Month: February 2009

I was at the bank yesterday depositing a check and I noticed they had a poster advertising a free iPod Shuffle if you open a new account. Since I already have an account, I asked if opening a second account would qualify, and was told that it would. I was in a hurry, so I left and went back this morning when I had a little more time.

After about ten minutes of paperwork, I had my new Shuffle in hand (they only had silver left– I guess it’s a pretty popular promotion). Woo hoo!

Now I’m loading it up with music, but unfortunately the third-generation Shuffles have some trouble running on a Linux system out of the box. I have to erase the partition table on the internal flash drive, then stick it into a Windows computer running iTunes. The iTunes software recognizes that it’s an iPod and also that the disk is horked, so it kindly offers to reformat the Shuffle properly. After that I can plug it into my Linux box and everything is great.

While going through all of this, I was struck by how downright ugly iTunes is. Here’s the default window on my Windows system:

What’s with the olive green and pink/purple colors? It looks like someone ate a box of crayons and threw up on the screen. The left-hand links aren’t very intuitive– it’s not clear how I can take a song from my collection and put it on the iPod. I poked around the menus and it seemed like they were organized randomly, without much helpful information. Clicking About iTunes opened up Word to display a document… huh? And the interface itself doesn’t follow Windows standards; obviously the people at Apple who wrote it wanted it to look Mac-like, but the result is something that’s inconsistent with both Windows and the Mac. It’s sort of a pathetic hybrid of the two.

So I guess I won’t be using iTunes any time soon.

Perhaps the software looks nicer on a Mac; I didn’t give it a go because on the Mac the Shuffle will be formatted with Apple’s HFS filesystem which is much more work under Linux than the Windows FAT32 setup. A Windows-formatted iPod will work in Windows, Mac, and Linux, while a Mac-formatted one will only work on a Mac. Strange design decision.

Anyway, then I plugged the little silver guy into my Linux box and fired up AmaroK.

I was rewarded with the nice KDE-based interface and the simple commands, including buttons that say exactly what they do (“Connect”, “Transfer”, etc.) and the ability to simply drag songs to and from the iPod. No pesky automatic re-synching which accidentally deletes your music collection, no olive green and hot pink.

Apple might have done a wonderful job on the iPod hardware, but their software falls way short.

I get such a kick out of de-motivational posters.

… So I’m working at home today, and I just finished a bunch of little tasks on my to-do list. Now it’s time to jump into a couple of major projects, but before I do it would be nice to take a little break.

At the office it’s customary to just say “foos?” and everyone gets up and heads over to the foosball table for ten minutes or so. But at home, there aren’t any distractions like that so I end up glued to my chair hacking through code.

Maybe I should go play Mario Kart…

Happy birthday to me!

Me in London, being patted down by a bobbie, circa 1999:

When I went to England I tooled around London for a while and had a great time. Since I thought the police over there have such fun hats, I asked a pair of them if they’d take a picture of me being searched. They laughed and did it.

As of today, if I tried to do the same thing I’d be arrested– for real– under terrorism charges. Yes, that’s right: Great Britain, in its quest to be even more draconian than the United States in finding endless ways to “fight terrorism”, has just passed a law making it illegal to photograph a police officer or military personnel.

What is the world coming to when you can’t even snap a shot of a bobbie patting you down?

“A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”

— George Bernard Shaw

(Particularly appropriate as Obama signs the latest bailout package…)

As tax season descends upon us and I spend my weekends gathering all of the documentation and cranking through the forms to create the mystical and all-powerful 1040, I can’t help but reflect on my financial state.

I started wondering– as most people do from time to time– what it would be like to have so much stinkin’ money that I wouldn’t need to worry about anything. Whatever I wanted I could have, and I could shower my friends and family with lavish gifts. A bit more thought refined that wish to something a little more realistic:

How much money would be enough but not necessarily too much?

