forming new memories. She's withdrawn, and sad. She's somewhat aware of the loss that she's suffering, and that probably makes it even worse for her.

When I look at the cow and the dollar bill, much as when I look at my sister, I am reminded of the person who gave it to me, and everything that she represented in my life. But when I see this imposter dollar bill, not the one that my sister gave me, I feel like something is lost, and I know that it can never be regained.

One thing that troubles me is that, while there's no way I can ever imagine myself parting with the inanimate reminder that I keep, I have already distanced myself from the person of whom I am reminded because, while it's possible for me to look at the cow and the dollar bill, and have everything it has ever been and ever meant evoked in my mind, the same is not true for my sister. Communicating with my sister now reminds me only of what is lost, and what she is no longer, and will never be again. I feel like she's gone, but she is still here. And I have a hard time with that. I suspect I should probably be trying to make what connection I still can, while she is still here at all, rather than lament what is not. I am a little bit afraid of that. I think it betrays a problem I have with mortality. I'm trying to deny it. But as I come of the age that more and more of those dear to me will become frail, ill, or die, it's going to become increasingly unavoidable. I need to face it.

Perhaps I should see if she remembers the cow and the dollar bill.

Why everyone should keep a journal

2011-10-06T19:14:00.000-07:00

Last night, I spent almost two hours rereading journal entries from 2008. I'm speaking of a "diary" that happens to be online, as opposed to this blog. From time to time, I go back and start rereading what I've written. And it's never easy to be reminded of where I was before. I don't often write about fluffy topics in the journal. It usually is about self-exploration, or venting the struggles I'm having with various situations happening in my life.

The hardest thing for me is when I see huge sections of my emotional history that have repeated themselves. I can find a page from 2008 that could just as easily be written today. New situation, different year, different people involved, but the same me. And, consequently, the same struggles and same questions. Sometimes, reading those excerpts leads me to question whether I'm growing at all. Am I truly repeating the exact same mistakes as I was three years ago? But there's a tendency to latch on to the negatives, the similarities in plight, without recognizing the small, but significant differences.

In 2008, I had written a little "vision statement" for where I wanted to see myself heading in the future. It was originally intended for this blog, but I'd moved it to the journal instead, because I was worried it would be a little too sensitive for people who may have felt "involved" in the birth of that vision. I think enough time has passed that I can post it here:

There are ways in which I wish I were more capable.

I wish I had the discipline and motivation to drive my career toward productive ends.
I wish I had the wisdom and restraint to not engage in commitments that I cannot keep.
I wish I could be a hero.
I wish I would realize that being a hero is a commitment I cannot keep.
I wish I could decide to focus on exercise, and it would last longer than a week.
I wish I could learn to keep promises to myself.
I wish I would never cause anyone pain ever again, myself included.
I wish I would set for myself more realistic wishes.

When I look at this now, I realize that I've grown a lot more than I thought. Certainly, I experience many of the same feelings and fears as I did three years ago. And certainly I have made some of the same mistakes. But when I look at the list above, I realize that, by and large, I have achieved every one of these goals. But the unrealistic wishes that I had then, to some extent, still persist as an Achilles' heel for me. I still battle with wanting to be a hero. I still labor over the fear of being hurt, or hurting, in such fashion so as to render me rather risk-averse.

It's a good thing to see that I set these goals for myself three years ago. Going back and reading it in a journal is a helpful way to realize who I was, who I am, what's changed. And it serves as a reminder of the direction I've set for myself. Definitely something I would recommend to everyone.

I've got a ways to go. But it's getting better.

How surfing is like dating

2011-10-06T18:59:00.000-07:00

I was sitting on lava rocks, in Kona, at a beach named "Magic Sands," watching the surfers on the water in front of me. I was on my cell phone having a conversation about relationships. And suddenly, the combination of the conversation and the visuals in front of me, brought about the following metaphor:

Surfing is a lot like (online) dating.

I add the term "online" in parentheses because I think it is probably a nearly obligatory modifier.

So, how does it work?

Simple. Let me explain. You sign up for an online dating site, and you've essentially grabbed your surfboard and decided to enter the water. Easy enough, right? And then, you watch and wait. For something with potential to come along. Sometimes there's nothing. Sometimes there's plenty. Finally, a wave comes along that looks like a good one, so you decide you're gonna have a go at it. Of course, one of the most critical things, no matter how good the wave is, is that you need to time it right, and use the proper technique for picking up the wave. Sound familiar? Much the same as online dating, where you need to read that wave, and start off with the right kind of communication, or else you never even get a date.

So, getting a date is sort of like standing up on your board and starting to ride the wave.

What happens next, of course, is completely unpredictable. Sometimes the wave disintegrates immediately, and you fall right off your board. Sometimes the wave gets too big too fast, and swallows you. That's like when you discover on the first date, or shortly thereafter, that it's not what you had hoped, and you either abort, or get tossed. Or sometimes people come on too strong, and it's necessary to run away.

Occasionally, you get off to a good start, and you're on that wave, reading the changes in it, and feeling like everything's completely under control. That would be "steady dating." Even then, sudden twists and turns, or missteps, or interference from other currents in the water throw you off sooner than you might have expected. The failed relationship.

Rarely, almost never, you ride that perfect wave, handling every nuance of it, and eventually find yourself still standing, well clear of the surge, and coasting gently to shore. Ah, commitment.

Much like surfing, you usually take on plenty of waves of highly-varying quality and duration before finding that one that takes you home. The metaphor breaks down for me a little bit when I think about the fact that there are various ways to leave the game of surfing. You could get injured. You could have so many bad waves that you finally decide to leave the water on a less-than-optimal note. Conversely, one could be so obsessed with the novelty and rush of every unique wave that comes along, that you never want to leave the water.

Do we have the capacity to know when we're on the most awesome wave we're ever going to see? Or is it only in hindsight that we look back and think about an amazing wave, perhaps idealizing it to have been bigger, and more perfect than perhaps it actually was?

I do not know.

THE GAP in quality... the price of fleeting fashion

2011-09-27T01:48:00.000-07:00

Let me start with a disclaimer. I have not done everything according to "the books" in the story I am about to relate. Nonetheless, I feel that the experience I had does not reflect exemplary customer service. In the end, I have decided that the keyboard may not be mightier than any figurative sword, but it's about all I've got left.

For Christmas, I received a very nice blue and black flannel from THE GAP. The shirt was a medium, and it barely fit before washing. After a few weeks' delay (due to my schedule), I managed to make it into the Downtown Seattle location of THE GAP to try to exchange the shirt for a large. They did not have a large in stock there, but said they'd be happy to have the shirt held at another location. Just to be sure, I tried on a large of a very similar (but not the same) flannel that they had in stock, and it seemed to be a perfect fit.

A few days later, I went to the Redmond location of THE GAP and picked up the large shirt they had held for me. MISTAKE #1 that I made was that I did not try on the shirt before taking it home. I was in a hurry and, since I had already tried a large of a similar flannel, assumed it would be perfect. When I got home, sure enough, the shirt did not fit. It was absolutely huge, and it also had a weird variation in how the top button was latched, which differed from the medium of the same exact product code. Odd.

MISTAKE #2 is that my schedule resulted in me not managing to make it back to THE GAP to exchange this oversized shirt until the first week of March. MISTAKE #3 is that I did not have a gift receipt. Thus, when I went to the Downtown Seattle store to exchange, they informed me that they no longer were stocking this shirt, because it had gone out of season. As a result, in the absence of receipts, they could only credit me the old-stock price of $29 (the original price of the shirt was $54). Grudgingly, I purchased another shirt from THE GAP, that was currently in style, for $54. At this point, I am now down $29, but such is life, and such is the penalty for making a few mistakes, and taking too long to handle an exchange.

The new shirt is a gray, Western-style shirt with metal snaps that have white overlays affixed to the metal snaps. Very cool looking shirt. I wear it once, and one of the white overlays falls off in the washing machine.This surprised me a bit. There was nothing that said the shirt was dry-clean only. Nonetheless, I grabbed my Super Glue, and reattached the overlay. I wear the shirt a second time and, while wearing it, a different button falls off the shirt while I'm just sitting doing nothing. At this point, I decide that I should really return this shirt.

MISTAKE #4 is that I probably waited a month from the time that the second button falls off the shirt before I get around to going back the Downtown Seattle location of THE GAP. When I go to my closet to grab the shirt, I notice that yet another button has fallen off the shirt, and the overlay piece is just sitting on the floor of my closet! It fell off the shirt while I wasn't even wearing it! I bring the shirt and the two missing buttons into THE GAP. They ask me if I have a receipt, which I do not. They tell me that I can only exchange the shirt for the old-stock value of $29 because it is now out of season (it's summer by this time). At this point, I am not happy, but I very politely explain my lengthy story, and they call the manager over to speak with me. The manager tries to make it right. She agrees that this is messed up. The solution is that she will order a replacement of the shirt from the warehouse, at no charge, and she will also give me a gift card for $20, which brings me almost back to Even Steven on the entire amount that I am into clothing from THE GAP (including the original loss of $29 from the first round, minus $9 difference).

I feel like this is a victory.

But alas, it's not that easy...

A week or so later, I receive a package from THE GAP. I leave it on the kitchen table for a few days because, at this point, I am not particularly excited anymore about anything from THE GAP, and I've learned to expect the worst.

Finally, I open the package.

The replacement shirt is missing two button overlays. And they're not even in the damn bag! They actually sent me a shirt that was missing buttons straight from the factory!

Back to THE GAP. This time, it's September, and I'm at the University Village location. I tell the manager my story. She tells me that it has really been too long, and they've really done all they can do. She understands my frustration. The solution this time, which is not entirely satisfactory, is that she refunds me another $6 (a discount on the defective shirt), and suggests that I try gluing the two buttons (from the original version of this shirt) onto the missing spots on the replacement shirt. I agree, because I realize I'm not going to get a better solution than this. And, fool that I am, I spent another $60 dollars on more clothing! I'm a glutton for punishment, right? Or a devoted customer... you be the judge.

I am pretty sure that it won't be long before more buttons fall off the shirt, and then I'm probably going to have to just suck it up and realize that clothing from THE GAP is not meant to last more than a few wearings. Further case in point, which is one that I have not even bothered to raise during my visits, is the fact that I have a quarter-sized hole in the back pocket of a pair of 1969 jeans that are less than 2 years old, and have probably only been washed 15 or 20 times. Contrast that with Levi's that I've had for a decade and have no rips, and I just have to believe THE GAP clothing is made to not last.

The staff at THE GAP have been nice. They've never been rude to me. They agree the quality should be better than it is. But I don't feel particularly satisfied with my Christmas Gift Experience... it ended up requiring multiple visits to multiple store locations, only to end up nearly even, but with a slightly defective shirt.

Here's to finding out if THE GAP searches the blogs for customer stories...

Moments: Red Truck (1/30/2006)

2011-09-12T18:07:00.000-07:00

Forty days and forty nights.

Looking out the window again. The red pickup truck is still there. The rain is still falling. Did Seattle deserve a great flood, or what? I wonder, will the red truck move before tomorrow? The view being the same, it's sort of like reliving yesterday. Steel-gray sky. Whatever. Maybe should think about better words to describe the sky. The red truck (again) catches my eye, as it's the only - well, almost the only - bright-colored object in view. And, as red trucks go, it's pretty drab, at that. Rusted-out near the wheel wells, paint faded. Almost an orangey-red. Could be a Ford. Or a Dodge, or a Chevy. But that's not my specialty so, without further investigation, I'm just guessing.

So, I lied about the brilliant colors. The building behind the red truck has a reasonably bright-blue roof. That's something, right? The neighbors have a bright-yellow milk crate in their backyard, amidst an otherwise brownish-grayish yardscape.

I don't know what I'm expecting to see out there. Perhaps this is just a realization that urban-world or, for that matter, any-world, is not particularly colorful. I mean, this isn't the tropics. Yet, I am still focused on the lack of color.

An orangey-brown flower pot is near the yellow crate. Large pot. Didn't see it until I moved closer to the window. Green barbecue cover, too. Saw that, but didn't think it warranted mentioning.

What am I looking for? I don't know. Maybe I should stop looking. But probably it's better to keep examining this landscape until it looks like home, instead of a holding pen.

Moments: From My Window (1/29/2006)

2011-09-12T17:59:00.000-07:00

The sky is steel-gray, or maybe it's lighter than that. I can't really picture steel. Call it brushed aluminum, then, I guess. But from here, I'm trying to appreciate this view that I never particularly asked for. But looking on the bright side, as I now am, I can see what is one of the islands or hills or whatever. Seattle has so many of them. Who can keep track? Maybe it's Magnolia. It's definitely not Mercer. That much, I've learned. The beautiful power plant sits off to the left of the plane. Why does anyone ever get stuck with a power plant near their home? Seems like this junk could go underground or on some platform in the ocean.

Large black dog is led down 8th by a woman in a scarf. The dog was gigantic... wolf-sized. Or maybe the girl was tiny? This is not pleasing me, but I'm losing the moment, so let's bring it back. Out the window. A chimney sticks up straight ahead. I can sight along the sharp 50 degree angle of the roof that holds it. Moss covered on the north edge, but clean on its south side. Weird how just a few inches is the difference between moss and not. A few inches, distinguishing a favorable environment from a tundra. Is the light really that different between those two spots? The moss knows.

I still can't see why this view is special. It's expansive, but everything in my line of sight is drab. Too low to really see the mountains. I've always come by this neighborhood from above, and thought that to the west was a somewhat stark or barren or industrial-looking landscape. But now it's my view, so I guess I'd better start seeing the beauty in it.

No eagles to spare

2011-08-03T13:36:00.000-07:00

I come from New England, where the largest bird you typically see is a seagull, which can hardly be called a bird. In fact, we used to refer to them as "rats with wings" because they're noisy, vile, and a generally aggressive nuisance.

When I ventured outside my tiny bubble, I discovered that there were some amazing birds of prey out and about everywhere in the country. Notably, sightings of hawks is commonplace, especially when driving on the interstate highways. It is always mesmerizing to look up and see those giant wings circling and watching the ground for some small movement. Hard to believe that relevant stimuli could be detected from hundreds of feet above the ground. One of the many ways (besides the obvious capacity for flight) that birds are amazing in ways that we simply can't comprehend.

But it was only when I came to Seattle that I encountered the Bald Eagle.

Weird that the symbol for our nation is something that can only be seen if one is lucky. Why isn't our national bird the pigeon, or the sparrow or, even better, the crow?

But it was in Seattle that I first saw an eagle. And under the strangest of circumstances (to me at the time). One day, in the Maple Leaf neighborhood, there was a giant ruckus outside. Crows were going insane, squawking and flying everywhere. I had no idea what could be the reason for their madness. Then I saw it. They were chasing a giant bird, a bald eagle, that looked as if it were 3-4 times as large as any of them (and the crow is not exactly a small bird). They were chasing it, and it was fleeing, but not really fleeing in fear. It was sort of just flying about, impervious to them. I was later told that the eagle was likely trying to raid the crows' nests. What was happening was a collective effort by the crows to essentially "harass" the eagle until it became not worth its while to keep trying. It was an amazing sight to see.

For a long time, that was the only time I'd ever witnessed an eagle.

Then, one day, driving along SR520, a necessary but rather miserable excuse for a "highway" that we have in the Seattle area, I look up, and I see a bald eagle just sitting there atop a highway streetlight. Immense. Awe-inspiring. I don't know how it didn't cause daily wrecks, with people rubber-necking to see this breathtaking animal.

I figured it was a once-in-a-lifetime observation. But it turned out, it was not. Time and time again, I would see the eagle, perched on the same post. This was part of its territory. This was clearly one of the places that he wanted to be. And it felt neat to think that a completely man-made object, a streetlight, had become a lookout point for one of the most awesome predators on our planet.

Just last week, I was crossing the bridge, and I saw him eating some sort of kill up there. Maybe a rodent. Maybe a fish. Maybe a small bird. Who knows?

And that's the last time we'll ever see him.

This week, the eagle was struck and killed by a vehicle at that very same location. It had swooped down to the road to get at some roadkill that was ripe for the picking. And it was hit. And it died.

