Dispatches from the Prarie

after putting my crap (in homage to the recently departed George Carlin, I’m calling my stuff crap today) in storage for a year, things got pretty messy. Before I left for Russia, water got in and damaged a bunch of crap. While my backup drive and desktop computers were in the back of the cabinet, i accumulated a new USB drive and a couple of 4GB flash drives. All the crap just got dusty.

Since it is all going back into storage I decided I should clean and thin the crap. It all fit in a 10 X 13′ room before. My goal is to get it down to 10 X 10 this time. A self respecting vagabond should be able to fit everything in a 5X10 room. And there is a new 36″ television.

I donated a bike i hardly ever ride. Now I just have 2, so that should be enough. Hopefully there will be a happy short person someplace soon.

I reviewed the books that didn’t get too wet. Some of them got wet enough to support mold, so i tossed them. As well there are a lot that i will never look at again, they got tossed as well. Clothes are getting thinned out too. Stained t-shirt, goodbye.

This should be easy, but i inherited a strong pack rat sensibility from my mother, who grew up during the great depression. So now that I’m a loner, i shouldn’t have much in the way of attachments, but i do. Really it is embarrassing.

Here is a glimpse of my neurosis - I have over 2 weeks worth of white undershirts and 6 suits I haven’t worn in over 2 years. Am I really going to look for a corporate job that requires that stuff more than 2 times a year? I hope not. Like I said, it should be easy. But it is not.

I heard apartment dwellers should review everything in their apartments and toss anything they haven’t touched in a year.  And seriously consider tossing anything they haven’t used in 6 months.  Seems like good advice.  By that measure, almost everything I own should be tossed.  Should I toss it all out?  And think about this, I put 3 computers into storage.  Do you know how fast a computer depreciates????

Along with the physical mess is a virtual mess. I’m expecting a new laptop for work next week and I have 6 hard drives to reorganize. Two of them will go into storage and the rest will travel. I’m organizing them and removing duplication. Then I’m going to create duplication - we call that taking a backup. But it will be organized duplication rather than incidental overlap.

I intend to sell my stereo, CDs, and XBox. If monks can wander around southeast Asia with one set of clothes and a bowl, I should be able to make due with 2 pieces of luggage totalling less than 40 kilos. Anyone want a Treo 650? :-)

I heard this show this morning want to praise it.  It makes me feel good to hear 2 middle aged guys talk about pop music (so I’m not the only one).  Normally I like their choices.  Today they talked about mistakes- things they have changed their minds about.  I noticed two things:

Firstly there was a pattern.  The stuff they originally didn’t like but then did was mostly from the UK - Radiohead’s OK Computer, The Jam, and Oasis. The music they started off liking but later didn’t was American - REMs Monster.  Perhaps they are more long term minded on the other side of the atlantic?

The other thing I noticed was I am more in tune with there current opinions.  Maybe I should get a radio show…

So this morning I finally got around to upgrading my version of WordPress. I’m current now, but lost my categories :-).  The wp_categories table is gone from the db, but I’m not sure if that is intended.  Note the empty list to the right.  In defense of WP, I did hit the site before the whole upgrade was complete and then I hit the wrong page (both my own mistakes).

Anyway, I’m not going to check this out right now. I have a backup of the db and once i figure out what is wrong, I may attempt a fix.  File under “To Do” :-)

In other news I opened an ING Orange checking account, because I had a good experience with them. But when I tried to do a withdrawal at a “free” ATM it said they would charge me $2. Maybe I misunderstood the ING web site (the ATM was very clear).  So I’m not giving up on my local bank (5th 3rd) yet.

When I was in Russia, I met a few people who didn’t have bank accounts. Many of those that did had it chosen for them by their employers.  Some only used it for direct deposit, not really for savings. This seemed crazy to me until I learned that they had 2 financial collapses in the 90s. One of them destroyed the majority of deposits from almost all bank deposits. So it is understandable that many people were not that trusting of banking in general.

Last year this seemed like a completely alien mindset. Today it doesn’t seem so inconceivable given the banks that have collapsed here.  Reading the black swan made it that much more conceivable.

I loved this book. The basic thesis is that we are not that good at handling the unexpected. Pretty obvious, right? But exploring the finer points and the sophisticated ways that we delude ourselves is very interesting reading. Highly recommended. Buy it at Amazon

Some reviewers call the author arrogant or pompous. They may mean erudite. He references many people I’ve never heard of, but never in an off-handed, I’m better than you kind of way. Always with a basic explanation of the referenced thinker’s ideas (or at least the ones being referenced). The alternative, to not reference, is to present all the ideas as one’s own.  Let us face the fact that Nassim has read and talked to a lot of people that we haven’t. I’m comfortable with that. Instead of being insulted for making my ignorance obvious, I’m grateful for his help.

He hooked me in the first chapter with this excuse for not reading the business section of the newspaper:

… a perfect alibi since I found nothing interesting about the details of the business world - inelegant, dull, pompous, greedy, unintellectual, selfish, and boring.

