[r]evolution

N minus 2

2011-11-17T19:59:00.001-06:00

Last week, my two year old Motorola Droid A855 bit the dust. I had paid something like $200 for the phone, and I was really hoping to get more time out of it. The phone I had before it was a first-generation iPhone that I bought second-hand from an acquaintance for $50. The only reason I got rid of it was because AT&T service was horrendous at my new apartment.

The Droid was a trooper until this past summer, when the touch screen started acting up on humid days. Within a few weeks, the on-screen keyboard was unusable, and I frequently had to power-cycle the phone to get it to come back to normal. I put up with the problem for about two months, until last weekend it got so bad that I finally threw up my hands and caved to buy a new phone.

There was a time about a decade ago when new phone models only came out once a year. But now manufacturers are pumping out new models every three months. The Droid RAZR made its debut on 11/11/11 for $300. The Droid Bionic, the "N-1" model, was marked down to a paltry $250. And then the Droid X2, the "N-2" model, was down to $150 with a $50 mail-in rebate. And as an existing Verizon customer who had waited "an eternity" to upgrade, I was eligible for an additional $30 off. So I walked out with a new phone for $70.00. Not bad.

When I was a kid, I never understood why my dad never bought new cars, or why he hung on so long to a clunker of a computer before upgrading. But with each passing year as a taxpayer, I appreciate his approach more and more. It takes self-control and a lot of patience to ignore ads and consumerism, but you can save a boatload of cash. And the Droid X2, despite being ancient history compared to "new" phones, still completely blows my A855 out of the water.

I've come to call this the "N-2" approach. N is the new expensive thing. N-1 is yesterday's news, marked down but still expensive. N-2 is the discount rack that's in a ratty corner of the department store. N-2 is my home turf.

To this day, the only purchase that I really "regret" is my 2004 CTS. I bought it in 2007 with 44,000 miles on the clock for $20,000 out the door, and I thought I was getting a deal. Technically it was a deal--the original sticker was in the high 30s. But the Toyota dealership down the street was selling 2006 corollas with 10,000 miles on the clock for $10,000. Better gas mileage, cheaper car, cheaper insurance. That's the last time I let my ego do my shopping for me.

My next car will be something small and fuel efficient, like a Corolla or a Cruze. Sure, it won't be fancy. It might not even be nice enough to warrant collision insurance. But I've learned by now that personality, not possessions, are what make a lasting impression.

On Hopes and Dreams

2011-10-26T02:21:00.001-05:00

In the past year, my day job has consumed my time in ways that puts my old job to shame. But here's the thing--I love what I do. Just over a year ago, I was spending every last minute of my free time trying to write code and create a company of my own. Today I find myself weighing the security and enjoyability of my day job against the shoot-for-the-moon dreams that I have of striking it out as an entrepreneur or consultant.

Things are constantly changing for my life, and for the world around me.

Over a dozen of my friends and acquaintances from college are married with kids. Today I learned that one of my friends is actually going through a divorce. It seems that as life evolves, so must our hopes and dreams, and what criteria we place on happiness.

In past posts I've emphasized how important it is to make this life the one that I want to live. In college, when things were bad with either academics, friendships, or my dating life, I often escaped into daydreams where I had graduated school and magically landed a successful and high-paying job. In hindsight, those were the times where it would have helped the most to face reality and acknowledge that I had some tough decisions to make.

There is a tiny piece of me that fantasizes about rising up the corporate ladder over the next few decades, eventually landing in an executive leadership position. I could then change the company into something more in line with what I wish I could make starting from scratch as an entrepreneur. It goes without saying that I'm never going to pull that off. But it doesn't mean that I couldn't work my way up to a comfortable position and lead people as a benevolent but results-oriented director or VP. I could still be quite happy and fulfilled if I continue going down that current road.

Ok, it's almost 2:30 AM. I've been coding (on a day-job project) for the past four hours. Time to get some rest.

Thoughtful Thursday

2011-10-06T22:14:00.000-05:00

It's almost 10PM on Thursday night. I'm holed up at the Starbuck's at Piper's Alley, three or four sips into a latte and gearing up for several hours of coding and reading. I've really been pushing myself to follow through on the things that I start. For tonight, that includes working on Elisa's website.

In college I used to gear up for Thirsty Thursday, which usually meant drinking the night away at dive bars and going to class hung over and inches from death the next morning. Lately I've been reviving the habit in a different way, something I call Thoughtful Thursday. Basically, I've been trying to use Thursdays as a chance to really take stock in the week, in my life, and in the world around me.

I spent the final two weeks of September on a business trip to Las Vegas. We had 10-12 hour workdays coupled with obscene business meals that I'm sure pushed the 1000 calorie mark on multiple occasions. That's one of the great things about my job. If you're putting in 10 hours at work, you better damn well put in an hour or two at the bar when you're done for the day. Your coworkers will hold you to it.

Between the cycles of working, eating, and sleeping, I spent a lot of time exploring what exactly was making me afraid to take the next steps in my professional life. Like I said in my last post, a lot of it boils down to fear of failure and fear of not being good enough. So this past weekend, I started taking action. I went to Half Price Books and picked up a copy of Nolo's Legal Guide for Starting and Running a Small Business. The latest Time Out Chicago also featured an amazing infographic about how to turn an idea into a marketable product (or a business).

Finally, Steve Jobs lost his battle with cancer. The media had been sitting on a stockpile of documentaries, articles, obituaries, praise, and criticism for years. So when he finally passed on last night, the tsunami of media coverage erupted on the web with a force that eclipsed the coverage of any recent celebrity or personality. It made the coverage of Princess Diana's death seem like an almost non-event.

Jobs was a polarizing figure in the tech world, but the more I read about him, the more I respect him. Tonight I read a transcript of the commencement address that he delivered to the 2005 graduating class at Stanford. One paragraph really caught my attention...

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

I'm doing it. I'm following through. I'm not afraid anymore.

9/11, 10 years later

2011-09-12T00:38:00.002-05:00

It's 12:01 AM on September 12th. The 10-year anniversary of 9/11 was a thought-provoking day in many respects.

On one hand, it was a solemn day of remembrance. Major TV networks blocked out their morning schedule with several hours of coverage of the 10-year anniversary ceremonies at the major crash sites. I liked Joe Biden's speech at the Pentagon quite a bit--much more than I thought I would have. Here's an excerpt:

It’s a basic American instinct to respond to crises when help is needed, to confront [sic] the afflicted. An American instinct summoned by the collective strength of the American people that we see come to the fore in our darkest hours, an instinct that echoes through the ages -— from Pearl Harbor, to Beirut; from Mogadishu to Ground Zero; Flight 93 to right here in the Pentagon.

Those in this building that day knew what they were witnesses. It was a declaration of war by stateless actors -- bent on changing our way of life -- who believed that these horrible acts of terror -- these horrible acts of terror directed against innocents could buckle our knees, could bend our will, could being to break us and break our resolve.

But they did not know us. Instead, that same American instinct that sent all of you into the breach between the 4th

In other ways, the day was quite ordinary. In the early afternoon, I walked four miles from our apartment to Navy Pier. The Bears-Falcons game had just ended, and a monsoon of fans was making their way out of Soldier Field, flooding every available street and walking path. There was plenty of slurred sports commentary, but not much in the way of discussion about what happened 10 years ago.

I had to wonder about the ordinary-ness of the day--was it a good thing, or a bad thing?

I'll go out on a limb and say that it was good. The terrorists claimed a variety of motives to attack the United States, however twisted and misplaced they might have been. And for a few hours on September 11th, 2001, they struck tremendous fear in our hearts. They took the lives of many of our loved ones. In some ways our lives were forever changed. But in many other ways, they were not. Despite the suffering and loss that we experienced, here we are, 10 years later, enjoying American past times and going about our lives. We're wiser, but not jaded. Cautious, but not paranoid.

There are some deep questions remaining for the United States. We continue to wrestle with how to address the general problem of religious extremism while protecting free speech. We struggle with how to safeguard our citizens without violating their rights to privacy or fair trials. And we're soul-searching for how to achieve peace without acting like we're the world's police force.

The world is certainly not an easier or simpler place in the wake of 9/11, but I think our generation can harness these experiences towards making it a better place.

Fear of Failure = Failure to Follow Through

2011-09-05T02:08:00.000-05:00

It's nearly 2AM on Labor Day, and I'm sitting at a table at the 24-hour Starbucks on North Avenue in Chicago's Old Town neighborhood. My laptop sits on a well-worn wooden table that seats eight. My elbows rest in vague ruts worn into the surface from years of customers burning away the wee hours of the night with coding, homework, and web browsing.

The clientele at this hour is an eclectic mix for sure. A small group of 20-somethings huddles quietly in the corner talking. To my right, a law student rifles through a mountain of papers and thick textbooks. Over my shoulder, three old retired guys engage in a heated game of chess. A steady stream of 20 and 30-somethings filters in and out. They're dressed as if it's the early afternoon and they decided to randomly stop in to grab a cup of Joe. Other than the darkness outside and my growing sleepiness, there's little evidence that it's the middle of the night.

I haven't written at all this summer, but on the flip side I've been quite busy living and experiencing the world around me. Elisa and I moved in with each other in May, and it's been arguably the best thing that we could have done for our relationship. I've also cultivated some new friendships with people at work. I had two major business trips this summer that really made me feel like "one of the guys" with my team.

As the months have gone by, I've been realizing some new things about myself as a person. For one, I have a real problem with follow-through. And it's not linked to laziness. It's linked to a very real fear of failure. I've complained several times over previous posts about how I "have no time" to work on some of my personal projects. The more I examine myself, the more I realize this isn't true. I came close to capturing the reality in my "Chronic Project Syndrome" post--I have a personality that gravitates towards identifying and solving problems. But I have a real problem with picking up too many things and spreading myself too thin. In many ways, this is a defense mechanism. Some of the things that I take on are BIG and ambitious. And by taking on dozens of things at once, I put myself in a position where I'm guaranteed to either A) to never start or B) to start energetically for a day or two, and then never make measurable progress after that point.

Why do I do this to myself?

When I put this in the context of my personal coding projects, I see some fears emerge. One part of me has an incredible drive to write software, get it patented, and pursue VC funding to really turn it into the Next Big Thing. Another part of me worries about burning up my free time for no good reason, or getting sued and losing everything I have, or creating a company but running it into the ground over bad business management on my part. The list of hypothetical situations goes on and on.

Within the past few weeks this has been changing in a big way. I've been slowly but surely clearing "to do" items off my plate, both in my professional and personal life. My work list at my day job is now pretty clean and straightforward. Outside of work, I've been focusing on updating Elisa's web site, as well as finishing the pile of books that have been sitting on my nightstand. And I've also found time to open up my old source code and refresh my brain about how I wrote it. Within another few weeks I'll be coding full steam ahead, and getting ready to put it in front of an IP attorney.

It's totally possible that my idea will crash and burn and I'll be forced to devote my efforts to something else. But that's exactly the point--if I don't try, if I don't give it my all, I'll never know. And even though I've experienced my share of successes and failures, one thing has proven true throughout my life--the simple act of trying made all the difference.

Here's to following through and living life to the fullest.

Things bothering me, part 1: My car

2011-04-16T20:13:00.010-05:00

My Cadillac CTS has been a thorn in my side for the past year or so. It's a 2004 with a little less than 110,000 miles on it. I bought it in 2007 with 40,000 miles, and after about 60,000 miles I had nothing but problems with it. The list is really irritating:

ECU failure. On two occasions now, I've sat down in the car to start it, and the gauges and center console will be completely whacked out. Keep in mind, I have an official Helm's Manual, but this hasn't helped, because the car is never near my garage when this failure has occurred. On both occasions I've had to have it towed.
Cost: $250 each occasion, including towing.
Transmission line failure. Like most automatic transmission passenger cars, the transmission cooler is integrated into the radiator. The cooler is designed in such a way that engine coolant flows around it, and it is held in place at the base of the radiator by nuts that thread around the coolant hose fittings. CTS's have a known issue where road salt will cause corrosion of these fittings, causing the line to fall off and the cooler to lose its seal from the engine coolant in the radiator.
Cost: $700 in parts (purchased from a discount GM parts warehouse that is a favorite of performance enthusiasts). No installation charge because I did it myself.
Brake line failure. The driver-side from brake caliper is fed by a hard line that runs underneath the front "frame horn" on the unibody. Just like the transmission cooler fittings, this line is exposed to road salt and corrosion. Sure enough, I was running errands this past January when my "check brake system" and "low brake fluid" lights came on. Due to the car's ABS system, this wasn't something that I could fix myself.
Cost: $300 (parts + labor)
Rear axle whine. The car's rear axle has been whining pretty steadily since I purchased the car. A new one would cost about $900. I'm not so sure that I want to fix it.

I'm leaving out some cheaper things that are minor annoyances (examples: rear passenger side window regulator replacement, $75... and trunk gas shock replacement, $30). But you get the idea. I've had some pretty significant issues with the car--problems that, when they come up, you can't just "deal with it"--they have to be fixed for the car to be drivable.

Today, the car has a check engine light due to trouble code P0300 and P0301--basically a random misfire and a cylinder #1 misfire. This could be caused by a few different things--a bad ignition coil pack, a bad spark plug, or a bad fuel injector. This coming week I'm going to try and diagnose the problem and fix it. A coil pack is about $60, and a fuel injector is about $50. In most cases this type of problem is a one-or-the-other type of fix. But either way, the car has a bad intermittent part-throttle stumble that I really want to fix.

I bought the car for $19,000 in 2007. It was, and still is, the biggest purchase that I've ever made. At the time I felt that I had done my research and had picked a sharp car. The CTS had a sharp body style, a strong V6, and a host of nice interior features. But years later, after the problems that I've experienced, I feel jaded by more than just the money that I've spent in upkeep. A part of me feels this deeper unease that the decision to buy an unreliable car as my first "adult" purchase is a broader reflection on me having poor decision-making skills in general.

There's another thing that I feel jaded about--my parents have bought Toyota's for the past 15 years, and they have had ZERO problems. Well, I take that back--my dad's Avalon needed a rear O2 sensor at 160,000 miles. But other than that, the cars have run perfectly. Every day, rain or shine. The only other costs have been tires, oil changes, and fuel.

It's entirely possible that, if I had been the first owner, I would never have had these problems with my CTS. But at the end of the day, the car has been unreliable, and I'm not particularly eager to roll the dice again by buying another GM car. Maybe some day, but not for the next few years. It's a shame, too. The new Cruze seems like such a cool little car.

Gas has also been creeping up in price. The local station is charging about $4.20 for regular unleaded. The KBB says that the car has a trade-in value of around $7,000... but I'm concerned that the 19MPG combined EPA fuel economy rating could hurt that value considerably once fuel prices pass the $5.00 / gallon mark.

I did some research about alternate cars, and I'm curious about getting either a 2004+ Corolla, or 2004+ Prius. But if I trade in the CTS for a more fuel-efficient car, at what point will I break even? Edmunds has a very useful "Is it Worth Trading in your Gas Guzzler?" page that makes it easy to answer that question. The results are surprising--even if I drive 500 miles per month (a high estimate), it would take 10 years to make up the $9500 in price difference between a used Prius and the trade-in value of my CTS.

That takes me back to the other part of the equation. Will the CTS last another 10 years? Probably not. And in the mean time, what other reliability issues will pop up?

Fortunately, I don't have to take action just yet--the car is still running, and still gets me to work each day. And if worse comes to worst, I can always drive my MR2 exclusively for a while until I have a better daily driver. But for now, I'll always have this faint feeling of unease every time I sit down in the CTS and turn the key...

Restless Tuesday

2011-04-05T18:58:00.002-05:00

Every other day for the past week, I've been going to my parents' house to work on my MR2 and get it ready for the spring season. Even now as I sit here, I'm putting together a mental to-do list of what I want to accomplish the next time that I'm out there.

Something's going on with me, but I'm not sure what. I usually get like this when I'm stressed out or overwhelmed by something going on in my life. In college I would retreat to car projects as a way of coping with emotional or academic stress. School is behind me, but old habits (both healthy and unhealthy) die hard. But being at my apartment tonight gives me time to re-center myself and get a grip. Maybe I need to make a different kind of list--a breakdown of what's going on in my head, and what's bothering me.

Programming
Elisa's Website
MR2
Work

I had a hard time picking item #1, but I think that choice makes the most sense. I've had this pet project for about 2 years, that I'm making extremely slow progress on. In a nutshell, it's a paradigm shift in how information about machines and instrumentation is graphically displayed. I have countless ideas for it, and do tons of doodling in my various notebooks, but my coding progress on it has been pretty lousy.

I think a part of me is afraid of getting emotionally committed. For now, it's a fun little program that I work on here and there. But a small part of me wants to commercialize it in a big way--in assembly lines, refineries, test facilities, automotive manufacturers, and more. The trouble is, I'm terrified of putting my heat and soul into it, and ending up broke, or neck-deep in intellectual property lawsuits. I've been letting my fears stifle my creative drive to make this thing a reality.

Sunday night I wrote some code for the first time in about two weeks. I think I productively peaked on the code sometime in early 2010, when I wrote an average of three hours a day f0or about a month solid.

I've been here before, and written about these types of feelings on more than one occasion. This is really unhealthy behavior. It's true that I need to get the MR2 out of the garage so I don't drive my parents bonkers. But on a deeper level, working on a big project like that acts as an emotional crutch--I end up leaning on it as an excuse not to be making concrete, steady progress in the other things in my life.

Maybe it's time that I start coding as religiously as I work out...

Of Project Cars and Drug Addictions

2011-03-18T06:27:00.003-05:00

I'm not a Road & Track subscriber, but columnist Peter Egan is considered one of the best automotive writers alive. He's known for some timeless quotes about the nature of being an automotive enthusiast and gear head. One in particular stands out in my memory:

"Racing makes heroin addiction seem like a vague wish for something salty."

I've never used or abused any substances (I smoked a cigarette once, but that's about it). However, Peter Egan's statement about working on cars is probably pretty accurate, even if it is a hyperbole. I sold my Camaro project car on March 10, 2010--just over a year ago. I had that car for 8 years, and it stayed stock for about the first 6 months of ownership. The other 7 and a half years was one wild ride, alternating from euphoric highs to depressing lows.

Several of the seasoned gear heads that I've talked to at work seem to have one thing in common--their first project car was the most intense, misguided endeavor that they ever undertake. You buy a pile of tools and a mountain of aftermarket parts. You throw time and money at the car, not really caring what you're doing, as long as you get an excuse to mess with something and learn about some new aspect of the car operates.

My Camaro went through several phases. From 2002 to 2005 was essentially a blind desire to work on it for whatever reason, with predictable consequences. In 2006, I turned a new leaf with it and began slowly un-doing the poorly-done work of the past. I worked slowly, one season at a time. By 2010 the car seemed inches from being "perfect"--it was running and driving smoothly for the first time in years, and almost every factory feature was functional again. I had tracked down driveline vibrations and squeaks, as well as issues with the tune. It seemed like I had saved the car from myself.

Then, disaster struck.

I won't get in to any gory details. Suffice to say, a part failed catastrophically at the drag strip, causing the air bags to deploy when the car wasn't even moving. Nobody got hurt, but it was the last straw. I had to face up to the fact that this car was always going to be a money pit, no matter how hard I tried to undo the past several years of amateur attempts at modifying it.

I sold the car on 3/10/2010. I knew that I wasn't out of the game for good--I just wanted to start over with something new that I could approach pragmatically. If I was going to start working on a car again, I wanted to do it with a sense of purpose, not merely for the sake of turning wrenches and lying on a cold garage floor.

Four months later, I bought a black 1991 MR2 for $3,000.

MR2's are interesting little cars--they're mid-engined, meaning that the engine sits behind the driver. They're also light--around 2800 pounds. A typical sedan like a Honda Accord is 3500 pounds. MR2's also have very nimble handling characteristics, albeit with some quirkiness known as snap oversteer that can catch inexperienced drivers buy surprise. I had owned an MR2 in 2005 while I was out in San Jose, and it was easily the most fun car that I had ever owned. So when the Camaro was sold, it seemed like another MR2 would be a great purchase.

On the day I picked up the car, I rolled the windows down and took a spirited drive back to my apartment. The Peter Egan quote echoed somewhere in my consciousness. I thought about the comparison between drugs and racing. I also couldn't deny the trickle of ideas that went through my head--I could upgrade to leather seats, get new tires, maybe some Koni shocks...

I then thought of my own quote:

Saying:
"The next time I own a project car, it's going to be different than last time."

Is a bit like saying:
"The next time I do drugs, it's going to be different than last time."

I did end up spending about $1000 on the car last year, mostly between new tires, used leather seats, and a Kenwood head unit with built-in navigation.

As the days grow longer and snow begins to thaw, I've prepared another budget for the 2011 season. I spent several months getting my financial picture in order, and I'd like to tell myself that the MR2 is going to be a different experience than the Camaro. But it's only March, and there are several months of cruise nights, car shows, and wrenching sessions with fellow enthusiasts ahead of me. Each of those represents the temptation to "fall off the wagon."

There are some frightening similarities between buying car parts and doing drugs. For one, it's much easier to swipe a credit card than it is to sock enough money away to open up an IRA. Similarly, it's much easier to turn to drugs than it is to look at yourself in the mirror and deal with whatever problems you have in life.

My name is Peter, and I was addicted to modifying cars. I've been clean for 1 year and 10 days... and I intend to stay that way. One day at a time...

Alaska -- Ice Road in Review

2011-03-17T21:34:00.004-05:00

My second week in Alaska was the adventure of a lifetime.

The first week in Alaska had been slow due to the needs of our R&D center back in Chicagoland--we had focused mostly on tests that required us to be near the garage rather than on the open road. It was now Tuesday of Week 2, and my dreams of going up the Dalton Highway were getting dimmer by the minute.

Just after noon, Norm, our expert driver, asked if anybody wanted to take a run up north.

Because we were testing prototype vehicles, it would be too risky to make the entire 500 mile, 3-day round trip alone. One of us would drive a 4x4 chase vehicle and escort the truck up to Coldfoot, the halfway point on the Dalton. If all was well, we'd leave the chase vehicle in Coldfoot and continue on alone the rest of the way to Deadhorse and Prudhoe Bay.

I eagerly volunteered to drive the chase vehicle. To be fair, the road from Fairbanks to Coldfoot is a bit gentler than Coldfoot to Deadhorse, but there are still plenty of opportunities to skid off the road and down a thousand-foot cliff to your death. I mean, really--what guy would turn down that opportunity?

The ride up was something that I'll never forget. We passed the Silver Gulch Restaurant and Brewery, which holds the title of America's Most Northern Brewery.

About 5 miles later, we stopped to top off our fuel at the Hilltop Truckstop, arguably one of the last outposts of civilization between Fairbanks and Coldfoot. We spotted a few trucks from the Carlile Transportation company as well--a company now famous thanks in part to Ice Road Truckers.

The ride north from Hilltop alternated between breathtaking vistas and some mildly white-knuckled moments where I wasn't sure if I was going into a curve too fast for my tires. Even behind the mass of a burly 8,000 pound SUV, I still felt vulnerable to ice and gravity. But that didn't stop me from snapping pictures along the way...

In the center picture you can see a stretch of the Alaskan Pipeline. As each mile ticked away on the dashboard tripometer, I grew more and more amazed at how in the hell anybody managed to ship thousands of segments of pipe to such a remote location and assemble them into a functional transport system. It's even more mind boggling to think that the infrastructure required to monitor and maintain this pipeline is actually profitable.

This trip was the first time in a while where I felt like I was having a real adventure--doing something a little risky that was really, really outside of my comfort zone. Sure, I push a progressive agenda at work, and like doing fun activities on the weekends, but this was the first "once in a lifetime" opportunity that I had in a long time. My arms and wrists were tense throughout the drive, but with each passing turn I felt more alive than ever before.

The drive to Coldfoot took the better part of 5 hours, and the sun had long since fallen below the mountains by the time we arrived. Norm nestled the truck into an open space amidst rows of big rigs, and I parked the Excursion off to the side next to a small cluster of support vehicles. I kept thinking how huge an Excursion was as a vehicle, but how tiny it felt next to these massive tractor-trailers. One thing was for sure--Coldfoot in early March this was no place for a Prius.

Coldfoot began as a mining outpost, and its name supposedly originates because greenhorn miners would arrive to that area of Alaska, witness the harsh environment, and get "cold feet" about their mining careers. Or at least it says so on their website.

Coldfoot faded into irrelevance for much of the 20th century until construction began on the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline. Dozens of metal trailers were brought up and connected in rows to create a makeshift city and support base while crews assembled the pipeline and laid gravel for what would become the Dalton Highway.

The camp has shrunk in size considerably since its heyday, but a makeshift "motel" of trailers remains for visitors who can't sleep in their trucks. It has all the comfort of public housing--but after a 5 or 6 hour drive, $200/night for a warm bed is a steal.

I only took a few pictures north of Coldfoot before my camera memory card filled up. But the terrain was as beautiful as it was dangerous.

I was surprised to learn that driving the Dalton (in its current form) doesn't actually require driving over frozen bodies of water. In the 70's, trucks traveling the Dalton had only two ways of crossing the river. In the summer, a ferry would load trucks one or two at a time and carry them across, or in the dead of winter, truckers could drive straight over the frozen surface. This changed in 1974 with the completion of the E.L. Patton Yukon River Bridge. Although truckers do occasionally die on the Dalton, they don't have to worry about falling through ice and drowning.

Alaska -- Week(end) in Review

2011-03-12T01:17:00.006-06:00

I think I understand more about why I don't blog more. There's just so much going on in my head that I have a hard time keeping the energy up to record all of my thoughts and feelings.

Then again, this is the same kind of excuse that I used to make about not going to the gym--that I "didn't have the energy."

On Saturday I worked nearly a full day (about 9 to 5) and then set out to explore Fairbanks. With a front-wheel drive rental car, it was going to be risky to travel beyond the city limits. And, seeing that it was the middle of winter, I didn't have much choice for activities. I made a point to find a coffee house. Alaska Coffee Roasting Co. right across from The University of Fairbanks fit the bill perfectly. The layout was surprising--it had wood paneling and a rustic overall feel that Starbucks and Caribou coffee try so hard to shrink-wrap in their brand, and yet, it had no couches. The seating was just a monotonous sea of round, 4-person tables and cushioned chairs. But either way, now that I've had coffee in the land of real live Caribou, the franchised shops in Chicagoland just won't be the same.

Around 7 PM I caught a quick bite to eat at Subway (having lunch for dinner, as Elisa would say) and then saw The Adjustment Bureau. It was a really well-done movie, although I'll agree with critics that the directors were a bit gun-shy about using the premise to really push at deeper questions about the nature of free will.

After the movie got out around 9:30, I was feeling pretty spent. I think I went to bed a little bit after 10 PM.

Sunday was pretty low-key. I took some time to visit the Fairbanks local library, wandered the downtown area, and ate dinner at Chili's. I stopped by Barnes and Noble to finish off the night. This particular bookstore put anything south of the Canadian border to shame. It's massive, and open every night until 11PM--even on Sundays. The coffee shop area was dominated by a freestanding circular fireplace. The fireplace was roughly 10 feet in diameter, circled by a cluster of armchairs. Their occupants were in varying states of reading, writing, or dozing. I grabbed a copy of The Investment Answer, a short 96-page overview of conservative investing principles, and read it cover-to-cover.

