Month: October 2008

10/16/2008

You know how some songs evoke strong memories? Funny how music has a way of connecting to something deep within us…

It’s after midnight and I’m hacking away, listening to some great tunes, and here’s one of my all-time favorite songs: U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. I remember when I first heard the song: it was in college, on a warm spring day, playing sand volleyball while we cranked some CD’s my friend Dempsey had brought along. This song came on and it was just amazing for some reason.

I can’t explain it, but this song resonates with me. Maybe someday I will find what I’m looking for. Whatever that may be.

10/15/2008

Of course I’m a Linux bigot, and I shake my head at those poor souls who still use Windows on their computers (and, to a degree, OS X). I mean, why pay so much money for so much mediocre software when there are all of the other possibilities in the open-source world?

Take AmaroK, for example, which is arguably the best media player on the market today.

It’s got every feature you’d ever want in a digital music player, and many others you’d never even think of. Playlists, album covers, lyrics, MusicBrainz, last.fm, filters, visualizations, iPods, and on and on. All for the bargain price of… well, nothing.

Every now and then I think about how effortlessly I navigate through all of my applications– not only to do my job, but also to just be a part of our internet society. And how Linux and KDE and a hundred other applications make it possible in such a fabulous way.

Those poor souls.

10/15/2008

My current laptop is a four-year-old Dell Inspiron 8600, which is a hefty beast. It has a sweet 15″ display and a full-size keyboard, and it’s a real workhorse. It’s served me well for many moons as I’ve worked in bed or downstairs or on the road.

But hey, technology marches on and these days we’ve got faster, smaller, more powerful laptops out there. So I decided to plunk down some change on a Dell Inspiron Mini 9.

It’s the latest in the “netbook” arena– a miniature laptop, basically. From all the reviews I’ve read it’s a pretty nice machine. It doesn’t have a hard drive (all solid-state disk) and uses a low-power CPU so it doesn’t need a cooling fan. That makes it completely silent, which is nice. But nicer still is the fact that it’s the size of a paperback book. Sure, the 9″ screen and the 80%-size keyboard are a little cramped, but I can practically slip this thing into a jacket pocket as I head out the door.

Of course the first thing I did was wipe the disk and install KDE, and now I’m configuring everything to be just so. My desktop environment has evolved over the past decade into a finely-tuned piece of art so highly customized I hardly know what to do with a stock install any more.

Once it’s up and running the way I like it, I’m pretty excited to see if it’ll live up to the hype. And it’ll be great for trips and just lazing around the family room.

10/15/2008

Two weeks ago, we heard Ben Bernanke screaming, “Holy crap! If we don’t vote this $700 billion bailout package into law this very week the entire economy is going to implode and everyone will die!”

Or something like that.

Regardless of his actual words, the message from the Treasury and the Fed and all of the other so-called “experts” was that we needed the bailout package and we needed it right away. So Congress caved and gave them their money.

Now things aren’t looking that great, we’re still sliding inexorably into recession, and it’s clear the bailout really isn’t all it was advertised to be. But never fear– Bernanke is back, except this time he’s saying “Well, hey, it’s going to take some time for stuff to happen.”

So which is it? Quick action? Or wait and see?

I suspect I could do a better job running this economy than the clowns in charge right now. And I’m a physicist.

10/11/2008

I tried hard to be proud of my service, but all I could feel was shame. Racism could no longer mask the reality of the Iraq occupation. These are human beings. I’ve since been plagued by guilt. I feel guilt any time I see an elderly man, like the one who couldn’t walk who we rolled onto a stretcher and told the Iraqi police to take him away. I feel guilt any time I see a mother with her children, like the one who cried hysterically and screamed that we were worse than Saddam as we forced her from her home. I feel guilt any time I see a young girl, like the one I grabbed by the arm and dragged into the street.

We were told we were fighting terrorists; the real terrorist was me, and the real terrorism is this occupation. Racism within the military has long been an important tool to justify the destruction and occupation of another country. Without racism, soldiers would realize that they have more in common with the Iraqi people than they do with the billionaires who send us to war.

I threw families onto the street in Iraq, only to come home and find families thrown onto the street in this country, in this tragic and unnecessary foreclosure crisis. Our enemies are not five thousand miles away, they are right here at home, and if we organize and fight, we can stop this war, we can stop this government, and we can create a better world.

— Corporal Michael Prysner, U.S. Army Reserve Aerial Intelligence Specialist, in an excerpt from Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan

10/10/2008

Like everyone else, I’ve watched my stock portfolio get demolished the past few weeks. I kissed several years’ worth of retirement savings goodbye. But I suppose my losses pale in comparison to those felt by Bill Gates (who lost about $2.5 billion since September) and Larry Ellison (who dropped $1.6 billion). In fact, it’s Warren Buffett who has shown us how smart he is about investing, because he’s made $8 billion in the same period and now stands as the richest person in America.

Must be rough.

10/10/2008

I started reading Seth Godin’s blog and found some good articles. In one that caught my eye he discusses how many people perceive “effort as a myth”, meaning we are always seeing examples of others who are extraordinarily lucky and thus have an easier life than us, or accomplish things we never think we will.

But he dispels that myth by talking about luck, and what he says is insightful:

The thing about luck is this: we’re already lucky. We’re insanely lucky that we weren’t born during the black plague or in a country with no freedom. We’re lucky that we’ve got access to highly-leveraged tools and terrific opportunities. If we set that luck aside, though, something interesting shows up.

Delete the outliers– the people who are hit by a bus or win the lottery, the people who luck out in a big way, and we’re left with everyone else. And for everyone else, effort is directly related to success. Not all the time, but as much as you would expect. Smarter, harder working, better informed and better liked people do better than other people, most of the time.

Effort takes many forms. Showing up, certainly. Knowing stuff (being smart might be luck of the draw, but knowing stuff is the result of effort). Being kind when it’s more fun not to. Paying forward when there’s no hope of tangible reward. Doing the right thing. You’ve heard these things a hundred times before, of course, but I guess it’s easier to bet on luck.

I think this is true, and it inspires me to use more effort and less luck.

10/10/2008

“There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.”

— Richard Feynman