Blog Archives 061114 to 061020

Old pointless chatter instead of new pointless chatter.

 

061114 Davis, CA
Hmm. Politics. I've not bothered mentioning the election results in part because I'm not sure what the results mean yet. The right wing talking heads are stunned and horrified while the left wing talking heads are celebratory. Me, I think it is not so clear. You see, the Democrats that replaced a bunch of Republicans are not exactly lefties; they are "Lieberman Democrats". When you have a socially conservative, anti-abortion, pro-gun Republican replaced by a socially conservative, anti-abortion, pro-gun Democrat, it is hard to see this as a dramatic change. Still, having the president and the majority of the congress in different parties seems to me to be a distinct advantage to the nation in that it ensures debate about issues and legislation. Hopefully, this election will end the ram-rodding of ill-conceived legislation through our government.

Oh, one interesting tidbit, picked up while listening to conservative talk radio (which was bemoaning the loss of their beloved Rumsfield): apparently the reason Rumsfield ignored the advice of the Army War College, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and every other military advisor when making the war plans for Iraq came out of a wish to avoid a quagmire. Rumsfield, according to a friend of his being interviewed by the radio host, wanted to make sure that the US forces were deployed along the lines of the early Vietnam engagement (mostly special forces, not very many boots on the ground, relatively small support personell contingent) rather than along the lines of the late Vietnam engagement (a target rich environment of massive numbers of troops, lots of support personnel, and big local impact). Apparently, Rumsfield was betting that few troops equaled low potential for quagmire.

Of course, this ignores such obvious facts as the fact that in the early Vietnam engagement the (south) Vietnamese Government took care of providing the policing, massive numbers of boots on the ground, and support. Vietnam started with an invitation for "advisors", with the local authority structure remaining intact at the start. Iraq was always going to be an invasion and occupation, with destruction of the local authority structure and resulting power vaccuum. Er, actually, the Army War College plan called for retention of as much of the local authority structure as possible, but Rumsfield (and Bush) wasn't (weren't) listening to that part, or any part, of the military advice.

Oops. Got off track... Right, the election. Anyway, I don't expect big changes, just a minor (but important) return to the Constitutionally directed checks and balances between the branches. Our legislature remains quite socially conservative and I'm hoping to see a return to fiscal conservatism. That's not too much to ask, is it?

061113 Davis, CA
So, now that I've stopped traveling so much, I no longer have the pressure of a very tight project timeline (6 months, start to finish) and I promised myself I'd actually use the vacation time I'm alotted. I'll be taking a few days this week and going to a convention in L.A.. It is a games convention that some friends from Utah will be attending. It'll be nice to see the old gang again.

I'm finding that I'm not very good at taking vacation. I then to work harder just before the start of vacation, out of some odd urge to "make up" for the "lost time". I don't just relax and look forward to the start of vacation; instead I get more frantic, attempting to do more and more before the leave date. Eh, this is just one more indication that I ought to take more vacation. I'm sure I'll eventually get used to the concept.

061112 Davis, CA
For today, you get an interesting news brief and then a rant. The news brief is Why climate change cannot be ignored, an article out of Food Navigator. It talks about the implications from a UK governmental review which looked at the impact of global warming on agricultural productivity... It's not good news and makes clear the economic costs of doing nothing as compared to the economic costs of taking strong action to reduce emissions.

Now for the rant. I call this rant "Frequent Flyer Miles Are Not Real". You see, airline companies talk about frequent flyer miles, encouraging you to register in their programs and "build up" miles in these programs, as a way to get free flights. Credit card companies talk about frequent flyer miles and cards that give you credited miles on various airlines as though this is a benefit of having and using their particular card. However, I don't believe any of this is "real".