I finished the book about 30 minutes before closing time. The fire was warm, and I closed my eyes momentarily, allowing the ambient noise to fade into the distance.

I have a hard time relaxing when I'm home, and for years I've struggled to really understand why. I usually get caught up in my day-to-day activities and projects, and most of my free time is spent with my girlfriend. But these are excuses--just like saying "I don't work out because I don't have time." It might be more accurate to say that writing, like working out, requires some humility and perseverance. When you're not at the gym, or you don't work out, you can tell yourself that you'd be in great shape in just a few weeks, if you really wanted to be. But it's an entirely different thing to actually throw on some sweats and hop on a treadmill. The same goes for blogging.

I haven't written consistently in almost two years. I'm out of shape.

There, I said it.

Over the next few weeks, I want to make a solid effort to write and get my thoughts out on paper, or in this blog. I need that to keep myself mentally and emotionally in shape. Tonight was a good start. Let's try to keep it up.

Alaska -- Week 1 in Review

2011-03-06T01:53:00.002-06:00

For the past week I've been on a business trip in Fairbanks, Alaska. Tonight marks the halfway point of my two-week trip. The days have been long--up at 5 AM, at work just before 7 AM, and finishing up at just after 7 PM. When I first stepped off the plane this past Monday, the chill of the weather stung my skin and lungs. But two days into it, I was getting accustomed to it. The humidity in Fairbanks is minimal, which makes the cold have a different feel than Chicago. You feel it much more in your throat than anywhere else. Although I didn't bundle up today like I did my first day here, I'm still way behind the locals. The three Alaskan engineers that we work with are so accustomed to the weather that they think nothing of walking outside wearing just jeans and a t-shirt. I have a long way to go before I'm that comfortable with the weather.

As I've said before, business trips offer an amazing opportunity for reflection on my life and the world around me. Tuesday morning, I got up for work at 5 AM, showered, and lumbered down to the hotel lobby to eat a quick breakfast. I munched my cereal slowly, trying to shake off the haze of the three-hour time difference from Chicago. As I woke up, I felt guilty about my grumpiness of the working hours. Not just in Alaska, or just in America, but all over the world, countless people rise long before dawn and work 12, 16, or more hours in a day. Every day. Their entire lives.

As this moment of clarity drifted through my head, I imagined the lives of the plant workers that bagged my cereal, or those who operated the injection molding machine that created my biodegradable plastic spoon. Did they ever complain? Did they ever "feel tired"? If they traded lives with me for a week, what would they think? Would their minds be filled with awe, or disgust?

Alaska's snow-blanketed landscape offers a beautiful backdrop to think about these questions. Vehicle license plates bear the words "Alaska -- The Last Frontier". The roads are typically crusted with a sheet of ice. In the winter, the temperature drops to 20 below, which means that salting the roads is nearly useless. Instead, plows scrape as much ice and snow as possible, then deposit pea gravel at intersections. The roads are dominated by pickup trucks, and a solid majority of sedans are all-wheel drive. Nearly every vehicle that I have seen has a plug sticking out the front bumper for an engine block heater, and hotel parking lots have concrete posts at every stall that carry an electrical outlet for plugging in your car overnight.

Every morning when I prepare to go to work here, I step out to unplug my rental car and wind up the extension chord around my arm. As I gaze out in the morning twilight, I can see a ring of hills and mountains off in the distance, crowned by a thick forest of ancient pine trees.

Closer to me, just across the four-lane divided highway, is a McDonalds. And a WalMart. And a Lowe's.

I've heard that you can get a Big Mac or a Subway Footlong even in the heart of Prague. It troubles me that bringing heat, electricity, and medical care to a region implies bringing a homogeneous Western economic environment as well. I fear that one day in the not-too-distant future, people will step off airplanes and be more interested in finding the nearest Burger King than stopping to admire the breathtaking beauty of the countryside.

It's nearly midnight. For next time--thoughts on frontiers, both on land and in the soul...

Of Pumping Iron and Cash Flow

2011-03-05T20:55:00.004-06:00

How ironic--in early January I promised to make a new blog post "tomorrow"--and two months have passed since then. The new year's resolution of blogging is off to a questionable start indeed.

It's hard to believe that Q1 2011 is already wrapping up. This year so far has been an interesting lesson in follow-through. Just after the turn of the new year, I curled 45 pound dumbbells for the first time. Most high school and college athletes would scoff at that number. But for me, it was a milestone--the first time that I had really followed through on a workout plan for a few months and seen measurable results. There's much left to do, but the modest success has been a real motivation.

Although my writing has been lousy, I give myself a pat on the back for keeping a strong pace of reading books. Since the new year, I've read or finished the following:

The Art of Agile Development by James Shore
Test Driven Development: By Example by Kent Beck
The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness by Dave Ramsey

This last book--The Total Money Makeover--deserves some discussion.

This past year, I was living in downtown Chicago in a luxury high-rise apartment. It came with granite and stainless everything, in-unit laundry, central air, a doorman, a gym, and a massive monthly rent. I really enjoyed the place, but I was really living beyond my means. My lease ended in November, which was a double-edged sword--it was easy to find cheap rents in the fall, but this also meant that I would be shouldering moving expenses back-to-back with the Christmas shopping season.

After the holidays had passed, I sat down at desk and took a long, hard look at my finances. My savings had shrunk considerably over the past few months, and they were about even with my credit card debt. It wasn't a good situation, but it wasn't horrible either--I just had to clean up my monthly budget and set up a plan to save up money and get out of debt.

Elisa's brother Justin introduced me to an awesome website--Mint.com. It's a free budgeting and finance site made by Intuit, the company behind Quicken and TurboTax. The site allows you to aggregate all of your finances--your bank accounts, mortgage, credit cards, retirement accounts, investments, and even store credit card accounts all under one roof. By creating a one-stop-shop, it makes it much easier to get a clear picture of your finances and what needs the most work.

From there, the pieces started falling into place. I realized that getting control of my money was going to take more than just paying off the bills--I would need to make a systematic change to my money management habits. In some cases I needed to make habits where I had none to begin with. Within the first two months, I had created a realistic budget for monthly expenses, saved $300, and had paid down $1000 in debt. I also followed through by putting money from my company's profit sharing check straight into paying down my credit cards.

I started following some money management blogs like The Simple Dollar and Get Rich Slowly. It was there that I heard about Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover book.

Ramsey's book is simple, and comes with plenty of disclaimers. From the get-go, he is brutally honest about the content of the book--the book doesn't say anything new about money management. It doesn't promise to make you a millionaire. It just shows how to gain control of your money and escape a life of debt and living paycheck-to-paycheck. He makes a very interesting comment that resonated with me:

Winning at money is 80 percent behavior and 20 percent head knowledge.

This "behavior modification" approach to money management is simple, yet effective--it's the same approach used by Weight Watchers or Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT). Through a series of vignettes peppered throughout the book, Ramsey drives home the reality that making more money isn't the key to financial happiness--the real change only happens when people find the courage to change their underlying thought process. Only then can the bills shrink and the savings grow. Until then, it's just putting a band-aid on cancer.

Based on my financial trajectory, I'll have my debts paid off by April, just in time to open a Roth IRA before the start of the new tax year. I'm going to do my best to stick with working out, reading books, and watching my budget.

Now if I could just do something about keeping up with writing...

New Year. New Goals.

2011-01-06T22:53:00.003-06:00

It's 11PM on January 6th. 2011 is already 1% over. But I'm trying to make good on my New Year's resolution--blog at least once a week.

Even after a lifetime of journaling and (I hope) introspective thinking, I still have a hard time writing "for me" consistently. I think my creative peak was when I lived in San Jose. Something about being in my early 20's in the west coast gave my writing a flow that I've never quite been able to replicate. My mind was just... I don't know how else to describe it... on. There was so much to experience in the world around me, and so much to explore within my own feelings and psyche.

This past June, I took a leap of faith and made a career change that proved to be one of the best decisions of my life. From a mental health standpoint alone, the difference was huge. I had a social outlet and a new set of workplace dynamics that broke up the monotony of the day. I had friendly, socially active coworkers and interacted with an eclectic mix of personalities across the different teams and management chains. And most of all, I had this sense of progress and ownership of my career and my life.

I've started looking differently at the craft of software development. Just a few years ago, I limited my thinking to learning languages and API's. But over time I opened myself to the wider concepts of design patterns and methodologies. I read The Pragmatic Programmer, a famous book on the craft of writing software and working as an engineer. For lack of a better phrase, the book changed my life. It got me on a serious book-reading kick. I'm now reading The Art of Agile Development and Test Driven Development by Example. I've never been more excited to be a programmer. Software development is such a fantastic field--it has the limitless creative boundaries of writing, art, and music, in the sense that the software that you create is only limited by the power of your imagination. And at the same time it's astoundingly practical--behind all the hype and magic surrounding devices like smart phones and the iPad, these devices actually help you get meaningful stuff accomplished. Or they can suck you into playing Angry Birds for hours on end, and before you know it you've been at it for 8 hours and you're left wondering what happened to your free time. It seems that every human endeavor, from creative to practical, manages to be a double-edged sword.

For Christmas I received a small mountain of books. I'm trying to strike a balance between strictly professional books and good fiction. In addition to the professional development books, I'm about 20% through Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Years ago, I read The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, and I was so impressed with how well she captured not just the realities of living in post-Apartheid Africa, but also how she portrayed the cultural and societal clash of Southern Baptist missionaries and the tribal natives of Belgian Congo. Kingsolver's novel is brilliantly executed. On one hand, it's a powerful retelling of how western nations and unbridled capitalism decimated tribal African societies in the 20th century. It also illustrates the futility of fundamentalists insisting that there is One True Way that should somehow fit the needs of every human civilization.

In other news, I've been sticking to my workout pretty solidly for the past four months. I feel much stronger than I started out, but there's still a lot of room for improvement. I'm doing 2 days of the 3-day rotation, mostly ignoring legs and cardio. Starting this week I'm introducing those two missing elements, so I'll have a more balanced workout and should see even more improvement for the new year. The company gym has been overrun with new faces starting their New Year's resolutions. We'll see how many of them become regulars. I just hope I can stick with the workout and continue making it a built-in part of my day.

For tomorrow: Elisa! 2010 was a year in million-dollar smiles. A review of our relationship over the past several months, and new exciting experiences ahead.

3 more months

2010-01-30T16:35:00.002-06:00

When I said I'd post "after dinner", what I meant to say was "after I get back to the U.S."...

October:

Came home from work to discover that my Mom had bought a GIANT PILE of necessities, ranging from cans of soup to a bathroom thermometer. Calmly explained to her that I could buy these things myself and that she didn't need to do all my shopping for me. Later in the month, the pile grows ever-so-slightly with odds and ends like Kleenex and Formula 409. Mom claims ignorance.
Elisa finds out that she has mono. She remains sick for nearly 2 months.
Repaired dashboard of Camaro. Began re-thinking what I want to get out of my car hobby.
Celebrated my birthday with Elisa. Had an absolutely wonderful night, including a dinner at Texas De Brazil that was marred with indigestion.
Helped my dad build a shed to store car parts and yard equipment. Mostly car parts.
Helped my friend Kirsten shop for a Mini Cooper. Started re-thinking what I want out of a daily driver.
Crazy last-minute packing and moving of furniture, clothes, and storage unit items.

November:

Moved into my new apartment. After the dust settles, I realize that despite all the stuf I broughty, there are about $200 in daily living necessities that I still need.
Elisa and I celebrate the night that we first met.
Lunch with Mom. She suggests that we meet for lunch... weekly.
One-year anniversary with Elisa at the Signature Room at the 95th. Elisa checks to see if it's true that the women's bathroom has the best view of Chicago available anywhere. I check the men's bathroom, only to find out that it doesn't even have windows. Neither of us believe each other when we share our stories.

December:

Tori and Ethan return home for Thanksgiving Break. We meet up for Hookah at a bar in Lincoln Park. Tori is over-eager. Ethan is terrified of germs. Our waiter is female-to-male transgendered, which sparks some discussion about the phenomenon of passing, which I learned about from reading She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders.
Saw the Addams Family Musical. One of the best plays I've seen in forever. NOT for young kids.
FIVE CHRISTMASES. First with Elisa, then with my parents, then her parents, then her mom's parents, then her dad's parents. By the end of it I needed another vacation. Even though it was stressful, it included some incredibly emotionally intense moments, including when we gathered together and watched an amazing video that Elisa made of her grandpa. I can't wait to see if she'll make a feature-length version of it.
Celebrated New Year's Eve at ZED 451. Went back to watch TV at my place. I passed out shortly after the ball dropped.

Which brings us to January.

Time for another post...

3 months. 10 minutes.

2010-01-28T09:03:00.004-06:00

I haven't written in here forever. Time to flush out my brain.

July:

Went to Route 66 Dragway in Joliet. On second pass, torque arm snapped in water box, causing airbags to deploy. Done for the season.
Went to my company's annual picnic at our owner's lake house. Attempted to water ski for the first time. Elisa has me beat there, but I am better at staying on a jet-ski. MUST buy one of those some day.
Went to Kirsten's wedding. Almost didn't make the flight. We literally walked on the plane and they shut the door. Stood up in front of the crowd and read a bible passage--from my iPhone. A new echelon in classiness. The wedding itself was awesome, complete with some Neon Cactus style. Aside from getting seated with Kirsten's creepy ex-fiance(!) things went really well.

August:

Went to Davenport for work a bunch of times. Starting to know the Ramada hotel staff on a first-name basis. Weren't we supposed to have near-zero travel this year?
Tori moves in to SLU. She instantly becomes "the girl who always wears the frog slippers".
Canoe and Lunch event at the singles club. Elisa and I made it down the river without tipping over our canoe.
Ran through finances at the bank, saw some condos, and after carefully doing the math, I realized that it wasn't the right time to buy. Low interest rates mean that the reward is high, but with the job market the way it is and our own customers cutting costs left and right, the risk is just too great. And I don't think the economy is done tanking.
Started my electronics class at the community college, and realized that I love it. I immediately started thinking about grad school.
With a condo out of the options list for now, and desperately wanting to step out and start my adult life, I went apartment hunting. After scouring the internet and going to several showings, I found some cool new diggs in the Fulton River district, just west of the Loop.
Spent two hours in the waiting room at the court house for jury duty, only to find out that the cases for the day had been cancelled and I had to go to work after all. Should have just taken the day off, but noooo, I had to be honest.

September:

Sign lease at apartment for November 7th move-in date. Sky immediately turns a shade bluer than before. Wallet immediately feels lighter than before.
Buddy Baseball at Cingular Field, home of the White Sox. I helped Elisa carry around camera equipment and learned the ropes of documentary production. She remains surprisingly calm despite crazy pressure.
Rented a cabin in Wisconsin with Elisa. The canoeing was great. The campfire was not really a fire.
Had a barbeque on the lawn near Lincoln Park Zoo. Played a few games of flag football. Learned that I can spiral a football better than I thought I could. Played a few games of flippy cup. Then invented "flag flippy cup". It just might catch on...

More after dinner...

Another crazy week

2009-07-08T19:05:00.002-05:00

This 4th of July was an awesome, awesome experience. Elisa and I went everywhere. First, we drove up to her parents' house in Madison. We spent the night and ate lunch with her mom. We then drove to Milwaulkee where saw Guster perform a set at Summerfest. The music was loud -- about on par with In Flames when I saw them at Sounds of the Underground. It sounded crystal clear through my ear plugs.

Guster played a few songs for an encore, but then the festival admins shut things down and turned on the lights. Guster has been known to do multiple encores, but the Summerfest folks didn't want to cooperate. Bummer. At least we got to hear Satellite. By the time the concert finished at 11:30 PM, the streets were flooded with people. Fortunately Elisa and I scored the ultimate metered parking spot. We jumped in the car and we were on the highway in a few minutes--it would have been awful to be stuck in a parking lot, double- or triple-parked with rows of other cars.

We drove back down to Elisa's apartment on the north side of Chicago. The next day, we got up early and started the second half of our kick-ass trip. We packed the van and headed down to River North to pick up two of our friends. The van was so stuffed it felt like a Mercury space capsule. I gunned the engine and we headed south on the Kennedy towards Chain O' Lakes in Indiana. I thought the drive was going to take forever, but between the Cubs game and the gossip, it was a pretty fun trip.

We arrived at the camp site we met up with the third couple in our group. Three people in our group were regular camping junkies--two of them had been on multiple trips to the Boundary Waters. And this was my first camping trip ever. The closest I had come before this was setting up a tent in a friend's backyard as a kid.

The weekend was a lot of fun. We grilled, sat on the beach, and listened to music by the campfire. At night Elisa and I cuddled on an air mattress, falling asleep to the sound of raindrops on the tent. It was a great change of pace from the frantic preparation and travel that I've been doing for the past two months.

Finally, after all the running around, my summer has started.

Friday night chillout

2009-06-26T22:16:00.003-05:00

In the past few months, I'm normally not home on a Friday night unless I'm packing for a business trip. Tonight I stayed home on the premise of taking my dad to White Castle to celebrate his birthday. Ironically, these plans fell apart--my dad didn't get home from work until almost 8PM. My mom had a backup plan consisting of burger patties and beer. It worked out perfectly. But I miss having sliders. My dad and I are going to try and take a raincheck for sometime in the next two weeks, probably after I go to Summerfest.

I've been making some awesome progress on a bunch of different projects--I should have the Camaro up and running again sometime next week. It feels really, really good to get things done.

Chronic Project Syndrome

2009-06-20T19:13:00.005-05:00

For the past four generations, the men in my family have suffered from a pre-disposition, tendency, or flat-out disorder that I'd like to call Chronic Project Syndrome. Basically, it's an addiction to working on multiple ongoing projects in various stages of completion.

This disease has manifested itself in a variety of ways throughout my family history. My great-grandfather was a master at re-purposing junk and spare parts in the name of saving money. My grandpa had a tiny cottage in Delavan, WI that he painstakingly renovated over the course of 20 years. His projects included electrical wiring, drywalling, plumbing, and building a front and rear porch. He worked on it tirelessly up until a few years before he passed away. When he wasn't up at the cottage, he was usually maintaining and improving his home on the south side of Chicago. He was an avid accordian player, and as he aged he continually found new ways to make the sheer size and weight of his Cordovox more manageable to counteract his weakening upper-body strength.

As far as I'm concerned, my dad is the king of projects. He has an absolutely crazy list of things on his plate. Here are just a few:

Tiling the basement floor
Renovating the kitchen
Planning a shed
Configuring his basement music studio
Gardening and landscaping

I've struggled lately to figure out where I fit with these projects. I'm often on business trips or downtown during the weekends, and I've had trouble figuring out how to strike a good balance between having a social life downtown and not leaving my dad high and dry for the labor-intensive stuff. I think one approach to this would be to stay at home on Friday nights and head into the city on Saturday around noon, or perhaps leave the city early on Sunday mornings (early, as in, 8 AM) and head home so I can lend a full day if needed. I'll have to think more about that when I get back from this trip... there are benefits and drawbacks to either scenario.

So I've called my dad the king of projects. Well, if my dad is the king, my brother and I are heirs to his throne.

I have a ridiculous number of things on my plate. Here's a look at what's in the hopper:

Car projects. The theme for this summer is cleaning up several years of mods to the suspension and powertrain. More on that in another post.
Lib1979. This is a complete implementation of the SAE J1979 library, which is a standard that's used to talk to the computer module that controls a car's engine and transmission. You can read things like engine RPM, speed, temperature, load, fuel enrichment, and several more parameters. So far I have about 60 functions implemented with about 60 more to go, and I've tested it on multiple cars. But there's still much work left to do.
LibLDV. This one is a more-or-less sister project to Lib1979. It's a communications driver for the B&B Electronics LDV6U. This is an interface box that allows your laptop to connect to your car's computer. You talk to the box and send it messages in J1979 format, and then read the responses and decode them.
There's also an as-yet-unnamed side project that I'm doing after-hours at work. The vision is that it could be an evolutionary advancement in the field of industrial human-computer-interaction. Imagine an industrial monitoring system that has the interface and graphical capability of a PlayStation 3 video game.

I've been making decent headway on these projects--I've worked on each of them at least once in the past month. But there are some lingering thorns in my side that I just can't seem to make a dent in:

Working out. This is by far my worst project. I keep finding excuses not to go to the gym. Things like being too worn out at the end of the work day. Or not having time between my evening activities. Or not wanting to come face-to-face with the fact that I'm a scrawny programmer. For July, I want to stop making excuses. I need to formulate a workout plan (and maybe get a personal trainer). That's probably the best way to get back into the routine.
Grad school. The University of Chicago offers a 1-year accelerated Master's program. I think it (or another night-school type of degree like it) would be a good career move. To my credit, I haven't been "slacking" in this per se--I have been making a point of reading my college CS textbooks again, but I think I need to get a way, way better command of Knuth before I'm ready to take on a Master's degree. I think if I do a chapter or two per week I will be in pretty good shape by new year's. But that's something that never seems to get done.

The number one personality flaw that I have when it comes to procrastination is that I am horribly far-sighted when it comes to setting goals. Basically, when I set goals, I tend to say things like:

I want to build an ass-kicking visualization platform that will revolutionize the field of HMI technology.

Instead of something a little more concrete, like:

Write a feature wishlist for a 3D visualization platform, and budget the estimated time to implement each feature.

Ironically, this is my job--I have no problem doing it for 8 to 10 hours a day at work. But when it comes to my personal life, it's almost as if my planning capacity becomes diminished and I resort to vague visions of what I'd like to do, rather than breaking it down into the steps I need to pull it off.

On that note, I have some design work to do...

Half-year in review...

2009-06-20T17:40:00.003-05:00

It's about 7:30 AM in Gwangyang. I've been online for about 2 hours, taking care of a bunch of my weekly to-do items. Every Sunday, I try to make time for the following things:

Read
I spend a ridiculous amount of time in front of a computer. I work as a software developer, plus programming is one of my favorite hobbies. To make matters worse, I spend a lot of time on discussion forums like LS1Tech, MFBA.org, and CamaroZ28.com, to name a few. I have a bad habit of going for several weeks at a time without picking up a regular printed book. So this morning I've reserved about an hour to dig in with Operating Systems Concepts, an old textbook from college.

Track progress on various projects
I'm totally addicted to Remember The Milk. I started using it long before Google Labs came out with their to-do list. At some point I might switch over to my brother's project, TaskStep. More on this in my next blog post.

Tracking personal finances

Track receipts for the week. I'm on a business trip, so nearly all of my expenses are rolled into my hotel bill.
Check my bank accounts and credit card balances
Check my savings account, making sure that I'm on schedule with my savings plan. I set a goal of saving 1/3 of my gross income this year. After taxes and 401(k) reductions, that ends up being 50% of my net income. So far, so good--but I will need to push just a little in the second half of 2009 in order to reach the goal.

Write
I've been more-or-less faithful at writing in my Moleskine. I have a bad tendency to only blog on business trips. My little sister has a great habit of writing every day at the same time each day, a bit like a mental workout routine. I really like this idea--I think I'll add it to my daily routine. Elisa told me about a very interesting idea last week--therapy works best when you just wake up. Your mind is refreshed from sleep, and you haven't yet put up your gaurd after a stressful work day. I'll bet that the same goes for writing.

Shower break, then another post.

Gwangyang again

2009-06-17T15:39:00.003-05:00

It's about 5:30 AM in South Korea. I'm paying another visit to Gwangyang for an equipment installation at a local steel mill. It's my second time in South Korea, so I was prepared for the cuisine and the culture.

Gwangyang is a city located on the southern coast of the country. The countryside is absolutely beautiful--when I look out of my hotel window I see an amazing medley of sights. There are mountains and rolling hills off in the distance. At the base of the hills are a series of high-rise apartment buildings that are eerily clean and uniform in color and architecture. Then there's a sprawling patchwork of three-story buildings stretching across the valley. At night, the city is dominated by flashing neon signs and spinning barber poles.

The language barrier is noticeably bigger than my trips to other countries like Mexico or Ukraine. At least in Ukraine I was able to read up on cyrillic script so I could sound out the words I saw, even if I didn't know their meaning. But so far I think Hangul is a bit too much to learn in two weeks. I have to admit that it's a very cleverly engineered writing system. Unlike Chinese or Japanese which have thousands of separate characters, Korean has a very clever design where a small set of Jamo, or characters, are "stacked" into syllabic blocks.

For example:

인천 reads "Incheon", the name of the gigantic international airport located to the west of Seoul. The "ㄴ" character is an "n" sound. The "ㅊ" character is a "ch-" sound. After you read the rules on the order that symbols should be read, decoding is as simple as matching a symbol up to the sound that it makes.

I'm continually amazed by how our customer runs their steel operation. The entire plant is eerily, unnaturally clean. In general, continuous steel casting is an unbelievably filthy process. Because moulten steel is so damned hot, there's an entire industry that has emerged in an effort to insulate equipment and molds so they don't melt while trying to make the steel. These materials are called refractory compounds, a family of ceramic materials that are used to line the insides and surfaces of basically anything that has to touch moulten steel.

In the same way that a flowing river carves through sand, dirt, and rock, steel eats through refractory at a frightening pace. At any given moment, dozens of surfaces within a steel plant are being re-lined with fresh refractory. I can't imagine how many tons of it a small plant goes through in a year. The refractory ends up either being burned up, pulverized into dust, or being splattered around. And it ends up covering EVERYTHING in the plant in a fine film of muck.

I think the thing that makes this customer different is that they aggressively clean, scrub, and repaint their buildings on a regular basis. They're also pursuing some exciting new technologies that take out some of the dirtiest and expensive steps in the steel-making process. I can't talk about them in detail, but let's just say I really wish other steel plants would follow their example.

For tonight: a follow-up on my personal goals for 2009.

Second City hiatus for a few months

2009-05-22T00:59:00.002-05:00

I've been taking comedy writing classes at Second City, and I put off registering for the new quarter for too long--I missed the boat by a few days, and I'll be sitting out this quarter. I was miffed when I realized my mistake--but on second thought, this might actually be a good thing. I've had trouble making time for Second City lately, partly due to my work general schedule, and partly due to business travel. So I'm going to retro-actively pretend that I "decided" to take a hiatus.

I have a crazy number of business trips coming up between now and 2010:

Gwangyang, South Kora
Taranto, Italy (in between the "heel" and the "toe" of the coastline)
Tangshan, China
Lipetsk, Russia
Davenport, IA

Hopefully I can barter with my coworkers so I won't have to take on all of these trips... but I'm trying to prepare for the worst, just in case. I've already missed two Second City classes due to trips. Hopefully by the end of summer I'll be in a much better position to resume classes.

I guess I would call these trips an "anti-vacation". I spend most of the day wearing a fire-retardant suit and metatarsal boots. At the end of the day my brain is pretty much fried. But in this economy, staying busy is vital. Several of my friends have been asked to work part-time or to take unpaid time off. I've been lucky to keep my salary (for now), and I'm determined to go the extra mile if it means keeping a paycheck.

Within the next few months I'll have more money saved away, and I'll be in a better position to think about my job and where I want to live. In the mean time, I can still stay active with my Lazarus House and ESL tutoring activities. And maybe I can get my ass to the gym again. But more on that later.

Still to come:

Aluminum production
Fighting my "5PM coma"
Steel production
and more

Stay tuned...

