'Tis the season... for the chiropractor

It’s been a week of sore muscles.

Well, it’s also been a week of celebration, gratitude, generosity, family fun and good food. But the sore muscles really do stand out.

First, the hit to the pocketbook as well as the back: On Monday, we joined the 23% of Americans purchasing televisions this season. This necessitated a trip to Sears to get our plasma. A cheerful Sears minion loaded it into my pickup; Karla and I had to carry it into the house and lift it, above shoulder level, to the TV nook above our fireplace. But that TV is only 87 lbs. The big job was getting the old 32” tube TV (142 lbs, according to Google) out of the nook and then up the stairs to our bedroom armoire. This old beast has been with me for nine years, in and out of at least seven residences. I’m tired of moving it; I think when it finally breaks down, I’ll just toss it out the bedroom window onto the pavement, though knowing the Japanese Victor Company’s tendency to overbuild things, it will probably just bounce a bit.

Our next sore-muscle adventure occurred Christmas morning. My brother and his family had arrived the previous evening at the start of a blizzard that continued for the next eighteen hours. Christmas morning there was a 2-foot snowdrift in front of our house:


After digging out enough to get the garage door open, we scouted the territory and surmised that if we could get Tony’s crossover SUV off the driveway and into the one-lane section of the street that had been plowed, we would probably be okay to make the 40-minute drive to my parents’ place, where family, meals and my niece’s Christmas presents awaited. So we loaded up two toddlers, their gear, several presents and a homemade cheesecake into the car and started down the driveway. We made it about five feet off the driveway before we were stuck. There followed 45 minutes of hilarity, where we would dig the wheels out, only to have the car fishtail back into the mire. Here’s a tip: The 2WD Mazda CX-9 with sun-belt tires is a lousy snow vehicle.


With the snow still coming down (or sideways, as it were, with the wind), we had to throw in the towel. We unloaded the crowd and goodies; after breakfast, we set out to get the Mazda back on the driveway lest it have an unfortunate encounter with a plow or other vehicle. The result was another fun adventure of dig-push-dig-push, chipping through the ice down to the pavement one or two feet at a time, until we cleared the driveway threshold. By this time both Tony and I were soaked and freezing, but I felt better after a hot shower, a hot mug of cider, and a nice nap in front of the fire. Watching the snow continue to come down, I felt awfully glad to be the beneficiary of central heating, R-45 insulation, and Karla’s cooking, rather than being stuck in the snow by the side of the road with two unhappy toddlers. Homemade ham and potato soup isn’t the traditional Christmas feast, but I can’t think of a Christmas meal that tasted better.

The final chapter in the back-breaking week was a voluntary exercise: the transportation and installation of two enormous cabinets my dad made for our family as a Christmas present. Ever since we saw the floor plan for our family room three years ago, we knew we wanted built-in cabinets on either side of the fireplace. The builder wanted to charge us $4000 to put them in, so we decided to add them later. Dad offered to put them together for us this year. I don’t think any of us realized quite how big they would be: eight feet tall, five feet wide and 20 inches deep, each. Doesn’t sound too bad on paper, but when we saw them in my dad’s wood shop, they looked truly imposing. With Dad’s truck snowed in, the only option was my smaller pickup. This required carting them across my parents’ front yard (on a slope), through a foot of snow, to the driveway on the opposite side of the lot.

The snow and ice meant using a hand truck, or most any other back-saving device invented in the past 4000 years, was out of the question. As it turned out, though, the snow was actually more of a benefit than a hindrance. Because these cabinets would be enclosed on three sides by the walls, we didn’t need to keep the sides pretty; it was important to preserve only the front (and interior) of each unit for public consumption. This allowed us to slide the cabinets on their sides for a fair amount of the distance. It was still a chore, since the trail led uphill for several yards, but ultimately it was easier than it would have been on dry ground. We hoisted them into the pickup and made the trip to our home with no incident, though a gust of wind as we came down the hill into the valley caused them to sway a bit (and just about made my heart stop). Karla devised a way to slide the cabinets across our tile and wood flooring by placing bathroom mats face-down on the floor. The rubberized backs of the mats stuck to the cabinets and they slid, carpet-side down, across the flooring easily. There was some lifting and pushing to get them installed in their nooks, but they fit perfectly. Thanks, and nice job, Dad!


So, one week and half a bottle of Advil later, we have a new family room, with high-definition TV and loads of storage space for books, toys, and anything else you can think of. Let’s just hope there’s nothing else to move or shovel for a couple of days. In the meantime, I'll be keeping my eye on snow blower prices.

If programming languages were religions

I saw this on Slashdot this morning and had to laugh. Some guy has compared computer programming languages to world religions.

OK, it may be a little obscure, but anyone with an IT background will definitely find it amusing. The author sums up 40 years of ideological wars in the computer industry in a few paragraphs. And having just been in a meeting yesterday where our CTO mentioned that developing in Perl is "not encouraged" in our organization (we're a bank, after all), I saw the comments on Perl particularly apt. I even chuckled at the comparison of the LDS Church to Microsoft, which makes sense from an ecumenical perspective, if nothing else. ;-)

Much to the iPod's Delight

I face a conundrum every Christmas season, specifically about the music.

On the one hand, there is the music I like: The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the Cambridge Singers, Elvis, Buble, and Sinatra. And of course my wife's favorite, Josh Groban's rendition of "Oh Holy Night".

On the other hand is everything else. There are two kinds of bad Christmas music: Those songs that are bad outright, no matter how they are arranged or performed; and songs that are good, or at least decent, that have been tortuously adapted by misguided souls.

In the former category, those responsible for "Jingle Bell Rock" (and "Jingle Bells" itself, for that matter), "The Man With the Bag", "Merry Christmas, Baby" and "Winter Wonderland", among many others, have much to answer for. Whatever form they take, these songs trap the listener in a horrible alternate dimension of over-commercialized false cheer that is so divorced from any semblance of Christianity that one wonders how they ever entered the canon of Christmas music to begin with.

But in addition to this, a truly bad Christmas song also has to be really, really annoying. While children's songs such as "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" are also annoying, their utter banality is couched in pre-adolescent yearnings for, as Calvin & Hobbes author Bill Watterson would say, "more loot." At a certain point, most of us cross a threshold where Christmas means more than a pile of loot. The faux Christmas embodied by these pop hits from decades of yore never transcends the materialism. Not to say that the 40s and 50s have a monopoly on bad Christmas music: a collection we bought a few years ago has an original song by some starlet or other who reminds us at each repetition of the chorus that "this season only comes once every year." (This is opposed to other seasons, which in her world do occur multiple times a year; perhaps she's using some sort of pre-Gregorian calendar?)

The other category of bad Christmas music, abusing perfectly good Christmas carols, has no musical or cultural boundaries. We are just as likely to hear the embarrassment of "Silent Night" stretched to rock ballad as we are to hear it fed through a new age synthesizer. Then of course there is the countrification of everything from "Away in a Manger" to "Carol of the Bells", cheerfully led by that first disciple of Christmas Country, Kenny Rogers himself. (In morbid curiosity, I looked up our friend Kenny on Amazon.com, to see no fewer than 14 distinct Christmas albums. What a business model! No wonder the local FM station plays a Christmas song by Kenny every 15 minutes.)

This is not to say that Christmas music performed by popular artists does not have its place. Coldplay's rendition of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" is one of my favorites. And I still enjoy picking out the "cool" 80s acts (e.g., U2, Duran Duran, Sting) from "Do They Know It's Christmas?" even though this means I also have to put up with Boy George. Overall, though, my Christmas tastes trend strongly toward the traditional, to match my view of Christmas as a religious holiday. Anything crafted with the ultimate goal of wafting through shopping mall loudspeakers necessarily conflicts with my view of the holiday as a religious one.