From the article, I learned that the eagle was part of a nesting pair that had been living at a nearby golf course. All I can think about is that eagles are scarce enough that, if you lose half the nesting pair, there isn't going to be another male to come along and take up the vacancy. So the death of the male is tantamount to the death of the breeding pair. And who knows if the young they had stand a chance of thriving to replace their parents?

Just like that, the metal machines that we love so much bring us one step closer to eradicating completely irreplaceable pieces of our natural world.

It's tempting to level all kinds of hatred at the imagined driver of whatever vehicle committed the act... "I'll bet they didn't even slow down" or "I'm sure it was probably some giant, ridiculous SUV" or "They probably don't even care that they hit 'a bird'"... but the reality is, it was almost certainly a horrible accident. And the person whose vehicle hit the eagle probably had no chance of stopping. And they probably feel utterly miserable.

There are just too many of us, and too much of our toys and machinery, to avoid these inevitable erasures.

The Bald Eagle is a few ticks closer to extinction on the evolutionary clock. And it was the saddest news I've heard in a long, long time.

Conspiracy Theory #131: MENSA Sarah P

2011-07-20T20:00:00.000-07:00

Sarah Palin? Michele Bachmann?

Look at the things they've said... the views they espouse... the massive gaffes, and seemingly shameless manner in which they recover from them. The only possible explanation is that it's all an act. The American people, on average, are of below average intelligence. And people like people who are like them. So if you get up there and act like a world-class moron, people will like you. They feel comfortable. They can relate. And what's even better? When the "liberal elite" start pointing out all the ways in which these folks are wrong, it just makes them look stodgy, intolerant, and overly perfectionist. And that strengthens the bond with these caricatures even further.

So I say: Good job, Sarah. Good job, Michele. You've got everyone fooled.

Netflix, Conjoint Analysis, Market Simulation, Voila!

2011-07-19T15:18:00.000-07:00

I just took a market research course last week learning about a method called Conjoint Analysis. Basically, it goes like this: Any product or service is comprised of a series of attributes ("features"). Each of these attributes could possess any number of levels ("options"). For example, if you're talking about cars, the attributes might be "brand", "price", "fuel efficiency", "number of doors", "sound system", "type of loan", etc. Each of those attributes has a variety of possibilities... Toyota, Honda, VW... 35mpg, 40mpg, 25mpg... 2 doors, 4 doors, hatchback... and so on. In conjoint analysis, you do a survey where users are presented a series of random combinations of different levels of each attribute, and people pick the best one of each series. If you analyze all the data from a bunch of survey respondents, you will end up having an estimate of the relative importance of all the attributes. For instance, you might find that price is the most important thing for people deciding about what car to buy, followed by brand, and that sound system doesn't really influence their choices much, in comparison.

After you've done a conjoint, you can then do a market simulation. In this process, you can identify a series of hypothetical (or real) products that combine these attributes in specific ways. And you can predict what market share each product would achieve (all other things being equal). For instance, I might determine that a new version of a Toyota Camry that gets 40mpg instead of 30mpg would gain 10% market share over competitors, all else being equal, even though it raises the price of the car by $500 to produce.

So where am I going with all this?

I thought about Netflix recent price hike. And then I thought about the competition. There's really no viable competitor to Netflix right now. A nice article in the Huffington Post summarizes the options. The conclusion is that nothing touches Netflix. And not only does nothing touch Netflix at $9.99/month, nothing touches them at $15.98/month (and probably not even at $19.99/month). If you were to do a conjoint analysis on movie service options, and then consider the market share (and resultant revenue) for a hypothetically more expensive Netflix offering, what you'd undoubtedly find is that a) for modest price increases, there will be no loss of market share, and b) for even sizable price increases, the loss of market share (either to competitors or drop-out) pales in comparison to the increased revenue that results from the elevated pricing.

Tranlation: Even if Netflix lost a quarter of their customers due to these hikes (which is highly doubtful), they'll still probably increase their revenue by 10-20% (if not more).

If Netflix wants to buy back the karma, the slam dunk would be to increase the availability of titles for their streaming service (which is already pretty good, but could be better). Perhaps even offer specials, such as periodic offerings of newer films on the streaming service (perhaps during off-peak hours), or a pay-as-you-go streaming offer for newer movies (on top of the unlimited basic streaming plan).

Unfortunately, the more likely thing is that they're going to see how this increase flies, and if it does not have significant negative impact, and (big if) the competition doesn't step it up, then I wouldn't be surprised to see yet another rate hike in the 6-12 month time frame. And, in a capitalistic market, why shouldn't they?

Essentially what Netflix has done is to get us addicted to their product, and now start jacking up the cost. Pretty smart marketing for them. And possibly a good time to invest in Netflix, I would think.

Guitar Series: 2000 American Series Fender Telecaster

2011-07-03T16:49:00.000-07:00

Shortly after I joined the band, it became evident that I was going to be playing almost exclusively Telecasters. That's the way they wanted it, and I was inclined to go along with that wish. The only Telecaster I owned, at that time, was my 1978 (which you can see in another post in this blog). I had some qualms about gigging with that guitar, and even more qualms about touring with it, because its value is substantial (last time I had it appraised, it was about $3500). So I needed a Telecaster that I didn't mind bringing with me everywhere.

During one of my routine "see if there's anything cool today" trips to Trading Musician, I saw this guitar, shown below. Immediately, I was in awe, because it was just about the coolest guitar I had ever seen.

The color was something I'd never seen before, and the finish had an amazing antique-like appearance to it. Immediately, I knew that I had to have this guitar. It would be "the guitar". I played it with the anxiety one plays an instrument when they're looking for validation of a choice, as opposed to objectivity. The guitar *needed* to sound good, because of how it looked. And if it didn't sound good, or play correctly, it would then be a question of how much work would be required to make it right.

Here's the kicker. The price was $350. And it's an American-made (Corona series, I later discovered) instrument. It could easily have gone for much more money, but the store considered it to be devalued because of the odd paint job.

And, as if the finish on the front were not weird enough, if you look at the back of the guitar, it's got strange "artwork" embedded into the finish. It appears that it was the work of a child, actually.

I was able to determine, through searching the web, and subsequent emails, that this guitar belonged to someone in a band named Branta. Hence the "Branta <3 Sea Horses". It was kind of cool to know where it originated.

As soon as the members of the band saw and heard this guitar, it became "The Gold Standard" for Telecasters, as far as they were concerned. In fact, I was pretty much forbidden, under penalty of extensive harassment, from using any other instrument. In fact, our lead guitarist gave this guitar a nickname, "Greengo", a play on the word "Gringo", which ended up sticking. If I ever played a different guitar, the guys would say "Where's Greengo? Why aren't you playing Greengo?!"

On numerous occasions, I was approached after shows, by people from other bands or audience members, who asked me to tell them the details about this guitar. Many inquired as to the vintage, expecting to hear that it was something really old, especially supported by the apparent aged look of the instrument. Of course, all were surprised to know that it is, technically speaking, "nothing special".

Why does it sound so good?

Well, something about the pickups seems to result in a bit more clarity of individual notes than you typically hear with Telecasters. I've played many, and own three now and, when you push the drive levels with pedals or gain, Telecasters tend to get a blending of the notes of a chord. This one does the same, but not nearly as quickly. You can get a pretty biting, hot tone, and still have the distinctiveness. I've played other Corona-made Telecasters from similar vintage, and they are quite similar. So it's something about the model. I contemplated trying to acquire an identical one as a backup, but never did. Lately, it makes less sense, since I'm not performing.

I've done a little bit of work on the guitar, but mostly in the form of advanced setup. I wanted to change the string gauge to 11-52, and in order to do that, I ended up needing to make multiple adjustments; not just the usual truss rod and string height, but also needed to get into neck angle, which was a whole new bag for me. Reading instructions on the internet, I was able to do it without getting into any trouble.

The custom strap shown in the first picture is from Levy's Leathers. They make the coolest straps of anyone, and they have a wide variety.

I've had a few lucky finds, and good purchases through the years. But this one stands out as the biggest bang for any buck I've ever spent on music gear.

Lifestyles of the vapid

2011-06-08T14:16:00.000-07:00

The airport is a great place to listen to people who are completely full of it, and have nothing to say, but say something anyway.

Right now, as we speak, the guy next to me is relating, over his cell phone, the intimate details about how his rider-mower has been missing spots in his yard. Yep. It's true. When he's riding along, the right side often misses some blades of grass. He's moved onto another topic now, which has something to do with things being very clean, and moving fast, and needing to have the belts changed. I have no idea what the device is that he's discussing.

Earlier, in line for security, a doofy looking man with curly gray hair was having a conversation with a young Asian woman who was clearly his colleague. And she was also clearly under some appendage of his that must resemble a "wing" because he was imparting to her all of his words of wisdom, as she stared blankly at him, and smiled at the appropriate times, while it was evident that she was secretly wishing for a bomb threat. Can I even type "bomb threat" while sitting in an airport terminal? Could they even know? Who knows. Well, here's to finding out. At one point in the conversation, he managed to cram into a single sentence the words "best practice," "task force," "consensus," and "standardization." Seriously. The best part is that he stated "I was appointed to a best-practice task force." When you hear someone using words like that, the only thing that becomes painfully evident is that their work probably consists of nothing of any substance and that, if they happened to be kidnapped and tied up in a cabin in the woods of Vermont for, say, 4 months, there would be absolutely no disruption in the main flow of business in whatever venue he is employed.

I am sure there will be more depressing experiences to relate to you. But, for now, that's all.

Apple iPhone Unsolvable Software Problem - Home Button

2011-06-08T12:48:00.000-07:00

So you've got a problem with your iPhone?

Let me guess. Sometimes -- perhaps often -- you find that pressing the "Home" button doesn't exit you from the app you were running. In fact, on a bad day, you might find yourself pressing the "Home" button 20-30 times, every time you try to exit anything.

The standard procedures for handling "glitchy" things like this would include the following: (1) exit all apps running in the background, (2) perform a soft reset, (3) reboot the phone. Unfortunately, when the "Home" button problem is happening (which, turns out, is intermittent, and without an easily identifiable pattern), none of those typical fixes solve the issue.

The more radical procedure, of course (and the one they will typically recommend at the Genius Bar for any weirdness), is to perform a clean restore of the latest operating system, wiping your phone clean. This solves the problem... temporarily. After a few days or maybe weeks if you're lucky, the problem recurs.

For those of you who have come here, and are trying to figure out what's wrong, this is *not* a mechanical problem with the "Home" button itself. It's a software problem where the OS is not responding to the activation of the button. This was confirmed by the people at the Genius Bar.

And that brings me to the Genius Bar... I waited a couple of hours to speak to someone at the Genius Bar last month. What I learned was the following: (1) It is, in fact, a software problem, (2) Apple is, in fact, aware of it, (3) There was not (as of a few weeks ago) any solution, (4) This is a very common problem (the Genius Bar representative said that he, as well as most of his friends, are suffering the same problem), and (5) Apple will be happy to replace my phone, but in all likelihood, the new one will develop the same problem.

He also implied that he had the impression that Apple considers this to be an urgent problem.

So, with that... a few complaints for you folks at Apple.

First, I'm disappointed that there's such a major experience glitch, affecting large numbers of users, out there in the wild. Hard to believe that not enough testing was done to avoid such things.

Second, I'm surprised that Apple did not have a "Get Out Of Jail" approach for reverting back to an operating system on which the problem would not occur (this issue spontaneously started shortly after, I think, the 4.2 iOS (give or take a minor release).

Finally, shame on Apple for not even making a press announcement that they're having issues that are affecting customers. If you call Apple Support, their line is that they have not heard of such a problem. That's in conflict with what was said in the Genius Bar. So Apple clearly has an "official story" that they're sticking to, save for the staff who are going rogue and telling customers the truth.

Needing to press the "Home" button 20-30 times is more than a minor inconvenience. It's absolutely ridiculous. I am walking around with what is arguably one of the most technologically impressive mainstream consumer products ever produced. And it's flawed.

I expect a little more from Apple.

Hey! Can I get some bass?

2011-05-28T13:46:00.000-07:00

The long process of emerging from a musical funk took a baby step forward today.

For weeks, I've been thinking, vaguely, that I should get my bass back into a condition where it could be played easily. It's a 2000 USA Fender Jazz Bass, and I've barely ever played it because I'm primarily a guitarist. But if you want to do home recording, you need a bass. This one seems to have drifted, through the years, into a state of having very high action. And I can't afford to have any hindrances to my already lacking bass-playing ability. So I've been contemplating learning how to set up a bass guitar. I've done plenty of set ups on regular guitars, including some more bold adjustments such as neck angle. And I've become reasonably comfortable that I can get myself through whatever adjustment is needed; at least on an electric guitar. I don't feel nearly as comfortable with acoustics unless it's just bridge height.

So, after pondering for weeks, I finally got down to it today and, in less than 20 minutes, I've got myself a bass that plays as well as you could possibly want.

This has been a long process, that of emerging from a year-long musical funk. I am still not completely out of it yet, but there's been a gradual shift. For about 9 months, I hardly touched a guitar. Probably didn't even play for an hour in that entire time. For some reason, every time that I did touch a guitar, I felt like nothing that came out of my hands was worth playing. It all felt trite, and pointless. Then, about a month ago, I dropped the tuning on one of my Stratocasters (a mint-green Mexican model, that just happens to play very well) into open-D tuning and, suddenly, the "player's block" seemed to be lifted away. Something about being in a tuning where I have only spent a little time seems to free me from the feelings of triteness (I have always had a dabbling interest, due to guitarists like Keith Richards and Michael Gurley (of dada), each of whom have used a little bit of this tuning -- though, as you surely know, Keith is much more of an open-G player). It's like forcing your brain to get out of the automatic patterns because even just playing a simple 1-4-5 progressing is, not difficult, but different than what you always do. Eventually, you discover that new patterns make more sense in the different tuning. And that new rhythms reveal themselves when you're in fresh snow.

So these have been two steps in the reemergence. First, playing again. Second, getting the gear ready.

I can't say what will come of it, but I feel like the one certainty is that it has to come from the fresh snow.

Kill your facebook

2011-04-28T19:42:00.000-07:00

Today marks the end of the social networking experiment for me. Not that it was ever an experiment. It was just a huge time sink, into which I could dump countless hours of each day, with nothing to show for it. I don't think I could even estimate how much mental bandwidth I have actually spent there, because it doesn't often come in giant blocks. It's something that I would go to over and over, obsessively. And part of the reason that it has become so viral in my life was not just because of the main showroom that is my "wall," but because of other things that may not look like facebook, but actually are.

Examples: Scrabble, Bejeweled Blitz.

Who knows what other thing will occupy my mind, my check-out time, my available space. I really don't know. But it's not going to be the social network. I've heard of others getting out, and it has always sounded interesting and compelling to me. But then I think about what I'm going to miss. I think about the posts I won't be able to make, or the photos I won't be able to view at leisure. And then I go to the next level of absurdity, and think about my Scrabble rating! My Scrabble rating! Yes. As if that is a real "thing." And I know it's a bit hypocritical for me to talk about how it may not be a real thing, when only yesterday, I was pointing out how I didn't want to play nice with one of my opponents, because I didn't want to risk hurting my rating.

But that's just the point. My level of dissociation from reality has gone to the point that I buy my own lies.

There are many reasons why I shut it down. And I don't feel compelled to share them all here. One thing that does bother me is that facebook, which is honestly nobody I trust (the entity that is facebook, I mean), has the rights to my entire personal life. They know everything about me. It's all in their database. I told them everything. And then I spilled it all via emails, and wall posts, to people I know, and people I barely know. My inappropriate asides, through the years, are also probably captured in some fragment of the many billions of petabytes of data that facebook is sitting on.

I don't delude myself for one second that shutting down my account makes any of that go away. It's there. The damage is done. Facebook has the rights to my story. I clicked some checkbox somewhere that said it was okay for them to do whatever they wanted with the information. And why? Why do we check the checkbox? Because we want to see a cool feature, or see the results from some inane quiz that we took. Our momentary curiosity is our justification for signing it all away.

So, then, what good does it do for me to delete my account, if it's all out there already?

I don't know that it does any good for the integrity of my private factbook (not a typo). But it creates space in my present life to do things that are not plugged in to the Borg network. I don't know yet what I'll do with the time that I don't play Scrabble. I may write in here, and other places more. I may work more. I may listen to more podcasts, which I've recently taken a great liking to. I may play more music. I may sit and stare at nothing.