Before we talk about steel -- a brief discussion on injection-molded plastic

2009-05-21T14:24:00.004-05:00

As I mentioned in my previous post, the process of producing steel is probably the nastiest, filthiest industrial environment that I could imagine.

As I was eating dinner tonight I realized that I've had a fairly decent amount of exposure to manufacturing. During my freshman through junior years in college I spent my summers working as a setup technician (and other times as a janitor) in a plastics injection molding company. The company itself was a single-plant operation that specialized in polypropylene and nylon. The presses were all rated at 500 tons or less. This picture gives a pretty good idea of what one of these things looks like. In general they're about 20 feet long, so not quite the size of a school bus. A 500-ton rated machine can crank out 4 plastic paint can lids or 32 plastic water bottle caps in a 10 second cycle, and they're built to run 24x7 with minimal maintenance. The plastic comes in the form of tiny pellets about the size of a BB.

This animation gives a pretty decent overview of the process, but if you're interested in a play-by-play, read on.

First, the pellets are fed into a device called a hopper (the silo-shaped thing in this picture). At the base of the hopper is a screw device that's heated with a high-voltage heating coil*. This screw is about 3-5" in diameter and spins furiously to shoot the plastic into the mold with several tons of pressure.

To create colored parts, a technician (or, more commonly, a machine) will mix a certain ratio of clear polypropylene beads with a measure of color pellets, which are usually shaped more like rice grains. Just like mixing paint, you need to get the ratio right in order to get the correct color on the part. Too much color and the plastic gets all weird, too little and it gets streaky or translucent.

After the plastic is injected, the mold opens and the injected part(s) fall out the bottom, usually onto a conveyor belt or into a box.

Environmental quotient

Disclaimer -- I've only worked at one plastics factory, which was a privately-owned, US operation. I have no idea what it's like to work for a corporate entity, or a factory that's overseas without OSHA regulations.

In general, plastics production seems pretty clean. In my experience, a set of 10 machines would produce roughly 200 pounds in waste each day. This usually consists of things like broken pallets, metal tie-wraps, waste plastic, and a daily assortment of disposable hair nets, arm sleeves, and other safety equipment.

Whenever you change molds, plastics, or colors of plastic, you need to "purge" the press. Basically, you run the press dry, then you pour in several pounds of "cleaning" compound (I'm not sure what the technical name for this stuff is). The press is then manually put on "splooge" mode, in which it continuously discharges the compound out of its main nozzle until all traces of the previous material are replaced with a clear, hot-glue-esque material. A 500 pound press usually produces a 5 pound, pizza-sized blob of plastic goop after every changeover. In the same time the press might have produced 2000 pounds of usable parts. Overall pollution ratio, not that bad.

At least from this one experience, plastics production seems drastically cleaner than anything tied into metals. That being said, there is quite a bit of maintenance work that goes into the machines, such as replacing the drive screws at regular intervals. Many presses are hydraulic, and if a pressurized component fails, the machine can soak EVERYTHING in the area with high-pressure hydraulic oil. But in general, my experience there hasn't made me feel guilty when i pick up a remote control or uncrew a water bottle cap.

Next: Aluminum.

Clearing my head...

2009-05-17T12:17:00.005-05:00

Wow, this has been a crazy past few months.

I'm currently in Mariupol, Ukraine to install some quality control equipment on several of the slab castors at Azovstal Steel. Steel making (specifically, continuous casting) is a filthy, dangerous job. Everything is on fire. Sparks are constantly flying. A slab caster is simply monstrous machine, nearly four stories tall. This picture gives an interesting x-ray view of it--it's fairly accurate. During an installation I spend most of my time near the ladle turret (this thing), which is where the sensors for our system are installed.

I've had the opportunity to see four continuous-casting steel factories and three aluminum plate mills. I've never visited an aluminum smelting site, but from what I've experienced so far, I think that steel production is a billion times diritier and more dangerous than aluminum production.

It's almost 6:30 AM now, and I'm gearing up for what will hopefully be the last "big" day of stuff on-site.

For tonight: a deeper discussion of steel, industry, and the grimier side of the capitalism machine.

My body doesn't like Ukraine time

2009-05-15T19:46:00.003-05:00

...and it's been 2 months since my last post. It's 3:45 AM and I've been drifting in and out of consciousness for the past 2 hours. Gonna try once more to fall asleep, then maybe I'll blog when I get up.

Thursday night chill-out

2009-03-12T18:51:00.002-05:00

This week at our customer site has been amazing for just one reason: every night that I leave the plant, there's still daylight outside. I've written in past entries that "Davenport means perpetual twilight". Just seeing some sun on this landscape is very refreshing. That doesn't change the fact that it's exhausting--I think I spent about 5 solid hours digging through the MSDN documentation on access tokens, which are one of the core components of the Windows security system. If I have to read one more article on how to use AdjustTokenPrivileges() to open a process handle owned by another user, I think I'm gonna pop a fuse.

I feel a bit more energy than yesterday, but not much. On Tuesday night I broke company tradition and actually did something fun--I went to the local movie theater and saw Watchmen. I've read (and thoroughly enjoyed) the comic book, so I'm not sure if I can really rate the movie independently of its source material. Overall, I think the graphic novel's author, Alan Moore, said it best--he wrote the graphic novel because it was a story that could only be told in comic book format.

In general, I'd say the filmmakers did a pretty good job of capturing the spirit of the story. There are some details missing, like the Tales of the Black Freighter story-within-a-story, or the subplot about what type of massive attack on US soil will unite humanity. But given the tremendous size of the graphic novel, and its technique of interleaving written "news articles" in between chapters, I give Zack Snyder and co. a thumbs-up for their effort. True, they didn't create a shot-for-shot replica of the comic book, but I'd argue that they came as close as possible to converting the story into something that could be watched in one sitting.

About the only acting that I flat-out didn't like was Carla Gugino, who played Sally Jupiter. She probably gave the most wooden performance. Billy Crudup's voice acting for Dr. Manhattan was spot-on. I was glad that the filmmakers didn't completely eschew the novel's subplot about human free will and determinism, but they certainly truncated it to make it less suffocating for the nuckle-draggging demographic expecting an action movie. Other than that, the casting and acting seemed pretty in-line with the way I pictured the characters from the book.

The film got out at 11PM, and the length of the workday hit me like a tsunami. I was completely exhausted from the 10 hours that I had put in at the plant earlier that day. I suppose I could have followed our unspoken company tradition and gone back to the hotel and worked for another 2 hours. But some nights you just need a break.

It's about 7:20 PM, and the sun is quickly retreating over the horizon. The dinner crowd is starting to thin out, leaving only the hardcore coffee drinkers and laptop junkies like myself. Outside the cars in the parking lot are changing color from burnt orange to dark blue. At the intersection the traffic light has brought east-west traffic to a stop. Someone turns on their headlights. Three more cars follow suit.

Here, right now, I feel alive. Maybe a bit tired from the long workday, but alive. I'm not sure if it's winter, or just me, but over the past few months I've had a bad habit of not doing anything during the week. Sure, there's volunteering at Lazarus House and tutoring ESL, but I have a really bad habit of going home and sulking around the internet. Maybe I need to make a point of going to a coffee shop once a week, no matter what, for no other purpose than to read and write. If nothing else that'll help keep my brain from getting clogged up.

The scenery outside has completely disappeared. It's hard to see past my reflection in the window and discern any detail in the landscape before me. A truck turns on and goes into reverse, its rectangular backup lights floating just outside the reach of the parking lot lights.

I can feel myself going into digestion mode--the change in glucose is making me feel like I should lay down and take a nap. My metatarsal boots are starting to feel too stiff. If I go home to the hotel and take them off, that's the kiss of death--I'll be asleep in 10 minutes. But If I stay here and slowly siphon caffeine from the soft drink machine, I can break the cycle and prove that there's more to Davenport than just work and stress.

Here's to brighter days in the Quad Cities.

Ugh.

2009-03-09T21:33:00.002-05:00

The worst thing about business trips is the dead time between dinner and sleep. By the time I get back to the hotel and digestion has kicked in, my brain completely shuts off. I end up sitting in the hotel staring at the TV or mindlessly wandering the Internet. It's hard to "get it together" to do anything fun when your brain is fried from a day of programming.

As the 2009 economic downturn worsens, the owners of the company that I work for are continuing to emphasize just how important it is to be efficient in our work, visible to our customers, and frugal with how much budget we burn each week. At our most recent company meeting, our president alluded to how he wants to avoid letting people go at all costs. As the backlog of PO's and work grows thinner, one of those possibilities includes offering employees unpaid time off of work.

Secretly, I would love this.

If I had [the opportunity] to take regular unpaid time off, I'd sum it up in one sentence: Four Day Work Week. I'd take Fridays off. I'd take the train downtown, with an empty notepad in my backpack. During winter months I'd find a comfortable spot in the Chicago Public Library and recline in a lounge chair. I'd alternate between reading novels and writing my own.

During summer time I'd make my way to the lake and walk up the coastline to Lincoln Park. I'd pick a spot to sit down and people-watch. I'd draft up ideas for sketch comedy skits. Some pages would have mind maps or word association. Others would be drawings or schematics or floorplans like I used to do in high school.

More on that later.

On writing, working out, and flying shoes...

2009-01-26T20:25:00.004-06:00

I went all of December and January without blogging. Every time I say I'm going to write regularly again, I "fall off the wagon" and I stop writing for months at a time.

I've started a writing class at Second City which has been an awesome experience so far. I really think that it's helping me break the ice in my everyday routine. I've also started going to the gym again, which was another important step in me getting my life back in gear.

I have this problem where I only think long-term. For example, I'm planning on buying a condo the instant that the economy turns around, but that could be over a year from now. In the mean time I've been in my bland daily routine of waking up, eating breakfast, going to work, and doing my part to solve massive social problems like solving illiteracy and poverty. But when it comes to variety in the day-to-day arena things were pretty boring.

Writing and working out has been an awesome, exciting change. It really helps balance out the workday experience where I go cross-eyed from writing software all day. I like my job quite a bit, but in the past few months I've really felt mentally smoked and worn out at the end of the work day. I think that was the main factor that caused me to stop writing. I think staying involved in stuff like the gym and writing programs is going to be an important step in getting "on the wagon" and staying on the wagon.

Disclaimer: I'm going to switch topics to politics. As I've mentioned before, I don't vote. This is for a number of reasons, one of which is that I'm arguably the worst history student ever, and you don't want somebody like me having any influence in the political arena. So when I talk about politics, please understand that I'm talking about the "human" side of the equation.

I want to talk about Bush's infamous shoe throwing incident. It's a topic that has been beaten to death already, and has its own Wikipedia article detailing the event, the shoe thrower, and its aftermath.

Bush's reply was straightforward:

"Thanks for apologizing on behalf of the Iraqi people. It doesn't bother me... If you want the facts, it's a size 10 shoe that he threw."

Bush's reply was simultaneously hilarious and depressing. On one hand, I give him credit for being humiliated on the world stage and being able to say much of anything in response. On the other hand, the event echoed the world's downright depressing sentiment towards the United States, and Bush's reply seemed a bit too in-character with the aura of incompetence that permeated his administration.

If you ask me, Bush missed a golden opportunity to vindicate himself. Instead of making a joke about the shoe size, he could have looked in the camera and asked the world a simple question:

"If Saddam Hussein was president, what would have happened to this man? What unspeakable atrocities would have happened to this reporter's family?"

That's it. No long speech... just a simple question. I don't think it would have been enough to radically change the public image of the war in Iraq--but it would have illustrated a powerful point. Despite our vested political interests, questions about the "worth" of the war, and concerns about the lack of weapons of mass destruction, perhaps the United States has brought something positive to the country: a glimmer of hope for a brighter future.

Black Friday in 3... 2... 1...

2008-11-27T23:26:00.002-06:00

Unlike most Americans, I'll be going to bed tonight in about 15 minutes with every intention of sleeping past 9 AM. For some reason, I've never found Black Friday to be that exciting. I'm one of those types that will drive in right after lunch, after the dust is settled. Shopping during that time on Black Friday is a very different experience--most stores are ransacked, with merchandise everywhere. The up-since-4AM sales people lean against the front counters with their eyes glazed over, counting down the seconds until they get to punch out and go home.

Lately I've started watching the news and reading blogs like it's a primetime TV show. I find the economy both confusing, depressing, and poetically justified all at the same time. I only wish that this financial meltdown was a story that I was reading about, rather than a historical period that I'm living through. I'm one of the people who didn't climb on the housing, oil, and stock market bubble--so instead of pulling my hair out over losing all my money on deflated investments, I'm pulling my hair out hoping that my company's publicly-owned clients won't pull the plug on our business contracts and leave me unemployed.

As more and more news reports and blog postings arrive, I get continually amazed at how little I understand finance. My knowledge of personal finance goes something like this:

Every paycheck, immediately put XX% into savings before you do anything else
Spend less than what you earn
Pay off all financed debts as fast as possible while still following rules 1 and 2

That's it. No sophisticated asset allocation strategy, no get-rich-quick schemes, just three simple rules.

I've met some people over the past few years that insist that my primitive financial mentality is hurting me, and that I could retire at 35 if I would just open my eyes and be "smart" about money. Ironically, most of these guys were the same ones that were riding the wave of high oil prices and mortgage-backed securities. Oh well. Maybe I'll see them standing in line while I'm volunteering at the local soup kitchen?

That's all for now. I'll keep an eye on the news over the next few days to see just how well Black Friday goes for the retail industry.

Coding for far too long

2008-10-22T23:20:00.002-05:00

I've been coding for about 12 hours today, not counting lunch and dinner. As a personal exercise I've taken on a side project of modernizing one of my company's legacy products. I won't get paid for it, but this is really an exercise in learning how to do software engineering, and learning how to budget time. Based on my progress so far, I think I'd have a tough time finishing the job in less than two months.

Anyways, just a short thought for tonight--is capitalism on its way out?

While google surfing over lunch the other day, I read an interesting quote that seems to echo my own thoughts quite nicely:

“Capitalism will not collapse…” On the contrary, it WILL collapse, because any system that structurally depends upon constant growth and speculation-upon-that-growth cannot coexist forever on a finite planet where necessary and crucial resources are in permanent and deepening shortage.

Constant growth. What a paradox--our entire economic system only works if companies are constantly getting bigger. It's like a financial version of cancer. How more unsustainable of a model can you get?

Is there a true balance between socialism and capitalism? From what I've seen on Wikipedia there's a staggering array of socio-economic schools of thought--I think it would take me weeks just to get a vague understanding of them. I suppose that I'm neither a capitalist nor a socialist--I think it's OK for people to start their own business and grow wealthy on their own hard work. But at the same time I strongly oppose the CEO who receives a multimillion dollar severance package as they flee the boardroom of a dying company. I think fundamentally broken corporations need to be allowed to collapse and be replaced by better ones. But at the same time I don't think a complete lack of government regulation is a good idea either.

What's the name for this mindset?

October. How did that happen?

2008-10-06T22:51:00.004-05:00

A year ago today I was drinking at Izakaya, a bar in Gwanyang, South Korea. I haven't left the US since then. I looked through some of my pictures and started to feel melancholy.

My travel schedule with work has been completely up in the air--we were supposed to go to Ukraine in late spring, then it got pushed back to late summer, and now it's going to happen sometime in 2009.

I had this fancy idea that I could fly out on one of these business trips, then piggy-back a vacation onto the end and take advantage of a cheap flight to some nearby European country. So much for that idea--looks like I'll have to actually plan something out and follow through on it. :-P

The weather in the Chicagoland area is rapidly decaying--early October is usually the last time that you can wear a short-sleeve shirt outside without a jacket. Then by October you'd never wear less than a sweater. I'm trying to rack up some fun activities for winter. The Second City writing class should be fun. My boss also offered to cover an electrical engineering course, so that should be cool.

The parking lot at my company is split by a small concrete divider that contains a row of Maple trees. At lunch today I stared out the window for a few minutes, watching the wind weave its way through the leaves. And I caught a glimpse of brown. The beginning of the end. Before we know it there will be ice and bitter cold and two-foot deep snow drifts. Fingers and faces numb from an hour of shoveling the driveway. I will curse and shiver as I scrape ice off my windshield.

But even after all that mess, all that hiding under blankets and scarves, there will come a day in late April when the sun will shine, and the temperature will hit 60 degrees, and the entire midwest will breathe a collective sigh of relief. That end of winter feeling that we get just once a year is more powerful than a million sunny California days.

I can't think of how to wrap this up for tonight. I'll think of something later I guess.

Double post for tonight--a quick thought on politics

2008-10-02T23:27:00.004-05:00

I've had no luck figuring out if I'm a conservative, liberal, Libertarian, Green Party-ist, or whatever. Here's post #1 in an ongoing series about my personal politics...

Lemma 1:

Any person who claims to be prepared to take on the President's responsibility for the nation's economy, health care, education, social justice, environment, disaster recovery, foreign policy, defense, and intelligence activities is either:

A) joking, or
B) clinically insane

Lemma 2:

A war against religious extremists cannot be won with a conventional army, because bullets and bombs cannot kill extremism, which is an idea. (Thought experiment: could anything short of nuclear holocaust could wipe out Christianity?)

That's all the half-baked thinking I've got for now.

I want more.

2008-10-02T22:35:00.004-05:00

As I've mentioned before, I get these periodic urges to just drop everything and move to some place I know nothing about--Madagascar, or Belize, or Hungary, or somewhere in Indonesia. I'm just under 24 months away from really having a substantial, 20% down-payment for a condo, so I've got plenty of time to watch the housing market and contemplate where I really want to live.

I'm starting to realize why I get these wanderlust attacks--it's because I don't want a passive, forgettable life. I don't want to live the standard American SITCOM formula--Single Income, Two Children, Opressive Mortgage. Life is so much more than paychecks and bills. There were a few months in 2007 where things were a complete blur. I'd go to work, go home, and sleep. The weekends would pass by, and I'd use them to run errands. Then bam, another paycheck followed by bills. I'd sit at my desk at the first of the month, flip the calendar, and pause in a moment of shock, thinking What just happened?

Life is far too short to live like that. I want more.

All things being equal, I won't end up spending my life as a volunteer with the World Food Programme in Afghanistan. There's plenty to do right here... and I've already put the pieces in motion. The literacy volunteer program has been a blast--and I'm excited about the Lazarus House homeless shelter orientation coming up next week.

Last year I felt pretty worn out by winter, so for this year I've decided to spice things up a bit. I joined an activities group called HighLife Adventures. These guys advertise like crazy on the local radio stations--I remember hearing about them since I was in middle school. Some of the folks over at Yelp have a harsh opinion about them, but I think this will be a great way to meet new people. I've got four events scheduled for October. A part of me really wanted to try the writing classes at Second City, but I think I'll save that for January--I've got a full plate for now.

Everything, and then some

2008-09-23T21:29:00.003-05:00

This past Saturday night I went downtown with my sister. We parked in the near west loop and then walked through the nightlife in River North. Rush Street, as usual, was crawling with 20-something coeds chasing after guys driving Ferraris. Considering the types of car dealerships nearby, the income level of the eligible bachelors in the area should be no surprise. Lamborghini, Maserati, Porsche... *yawn*. My sister and I joked that the gold diggers in that area wouldn't be caught dead in something as cheap as a BMW.

Further north at Division Street is a more relaxed set of bars, including Bar Chicago, Finn McCool's, The Original Mother's. I learned an interesting fact this weekend that apparently everyone in the Chicagoland area knew except me--Mother's was the backdrop for some prominent scenes in the 1986 Demi Moore classic About Last Night. I'll have to put that on my list of movies to rent.

My ESL student came up with a good idea for a textbook for our lessons--hopefully we'll be able to make some solid progress this fall. I just need to reciprocate by really working on my Spanish--I have a bad tendency to resort to present tense in all of my verb conjugations, which makes everything I say have the elegance of "To me am helping you understanding an English?" So yeah, I've got my work cut out for me.

My adventure in teaching English has been the first step in a general change in priorities that I've been having lately. While my job is interesting, it's not particularly gratifying. The pay is great, and my workload is pretty reasonable (aside from a 3-month debacle over early summer). But as I pack my laptop up at the end of the day, I don't really have the feeling that I left the world a better place than when I arrived in the morning.

I want to change that. I don't want to be the guy who just goes to work each day, never really making a difference.

I've still been kicking around the idea of a short-term outreach trip, but this year wasn't really ideal for that. My travel schedule was constantly in flux, and our new customer in Europe has been unpredictable about scheduling our on-site visits. So I think doing a habitat for humanity thing in Ghana is going to have to wait a year.

Interesting side note--a few years ago, some family friends of ours went on an outreach trip to Ethiopa for about 18 months. When they returned back, everyone asked them what the biggest eye-opening experience was while they were abroad. Their response? "We learned that you don't have to go to Africa to make a difference in people's lives."

I have two more outreach activities that I'm planning for this fall. Coming up in early October is the orientation meeting for Lazarus House, the local homeless and women's shelter. I honestly don't know much about them, but I pass by them every day, and they always seem busy. They're about halfway between my house and my work, so it's easy to fit into my day.

I'm also interested in learning more about Fox Valley Hospice. So far my only experience with bereavement and dying comes from watching my grandpa die, and my grandma wither away after a stroke. It sucks. I hope nobody ever has to experience that alone. Part of my inspiration to try this comes from Chuck Palahniuk's Stranger Than Fiction, where he mentions some of the exotic experiences that he had while technical writing at a truck factory and moonlighting as a volunteer at a local hospice.

Well, it's 10:30 and I'm exhausted. For tomorrow, a discussion of politics, mortgages, commutes, and the death of the novel.

Trying to un-block the writer's block

2008-08-30T06:19:00.003-05:00

The deadline for submissions to the 2008 Random House Chicago Crime Writers Competition is September 2nd. I decided to dig up an old story that I wrote for an English class and try to adapt it for the competition.

Here I am, at 6:30 AM on a Saturday, still staring at a basically unaltered copy. It just isn't working for some reason.

I wrote this story back in 2004 as part of a unique assignment--each of us were given a different opening sentence from a random piece of New Yorker fiction, and told to run with it. My sentence was from a 2002 piece by Alice Munro, entitled "Fathers":

Dahlia Newcombe could not possibly have had anything to do with her father's accident.

I started with that, and ended up with a 1400-word story about a cop trying to make sense of a suicide. Now that I'm looking at it again 4 years later, I don't like it. It doesn't work. One reason is that I've never been inside a police station. And it bears the opening sentence--the fingerprint, perhaps--of a far different, far superior story.

Over the past few days I've been trying to coax out some other type of crime story that would be worthy of submission. But as a suburbanite who sees news on the TV rather than in my own neighborhood, I don't have much personal experience to draw on.

But there was this one time, out in San Jose...

Sunday morning

2008-08-10T05:42:00.002-05:00

I woke up at 5:30 this morning for no apparent reason.

Yesterday was another step in Apartment Hunt 2008. I visited 180 N Jefferson, a mid-rise complex that's roughly a 3-minute walk from Ogilvie. After seeing a half-dozen buildings in the past week, the details have started to run together.

Granite countertops? Check.
Stainless steel applicances? Check.
Fancy bathroom fixtures? Check.
Killer view? Check.
Mini-gym? Check.
Rooftop terrace? Check.
Game room / conference room? Check.
Free heat and AC? Check.
In-unit washer and dryer? Check.

Those features summarize most of the apartments that I've seen so far. Aside from rental price, walking distance to Metra and in-unit laundry seem to be the only tie breakers.

My legs are sore from all the walking that I did yesterday. I attempted to visit West Fest, but go figure--I just finished walking from the Chicago Blue Line stop to Damen avenue when I realized that I was going to be late for my leasing appointment if I didn't turn back now.

After the appointment, I walked back to the loop and decided to do some exploring. During lunch breaks at work I've been reading my 2007 copy of the NFT guide to Chicago, hoping to learn more about what the city has to offer. For this weekend, I picked the intersection of North and Halsted.

I hopped on the Red Line and headed north. The L has been under crazy construction for the past year or so, which means that trains are rerouted all over the place. The Red Line follows the Brown Line tracks between the Loop and the Fullerton stop. I ended up getting off at Sedgewick and walking west to my destination.

The intersection at North and Halsted has a unique feel--it has the traffic of Chicago with the general suburban feel of Naperville or Schaumburg. On one hand, you have your staples of midwestern suburbia. There's a Best Buy. A Crate and Barrel. A Borders. Then you have the things that are unique to Chicago. CTA busses. Mom and pop restaurants. The Steppenwolf and Royal George theaters. To the north is a neighborhood called the Ranch Triangle. To the east, Old Town. To the south, a club-oriented neighborhood called the Weed Street District.

My feet were killing me. For some reason I had decided to wear a jeans and a long-sleeve button-down when I knew I'd be walking several miles on an 80 degree day. I walked slowly into Borders and inhaled the best $5 iced coffee I've ever had. I pulled out my Moleskine and started to write.

I've had trouble understanding where the city fits into me, and where I fit into the city. I'm a guy who feels at home covered in grease from setting up ring and pinion gears. Who's shot competitively with a German-made target rifle. Who enjoys community outreach. Who spends about 6 weeks a year wearing a hardhat in exotic locations. And who has a freakishly metrosexual taste in designer furniture. I mean, seriously... who am I?

That's all part of the experiment, I suppose. Chicago symbolizes many things for me. Self-discovery. Community. Inspiration. Writing. And maybe a few weekends of hazy drunken stupors.

Well, it's 7:30 AM. Time to run to Auto Zone and buy oil and brake pads.

Setting goals, putting stuff in motion...

2008-08-04T22:08:00.003-05:00

So for the past few weeks I've been obsessing about living in downtown Chicago. Obsessions seem to be a theme throughout the year so far. Back in January I had a week-long obsession with parting out my Z28 and switching to a Corvette. After that was the idea of trying to hunt down a foreclosed townhome in the suburbs. And now the latest thing is this pipe dream of city life.

I haven't been this fidgety with life since about three or four years ago. You see, my life feels stagnated. I have all these long-term goals that are at least 5 years out--things that I can only work towards in a vague sense, like saving X dollars every paycheck or doing something vague like "being proactive" at work. And between my projects at work and pet projects at home I end up sitting in front of C++ code in Visual Studio about 60 hours a week.

I need to set better goals. Or at least, I need to do a better job of breaking them down into steps. Most of my stuff is really big or abstract--the time table is measured in months, if at all.

For tonight -- setting long-term and short-term goals. Maximum time window: 30 days.

One day I'll learn...

2008-08-04T00:09:00.002-05:00

I have a bad tendency to end blogs with phrases like "more on that tomorrow" or "on Monday I'll talk about ____". And I do write about those things... just not on my blog.

More coming Monday night... for real.

The Library Diaries--Part 1

2008-07-23T18:50:00.001-05:00

It's just before 6PM and I'm sitting at a desk at the Harold Washington Public Library in downtown Chicago. I came here on a whim--today I had to conduct some training at US Steel in Gary, IN. As a reward for not getting carjacked or shot, I took the Skyway back to Illinois and hopped into the loop for an adventure.

Lately I've been very interested at the thought of moving downtown, specifically to the west loop. Ideally I'd like to keep my job in the western suburbs, which means orchestrating a reverse commute. To get to work at my normal 8 AM time, that means that I'd have to be *on* the train at 6:30 AM. And then there's a short 5 minute drive from the train station to the office. If I got out of work at 5 PM sharp, I'd catch the inbound train around 5:30 PM and roll into the city around 7.