At least the iPod is happy. Its hankering for Christmas tunes (about which I have previously written) is doubtless satisfied, at least for this month.

Mealtime Fun

Meals have been very interesting at our house ever since Spencer came along. First there was the spew phase, where he launched pureed carrots around the dining room with the precision and frequency of an artillery commander at the Meuse-Argonne. This was followed by the gravity phase, epitomized by the consistent and successful effort to drop his drink, bowl, and utensils over the side of the high chair onto the floor. Not to mention green beans, corn, potatoes, and anything else that won't stick to his fingers. More recently these bombing runs have been accompanied by an exclamation of "uh-oh", with, shall we say, somewhat tepid conviction and sincerity. Throughout these there has also been the sharing phase, where he will cheerfully remove some half-chewed item from his mouth and offer it to you. (This one is actually very sincere, and the sentiment is nice. We just need to work on the particulars of the delivery so it occurs before anything is ingested.)

Over the past few months he has been more eager to feed himself, and this has also coincided with his more active use of sign language. He actually has a pretty good spoken vocabulary for his age, but he has been very excited to learn signs, particularly those pertaining to food and meals. He knows the signs for food, juice, milk, apple, cracker, and cookie (among others). He also has his own version of "finished", which he uses whenever we put something in front of him that he doesn't
like (or even something he does like, but apparently is not on his own internal menu for the day). Usually, "finished" will be followed immediately by "cookie" so that there is no doubt as to his expectations: "I'm not full; just take this away and give me a cookie." Thus we now have the demanding-diner phase. Another aspect of demanding-diner is his tendency to overload his mouth with food that he can't chew; lacking molars, he does a pretty good job, but occasionally he will literally bite off more than he can chew, and this results in an unhappy moment. He simply looks at me with sad eyes and moans, his cheeks loaded like a chipmunk's. It is then that I brave the incisors of death (they're really sharp) to fish out the offending, half-chewed piece of chicken or whatever that is the bottleneck. His mom is better at it than I am, but so far I've managed to avoid getting chewed/bitten along the way.

If all this makes any of you prospective parents lose your appetite, take heart; it seems that as a parent, one is able to build an immunity to this (among many other things) over time. Speaking of which, I'm off
to get lunch.

Golden What?

So I’m munching this golden delicious apple that was part of my balanced lunch (read: it offset, in microscopic terms, the LDL being piled on by the two slices of leftover Pizza Hut that I ate today).  I know it’s a golden delicious because of the friendly sticker.  And I’m wondering, who gets away with categorizing an entire fruit type as “delicious” anyway?  One bad apple (ha, ha!) could ruin the whole reputation.  I’m sure we’ve all had a golden delicious (or its friend the red delicious) that was somewhat less than delicious, strictly speaking.  But then, who would buy a “golden pretty good” apple anyway?  Accurate, true, but with all the charm of a planned economy.

It turns out that those folksy West Virginians have no scruples when it comes to imposing performance anxiety on thousands of apples every day.  Per our friends at Wikipedia (who also supply the lovely stock photo), the golden delicious spontaneously appeared as a volunteer tree in the middle of a West Virginia farm in the 1890s.  (You should read the whole account; all that’s missing is an aphorism at the end: “and that, boys and girls, is why you never pull up an apple sapling; you may be saving an entirely new cultivar.”)  Objectively delicious (is there such as thing?) or not, West Virginia immortalized the golden delicious in 1955 by making it the official state fruit.

And thus ends the lunchtime musing.  For the record: mine was delicious.

More on Oil Prices

Back in June, I referred to a WSJ article that pointed out the silver lining in high oil prices: consumers willing to pay a premium for more expensive vehicles such as hybrids that helped to offset the ongoing expense of $4 gasoline. If you can trim your fill-up costs by 30% over the life of the vehicle, you may be willing to pay a premium, upfront or over a few years of loan payments. (Unless you’re the type of person who budgets car payments in perpetuity, trading in every 24-36 months to drive the new hotness, in which case hybrids make zero financial sense. Of course, if you fall into this category, your gilded goose is cooked anyway; it’s increasingly unlikely you’ll get the 0% financing or lease deals that have sustained your auto choices up to 2008, the year of the auto industry collective aneurism.)

What a difference in four short months. Oil prices have plummeted, and even in my state, which apparently is among the more expensive places to buy gas, prices at the pump are way down (my last fill-up was under $3/gallon for 88 octane). Our family has a small surplus in our transportation budget, since we planned on $4 gasoline for the 800 miles I drive every month to get to and from work.

Today I offer a link to an article in contrast to the WSJ link I put up last June: The Motley Fool has a nice analysis of what the drop in oil means for the economy, at least in the immediate future. It’s good stuff, likely to be overlooked as we collectively fixate on the percentage drops in our retirement portfolios, but its effects are real, both on the pocketbook and the trade deficit.

Too bad it won’t last.

I don’t think anyone can predict where we’re headed in the equities and commodities markets, and that includes oil. That being said, there are some fundamental principles to remember: Energy consumption per capita is increasing . So is the capita; people keep having babies, especially in certain parts of the world. Those kids will have dramatically longer lifespans, educational opportunities, income, and commensurate energy needs compared to their parents’ generation. So the long-term need for energy is not going to diminish, short of some apocalyptic event (which the prudent among us plan for, but of course are unable to predict). We may be in a brief trough of energy demand, but it will pop back up once the credit markets have a chance to thaw and home inventories drain.

As for me, I’m planning on making it to 2011 in my current commute pattern. By then the local transit authority is planning on opening a light rail line on our side of the valley, and I can afford to drive the 3 miles to the station even if gas is $10 a gallon. In the original computer game Civilization (circa 1991), players got a fairly decent bonus for building mass transit systems in cities. Let’s hope that our local officials are big fans of the game, and keep the funding coming.

Then you got the flows*

Air flows, that is. All around my office. (Not that I’m complaining; I’m glad to have a job, and glad to finally be in my office as opposed to Cubicle A1, which was really just a corner of a conference room with one of those cubicle panels bolted to the wall; in case you were wondering, a 5 foot cube panel doesn’t block the sound from the conference room, even a little. But I digress.)

My building was probably constructed around the time I was born. It has that 70’s vibe: brown-tinted windows on the ground floor, narrow corridors, flickering fluorescent lights (think the early scenes of “Joe vs. the Volcano”), and, of course, terribly inefficient climate control. To wit: the building is always freezing. The other morning, I walked in at 6:35 and passed the air conditioning compressor merrily whirring along. Never mind that there was frost on the door handle; discounting the report from the radio that said it was 37 degrees downtown, and that you can always shave a few degrees from that for where we are. So why on earth would we need the air conditioning running?

When it was inaugurated, most of the second floor of our building wing was open space. In the intervening decades, they’ve carved that space up a number of different ways, but never rejiggered the HVAC properly to match the rooms. So the thermostat for our wing sits on the opposite side of the building through three of four walls. But why would even those people want their air conditioner running when it is barely above freezing outside? Well… they’re in the kitchen. The kitchen that fries up countless servings of grease-laden bacon, sausage and eggs every morning to feed the IT horde. This is followed by a hearty selection of lunch items, one of which is always “from the grill”. I’ve craned my neck into the kitchen a few times to see if I can spot the thermostat, but I haven’t located it yet; from the way the cold air blows in my office, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the thermostat is located inside the vent hood for the grill.

But that’s only half the airflow story. Like everyone else in this part of the building, I employ an electric space heater to counter the ever present artificial draft. I also have a large picture window in my office, which produces its own natural draft (it looks over the parking lot and the fenced lot beyond, which is currently packed with earth-moving equipment in various stages of decomposition). So I have the cold air coming down and the warm air coming up. And I’m in the middle, enjoying a nice lukewarm swirling breeze; I try to imagine it as the type of ocean breeze you’d get sitting on a beach as a cool front moves in from the Pacific, but I usually fail.