Who knows.

But I only know that I won't be contributing to the database.

Blogger with lost voice

2011-04-24T17:22:00.000-07:00

Lately, I've been suffering from a feeling that nothing I could write is worth saying.

I recognize fully that this is not the first thing I want someone to see when they happen upon this blog, because it is not going to do much good for my readership. Perhaps this will be my way of boxing myself into writing more entries, to push this down the page, replacing it with insightful pithy observations about the world.

It's strange, because there are have been times in my life where I have not been writing, because I've been down, and have not felt like expressing myself. That hasn't been the case lately. If anything, life has been going very well. But it seems like the creative voice in me is muffled, or perhaps being smothered under a big fluffy pillow called "Life." And I have mixed feelings about what that means in the long run. Would I forever trade my creative self for a happy self? I'm conflicted.

In the last year, I've started three other blogs. Each of them came with the expectation that it was a new, "special" project. One that had a cause. One that I would diligently update. Because there was a cause, and there would be a readership. Great ideas, one and all. But I didn't stick with them. They're also sitting there, languishing. So now I feel like I've got four creative endeavors, instead of only one. All of them in stagnation.

Clearly the problem right now is an inner-critic problem. I've written entries that I've deleted or saved without posting. I've had ideas that later get dismissed as "not worthy."

I don't know whether to push forward with some "Blog-A-Day" rule for myself, hoping that sheer brute force will get me through this colossal writer's block. Or if I should accept that I'm not there right now, and wait. Because I don't want to write shitty blogs.

Something tells me I need to not worry about whether they're good or not. Just write.

Starting now.

Smash the guitars

2011-04-24T16:09:00.001-07:00

It has been almost 10 months since the last time I stepped on a stage.

And in the time that has passed since, I've probably held a guitar in my hands for fewer total minutes than I did during just that last show alone, which happened to be a Marathon two-hour set on the back of a flatbed truck, in my final show with my former band.

What's happened to me musically in the aftermath could best be described as similar to when someone goes through a really bad breakup (though, oddly, I tend to recover/rebound from those quite readily). I have pretty much stopped feeling like a musician. And I am not sure I'll ever be again, if for no other reason than the psychological obstacles I've created for myself.

I had a good situation in my former band. It was essentially the fulfillment of my musical dreams. I couldn't have dreamed of doing more, because it would have been pipe dreams. But after doing it for two years, I have come to realize in retrospect, my commitment to the effort waned. In fact, it would be fairer to say that the commitment gradually eroded over the course of the second year, and culminated with my being let go after violating just about every rule you don't violate if you're trying to make people feel that you're part of the team.

I stopped hanging out with the guys after practices.
I stopped riding to shows in the van, instead driving separately.
I invited others (girlfriends) into the private circle of the band, at the expense of having band bonding time.
I stopped hanging out at the shows, opting to isolate myself and occupy my time until or after we played.
I was reluctant to take vacation time to travel with the band.
When I did travel with the band, I would often travel separately, meeting up with them, causing inconvenience.
I was routinely late for rehearsal.
I waffled on my commitments to the band, when those things were in competition with other commitments, such as relationships or work.

I left my bandmates to drive themselves home, intoxicated, when I was sober.

That last one hurts the most. And I am not even sure if I got "dinged" for it directly. I'm not sure that it was even one of the reasons for my dismissal. But when I did it (it was a show in Tacoma and I'd driven separately), I knew that it was the wrong thing to do. It felt like I was abandoning them. And I rationalized to myself that it wasn't my responsibility to drive them home because they didn't stay sober. But the fact is, it was my responsibility. Because I was a member of the band. Leaving, in a sense, meant that I was *not* a member of the band. That was maybe a week before the whole thing came to an end.

I really don't think anybody was keeping score on all of these things. In hindsight, I've had a lot of hours and months to add up this score, and realize my accountability for crafting the outcome which resulted. But I think the reason that things went as they did is because I just didn't have the desire to be as committed as one needs to be, to be in a band that's trying to get stuff done. In the end, I was "phoning it in." And I didn't even realize it, because I was more absorbed in the other things in my life. I did, however, know that phone-ins were one of the things that were least respected and least tolerated by the The-Band-Powers-That-Be, and rightfully so.

So now, I'm living my life, minus music. I own some fifteen guitars, and hardly play any of them. I've pretty much decided that I don't want to go back to playing in a band again, because I've been there, done that, and literally, got the t-shirt. Though, the largest reason why I don't see myself going back to it is that, once you've had a really good opportunity, such as the one I had, it would be hard to go back to some crappy bottom-tier band that would be lucky to get a show at the Blue Moon.

So the alternate plan was to try to pursue working on my own music. That's an avenue that has been barely traveled in my life, having only written a handful of songs, and a few dozen partially-completed ideas. It seems unlikely (though that's the problem with negative thinking) that I'll suddenly become prolific. Nonetheless, I decided to get myself set up for doing home recording, and purchased some reasonably-priced recording software. And then, did nothing with it. Will I ever? I don't know.

Part of me would rather just work on fun recording projects, without worrying much about writing songs. But then my inner critic gets going and tends to shut that down as well. All that leaves me sitting here on a Sunday afternoon, feeling like I should just sell all the gear. And the main reason I don't is because I'm sure I'd regret it, I don't need the money and, honestly, I just really like these guitars.

No charges in woodcarver slaying: Seattle Police above the law

2011-02-16T10:49:00.000-08:00

It's not really surprising at all, yet it still sickens me that, once again, an innocent person is not only apprehended, but shot and killed, by a police officer. And there will be no criminal charges for the assailant. The entire case has been one long charade of ignoring the obvious: a man was killed pretty much for being homeless. Because, in this city, it's a crime to be homeless.

The notion that Ian Birk, a 27 year old police officer, with a gun, in broad daylight, in a public place, "feared for his life" is just ludicrous. He made the choice to approach the victim. He could have chosen to keep a safe distance if "fear" was the emotion he was experiencing. If an elderly homeless man carving wood causes Ian Birk "fear" then perhaps he was in the wrong profession all along. Perhaps he should work at Starbucks. Although they do have hot liquids there, so maybe that would be a bit frightening as well. Maybe at a yarn store. Though, if an elderly woman came in with knitting needles, there's no telling what he would do.

I don't mean to make light of this in any way. I just find it disgusting when our legal system allows the trees to obscure the forest. Ian Birk was unhinged and gun-happy. He shot the woodcarver because somewhere in his mind, he knew he could get away with it. And the fact that he had the audacity to do it in front of witnesses only demonstrates that the Seattle Police suffer from a severe deficit in the area of screening the mental health of their officers. If, on the contrary, our city has an unspoken goal of removing certain individuals or types of individuals from our society, that's a different story altogether.

I don't have a whole lot more to say about it, beyond what others have said. I'm just putting my vote of no confidence in our law enforcement and legal system out there for the eyes and ears of whoever happens to be performing a Google search on this sad story.

Asinine violation of rights: Tacoma student sent home for wearing Steelers' shirt?

2011-01-15T21:39:00.000-08:00

Not sure if you heard about it, because it wasn't exactly national news. But in Tacoma, yesterday, a middle-school student was sent home from school for wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers' uniform shirt, on a day where students were permitted to wear their Seahawks' shirts. This was at a school where there is typically a standard dress code. For the purpose of "Seahawks' Spirit" there was an exception to this dress code.

Apparently, only Seahawks' colors were permitted.

I feel that this is a violation of this child's rights. First of all, Tacoma is not even part of Seattle, so technically the school was permitting their dress code to be broken, already, for a purpose that was unrelated to school- or city-spirit. For this student to act on his wish to show his spirit for the Pittsburgh Steelers seems completely within the realm of acceptable expression. It's especially innocuous because the Steelers were not even opposing the Seahawks, so this should not have been considered inflammatory by anyone (not that this should make any difference).

There are so many things that are important, and should be enforced in schools. And seriously, this was not one of them. It was a petty act on the part of the school administration, and the message it sends to youths is that authority is all about petty demonstrations of power.

Shame.

Windows Phone 7 supporters more fanatic than iPhone supporters

2011-01-14T10:54:00.000-08:00

Over the years, I have posted many blog entries flaming the iPhone for its various shortcomings and annoyances. The manner in which I did it was informal, crass, and impulsive. Often, after making those posts, I would later realize that I was just in a bad mood that day, and taking out my frustrations on an inanimate object. But never once did my posts about the iPhone lead to anonymous verbal assaults for my expressing opinions on here.

A few weeks ago, I decided to post a blog entry about the new Windows Phone 7. My intent was not to be inflammatory, and it was not done out of knee-jerk reaction. Actually, it was a "formal" review of my experience with the Samsung Focus. The intent of the blog was to share my experiences with others online. And part of the reason for this was because I felt that the handful of posts that were already out there on the web were completely inconsistent with the experience I was having, slanted heavily toward the "cheerleader" angle. In fact, most of what I read felt like it was written by people who had an agenda. So, I was merely trying to give a different perspective.

The result?

I've received hate mail. Some of which I've published as comments, and some of which I have omitted. People have told me that I should just not post such things like that anymore (apparently, they feel that expressing one's opinion online is something that only some people should be allowed to do). I've also received messages directly attacking me as a person. That's entertaining and, of course, says far more about the mindset of the people posting than it does about me.

I'm not sure when it became unacceptable to dislike something, and let others know about it. Would it be better if we went to sites like Yelp! and saw nothing but positive reviews of restaurants? Would it be useful if we went to Amazon.com and saw every product rated with a 5-star rating? It's true that sometimes people's reviews are colored by bias, and sometimes reviews need to be taken with a grain of salt. But it's the reader's right to decide which are which.

Tax savings = Lost revenue (or is that not obvious to you)

2011-01-07T13:46:00.000-08:00

Have a look at this website. It's one of Tim Eyman's "things."

At the bottom of the page, they spout off with great pride how they've saved Washington taxpayers over $15 billion with the three initiatives that they've passed (I-695, the $30 tabs; I-747, the 1% property tax cap; and I-776, also related to tab fees). Sounds great, huh? We've got $15 billion more in our pockets that we can use to buy shit that we don't need. You'd think that this would be good for everyone, right? Saves us all money, right? Well, the property tax initiative doesn't help anyone who doesn't own property. And the tab fee initiative saves more money for people who drive more expensive cars (who, ironically, would not be impacted in the least by the higher tab fees - if you can afford to drive a goddamn Escalade, you can pay $500 a year to keep it on the road, if nothing else than as a punishment for such an environmentally unfriendly choice). But no. That would be unfair, right? People (even rich ones) should not be penalized for the choices they make, right? Why should they carry a higher burden?

So now, over the last 8-10 years, what it all means is that we've had $15 billion less in revenue that could have been used for getting things done in this state that we can't afford to get done. I wonder how many services were cut? Aid to homeless? Elderly? Health care? Education? Road maintenance? I wonder how much you could do with $15 billion dollars?

But we should be thankful, because Tim Eyman and company gave it back to the taxpayers.

Thank you, Tim.

Legislative accountability? Or getting things right? Which is more important?

2011-01-07T13:34:00.000-08:00

Tim Eyman (along with a couple of independent groups) is going to fight the tolls being imposed on SR-520. The grounds for the battle are that the recently passed Initiative 1053 dictates that any new "fees" be voted on by the legislature. The proposed toll, Eyman argues, is a fee (I'd prefer to call it a "tax" but we're splitting hairs). Therefore, the Transportation Commission should not have the power to impose the toll on their own.

It's an interesting quandary, actually. For starters, I am not a fan of Tim Eyman. I don't understand why he's so popular, except for the fact that he repeatedly promises people they'll pay less if they support his initiatives and, since people are inherently selfish, they find his ideas appealing. I also am not entirely sure why he bounced back so gloriously from the illegal activities he engaged in previously (diverting money to himself from funds raised). But there you have it with Eyman.

The thing that is interesting to me is that I see his point here. Why should taxes be imposed with no vote? There are a few reasons for this: (1) The will of the people is not considered (I'll come back to that one), and (2) Our legislature gets to skip-out on accountability for such taxes.

The second item above is the one that bothers me. The legislators obviously know that to fund the SR-520 project, we either need to raise taxes (somewhere, e.g. toll imposition) or cut elsewhere in the budget (I don't think state governments have the same luxury of running massive deficits like the federal government does). The legislators who would oppose the toll would anger people whose services are ultimately cut. Conversely, the legislators who favor the toll would anger people who don't want to pay a toll. One can argue that they should at least have to take a stance, and not think purely about their next election bid.

The first item... well, that's one over which we can have a philosophical argument from now until the end of time. The question really is: Should we honor the will of the people, regardless of whether people know what's best for them or not? I'm not calling the average voter stupid. But I do think the average voter (often, myself included) thinks short-term and in their own self-interest. The beauty of democracy is that the will of the people is upheld. But the seedy underbelly of democracy is also just that: the will of the people is upheld.

People would call me socialistic, if I assert that it's better for a Commission to decide what must be done, for the good of all. But perhaps that's what is needed. At the federal level, the will of the people is required in every budget decision (with the exception of certain military appropriations, in case of emergency). However, some decisions are handled by the courts. A commission, is not unlike a court, but it's operating around a territory that overlaps with legislative areas. That's not that much different from the way that ballot initiatives are now overlapping with decisions that would typically be made by the courts (i.e. gay marriage, assisted suicide, etc.). We do not run our government in absolutes division of responsibility. There is crosstalk between branches. I'm not exactly sure what branch of the "government" the Transportation Commission belongs to? I am guessing it's probably Executive? Or is it not even part of the government? I'm out of my depth here.

The right thing to do here, given the situation we have, is to impose the toll. As I said below, I'd rather see the toll go on I-90 and SR-520, or for them to at least act quickly to toll I-90 if it clearly becomes a traffic nightmare. But it does bother me a little bit that our legislature doesn't have any accountability in this decision (as of yet).

Of course, if you want to know what I think would have really been the right thing to do, it would have been the damn income tax. Given that Washington has the single most regressive tax policy in the entire country (yet we're supposedly a liberal state), I think it should have been a no-brainer. And it should definitely have not appeared as a ballot initiative, for the reasons I mentioned above.

I guess we're back to me sounding like a socialist again.

Tim Eyman may actually be right this time

2011-01-06T23:11:00.001-08:00

For the most part, I have considered Eyman to be a villain. An enemy of infrastructure, who seeks to work every angle to make sure that the state is strangled for funds. That's been my general attitude. But, on one particular topic, I think he may be correct.

The proposed tolls for SR-520 were to be imposed by the Transportation Commission. These are not elected officials. They are appointed officials. Given that a toll is a type of fee, the recent initiative (1053, penned by Eyman) would require that the legislature vote on all fee increases. He's now arguing, therefore, that the toll must be approved by the legislature. And he's probably going to be successful in making sure that it does go to a vote. Unfortunately, political pressure on members of the legislature will make it very unpopular for them to vote in favor of the toll. If the toll is rejected, then there will be a shortfall of funding in the state. How will they make up the gap? Probably, they'll have to make cuts in the budget, unless they run a deficit (which I'm not even sure the state is allowed to do, right?).

So, this would be bad, right? We need that toll! Or else we can't balance the budget and get the necessary projects completed.

True. But I think that what Eyman's initiative does is to force the members of the legislature to take a stance on what they support or do not support. They'd all be happy to sit "Mum" while the Commission imposes the tax, because then nobody's hands are dirty with making people pay more.

But wait! There's more... Seattle building largest tunnel ever!

2011-01-06T22:03:00.000-08:00

If there's one thing you can be sure of, it's that any major project that the City of Seattle attempts to launch will experience all of the following: (1) It will encounter major efforts, via ballot initiatives, to block it from happening, (2) It will cost far more than estimated, and (3) It will likely create a massive disaster, and not turn out as planned.

The latest? The Alaskan Way Viaduct which, in truth, could crumble at the slightest shaking of the soft earth on which it resides, is going to be replaced. Rather than replace it with something that sounds conservative, such as, perhaps, another elevated roadway adjacent to the current one, they're going to dig under the ground. They're going to make the largest tunnel ever built. Fifty-seven feet in diameter. Everyone has always talked about how Seattle has the problem of most of downtown being built on landfill. But I guess they've got that all figured out. Actually, it doesn't really matter if they've got it figured out or not. Because, if shit goes wrong, they'll just keep paying the contractor, and the bill will go to the taxpayer.