A 12 hour day. For what?

That's exactly the question that I've been trying to answer for myself. From a commute standpoint, living at home is a dream--I drive less than 10 miles to work. Going to live in the city would more than triple that distance.

And here's the ironic part--today's crazy trip to the Region meant that I had to get up and be on the road at no later than 6 AM. Here I am just 12 hours later feeling completely exhausted, like there's nothing left in me except to get some sleep.

There are also some lifestyle changes. My love for working on cars has no place in the land of $24 overnight parking. If I tried this and loved it--really loved it--I'd have to say goodbye to the car and the parts and the tools. But I suppose that, all things being equal, I would really enjoy the discovery process of finding something to take its place.

But despite the lifestyle change and the time commitment, I think the real disadvantage comes from the financial bottom line--as much as I'm excited by it, I won't be able to afford it until I pay off my car.

Oh, oh OH! There's the other issue that's had me confused. So I've got this nice new car that I'm paying off like crazy. Well, if I move downtown, I'll need a car to drive from the suburban Metra station to my job. Do I really want to leave a just-paid-for car in a train parking lot each night? No way. The best thing I could do is buy a beater to leave at the station... which implies that I'd either keep the nice car downtown (where I'd rarely drive it) or sell it, or leave it at my parents' place (neither option is attractive).

So what is it that draws me to this land of 10.25% sales tax? I really wish that I could put a finger on it. I suppose that there's the prospect of romance and new friendships. Then there's the intellectual and emotional stimulus of living amongst millions of people from all walks of life.

A good 90% of these problems would change forever if I just got a job in the city to boot. But that's another issue that I'm not quite ready to get into just yet. I want to put in another 2 years at my company before I even entertain that idea. I'm learning way too much to walk away from it.

More on the past three months tomorrow.

April in review

2008-04-30T23:38:00.003-05:00

Tomorrow I'm heading to Davenport for a brief visit to a customer site. For whatever reason I always feel a little more "awake" the night before a business trip. So I've been catching up on some stuff. I'll keep this short because I really should just get to bed and get some rest. So here's my week in a nutshell:

I signed up for membership with the Literacy Volunteers of Fox Valley. Their training sessions run twice a week beginning in July, so that will still give me plenty of time to travel in the summer.
I've been really busting my ass about paying off my car loan--I should have it completely paid off by sometime in September (a full 36 months ahead of schedule). If I keep this momentum up after the loan is paid off and I put that same money into saving for a house, I should have no problem getting a down payment together.
I've been working a lot with COM lately, and I realized that I've had very little formal education on it. So I placed an order for three used books from Amazon.
Similarly, I've noticed some frustrating gaps in the documentation for DirectShow. Lately I've been considering starting a tech and programming blog to share some of the basics that the MSDN documentation seems to leave out.
Iron Man comes out in select theaters tomorrow night. I am going, come hell or high water.
I signed up for another summer season of softball in the local city league with my buddies. My motivation is high. My skill is about on-par with where it was in 7th grade gym class.

Ok, I think that's enough for tonight.

Making plans

2008-04-14T22:40:00.002-05:00

After a six month drought of hardly reading anything recreationally, I'm finally getting through the stack of books next to my bed. It feels good to escape from the grind for a few minutes a day, even if the story is sobering.

Peter Camenzind was probably the slowest read that I've had in a while, which is unusual since I really like Hesse's stuff. I think a part of the reason is that it was hard to relate to the character. Camenzind is a wanderer by nature, someone who has difficulty getting close to people and settling down in one place. I love to explore the far corners of the globe, but for some reason I just couldn't connect with his character. Maybe if I read it again and didn't shelve it for such long periods at a time I would feel differently. Next up on my dresser is Knulp, and underneath that, Steppenwolf.

I have just under 100 pages left in Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. This book is incredible--I read about half of it last week alone. The story revolves around a family of Baptist missionaries and their experiences trying to bring their faith to the Belgian Congo during the early 1960's. It's a very powerful tale illustrating the cultural voids that make every aspect of western life, from politics to religion, null and void in the heat of the African jungle. The narrative is told in a clever first-person fashion, alternating between Orleanna Price and each of her four daughters.

Books like these make me feel like I need to be doing something more with my life.

After traveling to Mexico and South Korea and catching glimpses at the sinister underpinnings of capitalism, Kingsolver's book strikes a powerful chord. My company's work focuses on quality control and minimizing pollution and industrial waste, which I suppose are noble causes, but there's still so much room to grow, so much more that I could be doing.

In keeping with my five-year plan, I put together a few ideas for local volunteering:

It also occurred to me that I have over a week of vacation this year to do a community service trip abroad. So why not get a bit ambitious?

Okay, so that might be reaching for it a bit. I have a hard enough time getting to the gym on a regular basis. But this is just Step Zero--understanding what's out there so I can pick which options I can pursue.

Meanwhile, I'm getting my passport ready for a two-week business trip to Mariupol, a city on the southeast coast of Ukraine. I think it's going to be an interesting experience, particularly since Ukraine doesn't strike me as a popular tourist destination. Of course, as someone who's never even set foot in Europe, that doesn't say much. Regardless of what the country is like, I'll have my camera and my notebook close at hand to record the experience.

I wait far too long to blog.

2008-04-07T22:50:00.002-05:00

I think that writing and reading are a lot like working out. If you don't have the discipline to do it, you'll quickly make up excuses to avoid it, or claim that your day is so full that you can't seem to fit it in. Before you know it, your body and mind both become dull.

It's been over a month since I last sat down at a keyboard to sort out my thoughts on life. The past two weeks have been especially strange--I'm not sure if I was coming down with something or just tired from stress, but I just felt, well, out of it.

I made a point to get back into reading regularly. I finished Peter Camenzind in a few days, although it's probably been over a year since I first picked it up. I also read over a hundred pages of The Poisonwood Bible. After a particularly miserable winter, I'm really been trying to get my body and mind moving again.

I put together a five-year plan for myself. These things are horribly cliche nowadays. It seems like everyone from high school students to CEO's have them. But when done properly, I think that this is a good tool to help you make the most of each day. My list isn't anything too fancy, but it's a start. Most of these goals are ongoing--not the kind of thing that you put on a to-do list, but rather the kind of stuff that you want to turn into a regular part of your life:

Become actively involved in some kind of service/outreach organization
Learn some Italian
Learn some sign language
Attend a few weekend driving/racing schools
Complete National Novel Writing Month
Get published

More on that adventure coming later this week.

Cabin Fever, pt 2

2008-02-28T06:04:00.003-06:00

What was originally going to be a one-night blog post turned into a week-long adventure of self discovery.

I'll start with Saturday.

I left Caribou and decided to drive into the loop. Traffic was a nightmare, since just about everybody exiting the Congress was a suburbanite like me, barely knowing where they were trying to go and knowing even less how to actually get there.

I drove up Michigan Avenue, dodging cabs and aggressive pedestrians. Even in the freezing cold, the city was alive and moving. At the end of the Mag Mile I turned a right on Delaware street and drove slowly to gaze up at the Hancock Center.

I decided earlier this month that I want to live downtown before I die. With the real estate market crumbling, the next few years might be a great time to buy. The Hancock Center is one of the top places on my dream list. Ironically, it might be the most attainable. The 100 story skyscraper will be 40 years old next year, and many of its condos are unrenovated and miserably unsexy compared to the offerings of newer buildings appearing in the south loop. However, some interesting foreclosures have been popping up recently, and I don't know about you, but this building gives you one killer view. Just a few more months of aggressive car payments, then I'm going to start saving for my bachelor pad.

On the drive back home I started thinking about how much my life has changed since I graduated. There's so much that I haven't discovered about the world, or even about myself. There are opportunities at my fingertips that I didn't even consider in college because they seemed so far off and unattainable.

Which brings me to another topic--volunteering and community service. I had no time for this in college, but after a year at my new job I'm finally getting the time to get into it. I'm still looking at a bunch of options, from local grassroots stuff all the way up to the national level. I considered the Peace Corps for a while, but then I realized that a 24-28 month commitment that didn't tie into my work experience might hurt me when I tried to re-enter the work force. I don't have much volunteer experience from college, which might also hurt my ability to get in. Then I ran across this blog post that talks about all kinds of great ways to help out across the globe even if you have only a week or two to spare. I'll definitely have to look into those more as the year goes by.

As the city skyline faded off in my rearview mirror, I knew that this was just the beginning. The world is out there, begging to be discovered and experienced, if only I make up my mind and go for it.

For tonight: Adventures from my latest business trip.

Cabin Fever, pt 1

2008-02-23T20:35:00.002-06:00

Globe trotting is a double-edged sword. My next major trip, coming up in May, will take me to Ukraine. I get really excited at each new opportunity to experience another culture for free. But at the same time, I find that the times at home sometimes hard. It's a Saturday night and I feel like there's not much to do. It almost feels like something is wrong--like I should be out exploring and experiencing new things, as if staying in for the night means wasting a night. So tonight I'm going to do a two-part blog post.

I'm starting off the evening at a Caribou Coffee. I'm going to file some travel expenses for work, then read The Poisonwood Bible until closing time (about 9:30 or 10:00). I'll wing it from there and try to do something crazy and different.

Here goes nothing...

[Gun/self/mind] control

2008-02-21T12:34:00.003-06:00

Over the past few days, the recent shooting at NIU has introduced a new wave of discussion over gun control, antidepressants, and campus safety. I've always found these discussions interesting because they bring out such a wide range of emotions and responses in people.

CNN.com has been posting some interesting articles on the issue. One that caught my eye today focused on students at the University of Utah who are using Utah's concealed carry laws to bring weapons to campus for their own safety. It took less than an hour for 75 reader comments to erupt at the bottom of the article. As you might imagine, the replies were religious, emotional, political, damning, and supportive. Inevitably, a heated discussion about gun control laws develops.

While I don't follow legislation closely, it always seems that when we discuss gun laws we are treating the symptoms and not the disease--as if somehow passing more laws about guns is going to fix the underlying problem of people going nuts and trying to hurt others.

Of course, that observation doesn't help much since our legal system is incapable of fixing problems like that. If a real solution to these tragedies exists, it probably boils down to figuring out how to make everyone, everywhere, feel loved and special so they'd never have to feel helpless or alone. I'll let religion, philosophy, and family bonding take over from there--that question is too big for any one person to figure out.

In the meantime, we live in a world that already has weapons and violence, and we're struggling to figure out how to make the situation better. Can we just arm everybody? Can we just get rid of all the guns? Maybe if everybody just believed in [Jesus/Yahweh/Allah/Buddah]...?

I really wish the answers were simple.

Strange beauty

2008-02-19T13:36:00.004-06:00

A lot has happened in the past few months. Even more, it seems, has happened in the past few days.

I welcomed 2008 with a dozen or so friends packed into a small Chicago apartment. The trip to the party was an adventure in itself, requiring a mix of cab rides, the CTA, and walking through snow and cold wind. As a suburbanite I'm still amazed at how sheltered I am from the reality of getting from point A to point B in a city. San Francisco and San Jose were hardly good examples--nobody ever dies of exposure while strolling through 70 degree, low-humidity weather in the shade of palm trees.

In other news, I just had my one-year anniversary at my new job. It's been an excellent choice. While I'm grateful for the opportunity I had at my old job, I don't regret my choice for a moment. The past 12 months had some rough patches, but I'm amazed at how much I've learned. I feel myself getting stronger and more experienced every day. It's exciting to think how capable I'll become after five or ten years in this field.

Now for February. This is where the adventure really begins.

As part of my job I've been out in Davenport, IA since February 4th, stopping back at home for about 24 hours at a stretch to do laundry and sort through junk mail. Each week I've been working at our customer's site on a different shift--mornings for the first week, evenings for the second week, and now nights for the final week. When it's all over I'll be back home for a day or two to catch up on projects for other customers before hopping out again, this time to another customer site, for another five or six days. Overall I'll have slept in my own bed less than seven days out of the entire month.

Ironically, this is just the kind of break that I need.

This trip has been a great escape for me, almost like a vacation in disguise. While at the customer's plant I've had the opportunity to work with an exotic spectrum of people. Everyone is unique and different--nobody really fits the factory worker mold. After working with them and talking to them over breaks I think I've seen just about every flavor of American personality that I could imagine. There's the father-of-six type. The disillusioned army vet. The compulsive football fan. The young single mother. The company rabble-rouser. The company peacekeeper. The union fanatic. The union hater. The fool with the face and gaze of a mathematician or physicist. All of them collecting to form a beautiful, breathtaking panorama of the human spectra.

And there's still one more day of people to meet.

This week has been the most interesting by far. I'm working the third shift, starting just before midnight. I've found myself sleeping twice a day--first from 8AM to noon, then from about 5 to 10PM. This gives me a pocket of time right after lunch where I'm out and about when most others are at the office. I make a point of eating at places like Panera bread where I can dine slowly and people-watch. If the restaurant is dead I'll pull out Peter Camenzind or The Poisonwood Bible and finish another chapter. And then I'll finish my drink and gaze outside at the sub-zero wind howling through the trees and count the remaining seconds of winter.

One interesting part of this week is the fact that I'm in the room, asleep usually, when roomservice makes its rounds on my floor of the hotel. And this morning I met the most interesting person of all.

It was about 11:30 AM when I heard a knock on my door. My room was pitch black except for a small sliver of sunlight creeping through the gap between the curtain and the HVAC unit mounted below the window. I rubbed my eyes and threw on a shirt and jeans, not bothering with socks or turning on any lights. I then opened the door to the most unique cleaning lady I've ever met.

I could tell the instant that I saw her that something was different about her--she just couldn't stop moving. Some people might have described her as "sick" or even "disabled"--but regardless of the neurological condition that I saw today, I witnessed something beautiful.

She apologized for waking me up, her head and neck tossing her hair side to side. She asked if I would like new towels or bed linen. The entire time her wrists and shoulders and knees and waist were twisting, arcing, flowing--like living liquid. It was a constant motion unlike any dance I could have ever imagined. She placed new bottles of soap on the vanity with the most amazing style. As she folded the bath towels it seemed that the towel and her arms were both fanning and falling on air as a single piece of living fabric.

She was in and out of the room in less than two minutes. Already my mind was racing with thoughts. I wondered how else the electrical storm in her cerebral cortex might have influenced her life. Was she always like this? Did she chew her food differently than the rest of us? How did she tie her shoes or sign her name? How did this strange mixed blessing of a disorder affect her childhood? I wondered if perhaps she enjoyed this job and the steady movement throughout the day more than any other human being possibly could. No vacuuming the room, no making the bed, no two steps taken down the hall would ever be the same. I only hoped that modern medicine and the cruel conformist nature of society hadn't crushed her ability to appreciate that mysterious, beautiful spectacle that I had just witnessed.

Whoever you are, thank you.

NaNoReadMo

2007-11-19T23:30:00.000-06:00

National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, is rapidly burning away. If I could count my technical writing towards the project I'd be just about on-track with the goal of 50,000 words in a month. Unfortunately the 6 hours that I spent copy-editing and writing didn't do much to contribute to the screenplay that I'm trying to put together.

In the meantime however I've made some great progress reading novels. Even if the writing part of the month isn't going so well, the reading part is great. 3 pages per book per night. So far I've been able to cover quite a bit of ground in a bunch of books that have otherwise sat comatose on my nightstand for the past six months.

In other news, the Camaro is hibernating for the winter season. My job is going well. And I bought a new monitor because I was going nuts alt-tab'ing between code and spec documents. Now it's no problem to view both side-by-side. I now have no excuse not to churn out some cool open-source projects this winter season.

Oh yeah, and my girlfriend is moving up this weekend! So my evenings for the next few months are going to be a toss-up between work, apartment hunting, and trips to the gym.

And I'll still have that unwritten novel waiting for me off in the future.

Dissociative Fugue, (n):

2007-11-14T22:26:00.000-06:00

"A rare disorder in which a person suddenly, without planning or warning, travels far from home or work and leaves behind a past life." -- http://www.minddisorders.com

On days like today I wish I could grab a plane ticket and start over. I'd make the same mistakes and errors as before but it wouldn't weigh on me like an iron chain. I've been having days like this a lot lately.

I've felt conflicted lately at work. On one side of the fence I have my daily responsibilities which include maintaining a mature program with minimal documentation. On the other side is the desire to make that documentation and really dig my heels into the challenge of establishing processes and hierarchies for information at the company.

But first we'll start with the responsibilities.

Our recent overhaul of the software has introduced a host of bugs that have been taking considerable time to stamp out. I find myself lying awake at night worrying about what I'll find in my inbox the next morning.

Developing industrial-grade software has proven to be a radically different experience from typical commercial and end-user offerings. The notion of developing software that will not fail is a daunting task. At my previous job I thought this was totally impossible. The testing teams on the east coast would flood our inboxes with hundreds if not thousands of bugs per month.

The scope of the emails spanned every facet of development--serious data corruption problems to obscure bugs in the UI to downright crazy issues like subject-verb agreement in some sentence in the that was causing problems when the user manual was machine-translated into Chinese. At the start of the day a bug-tracking tool notified the appropriate people based on some metadata entered by the testers, and that set our schedule for the week. We were there as much to add features as we were to fix bugs.

This is where the technical writer part of me comes into play. I often ask myself the question "where do my bugs come from?" Is it carelessness? Lack of understanding about the language? Lack of understanding about the effect that my changes will have on the program at large? Perhaps lack of testing?

Off the top of my head I would say that these four items share responsibility almost equally.

Carelessness -- I think this will resolve itself with additional caution and, above all, more seat time. Unless you're a completely accident-prone fool you rarely make the same type of programming mistake twice.
Understanding the language -- I have a decent working knowledge of programming concepts, but I have to admit that I have burned the equivalent of a month of my life just learning the ropes with some API's like MFC. But on the other hand you don't go to college to get trained, you go to college to learn how to teach yourself new things.
Lack of understanding the effects of changes -- Oh man, I'm getting pissed just thinking about this issue. The biggest phenomenon that I have observed so far is how small companies seem to rely on oral traditions and memorization rather than written documents to record their history. This method of relaying information mirrors the simplicity and lack of specialization in the organization at large.

In contrast, large companies lie on the opposite extreme. At my old job, there were countless levels of bureaucracy, processes, and assorted systems that were meant to regulate everything from code production to documentation to how meetings were organized. Similarly, this company had multiple tiers of management with highly specialized worker-bee employees. Of course, not all of this is good. The large-company model is one of tremendous inertia. Even the slightest changes to existing processes take tremendous effort.
Lack of testing -- I am growing more and more convinced that all industrial products need some form of automated regression testing. There are just too many interlocking components for a single person to truly grasp the effect of every minute change to the system. One of the many things that I want to do for this company is develop some kind of regression testing methodology that we can use on every new release that goes out the door. This would include dozens or maybe hundreds of test cases to make absolutely sure that nothing broke--and if something makes it through the cracks, then it's a bug that we had absolutely no method of detecting beforehand.

I want to talk a bit more about number 3 because I think it's a critical but often-overlooked aspect of documentation. New employees are phenomenally dangerous to an organization. I would argue that their ability to make any type of change to existing software without damaging it is directly linked to how much internal documentation exists. As new employees, they have no other way to quickly gain an understanding of the important aspects of the system design. What's even worse is that an if() statement or loop might perform exactly as intended within its block, but the ramifications of that new code might only be evident to someone with a birds-eye view of the program. This understanding can come in two forms--thoroughly reading the code, or thoroughly reading through thoroughly written documentation.

As midnight looms closer, my laptop is still grinding through a series of tests for one of our products. This is a small step in a great direction.

Workin' for the weekend

2007-11-10T08:04:00.000-06:00

Lately I've been waking up at 6 or 7 AM on weekends without an alarm clock. I think part of the reason is that I spend so much time at work and come home so tired that I just want to get every minute that I can out of my weekends.

I logged just over 65 hours of work this week. That equates to getting in at 8 and leaving around 9 each night. That time span by itself isn't that bad. But what's missing is a sense of gratification and ownership. There are so many things that I'd love to do in the name of our various projects, but the customer won't pay for complete overhauls of their internal and external documentation.

As I look forward to the next few months when the icy grip of winter will descend upon the Chicagoland area, I can't help but wonder what I'm going to do to pass the time. Fall and winter are great seasons to read books, save money, and do some quality recreational programming. Thanksgiving weekend I'm going to put the Camaro into storage and do one final once-over of the garage. I can already think of about a dozen car-related projects that take about 80% time and 20% money. Ironic how I only had one in college, and now I only have the other.

I've been slowly working my way through the stack of books on my bedside table. The list, in no particular order:

No Plot? No Problem!
The Poisonwood Bible
Peter Camenzind
The C Programming Language (K&R)
Learn Visual C++ 6.0 Now
I am a Strange Loop

I've been making some very slow progress on my F-body 9-inch conversion guide, which requires a lot of Photoshop time that I haven't had the time to do. And then there's libLDV, my homebrew interface driver for the B&B Electronics LDV6x. I made that project almost a year ago and I still haven't gotten around to posting my code.

You see, that's what gets me. I have this exotic, inspiring mix of things going on in my life but there's no natural flow to things.

So with that in mind, here's my list:

Clean up the room a bit
Center the panhard bar on the Camaro
Draft up a winter development agenda for libLDV
Finish cleaning up the garage
Head to downtown Chicago in early afternoon. Read a book on the train.
Kick back and relax during the evening. Not sure where that will be.

It's 8:43. Time to get moving.

Twenty five... where to go now?

2007-10-23T22:49:00.000-05:00

It's just past 11 PM, and I'm sitting in bed with my laptop in a hotel in Davenport, IA. I'm out here with my manager and a coworker to perform some testing on a product that we'll be comissioning within the next few weeks. Trips to this site are like stepping into another world--not because Davenport is any different than any other non-descript midwestern city, but rather because we enter the building at just before dawn and leave just after sunset.

Davenport means perpetual twilight.

I turned 25 about a week ago, and it's been both an exciting and scary milestone. On one hand, I survived my childhood and made it through my college years. On the other hand, my days of "growing up"--whatever that means--are coming to a close. When parents tell you to study hard in school, to mind your manners, to do the right thing, they're helping you to grow into the best adult that you can be.

Some things along the way didn't turn out how I pictured them at the age of ten or eleven. I didn't become the President or an astronaut or any of the other whimsical dream jobs to which kids gravitate. And that's not a bad thing. What bothers me, I suppose, is how I can make the most out of my day to day life.

When I was out in California my life had this flow--I'd shower and eat breakfast, go to work, hit the gym, and then stop back at home for dinner before going right back outside to write or read somewhere downtown. I was lonely, but there was also a sense of harmony. At this time in my life I feel anything but peace and tranquility. I usually find myself lying awake at night wondering if I didn't do something wrong along the way--whether that means picking the wrong major in college or the wrong state to start a career.

Don't get me wrong here--I wouldn't say that I'm depressed or sad. Instead I'm discouraged that things aren't fitting together naturally. It's hard to do even simple stuff like make it to the gym every few days, or make it through a few more pages in one of the novels sitting on my bedside table, or work on the car. Somewhere in the last few months I got off on the wrong foot, and my weeks have been stumbling along ever since. Until I get back on track, I'll have to keep chasing after all these dreams and ideas.

For tomorrow night: Starting fresh.

"Oh, yeah, I have a blog."

2007-09-10T19:32:00.000-05:00

Those were the words that I thought as I drove home from my buddy's wedding yesterday afternoon. My life has been going almost non-stop since the new year rolled in. Between business trips, car projects, working out, and seeing friends and my girlfriend, I haven't had much time to get anything done.

Then yesterday I found myself staring down the infinite stretch of highway leading back to Chicago, and I thought about how much it reminded me of driving home from San Jose.

It's crazy what can happen in a few months. I've been on a business trip to Monclova, Mexico. I broke the rearend in the Camaro. I've had some great weekends with my girlfriend. I've kicked back some beers with friends as we watched the sun rise over the Chicago skyline from the rooftop of an apartment building. I've gained a functional knowledge of MFC, RAS, and MSXML. I've started libLDV, an open-source framework for the B&B Electronics LDV6x. I've managed to start going to the gym again. I joined my buddy's fall-league softball team.

And somehow I haven't written a thing.

As I type this I'm struck by two questions--how to summarize the past 6 months and 22 days effectively, and how I managed to do all that stuff and not make any time for productive writing. I'll get small bursts here and there where I'll feel the urge to write something down. I had a brief productive streak while I was in Mexico where I managed to write nightly for about a week. But for the most part I've used the pages of my Moleskine for laying out my monthly budgets and planning to-do lists.

There have been moments over the past few months where I've gotten sentimental about California, not for its real estate or its weather but rather the fact that I could just write and write and write when I was there. Even if 90% of what I put down on paper during that time was complete crap, the remaining 10% still constitutes the largest amount of worthwhile writing that I've done in my entire life.

November 1st marks the start of National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo. It's a free event designed to get people off their butts and in front of blank paper. The mission: to bang out the novel that you've always said you're going to write, but never find time to do.

My plan is to participate this year. I'm going to write something with autobiographical elements--namely, a story about a guy from the Midwest who finds himself in San Jose. If I don't write something now I'll never make it through. So I'm going to buckle down and do the required ~1500 words a night. To cap it off, I'm going to take a Friday off work during the last week of November to fly out there and finish it up.

Restless

2007-02-19T01:00:00.000-06:00

It's 1 AM on Monday morning. I have to get up for work in 5 hours. I know I'll be dragging all day. I've slept really well all week, but this past weekend I've felt really restless.

Now that I'm done with school I'm trying to take a deeper look into some of the deeper stuff in life, like spirituality. I'm puzzled how in an age where human thought can be transmitted around the globe at the speed of light, people can dismiss the tremendous scope of religion and write it off as mass deception... or worse yet, condemn those beliefs because they differ from their own faith.

Thousands of years later, nobody seems to have created a philosophical silver bullet--that is, a logical argument for a given faith or lifestyle that is absolutely infallible. In other words, religious apologetics has yet to figure out a sales pitch that can convert absolutely anyone and everyone. I don't think that this means there's no God... quite the contrary. At least in my particular worldview, I see that as further evidence that religious plurality exists for a powerful reason. I think there's a natural beauty that people across all cultures are seeking a deeper connection to a reality that transcends the everyday human experience.

It's even more beautiful to see the many ways that this mutual longing has manifested itself across the globe. Baha'i. Christianity. Sikhism. Shinto. Falun Gong. Mahayana Buddhism. Islam. Pantheism. I mean, even if there's nothing out there--even if spirituality is just some primitive daydream... doesn't the existence of religion say something about mankind's desire for truth and love? And if there's a sentient, omniscient entity out there, doesn't it make observations like that?

I guess I'll never know for sure in this lifetime. And in a way, I think that uncertainty makes life a little more exciting.

Bored, for the first time in almost 6 months.

2007-02-01T14:28:00.000-06:00

I start my first out-of-college job this Monday. In the meantime I've done just about everything that I can think of to prepare for my first day--taken care of car insurance, cell phone coverage, banking, etc... now I'm home alone at 2 in the afternoon with nothing pressing to do.

Months ago I would have killed for this--a Thursday with no papers to write, no exams to study for, no work, no projects, no broken cars, nothing. Yet here I am, and I have it, and I actually miss having something to do.