Here is why: For me to believe that an imaginary number (like banked "miles") is real, there has to be responsible accounting for that imaginary number, with real-world impact should that accounting fail. I.e. both the consumer and the provider have to act like the numbers are real and only then they are real for that relationship. For example, a number of different studies have looked at the exchange rate between World of Warcraft Gold Pieces and real US Dollars. People EBay virtual property and charge real money for the exchange of "gold piece" values, with real lawsuits filed over deals gone bad. Blizzard (the creators/operators of the on-line world) has been careful with their on-line world and treated the imaginary economy with care, attempting to keep it in balance in ways respectful of the account-holders' imaginary savings. So, this is a good example of an imaginary unit that is effectively "real", because all involved parties treat it with the care and respect due a real unit of exchange or commerce.

Airlines, on the other hand, are given to simply declaring that your miles "expired". Any other currency may be subject to inflation, but the airlines sometimes change the rules about how long your "miles" last. Also, there is no other "banking" relationship I know of where the customer has a constant fight to keep the "bank" honest. The passenger supplies all of the needed documentation, account number, etc., and then takes the flight. Why is it necessary for the customer to then check after the flight to see if the frequent flyer account was properly credited? The frequency with which the miles are not credited is clear proof that the airlines themselves do not consider the currency of miles to be "real" or worthy of proper accounting.

Oh, as you may have guessed, when I checked on my "miles" status with the various airlines, I found that none of my various flights to Europe or Asia had been recorded, despite the fact that I'd submitted my frequent flyer information to the travel agent and, upon check-in, verified with one of the desk people that my frequent flyer information was present. None of my transoceanic flights back to the US had been recorded either. Sending evidence of paid-for tickets (receipts, etc.) did not get me credited either; boarding passes were the required evidence and I no longer have those. While I'm tempted by a conspiracy theory explaination (that airlines deliberately "lose" the miles from long flights), simple incompentence seems a more likely explaination.

So, various companies attempt to convince you that these "miles" are a valid exchange currency, but they expire, are subject to lackadaisical accounting by the administrating bodies (the airlines), are of limited utility (restricted to non-optimal dates or times) and of varying exchange rate (American has made some trips now cost 50,000 instead of 25,000 of these "miles"), etc. All in all, by several different measures, frequent flyer miles are less real than "Burger King Burger Bucks" were.

Yeah, I know it works out for some people. Persistent, detail oriented people, like my mother, check up on the airlines and make sure every mile and every mile-linked credit card transaction is properly logged by the frequent flyer administrators, spending the extra time and effort needed to make them do the job that is theirs implicitly in the frequent flyer account agreements. However, I find it to be an annoying con game every time I'm forced to look into it. I'll keep submitting the frequent flyer information every time I fly, and perhaps I may, some decade, actually find some benefit to it, but I'm not going to get all excited by offers of these imaginary "miles", not when I know that imaginary World of Warcraft "gold pieces" are far more competently administered, accounted, and valued. Heck, if I could trade my imaginary "miles" for imaginary "gold pieces", I'd do it in a heart-beat even though I don't play the game... Then I could at least sell 'em on EBay and get some real advantage out of it.

061111 Davis, CA
I met Eric, Chris, and the nephews for an outing to San Fran today. We were going to the Legion of Honor Fine Arts Museum. California traffic was it's usual nightmare (heavy and delay-ridden), but the visit was really good. We saw a nice Japanese-style garden in one of the parks and I spent hours in the museum after Eric and Chris left. Not only is their Rodin collection excellent, but there was a visiting exhibit; "Claude Lorrain - The Painter as Draftsman", from the British Museum. Walking out of the museum, having lingered over many excellent landscape paintings, I was struck by the beauty of the location: golden rays of a setting sun lit up the Golden Gate Bridge, the bay, and the mountains across the bay. It was worth watching for a good long while, so I did.

061110 Davis, CA
I've been emailing various friends of late, people from North Carolina and people from Denmark. I've done a terrible job of telling people that my rotations are over, so I won't be returning to Denmark shortly, and that my permanent assignment is Davis, so I won't be moving permanently to either North Carolina or Denmark. It is only through this blog that I've notified many people at once. I think I'll have to put together some sort of relatively decent holiday letter, summarizing the last year or so, and send it off as a mass mailing to everyone with whom I'd like to stay in contact.