I’m told that I ain’t seen nothin’ yet, that October is pretty tame compared to January. One guy kept a thermometer at his desk last winter and charted the number of times the temperature dipped below fifty; quite a few ticks on that chart. Nice. So folks crank up their space heaters. Every once in a while, I’m told, the combined load pops a circuit or two and we all go dark. I’m considering bringing in some of those handwarmers that you snap to activate, and strapping them to my wrists to work throughout the day. That, and a big old fireman’s ax to store behind the door, in case the space heaters start an electrical fire that blocks my way to the stairs and I have to chop my way out.

*If you don’t recognize the line that titles this post, bring up this youtube link or google "Bubb Rubb".

Some observations of the economic crisis

Or, rather, some observations on the media’s coverage. For good or ill, I always have a browser up during the day to track the markets and news, and I listen to news radio on both sides of my commute. So here’s what I’ve noticed:

Dejected Traders. Someone’s gunning for a photography Pulitzer, trying to find the stock trader showing the most angst. Common poses include the one-handed eye-rub (pictured; photo from www.talkingproud.us), the exasperated heavenward glance, and head in hands on the desk. Are these people—either the traders or their assiduous photo-documentarians—for real? Why is this news? If it is, I fully expect to see photos of anguished ditch-diggers, farmers, massage therapists and IT managers in similar depressed stances when they encounter trouble at work (perhaps a nice spread of some angry Working Americans).

Working Americans. You didn’t hear this one very often prior to last month, but suddenly, “Working Americans” are coming out of the woodwork. They’re a swing voting bloc. They’re “the heart of America”, and, let’s not forget, they’re angry, so incredibly angry. I know there’s a sizeable portion of the population that is not employed, but the rest of us are not some homogenized blob of rage. Last I checked there was a wide range of income, opinion, outlook and political persuasion at my office, and neither my industry nor my town is known for much diversity. Journalists have a responsibility to use (or define) accurate terms when referring to slices of the population, so they should be clear. Rhetoric-laced campaign dispatches are heavy on stereotypes, and when the media uses the same terms, it shows laziness, ineptitude, or both.

Irritating Campaign Advisors. I know, this is news of the tautological—what do we really expect? But the economic teams from both presidential campaigns are driving me up the wall. To pick just one example, there’s the practice of continuous repetition of the candidates’ full names in every sentence. “Barack Obama will put $500 in every Working American’s pocket. That’s what Barack Obama will do. You can trust that Barack Obama will do what’s best for the American People, because Barack Obama has the vision to lead us out of this crisis.” (Newsflash: 1. It’s okay to use a pronoun every once in a while; give it a try sometime, and 2. Unless you say something incredibly stupid or controversial, you are not important enough to be quoted outside of the interview, so there will be no confusion about a remark taken out of context; really.)

Pandering and Finger-pointing. Again, what can we really expect? I imagine many NPR listeners are just waiting for the journalists to sock it to the conservative Wall Street types who agree to appear on their programs. “But don’t you think that this past month has been a vindication for those who have said all along that trickle-down economics is a flawed concept?” This has to be journalistic objectivity at its finest. Or perhaps it’s this one: “Should Obama have clamped down on Fannie and Freddie, instead of looking the other way, so that we wouldn’t be in this mess?” Yes, blame the guy who first came into office after the high-rise house of cards was already constructed, because he was too clueless to stop the renovation of the penthouse. There’s plenty of blame to go around.

I expect this nonsense to continue for some time to come, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. In a way I feel a lot like the guy pictured at the top of the post, with the DJIA down again today over 700 points. At least when I rub my eyes wearily, the paparazzi aren’t there to preserve it for posterity.

Don't Panic

"In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the 'Hitchiker's Guide' has already supplanted the great 'Encyclopedia Galactica' as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and second, it has the words 'DON'T PANIC' inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover."
--Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I claim no originality in quoting Douglas Adams in reference to the current financial crisis, but then, not everyone reads the same sites I do, and you might have missed it. I think the message is a good one: financial decisions made in a mindset of panic are reactive, emotionally charged, and fraught with danger. (I thought of adding some more dire descriptions, but you get the idea.) The markets are ugly right now, and apt to get uglier regardless of the outcome of any bailout plan. But that doesn’t justify a rush to convert your entire retirement plan to Treasurys. So what to do about it?

Keeping the Faith
In our case, we have at least 30 years until retirement, so we really aren’t adjusting our investment strategy in light of current events. Our active 401K is still set to a drop the lion’s share of contributions into a set of no-load index mutual funds. (What this means is that these funds don’t charge sales commissions, just a small maintenance fee; they can do this because the fund is balanced by computer to hold portions of the companies that make up some of the major US and International stock indexes, so there isn’t some brilliant manager being paid millions to move our money in and out of stocks.)

We believe that the companies that comprise the major stock indexes are fundamentally sound. There is likely to be a period of slower growth, since the finance companies in these index funds will no longer be able to borrow so aggressively to swing their earnings, but the industries overall will continue to grow, and the indexes will track that. Unless there is a dramatic calamity that fundamentally alters the way the industrialized world does business, stocks will continue to go up over time. And if there is a dramatic calamity, say, something that devalues the dollar like a 1932 Deutschmark, the 1.5% we get by parking our retirement in a money market account will only result in a few more dollars in the wheelbarrow we cart down to the soup kitchen to pay for dinner.

Diversifying
So, we will keep chugging along with our index funds and hope the 2040 market is better than the 2008 market. I imagine folks like our parents and other boomer types are somewhat more concerned, enduring the equity haircut but lacking the long horizon to grow it back. My heart goes out to people like the widow profiled in the WSJ who had over 50% of her retirement income from Wachovia Bank dividends. We saw this with those at Enron too, who lost their entire retirement, and also those whose portfolios leaned too heavily toward the tech sector pre-2001. I saw one article asserting that the current crisis had shown that diversification as an investment strategy had failed, since everyone is losing. I think they miss the point. You don’t account for the possibility of 700 billion dollars in bad debt weighing down the economy without taking a system-wide shock. No business I’m aware of can function without borrowing. To paraphrase Churchill, diversification is the worst investment strategy, except for all the others that have been tried. We’ve settled on indexing (along with other allocations) as a low-maintenance, hands-off way to diversify our stock holdings, but there are many other ways to keep your portfolio diverse. If you don’t have a head for this kind of stuff, call your 401K administrator and ask to be enrolled in a preset mix of funds determined by your retirement date. They cost a little bit more but they will save you in the long run, since the guys running the funds will automatically balance your holdings as you get closer to retirement. Then if there’s another doozey market swoon like the current one right before you retire, hopefully most of your holdings will be in bonds rather than stocks.

Playing Defense

Stanley and Danko’s excellent Millionaire Next Door throws a nice sports metaphor into the world of personal finance. They write that people spend a lot of time focusing on offense, that is, bringing in as much money as possible, while neglecting defense, that is, controlling expenses. I’ve seen a few chicken-little articles this week highlighting the uncertain economic times and recommending, among other things:

• Canceling cable television

• Brown-bagging lunch at work

• Eating out less

• Buying generic groceries and health/beauty items

I wrote about implementing some of these practices last year as our adoption expenses loomed and we were in the wonderful world of dual housing payments. Now that we’re back to one housing payment, we see no reason to change any of the frugal habits we evolved to survive Great Financial Squeeze of 2007. (We did blow a fair amount at a recent dinner to a local seafood joint, but it was our first dinner out, sans one year-old, since April, so we felt entitled.) Consumption will rise to match (or exceed) income unless we fight it, one dollar at a time. The best way to play defense is to track expenses religiously, then run down and cross off anything that does not provide lasting value. I don’t mean to imply that anything not made of cast iron should be discarded. Vacations, dinners out, and flowers for the wife most certainly provide lasting value. It’s the battery-powered lawn gnomes and all that other good stuff you hadn’t planned on buying, yet somehow makes it to the Costco register, that needs to be chased down and eliminated.