I predict that will end quickly once my new job starts. In the meantime I'm going to try and enjoy having all this free time, even if it means staring out the window waiting for warm weather to return.

11PM, step 10 -- die of exhaustion

2007-01-29T22:04:00.000-06:00

Out of the original list, I managed to do the following:

Drop off an old TV at Goodwill

~~Return some partially-read library books~~

~~Call my prospective employer and announce my intentions to join the company~~

~~Get plates from MR2~~

~~Try and purchase a daily driver... and use the MR2's plates to drive home~~

Call Geico and set up insurance on daily driver, along with storage insurance on Z28

Put plates back on MR2 and sell it at CarMax... and remember to take plates home with me

Call AllState and cancel insurance on MR2

Help Dad install the snow plow on the tractor

~~Die of exhaustion~~

So I barely got ANY of that stuff done... and I'm still ready to pass out. More on all this tomorrow.

8AM -- the start of the busiest Monday ever.

2007-01-29T08:00:00.000-06:00

Today is gonna be just totally nuts. In quasi-order, here's a few things that I have to get done:

Drop off an old TV at Goodwill
Return some partially-read library books
Call my prospective employer and announce my intentions to join the company
Get plates from MR2
Try and purchase a daily driver... and use the MR2's plates to drive home
Call Geico and set up insurance on daily driver, along with storage insurance on Z28
Put plates back on MR2 and sell it at CarMax... and remember to take plates home with me
Call AllState and cancel insurance on MR2
Help Dad install the snow plow on the tractor
Die of exhaustion

Since this is not a this-is-what-I-did-today blog, I'll add some deeper thinking about life later tonight.

That's about it. 8:17 -- time to make my bed and shower.

26 days, 17 positions, 14 companies, and 4 job offers later, job hunt '07 comes to a close.

2007-01-26T23:44:00.000-06:00

It's just about 11 PM and I'm officially declaring job hunt '07 to be a rip-roaring success. It was nerve wracking to send out some longshot resumes, but so far my interview-to-offer ratio has been 1:1, which makes me smile. Dad was right on one thing -- finding companies to send resumes to can sometimes be the biggest challenge. I think if I was in total desperation I could have tripled my output, but the crop of companies that I interacted with was so good that I already had a prime selection. I'm using this weekend to make a final decision on companies, and I'll notify them of my intent on Monday.

In other news, I am just about officially broke, which makes this an equally beautiful time to get a job. Unfortunately, I might need to sign my life away into a car loan long before that. The MR2 has been getting bleaker by the minute. The oil pump is leaking, and the water pump was toast. I just don't have the energy any more to fix this car randomly.

I'm trading it in at CarMax tomorrow. Even if they only give me $500, I'm taking it and running -- at this point the car has just caused me too much grief to be considered reliable.

And so, with the end of Job Hunt '07, Daily Driver Hunt '07 begins. Objectives:

Sedan
1996 or newer (OBDII will help in problem diagnosis down the road)
25 MPG highway
Auto transmission
Less than 40K miles
Target price: < $25,000 -- preferably less than $15,000.
Said vehicle must reside within 25 miles of my hometown.

These are some pretty vague criteria. As of this moment, AutoTrader shows that nearly 4,000 vehicles for sale in the area fit that description, ranging from a Hyundai Elantra to a brand new Acura TSX. Being a car guy looking for a daily driver is hell, because it's difficult to separate passion for driving from the need for utility. A 2000+ Corolla, for example, has a great interior for a car of its price, but it doesn't quite have the same feel as a mid-sized youth market sedan such as a Pontiac G6, or a Mazda6, which themselves pale in comparison to the depreciation-friendly Cadillac CTS, a growing favorite among younger enthusiasts looking for a luxury sedan that depreciates from $40K MSRP to $20K in just two years. I found a beautiful CTS not far from where I live, but I have a feeling that car payments would totally kill me. Then again, when it comes to cars, I've never been one to let common sense get in the way of a good time.

Tomorrow I'll run some financing and insurance figures which I think will help me get a better picture of which vehicle will be best for my budget. If I get something closer to $10K that means I'll have a bit of disposable income available for Z28 mods. Otherwise I'll probably be using half my annual salary paying off a car.

In other news I am really behind on my CS reading. I had this big vision of using the first few weeks of the new year to get my feet wet using Perl, XML, and PHP, but as it turns out the days just seem to get burned away with interviews and helping my folks out.

My end table is split 50/50 with library books and ones that I bought months ago and haven't had time to read:

Peter Camenzind by Herman Hesse
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide by Eric Meyer
Perl for C Programmers by Stee Oualline
Visual C# 2005 Step by Step by John Sharp
The Zen of CSS design by Dave Shea and Molly Holzschalg
Beginning XML -- 3rd Edition (various authors)

Somewhere I got the idea where I could read 10 pages a day from each book and start a rolling list where I'd finish a book each week or something. Yeah, that system lasted about one day. But in all honesty I think I'll start reading again regularly sometime next week now that my job hunt is winding down and I have more of a schedule.

The next ~340 days of 2007 are shaping up to be pretty good so far. More thoughts tomorrow.

The new year, day 15.

2007-01-15T23:10:00.000-06:00

I've had three on-site interviews, with one more coming up Wednesday, and one standing job offer with a local company. It's shaping up to be a good January so far. For tomorrow I want to get through another 6 days worth of classified ads, and make another round of applications on Dice, CareerBuilder, and Monster.

I decided today, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that I'm going to sell the MR2. Oh, don't get me wrong, that little car has been a trooper--with just under 180K on the clock it made a 2500 mile trip from San Jose to Chicago in just over 4 days, not to mention multiple round trips from Chicago to Purdue and back.

On the other hand, I've also had to do quite a bit of work on it in the 2 years that I've owned it (head gasket, waterpump, timing belt, ecu, and splicing about 10 feet of wire to fix random body electrical issues). The car has held up ok, but it still PMS's too often to for me to consider it a "reliable" vehicle. For example, the waterpump (which I replaced 2 years ago) just went out this past week. The car is up on jackstands as I write this.

It kills me to sell that car leaving certain things unfixed or unfinished, but at the end of the day the list of small projects I have for it are for me alone, and the best I could do would be break even on whatever further money I invested in the car. So if the net return is $0, why leave with no extra money and lost time?

Once car drama out of the way I can focus my savings on paying off the vehicle and shoveling money away for a townhome. The place that I'd most like to work for is located just 8 miles from my parent's house, which means that the commute is almost non-existent. On the downside, if I buy a place near work it will also, by definition, be very close to my parents. Early-warning satellite defenses will be useless--they'll be able to stop by unannounced with no
time for me to prepare the place for public viewing.

People talk constantly about a five-year plan, a list of goals that you're going to accomplish in that set time period. I haven't made such a plan just yet. But I do have a one-month plan:

Get a waterpump for the MR2 so it's in running condition to get me to work every day.
Get said job.
Get insurance and 401(K) in line.
Pay off credit card.
Save for a daily-driver.

There ya go. 5 items. 30 days. I can handle that. I'll update the blog as the checklist gets shorter.

Home for the holidays. Home for good.

2007-01-02T00:13:00.000-06:00

The clock has just tipped into January 2nd, 2007. The new year is just over 24 hours old and already I can sense a wave of change on the way. I bought Microsoft Money 2007 to help me keep track of my finances. As of last week I'm starting to read again--80 pages of Peter Camenzind and nearly a hundred of The Poisonwood Bible.

After much debate, I turned down the San Jose offer. My first action of the new year was to box up the work laptop and send it on its way back to SVL. Godspeed, little T40. May your journey to Silicon Valley be swift and uneventful.

For tomorrow -- my January task list, the job hunt, and my new daily routine.

14 days left, then heading to...?

2006-12-01T18:10:00.000-06:00

Friday night, 7PM, blogging.

I haven't done this in months. It feels so good. Just me, sitting alone in a dimly lit room, listening to some relaxing music, taking some well-needed time away from the rest of the world. I'm going to start doing laundry in a bit. Then I'm going to clean up my room and sort out the pile of books and magazines in the corner of my room. Then I'll empty my trash and take an inventory of the car parts and tools that I have sitting around the garage. This is me time.

As I sit here with half-opened eyes, "Jericho" by the Weekend Players is filling the room with its slow, ambient rhythm. I feel less stressed out already. Unfortunately, on today in particular there are thousands of people the world over who are finding out for the first time that things are not going well for them. I can't really speak for them since I can't even imagine how devastating it must be to contract HIV.

On a lighter note, I now have submitted a total of 8 resumes in my first week of real job hunting. I should have been doing this much, much earlier.

So here's the situation. I have an offer from my current employer. As long as I don't screw up this semester, I'm as good as in. So let's look at some pros and cons to life in the Bay Area.

Pros:

Culture. The Bay Area has arguably some of the most diverse cultural offerings on the west coast. You can get anything from your average In n' Out cheeseburger up to a genuine japanese cocktail at Hukilau lounge in San Jose. Looking for something a little more upscale? Try walking through downtown Mountain View or an afternoon browsing the SFMoMA.
Weather. Average daily highs break into the 60s in San Jose well into December. The monthly weather averages for San Jose make West Lafayette look like Siberia.
Mass transit. The tree-hugging hippies have a bad reputation in the Midwest, but they've definitely gotten public transportation down to a science. Whether you need a quick ride on the VTA bus and light rail system or you're making a longer journey on Caltrain or BART, you can go almost anywhere in the Bay without driving. While getting around town for spontaneous trips is still a pain in the ass (I am convinced that the corner of 8th and Julian is seriously the worst place to live if you need to get to a grocery store without a car) public transit will still do the job for the daily commute.
The Pacific Ocean. The California coastline is a 1200 mile long front row seat to the most beautiful 161 million cubic miles of water on earth. Need we say more?
An insane real estate market. With overinflated prices that put the price of a 900 square foot condo at north of $450,000, it's only a matter of time before the bottom falls out and normal people have a decent chance at home ownership.

Which brings us to...

Cons

An insane real estate market. The real-estate bubble is a double-edged sword. With rent for studio apartments being in the $1000 range, it's hard to save much of anything for a down payment, especially when you're trying to fork up 20% on a $450,000+ one-bedroom place.
Miles from everyone I love. With a tight-knit family back in the midwest, being out in CA means leaving behind everybody I love, and probably only being able to see them at Christmas time. Video conferencing and nationwide cell phone plans have shrunken the world, but you can't send a hug in an email just yet.
Emissions laws. Let's face it, California has got to be the worst state in the US when it comes to sympathy for gearheads. Not only do they do a sniffer test, they check for C.A.R.B. EO numbers on all aftermarket parts from cold air intakes to underdrive pulleys. Wanna do a heads n' cam swap on your car? Hope you don't drop the soap in prison.
Smoke and mirrors financing. Even if you do bite the bullet and head out west, the housing finance market is a mine field. I've seen a bunch of crazy solutions for affording $500,000 condos, ranging from dual mortgages (one for $200,000, the other for $300,000) to delayed-debt mortgages (take out a $300,000 mortgage now and the bank gets the remaining $200,000 when you sell the house) and the 80-year mortgage. I hate to say it, but half a million bucks for a one-bedroom place is nuts. For comparison, $569,000 could buy you an amazing 3 bedroom house in Lincoln Park, arguably Chicago's richest burrough. Indianapolis is even cheaper--$247,900 can buy you a 2000 square foot condo in Broadripple, Indy's premiere area for hipsters.

It kills me to turn down San Jose. But when I compare the advantages and disadvantages, I think it's for the best.

SeatStaysUp.com -- my latest waste of time.

2006-11-28T21:03:00.000-06:00

The folks who brought such classic forums as LS1Tech and ModMotorTech opened up a new project, SeatStaysUp, which caters to the fine art of being a guy.

Here's one such gem of wisdom:

DICTIONARY FOR DECODING WOMEN'S ENGLISH:
1. Yes = No
2. No = Yes
3. Maybe = No
4. We need = I want
5. I am sorry = You'll be sorry
6. We need to talk = You're in trouble
7. Sure, go ahead = You better not
8. Do what you want = You will pay for this later
9. I am not upset = Of course, I am upset, you moron!
10. You're certainly attentive tonight = Is sex all you ever think about?

DICTIONARY FOR DECODING MEN'S ENGLISH:
1. I am hungry = I am hungry
2. I am sleepy = I am sleepy
3. I am tired = I am tired
4. Nice dress = Nice cleavage!
5. I love you = Let's have sex... now.
6. I am bored = Do you want to have sex?
7. May I have this dance? = I'd like to have sex with you.
8. Can I call you sometime? = I'd like to have sex with you.
9. Do you want to go to a movie? = I'd like to have sex with you.
10. Can I take you out to dinner? = I'd like to have sex with you.
11. I don't think those shoes go with that outfit. = I'm gay

I'm dating a great girl. But I have to admit, it took a while (and several disastrous dating experiences) to find her. The thing that gets me is that the female half of the joke list reminds me way too much of some of those relationships. It seems like quite a few girls out there don't say what they mean, and maybe they rely too much on guys knowing what's bothering them. Things get even more screwed up when one of the people is psychologically unstable.

Love and relationships have been a favorite topic of art, literature, and philosophy since the dawn of recorded history. So why do young people, with so much reflective material to look to, find themselves stuck in such awful relationships?

A look back on four years as a gearhead...

2006-11-23T23:50:00.000-06:00

A member of PAPA recently posted a thread with the question "What's the worst modification you've ever done on your vehicle?"

For anyone who's seen my car, the thing has been through hell and back. I mean it. In the four years that I've owned the vehicle, the dash has been apart about 7 times. It's been through two sets of aftermarket control arms, three cams, and two sets of headers, just to mention a few things. Only now, as 2006 draws to a close, is the car reaching a balance between reliability and performance. The Camaro had the horrible fate of being the car that I used to learn how to work on cars. As most gearheads will tell you, that first project car should almost NEVER start out as a "good" car.

I dug back in my memory to the first time that I touched a wrench to the engine bay and replayed four years of experiments, projects, mistakes, and repairs. After some thought, this was my reply to the thread:

Let me first say that I hope that none of you are as incurably stupid as I am. Some people have to learn common sense the hard way. I am one of those people.

Mistake 1: First-fast-car-fever.

My first car was a Corolla, and I got my Z28 right when I was learning about how to work on cars. I was so nuts about working on it for the sake of working on it that I forgot the #1 rule of modding -- know what the hell you're doing and why you should do it. I did my heads/cam swap in December of 2002. 8 months earlier I had no idea what a rocker arm looked like, and had barely turned any wrenches on other people's cars to know what I was doing. Somebody with that little wrenching experience has no friggin' business taking on a project of that scale. Thank God that I didn't ruin that motor.

Mistake 2: Not having a daily driver while doing mods.

This mistake shares equal responsibility for my car being a jank POS for a few years. The worst thing you can do when you're new to a hobby is force yourself into a time constraint. If you have no daily driver, suddenly everything that you do HAS to be finished between Friday night and Monday morning. Balls-deep in a project on Saturday night and you realize that you're missing a bracket or a bolt for something? Better rig something up or you're gonna miss work.

Mistake 3: No frame of reference.

Anyone remember how my car used to have awful clutch disengagement issues? I drove it for almost 5K miles over the summer before I drove someone else's F-body and realized how bad mine was. Then I remounted it, bled it, and the pedal worked fine. I would have found out a lot sooner if I had been around other gearheads or fast cars to get a frame of reference about whether or not my fucked-to-hell clutch was difficult to shift because A) I had just never driven another stick vehicle before or B) because the master cylinder wasn't set up properly.

So how would I have solved these issues? Simple.

Hang around other gearheads for a year or so before even touching a wrench to your own car. You'll get a chance to ride in cars and see how mods affect streetability. You'll take part in wrenching sessions. You'll learn about how the cars work by being able to ask plenty of questions. You'll also get an idea of what it's like to be in the game for several years, and that gives you a sense of what mistakes other guys have made and what directions you can take for your own projects.

In other words, join [the car club] and don't fuck with your own car until you've been around for a while.

I plan on starting a backpack page about the car later this week to document my progress on the car. There are some repairs to do, some parts to buy, and some parts to sell before the new year:

Repair / replace:

Driver-side spring adjustment collar
Driver-side O2 sensor

Buy:

Front 17x9.5 GrandSport wheels
BFG G-Force KDW 275/40R17 tires for front
Nitto 555R 315/35R17 tires for rear
13" C5 rotors (pair)
Hawk HP+ LS1 brake pads
Braided front brake lines

Sell:

Shock tower brace
Nitrous kit
Assorted non-car related parts

It feels good to have that list written in stone. Now that I have a vision of where I want the car to be, the end is in sight. No more exhaustive marathon on the "just make it faster" treadmill.

More on this in January.

Half my life is on the Internet.

2006-11-18T08:54:00.000-06:00

One day in late September I was at an AutoZone getting some oil for my MR2 and enjoying the last weeks of warm weather before the frigid cold of winter descended on West Lafayette.

I walked out to the car with a bottle of cheap 10W30 and popped the hood. I had washed the car the day before and it was in pretty good shape for a vehicle that's driven from San Jose to Indiana. As I poured the oil in the engine I heard a distinctive rumble approach the parking lot. Deep with strong midrange tone. Small displacement. Ford 5.0. A Fox body.

I looked up and saw a bright orange '87+ Mustang hatch. The car had dumps and a strong cam. I flagged down the driver, a guy about my age, and asked him about the car. We talked shop for a few minutes, telling each other about our setups. I asked him what his user name was on Corral.

"What?" he asked.

"Corral. Corral.net" I replied in disbelief. "The mustang site." How could this guy have never heard of it?

"Oh. I'll have to check it out. Take care buddy."

I headed back to my car and sat down, pausing for a moment to look at the steering wheel. The guy had never heard of Corral before. How did he learn about cars?

Since I was an internet junkie long before I got into cars, it seemed like the web was a natural place to learn about this new hobby. I got my bearings through a few of the popular Vizard hotrodding books and read magazines like GMHTP and Chevy High Performance, but they were mainly a place to learn about what good internet forums were out there.

Once I had a launching point, I jumped to the internet.

www.mfba.org
www.CamaroZ28.com/forums
www.ls1tech.com
www.ls1.com/forums
www.lt1tech.com
www.frrax.com/rrforum
www.corner-carvers.com/forums
www.corral.net
web.ics.purdue.edu/~papa/forums
www.chitownracing.com

Those are just a few of the sites that I regularly post at. I'm a member on about 20 car forums. That's right... twenty forums.

In the late 90s it was unfashionable, maybe even bad to use the internet so heavily. With the start of the 3rd millennium, I think that this trend is changing. The internet is rapidly evolving into the de facto standard for learning and sharing information. I don't think it will surpass traditional bricks-and-mortar schools in my lifetime, but in the meantime it's already revolutionizing how people find out about new things.

For now, I'll still get goofy stares when I run across the old-school hot rodders that didn't discover this hobby through a web browser. But sooner or later, the phrase "Give me a call." will be just as common as "Send me a PM."

The return to Village Coffee Shop

2006-10-03T22:56:00.000-05:00

I can't remember the last time that I went to Village Coffee Shop. I haven't gone regularly since spring of 2004, maybe earlier. Tonight I'm here half by accident, half on purpose. It's nearly midnight and the HSSE library is closed for the evening. The underground mecca known as the UGRL is open until 2, but there's something about being down there that just doesn't jive. So I decided to try the coffee shop. It's got just enough background noise so you don't go nuts from the silence, but is sleepier than the lounge areas in the Union.

I have a midterm exam tomorrow in ENGL 286 -- Film. Professor King has gotten better with each lecture. He's got the use of the VCR and DVD player down well now, so there's no longer awkward pauses whlie he tries to pinpoint different scenes. Since film is a visual medium it's only natural that lecture should include a mix of spoken word and short clips to emphasize different techniques and stylistic elements.

Like most CS majors, liberal arts elective classes have a noticeably different feel than the cold, analytical atmosphere that comes from working with math and computers all day. There's a tendency to mentally brush a class like this aside because its projects and homework assignments don't cause internal bleeding. But despite this, I think this is one of my most enjoyable electives ever.

This trip to the coffee shop is a good thing. Already I can feel myself looking at the study guide not as something I need to drill into my memory but instead as something that I genuinely want to learn.

Maybe the trick to doing well in college is to figure out how to turn courses into hobbies. If I could just get into math as much as I get into learning about cars I'd be selecting a thesis topic for graduate school.

I'm at the bottom inch of my $3.75 drink, glancing between the laptop and the book as my eyes skim past vocabulary words. Continuity editing -- "A system of cutting to maintain continuous and clear narrative action. Continuity editing relies on matching screen direction, position, and temporal relations from shot to shot." Mise-en-scene -- "All of the elments placed in front of the camera to be photographed: the settings and props, lighting, costumes and makeup, and figure behavior." The list stretches on for half a dozen pages.

There's a term here, symptomatic meaning, or the connotation of a work as implied by the culture and social climate from which it came, which brings me to another topic--life after college. This past weekend I took a trip up to Chicago with my girlfriend and another couple. We spent Friday evening and all day Saturday exploring what the Gold Coast had to offer. There's plenty of shopping along the Magnificent Mile, but there's also a good amount of culture to experience through museums, galleries, and music venues.

San Jose had all of these things... but when I was out there I had nobody to share it with. All the culture in the world can't make up for being 2000 miles away from the people that matter to you. On the flipside, I'm pretty sure that I can make friends just about anywhere that I would end up... but I don't know if I could ever really get used to renting for my entire life. For middle class folks in urban areas of Western Europe and the UK it's the norm. But why do that if I have a choice?

[30 minute pause as I finish studying]

It's 1AM, and the coffee shop is closing. Tuesday nights are now officially coffee shop nights.

Tomorrow -- a look at hobbies, graduation, and swanky college furnishings.

Never too late to start fresh -- lifehacking the workday

2006-10-03T16:54:00.000-05:00

It's Tuesday, October 3rd. We're about halfway through the semester, just before midterms, and I realized today, without a doubt, I need a change in my daily schedule. The balance between work and school during this long-awaited final semester of my college career has been a delicate one. I've come through ok so far, but each day I feel like I'm being dragged along by my schedule, frantically trying to stay afloat, rather than being behind the wheel and trying to see what cool things I can accomplish with my day.

My day gets chewed up by two main things: school and work. Homework has to get wedged into the crevices wherever I can fit it. But considering my late-starting classes, I really haven't been using much of my mornings. I need to be more proactive about not sleeping in. I should get up at 7. Shower. Eat breakfast. Go to campus. Read and plan projects. There's a lot that can be done in the three to five hours before those classes start. I just wish I could wake up at 7 just as easily as I can stay up til 3 doing homework.

The other thing I'm amazed by is how much meals can disrupt your flow when you do a crappy job of planning your day. On Wednesday I have an 11:30-12:20 class, a 1:30-2:20 class, a 3:30 -4:20 class, and a 6:30-9:30 class. I end up hopping in my car during that 12:20-1:30 break just to fly home, eat lunch, and try to make it back to campus in time for my next class. I can save a little bit of time by buying or packing a lunch, but that still means either spending money or going to my car to get a lunchbox, eating, and walking back to campus.

Out in San Jose, meals punctuated my day. Breakfast started the workday. I'd take my last bite of fruit and walk out the door to catch the train. Lunch signalled the start of creative and exciting work to offset afternoon meetings. I'd come home from the gym in the evening to eat dinner, which marked off the division between work and free time. It was a full schedule, but one that flowed naturally and didn't lead to compounding stress as the week went on.

I've also learned something important about the work/school mix--it sucks. Don't do it. Like most white collar jobs, my tasks are modular and project-oriented, which allows for easy incremental progress. However, this also requires considerable effort to keep up the mental pace from coursework. There's no surefire fix to this issue besides discipline, which is ok. A little hard work and effort never hurt anyone.

The weekends are also going to be critical to making the second half of the semester flow smoothly. Friday night is my night. Saturday daytime should be a mix of homework and light housework. Saturday night is date night. Sunday is for homework and relaxation.

There's no school bell that rings to set boundaries when things should start or end. But having a general idea of how you want to set up a day can make a huge difference between following a schedule and living a life. The better the overall organization, the more natural and unique each waking moment becomes.

Thank you for shopping at Best Buy...

2006-09-24T01:36:00.000-05:00

After nearly five years of being bombarded with Apple's silhouette commercials, I finally caved in and bought an iPod Nano. I used to be an early adopter for techno-crap like this. I remember shoveling out $400 for a Compaq iPaq 3635 (which I still have) when it first hit the market in 2000. I had no idea what I was gonna do with it or how I could possibly justify vaporizing 2 weeks of paychecks at my high school job to buy it, but it was COOL.

Thank God I'm not like that anymore.

Wait, no. I am still like that. But instead of techno crap I buy car crap. Oops. Back to square one.

There's been a lot of exciting stuff going on in my life over the past two months. And I mean exciting not so much in the "look at me I'm so great" way as I do in the "this is as scary as it is wonderful" kind of way. The uncertainty of the near future makes each day a true adventure. My waking hours have been a whirlwind of homework, DITA, motor oil, code, and resumes. The pace is really killing me right now. At the rate I'm going, I can't keep this up much past December, which is fine since my main goal right now is to finally graduate, get a few leads on a job, and somewhere along the lines hang out with friends, spend time with my girlfriend and maybe get the Camaro off jackstands too.

Tomorrow I'm going to make up for 2 months of silence on this blog and reflect a bit on classes, work, aging, writing buffer overflows, checking valvespring installation height, and the reason that I came home on this rainy, miserable weekend. But for now, it's 1:45 AM CST and I should really get some sleep.

Another character study

2006-07-14T02:22:00.000-05:00

Here's another character study for a story that I'm working on... not sure if it'll end up in the final version. Enjoy.

Sam leaned around the corner of the cubicle. One of the carpeted walls was covered in magazine clippings--pictures of people, scenery, advertisements, and article text. Piled on top of these were novelty bumper stickers, parking tickets, and utility bills with the words "PAST DUE" stamped on them. The small gray desk was relatively empty except for his workstation and an ancient fax machine. In the corner sat the hemp bag that contained The Laptop.

He felt a hand on his shoulder. "Yeah, this is the office..." Enzo said. "Enzo Perez... brain in a box."

Enzo took a seat in his maroon office chair and motioned toward a folding chair leaning against the wall of the cubicle. Sam sat down and leaned toward him.

"Dude. We've gotta do something about Ash." Sam said quietly, shaking his head. "He's getting out of control. Last night I came home and there were math equations just written all over the wall in black marker. I mean, tons of shit. It started on the left side of the room as numbers and symbols and then by the time he got to the corner he was drawing stick figures with tits."

Enzo shrugged his shoulders. "Your professor said he was onto something though, right? I mean, the guy proved a theorem by himself."

Sam ran his hands through his hair and scrached his scalp. "Look... I don't know how much longer I can do this. Dude, think about this. I fucking failed undergraduate algorithms classes. Here I am having Ash doing my goddamn homework. Now my thesis advisor wants me to co-author a goddman paper with him."

Over Enzo's shoulder the fax machine groaned to life and began printing out a message.

"You said so yourself that you couldn't make it through the Master's program there. I'm not gonna blow smoke up your ass and tell you that you can." Enzo turned his back to Sam and reached for the fax. "Face it man, you're fucked. So why not just go with it and see what happens? Write a book or something afterwards."

