Year: 2006

The mortgage on my house is through Chase Bank, and today I received a Special New Offer from them. Whee!

They “noticed” that my last payment was delivered in a U.S. Mail envelope. Since every payment I’ve sent them for the past four years was also delivered via U.S. Mail, one wonders why this is such a revelation to them… but apparently it made someone over at Chase sit up and take notice. “Hey,” I’m sure they said, “we need to extend a Special New Offer to this guy!”

So the Special New Offer is an opportunity for me to sign up for their “Chase FastPay” program, wherein my mortgage payments are deducted directly from my bank account. According to their nice personalized letter, this will make my life so much easier, and will also save me money. Well, heck, I’m a sucker for an easier life and saving money, so I skimmed the next few paragraphs.

It turns out there’s a Low Monthly Fee of only $12.00 to enroll in this program. Hmm. I don’t know if they checked the price of stamps at their local post office, but I’d be surprised to find any twelve-dollar stamps around there. One wonders how twelve bucks will be a savings over the thirty-seven cents I normally spend every month, but I’m no financial wizard, and we all know the guys at Chase are. So maybe I’m missing something.

It also occurred to me that an electronic payment would most likely make their processing easier, since they wouldn’t have to open my envelope, pull out the check, open the computer program and enter the account number, enter the amount, and verify that it posted. It seems that they should be paying me to use their FastPay program, although maybe they have Third-World sweatshops staffed by poor children who only cost a few pennies a day for the data entry. Who knows.

So, sadly, I’m going to have to pass on the Special New Offer and continue licking stamps every month. Hey, wait, I don’t even have to lick them any more– isn’t technology great?

Remember those inspirational posters that were so hugely popular in the Nineties? It’s hilarious how even after all these years, they still provide fodder for a near-infinite number of spoofs.

It’s so much fun to live in a world where stuff like this happens:

Any time you hear someone say, “we conducted a variety of tests and figured out it was Jell-O” you know the terrorists have won.

Tom and I went on our annual hiking/backpacking/photography road trip last week, and had a fabulous time in Yosemite and the Sierra Nevadas and the northern California coastline. Armed with my (relatively) new Panasonic Lumix digital camera, I was able to take much richer pictures than I did with the old Sony Cybershot.

Now I’m going through the photos, adjusting black levels and colors and so on, pulling out the natural hues and pushing them to a much more realistic look. As I mess with various settings, it’s amazing what can be done with a simple digital photograph.

Take, for example, this shot of the eastern side of the Sierras. The rocks are generally grey (granite), the sky is of course blue, and we have some white clouds. Compare the left half of the photo– the raw data from the camera– with the simple black-level adjustment on the right. It’s dramatic.

It’s also interesting to see the things the camera captures but doesn’t necessarily show in the photo. Here’s a shot of a tree near the beach at sunset:

After I took the picture and lowered my camera, I noticed a couple walking along the road. They’re not visible in the raw image, but tweaking the brightness of the image reveals them (along with a trash can and the curb).

Cool stuff. I think I’m getting addicted to this photography thing.

This is just plain cool.

Gene Callahan says:

Like the use of the word “fascist” to describe anything that’s even remotely oppressive or even irritating, evoking the Nazis in a political discussion is vastly overused. But in this case, it’s honestly frightening how many similarities exist between 1934 Germany and 2006 America. Bush may not be Hitler, but his continual consolidation and expansion of government power is a shocking parallel to Hitler’s manipulation of the Reichstag.

September 28, 2006: the day our country died.