I'm not opposed to infrastructure improvements. In fact, I am all for them. But I'm opposed to the obvious idiotic approach that this state seems to take, regarding all attempted improvements. They don't want to do small things to make our system better. They want to do big things. And they don't care if they do them well. They just need to be big. I suppose I should be grateful that, after living here 10 years, during which time there was nary an improvement to infrastructure, except for the start of the light rail system (which is a good thing, but it's too little, too late), they're finally taking on big projects. But what's it going to look like for the next five years while all this is happening? We're already looking at one diversion disaster with 520 traffic jumping over to 90. And one can imagine that there will be an overlapping period where 99 traffic will be jumping over to 5 (especially since, if you read the fine print, they're going to put a toll on the new 99 tunnel). The other thing that doesn't make much sense to me about this project is that they want to increase volume on this stretch of road, compared to the viaduct. But I don't see what good that will do, when you've got cramped two-lane roadways north and south of the viaduct, with odd exit-ramp setups. It's like replacing one section in a chain of Crazy Straws with a toilet paper roll, and thinking you can drink faster.

Anyway.

I know this is a rambling blog entry. And I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth. And you can't have it both ways. And I suppose it's better late than never. I'd just like to think that if someone moves to Seattle in 2017, and looks at the transit system: a new 520 bridge, a new 99, a light rail system that runs from North Seattle all the way to the Airport, perhaps they'll think "This is a city that got its act together."

We'll see.

Seattle 520 bridge construction promises more bad transit decisions

2010-12-28T11:33:00.000-08:00

For years, they've been talking about "fixing" the situation with SR-520, the "highway" that serves as one of the two commute paths across Lake Washington, connecting the Eastside to Seattle. Every time it appears in the news, I imagine the horror that is going to occur when that road goes under construction. But it fades from the news, and I forget for a little while.

This week, I was reminded once again that the tolls (Phase 1 of the insanity that will ensue) will commence in a few months. Even though major construction will not start for some time after that, the tolling is going to immediately disrupt the tenuous excuse for an "equilibrium" that currently keeps traffic at a manageable level. After much debate and deliberation, it appears that they have decided to only put a toll on SR-520 itself, and not charge drivers who go across I-90, located a few miles south. Makes sense, right? We should only make those who use the road pay for its improvement.

I'm hoping that you can detect the sarcasm in that assertion.

Apparently, those who make the decisions about such things must prefer checkers over chess, because they're clearly not in the business of thinking more than one step ahead. It does not require a doctorate in statistical analysis or civil engineering, or even a college education to know that if you only tax (I mean, toll) one of the two bridges across the lake, it will result in a percentage of traffic diverting to the other bridge to avoid the toll. On the surface (again, only one move ahead) you might think this is a good thing, because SR-520 traffic tends to be a bit worse on a daily basis than I-90. Fair, right? But if that flux of cars avoiding SR-520 is great enough, it will lead to a traffic nightmare on I-90. There are already issues with that road due to its lane arrangement, with frequent backups passing through Mercer Island, even when traffic would otherwise be moderate or light. If you throw 20% more load into that system, it is probably going to break. Similarly, the I-90/I-405 interchange is extremely poorly designed, with on-ramp and off-ramp positions too close together, resulting in unnecessary backups every day, even in light traffic, just trying to sort out the cars who are getting on the highway from those getting off the highway. If you add 20% more traffic, it will have a dramatic impact on those bottlenecks first.

I'm not even considering the fact that the construction itself (as it always does) will cause rubber-necking pandemonium on SR-520, likely nullifying the hypothesized speed-up of traffic due to imposing of tolls. In fact, maybe they are thinking 2 moves ahead. Maybe they know that SR-520 is going to be nuts, and they're trying to dump traffic onto I-90 just to keep things balanced. But if that's the case, they should not be touting expected increases in travel speed by imposing tolls. They should come out and say "For 2 years, it's going to be the worst imaginable nightmare. We know it. And the only thing we can do is try to distribute it evenly, so we're putting a toll on SR-520 to get the cars off that road." At least that would demonstrate some integrity. But politicians who make decisions don't like to make unpopular statements. They'd rather live now and pay later. One thing politicians are good are is apologizing and informing the public that said circumstances were unforeseen.

The last part of my rant relates to the utter selfishness of the whining residents of Mercer Island who, in their aloof upper-middle-class land of delusion, are under the impression that they should be protected from the ills of infrastructure improvement, unless it directly benefits them. These folks are insisting that tolling I-90 is unfair and will disrupt businesses, and unfairly tax them, and potentially impact their school system by making it difficult for their teachers to get to and from work. Seriously? I'll bet that if we look at the median income of a Mercer Island resident, and the number of hours per week that the average Mercer Island resident spends working and/or commuting, as compared to a Seattle resident, we'll see that a) they can afford to pay a toll, and b) they can afford to cover the cost of their teachers' tolls and give them a pay raise to compensate their inconvenience, and c) they can afford to spend a little more time sitting in traffic (which they'll do if we don't put a toll on I-90, for sure). If they want idyllic island life, without confronting the reality of being within a stone's throw of a major metropolitan area, let them pack their bags, load up their Lexus SUVs, and move to Whidbey Island.

A final note about the entire project. Apparently, the city has not yet settled on how they're going to finish the project. They haven't completely sorted out where the money will come from. And they haven't sorted out what the design will actually be for the section of SR-520 that connects Montlake to I-5. This is a rather shocking detail, considering that it involves major complicated connections, with political pressure from neighborhoods about where there should or should not be on-ramps. Beginning to replace the bridge across the lake without a plan for connecting up to I-5 is like launching the Space Shuttle without equipping it with the appropriate shielding for reentering the atmosphere.

Well, it's not exactly like that. But I'm at a loss for a suitable metaphor.

Foray into Windows Phone 7 ends with iPhone relapse

2010-12-23T10:27:00.000-08:00

If you read my post below about the Samsung Focus, and my month-long experience with it, you probably won't be surprised to know that I caved and went back to the iPhone 4. Sadly, I realized that for a gadget geek, it just makes no sense to wait, dissatisfied, hoping and praying that Microsoft does enough to make their phones a viable alternative with updates over the coming year(s). The promise of "copy and paste" as the big January update just didn't cut it for me. And if one reads the available rumors on the internet, it sounds like there won't be much else significant to speak of until at least late summer or early fall when WP7.5 is supposedly scheduled to be released.

The thing that made it so hard for me to decide to leave the platform was that everybody else seems so happy with them. All the reviews online are talking about how fabulous it is. People have referred to it as at least a Droid killer, if not an iPhone killer. How could I be so out of alignment with consensus? Or is it just that I always have buyer's remorse over every decision?

Then, one day last week, my officemate came into work with her new Samsung Focus. She'd been an iPhone 3G user, previously. And the first words out of her mouth were "Oh my God! I am so incredibly frustrated with this new phone!" We talked about it a bit. And her description of the WP7 pretty much hit the nail right on the head: "All of the fancy, beautiful animations and fonts are impressive for like the first fifteen minutes. After that, I was like 'Where are all my apps?'"

Indeed.

Now, I recognize that it would be completely unfair to expect a brand-new platform to have a good selection of applications. Though, we should pause for a second and note that Microsoft is not really a brand-new player in the mobile device industry. Microsoft has been making operating systems for mobile/portable devices for between eight and ten years, depending on exactly where you start counting, with the first Windows Mobile smartphones in 2003. I recognize that Windows Phone 7 represents a new platform. But that doesn't change the fact that Microsoft has been in the mobile phone business longer than Apple or Google. The company chose to start over again with WP7, in the hopes that it will take them further in the long run. This is a bold move, and likely signals a commitment to becoming a real contender.

But the conversation with my colleague made me realize that, for those of us who have been enjoying the rich experience available on phones such as the iPhone or the Droid, it is a huge step backward to adopt a new platform. For some users, this may not be a problem; namely, those who really just use a phone for email, text, voice, and occasional directions or web browsing. But I'm a user who has typically pushed the phone to the limits, always wanting to have the coolest and most extreme functionality.

Long story short, I found myself on Craigslist, sent half a dozen emails, and found a seller of an iPhone 4 who worked on campus. He had just purchased his Samsung Focus, and was cashing in his iPhone. I paid him $500 cold hard cash for the privilege to reenter the comfortable world of iPhone. I'd sold mine 3 weeks ago for $450. I decided that a $50 penalty was an acceptable price to pay for a valuable lesson learned. Leave well enough alone.

I'm not really sorry that I experimented with the WP7. And I wanted to like it... I really did. Some of what it does, it does very well. I can't doubt that in a year or two, WP7 may kill the Droid. It is a little harder to believe that Apple will slow their innovation to the degree that it would fall behind WP7.

Now that I have my iPhone back in my hand, with the solid substantial feel of glass and metal, the gorgeous and tantalizing sensibly small icons for dozens of interesting applications, and the confidence that anything cool that is ever made, by anyone, will be available to me on this platform, I feel a sense of relief. And I also feel a lot more forgiving of the shortcomings of the iPhone. If you read way back through my posts (such as this one or this one), you'll hear me rant about the things iPhone didn't do right. But I can see now that I was selectively ignoring the 95% of what Apple did right.

Last week, my girlfriend's new HTC MyTouch 4g Droid phone seemed like a space-age wonder device. I was having such phone envy, I wanted to yell at her, because of my jealousy as she happily poked away at tiny cool icons of neat little apps. Now that I have my iPhone again, I look at the latest Droid, and have a slightly different take. The Droid now looks like a powerful, but slightly chaotic, glitchy, non-cohesive experience that emulates the Apple iPhone, but feels more like a story that's composed by passing a notebook around a campfire with each person writing one sentence. That's the place where WP7 has a good shot at overtaking the Droid, because Microsoft does appear to have a consistent experience so far, even across manufacturers and providers. That will go a long way. I look forward to seeing just how far, and hope that I'll find myself giving WP another chance, whether it be WP7, WP7.5 or WP8.

Free healthcare for children

2010-12-20T18:06:00.000-08:00

The other day, I was having a conversation with a friend about healthcare for children.

Guess what? Healthcare isn't free for children. Who knew?

I'm being facetious, of course. Everyone with a child knows. And most everyone else knows, too. If you're dismally poor, then there are provisions in the government to provide. But otherwise, a child's healthcare is in a similar bucket to an adult's healthcare. It must be either paid for, at least to some degree, by some adult, or it is provided, at least in part, by some employer of said adult. This strikes me as "wrong." Children are not required or expected to work, of course. Nobody disputes that. Likewise, children are not expected to provide for themselves. It is expected that someone will provide for children. And proper healthcare might be imagined to fall under the general category of things that should be provided. And yet, it seems that parents are needing to make very tough choices about how much and what type of healthcare to provide, in cases where there isn't an employer-based plan to take care of everything.

I recognize I'm oversimplifying this issue dramatically. I recognize that someone needs to pay for it. I recognize that our taxes already have deductions for children that could be construed as provision toward healthcare costs, or other living costs associated with raising a child. It's a complicated one.

The problem I have is this: in much the same way that children are at the mercy of what their parents feed them, and how their parents discipline them, nurture them, provide for their education; children are also at the mercy of how their parents provide for their healthcare.

As I am writing this, I am recognizing the futility of my point. Healthcare is just one of many ways in which children are at the mercy of their parents' ability to provide. The truth is, children must enter the world, and develop in the world that is largely defined by the environment that the parents create. Children start off "innocent," and it would be nice to think that they have all the best things afforded them: great food, a great home, education, social opportunities, travel, healthcare, love. If they did, one can imagine that outcomes would be better in this world than they are. The part that is difficult for me is the idea that socioeconomic factors play such a major role in defining the nature of this childhood experience. It really comes to the question of "Is it the government's responsibility to level the playing field?" and if yes, the next question would still be "Is there an approach to leveling the playing field whose measurable success justifies the overall cost to society of doing so?" And the answers to those questions may define the fundamental difference between the left and the right. The left would rather see the effort made, even if it is a failed one, even if it is immeasurable or inconclusive, even if there is massive systemic abuse, in order to assert that the government takes responsibility for the welfare of citizens. The right would say that it is not the responsibility of government to do so, and furthermore, that there is not evidence that the cost to society outweighs the benefit.

Sometimes, I try to compare us to "the animals" and see if we're the same, better, or worse. The rationale in my mind is that we should at least be "the same" and hopefully "better" when it comes to how our civilization operates. Animals that are stronger, more genetically fit, more fortunate circumstantially, tend to thrive over those who are less so. And the animals that are more fit will have no hesitation whatsoever about exercising this dominance to provide for their own. For some animals, this occurs at the individual level. For some, at the group level. In most cases, a given species will exercise whatever actions it must, at the expense of another species, for its own survival. Humans don't really appear to operate at much different level, on average, than the animals do. The key differences are the presence of extreme outliers (altruists, barbarians), and the diversity of fashions in which one human or a group of humans may demonstrate "fitness." For humans, to be "fit" is no longer just a biological phenomenon. And fortunate circumstances can come in far more forms than exist in the animal kingdom.

I'd like to see society operate in a more altruistic fashion. Partly because I am idealist, I realize. But also, because I believe we have the capacity and the means to do so. But therein lies more idealism, I suppose.

Samsung Focus Windows Phone 7 Review

2010-12-16T10:13:00.000-08:00

I hate to go "techie" in this blog, but I cannot resist the need to review this phone here. I am doing it for two reasons: (1) to vent my frustrations and (2) to counterbalance the overly positive reviews that seem to be appearing elsewhere online.

I've been using the Focus for about 1 month now. This is my second Samsung Focus, because I had to return the first one due to problems with the device.

Industrial Design

The Focus does not look as expensive as an iPhone and it does not feel as substantial as most other phones in its class, including T-Mobile's HTC HD7. The reasons for this are its light weight, rounded soft corners, and the lack of any metal on the body of the device. It just feels and looks flimsy. In the first week or two of ownership, I dropped the phone several times (which interestingly never happened with my iPhone in years of ownership). Each time, the cheap plastic back of the phone fell off, and the battery fell out. Cheap.

Continuing on with the ID flaws, perhaps the biggest problem is the button placement on this phone. Windows Phone 7 already (in my opinion) made some bad decisions by using all softkeys for the main controls on the face. I constantly find myself accidentally pressing the back button or launching Bing, because of my hands resting on the phone. While this is likely an issue with all WP7 devices, I suspect it's exacerbated on the Focus because of the extreme rounding of corners and positioning of the buttons very low. But the softkeys are not the worst problem. It's all of the other buttons. If you look at other WP7 devices (or the iPhone, or most Androids), the Power button is positioned on the top of the phone. And there's a really good reason for that: So you don't accidentally shut off your phone when you don't mean to. But Samsung messed this up. They put the Power button on the right side, opposite the Volume controls. Consequence? When you're trying to increase or decrease volume while gripping the phone, you're likely to press the Power button. Even worse, is that the Power button is on the same side as the Camera shutter button. Consequence? When you're holding your phone in various orientations and you want to activate the camera, it's easy to get confused and accidentally shut off your phone instead of launching the camera application. This was a completely unnecessary problem, and it was introduced because Samsung decided to do things differently than most of the other manufacturers.

Performance and Experience

The phone has great headphones. I will tell you that. Compared to the HTC HD7 or the MyTouch 4g Android (which my girlfriend just got), these are really good quality. The phone also has very good sound quality for calls and for music.

The camera in the Focus is great - from what I can tell, it takes better pictures than the iPhone 4. Of course, there is no front-facing camera, which deprives you of the self-portrait capability, but if you only have your phone with you for picture taking, you probably won't be disappointed with the Samsung Focus. Even when zooming in, the images do not become pixelated. And, comparing this phone with the other WP7 models that I've seen, it has far more features and controls in the camera settings menu, including some very useful things that make it a bona fide digital camera.

Now for the negatives... some of which may be WP7 issues, and some may be Focus-specific.