"I need a job though man." Sam retorted. "If I get caught plagiarizing I'll be working this goddamn McDonald's job for the rest of my life."

Enzo nodded absent-mindedly, holding up the fax. "Home ownership can be yours... no downpayment... everyone qualifies... fax us back at 555-5905... wow, these fuckers never learn do they."

Sam watched silently as Enzo reached into his filing cabinet and extracted a full-page grayscale photograph. It was a point-blank genital shot of a black man performing anal sex with a white woman. He fed the sheet into the fax and slowly punched in the number from the advertisement.

"This usually keeps them quiet for about six months." He said flatly. "So what were you saying about McDonald's?"

Sam shook his head and sighed. "Nevermind. I'll see you tonight at the house."

A Wikipedia contrail

2006-07-09T19:40:00.000-05:00

Passive aggressive behavior

2006-07-03T00:37:00.000-05:00

It's 10:37 PM and I'm sitting in Pita Pit eating a Chicken Crave. I just got out of a showing of Superman Returns. The movie was excellent and made me forget that I hadn't eaten anything since noon. Now I'm trying to make the most of this $8 dinner, alternating between chomping and typing. There's some weird quasi-rap music playing. It reminds me of Moodorama, Weekend Players, and Kayne West all rolled into one. It has a sleepy saxaphone sound and a mellow bass line that's more chill music than hip hop.

San Jose continues to be a social and psychological test tube. Earlier today I talked a bit about technology and how the Internet was preserving the opportunity for old-school business competition. But the next thing that came my direction was a totally different issue--arguments and misunderstandings.

Throughout my college career and especially during my brief stint in the Greek system I saw people get into arguments and lose friendships over crazy things. I'm lousy when it comes to reading people and have done my fair share of totally making the wrong call in social politics. Looking back on it, however, I think the one common thread between all of those arguments was a lack of communication. I remember talking to friends over the years and hearing them bitch and moan about someone they lived with or were friends with, and how this person was driving them nuts. No matter what the problem was, for some reason it was irreconcileable and the only solution at this point was avoidance or passive-aggressive behavior.

One of my roommates is female, and seems to be angry at me about... well, something. Who knows what, but she's pissed. She seemed totally fine talking to my other roommate, her boyfriend.

Later in the day I was walking towards the movie theater, watching the shadows of palm trees dance across the sunbleached asphalt, trying to figure out why this girl was angry with me. I thought of a bunch of possible reasons, but couldn't really come up with anything legitimate. I was a clean person, did the dishes every weekend, took out the garbage regularly, and was pretty unobtrusive in my bathroom usage. So why the anger?

Here's the scary part about all of this--I'm playing the role of the unaware second party. Without intervention, it's almost inevitable that I keep going about my day-to-day routine, completely oblivious to whatever is bothering my roommate, until finally she reaches a boiling point and lashes out in an emotional outburst. And just like all those past cases of people going off the wall, the second party is never fully aware of what the hell just happened, other than that their friend or roommate is going nuts.

The obvious thing to do in this situation is to ask what's wrong, hoping that the problem hasn't been going on for so long that apology and reconciliaition is irrelevant. But of course there are other social dynamics at work here, including the inevitable question of How The Hell Can't You Know What's Wrong. I think that's part of the reason that some people can see conflict coming and decide to brace for impact rather than try and fix things. It's kind of stupid that I'm an adult and yet I get nervous at the idea of talking out a problem. I wonder how often this kind of behavior happens in boardrooms and foreign politics. Actually, wait, I don't... I think I'm afraid to find out.

Thought of the week: the internet is a BIG place.

2006-07-02T18:15:00.000-05:00

After spending over 12 hours outdoors at yesterday's Ozzfest 2006 in San Francisco, I decided to give my sunburnt skin a rest and sit inside until the late afternoon. I did laundry, cleaned dishes, and then went online to do some web browsing. As usual, I learned some cool things about society and culture.

The modern age has ruined my generation's concept of the mom-and-pop store. On May 14th the West Lafayette-based supermarket Smitty's closed its doors after 50 years in business. The latest rumor is that corporate juggernaut Albertson's might move into the retail space.

There are days where I walk down the street and wonder how it's possible for anyone to start a business nowadays without the aid of venture capitalists and an IPO. But this past week the Internet gave me some hope.

One of the Internet trends that's continued steadily for the past 10 years is social collaboration, whether it's traveling, consumer reviews, or the latest trend, social bookmarking. Whereas a city only has a finite amount of prime real estate for businesses, the internet is boundless and immune to issues like demographics and travel time. A new organization can sprout up with minimal investment and gather a tremendous following.

Digg is one such example. The site started in 2004 and has since gained following similar to Slashdot, Everything2, and Kuro5hin, to name a few. The five-year old site Plastic recently disappeared off the Internet without a trace in early May of this year, spawning such shock that a group of users took it under themselves not only to hold vigil until the site came back up, but eventually they created an entirely new community, Trees And Things. Talk about resilience.

Things get even more interesting when you consider niche sites such as Hugg, a sort of Digg for environmental issues. Then there are site families like the privately owned Gawker Media chain, which has an impressive portfolio of sites such as my personal favorite, LifeHacker, a community blog about increasing productivity and reducing stress.

By now you're probably getting the picture. The internet could very well be the last place that a group of non-millionaires can create a small international business without the need to go public. The only downside that I can see is not learning about websites for months at a time. For example, earlier today I just discovered Charlie Suismann's Manhattan User's Guide. Now I've got the itch to visit New York before I turn 30.

The great part of all this is a return to the real consumer-side benefit of business--competition. Del.icio.us made such an impact that dozens of clones have appeared, not only to directly compete with del.icio.us but to apply its methodology to other news sites like Slashdot and Digg. Here's a short list:
http://www.spurl.net/
http://www.furl.net/
http://www.blinklist.com/
http://www.simpy.com/
http://diggdot.us/
http://www.digglicious.com/
http://bluedot.us/friends/dots

If you've got a lot of time on your hands you can visit this exhaustive list on 3Spots and try them all.

Obviously no one person can use all of these sites. I'll make another entry this evening about the sites and services that I use. The thing that gets me excited is that there are so many choices. I can't walk less than a mile from my place without running into a McDonald's. But you can spend years online sorting through the mountains of quality grassroots internet sites emerging each day. In an age where anything built out of bricks seems to be a corporate franchise, the web provides us with a glimmer of hope.

Jazz at Santana Row

2006-06-28T01:27:00.000-05:00

It's 8:34 PM and I'm sitting inside another Starbucks, this time at Santana Row overlooking a small courtyard. A group of high school and college-aged musicians are performing as part of the Row's Summer Jazz Series, a free live music program on Tuesday nights. The area is absolutely packed with people. I had this idea that I was going to sit down outside and be able to blog and listen to music. Instead the area is so horrendously packed that I'm sitting inside the coffee shop watching the concert from behind plate glass.

I finished "The Millionaire Next Door" today. All in all it was a pretty good buy, although you could probably squeeze the 250 pages of case studies down to a nice 30 page booklet of facts and investment advice. The overall message remains pretty attractive--don't act wealthy, be wealthy. BMWs and expensive homes mean nothing if there's no solid equity underneath it all. The end goal isn't about trying to have the most toys or instill the most envy in your neighbors (which is the "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" mentality that I can't friggin stand).

Which brings me to Santana Row. This place is a shrine to voracious western consumerism. On my short walk to Starbucks I passed by a Ford GT and several E-class Mercedes Benzes. All around me are people who are flaunting wealth pointlessly, almost painfully. There's a few guys standing outside of the coffee shop wearing jeans that are torn to shreds. Knowing that Santana Row is home to stores for companies like Prada, Gucci, and Diesel, I'm willing to bet that a pair of jeans like that costs more than I make in a day.

After reading Millionaire I'm feeling motivated to try and change my lifestyle a bit towards something that's more sustainable. I think that the first place to cut the fat could be in my hobbies--namely, cars.

For the past few years I've been slowly feeding a blue monster that's currently sitting in my driveway back home in Chicago. It's fun as hell to drive, but it has a voracious appetite for any equity that comes near it. That car has eaten a ton of money so far, and it shows no signs of stopping. In the gearhead field this is what makes a vehicle a "project car" -- no matter what's done to it, things are either breaking from abuse or always undergoing a state of improvement and reinvention.

It's been a fun adventure, but I think it's time to change my goals for that vehicle. I have to do some overdue maintenance on it this fall, and that might be a great time to change some parts out for things that are a bit less extreme, even if that does mean making it a little less heartstopping to drive on the street. Slight changes now will help to cut down the artificial expense of driving the car.

I have a second car that's been far cheaper--a 1991 Toyota MR2 that I bought for $2500 last year. It's a great little car that gets 30 miles to the gallon even in city driving. Enthusiasts call a car like this a daily driver--a vehicle that's cheap and reliable, unlike the typical project car. Even though it's been a blast to own, sooner or later I'll have to sell it. The trunk is the size of a large duffel bag and the engine is approaching 200,000 miles.

...This is where the enthusiast side of me causes trouble.

I was eating lunch at work a week ago, thinking about what I would do when I needed to replace the MR2. A ton of ideas popped into my head. Find something four door, maybe a little fancy. BMW? Lexus? In a flash I was digging through my memory of the best years for those brands for engine and transmission configurations and trying to remember when key suspension geometry changes were introduced to the next model year. A good late model 3-series Bimmer runs $25K... used.

(This is about the time of the entry where, in the past few months, I would try and pull together some kind of deep thought and things would just fall apart. I can already feel myself losing grip of what I was trying to convey when I started writing this. So what... I'm gonna try and pull through anyways.)

Today I thought again about how I'd replace the MR2, but this time I had a much different angle. Forget a vehicle with all that sex appeal. If I'm getting something relatively low miles, why not get a total economy car, like the new Toyota Yaris? For $10,000 I could pick up a new Yaris and it would be cheap enough that I could save up for it in a year and buy outright. No car payment, nothing. I'd drive away and be debt free, rather than tied down paying hundreds a month. Sure, with a white collar Computer Science job I could probably "afford" the debt of a German car, but why put myself through that if I can get by just fine without it? I could redirect that $400 a month in car payments towards an IRA or 401(k)... money that I'd actually be able to use later on in life.

That's just the tip of the savings iceberg. Moving from a traditional western credit-based lifestyle to a more disciplined equity-based lifestyle means that your financial outlook isn't doomed based on your posessions, and the things that you *do* own aren't slowly bleeding your bank account dry through interest.

So once you determine that the key to financial nirvana lies not in keeping up with the Joneses, but rather weighing what things are truly necessary, where do you take it? I think I have an idea. Next week I want to get in touch with a college recruiter at work. I'm going to tell them that I'd like a new assignment. Not just in the U.S, but rather anywhere that there's electricity and running water. I think it would be great to slow my climb on the corporate ladder in exchange for being able to work in exotic places and experience different cultures. How many American programmers can say that they've worked in both California and Bangladesh? Following a frugal mindset I could live abroad for a year or two, experience the world, and come home debt free, ready to settle down in the comfort and familiarity of home.

The $11 Sunday

2006-06-25T19:32:00.000-05:00

I'm sitting in a Starbuck's off Paseo De San Antonio. It's a warm afternoon here in San Jose. The sky is clear as usual and the sun is slowly creeping toward the horizon. Outside people of all cultures and backgrounds sit and mingle with each other. The 5:30 light rail train to Santa Teresa creeps by at 5 miles per hour on tracks that sit embedded in the sidewalk.

It's taken me a full month to get back to the lifestyle that I had last fall--slow, reflective Sundays. It feels so good to take a breather once in a while.

I picked up two interesting books yesterday: The Millionaire Next Door, and Delaying the Real World. I figured that it's summer and it's the perfect time to get into some new things and try some socioeconomic and cultural experiments. I'm about 60 pages into each book and they've proven to be excellent purchases.

Delaying the Real World is a guidebook of sorts geared towards recent college grads looking to do something else with their 20's besides dive headfirst into the workforce. It present a variety of possible adventures and trips, ranging from spending a year aboard a cruiseliner to teaching English to children in impoverished regions of Cambodia. Throughout the narrative are dozens of personal accounts of how twenty-somethings from across the United States broadened their global perspective before entering the workforce full time. Some have approached their thirties never really settling down, instead having a succession of service and charity stints across the globe. Others have struck a balance with international corporations by leaping at the chance to work abroad in places like Egypt, India, or Sri Lanka, using their white collar job for income and gaining a feel for the surrounding culture by volunteering on weekends.

To an extent I'm already doing something like this by being across the country and experimenting with life in a bedroom community like San Jose. Developing software doesn't have the same outreach factor as working in the Peace Corps, but I think I've learned a great deal about the importance of owning a home and realizing that beautiful weather doesn't really make or break a place.

Reading the book has given me a few interesting ideas about how to spend next spring. I could save up a few grand between now and December... possibly enough to finance a few months abroad after I graduate. There are several development labs throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia that might provide me with the chance to experience a completely different culture while still making decent money for my eventual return to the western world.

That's the pipe dream at least. I've only owned the book for about 18 hours so I'm gonna have to do a little more research and planning before I spend time brushing up on my Armenian and Cantonese.

The other book, The Millionaire Next Door, is an equally interesting book. Last year I read "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" by controversial real estate mogul Robert Kiyosaki and was thoroughly disgusted with the guy's approach of using the real estate market to oppress and extort money from the lower class. His examples are riddled with anecdotal tales of buying Porches and making fortunes off undervalued real estate and rental property.

Stanley and Danko's "Millionaire" is a much different approach to wealth. Where Kiyosaki proposes unimaginable wealth through real estate investment and going to seminars, this other book is a far more mundane and realistic, though still inspiring guide. The precepts are simple--hard work, dedication, and thrift. The authors explain that real wealth isn't about flaunting expensive cars or massive houses or waterfront vacation properties. This is "visual" wealth, but it's not actual equity in the form of savings and retirement accounts. The real millionaires, the authors explain, are the ones who didn't need to buy the fancy plasma TV's or the foreign cars or the designer clothing. Rather, they worked their asses off and saved for the things that really mattered, like their kid's education and a down payment on a reasonably priced house. One statistic that the book flaunts is that more than half of the people with a net worth of over $1 million make less than $80,000 per year in gross income. And when they budget their finite income, they spend frugally and don't fall into the trap of thinking that 400 channels of satellite TV is equally necessary to paying their mortgage.

I love this little book. It's exactly the kind of thing that college students should be reading. Instead of the mountain of get-rich books out there that glorify voracious consumerism, The Millionaire Next Door is a sobering kick in the ass that no, you will probably never have the flamboyant lifestyle of a movie star or professional athlete, but with mature budgeting you can have retire at 50 and have enough money saved to last for 20 years of comfortable living.

I'll give this lifestyle a try. Today I've spent $11 between lunch at Pita Pit (Chicken Crave with a small softdrink and salt/vinegar chips) and a small Mocha Frappuccino at Starbuck's. Hopefully I'll be able to look back one day and be able to say that I lived my financial life not chasing after some materialistic pipe dream, but rather firmly grounded in the things that really count.

I need to stop this one-post-a-month thing.

2006-06-23T23:38:00.000-05:00

I've made attempts to blog multiple times in the past few weeks, but I can't seem to get stuff together and make an idea flow. History has shown that this is a warning sign. The less I write the more I get caught up in pointless projects and I stop really thinking and making time for intellectual hobbies.

To coax stuff out I'm going to talk a little bit about my time out here so far.

I've been to San Francisco just once this time around, but I plan on making another trip next weekend for the 4th of July. I've checked out a bunch of live music events such as Music in the Other Park, which was free and a lot of fun. The nightlife scene here is a blast and is great for acquaintances to mingle and network.

Another change of pace this time around is that I'm actually hanging out with some people from work. During my last trip here it was hard to really meet interns that were native English speakers and had hobbies and interests that had at least some intersection with American life. The guys from New Zealand are here again, and they are assholes as usual. But so far they're the only guys that have fit the stereotype of the elitist superintelligent engineer. For the most part the workforce here is talented but humble, which works well for me.

I've started to work out with my friend Billy. The guy really knows his way around the gym. We did upper body stuff on Tuesday, and three days later my arms are still killing me. At least today I can do things like brush my teeth. Yesterday it was so bad that I had to wear button-up shirts to work because it was damn near impossible to get my arms and head through a regular t-shirt. Billy mentioned that this is the normal initial shock to a workout, and that after this first painful phase your muscles start dissapating lactic acid more efficiently so you can recover faster. Hopefully by the end of summer I will be able to look good naked.

I also discovered the best kept secret of San Jose: Happy Hour at Mission Ale House, from 5-9PM daily. Drinks are half-price, and the grill menu is unbelievable--everything costs just $1.59, including the house special, a 1/3 pound cheeseburger. That's right. A huge-ass burger, in the heart of Silicon Valley, for under two bucks.

Doing some math, this actually makes eating a Mission Ale burger or monster-sized quesadilla for dinner competitive, if not marignally cheaper, than buying groceries.

Now if only I could find a place to live that was cheap.

Real estate is another thing that's been on my mind. I want this job, bad. But I also want to get the hell out of California. Life in Illinois and Indiana has ruined my concept of what it means to live in the US. I've taken for granted the idea of owning property. Before I came here I never saw anything special about the idea of saving money for a down payment and moving into a condo, townhouse, or home sometime in the course of your life.

To illustrate this point, take one of my coworkers for example. He's in his mid twenties and is teaming up with his brother to buy a "massive" 1700 square foot house. The sticker price is somewhere in the upper $800's, which is about as affordable as you can get without living in a seedy part of town. With a combined gross annual income of about $150K, these guys just barely qualify for a 30 year mortgage with about a $4500 monthly payment.

The killer part about it is that this house isn't a mansion. It's a small bungalow style place that you'd find in a college town--a leftover relic from the 1930's with plumbing and electrical wiring that's barely up to code. PVC drain pipe clings to the wooden siding of the house where the walls were too fragile to properly route drainage for toilets and sinks and showers. The windows are old and creaky, with single-pane glass that lets in drafts and does little to control temperature changes throughout the day.

In Lafayette I don't think the place would sell for more than $60,000. But out here, it's a goldmine.

My coworker said, only half-jokingly, that even with the thousands that he has socked away for the down payment, once he takes on the mortgage he and his brother will be living paycheck to paycheck just to make ends meet.

I look back on my high school aged angst over the monotony of the Chicago suburbs, and now I realize that there are aspects of that lifestyle that I really envy after seeing what it's like out here. Living in Silicon Valley really makes you think about the meaning of "financial sacrifice".

I'm looking at alternate living locations, like Toronto, Canada or Raleigh, NC. Both places would be more affordable and I wouldn't have to schedule a weeklong vacation to visit home. No matter where I end up, all I know is that I don't want to be 40, married, and renting.

This past year I've done some interesting economics experiments with the way that I spend money. Last spring I completely destroyed my collection of illegal software and bought licenses for everything that I couldn't replace with open source. Since I use Adobe InDesign which doesn't have an open source equivalent, I went out and bought Adobe Creative Suite for $200 through Purdue. After factoring manufacturing costs of the packaging, my purchase funded about 5 hours of some software engineer's salary. It was the most I've spent on software to date, but it felt good to be a team player.

Now, I've extended this habit to music.

I used to stockpile MP3s. My collection was never really huge, maybe about 1000 songs, but I noticed that I kept hitting "next" countless times whenever I listened to things. So when I came out to San Jose I started with a music library that consisted only of songs that I either got from ripping my store-bought albums, or from stuff that I got for free on artist websites or the Creative Commons Mixter. The rest, I decided, I would buy legit this time.

I do my shopping based on the desire to get good deals. That involves four sources:

Amazon
Ebay
Rasputin Music, a privately-owned music chain in the Bay Area
iTunes

When I run across a song that I like, I first figure out the band and what else they play. iTunes prices songs at 99 cents each, so if I can find a CD with, say, 6 good songs online or at Rasputin for less than $6, then it's worth it to buy the real CD instead of going on iTunes. That way I avoid resorting to DRM'ed music unless I absolutely have to. Plus, buying the albums second-hand means that those rotten bastards at the RIAA don't get a single penny.

The experiment has gone well so far. This past week I bought $30 of music from iTunes, mostly singles. The shopping cart included Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, Zero 7, Weekend Players, Local H, and Jet. Next on my list is tracking down a used copy of the "O Yeah! The Ultimate Aerosmith Hits" double album and maybe some kind of greatest hits thing for Led Zeppelin.

Alright, it's 10:30 out here. If I want to do something cool tomorrow I'll have to wake up early. More thoughts tomorrow.

Could I give up everything?

2006-05-30T23:22:00.000-05:00

Taken from a notebook entry on Memorial Day...

I'm heading northbound on the VTA light rail towards Mountain View, where I'll catch the Caltrain to San Francisco. The ride from there shouldn't be more than half an hour.

The weather today is beautiful. There's not a cloud in the sky and the temperature is probably about 70 degrees with no humidity. As the train passes throuh the endless canopy of trees I can see shadows of leaves and branches dancing across the pages of my notebook.

I've been giving a lot of thought lately to my future. I'm what, 23 years old and over 1/4 through with my life. Graduating college and taking on a career can constitute a massive life change, just like my college experience radically changed things compared to high school.

So here I am, potentially faced with the choice to live out here. Do I take it, abandoning my hobbies and dreams, or do I dive in head-first and disavow my midwestern ideals of living? Living in the midwest I used to take so many things for granted. Things like having a house with a yard and a garage and more than 1200 square feet of living space. But then again, you don't need things like that out here, in a place where you average more than 300 sunny days per year. If it's that beautiful all the time, all you really need your house for is sleeping and bathing. Everything else becomes extra fluff.

Like today. It's sunny and beautiful with no humidity. Instead of staying inside to avoid being choked by 90 degree weather and 70 percent humidity, I'm enjoying a cool breeze and going to San Francisco for $12.00 round trip, cheaper than it would cost to go to Chicago from my hometown. Meanwhile the room that I rent out for $500 a month is going totally unused. Because out here in this place, I don't need it for anything else than sleeping.

Things become different when you have a family and kids. Once that happens you kind of need to buy or lease your own place. Costs spike dramatically at that point compared to life back home. You can buy a two-bedroom house in the Chicago suburbs and have a mortgage payment about on par with a nice two-bedroom apartment. Out here a two-bedroom apartment is $1500 a month, but a two-bedroom house costs over $800,000.

...Unless I live out here for a while and get all that city life stuff out of my system, then come back home to the midwest when I've had enough. No matter what I do, I'm not ready to make that call yet. For now I'm going to enjoy a day of sunshine in The City.

A trip home on the VTA light rail

2006-05-25T22:00:00.000-05:00

First blog entry in a long time. I've had things that I've wanted to talk about backing up inside my head for a while. It's sort of the inverse of writer's block... instead of not being able to say anything out of lack of inspiration, I've had a problem prioritizing things to get out of my head.

I'm on the train home from work, goin gnothbound to downtown San Jose. It's about 7 PM. I worked over 10 hours today. It felt good to be productive.

I'm out here again with no car and nothing more than a duffel bag and a backpack to my name. Feels like de ja vu.

I want to allocate money better this time around. I also want to be more mindful of my work/life balance. I wouldn't say that last time things were skewed... but I felt like work and the MR2 was all that I had. There wasn't enough social development during my last time out here. Maybe that's why I can't get rid of that car... too many shared experiences. It kept me going.

I'm writing in my lap right now, so my handwriting looks like total ass. Ahead of me in the traincar is a woman who looks like she's on welfare. From the way she looks and the way she coughs, she probably has TB or some other disease. I see people like her on the train on a daily basis. They free-ride and look around nervously at each stop to make sure that a VTA attendant isn't boarding to ask for tickets. What a strange thing that my coworkers and I share a train with them. We're all human beings, and we're riding this train, but I can't even begin to imagine how class differences have affected our lifestyles and experiences.

I'm looking at that woman with her worn skin and ragged hair and piercing blue eyes, and a question comes to mind. At what point did the innocent baby girl turn hopelessly down the path to becoming this woman? What was missing from her life? Was there one thing that could have changed it all around?

1 month of silence. Not good.

2006-04-04T09:05:00.000-05:00

I was in the shower this morning when I realized that my blog has practically dried up. I was really good about making multiple updates a week... not for any particular reason other than to keep my mind from clogging up under the stress of school and work.

It's the first week of April, and I can say pretty confidently that everything's clogged.

I haven't read a book recreationally since January. I haven't written anything mentally productive since my last blog entry a month ago. I took down my student website for renovation back in February but haven't touched it since. This is not good. Losing control of free time almost gaurantees that I'm losing control of my real day-to-day responsibilities.

I'm on an antibiotic now for strep throat, and it's making me pretty sleepy. I missed my 9 AM class today, which was not good. I already skipped my 8:30 yesterday to go into the health center to get my throat checked out... a good reason, considering that strep can kill you if left untreated. So I can let Monday slide.

Let me change gears here for a moment. I'm already falling into that here's-what-I-did-today trap.

What I want to talk about today is Addiction.

In the course of the past semester I've been on a computer for nearly 10 hours a day. I write English papers, work on CS projects, do my job, and then browse the web in my free time. In the morning I wake up and the first thing I do, before brushing my teeth, before showering, before going to the bathroom, is go on CNN and Slashdot to see what happened over the past day.

Now there are worse things than this. Computer / internet addiction isn't quite as damaging as substance abuse, and I have no interest in those alternate-reality games like EverQuest. But in the course of the past few months I've been falling into this vicious circle of always going back to the damn PC. I went back to my room after lunch yesterday and went online. I had no reason to. I could have just gone to the library. But instead I went on the Internet. I think in clinical psychology they call these things "warning signs."

For now, I'm going to click "Publish Post" to add this blog entry. Then I'm going to close the browser window, put on my shoes, and go outside. Weather.com tells me that the high is going to approach 60 degrees. It's already sunny outside and I can see people walking around and enjoying the spring air in t-shirts and light sweaters.

It's beautiful today. And it's a perfect day to turn it all around.

The last night, in 15 minutes

2006-03-03T06:55:00.000-06:00

Ok, I hit "new post" at 7:55 AM. Let's see what I can get down in 15 minutes.

I went to the Neon Cactus last night with a group of friends and spent a bunch of time in the Piano Bar. The night was pretty long. We got there at about 9:45 and didn't leave until almost 2:30. One of my friends got up on stage and actually played bass, which was pretty sweet.

The late author Hunter S. Thompson made some observations about writing while intoxicated or under the influence of drugs which seemed to hit home pretty well last night. When I get wasted I get just as stupid as anyone else. Nothing fancy to see there. And just like everyone else, the decision-making part of my brain might as well be shut off completely.

I was laying in bed at around 2:45, feeling the room rock back and forth in the alcoholic haze. Wow, I thought, this was like being on a roller coaster.

Then suddenly I remembered doing something at the bar. At some point in the evening I was talking with a random girl, and I actually took a piece of paper out of my wallet and wrote down my name and blog address on it.

I sat up in bed, feeling the five second delay as my sense of balance registered the new angle. Oh, shit, I thought. I gave it out. I told a complete stranger about my blog.

In reality, this isn't that awful of a thing. There's nothing crazy on here like my social security number or any of that stuff. But there's still a lot of very personal discourse, a more reflective (I hope) side of my mind that I don't share with just anybody.