In the Hitchhiker’s Guide, the protagonist sees the Earth being destroyed to make way for an intergalactic bypass. We clearly aren’t at that point yet, though the news pundits at times do sound like they’re spouting Vogon poetry; you just wish they’d shut up. Hopefully you’ll remember not to panic, even if you didn’t bring your towel.

This is what we have to look forward to?

Is it odd to be more excited about the presidential primaries than the general election?  During the primaries, I tracked the news closely and followed the debates like boxing matches.  With the candidates selected I find myself far less enthusiastic.  Like Paul Newman’s Butch Cassidy, I find myself asking, “Who are these guys?”  What do they stand for, and how would each of them address the challenges we face?

If their reaction to the current financial crisis is any indication, we’re in for a long dearth of leadership.  I subscribe to the “it’s the economy, stupid” school of politics for many reasons.  I’m a business geek; I work for bank holding company; and our family is shelling out tens of thousands of dollars for adoptions while still trying to fund our retirement.  Any candidate who offers a real possibility of extending social security, repealing the alternative minimum tax, and improving adoption tax credits has my attention. What I’m hearing from the candidates regarding the Wall Street crisis is not encouraging.

John McCain asserts the “foundations of the economy are strong” and then contradicts himself four hours later with the statement that “the economy is at risk.”  While technically not mutually exclusive statements, there is enough confusion here to make me uneasy.  Inflammatory comments about wanting to fire the head of the SEC are hardly constructive, and the born-again populist attacks on “Wall Street greed” are insincere and vapid.  I had to agree with the Obama droid who wondered aloud whether McCain was channeling Dennis Kucinich.

Yet Obama is no better.  To listen to him, the entire morass on Wall Street is George W. Bush’s fault.  Bush didn’t see it coming, and therefore didn’t impose “regulations” earlier in the decade.  (The argument about the efficacy of any regulation that could have made it through the Washington machine is beyond the scope of my words today.)   You can’t blame a politician for pointing out the flaws of the incumbent, but the argument has to be legitimate.  Would a Gore or Kerry presidency have prevented the financial meltdown?  I don’t see how.

Now we have McCain wanting to postpone Friday’s debate with Obama to focus on brokering a solution.  At least McCain is trying to do something, though the magnanimity of the effort is dulled by the grandstanding of claiming to “suspend” his campaign.  To anyone who believes that the nominee of a major party is “suspending” anything within 40 days of the election, I offer the investment opportunity of some prime Florida real estate (or perhaps a bridge to Ketchikan).  Politicians need to be well versed in both salesmanship and leadership, but they must not insult the electorate by pretending we don’t know the difference.  Nevertheless, I am intrigued by McCain’s proposal of bringing both nominees to the negotiating table.  This puts the winner in the unenviable position of having to eat his own cooking (or dog food, if you prefer).  If Obama wins, at least we won’t have yet another “I told you so” moment where he holds forth on what he would have done, had he had any involvement in the process at all.  Talk is cheap; whiskey costs money. 

At the moment, I tend to agree with one pundit who said recently that the response to the crisis thus far from both campaigns has been “moronic”.  Whether the debate goes forward as planned, or we get speeches on the capitol steps extolling how each candidate has “reached across party lines” to broker the bailout agreement, we can at least hope for something more detailed on the subject.  We may even get some policy morsels by which to judge these guys prior to putting one of them in the oval office.  There’s a cartoon by Gary Larson showing two bears as seen through a rifle scope.  The bear that is centered in the cross-hairs is looking right at the gun and pointing at his companion with a foolish expression on his face.  Time will tell which bear represents which candidate, but right now they’re both fair game.

 

Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge

Now that we're all settled in our new/old house, there is enough time to establish some sort of routine. My work schedule now is longer than it was in Austin, and the commute is slightly longer as well; this makes me treasure weekends all the more (especially when the 1 year-old is napping).

I finished Year Million several weeks ago. I'm not normally one for anthologies, but the premise was too good to resist: ask a bunch of folks, from a variety of fields, what they think will be the state of the human race in a million years. I think the question has an inherit Rorschach quality to it, in the sense that people unavoidably extrapolate from what they regard as the seeds of significance today. Thus, engineers eagerly contemplate nanotechnology and the digital singularity; biologists examine potential evolutionary paths, and the astrophysicists, already accustomed to looking forward and backward in time by the nature of their vocation, take us even beyond year million to the far-distant time when everything (almost) goes dark.

Although the contributors come from many different fields of study, a few common themes emerged as I made my way through the essays. Several writers postulated that the ultimate destiny of the human race lies in transforming our solar system into a vast thinking machine, called a Matrioshka Brain, which captures a very high percentage of the sun's energy in nested layers of material, and converts it to computational power. The fundamental idea here is that we will have transcended organic existence and downloaded ourselves into a supercomputer; instead of living in brick and mortar buildings, we'll create them out of bits and bytes, in a kind of inconceivably advanced version of World of Warcraft or Second Life.

The goal of all this nonsense is immortality and an avoidance of all those unpleasant aspects of life, e.g., the scarcity of resources that causes us to get up every morning and go to work. The most astute of those folks who focused on the M-brain hypothesis, though, pointed out a couple of flaws. First, the scarcity of resources problem does not go away, it merely crystallizes into a singular quest for more computational power, fed by raw energy, as we would seek to make our virtual country club McMansions ever larger and more ornate. In other words, human nature doesn't change when we trade cells for silicon.

The second flaw in the M-brain hypothesis, only partially answered in the ecumenical sphere of the popular audience, is the lack of any philosophical, moral, or theological advancement. If we assume that we're all going to be immortal, perched in virtual worlds of our own making, things would get awfully boring. Most religious people accept the premise (which comes in a variety of specific concepts) that this life we have on Earth is merely one stop on a journey that began before we were born and will continue after we die. Artificially prolonging this phase of existence would be as pointless as an adolescent never wanting to turn 18. (Not that we don't see this elsewhere in our popular culture, of course.) I understand that the panel brought together for this anthology would not delve too deeply into religious or philosophical aspects, but to ignore it altogether is an unfortunate oversight. Science and religion are not mutually exclusive.

Overall, I found much to intrigue me about these futurist essays. Very few of them focused on the dystopian notion that we will nuke ourselves or poison our planet to extinction (though the "gray goo" hypothesis of nanomachines going amok and destroying the entire planet was mentioned more than once). The ideas put forth, from interstellar travel to amazing digital and engineering feats, were very interesting. But reading these ideas made me grateful for my religious and philosophical understanding about the meaning of life. Examining the question of our million year destiny without accounting for God's hand in my life is an interesting mental exercise, but not an existence I'd ever look forward to.

Sometimes life comes at you that way

I found myself saying these words the other day to a colleague, someone I know only cursorily, who was asking why I am leaving our mutual employer. “A lot of reasons, really; it’s a big change, but sometimes life comes at you that way.” It’s the type of statement made to people we don’t know well, where the rapport is insufficient to elicit much disclosure. Even with closer friends and colleagues, though, I’ve had an interesting time articulating why we are moving (again).