Facebook is painfully slow (usually 15 seconds to load, and then continues slowly loading pages after that). The internet browsing experience is absolutely abysmal. Sometimes pages don't even load, it just times out and sits there. If this is an indication of what we can expect the application experience to be, I think that WP7 is in for some big challenges, since they don't come close to competing with iPhone or Android at this point.

Maps are slow, awkward, and the GPS can be horribly inaccurate. With the iPhone, I always found that the "Current Location" parameter worked quite well for obtaining directions, and it would update incrementally with decent precision. In contrast, the Focus' GPS is routinely off by over 1 mile in a major urban area, resulting in the "My Location" parameter being useless for obtaining directions, since it will give you directions from somewhere other than where you are. If you are on Wi-Fi, this problem goes away, but I don't think we can rely on Wi-Fi connection for mobile mapping applications, nor should we be expected to do so. Final comment on maps is that Bing Maps are far behind Google in terms of quality, and for some reason they are not privy to the same data that Google has for satellite views - but that's a WP7 issue, not specific to Samsung Focus, of course.

Problems, Glitches, Defects

I had to return my first Focus because of an audio problem. I am not sure if it was hardware or software, but almost every day it was necessary to reboot the phone in order to listen to music. It seems like some other application (Bluetooth? YouTube? Other?) was stealing the audio path, such that when I played Zune, the counter would indicate that music was playing, but no sound would emit. Reboot solved the problem, but it was a daily occurrence.

My second Focus does not have the audio problem, but it does suffer from a number of freeze-ups and glitches, where the screen goes black, or flickers, or applications become unresponsive. Another frequent occurrence is that I will try to launch an application, and after about 5-10 seconds delay, it will return me to the home screen without launching. This has happened for Zune and Marketplace.

Summary

I'm stuck with a Windows Phone 7. That's the bottom line. I'm stuck for X amount of time with a Beta-quality phone, when I had a fully-functional, application-rich, fast iPhone 4.

I've thought about bringing this Samsung back and swapping for the HTC Surround, but I'm not sure it's worth it. From what I've seen, I'll be sacrificing in camera quality, and getting crappier headphones. The Surround does have a sturdier design, but it also has a smaller screen. There just aren't many good choices.

The phone will receive updates in January and February, we're told. Features will be added. But will the glitchiness and poor performance be addressed in any of these patches? That remains to be seen.

I don't think I'll ever get over my frustration with the button placement, both of WP7 (softkeys) and the Samsung Focus (Power button). Likely, I will "suck it up" and live with this for a year, until AT&T decides I'm eligible for an upgrade. At that point, I'm not sure what I'll do. I've never been a fan of AT&T as a company, and now that I've hopped off the iPhone bandwagon, perhaps Android is next? And if that's the case, I'll probably go to either T-Mobile or Sprint.

Couple in a kayak

2010-11-05T16:17:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me yesterday that the best way to understand the dynamic between two people is to put them in a kayak together, and watch what happens. It's the perfect metaphor for the relationship dynamic.

You could really pick any of a number of types of activities, but the thing about a kayak is that you are tied enough to one another's "fate" that it models the interdependence of people in relationship; contrast that, for instance, with hiking, where people are less intertwined. At the same time, you are not so dependent on one another so as to be unrealistically associated, as would be the case with tandem cycling, for example.

The kayak is perfect.

When you get into a kayak, you are not fully in control of your own destiny. There needs to be cooperative decision-making, mutual effort, coordination, consideration, attentiveness to subtle details, patience, positive attitude. And when a couple is struggling in their relationship, the kayak reveals all truths.

I think back on various kayak relationships I have had. I remember bickering over the minutiae of planning a course, and navigating and executing the steering properly. What a fantastic metaphor for the kind of hypercritical battles that I had in that particular relationship! The big picture, i.e. "We are still moving down the river" didn't matter nearly as much as "But I told you not to go over there because of the rocks!" It didn't matter that we made it around the rocks anyway. It only mattered that there was a failure to follow specific instructions. I can recall being irritated with a partner who was not paddling as much as I thought they should be. All these angry feelings started stirring up in me, about how they just expected others to do all the work for them. It probably said more about my judgment and impatience than anything else because, honestly, there was more than one interpretation to their behavior. Perhaps they just didn't feel the need to turn the trip into work. Perhaps for them it was about leisure, and peace, and relaxation, as opposed to getting there.

When you see the healthy couple in the kayak, you see a silent, fluid rhythm. You see two bodies in harmony. Paddles switch sides without a word or a splash. Turns are gradual, and feel natural. Both people coast at the same time, or take turns coasting while the other maintains course, or halt to explore or observe something interesting or beautiful.

The kayak becomes a vessel symbolizing the connection between two people. In reality, there's always a kayak, even if it's an invisible one. The kayak holds us close to one another. Always within reach. Always with a subtle yet surmountable degree of interdependence. Capable of synergy. Moving through the world as one force. With one course, and one wake.

Yet also capable of drifting... listing... capsizing... sinking.

Together.

Conquering fear in the strangest ways

2010-11-04T19:27:00.000-07:00

I am going to Hawaii. Alone.

That's it. It's that simple. But embedded in that simple plan is the intention and apprehension around conquering one of my biggest fears. Being alone. And it's not quite as simple as I stated it. The plan that is "locked and loaded" is the part about "going," and the part about "alone." What remains to be executed is the bigger part of the plan, which is "going alone with no iPhone and no internet connectivity."

Whoa.

Yes. That's the part that makes it even harder. Scarier. But potentially so much more important.

It's a retreat.

I don't know how to describe it in a way that connects the various dots that I've been trying to put together for 20 years. But I just know that it comes to this. And even if it doesn't, it still does.

The first time I heard of meditation was when I was a kid. My brother would come to visit, and he would sit in the corner of the dining room, in the dark, in a chair, with his hands folded on his lap. And he would sit silently with his head down. He was meditating. And I was not supposed to bother him or interrupt. Of course, this made it incredibly difficult for me to not bother him, because I wanted to know what he was doing and wanted his attention!

The next time I heard about meditation was when I was going through one of my first (of many) soul-searching periods in life, either as a result of therapy or some other emotional issues. I read a couple of books about Zen, and thought it was amazing. The right stuff. Was going to solve everything for me! I was so into it. But I never meditated. Maybe I did for 3 minutes. Or 5 minutes. Or 3 days. But it never became a practice. I was not willing to let go. And for the past 20 years, still I have not. I always joke that I've twice made it halfway through "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" but never finished it. It's somewhat emblematic of my waffling on the journey.

Recently, I started thinking more and more about meditation. It came up in therapy. It came up in relationship. It was feeling more and more like something that was not a magic bullet, so much as a direction that I was meant to go. But still. Haven't gone. I know that my monkey mind is suffering from lack of clarity resulting from constantly diverting my attention to a million "pleasant alternatives" to whatever is right in front of me: work, cleaning, exercise, being present, pursuing various projects, relating to others. Just fill it up with stuff. Fill the bandwidth. Don't ever just be here now.

Of course, the iPhone is the #1 contributor to such things. It's the A # 1 mind-sink, ensuring that we never really need to be present. But all of the "benefits" it provides seem to outweigh the dumbing, numbing, disconnecting effect it has on all of us. On me.

This brings me to part two. A couple of years ago, I came to the epiphany that there was one time, one place, one situation in which I felt totally present. Totally in the moment. That place is snorkeling. Nothing but the sounds of the water, the rocks, and breath. What could be closer to a natural meditation than that? And, in fact, snorkeling seems to be one of the few activities that I am completely content to do alone (or so I think).

So, my substitute for a formal "retreat" is going to be this trip, alone. And it honestly terrifies me. I realize in advance just how reliant I am on the input from others, the presence of others, even just the knowledge that there is an "other" there to greet me, receive me, listen to me, react to me. In the same way that one might ask "If a tree falls in the forest..." I am asking myself now "If I see beautiful fish while snorkeling, and there's no one there to tell about it, is the experience still meaningful?"

And the fact that I am not sure what the answer is to that question is the biggest reason why I know I need to find out.

Truth is, it's really wrapping a few of my fears, habits, and personal challenges all into one. There's "being with myself." There's "being by myself." There's "being non-reliant on technology for every decision." The thought that I will actually need to write down addresses, or print maps is rather scary to me. In fact, as I type it, I am thinking "Maybe I need a cheap phone to take with me in case I need to call someone in emergency." But I know that there's always a phone that can be found in emergency, and that I will not have an emergency where a phone will make a difference.

I have never in my life gone 7 days without speaking to a friend, partner, or family member. And reality is that few of us do anymore, in a world that has become as connected as ours is. So this is an opportunity (pep talk ensuing). It's an opportunity to see what it feels like to have that separation. The hope? That it will amount to a more real and deep connection with myself, that will then lead to deeper connection with others and the world.

Of course, it will be whatever it will be.

Bacon & Eggs

2010-10-27T10:13:00.000-07:00

I don't know his name. But I know that he likes bacon and eggs. The reason that I know this is because I asked him what he likes. That, in and of itself, is an out-of-the-ordinary interaction; probably for him, as well as for me.

The story begins over two years ago, actually. And has nothing to do with this man. But it does pertain to the corner on which he stands: Rainier & Dearborn, in Seattle. Every day for nearly three years, I have driven past that corner on my way to work. Most of the time, the traffic light at the intersection is red, which means that I spend a minute or two idling there. As a result, I have become very familiar with the corner. One fixture of the corner was the homeless man who stood there every day. He had scraggly, grey hair, on which he usually work a stocking hat. His face was tanned, and deeply creased, and he had a unkempt beard. He looked like he was of Scandinavian origin, and I imagined him as a fisherman. His hands, gnarled-looking, were adorned with a variety of rings. One of his most notable behavioral traits is that he would wave to passing cars by flapping the fingers of his gnarled hand, as opposed to waving with the entire hand from the wrist. It was as if it would be too much effort to do it from the wrist. He seemed tired and worn out, and he walked with a slow shuffle. It's really hard to say how old he was, but if I were to take the median of the oldest he could be if he'd lived a normal life (60) and the youngest he could be, presuming a hard life (45), that would probably put him in his mid-50s.

I always felt like I should be doing something for this man.

But I never did. On one occasion, I think I gave him a banana. But the kinds of thoughts that ran through my head were crazy ideas of bringing him to my home, and giving him a shower, and making him dinner, and asking him to tell me his story. I am incredibly fascinated with how it is that people become homeless. And I realize that my morbid curiosity is not a good reason for generosity. But I just didn't understand the transition. I guess what I really wanted to know was whether there was ever a time where things were better? Was there a normal childhood, from which one could never have foretold the future on the street? Of course, I think the likely reality is that it's a mixture of all imaginable possibilities. There are people who never had a chance from the beginning, with broken childhoods. There are people who were okay up to a point, and then mental illness unraveled their world. There are people for whom drugs or alcohol pulled them from a normal life, and gradually deteriorated their world until they could no longer maintain the lives they previously had. And there are people who, through economic or situational misfortune such as losing a job, debt, or other circumstances, were no longer able to make ends meet. There are likely other scenarios that I have not imagined.

But passing this man each day, I wondered what his story was.

One day, driving to work, I noticed that he was gone. And he never returned. I do not know, and may never know what happened to him. Much as there are myriad possibilities of his history, there are also numerous possible explanations for his disappearance; some pleasant, but most not. It would be nice to think that his situation improved, and that he was no longer homeless. Perhaps he received medical care, and then settled into housing that provided a better life. Perhaps more likely, events led to him taking up residence at a new corner in some other part of the city. But the darker thought is that his disappearance from that corner, where he was seemingly a permanent fixture, corresponded with his disappearance from the world.

I never even knew his name. I never asked. He was a person who was, to me, defined by a location, an appearance, and a situation.

The corner was "for rent," so to speak, for many months after that. There would be a variety of people who might appear, and sometimes the corner was vacant. In some ways, it is not dissimilar to when any establishment goes out of business. But, being a viable venue, eventually someone new comes along and takes up residence.

A few weeks ago, I approached the intersection, and saw a new person at the corner. It was a bright, sunshiny morning, and I was wearing sunglasses. The man was holding a cardboard sign that said something to the effect of "Peace. Love. Anything Helps," or some such typical message. He looked at me, safe behind the tinted windshield of a brand-new car, for which I momentarily felt a little bit of shame. He nodded to me. I nodded to him. But the impassive appearance of my sunglasses undoubtedly gave the impression that I had not acknowledged him. He continued looking at me, and I looked away, because it felt a little uncomfortable, for no good reason.

He walked over to his pile of belongings, and put down his sign, picking up another in its place. The new sign said "Mean People Suck," and he walked toward my car holding this sign, and waving it at me, while nodding his head. Of course, this I did not acknowledge. I felt uncomfortable. I was the mean person. And I sucked. And a fair part of me believed he was right.

The next time I approached the intersection, days later (I've been traveling a lot lately, so missing many days of this corner), I was not wearing sunglasses, and I made sure to fully acknowledge him with more than one nod, and a wave, and a smile. He returned the gesture. I am not even sure if he knew I was the same person, but it really doesn't matter. It felt better.

Last week, I arrived back in town from a trip, and was riding a taxi home from the airport, in the morning. The taxi approached the intersection. We stopped at the traffic light. He was standing on the corner, but on the opposite side of the street from usual. From the back of the taxi, I nodded to him, and he nodded to me. Still no idea if he's identified me as the same person, or if it's three different people, or nobody, in his mind. He's big on eye contact, so there are multiple exchanged glances, again almost to the point that I'm feeling uncomfortable. What I never stopped to wonder (until now) is that maybe he feels uncomfortable too. He speaks to me through the closed window of the taxi (without approaching). He says, "Don't look at my lip!" I gestured that I didn't know why he was saying that, but then I noticed that his lip was split. He says, "I got this from standing over there [pointing at his usual spot], so now I'm standing over here." It would appear that the guy on the other corner had battled him for the spot, and won. The politics and economics of panhandling. Is it first-come, first-serve? Or do people "own" a corner? Things I have never pondered. Until now.

Yesterday, I approached the intersection on my way to work. He was back in his usual spot (first-come, first-serve?) and I did the wave and the nod, which he reciprocated. Then something came over me that made me feel I needed to say more. His story from the taxi cab morning somehow gave me enough of a sense of him, perhaps, that he's now "someone I know," and I just had to say something this time. So I roll down the window, with no plan, and I say something stupid like "Looks like winter's here, huh?" He replies in agreement, and then informs me that it's been tough, but that he's happy because someone gave him a V8 and a cookie. And that he just wants some food. Again, without planning, the words that come out of my mouth, "Well, what do you like?" This took him a bit by surprise. "What do I like? I like bacon and eggs!" He said this with a bit of a laugh. "I'd like to just have a hot meal." He goes on to tell me (all in the span of the brief traffic light cycle) that he used to be able to go over to a place under I-5 where they would cook meals for people, but recently the Department of Health closed it down. And then the light turned green, and our conversation was over.

My entire morning, and day, and most of the time since then, my mind keeps coming back to the question of how it is that I'm going to give this man bacon and eggs. Because I asked him what he liked. I now know more about him than I ever imagined I would know. I have invited myself into his world, in a tiny, but undeniable way.

Bacon and eggs.

What's your name, sir?

The mirror

2010-10-19T12:08:00.000-07:00

I think it would be fair to say that I do a lot of "projection." Enough so that I am not really sure even how much. Sometimes I catch myself doing it. But if you catch your cat digging in the potted plants, you can be damn sure that it's happening 20 times for every time you actually see the cat doing it. That's what alarms me. And there are a million reasons why it alarms me. Some of them are just plain paranoia, but others amount to something substantive about my perception of the world around me, and my place in it.

Let me give you an example.

Every time I go home to visit my friends from Boston, I always have a great time. These guys have made different choices than I've made in life. They've all got families, children, and live in the suburbs of the city where we grew up. In spite of the different path we've chosen, the connection is still there. And it feels like, essentially, we are the same people whom we've always been. That's not to say we haven't evolved. But just that we have not morphed into unrecognizable individuals.

But every time I go home, I experience the same anxiety. I think a series of thoughts...

They must think I'm crazy
They must think I'm a freak
They must wonder what my problem is
They must think it's pathetic that I can't keep a relationship
They must think I'm the kind of person who could never settle down
They must think I'm very unstable
They must think I'm inconsistent
They must think I am living an immature existence like some sort of teenager

The list goes on. With the central theme being "Things They Must Think."