I don't know about you all, but I don't find writing easy. If you keep it just to the most salient points, it is a brief, unfriendly-seeming listing of information. If you decide to throw in some small talk, you end up with lots of totally pointless and mostly uninteresting asides. Um, I nearly included an example of this sort of aside, but that would have been pretty dumb. Anyway, I think it's going to take me a little while to come up with a reasonable holiday letter, so I'm glad I thought of it now.

In other news, one of these weekends when I have some more time, I ought to finish transcribing entries from the time when I was travling in Yangshuo and Guilin. Here's just a piece of my notes from 060828, in Guilin:
I could play word games and call it "sultry", but it is just plain hot. Hot and humid like monkey balls... and that monkey is wearing saran-wrap speedos. This close to sea-level in south China, none of the local peaks are high enough to let me climb to cooler locations. Thanks to the heat and humidity, each climb has been a dance with heat exhaustion that leaves me drenched with sweat.
I also talk about rat-on-a-stick (night market food) and other things. Once I have it typed up, I'll announce it and put links in so you can easily read it if you want to.

061108 Davis, CA
I'm a political junkie... I've stayed up late listening to the returns and following the success or failure of both local propositions and national election trends. Locally, some amazingly stupid propositions are passing. Nationally, the democrats are doing better than had been predicted. Yeah, I could ignore it, go to bed early and read about the results in the morning, but to me this is more exiting than a sports game.

I don't actually think having the democrats gain some power will change anything much; many of the ones being elected and replacing a republican are "Lieberman democrats", i.e. socially conservative centrists. Mostly, having the democrats in the majority in the house or senate should be good for the nation in that it will force a bit more debate... This will end the one-party control of House, Senate, Executive, which allows ram-rodding of policy/law. It's not a big change, but it may be an important one.

061105 Davis, CA
Earlier today, I was standing in a laundromat musing on things. Then I realized that I'd spent the last twenty minutes wondering why my load was not done yet, while looking at the wrong machine (my clothes were done washing and sitting in the machine next to the one at which I was looking). Anyway, I was musing about the world of the laundromat. It is a world primarily populated by people too poor to own (or lease or rent) a washer and dryer; minimum wage workers, recent immigrants, a hand-full of off-campus students, etc. I was musing about the fact that many of my relatives have this world as a dim memory, if they have experienced it at all.

On an entirely different topic, I was thinking about being a "joiner". I'm not much of a joiner, but I need to be one now, much like I have needed to be one for much of my moving around. Going for these late-night runs may be all well and good from a fitness perspective, but it does absolutely nothing to decrease isolation. I ought to join a local gym, take some fitness related classes and whatnot, so that I'm both getting exercise and doing something social. Yoga was suggested (by C.) and it's a good idea: it's not a very "manly" activity meaning that, of the single people attending, there are a lot more women than men.

One thing that I've allowed to hold me back from doing it so far is the fact that yoga is pretty much guaranteed to make me feel weak, clumsy, and inflexible (at the beginning). I went to a class or two a few years back and it is like any physical discipline you try for the first time: for the first little bit, you are going to be utterly crappy at it. The main difference between yoga and some other physical disciplines is that yoga (at least to me) looks like it ought to be easy to do.

Eh, enough with the ego. I'm going to look into the local yoga studios.

Oh, the only other news is that I spent part of the weekend repeatedly monkeying with this site, trying to make it "better". I wasn't wild about any of the changes, so this format remains. If anyone would like something improved, let me know. The only thing I can think of as a clear improvement would be increasing the readability. Email me an lemme know if a bigger font size would be useful to you. Or maybe I should be "cool" and do white on black or something.