Another thing is that I use blog entries as opportunities to experiment with different writing styles and sentence structure. My previous entry on nonverbal communication, for example, has a lot of simile, metaphor, and other illustrative techniques. The fourth paragraph in has this nice little anthropomorphization:

It felt strange to watch the dancers exchange caresses between floor and flesh, perhaps because it made me conscious of how my most comfortable form of communication is so radically different than theirs.

At the time that I made the entry I liked that little phrase, caresses between floor and flesh. I remember writing that and saying "yeah, that one works pretty well". It was a neat little way to talk about human movement by suggestion rather than mentioning arms and legs in specific motions.

But last night as I was sitting in bed I thought about how that might come across to a complete stranger. I imagined that girl waking up in the morning, finding that receipt in her back pocket, and going to my blog, and reading about some guy's reflections on ballet and how he has trouble talking to people.

This is bad, I thought. Somebody out there is reading my blog and probably thinking that I make people into lampshades.

Ok, my 15 minutes are up. More on this later today... this entry has potential.

Nonverbal communication

2006-02-24T22:13:00.000-06:00

Tonight I went to the X-Works Spring 2006 dance concert at the Yue-Kong Pao Hall of Visual and Performing Arts. The building cost several million to build, but I had never walked inside until tonight.

The X-Works concert was only the second time in my life that I've seen modern dance outside of a play or musical. I sat in the front row off to the side and watched human forms flow like liquid, changing color and shape in the glow of theater lighthing.

If I had to define dance, I would probably say that it's a study in both art and in language. Watching the different acts tonight, I couldn't help but realize that there's an exchange in thought and emotion that goes a level deeper than what you can achieve with spoken and written words. When you strip away grammar and structure you can catch a glimpse at a pure idea that's untarnished by the limitations of vowels and consonants.

It felt strange to watch the dancers exchange caresses between floor and flesh, perhaps because it made me conscious of how my most comfortable form of communication is so radically different than theirs. I feel most at home with a keyboard or a notepad, something where I can coax letters onto a page and feel the texture of a napkin or sales receipt beneath the backs of my fingers. I've mentioned a handful of times that I feel like I'm not all there unless I write. Sometimes when I meet people or interact in a group I just wish I could step back and communicate to them in paper, bartering ink for sound.

When I was in San Jose I visited the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library, which is incidentally the largest library west of the Mississippi river. The library is just huge, spanning 8 floors. I remember coming home from work one day and walking through the stacks, watching the span of human knowledge race by on the book spines as I strode down each aisle. I came across a prominent section on sign language. One book, Sign Language Made Simple, caught my eye. I checked the book out and decided to give it a shot. Although my efforts never panned out to more than learning the general concepts, I ended up with a much greater appreciation for the diverse and beautiful ways in which language can manifest itself.

I have a couple other ideas that I'd like to tie into this, but it's about midnight and I'm going on 4 hours of sleep, and I really need to get some rest tonight. More thoughts on this tomorrow.

Restless.

2006-02-15T20:07:00.000-06:00

It's 9PM. I've been relatively unproductive for most of the week, and I'm trying to figure out why. Let's take a look at my day:

7:00 AM -- Got up.

7:05-7:45 -- Checked my email and my morning websites (slashdot.org, CNN.com, PurdueOnline.com, BoilerBS.com, PAPA, MR2oc.com, and MFBA.org). Nothing really crazy happened while I was asleep.

8:00 -- Shower.

8:30 -- CS 348. I learned about how to express relational algebra expressions in relational calculus.

9:30 -- Breakfast. I had hash browns, scrambled eggs, and an apple. They weren't serving any meat though, which sucked.

10:00AM-1:00PM -- Worked on a revision for my ENGL 266 paper about the development of images in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Even though this is a revision, my thesis still sucks. I need a better way to tie things together. Tomorrow I'll put a little more thought into it. The revision is due in class next Wednesday, Feb 22.

1:30-3:20PM ENGL 266 and PHIL 330. There's an attractive brunette in my PHIL 330 lecture. I'm going to try to do a college first and actually approach her and talk to her. The last time that I started talking to a girl in a lecture hall that I had never met before, I ended up in a really fucked up relationship. It's been a year and my throat still gets tight whenever I try to talk to someone new. That fear of getting hurt and getting clung to by somebody unstable is just overwhelming. It's getting better over time, but I'm still nervous about it.

There have been a couple cases last spring where I've almost started a conversation. I'll be right on the verge of introducing myself, and then I'll establish eye contact and I won't be able to breathe. I can only imagine what goes through a girl's head when she sees a random guy look at her and suddenly clam up. Psycho? Nah... I'm just too chicken-shit to talk to women.

3:30-5:30 Worked for Big Blue. Our next release of our product has some sweet functionality. The manuals will be in excellent shape, with almost 50% of the content rewritten or restructured. I can't wait to see it go live around summer time.

5:30-6:15 Wasted time online.

6:15-7:00 Walked to Windsor, ate dinner.

7:15-8:30 Worked on CS 334, tweaking a previous project so that Project 4 will be as easy to write as possible. But it will still be a PITA.

8:45-10:25 Walked home, talked with the parents, and generally did a whole lotta nothing besides blogging.

I don't want to do homework tonight. I need to, but I don't want to. I blame it on winter. More thoughts tomorrow.

My two majors finally found out about each other. And now they've teamed up and they're trying to kill me.

2006-02-10T07:09:00.000-06:00

This semester has been rough. My grades have been awesome, but I feel like I'm just working nonstop all day long (with the exception of a 2-hour nap from 10 to noon).

I've got about 8 minutes until my first class, so I figured that I would drop a few ideas down while they're fresh in my mind.

I'm working on material for a new story. I've had a pretty bad habit of writing of campy fiction and I'm really trying to lean away from that and write something that's more... real. I'm hoping to use this as an opportunity to put some college experiences to good use.

My writer's block has been off and on lately. I've noticed that there's a lot of times where I can only write on napkins or receipts. If I bring a notebook things seem forced and unnatural.

Well, anyways, that's that. Later tonight if I'm not totally drained from this crazy day, I'll try and write something a little "deeper". I need to be more proactive in keeping this from being a "this is what I did today, this is what I want to do tomorrow" blog.

Character study for a new story...

2006-02-06T22:16:00.000-06:00

Hanging on Vince's wall was a makeshift 80-inch poster that he had created from a grid of computer paper. The image was grossly distorted from intense magnification. Sam guessed that it had at one time been a 3 by 5 photograph of *something*.

"It's Joseph Kittinger." Vince said, his face still buried in the refrigerator.

"It's a person?" Sam asked. He still couldn't make sense of the image.

"Here man, stand over there. No, the far wall. That's it. Now look."

At a distance the moire pattern became clearer. It was a candid photograph of four people in flightsuits standing in front of a military airplane.

Vince emerged from the refrigerator, clutching a pile of Hot Pockets in his
arms. He walked towards an ancient microwave sitting beneath the poster.

"This," Vince said, pointing to the middle person in the picture, "is Joseph Kittinger. The man is a *legend* in the skydiving world. He's pretty much the undisputed king of free falling. First man to break the sound barrier without the aid of a vehicle."

He opened the door to the microwave and threw in the stack of Hot Pockets, plastic wrappers and all. He gave a half-turn to the control knob and the device roared to life, dousing the pastries with cosmic rays.

Vince noticed Sam's look of unease. "See, on the box they tell ya a minute and a half. But they always get too damn hot and they explode. But if you throw ten of these fuckers in at once for about four minutes, they come out perfect." Vince grinned and gave the machine a pat with his hand. Across the room the TV flashed with static.

Sam cleared a section of the couch and sat down. "So when are you jumping next?"

"Probably Tuesday." Vince said. "You wannna come along?"

"Nah, that's alright." Sam replied. "I think I'll just stay on the ground."

Dammit.

2006-01-29T23:38:00.000-06:00

I just spent an hour writing an entry about how your personality evolves with age. It had a nice tie-in to a phrase that's heard all too often:

"I used to be such a dork in high school".

I remembered hearing this phrase from a nerdy campus tour guide while I was doing my college search, and the memory of that girl and her supposed-to-be-artsy-but-failing-miserably-at-it outfit popped into my head as I was down in the union this evening. Around 11PM I got back to my room and started writing this entry that was going to present this nice little thesis statement that you are ALWAYS the same person throughout your life, so if you were a loser in junior high you retain the same personality traits in your twenties that you did in your early teens, only augmented by experience. But the core person and their tendencies are still there.

Anyways I had sat down and was trying to piece this together, and ended up pulling out my CD wallet. I dug out the oldest CD I had, dating from July 2001 when I was just about to leave for my freshman year at Purdue. The CD had homework assingments on it dating from back to Junior year in high school. One of the files was a journal that I had kept for my theology class.

Well anyways, I was going to take quotes from this journal and comment about things like diction and perspective and weave it in to some deeper observation about the person that I am now and how I really haven't changed at all since high school, despite all my fantasizing that I'm funnier or more mature or more interesting.

Then it just fell apart. I got right to that point where I was going to pull it all together and make the deep thought for the evening and it just wouldn't go.

I've been thinking about past relationships this weekend and it's gotten me stressed out. For most guys, this thing causes erectile dysfunction. For me, it causes literary dysfunction. You can give me all the ingredients, the big idea and the pen and the napkin or notebook paper or sales receipt, but I just can't perform. Come to think of it, I can't write for shit when I'm dating, let alone thinking about dating or relationship issues. Bummer.

Ok, it's almost 1 AM. I'll continue this one tomorrow.

Writer's block

2006-01-29T00:58:00.000-06:00

2 AM, back from a small social gathering, can't sleep.

This entire week I've had some awful writer's block. It starts off with a missed blog entry--a napkin with a few ideas that seems like it's worth developing. Then it extends to a series of pictures that need to be uploaded to ImageShack. Then there's that early morning shower where you've spent the last night working on a project until 2 AM and you think of this great thing that just HAS to get put down on paper but you're soaking wet with shampoo stinging your eyes as you look straight into the stream of the faucet.

I've never written an idea out on the wall of a shower with a bar of soap, but there are times when I've been tempted to.

The way I'm talking about this you'd think that I had some kind of great talent that was destined to be shared with all humanity, read in textbooks and studied in academia for years to come. The reality of most of what I write isn't anything remotely that sexy. A few close friends see it and say things like "good point" or "that's insightful" and that's it. Which is ok. I don't really write for praise. I write for me.

The thing that's torture is when I can't get an idea out on paper.

From a personality standpoint, I'm a horrible introvert. I've got certain social ticks that probably don't help in making friends or meeting girls, either. For one, I have an extroardinarily difficult time making eye contact when I speak to someone. I have no problem looking at someone when they talk, but when I try to say something and look into someone else's eyes, something... happens and suddenly I get stuck on words, tripping over syllables and stuttering like crazy. It's a really goofy psychosomatic thing that I can't explain. I get that with everybody, even family members.

Ever since I was in middle school, I felt like there was a significant part of my personality that just couldn't be expressed through speaking and live interaction. The only time I felt like I was "all there" was when I was writing.

When the writer Andre Dubus gave a talk at Purdue two years ago, he summed up the feeling beautifully: "When I don't write, I'm not me."

As you might imagine, this can become bottled up over time. If I can't write for a week I feel like my mind is bursting at the seams with all these ideas and experiences that I just can't get out of my system through live interaction. In 30 seconds, here's a few things that I started writing over the past week and haven't had time to finish:

A short idea entered on two Pita Pit napkins, drafting a second part to the "Facial Analysis" blog entry. This would extend human observation to things like speech, mannerisms, and an analysis of nervous tics.
A multi-page entry scrawled into my ENGL 266 notebook about the nature of gender identity as described by Jennifer Boylan and how it might factor into sexual frustration in normally-gender-aligned heterosexuals. (Before you get all uncomfortable and start crossing your legs at awkward angles, don't worry--I'm male, straight, and quite comfortable with being a guy!). This entry also mated up nicely to a short receipt that I started writing out on while having lunch with Kirsten.
A discussion about mental health and emotional stability, and an important lingering question I've had regarding how traumatized individuals are supposed to experience love and affection in the face of heavy dependence and depression issues.
A few comments about Garrison Keillor, my favorite modern author and radio performer. Earlier today I saw a showing of A Prairie Home Companion. It was my second time seeing Keillor live, and each time it keeps getting better.

That's about it. I'll get around to writing it all down tomorrow. Honest.

Facial analysis

2006-01-12T06:40:00.000-06:00

When I was in San Jose, I got an e-mail from Studio 8 advertising their latest best-party-on-earth event schedule for an upcoming Friday. I was signed up for the guest list for Saturdays, but I've never actually been there. The women were too beautiful, and the men were too chiseled. Whenever I glanced inside the main dance floor from the street I felt that I'd be not so much out of my league as out of my caste.

It was around this time that my digital camera started acting up. The battery would make it through two memory cards (about 20 pictures, taken over 40 minutes) before giving up the ghost. I tested the poor thing in my bathroom:

I wear that shirt when I do things like go to Target or the grocery store. On occasion I get glances from people as if they think that I'm conceited. But then again you'd have to know me, and my embarassing, 40-Year-Old-Virgin sense of style with women, to really get the joke.

So I promised a few nights ago that I'd have some sort of clever post about my appearance, and how to evaluate just how you look as a person. It's simple, really. The next time you're at a party or a bar, make a point to visit the bathroom every half hour or so as you drink.

We all know about "beer goggles" and how alcohol is supposed to impede your judgement and make downright disgusting or undesireable people look like the hottest thing around.

But what happens when you point that altered perception on your own face? As it turns out, the effect is quite interesting.

The average person looks at themselves in the mirror countless times during a day. If you're from a western nation you've probably glanced at your progressively maturing face every morning and evening since the dawn of your childhood memories. During this time, I think we grow accustomed to what we see. Moles, pigmentation irregularities, styes, and cranial asymmetry can become so familiar to us that they go entirely unnoticed when we look at our own images.

I'm going to take a stab at taking a fresh look at my own face. Try it yourself and see what you find.

We'll start out with a basic front-and-side view. I did some color adjusting in Photoshop, but the pictures are otherwise untouched. These pictures are from back in November, so I was still shaving daily and had freshly cut hair:

As you can see, I've got your average facial features like two eyes, two ears, lips, a nose, and a chin. The first test I'll do is for bilateral symmetry, or whether two halves of my face are mirror images of each other. Using Adobe illustrator it's pretty easy to see how well--or how badly--things line up:

Aside from a nose that's got a 3 degree sideways angle relative to the rest of my face, it looks like I've got at least a bit of symmetry. But it's not Abercrombie perfect by any stretch of the imagination--things are only accurate, at best, to about 1/4" side to side, then things start looking lopsided.

You might notice something else a bit unusual about my face, particularly my eyes:

Ok, yeah, I'm one of those people who has "sad" eyes... if I don't consciously smile I have a kind of natural frown on my face. Hell, with just the eyes I look kinda psycho... that ain't good is it?

Anyways, in almost all head-on pictures of me, my eye sockets don't seem quite symmetrical. They pass the "line test" above, but you can tell something is amiss based on how light hits them. As it turns out, this is due to the way that my zygomatic (cheek) bones meet up with the frontal (forehead) bone of my skull. One bone juts out from my face a bit more than the other, causing a noticeably out-of-balance appearance.

Let's take a closer look at this. I wasn't able to get a good set of pictures for each side of my face, but I think you'll get the idea by looking at how my brow and cheek are shaped from this multi-shot sequence of the right side...

I should mention that calling this the "zygomatic and frontal junction" isn't quite accurate, since the bones only mate at the side of the face just behind the eye socket. But as you can see in my face, when the curvature of these two bones is strong enough, they can combine to create a pretty comical cheek-eyebrow combination.

I was going to do a skin analysis, but circling every last pimple, stye, mole, and pigmentation irregularity was dragging my poor laptop to a crawl. Needless to say that I have a bunch of other little flaws with both skin and bone. But at the end of the day, after I close Photoshop and put the images up on ImageShack, this is my face. I'll have my crooked nose, the small mole next to my right nostril, and my asymmetrical cheek bones until the day that I die.

I'm sure if you scrutinize your own, you will find unique and exotic flaws as well that make you the only person like you in the world. So don't despair if you find issues with skeletal geometry and skin quality. There are other people in the world who may share your name or your hometown or your nationality, but your face is yours, and yours alone. And that's beautiful.

23 years old, and still can't grow facial hair.

2006-01-07T00:53:00.000-06:00

Warning: No deep thoughts here, move along.

I did two things of interest this past week:

I decided to stop shaving and see what I looked like with a beard.
I bought a Sony DSC-T7 to replace my aging Fuji MX2900.

With this came two observations:

I'm 23 and can't grow facial hair. The 5.1 megapixels of this camera also reveals that I have some god-awful acne. See image:
The Best Buy return policy might be one of the best things about their stores.

I've been eyeing the DSC-T7 since it came out last April, tipping the scales at $500. This of course is pocket change compared to the Fuji, which supposedly was in the $900 range at most shops when it debuted in 1999. This was one of those purchases that is convenient, but not by any means necessary.

The Fuji is a fine unit. It takes some decent pictures, but there was one serious drawback: size. When I was in San Francisco and San Jose, there were plenty of times where I wanted to take a picture, but didn't want to bother with taking off my backpack, removing the camera bag from within, waiting for the lens to expand, taking the picture, and waiting for the thing to shut off so I could pack it up again. This was especially important in situations like bars, museums, and karaoke where taking a backpack or camera bag is impossible or impracticle. I wanted something that was Point--Click--Done.

After owning this gem for one evening, I'm pretty satisfied with it, even if the image quality isn't quite as badass as my dad's DSC-H1. I bought the T7 on sale for $375, since it's being quietly shooed out the door in time for some new compact model that's coming out whenever. I wish the thing had been cheaper, but then again I usually prefer to get most things for free nowadays.

At the moment I'm not 100% sure that I'm going to keep it. The sales receipt comes just a bit shy of a month's room and board at Purdue, and I think that money would be better spent addressing living expenses. On the flipside, I can enjoy 14(?) days of cautious usage until I have to return it, so I can at least try and see whether I'll put the thing to as much good use as I fantasized about.

As for the entire facial hair thing, well, what can I say... I've got a crazy mix of genes, at 3/4 Polish and 1/4 Italian. It makes for an awkward lineage, especially when you see the faces of my grandfathers on either side of the family. They were pretty decent looking guys with very different and diverse appearances. When you combine these two ancestors, you get something like me, complete with its goofy browline, arched eyesockets, a wedge-shaped nose, monkey ears, acne, and minimal facial hair.

In tomorrow's post I'll address a rather provocative question: "What do I look like?" complete with a simple trick that I discovered that lets anyone see how they look to the eyes of a stranger. Are you one of the beautiful people?

Glad to be home

2005-12-22T01:29:00.000-06:00

My Dad came to visit me out in San Jose for a few days, after which we began a 2500 mile road trip back home. Determined to avoid snow and bad weather, we opted for a southern route that was split into five days of travel:

Tuesday: San Jose to Bakersfield, CA
Bakersfield to Flagstaff, AZ
Flagstaff to Amarillo, TX
Amarillo to Springfield, MO
Springfield to the Chicago suburbs!

The trip had a few interesting highlights. I had to write a 5-10 page final report for my ENGL 490 class. As it turned out it was one of the easiest papers that I've ever written. I submitted it from a motel room in Springfield and breathed a sigh of relief. The last obligation of my six month experience had been fulfilled.

As we passed into the Illinois border from Saint Louis, the driver-side tire of the MR2 started making noise, and on closer inspection I realized that the friggin' driver side swaybar mount had cracked off, carving a nice trench in the sidewall of the tire and also creating a healthy amount of negative static camber. The bracket probably broke due to the fact that the car was loaded down with several hundred pounds of luggage. I have a feeling that it broke during a brief stop at Target in Flagstaff, where we heard a loud popping noise while going over a speed bump. Eh, worse things could have happened.

One of the more interesting things about the trip home was Arizona and New Mexico. I was pretty surprised to see that there's a large chunk of the United States stretching from eastern California to north Texas that's a complete wasteland. The Mojave desert in Arizona was almost completely devoid of animal life. The red clay earth was covered in small bushes about the size of a soccer ball. Their pale green leaves reminded me of long pine needles or flower stems, weakly stretching skyward toward the sun that paradoxically killed and nurtured them.

It was on this car ride that my dad and I made an interesting observation about evolution. The concept of random mutations aiding survival holds particularly well in the desert. The tiny desert plants had completely overtaken the drought-stricken terrain, and seemed to be doing quite well. It makes sense that random mutations that aided in water usage or heat dissipation would propogate quickly under these circumstances.

On the flipside, you have humans. What evolutionary pressures drove us to our present state? How did the genes for understanding calculus or physics arise? There's also a more compelling question to ask--what environmental factors will push a species towards self-awareness and consciousness?

Unfortunately, my biology and anthropology background is sorely lacking, so any guesses that I have will be little more than a complete shot in the dark. Having said that, I can't help but wonder if fields like humanities and sciences are direct biproducts of becoming better killing machines. As crazy as it sounds, what if the same mental facilities for hunting food apply to finding polynomial time solutions for computer science problems?

At least judging by my math skills, it's a good thing that I can get my food at a grocery store.

Poof!

2005-12-06T23:22:00.000-06:00

That's the sound that money in my bank account makes when I get near a Summit Racing catalog. I had two gift cards totalling $125 that were set to expire, so I made the most of them. Total damage came out to $671.88, or just $8 under monthly rent. However, I got deals in multiple departments. Actual price of the goods purchases should have exceeded $1000, so I did pretty good by saving $200. Here was the shopping list:

6 QA1 XMR/L-12 rod ends and jam nuts
Coleman racing aluminum tubing for LCAs and PHR
Head, intake. and crossover tube gaskets
Comp 977 valve springs and seats
ARP head bolts
Cam Motion 232/240 .575/.595 112 LSA 108 ICL hydraulic roller camshaft

The cam is arguably huge, and is just about at the upper limit of what you can run with 350 cubes and a 23 degree ported stock casting. The shift point on the cam is rumored to be somewhere between 6500 and 7000 RPM... but the good thing is that I don't have to worry about the car being a daily driver anymore.

Now for a reality-check monent.

To be fair, spending this money with the new semester looming was probably a stupid, although not outright bad idea. I'll still bring back about $3,000 + ~$3,000 in the MR2, but I owe my parents $2000 for the initial setup of my bank account. So all in all I'll be bringing back $1,000 of actual profit. Not a fun thing especially when you consider (outside of the cost-of-living context) the amount that I pull in during a week.

Now for a hypocritical twist on the situation... it makes me anxious to think that I grossed a considerable amount of money here, and yet have hardly anything to show for it. But in the end, there's a pretty disturbing reality here... living in California is EXPENSIVE, especially when you run into massive bills like having an MR2 take a dump on you. Luckily though the car is running well and is in great shape. So even though I'm not going home with a fat wallet, I've at least learned an important lesson about how critical careful money management is.

ImageShack time...

2005-12-06T22:28:00.000-06:00

Well, my Purdue career account is officially jam-packed. I had to delete a bunch of old car pictures in order for the latest San Jose and San Francisco pictures to fit. After carving out 27 MB of space and almost immediately refilling it, I realized that I really needed to get online photo hosting.

ImageShack's infinite-capacity approach seems like a good option for now, mainly because (let's face it) I'm no Ansel Adams and none of the pictures that I take are going to qualify as irreplaceable art any time soon. ;-)

You can upload images one at a time for free with no space constraints. I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only person to look at this and think "this is a problem SCREAMING for a Perl script". But in the meantime

So here goes. First off, we have a cliff side from my tip to Half Moon bay:

This pic is one in a set of a few dozen, but it's all that I uploaded at the time. Further down we have a larger set taken from the Thanksgiving weekend. I don't have PhotoShop out here, so I was forced to do color correction with Microsoft Photo Editor and the Gimp...

First off is a picture from the Sushi Boat restaurant I mentioned in an earlier entry:

Next is a picture of a clock tower of a church located in Chinatown. The inscription is a rather famous line from Ecclesiastes 4:23...

After lunch I digested for a bit, then dragged my scrawny ass up to Coit Tower. The trip was tiring, but oh so worth it:

The tower is quite famous and draws tourists from across the globe. But the view at the top isn't the only thing that people come to see. The lobby in the tower's square base also has an amazing mural spanning dozens of feet. You can find the second image below in the Dorling Kindersley guide to San Francisco.

I think that's a decent start for now.

A Thanksgiving journal entry

2005-11-30T00:34:00.000-06:00

11/24/05 - 12:12 PM

I'm at a restaurant called the Sushi Boat in Chinatown, San Francisco. It's a small unassuming place at the intersection of Grant and Sacramento street. Half the floorspace is taken up by this oval-shaped miniature waterway with tiny boats floating in it. On each boat are small color-coded dishes featuring things like tuna, octopus, urchin, and California rolls.

I just burned the shit out of my mouth by sipping soup too fast. Damn.

There haven't been many live music venues out here in San Jose. It's kind of disappointing. One of the things that I'm trying to do is shift my spending from consumer goods to experiences. A cup of cofee at a famous coffee house is an experience. A pint of ale at a pub in Oxford is an experience. A ticket to a concert or a play is an experience.

It seems like happiness in general boils down to experience and doing, not merely having. I've been raised with knowledge of that fact my entire life, but it wasn't until I came out here and started living on my own that I realized just how important that is.

I'm going to try and make it to Alcatraz. If not, I'll head west to Golden Gate Park and MOMA (Museum of Modern Art).

1:17 PM

I made it to the top of Telegraph Hill. It's a shame that the sky isn't clear today. It's this heavy overcast look with just a hint of blue visible to the north. I'm sitting on the stone benches that face outward overlooking the Bay. The trees that encircle the gaurdrail are about three feet too high to see anything closer than a mile away while seated. Over my left should is a satue of Christopher Columbus wearing a flowing cape. He's been here since before I was born, and he wil continue to stand here after I die, gazing over the infinite beauty of this place with eternally sightless eyes.

I worry about going back to Chicago. I feel like being here connects me with a part of myself that is missing when I'm back home. I'm alive and thinking and inspired when I'm out here. The housing costs are horible and the emissions laws mean that automotive hobbies are non-existent. But that might still be tolerable.

The sun just peeked out. For a glorious three seconds the hilltop was bathed in light. The color and beauty up here is just phenomenal.

4:25

I'm back on Caltrian heading home. As it turns out, my day in San Francisco was pretty short, but not wasted by any means. But I have to admit that it ucked tht so many things were losed. Alcatraz was going to be the main event of the day, and go figure my guide book said that it was open today, although in reality it was closed for the holiday until this coming Sunday. Once 3:00 hit, most places were closing down for the evening.

San Jose has been an important learnign experience. Maybe I'll take it one step further and say that it was a serious boot to the ass that got me thinking about how important it is to manage money and have friends and a balanced life.

Out here I had basically no video games and no cars to work on, and for the most part very little social atmosphere. In the absene of those things, I've been forced to really look at and experience the person tht I am underneath it all.

And what a priceless thing that has turned out to be.

Women drive me nuts.