But when I visit with them, I don't hear questions like that. I don't hear "What are you going to settle down?" or "How come you can't just pick something and stick with it like we did?"

What I hear is "How are things going with the band?" or "Are you seeing anyone new?" or "Do you still like living in Seattle?"

And occasionally, a comment comes at total odds with my inner talk: "We're living vicariously through you."

And it makes me stop and realize that the things "They Must Think" are not the things they think. Rather, they're the things I fear about my own life. Projected onto the people whose approval and respect I want. Sure, they know I'm different and maybe a bit eccentric, and unconventional. But, by and large, they look at it as something exciting. Because, in spite of the fact that they all seem to be happy with their choices, there's something interesting about still having so many questions unanswered, as I seem to have.

The real issue for me is the question of why I fear these things so much in myself. Obviously it's got to do with self-acceptance. On the one hand, I should be glad that I'm at least willing to make the choices that work for me. But it would be so much easier if I could go the extra step of accepting the choices I've made, rather than constantly beating myself up with a measuring stick.

U.S. Bank screwed up my auto loan (with some help from the WA DOL)

2010-05-18T09:04:00.000-07:00

It seems that when all else fails to get a message across to Corporate America, the "blogosphere" is often the only thing that works. So, let's give it a go.

Six months ago, I purchased my friend's 2005 Honda Insight. Truth be told, I could have paid cash for it. But I thought it would be convenient to do an auto loan, just so I could distribute the payments over a period of time, rather than hit my account all at once for the $12,500 that I paid (which was a great deal, by the way).

After some brief research online, I discovered that US Bank apparently had very good auto loan interest rates; 3% actually, which was considerably better than anything else. And especially, better than other major banks. And the fact that I was already a US Bank account holder would (theoretically) make this very easy.

Right?

After choosing the bank, I filled out an information request over email, and was contacted by the Bellevue, Washington (Crossroads) branch of US Bank. I have done business at this branch before, and have been generally satisfied with them. Then why did I tell them "Oh, actually I think I'd prefer to do this with the Seattle (Capitol Hill) branch"? Well, because it was closer to my home, and also closer to where my friend (now my girlfriend) lives, so the loan preparation would (theoretically) be easier.

Right?

So I was put in touch with a loan officer, who shall remain unnamed, but let's refer to him as Brad Adamson, just for convenience. Brad and I spoke on the phone, and everything seemed like it would go smoothly. We got all the basic info down. He even drove from Seattle to Bellevue to meet me at work, so we could take care of some of the basic paperwork. Brad came to my workplace, we filled out all the papers. I made duplicates of them, so that we could sign both sets. Then Brad proceeded to depart with both sets of paperwork: mine and his. Inconvenient, and a little wonky for a loan officer to do this. But it's an honest mistake.

Right?

The next step in the process was that my (soon-to-be) girlfriend and I needed to meet at the US Bank branch to sign the official loan documents and transfer of ownership. This needed to be done on a Saturday morning, because neither of us could make it during weekday hours. Brad told us that he doesn't work on the weekend, but that everything will be ready to sign, and someone will be there who can help us. We arrive at the bank, and the only people working are the desk tellers. They have no idea how to process an auto loan. They do not understand any of the paperwork. We practically needed to explain to them what needed to be signed. Nonetheless, after much confusion, we sign all the papers. The loan is processed. And the ownership has been transferred.

Right?

Unfortunately, wrong. This is where things start really falling apart.

To make this long story somewhat shorter, here's what transpired.

Not all of the essential paperwork was completed, resulting in the loan not being fully processed - we needed to handle additional paperwork over email
Some documents were either not completed correctly, or possibly misinterpreted by the loan underwriting group, resulting in the paperwork being deemed insufficient for processing the transfer of registration (i.e. they didn't even submit to the Licensing Department). This occurred in multiple stages, result in at least 2 delays of submission for registration transfer. During this time, I engaged in many conversations with one of the senior loan officers or branch manager (not sure which) who shall remain nameless, but for kicks, let's refer to her as Sarah. Sarah is very nice, and repeatedly reassures me that she is on top of things. All evidence would suggest that she is - but unfortunately, she keeps encountering oddities and challenges in other areas of the process that make it hard to nail down a definitive solution.
Oh, forgot to mention that they failed to process the documentation for collecting proper sales tax on the vehicle purchase (here I must give them some kudos, because they decided to pay this for me - somewhere over $100 - as compensation for the inconvenience).

Time is passing by, and I am becoming increasingly concerned about not having my vehicle registered. Because I don't think I am going to have much leg to stand on if I get stopped by the police 4 or 5 months after purchasing my vehicle and try to tell them it's my bank's fault! I express this concern to Sarah. She says she understands.

About 2 weeks ago, I finally receive confirmation from Sarah that "Everything's all set!" with the registry, and that they should be mailing me my tabs and registration any day now. I am skeptical, but decide to be optimistic, and I thank her.

Within 3 days, I am stopped by the Bellevue Police for driving with invalid registration. I am not pleased. I explain my story, and they tell me that it looks like I am registered fine in the computer, and that I should just tell the police to check the computer if I am stopped.

A week goes by, and still no tabs or registration in the mail.

This morning, I have a ticket on my car. Expired registration: $42 penalty. The only way to appeal it is in person, which would mean that I either need to pay the ticket, or take time off from my job to deal with this never-ending issue. And still no tabs or registration in the mail.

I called the branch to inform Sarah of this situation. They've agreed to pay the ticket for me. But this has been going on for so long, and the frustration level is becoming so high (on both sides), that the kindness is starting to wear off. It's getting to the point that (I imagine) the last person Sarah at US Bank wants to hear from is me. Because every time she hears from me, it means more headaches for her. She is certainly not the one to blame here. But she's the one who unfortunately has to play "clean-up" for a bunch of other crap that has gone wrong.

To add more amusement to this story, it turns out that a big bottleneck has been the Washington State Department of Licensing. Apparently (Sarah told me just now), the licensing department has been receiving hundreds of calls about tabs not being sent. There is some type of massive system failure. This has gone on to the point that they are generating a special series of actions to remedy the tickets that are being issued for said missing tabs and registrations.

The moral of this story is two-fold:

Perhaps you get what you pay for. I thought US Bank would be a great deal. But then I found out that they were new to the auto loan business. And the loan officer and bank simply do not have the process down. They also informed me that my loan was not the only one that incurred such mishaps. This is a major national bank, and the level of churn has been astounding.
"Nice" doesn't cut it. Everyone whom I've dealt with has been very nice. Sarah is nice. Brad is nice. They're apologetic, accommodating, understanding. All those things are great. But my relationship with the bank is a business relationship. It's a financial agreement. I keep my end of the financial agreement by paying my loan payment every month. US Bank is supposed to keep their end of the relationship by ensuring that the loan is processed correctly, and ensuring that the commitment that make to transfer ownership and register my vehicle is executed smoothly. So "nice" isn't enough. It needs to be right.

Right?

Is Facebook Dead?

2010-04-02T15:44:00.000-07:00

I hear rumors that it is.

There are still 167 people on my friends' list. And I just had a new friend request just this week, albeit from someone whom I have not seen in 18 years. But it is not the community it once was. I look at the comments that show up on my page, and for the most part there is a very small pool of people commenting. It may have something to do with the way I have structured my privacy settings. But still. It ain't what it used to be.

I don't know what the new cutting edge of social networking is. Are all the cool people already on it? If so, why haven't they told me about it? I tried to get into Twitter a number of times, but for some reason it does not feel like it is substantive enough, because all you've got, essentially, is the status update. No photos. No... well, I guess that's really the difference between Facebook and Twitter. The photos. And how often do I really look at the photos anyway? I almost never look at anyone's profile information.

I do like the entertainment aspect of being able to comment on someone's photos, and then see other people comment on my photos. But it's really all about the banter back and forth. Nonetheless, I don't hear people talking about Twitter either. It's weird. Everyone's on Facebook. But it's dead. Doesn't ring true.

Is it really dead?

Tea versus Coffee versus Random Acts of Self-Discipline (Deprivation)

2010-03-10T16:08:00.000-08:00

I don't know why it is.

Until March of 2006, I never drank hot beverages. Honestly. I know that's hard to believe. I was 37 years old, and I had probably had fewer than 5 cups of coffee in my life. I had never been much for tea either. Heck, I am not even a fan of soup, except perhaps a good tomato cream soup, with lots of parmesan and some crackers.

In March of 2006, I went to Europe. The time shift, some latent depression that was lurking in the wings, and the cultural shift, led me to deem it appropriate to start consuming coffee. I needed it to function. And I suspected/knew, that with enough sugar and milk, anything tastes good. I recall the first time I had a cup of extremely strong Parisian coffee with my friend Lisa, I found myself running to the bathroom, not five minutes after finishing it.

It was my first experience with the age-old pearl of celestial wisdom: "Caffeine makes me poop".

Of course, so do Heritage Flakes, but on a slightly longer time scale.

After the trip to Europe, my coffee consumption was fixed into habit. I suddenly understood the social aspect of "getting coffee with someone". It became a bonding thing. It became a ritual that was apparently long understood by everyone else, yet somehow foreign to me. The drink of choice has gone through a few different permutations, depending on the degree to which I have allowed myself to indulge in the joyful part, as opposed to the purely stimulatory part.

2% Vanilla Latte... (joy)
Americano... (less joy)
2% Caramel Latte... (almost too much joy)
Drip... (self-deprivation, and/or thriftiness)

And eventually, it comes to... stop. No coffee.

It's happened several times now. I have either allowed myself to creep up from one cup per day, to one in the morning and another in the afternoon. And eventually, I have a cup (usually drip, usually bad) that turns my stomach and my spirit, just so, such that I decide "No more coffee".

And just like that, I am off coffee.

Usually for the first week, I will ply myself with ibuprofen so that I don't get any caffeine headaches. And then I'm fine. This has happened on at least four or five occasions. And I'm in the middle of such a "recess" presently. Well, sort of. Because part of my caffeine abstention always allows for the social weekend coffee. I'm not that into being miserable.

This last time was a bit more of an extreme withdrawal, because I decided to throw away caffeinated beverages of all forms. I had been augmenting my coffee intake with Diet Pepsi (which, ironically, I find kind of revolting, but it was more "interesting" than water, though seemed to have no real stimulatory effect). The soda was making me feel sickly as well. So I eliminated it all.

And in my last stride toward becoming completely feeble, I decided maybe I should drink tea. So now, it's 1-2 cups of English Teatime (with sugar), for the small amount of caffeine that it provides.

We'll see how long it lasts.

Goats gotten

2010-03-10T15:46:00.000-08:00

We are all annoyed by things. Some of them, we're keenly aware of. Others, only subtly. Even fewer, completely unaware, yet their effects manifest themselves in various ways. Especially true when the annoyance is inconvenient or, even worse, unacceptable. There are even things that annoy us, of which we are not aware, until someone else points out "Wow! You seem really annoyed by that!" Well, yes. I guess I am, huh?

I started this blog, with the idea in mind of telling you a laundry list of all the things that annoy me. Of course, after re-reading just my intro paragraph, I am pretty sure I can say that the list would either be trite, incomplete, or perhaps offensive.

So let's not go there.

But the thing about annoyance that's most interesting is the realization that things which bother one person may not bother another at all. It's all about perceptions. It's all about individual reality. And thus, it's really about individual experience. Maybe even individual biology. For example, it really bothers me when the guy in the office on the other side of the wall from me has speaker-phone conversations, even though he's alone in his office. Speaker-phone calls make sense when you've got a few people in your office who all need to hear. But if you don't, then basically, the only reason you're using speaker is so you have both hands free, and you're not uncomfortable. The annoyance with such behavior is two-fold for me. The feeling that boils inside of me is the anger that this guy has a nerve putting his comfort and convenience above respecting the need for those in offices surrounding him to have a peaceful environment. That's the annoyance part. And it's where I tend to dwell. I sit here, righteously, thinking about his nerve. And in the end, I feel like he is doing it to me as opposed to doing it for himself. It ends up being an act of commission, instead of an act of omission.

The reality is that I am bothered because I have difficultly concentrating. I cannot listen to music and do work. I cannot read if someone is talking. I just need very quiet and controlled environment, probably because I have some attention issues - tending to shift to whatever other stimuli are around me. So that's the fundamental issue. But I don't dwell there.

And annoyances are often like that. We find some secondary feature of the annoying stimulus, and start making it personal. And that amplifies the annoyance. Then, instead of getting only a little work done, because my concentration is impaired, I get zero work done, because my concentration is impaired and I am mad!

I wonder if I could shed all annoyances? I wonder if "being Zen" would be to just let it all flow through me, and not assign value to it. But to see it simply as action and reaction, internal and external, with no judgment. Would it feel better? Or do I want to hold on to the annoyance because it protects me from something else?

Back to square one

2010-02-24T23:50:00.000-08:00

In the same way that taking months off from exercise puts one back in that difficult apathetic lazy place of immobility, the same can be said for taking months off from writing. I don't want to do it. And it feels like a complete chore to put even these words down. Just as they leave my fingers, they're fighting internal judgment. Why bother writing this.

I keep waiting to have something interesting to say.

And it's not going to be tonight.

The Haves and the Have-Nots

2010-01-11T17:40:00.001-08:00

Well. After posting my most recent entry, complaining about my inability to refinance my home, I received an anonymous comment. The comment made a few points. But the most important point that it made was that I have a lot more to be happy about, and appreciative of, in this life, than I have to complain about. And that maybe I should not spend my energy focusing on the negatives.

And I guess it's quite true.

I spend a good portion of my time on here complaining. Some of it is for entertainment value, sure. But plenty of the time, I am just lamenting the fact that this or that minutiae did not go the way I'd specifically wished for it to go. I've painted many things in the most negative of light. It may be true that 2008 was not a spectacular year for me, as I noted in an earlier blog. But it wasn't a terrible year either. I traveled, yes. I actually had a decent job, yes. I bought a home for the first time, yes. I joined a spectacular band, yes.

And that was 2008. The "bad" year.

2009, which I referred to (I think) as "slightly better", should have fairly been called a "great" year. I had a job - still - when many people did not. I did not lose all of my retirement, because I'd moved a lot of it out before the big market drop. I was still in the great band. I still had the great home. Oh yeah, what else was there? Oh, yes. I started a new relationship with someone whom I'd been interested in for years, and had the opportunity to do all sorts of exciting and adventurous things together. I have this habit of separating out relationships from the rest of my life, and treating them as entities that are to be analyzed, and usually criticized. But putting the pieces back together into the whole, last year was a really, really good year. The band released a CD, which was more successful than I ever thought I would be (even though its actual success was modest). I made a positive career change. I started getting back into shape again, not that I was ever too badly out of shape.

Anyway, the point here is that I am one of the haves. I am not a have-not. I have. I have always had. And, if I don't fuck it up, I will probably manage to have as long as I am.

Happiness is not a 4.75% interest rate. Happiness is not a 4.5% interest rate. Happiness is not a 20% raise at work. Happiness is not a bigger house. Or an older house. Or a newer car. Or nicer jeans. Or higher download speeds on your internet connection. Happiness is not taking 3 vacations a year instead of 2. Happiness is not being a songwriter. Happiness is not being invited to all the right parties.

Happiness might not even exist. In which case, it's nothing. But the pursuit of happiness, which I suppose is what we're usually engaged in, no matter how circuitous the route... it's not about any numbers or categorizations. It's about the obvious.

My mother used to paraphrase what was probably a famous quote by someone like Oprah or Rosie O'Donnell. It went like this:

"Happiness is not having everything you want. It's wanting everything you have."

Ironically, my mother wanted a lot of things she didn't have. And she wasn't particularly happy, though I think she was functionally content, if you consider complaining to be part and parcel of being an old Jewish woman. But she at least had the wisdom to impart those words to me in a fashion that I will always remember, and always associate with her.

What I've been wishing a lot lately was that I still had my mother.

Obama Home Affordable Program not for me

2010-01-06T16:07:00.000-08:00

I feel left out right now.

And it's not fair. But there's nothing I can do about it.