In other words, how much would it take for me to meet all of my needs and a good portion of my wants? What kind of salary would that be? Would I want enough to:

• Eat out every day?
• Go to see every movie in the theater instead of waiting to rent it on DVD?
• Buy a nice new car every year?
• Pay off my house?

The list goes on, of course, and at some point I think I would cross the line (perhaps subconsciously) into extravagant excess. I drive a 1995 Saturn SC2 and love it. Even if I had the cash today, I don’t think I’d buy another car. Yes, someday this piece of rattling plastic will give up the ghost, and then I’ll get something else. But it’ll probably be used, and it’ll probably be something unassuming like a Honda, rather than a late-model BMW. So in that way, maybe I already have the salary I need.

I remember my first job– when I was a lad of fifteen– working at a fireworks stand. As I recall, the job lasted about three weeks, and I made something like $400. To a fifteen-year-old, that was more money than I knew what to do with. I was rich! The world was my oyster!

I probably blew it on cassette tapes and books.

Then I remember graduating from college and moving to Colorado where I started my first “real” job. After five years in school, when scraping together five bucks to order a pizza on Friday night was the extent of my financial planning, it was amazing to have a salary. Again, I felt like I was the king of the world, basking in wealth.

I bought a new 32″ television and a VCR.

Fast forward to today, where I make a comfortable salary but still feel like I need more. After all, I have a family! And a mortgage! And Laralee always wants to buy organic free-range no-preservative chicken meat! There are always things sucking up the money, leaving me wondering where the paycheck went, and why we can’t seem to dump anything into our savings.

Money is a funny thing. We never seem to have enough, but even more interesting is what happens when we compare our wealth with those around us. “I wonder if he makes more than me?” is a common thought in the corporate world. I’m reminded of a story of capuchin monkeys, which goes something like this:

There were scientists doing some experiments on capuchin monkeys, in which the monkeys were taught to navigate a maze and receive a cucumber as a reward at the end. The monkeys were perfectly happy to do this, and learned the maze well. They were excited to get their cucumbers.

Then the scientists built another maze beside the first one, and taught a different group of capuchins to run that maze. Their prize was a handful of grapes.

When the first group saw this, they became enraged. They refused to run the maze, and those who did took their cucumbers and threw them at the researchers.

The lesson is that the monkeys were content with what they had until they saw that others had something better. We might laugh at the little guys, but in many ways we’re exactly like them. I might be perfectly content making a salary of $50,000 a year until I find out that Bob, in the next cubicle, makes $60,000. Suddenly my salary seems inadequate, and I find myself resenting Bob and thinking how much better I do my job than he does his.

Similarly, I might feel smug and satisfied making $30,000 a year if I know Bob is only making $25,000. It makes me feel more valuable, more respected, and like I’m somehow more important than him.

As these sorts of thoughts run through my head while I consider my finances and calculate my taxes, I think it boils down to a couple of conclusions.

First, it’s a bad idea to compare yourself with others in terms of salary. There are so many ways to measure the “worth” of a person, and the money each of us make is certainly a poor yardstick. Teachers and nurses make much less than web developers, but I would argue they are far more important in the world.

And second, as I look at my income and compare it with my expenses, I need to keep in mind that in the end I really do have what I need. Sure, I could always use more, but all in all I have it pretty darn good. I should be grateful for it.

More to the point, I am grateful for it.

Database programmer joke:

“A SQL query walks into a bar and sees two tables. He walks up to them and says ‘Can I join you?'”

As usual, I’m jamming to various tunes while I work. Roxette’s “The Look” just came on, and I’m reminded once again how these guys have lyrics which are apparently generated by a random dictionary computer program or something.

For example:

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that they’re Swedish and only learned a subset of English; I don’t know. The funny thing is all of their songs are like this. Still, they have a good beat and remind me of those heady days of yesteryear… circa 1990 or so.

Speaking of being busy at work, I spent time on no fewer than twenty different client projects today.

It’s amazing I have time to eat or play Mario Kart.