We are quite the transients. In our nearly five years of marriage, we’ve lived in as many different domiciles. Every Christmas newsletter we’ve sent has been mailed from a different address. (Each newsletter has also been laced with all the momentous changes that occurred in our life over the year in question: since 2004 we’ve had four moves, one child, and four job changes/new jobs between us.) It’s a family joke: where will we be reporting from this coming Christmas? New York? London? Kathmandu? As it turns out, none of the above; we’re on track, for the first time, to write our second Christmas letter from the same address, as we’re returning to the house we built in 2006 and left in 2007. It looks like we’re settling down at last. Our future newsletter recipients will no doubt be disappointed by the mundane: no moves or career changes, just postcard-like commentary confirming (as every parent does) the utter brilliance and achievement of our kid(s). Sometimes life comes at you that way.

Desire for continuity aside, the move will enable us to avoid the treadmill of double housing payments. Mortgage for the vacant home on the 15th, rent for the current residence on the 30th, month in and month out, sucking the bi-weekly paychecks dry. It’s gotten old. It was old the day we started doing it last year and it’s even older now. I wondered aloud to my wife how many families there are out there like us, moving back after failing to sell their homes. The moving van shows up and the neighbors gather to see who’s moving into the old place, and lo and behold, it’s the same old people! Back from the hinterlands. (Side note: in our neighborhood, doubtless like many others, your house is only known as your house after you leave, and the people in that house assume your last name: “Where do you live? Oh, you mean the old Smith place.” In our case this results in a tautology, one advantage to moving back to the same place.)

To be sure, there are some things I am not looking forward to with the move: the inversion-laden winter months; the supercilious local NPR folks (although I suppose that’s another tautology, wherever you live); traffic on the highway between our home and my new place of employment; a dearth of decent Tex-Mex. One thing I won’t miss: what is apparently the worst water heater ever manufactured, judging by its stubborn refusal to produce its intended product, despite repeated service calls by the plumber and several replaced parts. Sometimes life comes at you that way.

I’ve nearly finished my latest book for the regular book review posting, but it’s taken a back seat to some material I’m cramming in for my new job, not to mention all the loose ends I’m trying to tie up before we leave Austin. But I’ll get it out there; I know you all can’t wait.

Update on the Cable-Free Household

As Karla wrote earlier this year, we canceled our basic cable service because we found we weren’t watching it. We discovered early in our marriage that we both have a strong—almost irrational—dislike for any kind of wasted money. We established our trash service with Austin City this month, and Karla noticed we could save $4 a month by trading down from our cavern-sized trash bin to smaller receptacle. It took her 15 minutes on hold and some patience explaining to the city folks why we wanted to do this when the larger bin was “such a good deal”, but she persevered, and we’re $4/month the better. That’s my girl. Hence, you can imagine how we felt when we realized that canceling our seldom-used cable could save us over $40/month.

We’ve had a DVR of some flavor for many years, so neither of us has indulged in the channel-hopping ritual in a long time. (When we were in corporate housing, sans TiVo, last summer, I thought I’d turn on the TV, old-school style, “just to see what’s on”, but I quickly fled from the incessant commercials.) So our viewing schedule each year followed the same pattern:

1) Start out recording and watching 6-7 interesting shows as the fall season gets underway

2) Continue watching the 2-3 of them that make it through cancellation after the first three weeks (I seem to have a real knack for liking shows that end up on the chopping block; I guess I’m just out of step)

3) Gradually turn away in dismay as the plot lines for 1-2 of those promising shows devolve into determining which of the lead characters will be shacking up with each other

4) Continue faithfully watching that approximately 1 show per season (e.g., Lost, 24) that is truly exceptional and well worth our time.

Once we realized we were paying $40/month for, at most, four episodes of really good TV per month, it was a no brainer. (It was sad to lose Jeopardy!, but I can’t imagine ever paying anything just for the conceit of correctly answering every geography question in a round, or mocking Alex for chiding the contestants for their lack of trivial depth (“yes, I’m quite surprised that none of you gave the correct response today; everyone knows that Tanzania’s top export in 1987 was cashew nuts.”)

All of this to say that we really haven’t missed cable TV very much. We make very good use of our Netflix account to catch up on past seasons; at least in this fashion I never waste time investing in a show that will be canceled after only 3 episodes, since they need a full season to make the DVD set. We also enjoy films, of course, since we’re unwilling to subject our 1 year-old to the overpowered “THX” monstrosity sound systems in movie theaters. (I could write another blog entry on the damage being done to little hearing systems, to say nothing of the lack of consideration to other theatergoers, but I won’t.) We also enjoy documentaries. For me this is kind of an extension on my fixation with history and biography books, since so many of the documentaries are about historical figures.

In fact, the only real disadvantage to this extended time-shifting of TV and movies is the occasional media blurb that may spoil something for those of us that have to wait for the product to arrive on DVD, many months after its premiere. This results in the type of exchange I had with Karla yesterday, while both of us were sitting at our computers:

K: “Oh no!”

D: “What?”

K: “Yahoo has this thing about Lost! It says—”

D: “I don’t want to know!”

K: “There’s a picture of—”

D: “I’m not listening” [covers ears, shouting] “I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you!”

K: “I’m not going to tell you—”

D: “I can’t hear you!”

[Baby wakes up from all the commotion]

As you can see, we make our own entertainment. Who needs the cable company?

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

Another biography, and it’s a founding father (again), by the author of a biography I read last year. Am I getting a little narrow of vision in my recreational reading? Perhaps. (For what it’s worth, I received my next book—via gift card—from my wife for Father’s Day, and it’s not a biography; it’s not even historical. What is it? Wait and see.)

Perhaps I’m so interested in folks like Truman, Lincoln and Franklin because I’m so disappointed with our current crop of political leaders. This reminds me of the music played in our office cafeteria, where I’m forced to go when a lack of foresight and a time combine to deprive me of any other lunch option. The music blaring on the radio is abysmal, and I can’t wait to get back to my desk and choose a track—any track—from the 10 gigabytes or so of music on my iPod. I guess our situation could be worse as far as political prospects go. (Post-Civil War, anyone? How about 1929? Though even then, the Congress probably had an approval rating in excess of last week’s all-time low, as measure by Gallup, of 12%.)

But back to Franklin. Everyone who wasn’t completely catatonic through the U.S. school system knows the basics: runaway, printer, scientist, diplomat. Poor Richard and dozens of witticisms. I’d toss them out to Karla as I was reading: Fish and company stink after three days. The two certainties in life are death and taxes. Snug as a bug in a rug. (After a while, I’m sure she tired of this…) Over 84 years, the guy had an astonishing output of observations, maxims and generally neat writings and sayings. But his prodigious contributions live on in more significant ways as well, as the only Colonial figure to have a hand in the four great documents of the time: The Declaration of Independence, The treaties with Britain and France, and finally the Constitution. And he didn’t just sign his name, either: “We hold these truths to be self-evident” is a Franklinism, trumping earlier drafts of the same sentiment with a clear Enlightenment bias.

There have been dozens of serious studies of Franklin over the years (many of them cited by Isaacson in this book). Most of them reflect the academic fads of the times in which they were written: Franklin is variously portrayed as a libertine, conservative, atheist, believer, abolitionist, segregationist, royalist, revolutionary, egotistical, humble, and above all, fascinating historical figure. I think Isaacson’s treatment benefits from his journalistic approach. He lays out the facts as they can be ascertained, and admits when information to make a firm determination is lacking. In this way we see that Franklin, over his long life, had many conflicts. He changed his opinions and positions over the many decades of his life; partly as a reflection of the times, and partly as a result of personal growth. Had the conflict with Britain not occurred, Franklin would doubtlessly have died a happy subject of the Crown. But once convinced of the Colonies’ position, he was their most ardent supporter. His views on slavery evolved along with his own moral sense, to the point of being a strong abolitionist later in life. Even his religious convictions grew as he aged.