My credit is 820. As you probably know, that's good credit. Better than good. I bought a home about 2 years ago, a little bit past the peak of the market. Prices had started coming down. At present, my house is probably worth just about what I paid for it, give or take a couple of percent. So I'm not in the red. I'm not "upside-down", as they call it.

But I can't get in on the refinancing fun. Everyone else got the 4.5%, the 4.75%. Not me. And the simple reason is that the loan that I was sold, which sounded perfectly good at the time, is a loan that is being excluded from consideration for virtually all refinancing plans. When I bought my place, I was only able to make a downpayment of 10%. There are two ways that this is usually handled. Option 1 is to have something called "PMI", or Mortgage Insurance, which is essentially a tax that the bank charges you for not being able to put down 20%. Option 2 is to do two mortgages; a primary mortgage for 80%, and then a secondary (sometimes called a Home Equity Line of Credit) for the 10% that makes up the difference of what you were not able to put down (in some cases, these were being issued for the entire 20% remainder - i.e. zero down mortgages).

The great offer that I was given by my mortgage broker was an Option 3, which was a 90/10 loan with "lender-paid" PMI. What this means was that I have a single loan for 90% of the value of the home (10% downpayment), and the mortgage insurance was folded into the interest rate, rather than being charged explicitly as a separate item. This was supposed to be a better deal for me, according to him. But now, I can see, for a variety of reasons, it was not a better deal.

First, if you do an 80/10 loan, then you could eventually pay off your 10% portion, and have a rapidly decreased effective interest rate, since those 10% portions are usually a crappy rate. Second, if you have PMI, you could always have your home appraised if it gains sufficient equity, and then you would be absolved of the PMI payment, and again, save a couple of hundred a month.

But with the option I have right now, I am stuck, because all of the money that Obama's plan is throwing at borrowers good and bad, is not going to anyone with loans such as the one that I have with GMAC Mortgage. If you've got PMI, lender-paid or otherwise, you do not qualify.

There's a massive amount of irony here, because there are people who have completely horrible credit, or have been missing payments left and right. They will qualify for this refinance program, even though they'll likely continue to miss payments. I have never missed a payment, have excellent credit, and will be stuck at 5.75% indefinitely, because at the point where I have enough equity to qualify for refinancing, the interest rates will likely be too high to justify doing it.

Thus another year approaches its end

2009-12-30T10:29:00.000-08:00

When the new year is approaching, we all have our own unique version of "looking back" or "looking ahead". Some of us do more of one and less of the other. We make resolutions, some of which we'll keep, and some of which we will abandon before the 1st of February.

The thing that stands out for me in this past year is that, more than any other year, I traveled a lot. In this calendar year alone, I visited:

Austria
Germany (twice)
Italy
California
New York
Kauai
Arizona (5 times)
Boston
Portland (at least 3 times)

Combined, those trips amounted to somewhere in the ballpark of 55 days away from home. None of that traveling was work-related. For most of the flights, I traveled alone (except for Kauai). It was a lot of back and forth. Obviously I cannot complain, since not very many people have the luxury or opportunity to move around as much as I did this year.

But I guess I come out of this year tired. With the feeling like I have uprooted myself from the regular routine. To add to the uprooting, I decided to switch jobs, and spent large chunks of the year in pursuit of this new opportunity. There were several dead ends, and no small amount of effort put into trying to pursue those paths that ultimately bore no fruit. For a bit, I desperately tried to get myself on the "Westside", since the commute across the lake every day has a way of sapping the life out of anyone. And that commute means that I spend about a third of my waking hours in environs that I would rather avoid.

I sold my third car in 2 years, as you have heard the last few entries.

I am tired of change. But somehow I seem drawn to it. Every few years, I seem to have a full discard, shuffle, and re-dealing of the cards.

Anyway, this can't possibly be interesting to anyone but me. And it did not go in the direction I wanted it to go.

Guitars and Helicopters...

2009-12-29T10:52:00.000-08:00

These things go hand-in-hand, right?

So, they must. I posted my 1970's Fender Champ amplifier to Craigslist because I am trying to unload it just to cut down on things I don't need. The contents of my ad are not integral to my story, but it was posted under Musical Instruments, and read in the standard fashion.

Today I received this email in response to my ad:

From:	Ronald XXXXXX
To:	sale-py9kn-1528339689@craigslist.org

	Blade1.jpg (65KB)

Would you be interested in a trade for an RC helicopter?

I have an E-flight Blade 400 RC Helicopter with many upgrades.
The blade 400 has the purple CNC metal head and the spectrum transmitter.
It has one new Hyperion battery, carbon fiber blades and extra wood blades.
I also have the original box for the helicopter.
Hyperion battery charger and one new batteries (batteries are $40 each, and the charger $120).
A HiTech gyro and servo combo ($180 new), which helps keep the tail in place (a major upgrade).
Everything you need for the perfect gift!!
This helicopter was recently serviced by Dale at RC Hobbies in Seattle.
Separately:
Blade 400 helicopter, Spectrum transmitter and 1 battery $400
HiTech gyro and servo combo $90
Hyperion battery charger and 1 battery $100
Package deal: $525 cash.
Call Ron at xxx-xxx-xxxx

--

Ronald XXXXXXX, ND, PhD - Licensed Naturopathic Physician

E-mail: ron@xxxxxxx.com, Phone: (206) xxx-xxxx

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The best part is that this sounds like it would be a 14-year old kid, and it's some sort of doctor dude. I don't know. Maybe I *should* get a helicopter. If it were powerful enough to put the cats in it, that would make it worthwhile.

Actually, I lied. The *best* part is that the so-called "helicopter" looks like a pile of electromechanical refuse in a heap all over his workbench.

Slemony Nicket's Series of Fortunate Events

2009-12-28T22:26:00.000-08:00

I decided I wanted a new(er) car. My friend decides she also wants a new(er) car. Her car was newer than mine. I buy hers.

I decided I wanted to sell my old car cheap and fast. Initial avenue of sale (to a friend) falls through due to lack of interest. Friend who sells me her car finds a potential buyer at the dealership where she is buying her new car. What could be easier.

Except.

I take my car to get the tabs renewed. Find out that it needs an emissions test. Okay. No biggie.

Bring it for emissions. Car fails emissions. Pain in the ass.

Find out I need to spend *lots* of money ($400) to pass emissions. Go to dealer, which would normally be a bad idea, but I like this dealer, and wanted it done right and fast. Dealer asks me how much I am going to ask for my car. I tell them. They tell me I am crazy, and that my car is worth *far* more than I am asking.

I take their advice, and list my car for "far more".

Sell my car to the first person who sees it. Come out way ahead.

Moral of the story: Sometimes the shortest distance between two points is not the fastest.

Gaining Insight (Part I.5)

2009-12-28T09:54:00.000-08:00

I am not sure I'm ready to go all the way to Part II yet, so you get Part I.5. I am not sure that's the proper notation of an interim data point, when one is using Roman numerals. Perhaps I am on to Part I.V. Or Part I.II.

As you probably recall, I've been a personality-test freak for a long time, and have written blogs about it, and encouraged all my friends to take surveys as well. My favorites are the Enneagram and the Myers-Briggs (Jung) tests. As with many of the tests out there, I tend to fall kind of close to the borderline on certain criteria, though for the most part, I have always assumed that I am either a 6 or a 3 on the Enneagram, and either an ENTJ or an ENTP on the Myers-Briggs. If I had to say what I most often tested, or what I have identified myself as being, it would be a 6/ENTJ.

However, on the Myers-Briggs there are always a lot of questions that I have a hard time answering, and on which I doubt my responses. I would read the question, and in many cases, answer what I think I should be, as opposed to how I actually am. In fact, on a few occasions, I have had my results come out as ESTJ or ENFP. All sorts of variations. The Enneagram, on the other hand, almost always says that 6 is my highest score, and I don't have much difficult answering those questions that result in me winding up there, much as I am not thrilled about that outcome.

Then I was poking around online, and found some mappings of Myers-Briggs to Enneagram, which stated the most common Myers-Briggs associated with each Enneagram (I recognize that this represents an extremely self-absorbed, narcissistic expenditure of time and energy, but I am going to think of it as "introspection" rather than those ugly traits). And what I found was the people who are 6's are always F on the Myers-Briggs. There are a few different types that map to the 6, but they always contain F. And this made me wonder... maybe those times that I came out F on the test were not "flukes" but were actually the only accurate readings of my type?

All this time I have been assuming that I am a T and that there was simply no question about it.

Then I thought about it some more and realized that, although I do analyze everything, and I do spend massive amounts of time "applying logic", in the end, when it comes time to make a decision, I am very likely to discard my findings if they do not support what my gut feeling is telling me. In the end, I often abandon all of the analysis, and make a choice. It's better, of course, if my gut maps to what the data told me. But when it hasn't, I have readily discarded it. And to top it off, after I make this "gut" decision, I will then commence another round of analysis and logic, designed to rationalize or justify my decision! So, to an outsider (who doesn't pay that close attention), it looks like I am logic, logic, logic. But not really.

I don't know what this means. I think it might be relevant to my happiness and my understanding of self, though. Not sure how. But it seems that if I've been operating with an incorrect model of "self", that it might be difficult for me to get where I need to be. Because I continually try to fit all of my experiences into an understanding that does not take into account key facets of my inner workings. So, I'm trying to sit with this, and "recast" myself as the ENFP or ESFP (or ENFJ or ESFJ, though I don't think so on those). I don't want to dwell in this to the point of mental masturbation, but I feel like I should at least try it on for size, and see if my behavior and my internal workings are more consistent with this understanding of self.

Gaining Insight (Part I)

2009-12-21T14:39:00.000-08:00

It seems like during the past several months, when I have not been writing at all, I have perhaps been lacking more than just the attention that comes with "publishing" to my tiny readership. I've also been lacking in introspection. And it seems that whenever I stop looking inward, it's usually because I don't want to see, deal with, or face what's going on inside.

What I really have been needing was more insight.

So I decided to buy a 2005 Honda Insight. I'm only half joking. Actually, less than half, since both of my above statements are absolutely true. I did, in fact, purchase a 2005 Honda Insight. And I have, in fact, as you have witnessed, not been writing here for many moons (well, for 3 moons, anyway).

I'll start with the Insight Part I (the car) because that's easier.

As you may recall, I went through a fiasco about 2 years ago, where I bought a brand-new Mazda 3, and then became completely disenchanted with it, because of the miserable gas mileage that it got. And I cannot fault the EPA, since their estimates turned out to be exactly correct. Thing is, I could not believe that their estimates would possibly be correct, and I operated on the assumption that I would do much better. But sadly, over the life of that ownership (about 6 months), I netted about 24 miles per gallon. And that was Mazda's most fuel efficient vehicle. That's another story altogether. And it is an utterly disgusting one. That a Japanese automaker, in the 21st century, does not sell one car in the United States that averages better than 24 miles per gallon.

Stop and think about that for a moment...

So I bought the Civic, opportunistically, because a friend had it to offer. After about a year of owning the Civic, I started to feel like, while I like the vehicle, I wanted something just a little nicer. Not a fancy car. Not a luxury car. But perhaps a car with power locks, so my passenger doesn't need to wait in the rain, while I get in to open the door for them (or vice versa). Maybe a car that has power windows. Maybe a car with power-assisted steering, so that I could get in and out of parking spaces without feeling like I am opening one of those hatches between the decks of a submarine. But most importantly, one that still gets as good, or better gas mileage.

So, of course, the most logical, sensible, cost-effective way of pursuing that goal would be to purchase... what? I know what you think I'm going to say: a hybrid.

Well, actually, nope. That's not what I wanted.

What I wanted to find was a Civic model that is called the HX. That car was rated at 40mpg on the highway, running entirely on gasoline. I am pretty sure I have ranted about this before. My search of Craigslist, and discussions with mechanics, revealed a sad reality: if you can even find an HX out there (they were discontinued around 2003), it will either be overpriced, or have extremely high mileage on it. This is because nobody wants to get rid of these cars.

So, I was wallowing in sadness, and beginning to consider "sucking-it-up" and just buying another Civic, a little bit newer, with a higher "trim" (meaning, it has all the bells and whistles), either the DX or the EX models. There are a billion of those out there. Of course, there are probably a lot of sketchy deals out there too. So it was fixing to be an unpleasant process.

Then, coincidentally, a friend of mine texts me: "You still wanna buy my car" (we'd been semi-joking about the idea for over a year). A 2005 Honda Insight. Now, 2 weeks later, the car is mine (and she's now driving a 2010 Honda Insight - which, I should note, weighs fifty percent more than the original Insight - but that's also a topic for another rant).

I picked up the car yesterday, and was excited to immediately see that one can easily get 55+ mpg on the highway, with "proper" hybrid driving technique (if not higher).

Now I just need to sell my Civic.

Crows walking across the street

2009-10-31T10:09:00.001-07:00

Why do crows sometimes elect to walk when they could fly? Seems incredibly wasteful. They just take it for granted?

That would have been a witty status update if I were still on facebook. Instead it's a lame blog entry.

-- Posted from my iPhone

The greatest social networking experiment of them all...

2009-10-30T11:27:00.000-07:00

I am on hiatus from Facebook. It was as of yesterday, but that needs to be revised to being as of today, because I decided that I should at least set my notifications so that I'll receive an email if people try to contact me. Otherwise, it's just kind of rude.

The reason?

Well, I have to give credit to a friend with whom I was discussing this topic over lunch yesterday. She'd said she quit doing all forms of social networking. Since I tend to think that most of her ideas are good ones, I figured I'd copy her once again, and see if it works for me. Actually that's only half joking. The reality is that I have felt disconnected for some time now. And I am not sure why. My social circle seems to have shrunken, and my eagerness to reach out to people is also diminished. I rarely make phone calls, and rarely send emails either. I don't even really try to make plans with people. Part of this, I am sure, is because once you settle into a stable relationship, there's a bit of nest building that occurs. But that doesn't explain all of it. I think it's possible that the illusion of connection that I obtain via pushing pixels around on Facebook serves as a substitute for real contact with people.

For a long time now, my spare time has been spent in front of a computer. Tuning out. Not creating anything. Just throwing hours down a well without even the benefit of the wishing. I sit and lament the things I could be doing instead but am not. It used to be that the internet was like an amusement park - like Disney World. Around every corner, there was something new and exciting to discover. Some place to throw my obsession. But much like Disney World, after you've been enough times, the rides start to look like what they really are: big hunks of gaudy metal and plastic, selling the illusion of fun and happiness, while everyone is lined up like cattle to experience the same predictable show. I am pretty sure that ceased to be a metaphor about half way through the last sentence.

But I decided that I don't want my hours to be spent starting at a Disney World of the mind. I hate Disney World. I am pausing for a moment to amuse myself with the fact that I will probably get lots of hits on this blog from people searching for Disney World. That's somewhat entertaining.

I may waste those hours anyway. I am not sure that watching Netflix, or exercising, is much more noble of a pursuit than perusing Facebook. I am not sure if writing entries in this blog, for either 3 friends, 5 strangers, or no one to read is better than "tweeting" on Twitter. But at least those are experiences that take me somewhere. I have something to show for them. Maybe. Maybe not. I really don't know. Depending on where you stick your threshold line for "what is worthwhile", you could argue that anything we do is an acceptable use of our time or, conversely, that nothing we do matters, and that we're all nothing but ants crawling over one another. Depends on where you position your camera.

From 10,000 feet, lovemaking and brutal murder look remarkably similar.

Seattle, Broadstripe, Monopolies, and Feeling Fleeced

2009-10-05T15:49:00.000-07:00

Seattle believes strongly about monopolies among its utility companies. So strongly, in fact, that they divided the city into a bunch of mini-monopolies. By neighborhood, there is only a single cable tv/internet provider. Some neighborhoods use Comcast. And some use Broadstripe. Comcast is the giant national corporation. Broadstripe is a more regional company that, as an internet provider, causes one pause when you consider that their own website looks like it was designed by a 5th grader; not a good sign for an actual internet provider.

I have the misfortune of living in a Broadstripe neighborhood. What that means is, while people a mile away from me are paying $29.99 a month, or even $19.99 for high speed broadband internet, I am paying over $60 a month for the same service. And there are never any specials. They don't recognize or compete with Comcast, because there is no competition. They are serving completely distinct areas. So the companies win, and the consumer loses.