061104 Davis, CA
Man, time has been flying by. I've been here about 6 weeks now and, while I have done some of the things I'd meant to do (getting a new car, finding a place to live, etc.), there is a lot more I should be doing. One of the simplest things is getting into a regular exercise routine. There is a nice park near my current place, and it links up with some extended greenspace corridors, so I have been hauling my butt out for a run every other day or so for the last two weeks...

When I say "day", what I should say is "night". You see, I can't get myself up early enough to go for a run before work, and I'm pretty hungry when I get home from work, and running right after eating is a bad idea, so I've been going for a run a couple of hours after dinner time. Pretty much, it's 9 PM or later before I manage to make myself head out for the run. Fortunately for me, the walkways through the greenspace corridors are nicely paved and lit, so I can go for a run at 9-10 PM and not have to worry about cars or getting mugged or whatever. The temperature is OK (once I've been running for 10 min or so) and the night sky is really nice. Around Halloween, the moon was half-full (45° tilt), large, orange, and low-set during my run, like a great serpent's eye inspiring the following:
Heavy orange moon
glowers over a crisp night.
Scent of damp fall leaves.
Eh, the haiku works if you say orange as "or-ange" rather than "ornge".

061102 Davis, CA
When I was in China, one of my colleagues from Davis was brought to China for two months to help set up a project there. Today, she gave a status update on that project, discussing the world-wide project status but focusing on the China location portion of the project. At the end of the project update, she gave a brief discussion of what it was like living in China for two months, since people had been asking.

One of the things she mentioned was "And here's the hotel I was staying at. It was kind of hard staying in a hotel for two months, but I shouldn't complain. Keith doesn't complain and he was living in the hotel for six months." I was sort of surprised... Two thoughts were running through my head: "I guess I've done a good job about not whining too much." and "If you thought that was hard, then you have no idea exactly how much these last two years have sucked.".

Don't get me wrong; it was/is a fantastic opportunity and I have no regrets, but it was/is tremendously isolating. I may have been in Davis before, but now, two years later, I'm still newly moved to Davis and I know no one outside of work. The few non-work people I knew from two years ago have moved on (they were grad students). Living in a hotel certainly underlined the transience of my position in China, but that was nothing compared to the two years of consistent anchor-less life disruption.

I'm now semi-desperate to establish some sort of normal life and knowing that it takes time (it typically takes a few months of social effort to establish a non-work social circle) is almost physically painful. For the first time in my adult life, I find myself wanting a TV: the comforting, babbling glow acts as a kind of company. Ugh.

Oh poop. I refuse to end on a downer note two posts in a row. I will instead observe that some of what I called "unremarkable music" (in the post on 061028, speaking about some of the new music I picked up) has definitely grown on me during repeated listening and several of the tracks from the "interesting picks" category have been upgraded to "pretty cool" (e.g. "Filli Neidhardi" by Corvus Corax, which sounds like someone took Virelai's medieval viking music, fused it to goth dance club percussion, and added some scottish bagpipe drone).

Oh, here's a bonus for those of you who are under the mistaken opinion that I have any competence in Chinese, I have finally provided an example to disabuse you of that opinion: Here is a copy of my goodbye email to my China site colleagues. It's a short couple of lines, but it's amazing how badly one can slaughter a language in a few short lines. Since you (probably) don't read Chinese, I've got it in English as well and I explain where I went wrong.

061101 Davis, CA
I signed a lease today, so I'll shortly be leaving the temporary apartment and moving into a condo on the north side of davis. If any of you have sent mail to my current address (4301 Ashland Terrace, Apt. D), please let me know ASAP since I'm moving soon and (as I noted in the Travel Details page) I have not bothered to locate the mailboxes for the Ashland Terrace complex. Unless someone tells me they sent mail to this address instead of my mailing address (1445 Drew Ave.) I'll be moving out without ever having looked for or received mail at the Ashland address.