I think this examination of Franklin is a good biography. Isaacson’s work on Einstein was more personally compelling to me, but anyone looking for a balanced, accessible story about Franklin could do much worse than this.

The only thing we have to fear... is low oil prices?

An article in today’s WSJ Autos section describes an interview with Mike Jackson, CEO of AutoNation, which is apparently the largest auto retailer in the country. Mr Jackson has an interesting take on how high gas prices are actually good for the auto industry, and, by interference, for consumers.

Jackson’s thinking goes something like this: The high cost of energy is here to stay. There never was real economic support for driving around a Hummer and not paying a small fortune to fuel it; “fundamentally incoherent national energy strategy” presented a mirage of viability, and now that oil prices are up, demand has suddenly dropped. (See GM, canceling EV-1 in favor of purchasing Hummer, under heading “Business Decisions, Shortsighted.”) He argues that auto makers now have sufficient incentive to develop alternative technologies since consumers will pay more for technology that reduces or eliminates their pain at the pump. Should oil prices drop again for a prolonged period, Hummers and Superdutys would again be in style and the electric and hybrid alternatives would again seem like eclectic fringe products.

I can see his point. Just looking at my own pocketbook, $4 or $5 for a gallon is expensive, but so is a premium at the dealership to buy the new technology. If I knew gas prices were going to stay high or climb to Europe-style heights, it would be a lot easier to justify paying more for a hybrid or electric car. But the penny-pincher in me would wince if gas dropped back down to $2/gallon. Not that we’ll ever see that again; I do think high fuel prices are here to stay, courtesy of the tremendous demand in the developing nations. So here’s to high gas prices! … How paradoxical.

Rental Numbers

As Karla mentions today on the family blog, we are moving from our rented apartment to a rented house next month. This will, among other things, let me get back to barbecuing, a hobby I’ve been unable to indulge for the past 14 months of apartment living. Before opting for this particular rental, we looked at all our rental options, and it was an interesting exercise.

We started out looking in our current neighborhood. Typical rents for a single family house around here, according to our (extensive but unscientific) survey conducted via Internet/phone/driving by, come out at about a dollar a square foot per month. That seems high by national standards as well as for Austin (it is about what we paid living on South Temple, a block from the Temple in the heart of downtown Salt Lake City). It is also high by our budget standards, since our goal was to pay roughly the same amount in housing as we are now ($0.80 square foot or so).

So what goes into that dollar/sq ft/month? A landlord has to pay taxes and homeowners fees in addition to the mortgage. And taxes around here are significantly influenced by the school district. (This post is not about correlating school taxes with academic performance, an exercise I am completely unqualified to undertake; all I can do is look at the numbers, and the fact is that certain school districts levy higher property taxes than others.) School taxes and HOA are components of the first three rules of real estate (location, location, location) and they result in higher rents when compared to properties that are not maintained to HOA standards and/or properties in school districts with lower tax burdens.

In the end we compromised on the school district, since we won’t have any school-age children for several more years. We found a nice place in clean, safe neighborhood that rents well below a dollar/sq ft per month, larger than our current place but for less per square foot. As an added bonus, the new place is 10 miles closer to work than our current apartment, with the following cost savings in gas (these calculations were made with $4/gallon gas and our aging Nissan, which gets ~20 mpg average city+highway):

• 30 miles/day = 1.5 gallons = $6 per day, * 20 working days/month = $120 per month commuting cost at our current home
  

• 10 miles/day = 0.5 gallons = $2 per day, * 20 working days/month = $40 per month commuting cost at our new home

Pretty cool, huh? Although it wasn’t the goal, it appears this reduces our “carbon footprint” as well—although, now that I can barbecue again, I guess we’ll be offsetting the decreased oil consumption with increased use of charcoal and mesquite smoking chips. So sue me.

Truman

Yes, it has been a while since I’ve posted a book review. There are several reasons for this: We now have an 11-month-old running (literally) around the house; Karla bought me the hardbound edition of the complete collection of The Far Side, and I entertained myself going through it page by page; and Truman has to be the most densely written book I’ve read since I left school. It’s only 1000 pages, but it felt about twice that long, spanning 84 years and featuring a Tolstoy-sized cast of American and European politicians and notables.

The only other book I’ve read by McCullough was 1776, and I think it took me about three days. In comparison, I turned the first page of this book last January, and I read about thirty pages a week until I was finished. The story is compelling, and certainly had its hooks in me for four months or I would have simply set it aside. What made it such a challenge to finish was the sheer breadth of the story. In my opinion, it should really have been written as three volumes, covering the periods prior to, during, and after World War II, and had much better pacing and flow. Had this been the case I would have been tempted to simply read the middle volume, clearly the most momentous and captivating part of the story. Nevertheless, I would have missed out on some interesting material about Truman’s earlier life, including his decorated military career. I was also drawn to his struggles to follow his moral compass during years of the machine and cronyism that dominated Missouri politics for decades.

Yet it is the WWII period that was, as predicted, the most fascinating part of the story. A handwritten note authorizing the nuclear actions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki is included among the several photos. The portrayal of Truman, having been willfully kept in the dark by a resentful Roosevelt, assuming command so effectively in such a short period, was inspiring. The story of how Truman so unexpectedly charmed Churchill and the British delegation at Potsdam (as he did so many other national and world figures throughout his life) was delightful. McCullough’s account was at its best when it portrayed how Truman’s Midwestern practicalities were key to his success in a variety of endeavors, not the handicap they were widely perceived to be. Truman was consistently underestimated and underappreciated throughout his career, but that did not stop him from accomplishing some truly amazing things.

The account bogged down a bit when it came to Truman’s presidential campaign, second term, and Korea. The “whistle stop” campaign was remarkable as the last great political effort before the dawn of television-centric politics, but it hardly deserved a treatment encompassing 15% of the entire biography. Korea of course was far more significant, and could not be recounted briefly while still doing Truman justice. Since I was born over two decades after the war ended, the whole picture, political and military, was a revelation to me, yet I found familiar echoes in press and personal accounts of “our boys dying for a foreign war” and accounts of military ineptitude being loudly proclaimed by Congress (1952, meet 2007). I think it would profitable for politicians on both sides of the aisle today to review the circumstances of Korea and the way in which the Truman and Eisenhower administrations dealt with the crisis.

Overall, Truman is a compelling portrait of one of America’s most remarkable presidents. Certainly the quality of a biography is dictated by the source material, and McCullough’s treatment does Mr Truman justice. In the future, however, I’ll be more aware of what I’m getting into when I pick up a 1000-page biography.

Seagate: It takes a licking…

I was amazed to see a post on Slashdot about a disk drive that was on board the space shuttle Columbia when it exploded. Investigators found “a 400 MB Seagate hard drive … in the sort of shape you think it would be in after being in an explosive fire and then hurled to earth from several miles up with a ferocious impact.” In an impressive feat of data recovery, the Kroll Ontrack firm was able to pull 90% of the data off, helping complete a complex scientific experiment. Cool.

First Steps

iPod Time Travel

Recently, I dusted off a number of CD’s that I hadn’t listened to for an extended period, and added them to my iPod playlists. I was amazed at how quickly a particular song transported me in time back to when I either first heard the track or had it in heavy rotation. It’s my version of Rob Gordon’s (High Fidelity) arrangement of albums by the experiences of his life. Here are just a few of those moments for me.

Miles Davis’ All Blues transports me to Highway 132 in Sanpete County, at about midnight, going 75 mph with the brights on, driving home from Karla’s place the autumn before we got married.