To make matters worse, this overpriced internet has been delivering abysmal performance for the past several months. My "broadband" service, which is supposed to be delivering 1.5Mbps (actually, it may even be specified at 3.0Mbps) has been routinely operating at 0.3Mbps. You can't even watch Netflix on this, without having it reload every 3 minutes, causing frustration like you can probably imagine.

Finally, after tolerating this for months, I decided to do another canvassing of the available alternatives, and discovered that the DSL plans in the area have now come down in price to the point that I am willing to roll the dice and see if Qwest is any better. I cannot imagine it will be worse.

Latest music purchases

2009-09-02T22:50:00.000-07:00

From iTunes:

Last two CDs by local Seattle band, Shim
Brent Amaker & The Rodeo
The single "Bound for the Floor" by Local H (circa 1995)

Apple gets too "smart" for this user

2009-08-29T10:41:00.000-07:00

In design, there is an ongoing debate as to how "smart" devices should try to be. A smart device is one that predicts (correctly) what the user's intention is, and then adjusts the experience to facilitate the detected scenario.

For instance:

You open your Gmail and you start typing your friend Suzie Blanchard's name. She's the only person in your entire contact list that has a name starting with "Su", so as soon as you type "Su", her entire name appears and all you need to do is hit Tab or Enter to choose her. That's an acceptable use of "smarts" in a program.

If, instead, you had friends named Suzie Blanchard, Susan Smith, and Sun Moonbeam, then you'd be annoyed if Suzie's name got stuck in there. Likewise, if it not only chose her name, but did the "Enter" for you, that would be bad too, because you would not be able to type a new "Su" name without deleting the entry of her name and hoping it learned that you didn't want her to be filled-in on the second try (lots of auto-correction behaviors in spell-check behave in that fashion - "No, I really wanted a lowercase 'i' in that sentence because I am writing about an integer variable, not writing about myself!"

So, where did the iPhone and Apple make big mistakes in their 3.0 version of the software? Two huge bets, that are turning out to be massive pain points for me as a user:

Many people wanted to be able to type emails and texts with the screen rotated, in the same manner that you would do rotated typing for the browser and many of the apps. It was a missing feature from the earlier builds. So it has been implemented in 3.0. The problem is, what if I don't want my screen to rotate with respect to the earth's gravitational field? For example, what if I am in bed trying to text or send email? The screen is parallel to the axis of my body, but it's perpendicular to the axis of the gravity, and thus, the image rotates, and I can't type because the screen is sideways for me. And the worst part is, there's no way to disable this feature!! Apple, and their smarts, decided that using the phone to say good morning to someone, while still in bed, was not a use case that needed to be addressed. Bad decision.
For some reason, even less practical than the one above, Apple decided that "Shake to Undo" was a feature that people would think is useful and cool. If you're doing something, and you want to undo it, you just shake your phone. Simple, right? The thing is, if I were going to make that feature, I would want to do a lot of testing to determine what constitutes a shake. Because as it stands, hitting a small bump in a car constitutes a shake. Going running constitutes a shake. Walking down a flight of stairs constitutes a shake. And every time you do one of these "non-shake" actions, a modal prompt (i.e. a message that you, as the user, need to actively dismiss) pops up on the screen, saying "Nothing to undo". That is horrible, and it will be shocking if Apple doesn't fix this. For starters, I suggest making the threshold for "What is a shake?" about double or triple it's current setting.

Train wrecks

2009-08-19T02:13:00.000-07:00

Why do we always stop to look at train wrecks
Why don't we just look the other way
There's nothing to see there, really
Nothing you haven't seen before
Because, while not all trains are the same
The respective wreckage looks eerily similar

Nonetheless, we stop
We look

Maybe there's something thankful
About not being that train

Wrecked

Yet

New ways that Facebook violates privacy policies

2009-08-04T16:53:00.001-07:00

Facebook does not, apparently, need to adhere to the same rules of security or privacy as other online institutions. I have observed three ways that they violate users' privacy, in spite of any privacy settings you might make.

If you make yourself appear "offline" in Facebook chat, then you should not appear in someone's chat list. This works. Well, there's an exception. If I connect to Facebook from my iPhone, then I can see you in my chat list, even if you said you don't want to be seen. I can't actually chat with you - I get an error - but I can see that you're online. This is a privacy "hole" that Facebook did not block.
If you set your Facebook privacy so that you cannot be found using the Facebook Search capability, then I will not find you if I search for you. Well, there's an exception, of course. Even though Facebook doesn't find you, there's a Web Search results section on the right side of the search results page, and it may find you there, providing me the link to your profile, even though you told Facebook not to let you be searchable. Of course, it's really no different than if I used Google to search for you. But it defeats the purpose of blocking search.
It appears that Facebook will, of its own free will, troll through your email contacts, if you have ever given it permission to look there. And it is not clear to me how one can withdraw that permission. At one point early in the game, I had let Facebook have the access to my Yahoo and Gmail contact lists so it could find Facebook users. But once they started doing the "People you may know" feature, it now seems like it is "revisiting" the contact list, and making suggestions from there. This, to me, seems like a privacy violation. I think Facebook should only have privilege to look at that list once and it should not retain access capability, and also should not maintain the list of contacts.

It's a fun program, for sure. And social networking is becoming a broad reality in our culture. But it's a bit scary that this one organization, Facebook, now knows everyone that we know, everything that we do, and everyone with whom we have ever been in electronic communication.

Scrapping the Scrabbling

2009-07-21T20:33:00.000-07:00

This could be called "Pursuing Our Passions: Part 1.5" but I thought that would be boring.

I vowed on Facebook the other day that I will stop playing online Scrabble. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, it's an obsession. Second, it's a waste of time that could be spent doing something more useful, such as pursuing a concrete goal in the real world. It might be true that I can note, among my accomplishments, the fact that I played BRAINIER for 140 points. But that, and $3.75, will not get me a 2% Vanilla Latte at the corner coffee shop.

The Scrabble is like a bucket into which I am dumping life. Hours that could be spent exercising, working, sleeping, hanging out with people, working on songwriting, practicing guitar, pursuing a new hobby, watching a movie. Instead, I am sitting and placing letters on a board. It's no different from World of Warcraft, which I previously swore off. In the end, it is simply this: "Sitting alone, and clicking buttons, while watching pixels change color on a screen". It may be true that I am learning some new words. But I am not, or rarely, bothering to learn the meaning of those words! I just learn the words! It's like when I went to Hebrew School and they taught us how to pray, but never taught us what the prayers meant! Sure, I am developing a type of skill. I am developing the oh-so-valuable life skill that is called "Playing Online Scrabble". It's not even the same skill as playing real Scrabble, because you don't have to know the words. You can just keep guessing until you find something that passes their dictionary.

These are the hours of my life.

I once spent them playing Moria, a D&D-based computer game. Then I spent them playing Diablo. Then I spent them playing Diablo II. Then I spent them playing Morrowind. And then, damn the creators, I spent them playing World of Warcraft. If WoW is heroin then, certainly, Scrabble is no more than Tylenol with Codeine. But ask Rush Limbaugh if that's a big deal or not. Plus, Tylenol will kill your liver. Seriously.

For some reason or another, I am always looking for a new psychological addiction to eat up my hours, and keep me from facing any of the stuff that's real. Is it stress relief? Do I really have that much stress that I require massive periods of disconnection to cope? Or is it just avoidance? Whatever the case, I am, as you have read in previous posts, questioning the meaning of my life, and questioning how I spend my time. And I am once again at a crossroads where I am looking for meaning.

The problem right with stopping Scrabble is that I have so many games going with people, I feel like I need to finish them, to be polite, but just not start any new ones. The truth is, I don't really need to finish them. I could forfeit all of them right now, and be done with it. Or I could not forefeit them, and still be done with it. To keep playing them to completion is like saying, "I am going to stop drinking, as soon as everything in the liquor cabinet is gone". It's a little different because it's more like each bottle of liquor is also being shared with another person, who may or may not wish to quit drinking, or may not even have a drinking problem. And this metaphor is falling apart really quickly.

I need to stop. I deleted the Scrabble application from my iPhone, which is sort of like removing the cocaine from your 8-ball and thinking you've kicked the addiction. But then I added it back again, because I thought I would be able to get through all those games more quickly if I could make moves when I was away from a computer.

There's really too much thought being put into this. I realize. And, on the one hand, ironically, it's throwing more money down the well, instead of doing meaningful things. But, on the other hand, if one of those meaningful things I was planning on doing is writing and self-reflection, then I guess it's all good.

Pursuing Our Passions: Part 1

2009-07-19T18:03:00.000-07:00

Sometimes things happen for a reason. You saw my earlier blog about happiness, and the pursuit thereof. I had a few conversations with a few friends about the topic over the past several days. Coincident with that, I was conducting a study at work, testing a feature in our software that enables users to create "forms" which are basically surveys that will port the data into a spreadsheet for you. That got me interested in conducting a survey of my own. So I decided it might be interesting to conduct a survey about people's pursuit of their passions. So I did. The survey had only 5 questions on it, which I will paraphrase for you here:

1. Do you have any passions/interests you pursue actively?
2. What are they, if you want to share?
3. Do you have any passions you'd like to pursue but don't have/make the time?
4. How often do you watch television?
5. How often do you browse the internet?

I created this survey, and sent it to a bunch of people on Facebook. And then I found out that my survey was broken, and was not collecting data. It had been overwritten with a blank survey. I would have to recreate and resend it. And I didn't want to do that, because it felt like I am an idiot, and I was spamming people. So instead I deleted the survey. Then I got mad, and almost deleted my Facebook account entirely.

But then, I calmed down, and realized that sometimes things happen for a reason. The issue in my life right now was that I was trying to figure out what my passions really are, and how I can go about pursuing them. And asking a bunch of other people questions about this is not going to get me any closer to having meaning in my life. It's just an exercise in mental masturbation. It's just a bunch of useless information. At best, or at worst, all it does is tell me that there are some people just like me, who also don't pursue their passions, because they waste their time on idle pursuits. And if not that, all it does is tell me that there are plenty of people who pursue their passions. Maybe I learn a little about what people's passions are. Maybe I make one or two people think about what they are or are not pursuing themselves, that they'd like to be. But, by and large, it does nothing to address my original goal, which was to get somewhere.

So, upon this further reflection, I realized that the demise of this survey was perhaps the best thing that could have occurred. I don't need to know why you do what you do. I don't need to know what you want to do, that you are not doing. I need to start doing what I want to do.

Clearly, blogging is one of those things. But there are others. And there is more than ample time to be pursuing some of them, if I reallocate my time strategically. Shouldn't be too hard.

Choices

2009-07-14T00:14:00.000-07:00

About 10 years ago, a little more, I made a choice. It was not a good choice, at the time. But it has led to everything that has happened since then, obviously, and I think things turned out quite well. I was working at a small company as an applications engineer. I was the only applications engineer at that company, and I provided a much needed, and reasonably appreciated service. In addition to having that specialization, I also was the only person at the company that had become skilled in circuit board layout using a particular custom piece of software. I was the go-to guy. And I was 28 years old. I'd only been out of school for about five years. And it was a decent place to be, in that company. There had already been one attempt, by a major corporation, to buy the company, which the CEO had refused, because he suspected his business was worth more than the several million that had been offered. But after two years at this company, I'd become impatient with my career growth. I felt that others were being treated better than I was. I felt like others were the "golden children" and that I was just sort of an underappreciated afterthought. I felt that I would never be recognized. Particularly, I felt that I would not be financially recognized. I even felt that my manager was receiving some of the credit for work that I was doing.

So, I gave them an ultimatum. I told them that I thought I should be promoted to senior engineer. And I told them that I thought I should be earning a certain amount of money that was about 40% more than I was earning at the time. It would have been almost unthinkable to give me that much of a raise, but that's what I had in my head. The review came, and I did not get what I wanted. The CEO told me that he felt I still had some growing to do. They did give me a 22% raise which, when you think about it, is pretty significant. But I turned my nose up at it. I immediately began looking for another job, and I found one that paid me what I wanted, and gave me the title that I wanted. And it was at a big company with a good reputation.

I walked in to the CEO of my company and told him about the offer, expecting him to counteroffer. But I should have known better. He was not one to be put into corners. He told me that he was disappointed to hear that I was leaving, and that he thought I was making a mistake, but he respected my decision. That was it. No negotiation. I was worth what I was worth, to him, at that point in time.

I left the company in 1998. The company went public in 2005, and quickly rose to around $18/share. It peaked at around $50 and is now at $33. Most of the senior designers, who would all be around 50 years old now, have retired, millionaires. People who were in the middle tier, like myself, who eventually left the company, cashed in their stock for tens or hundreds of thousands.

The job I took that gave me the title, and paid me more, sucked. It was boring as hell, and I never had anything to do. I was so bored, in fact, that I decided to stop being an engineer altogether, and change careers. And that's how I ended up deciding to study biology. I figured, "If more money didn't make it better, then I guess nothing will". I wasn't necessarily right in that assertion. I think that's what we call "throwing the bathwater out with the baby". But I had it in my head that I needed to make a change. So I did.

I cannot say I regret anything that I did, but I learned something. I think I learned something good, and something bad. One good thing that I learned is to not think short term, and to be more patient, and to see the big picture. I also learned that money isn't everything, because I went on to become much happier, in a less materialistic lifestyle. But the bad thing I learned was to shun certain types of risks. Career moves. I did take a risk by going back to school. True. And I did take a risk by abandoning, or at least forgoing, my graduate degree to work in a loosely related field in industry. But I do feel very hesitant and sheepish about career decisions after that hasty one back in 1998.

The upside is that maybe the worst thing that happens when we make these decisions is that we find ourselves in interesting and unexpected new places years down the road, all having stemmed from those seemingly precarious choices.

Just give me a cell phone that does everything I need it to do

2009-07-10T13:23:00.000-07:00

Thesis Statement:

There is no cell phone that does what I need it to do

Here's what I need:

I need a phone that has a keyboard, and preferably a small compact keyboard that is easy to type on. I do not want a phone that has only a touch screen, because I cannot type well on them. I was fast as lightning on my old HTC Shadow. Now, I am completely hobbled on my iPhone because of typos. This requirement rules out the iPhone and a handful of other models.
I need a phone that connect to my work email and calendar easily, without using a web browser to do it. That basically means I need Microsoft Exchange Server support. This requirement rules out the Blackberry which, from the sounds of it, is challenging at best to configure, and not sure if calendar or meetings is possible at all.
I need a phone that has good signal in my neighborhood. This requirement rules out T-Mobile as a provider, because they've got basically no signal in my part of town.
I need a phone that has navigation, maps, and web browsing, i.e. a Smartphone. This makes the list of choices short.

If those 4 things were all that I cared about, the decision would be, of course, to buy a Windows Mobile device, such as the Samsung Jack or Samsung Propel Pro. But in addition to the things I need, there are also things that I want.

I would prefer a phone that has a 3.5mm headphone jack so I can use the phone as my music player, with my good earbuds. Oops, that requirement rules out all of the Windows Mobile devices that AT&T carries which met my other requirements! The Samsung phones both use a stupid proprietary headphone jack and would require an awkward dongle to use my regular headphones.
I would prefer to be able to connect my phone as a music player to my car stereo. Only an iPhone seems to do that. I could not get my Zune to work, and I could not get any other mp3 player I own to work either, unless I use the radio tuner route, or the audio input directly, which is workable but inconvenient.
I would prefer the phone to have easy access to things like Facebook. This doesn't seem to rule out any of the options, but Blackberry and iPhone do it better than Windows Mobile

The bottom line is that, no matter which option I choose, especially with AT&T, I am hosed in one way or another. I love the iPhone in some ways. It gets all the little things right. But some of the big things it gets very wrong. Call dropping is an issue. Battery life is an issue. And typing, which I do a lot, is abyssmal. The latter is the reason I am on the verge of dumping my iPhone. But there needs to be a better option, and both Windows Mobile and Blackberry have Achilles' heels that, right out of the gate, I suspect will make the experience worse. Especially when you consider that they both lack nearly all of the bells and whistles the iPhone possesses.

There's really no winning. Perhaps the way to win is to say the hell with the Smartphone and go back to the Dumbphone?