Looking for another place was a depressing experience. On one hand, looking after University of California (Davis) classes had already started meant that the student rush was over and I didn't have to worry about places I'd seen being rented to someone else before I could evaluate multiple places.
On the other hand, what was left were the dribs and drabs that none of the students wanted.
On another hand, the rental prices had been reduced to help them get rented.
On yet another hand, looking for a place meant moving yet again, to move into it. Yeah, it is not moving to a different city, but it is still moving.
On a fifth hand, finding a place means that I can finally (eventually) get my things out of storage.
On a sixth hand, since realty agencies around here are not open on weekends or outside of 9:00 - 5:30, house-hunting meant long work hours. I'd come in to work, get some stuff done, take off in the mid-afternoon to tour places, and come back to complete a full working day. Therefore, on house-hunting days, I've been working until 9 at night or so. This adds up to working too much.

I can afford to rent a decent place with no problem, but this househunt served to strongly underline two things: two people can afford a much nicer place than one person can afford (I saw some very cute 3 bedroom houses that were more expensive than would be wise for me) and one person alone will rattle around in a large space (I saw several places that were affordable but just too big for just me). Although the property prices might make you wonder, Davis is no New York City; it has no single-person appropriate "loft"-like places.

The combination of working long hours, the dark, the cold, the fact that I'm still not "settled", etc., well, it left me in a pretty sour mood the entire time I was house-hunting. I'm glad it's over. I told a coworker about the condo I decided to go for and she asked "Is it what you wanted, or are you settling on it because you are tired of looking?" The answer to that is "Yes.". Of the places I saw, the condo was the best, and I am most definitely not looking any longer. Still, what I want (to own, not rent, a cute little suburban house) is not what I'll be getting anytime soon. House-hunting was a continuous reminder of that depressing reality.

Ugh. What a downer blog post. I think you can see why I've not been posting much of late.

061028 Davis, CA
I have been working too much of late. Getting home late and really not feeling much like doing anything on the blog. While I've done some minor tweeking of the wines page, updating it with whatever I've tried of late, the main thing I've done is to add a few more quotes to the random quotes file. You may not have noticed it, but I have a random quote that appears at the bottom of the left-hand menu. Anyway, here are, as examples, two of the quotes added to the random script:

To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.
- H.P. Lovecraft

Children are unpredictable. You never know what inconsistency they're going to catch you in next.
- Franklin P. Jones

Adding random quotes is a lazy addition to make, but that's what I've done on the days when I didn't feel like writing a post. It somehow seemed better than doing nothing.

Well, there was one more blog-related thing I attempted to do: The left-hand menu is rather long and for several of the pages (specifically, the "submenu" pages, e.g. the languages page, e.g. the old website bits page) have a left-hand menu that is much longer than the main body text. I'd noticed that the left-hand menu seemed to get truncated rather than being fully displayed. After a bit of troubleshooting, I found the problem: Microsoft's IE browser simply fails to display things properly. My site is properly encoded and strictly standards compliant, so all standards-compliant browsers (Firefox, Opera, Camino, Mozilla) were able to handle it properly and display things as intended, but IE does not. Essentially, there is nothing for me to fix, no workaround that I can use without making the blog display properly only in IE. My recommendation is that people download and use whatever they would like so long as it is compliant with the international web standards laid out by the w3 organization (i.e. not IE). I optimistically look forward to the day Microsoft stops attempting to balkanize the internet, although that day may never come.
Update: The just-released IE 7 handles things the display of an overly long left-hand menu, as well as implementing a number of "new" features which it has copied from Firefox, such as tabbed browsing. This fix notwithstanding, if you want a standards-compliant modern browser, Firefox is a far better bet than IE 7.

Oh, the other thing I've been doing of late was listening to a whole batch of new music. Tower Records is going out of business and all their stores are having sales to clear out the inventory. Tower Records was one of the few big chain stores that would carry a healthy inventory of indie and small import discs. It is a shame to see Tower go, since they were a good outlet for the indie market. I went in and grabbed a handful of discs at 20% markdown, which made it fiscally reasonable to try a bunch of new artists. So I picked up some Irfan, :Wumpscut:, Second Decay, etc. There have been one or two that turned out to be disappointingly unremarkable music, but there were also one or two that turned out to be really good, interesting picks. I'm sorry to see Tower going.