Black and White Town by Doves puts me on a regional jet, sitting on a runway in Spokane at 10:00pm, waiting 45 minutes after touchdown to get to the gate (how hard is it to get a gate open, for crying out loud.) This was followed by a 4-hour drive to Middle-of-Nowhere, Montana, in heavy fog.

Rainbow’s End by Modern English transports me back to the summer before my freshman year of high school, when I set up a computer bulletin board system (BBS) in my bedroom and discovered that I was not, in fact, the only kid in Provo who enjoyed working with computers.

Yours by Sara Gazarek: Karla and I were sitting in a movie theater waiting for the film to start. For once, they weren’t playing the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s greatest hits to accompany the ads, but this song instead. We went home and bought the album.

Queensryche’s Silent Lucidity: Closing the computer lab at 10pm on a Friday night in 1998, and setting up every station to play Starcraft in a massive free-for-all game with the other sysadmins. (No, at the time, I didn’t have anything better to do on a Friday night. Thanks for asking.)

Go Your Own Way by Fleetwood Mac sends me to the summer I worked for a medical device company in the period between my missionary service and my return to college. I drove a Dodge Colt with no air conditioning, but I did manage to scrape enough together to put a CD player in. At the time I thought a 30-minute commute was the most horrible thing imaginable. Oh, the innocence…

New Order: Waiting for the Sirens’ Call: June 2005, sitting in a bus, crossing the Austria-Germany border and missing my wife. I still want to take her to Vienna someday.

Suedehead by Morrissey transports me to the University of Utah Huntsman Center, where a good friend of mine in high school was so excited to see Morrissey in concert that he paid for tickets for me and my brother so he didn’t have to go alone.

U2’s Beautiful Day was on the radio the morning I got the offer for what I thought was my dream job, making a ton of money and living large off expense accounts. (I was laid off eight months later when the dot-com bubble collapsed.)

Another U2 track, The Electric Co., is off the very first CD I bought (the album was Boy), back in 1987, at Crandall Audio on 800 North in Orem. Since it was the only CD I owned, it got rather heavy rotation.

A Fictional Conversation?

“Daddy called that man in the car a bonehead.”

“Does that mean he has a bone in his head, or a bone for a head?”

“You’re a bonehead.”

“Am not!”

“Bonehead! Bonehead! Bonehead!”

[Hilarity ensues]

Spencer has started throwing consonants in with the vowels. We’re still at monosyllables, but in several months he’ll start associating those sounds with words, at which point he’ll soak up everything I say. (I’m not flattering myself here; I’m a laggard #2 in terms of folks that might influence his vocabulary in the near term, and it’s a short list.) At the point he starts picking up my words of wisdom, it may be best if I stop talking for a little while.

I’m not talking about salty language here, but the old “family-friendly” standbys I’ve employed over the years. (My sister Kate recently went through this with her son and the innocuous “stupid”, which goes to show that it’s just not the words but the way they’re employed that we need to watch.) As our adoption of Spencer neared, Karla began politely calling my attention to the variety of names I used in my observations of the poor driving habits of others. The fictional dialog at the top of this post came out of a conversation we had several months ago, doubtless after another driver cut me off by driving around me on the shoulder of the road. “Do you really want your children calling each other boneheads? Or calling us names?”

Kids are going to pick up words wherever they find them, and as parents we need to weed out the bad ones, just like any bad habit, but that can’t be done while advocating a double standard. Toddlers simply don’t understand “do as I say, not as I do.” (Nor for that matter do older kids, who seem to take great satisfaction in spotting parental hypocrisy.)

So I am now working to contain my use of scathing epithets. It’s an interesting exercise; I hadn’t realized how dependent I’d become on this mental shorthand to describe my perception of the behavior of others. After a recent slug-fest conference call with a particularly adversarial colleague from another department, I resisted the urge to announce to my team, “That man is a complete idiot” and instead replaced it with the less inflammatory “He’s misinformed.” It’s rough going, because, as we all know, people around us present almost irresistible targets for ridicule. Being in the great and spacious building sure is fun! (Until it’s not.) At least I’ve got a few months to hone this before it dawns on the kid that all those sounds actually mean something.

Is this a fool’s errand? Check back with me when Spencer’s got a vocabulary and we’ll see.

The Land of Made-up Words

I have to confess not being much into the social networking website scene. Not out of Luddite fears of the interface or (as it turns out, justified) privacy fears regarding who sees the data these sites collect and how long it is stored. Rather, I just simply am not interested. I have plenty of friends in the “real world”, and my interactions at work, home and church are more than enough to keep me happy. (Besides, my lifestyle doesn't really lend itself to this sort of thing; no drinking, no clubbing, no beach parties... a Myspace page featuring me would be snoozeville for sure.)

My one concession to online networking is the professional website, LinkedIn. I signed up about 3 years ago when a Silicon Valley exec was guest-lecturing one of my graduate school courses. It has been interesting to reconnect and stay in touch with former colleagues, but I don’t use it aggressively. Over the past few months, though, I’ve noticed an uptick in emails from folks in my LinkedIn network inviting me to connect with them on other networking sites. The invitation goes something like this:

“Hello Dave! I noticed we’re connected on LinkedIn. I have recently been using [new-fangled website] to keep track of my colleagues and clients. If you sign up today, they’ll send you a free stuffed iguana. Anyway, see you around!”

To add insult to injury, some clever script-kiddie came up with the concept of re-sending invitations that are ignored, over the course of several weeks. (I still haven’t figured out the time to live of some of these; they just. won’t. die.) As Cousin Eddie would say, that’s the gift that keeps on giving the whole year long.

This begs several questions. How many professional networking websites do you need in your life? (At this point, my answer seems to be anything less than one.) If you’re soliciting connections from people on an existing service, aren’t you implying that there is some sort of defect with that service? It’s like calling someone up and insisting they switch to your cell network so your minutes are free.

But the biggest puzzle to me about all these additional networking sites is how they possibly hope to gain any credibility and marketshare with such ridiculous names. Yorz? Xing? Naymz? I suppose we have Google to thank for such absurdity, but to me this falls flat. As a five year-old I recall my father (who has graduate degrees in mathematics and engineering) keeping me occupied by having me write out a “1” with a hundred zeros after it, and explaining that this was a googol. Hence when Google arrived I made the connection immediately. I realize that many people did not have the same geek-formative experience, so Google as a word was meaningless to them before it became a verb and top-ranked brand. But here’s the thing: it really did have significance before its rise to fame, as opposed to the random consonant-vowel knock-offs that are clogging my inbox. To me they sound like a pre-teen attempt to subvert the phonemes of the alphabet (“Z is so much cooler than S!”), which is hardly a way to influence professionals to use your site.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to write a Gmail filter to auto-disintegrate yet another site’s spam…

Top 5 Personal Finance Strategies

It’s been nearly a year since we put our house on the market. In the interim, we’ve completed an international adoption, and, once our corporate relocation subsidy expired, paid several months of rent for our apartment in addition to the mortgage on our home. Needless to say, this hasn’t been the healthiest year for us financially.

But there have been some definite pluses. Aside from the very real non-financial reasons we moved to Texas, we have also taken advantage of some tangible financial benefits in the past year. For instance, all of my income, and part of Karla’s income, is now exempt from state taxes because the states concerned do not have any income tax. And, despite all the expenses, the arrival of our son resulted in some tax benefits as well.