2005-11-26T03:04:00.000-06:00

It's 1:00 AM on Saturday. I've just come home from a brief barhopping session consisting of $9 spent between 7 Bamboo and Mission Ale House. I find myself having a hard time making fiends since classes and student clubs are nonexistent here. I've never had to move to a big city not knowing anyone and try to build a social life. Now that it's November it's pretty clear that I screwed things up in that department. I'm not unhappy per se... I'll be going back to Purdue to finish school, and I'll probably be out here again in summer '06, so I'll have a second crack at it. But in the meantime I'll have to figure out a better way to get to know people.

I'm going to really stick my neck out on this post and talk about a subject that has been bugging the living shit out of me for most of my college career, including my time in San Jose: women.

I love women. Everything about them. They have animated mannerisms and disarming smiles. They are both affectionate and fiercely competitive. Their interests and actions can cross gender role boundaries with an effect that is often paradoxically erotic--more often that not I find it appealing when a girl likes computers or follows football or can drive stick.

The thing that bothers me, however, is the strange way that friendships function between genders. As a guy I find it strangely difficult to just be friends with a female. There have been occasions where I'll know a girl for a while and suddenly I find myself captivated by them. The way that they form letters in their handwriting, or the way that they arch their eyebrows when asking a question, or the way that they inflect their voice when speaking--in the end I can't help but think "wow... I've just met one of the coolest human beings ever. I wish I could get to know her better".

But I don't actually say anything to her.

See, I've been burned a couple times by this sort of thing. I've stayed a casual acquaintance or friend with a girl, and then gotten the idea in my head to make a move. Whether it's ill-fated or just a catastrophicly poor evaluation of my romantic chances with a girl, I usually find myself rejected as well as minus one female friend. It's a terrible paradox. There's no question that my delivery is fucked up. Asking a girl to coffee shouldn't suddenly stop them from ever wanting to talk to you. But in my case, it does. I know that I have no game... but damn... having such a bad track record is a pretty solid indicator that I'm totally out of touch with who I really am as a person--there's a disconnect between the guy who I think I come across as and the guy that I really am.

Perhaps we can call this the Steve Urkel Disconnect Syndrome. It might be best described with an example:
"Friendly, highly-motivated and intelligent guy who loves to help people."
This sentence accurately describes the late John Lennon, famous musician and well-known sex symbol whose picture adorned countless girls' bedroom walls. The sentence also describes Steve Urkel, who is exactly the kind of guy you want to have around when you need your computer fixed. In either case, both of these people can be aware that their personalities fit a given decsription. But it's the other very important filler material that packages our personalities and affects how other people perceive us.

The way things are looking with my track record, I've got a pretty bad case of the disconnect syndrome. It might not be a bad thing. It's possible the disconnect syndrome could go both ways. Perhaps people with the disconnect syndrome can look at someone else's goofy personality packaging and see the Lennon inside the Urkel. So maybe the key to it all is for me to find that special someone where I see the Charlize Theron inside the nerd girl.

There might be hope for me yet...

Stalkerific

2005-11-18T22:28:00.000-06:00

It's Friday night. I should be going out and drinking, partying it up and all that jazz. Instead I'm inside, laying on the couch and totally exhausted after the work week. I can type. But I'm doing it with my eyes closed. The laptop is sitting casually just below my belt line. It feels warm on my thighs. My nuts are probably getting blasted with who knows how much radiation. If I wake up tomorrow with no pubic hair I'll know something wasn't quite right.

I'm half-dozing, half-websurfing. I went on my usual forums to see if anything was up. Most of the time I'm not online between Friday afternoon and Sunday morning, but tonight I'm laying here with an exhausted body and an active mind.

I ran across a funny thread at BoilerBlackSheep about bad pickup lines. A guy named Cheeseman took the stalker approach and left one that was a little too thought-out:

So, I've been watching you from afar. On many ocasions I've had the wonderful opportunity to follow you from BRNG to FRNY between classes. Durring these magical times I would stare at you and try to determine the kind of underwear you were wearing by the lines it would make in your pants. I check your facebook profile on a daily basis, I have followed all the links upon it. I've read your wall, and your friends' blogs to gain more information about you, and I've read an article you wrote for your high school newspaper I found with google. I think the article was very well done, and you made lots of valid points. I know that you prefer carnations to roses, you love italian food, your favorate movie is Mulan Rouge, your favorate book is Flowers in the Attic, and you played the oboe in middle school. The Purdue directory has given me your address, and once again thanks to facebook I know your class schedule. Sometimes I would stand outside your door for hours waiting for you to open it, and I have altered my laundry schedule so that I can see you in the laundromat.

somehow this line has never worked for me

It's a funny little post. But then that got me thinking. How many crazy passive-aggressive types are out there? More importantly, how does the Internet empower people to act like this?

So I decided to stalk myself.

I started with just my first and last name, and put it into a google search in double quotes. The first link back was to a website for my ENGL 420 class that I took in spring of '05 at Purdue.

One link in, and I've got a lead.

Further down on the google result list is a link to one of the worst articles that I ever wrote during my short career at the Purdue Exponent. The article is from 2002. I wonder if I'm still a student...

Smack dab at the center of the Purdue University home page is a link to the Directory Search page. One more link takies us to the ITaP directory. Enter my name, and voila!

On the results page, you can see that I'm a current student at the West Lafayette campus, and that I have a web page. There's not much to see there in terms of who I am, but there are some basics like what I read, what I write about, my interest in cars, and the fact that I've been on a spring break trip to England.

Throwing my e-mail address into Google gets interesting. You start to find out some crazy random hobbies and interests that I've had over the years. There are a few posts from the Linux-Hacker iAppliance BBS, some from PurdueOnline, as well as the one and only post that I made on Norther Illinois Fiero Enthusiasts forum a year ago when I thought about getting a Fiero as a daily driver.

Then you can find things like my common board usernames, thanks to a few posts on the Midwest F-Body Association forums. Combine this username with my e-mail or real name, and you can get more and more results.

Eventually, I find my hometown.
Then my phone number.
Then my address.

I'd say that's kinda scary, just from knowing "somebody's" name and what they look like. I didn't even have to give google hints of what country I was from, how old I was, my native language... nothing.

What's in a name? Everything. Literally.

For a future entry: Ideas on how to not be so damn obvious on the internet.

Random CNN linkage

2005-11-16T20:48:00.000-06:00

Part of my morning ritual at work is checking two sites: CNN, and Slashdot. They're both biased with plenty of spin on each news article, but this makes the reading more interesting. This morning, CNN ran an interesting Associated Press article about the increasing rate of C-sections in the United States. In a nutshell, the article mentions that Caeserean births have hit an all-time high, from 5% in 1970 to nearly 30% this year.

I was a C-section baby. It's a strange thing to think that your very existence is a result of modern medicine. This makes for an interesting theological thought experiment--in saving a child's life, is a doctor carrying out God's will, or disobeying it?

The thing I'm concerned about isn't so much a question of "should I be here" as it is "how long can humanity last?". I don't necessarily think that we're going to go on for 1000 years and suddenly nobody will be able to have "naturally" born children. But I do think that we're setting ourselves up for an unhealthy dependency on medicine and technology to reproduce.

In a quest for answers I decided to make use of the world's most powerful research tool: AOL Instant Messenger. My friend shared her wisdom with me, and she mentioned that some other statistics might play a role in this. One in particular was the female willingness to tolerate the pain of childbirth...

Dr. K: well...just think about passing a golf ball through your urethra
Dr. K: that'll do it
Dr. K: or anal sex with a grapefruit

It was moments like that where you truly appreciate the power of the written word. That idea, that sentence, created a sensory overload of crushing, crippling, terrible pain that no multimillion dollar hollywood effects studio could even hold a candle to. I wasn't merely watching something happen, I was there, having a softball sized fruit shoved into my nether regions.

For a brief moment, I couldn't breathe. I shook it off quietly and adjusted my sitting position.

Caeserean section...
Best. Idea. Ever.

I have no money management skills.

2005-11-14T23:51:00.000-06:00

In late October I visited the San Jose Museum of Art and toured their Brides of Frankenstein exhibit, which focused on examining the mechanical and artistical dual nature of life. One of the artists in the exhibit was Sabrina Raaf, who had a very impressive series of works on display. Several of her digitally photomanipulated prints stood at 6 feet high with stunning resolution and detail. Out of morbid curiousity, I sent her an e-mail.

Two weeks later, I got a friendly reply in my inbox from her, followed by a separate e-mail from her curator. This is what the second e-mail said:

Hello Peter,

Sabrina Raaf gave me your email address so I could introduce myself and answer any questions you may have about her work, etc. Your inquiry was about the Test Series photos which are awesome, indeed.

Yes, she is selling them. They are in a small edition of 7 and they are $3,000. each. I am happy to speak to you by phone or email at any time about her work. Let me know if you are interested – and which images. The best way to reach me is email. Please feel free to call me, though. FYI – We are having a solo show with Sabrina in the spring of 2006.

I hope to hear from you soon,

Wendy Cooper

www.wendycoopergallery

This e-mail arrived just a day after I experienced a sort of mass panic at the sight of my bank account, with a total balance just over the price of one of Raaf's pieces of artwork. I had grossed thousands of dollars during my internship, but most of it had practically disappeared on me. Even after factoring in the 30% hacked off by taxes, I was overwhelmed with one question: just what the hell did I spend all that cash on?

Realistically it was too late to do much of anything about this. My internship was coming to an end, and I had very little actual assets to show for it. So much for coming out ahead. But it proved to be a monumentally valuable lesson. I put my tail between my legs and vowed to have a financially responsible final month in San Jose, so I had at least some meager funding to subsidize the coming semester's college tuition.

I used CNN's monthly budget calculator and made a rough estimate of my ideal monthly expenses. The list came out like this:

$680 - Rent
$285 - IBM COBRA health insurance
$200 - Groceries
$100 - Entertainment ($25 per week, 4 weeks)
$50 - Gas (Just under 2 fill-ups per month)
$50 - Allstate auto insurance
$20 - Haircut
_____________
$1385 - Total

Of course, this expense model ends up leaving me with a considerable amount of money left over for savings.
The monthly equation only tells half the story... it completely ignores the MR2, which turned out to be quite a money pit:

$2300 - Purchase price
$300 - DMV title and registration
$120 - First tow after overheating
$120 - Second tow after overheating
$560 - Botched attempt at having a shop fix the car (a separate blog posting on this later)
$800 - Combined receipt totals for AutoZone and Kragen purchases of water pump, timing belt, plugs, wires, coil, cap/rotor, thermostat, radiator cap, jackstands, oil, coolant, catch can, head gasket set, oil pan gasket, o-rings, car care products, and other odds n' ends.
$200 - Craftsman tool chest, 3/4" breaker bar, socket adapters, etc.
$75 - Replacement water neck
$50 - Shifter and boot
$80 - Trunk support arm and new ash tray
_____________
$4605 - Total amount that my dumb ass spent on that little blue car.

As an exercise, let's see how long it would take me to spend $4605 on the Camaro:
$2148 - Moser F-body 12 Bolt Rear End with 3.73 gears
$125 - Upgrade 12-bolt to 33 spline axles
$35 - Upgrade to 1350 series yoke
$550 - Set of four 17x11 ZR1 wheels
$900 - Two 315/30R17 Yokohama AO32R-H tires, two 315/30R17 Nitto 555R tires
$500 - Corvette C5 front brake calipers, rotors, brake line and hardware
$200 - Corvette C5 front brake mounting brackets
$300 - Coleman racing aluminum suspension tubing for LCAs and PHR
_____________
$4758 - Total amount my dumb ass could have spent on that little blue car

Ok, so I went over budget. In one case, it's wasting money. In another case, it's a rush that's arguably as good, and in some cases (like shifting from 2nd to 3rd at 6500 RPM) better than, sex. If nothing else, this illustrates that my financial prioritization needs to change. Spending money on a car isn't the key to financial freedom or long term stability. Vehicles will break down, tires will wear out, and bearings will spin. In the end of the day, you still need a retirement account and a nest egg.

With this in mind, the theme of the week is moderation. That, and staying away from buying expensive art and car parts.

The $60 t-shirt

2005-11-13T23:20:00.000-06:00

I was in London in March of 2002 when I got the idea to try my hand at dressing fashionably. When I say "fashionably", I mean it in the midwestern sense, where logos and branding are everything and no outift is complete without multiple layers and accessories. With this in mind, I walked confidently through Oxford Circus in the heart of downtown and went right through the doors of French Connection--United Kingdom, better known by its initials, FCUK.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect. After spending thousands of dollars feeding a car hobby, I was finally aiming my overtime-like-no-tomorrow income reserves at the fashion world. It was the first time that I had EVER set foot in a designer clothing store. For me, designer is anything from, say, Gap, on up to DKNY or Gucci. Historically I just never bothered buying anything more expensive than Target or Kohl's. Perhaps there's a name for this materialistic apathy.

Everything in the store was white. The employees wore dark clothing and headsets and had hairstyles and piercings that gave a look of androgyny. Techno music boomed from nowhere. I found out later it was some artist named BT, who was apparently wildly famous. I had never heard of him.

"Are you finding everything okay, sir?" someone asked me. I turned around and gave a quick sweeping glance at the person. No breasts. Probably male.

"Fine, thanks." I replied. The sense of tension I felt at being in this store was ridiculous. Some people have a fear of heights or spiders or public speaking, yet here I was getting an elevated heart rate from being in a clothing store. The irony, or lack thereof, was deafening.

After about ten minutes of debate I selected a black T-shirt with the phrase "cool as fcuk" in white lettering. The price tag was 28 pounds, just over $60 at the current exchange rate. What the hell, I thought. I'm on vacation. And at least it's not commonplace back home.

I tried the shirt on for the first time the next morning. It was a large, but it still fit like spandex. Based on the way it was cut I guessed that I needed about six months of working out to fill it out properly. I still wore it, because I wasn't going to let my cartoon-character build get in the way of enjoying a designer shirt, no sir.

I put the shirt on, walked out to the bus stop just beyond the Gloucester street station, and immediately felt like an idiot. Sure enough, I went back to spending most of my days in a t-shirt and jeans combo.

Bland? Maybe. But it's about the only thing that feels natural to wear.

I still have that crazy black shirt, shrunken and hanging like a ballerina leotard in my closet. I'll wear it again one day after I've worked out for a while and the white-on-black style has gone from passe to retro chic. But chances are I'll still feel like a girly-man.

Mobile lifestyles and a move to web-based services

2005-11-13T00:09:00.000-06:00

It's just turning midnight here in San Jose, and I'm laying on my bed waiting for my laundry to finish. If I don't get my bath towels from the washer into the dryer I'll have a hard time starting my day tomorrow morning.

After being out in San Jose for a while I have been toying with two very different lifestyles. One involves buying a house and planting roots. I'd have a garage full of tools and car parts along with a modestly sized house to call my own. I could save up for a house right away and pay off my mortgage before I turned 50.

The alternative to this lifestyle is focusing my efforts on the travel and experience side of life. It's almost a polar opposite to the former approach to living. Rather than owning things and having a "home", I could rent for nearly my entire life, changing jobs and even countries of residence on a regular basis, aggressively building my resume well into retirement age. I could live in Morocco. Bangladesh. India. Hawaii. Italy. Great Britain. And I'd make a point to never own more than what I could fit into a pair of suitacases. That would keep the financial focus on either long-term savings or experiences. Rather than buy a tech toy I could put that money towards doing something like going to a concert or seeing an art gallery or taking a long weekend somewhere.

Regardless of whether you stay in one spot or stay on the move, it's commonplace nowadays for technically literate people to have some sort of digital paper trail, whether it be e-mail or favorite newsgroups or journal entries. Several technologies have come into the limelight to address these needs, such as web-based e-mail, blogs, podcasts, social networking tools, photo albums, and bookmarking services.

As a college student I was very tightly locked into the one-location paradigm. Sure, I used IMAP e-mail so I could access thins on the web, but I still archived most things to my desktop machine so I had a clean inbox. This means that part of my mail was bound to a physical location, nullifying the advantages of the Internet--your data should be able to go wherever you go.

Traditionally I've hosted pictures on my Purdue website. But sooner or later I'll have to move the ~300MB of pictures to some hosting service, because my University web space will disappear shortly after I graduate. But I'm not completely behind the times... I'm currently on facebook and I just recently started a del.icio.us account. The next challenge is to pick an image hosting service. Preferably something that doesn't require retarded software like WebShots. I'd much rather be able to upload pics from any type of platform. MySpace sounds like an option, but most of the pages that I've visited there just feel clunky and dated. ImageShack, Flickr, and PhotoBucket are all possibilities, but none of them seem quite right for what I'm looking for. So the search continues. I have a bunch of pics to put up from my adventures in San Jose. Sooner or later I'll find a place to put them all.

....And at the rate that I'm going with the rest of this technology adoption, I'll have my entire digital life mobile and ready to go, just in time for my kids to put me in a nursing home.

A thought on religion and spirituality

2005-11-09T22:11:00.000-06:00

After a crazy relationship in high school, I found myself rather disillusioned with organized religion, especially Christianity. At one time I considered myself to be a devout Catholic, but the exposure to the right wing views of the fundamentalist community left me with a sour taste in my mouth.

I had been happy, and faithful, and now I was being told that this was not good enough for God.

Ironically, that last sentence reveals a degree of vanity and ego in both myself and in the evangelicals that I encountered. Faith has a tendency to elicit very strong emotions, because at the end of the day, you can't call God on a cell phone or have him perform miracles on command. If it was that simple, it wouldn't be faith.

I haven't written much on spiritual topics lately. I touched on the subject briefly in 2002 in a journal entry that I put on my Purdue website. It wasn't until a Slashdot article mentioned Kansas' decision to teach Intelligent Design that I felt the need to try and write about it.

The thing about religion in general that people don't always grasp is that faith is a concept that transcends logic and reason. Place a fundamentalist Christian minister and a Shiite Muslim cleric in a room together, and ask them to prove that theirs is the One True Way. Something tells me that neither side would get very far.

There's a minister that comes to Purdue once each semester and delivers a fire and brimstone sermons from a plot of grass just south of the Class of 1939 water fountain. It's easy to walk by him, but it's frightening to look at the people standing around him knodding their heads in complete agreement. Good thing the Bible doesn't have any encouraging comments about machine guns or nuclear weapons. Then we'd really be in trouble.

I was going to start saying something clever at this point, but it's just not gel'ing tonight. Perhaps it's because religion is a topic that has been a central part of our lives throughout the history of the human race. It's a safe bet that nothing I can say can possibly be a unique thought on the issue. But I'll offer as creative a comment as I can muster.

One of the central tenets of fundamentalist Christianity revolves around the concept of salvation. Roman Catholics believe that Jesus' crucifixion saved mankind from eternal damnation. Fundamentalist Protestant Chrstians usually believe that the salvation effect of Jesus' self sacrifice doesn't benefit an individual until they become "born again" and accept their Savior's "gift" to them.

I spoke casually about this topic with a few Christians over the years, as well as did some research on ChristianAnswers.net, and saw some interesting points. The fundamentalist perspective of salvation means that people who do not accept Jesus' gift will go to hell when they die. You can be the nicest person in the world, doing great things for society and your family, but if you aren't a Christian, you will burn in a fiery pit for all eternity. In other words, your actions and good will toward the rest of mankind count for nothing unless you are a member of the Jesus Record Club.

If you ask me, that's insane.

I'm not arguing the validity of the Bible or it's teachings. To be fair, it could be 100% accurate. God could very well be so heartless and cruel that he will damn anyone who does not swear allegiance to Him. But in the end, I think I can say with some satisfaction that I will be going to hell for trying to be a good and compassionate person, standing up for what I believe in right until the moment that my soul plunges into the depths of hell for all eternity.

And hopefully, despite the price of eternal suffering and torture for my sins, I can look back and say that I helped make somebody's day a bit brighter and someone's life a bit happier.

About me: A no-holds-barred autobiography of college

2005-11-05T01:08:00.000-06:00

Anyone who knew me during my freshman year of college will probably tell you that I acted really weird during that time. A lot of the choices that I made and the behavior that I had in social situations was just, well... fucked up.

Looking back on it years later, I finally understand why. Plain and simple, the social environment of college made my brain completely blow a fuse. I had been a quiet guy in an all-guys high school, and was on activities that didn't encourage much social mingling. Competitive shooting teams and color guard are not a good way to learn crucial social skills. I was also burned out from my first relationship, which was with a girl who was a living definition of a Christian fundamentalist. My understanding of dealing with just about everything was about as fucked to hell as you can imagine.

I never did any bad stuff in college. I never mistreated anyone or betrayed them. But the way I interacted with people, the way I engaged in conversation and smalltalk, was like drunk driving. My ability to gauge people and just establish friendships was almost nonexistent. I'd wildly correct myself, hitting the gaurdrails back and forth at 80mph. I wasn't messed up or psycho... I just had the social skills and insecurities of an 8th grader and it was obvious to everybody but me.

I joined a frat, which was probably the single biggest mistake I could have made. Instead of getting friends and learning how to talk to girls, I ended up with bad grades and holed myself up in my room, only leaving for food or to go to class. Everything was just too damn overwhelming. I was still insecure and self-conscious. Grades, social life, and everything else took a nose dive.

Over the summer my parents put it in my hands to decide whether or not I should go back to Purdue. I really had to decide what I was going to do with my life. My Dad actually saw what was happening to me. He was really the first one to put into words what was frustrating me about college. Classes weren't the issue. I only had classes for a couple hours of the day. The real problem was how I was dealing with people and my friendships. That foundation was totally rotted out. I was so desperate to have friends, and so frustrated at not being able to establish roots at school, that everything else was collapsing down on me.

I had a decent summer job. I made some money, tinkered on my car a bit, and in the fall I went back to Purdue.

Dad's advice was right. And I don't mean right in the "I told you so" way. I mean "right" in the "this was the best decision I ever made" kind of way. I left the frat. I switched majors. I got involved in the car club and PSUB. I finally had some genuine friends. I started getting good grades again. I had a roommate who was pretty cool and laid back, aside from having a BDSM fetish. More on that later. After two really messed-up years, my maturity level was (to me, at least) finally level with my age. I still sucked at math, and had to put a lot of effort into CS classes to stay afloat, but to me those were small problems compared to what I had dealt with before. Things were finally turning around.

Summer was pretty shitty. I was a janitor in a plastics factory, cleaning toilets day in and day out and getting yelled at. Sometimes I got to sweep floors and get yelled at. Other days I just got yelled at. My boss rode me constantly for reasons I'm still not sure about. Actually, wait, I do know why. He was a single guy in his mid 40's, a head janitor with no social skills and a master's degree in music theory. His title was somewhat prestigious, "building supervisor". But in the end he still scrubbed toilets and had a shelf of cleaning supplies just like the rest of us. His entire emotional sustenance came from mopping the perfect floor. At lunch, all he would talk about was work. There was nothing else for him beyond the factory walls. And it was obvious to everyone but him.

Come to think of it, maybe he bothered me so much because I saw in him the part of myself that I hated the most.

Senior year was both good and bad. Classes came along ok. I dated a girl in fall semester and fell in love with her, but it didn't work out. I was the one who broke it off. In retrospect I learned a great deal about who I was as a human being. I also got a much clearer definition of what I want and don't want in a relationship.

In the spring semester I contacted IBM about a technical writing internship offered through their Silcon Valley Laboratory in San Jose, California. It was a six month paid internship. I still had two semesters of school left and was eager to test the waters of "real life" before committing to anything. What I wanted to do most was see if I would have a repeat of freshman year. Sure, I had adjusted to college... but when it came down to living my life, had I really learned anything?

It was a longshot, but after several months of interviewing, e-mails, phone calls, and "God, I know we haven't talked in a while, but if I got this, it would be pretty sweet", I was extended an offer. On the same day, I noticed that coolant was leaking up the shaft of one of the head bolts of my Camaro. Ok, so I had a job but I wouldn't be taking the pony car out to California. I could live with that.

I flew out to California on June 22, 2005. It was my first time being out on the West Coast. First time being away from home other than for school. It's November now, and I have just over a month left here. Funny how time flies.

IBM was great from the start, and continues to be a source of great inspiration. The people here are committed to their work and do their jobs with genuine passion. It's an exciting field to be in. Getting hired here after I graduate would be a dream come true.

Socially, things have been interesting. IBM's interns are a diverse bunch, hailing from places like Chicago, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand. It was frustrating at first to find people to hang out with. The guys from France were pretty cool, but all they liked to do was bike up mountains, which was something that I could respect but had no interest in doing. So meeting friends through work would probably take some effort.

I'll save another blog entry for talking about my first living situation. In two sentences: It wasn't good. But I got out fast.

I'll save yet another blog entry for talking about the MR2 that I bought out here. In two sentences: It broke. But I fixed it.

In August I was in a new place and started really enjoying life out here. I also discovered a new passion: karaoke. I got up on stage completely sober and sang the song "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" by Wham.

I sang horribly, my voice completely off-pitch, and there wasn't a single person in the room who wasn't cringing. It was the longest four minutes of my life.

When I finally put the mic down, I felt what some people might call a religious experience. It was a feeling that was better than sex. I had just sang a song in front of dozens of girls and countless people watching online, and done a downright awful job of it. But I survived. I was still alive and breathing, and not nearly as embarrassed as I thought I would be. In fact, the effect was downright liberating.

I had gone through all of high school and college longing to be free, longing to just do anything and not fear in the back of my mind how it would affect my ability to have friends. Junior year in college I was halfway there. But on that night in August when I choked out the verses to that awful song, I cut myself free from the last threads of bullshit that were holding me back. Finally, at the age of 22, I could look in the mirror and honestly say that I honestly Did Not Give a Fuck.

And god damn, did it feel good.

There's still some time left before I go back to school, and then I'll have from January until December to finish my college career. I wonder what will happen? I've been given the awesome opportunity to go out, try "real life" on for size, and then go back to college and capitalize on that experience.

One thing is for sure. When I go back to Purdue, one of the first thing's I'm doing is finding a karaoke bar. Although I'll probably be singing Elvis instead of 80's pop.

I told myself I would never blog. And yet here I am.

2005-11-05T00:42:00.000-06:00

As I type this I'm in San Jose, laying fully clothed on my bed with my IBM-issued laptop propped up on my thighs. It's pitch black outside and hovering somewhere in the low 50's. I just spent the last hour online looking for information on some of the local clubs and bars, trying to find something that I could visit and not feel ostracized for lack of beauty or money.

I got to thinking about what to wear for my first trip to an actual club, and then I had a flashback to my first time buying a designer T-shirt while on a trip to London. I opened up Wordpad and started scrawling some thoughts down. Then I realized that I didn't really have any place to put it online. My Purdue student account will expire in a year, at which point all of my thoughts and pictures and content will be lost.

So here I am, making my first post in my first blog. I'm not too eager to show it to people. That was one of the things that was nice about m3ntal, my Purdue site. People who were close friends with me knew about it and could poke around and scrutinize the snapshots of my psyche that I left on the internet, but there wasn't any sense of daily devotion to updating it.

My last solid update to m3ntal occured just under a year ago. But that doesn't mean that I wasn't writing... quite the opposite. I've filled a couple notebooks, and I still write compulsively on ATM receipts and napkins. I'm sure anybody at work that sees me do it probably thinks that I'm nuts. And that's ok. I write for me, not for them.

This will be my blog... my quiet, unbroadcasted blog. I won't hide its existence from anyone. It will be a holding place for thoughts that I feel brave enough to let out into the public.

Here goes nothing...