061026 Davis, CA
I have some friends who habitually call me when doing a long, boring drive or when running errands. I have others who decided to be efficient when on the phone and will call and then clean the kitchen. Others will talk and answer email at the same time. In all of these cases, there is the same basic problem: divided attention. I think I've had enough of it.

While it is perfectly true that you can do both things at the same time, the quality of the conversation suffers and it is usually easy to tell when someone has divided attention. If the point of the phone call is the conversation, then why divide your attention? If the point of the call is idle entertainment, then turn on the TV rather than using another human being.

Out of honesty, I should admit that I've done the same thing, talking on the phone while doing something else. I generally try not to, though.

061021 Davis, CA
Some leftover notes from the camping trip: My brother had brought along Samuel Adams' Brewer Patriot Collection, a four pack of beers. The beers were Traditional Ginger Honey Ale (a very light ale which lets you taste the added ginger, lemon peel, and honey), James Madison Dark Wheat Ale (a blah wheat ale with a slight smokey taste), George Washington Porter (a hoppy porter with licorice, surprisingly good), and 1790 Root Beer Brew (a brew with a wintergreen flavor as a curve ball). The only one I'd consider getting regularly would be the George Washington Porter, but the 4-pack collection is a nice way of sampling some off-beat brews. Hm... I kinda like the Traditional Ginger Honey Ale too.

And a leftover note from last weekend's visit to my brother's place in San Jose: When a mob of neighborhood kids were playing hide and seek as the adults stood around and watched and chatted, one of the oldest kids, 13, I think, came over to see who the new guy was (me). On being told that I was E.'s brother and the same age as him, she protested that he had to be older and he is going bald (very slight thining on the crown), etc. I pointed out that I was going bald too (thinning on the crown and a high hairline that has been wandering higher for a while). E. and I showed her our driver's licences' birthday entries to settle the matter, after which she pronounced the Official Truth: We are the same age, but I'm both balder and cooler (because I was wearing black Converse Hightops). Balder but cooler is not a bad trade off, I think. I was, however, told that for properly cool black Converse Hightops, according to the pre-teen fashionistas, I was supposed to have my friends sign the white parts of the shoes... I think I'll skip that part even though it would make me "cooler".

061020 Davis, CA
I have been listening to Rush Limbaugh in the evenings... You see, the apartment in which I am currently came with rented furniture, including a clock-radio which was pre-tuned to the local station that carries Fox New reports and Rush Limbaugh's show in the evening. I've left it there and I occasionally listen just to hear how the far right is viewing things.

So far, the Fox News segments have been more annoying than Rush. Rush sees himself as entertainment (although his listeners see him as news) so he is unconcerned by facts and he fearlessly announces things like "those sting ray barbs are dual-purpose tools; they are antennas, and who knows what they are communicating globally". Fox News, on the other hand, repeats their tag line "fair and balanced" while at the same time using selective reporting and prejudicial language.

Anyway, listening to that station in the evenings has been informative and occasionally scary. I say 'scary' because of things like the several week-long period where Rush and a series of other talking heads were confidently stating that not only was a silent majority in Iran hoping we would invade and topple the government there (over the nuclear reactor issue), but that American troops would be welcomed as liberating heroes. When have we heard that before?

The only other bit of news it that the orgy of reading continues. I'm now reading "The Theory of the Leisure Class" by Thorstein Veblen. It is the source of socioeconomic terms like "conspicuous consumption" and "pecuniary emulation". I'm a big fan of Dover Thrift Editions for printing a whole lot of unabridged classic and educational literature at nice low prices.

Page Last Modified: 2007 01 12, 13:46:17

 

 

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