Today the Senate passed S3930, which legalizes many forms of torture and gives the government the right to detain anyone who is suspected of terrorism indefinitely. The highlights– or rather lowlights– of the bill include no less than the following horrors:

• The Geneva Conventions will be re-defined by the President, allowing him to specify different methods of torture as permissible during interrogation. Moreover, his definitions can be kept secret.
• The definition of an enemy combatant has been expanded to include American citizens, and allow anyone declared as such to be imprisoned immediately and indefinitely without appeal.
• Judicial review of terrorism cases will be prohibited. Appeals of violations of the Geneva Conventions will be denied.
• Evidence given under coercion (read “torture”) will be permissible in court. This is even retroactive to past actions taken by the government.
• Secret evidence will be permitted. People accused by the government (and lucky enough to have a trial at all) can be condemned on evidence they aren’t allowed to see.
• Torture has been redefined to include anything that produces pain less than that of “total organ failure”. This includes waterboarding, exposure, personal indignity, and even rape.
• The whole idea of habeas corpus— the right to challenge imprisonment– has been suspended for those accused of terrorist activity.

All of these things– every one of them— are direct contradictions of existing American law. They completely revoke many of the rights citizens of this country have had since its founding, and in fact redefine the legal system in a way that’s comparable to the days prior to the Magna Carta (which codified, for the first time, the right to a fair trial). Even the Alien and Sedition Acts pale in comparison to the sweeping oppression seen here. This is, in a word, tyranny. We now live in a place where the government can imprison anyone for as long as they want– without even having to provide a reason.

The Constitution itself says this:

The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

Our country is not in rebellion (yet)– the only time in our nation’s history when habeas corpus was suspended was during the Civil War, when there was open rebellion, and President Lincoln decided it was necessary to do so. It is a great stretch to believe we are being “invaded” or that the public safety, in general, is being threatened to such an extent that a measure of such magnitude is the only option.

Supreme Court Justice Scalia is on record as saying:

The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive.

Indeed, we have now abandoned that… we have discarded the “very core of liberty” in the name of an impossible war being fought against an ideology.

It’s difficult for me to express my outrage and, indeed, profound sadness at this monumental injustice. In a single day we have gone from a nation where freedom and justice for all were fundamental rights– as stated in the closing phrase of the Pledge of Allegiance– to a nation where the irrational fear of terrorists has driven our lawmakers to the extreme and convinced them that a fair trial has no place in our system of law.

If there was ever any question about whether the terrorists have won, this is the answer. They have won in an unprecedented way. They have caused our country to abandon its most basic principles.

America as we have known it is dead.

I keep expecting the weather to turn into that crummy fall stuff, where it’s sort of grey most of the time, and there’s a cold wind that picks up occasionally. But for some reason, it’s been absolutely gorgeous for the past few weeks. It’s been sunny, and the temperature has hovered in the 70’s– which I always believe to be the perfect outdoor conditions.

Thus, my lunchtime ultimate games have been fabulous. With some nice warm sun and no wind, the conditions are ideal. I find myself wishing we played more than just twice a week, because I know the weather won’t last, and I want to get in as much game time as I can while it holds. Then again, it’s a real distraction from work (sigh) so maybe it’s for the best.

The scary thing here (besides the t-shirt) is that I actually took a Pascal class in college.

At lunch today I was talking with Craig and Rick and we decided that it’s not the technology that matters; it’s the marketing. Take, for example, the recent rumors that Yahoo is going to buy the Facebook web site for around a billion dollars (yes, that’s a “B”). Looking at Facebook, you don’t see anything particularly exciting or innovative. In fact, as far as the so-called “social networking” sites go, it’s pretty humdrum. It’s not the most popular, it doesn’t have the most features, and honestly I’m just not sure what makes it worth nine zeroes.

I’ve got technology. It’s coming out of my ears. I’m fast, capable, and innovative when it comes to building web sites. I haven’t yet met a customer who presented me with an impossible challenge in web technology. In fact, given a few weeks of dedicated time, I could probably build Facebook. And yet no one is offering to buy my web sites for a billion dollars.

Why? Because I don’t have any marketing juju. I’m a terrible marketeer, I’m a terrible sales guy, and in general I haven’t got the foggiest clue how to go out there and sell my goodies. All of my business is via referral– which is great, don’t get me wrong– and I’ve never once landed a job by simply calling someone or sending an unasked-for proposal.

So I guess if I want to make a bil, I need to find a marketing genius to help me.