Aside from those definite credits to the income statement, we have really honed our personal finance skills. We’ve always considered ourselves fairly good in this category, paying cash for things like graduate school and basement remodeling. And we were already doing the textbook things when it comes to personal finance: budgeting, tax-advantaged retirement accounts, avoiding consumer debt, etc. However, I’ve found a few simple things very helpful as we have hunkered down to weather the slow housing market:

5. Online Bill Pay

We signed up for bill pay in 2005 after the apartment we were living in mistakenly tried to transfer $90,000 (instead of 1% of that amount) from our checking account as part of our monthly auto-draft program, resulting in a fee that took months to sort out. We’ve never looked back. We’ve found a number of benefits. First, as our apartment experience shows, it is more secure, since nobody has their fingers in your account; all transactions are initiated by your bank, not the payee. The second benefit for me personally is more involvement in our finances. Several bills such as utilities and telecommunications fluctuate from month to month, so it’s not possible to set them to “auto pay” without risking underpaying. This gives me a chance to review the trend each month, but without having to manually fill out the bill. Finally, we have used bill pay for personal debts as well, sending small amounts to friends or family very conveniently (no writing checks, no stamps).

4. Rewards Credit Cards

This is a new one for me, but Karla has been enjoying rebate checks from her card vendor for many years. My historical criterion for selecting a credit card was the interest rate, which is pointless now since we never carry a balance month-to-month and hence pay no interest. Following Karla’s lead, I switched to a rewards card in 2007, and we’ve earned a modest amount of cash back as we’ve put every purchase we can on our reward cards. There are added benefits for shifting the bulk of our purchasing to credit cards. First, it is more secure than using a debit or ATM card since credit cards are protected from identity theft, whereas a thief has fewer obstacles if he obtains your debit card. There is also consumer protection from overcharges or other merchant practices if the product or service is unsatisfactory. Nearly everyplace from fast food places to gas stations accepts credit cards. Now if we can just get Costco on board…

3. Spending Thresholds

This strategy is really a matter of individual family style and approach to handling finances. It works for us, but every family is different. In our case, we have agreed that any discretionary purchase (e.g., aside from routine items like groceries, auto maintenance, etc) in excess of $100 should be discussed in joint session. Perhaps the limit for different families could be $20, or $2000… But we have found that having the threshold helps keep us both in the loop, and also empowered, if we want, to tap our (ever dwindling, it seems) pile of spare change after all the bills are paid.

2. Leftover Lunches

Prior to getting married to one of the world’s great cooks, I routinely ate out—sometimes twice a day. Lunch was an especially glaring example of a poor return on investment; the time around lunch is one of my most productive, and I rarely want to break away for a leisurely meal, which meant lots of fast food (and indigestion). Then there was the sales “steakhouse power lunch” phase of my career, where I had to strive mightily to fend off the threats to my cholesterol, if not my wallet (subsidized as I was by the all-powerful expense account). Now that I am again behind a desk for 45 or more hours a week, I find leftovers of Karla’s meals are wonderful, both to the taste and the pocketbook. By my back-of-the-envelope calculation, leftovers have saved us about $100 each month since June. Not too shabby.

1. Tithes and Offerings

To Latter-day Saints this one should come as no surprise, but I reiterate how we’ve been blessed by paying our tithing and offerings first. If we take them off the top, we don’t miss the money, but we would certainly miss the blessings. Life could always be easier, but it could also be much, much more difficult, and we’re grateful to have been so blessed, and we know in part that is due to our payment of tithes.

Broadcast Mode

As I’ve alluded to before, the office where I’ve now worked for nearly a year is a cubicle farm. (I reside at cube 1BC18, which certainly sounds Borg-esque.) I’ve had cubes before, but each time I was in a technical sales role and the cube pretty much collected dust while I met with clients or worked from home. About once a month, I made the pilgrimage to the cube to file expense reports. The other years of my career, I had an office.

Sometimes I really miss my own office.

I’ve been puzzling through internet protocol routing issues all afternoon, so permit me to use this as an analogy. In a grossly simplistic model of computer networking, you can have point-to-point communication and broadcast communication. The whole basis of the Internet—web, email, online banking—is point-to-point communication. Even “broadcasts” on the web are nothing but a massive collection of point-to-point dialogs. In a simpler time (e.g., the Carter Administration), computing networks made more aggressive use of broadcast protocols: everyone got every message, and you simply ignored the stuff that wasn’t addressed to you.

I’ve come to realize that working in a cube farm is like being on one of those old-time networks. Unlike other public places—libraries, banks, your local DMV office—there is no point-to-point communication here. All the coworkers are in broadcast mode, all the time. Conference calls, ad hoc corridor meetings, and the guy two cubes over who won’t shut up about the U-T basketball team—all of them are broadcasting continuously at full volume.

Think of the voice you use when you go to the bank. (If you don’t bank in person anymore, humor me.) Imagine approaching the teller and announcing your intent to withdraw $500 in cash. This is the definition of a point-to-point conversation. Of course, in the modern IT workplace, these types of conversations take place in conference rooms. That leaves all the detritus to float endlessly through the cube farm and drive us all insane. It’s valuable to, at most, three people in earshot; if there were any more of them, they’d book a conference room. Most of the time it’s two guys or gals just spending their time, like Biblical Athenians, telling or hearing “some new thing.” The rest of us have no choice but to receive the broadcast, however useless it is to us, and discard it.

So much for the efficiency of the modern workplace. Telecommute, anyone?

The Joys of Viral Gastroenteritis

I think that catching a stomach virus must be the nadir of everyday life experience. Cancer and other serious illnesses and injuries are in a separate, life-altering category, but everyone gets "the 24 hour flu" occasionally, and during that time it seems like life can't get much worse. Thursday evening through Saturday morning was most unpleasant. This was undoubtedly occasioned by the take-out we ordered for Valentine's Day. Perhaps it had been sitting under a hot lamp for too long. Whatever the reason, it only took about forty-five minutes after consumption to commence wreaking havoc on my digestive system. I'm not normally an advocate of wiping out an entire type of life form, but if I were, these little viral critters would be at the top of my list.

What made this time particularly bad was my inability to help my wife with our son during the time I was incapacitated. I wasn't sure if it was a contagious bug, so I tried to keep my distance. I think this confused the boy and made him difficult to deal with, since it broke the routine we enjoy of Dad putting him to bed each night. I'm sure all will be well now that I'm on the mend... Right after I get some sleep. Perhaps then I can shake this "run over by a freight train" feeling.

Top 10 Ways to Tell You’re Still Jetlagged…

…and continuously sleep deprived after bringing your infant son home from eleven time zones away. These are true stories:

10. You wake up multiple times during the night, out of the blue, and mumble, “Where’s the boy?” to your spouse before realizing it’s the dead of night and the boy is sleeping in the next room.

9. Dimming of the lights in a conference room for a presentation sends you into a bizarre waking dream of being on the “Battle Bridge” on board the Star Trek TNG Enterprise.

8. Mid-way through brushing your teeth, you stop in horror to realize you’re brushing with tap water. Then you recall that the city of Austin does, in fact have a potable drinking water system, and that, yes, you are in Austin, not Hanoi.

7. The grapefruit juice bottle mysteriously finds its way onto a pantry shelf instead of the fridge; further, you have no memory of putting it there.

6. An image of Foghorn Leghorn is superimposed on your division director’s face during an all-hands meeting. For a good thirty seconds, you honestly wonder why Foghorn Leghorn is talking about staff reorganization and the company’s stock price, before the image goes away.

5. At an early morning Church meeting, a colleague points out you missed a belt loop on your pants. It takes you at least three minutes during the meeting to figure out how to make the belt go through all the loops without having to stand up.

4. You have a recurring dream of Mitt Romney throwing a cream pie at John McCain.

3. You’re dead sleepy during dinner; by the time you put the boy down and get ready for bed, you’re wide awake.

2. Your handwritten notes from a conference call trail off mid-sentence to a wavy line that drops diagonally down the page, in some sort of graphical representation of the recent change in value of your 401K, off the page and onto your desk.

1. The cry of a hungry infant haunts the corridors of your dreams and strikes terror into your heart, even when you’re awake.