This passage is not really indicative of the tone nor definitely the content of the book, but it gives you his perspective. I share that perspective and admire anyone who has gotten them printed in a best seller :-)

I bought Amazon’s Kindle about 6 weeks ago. Took it on my trip to Russia.

Finished these books while abroad:
The God Delusion
The Strategy Paradox
Wolves Eat Dogs

Just started The Black Swan.

Regarding the kindle
I like it a lot. Everyone says it is expensive, which it is. But I am a rich fat American, with no kids. So what the hell.
Pros:

• hold tons of books, so I don’t have to decide what to bring with me when i travel
• not back lit like a computer, so i can read outside
• battery life is excellent
• good coverage of popular books
• support for most of the formats i use on the computer now (PDF, html, Word, and glorious text)

Cons:

• costs a lot
• not a lot of newspapers and magazines
• poor coverage of niche books - Most of my book buying is popular non-fiction or computer books. The non-fiction has good coverage, but the computer books do not. The saving grace here is that a lot of good material is not coming in electronic format as well as paper.
• closed distribution channel - Does it really matter? I don’t know, but choosing to buy books from Amazon feels good, they have fantastic customer service and prices. Having to buy books from Amazon feels bad - like waiting for the other shoe to drop

This device perfectly confounds my Russian friends. Since Russians are used to lax intellectual property laws and an active hacker/mob community - they are used to downloading and cracking software and bootleg music and movies - the idea of paying that much for a device and then paying for books is totally alien. One of them said “well if it didn’t cost so much, i would get it and put my library of PDFs on it, but the delivery system is a waste”. Clearly, they will be better served by a plain vanilla book reader.

Right now I am happy with it, but ultimately it’s long term success or failure will depend on breadth of content. When I can get the Communications of the ACM on it, I will not read paper any more.

I went back to Russia for vacation. Had intended to take the train and see some of the country when my project ended, but because of the visa law change, I had to leave early. After 90 days I could return, so i did.

That place is a combination of a few freedoms we don’t have here in the States and a bunch of beauracracy. I saw Kaliningrad, a region that is physically isolated since the breakup of the USSR. It had been part of Germany/Prussia in the past, so there was an interesting mix of really old buildings, Soviet buildings, and modern buildings.

I flew there from Moscow, because my fiancee has some relatives there. Her cousin graciously took a few days off of work and took us around. We saw the baltic sea, some forests, and farms. As well as several old forts and churches. Her uncle was great - he only wanted to do one small shot of vodka with me, so there were no horrendous hangovers, like with some Russians.

It seemed to me that Kaliningrad was better developed than other Russian cities. Most of the cities I saw were all falling apart, well past their prime with no maintenance to speak of. Except of course for Moscow, which is booming - there are cranes building everywhere and it is over crowded with cars. Whereas Kaliningrad seemed to be in good repair and was not experiencing a building craze.

I think it’s proximity to the rest of Europe helps. For example, I heard they have lower import taxes than the rest of Russia too - for instance a German car in Moscow costs about double what it does in the US, but in Kaliningrad it is only about 10% more. This was born out by her cousin’s car, a 2 year old VW station wagon.

They best known building is probably the church that Immanuel Kant attended and is burried at.

IIRC, from previous travels he worked in Heidelberg Germany. But this city celebrates him.

One of the great things about staying with Natasha’s family was fresh food. They had a huge garden and some chickens. 2 or 3 meals a day had fresh eggs, cucumber, tomatos, and honey. Some also had fresh leeks and chicken. This is the upside to being in a less modern place - factory food is not the norm. Given the time of year lots of people are sharing produce. Yumm.

During the time in Kaliningrad, I also made it to 2 tourist towns, Svetlogorsk and Zeliningradsk. They have funny looking “dancing trees” there:

One disappointment is how little time I got to be with my former co-workers in Moscow. Sorry people. The first few days I was adjusting to the timezone change, and then I wasn’t in town much. But it was good to see you all for the short time I had.

Recently there has been a lot of news about home declining prices.  I remember a long time ago (before i bought my first property) a person that trust a lot about finance said to assume 2-3% annual appreciation of real estate when comparing renting vs buy.   That same person said don’t buy unless you want to live in a place for at least 5-7 years.  That turned out to be sage advice.

Now it’s a big deal that house prices are falling.  But I just grapped the Zillow quarterly report for metro Boston.  And it has this nugget:

last quarter, down -2.7%; last year, down -8.5%; 5 year, down 0.4%; 10 year, up 6.4%

All those percentages are annualized!  Sure, if you bought a year ago, you have lost a lot of value.  But over 10 years, prices have gone up by more than double what used to be the conventional wisdom.  Wow.  So we have a little further to go before this is a “10 year correction.”  Just one more quarter like the last one and we will be close to the assumption I was given.

The moral of the story, don’t buy a house planning to flip it in 2-3 years.  Buy if you want to stay at least 5 years you will probably recoup your costs… Sounds like I got good advice.  I’m a lucky man (thanks Fred :-).  And for the time being, a renter .

Here’s a press release I found on the web:

“We continue to believe that our proposed acquisition made sense for Microsoft, Yahoo! and the market as a whole. Our goal in pursuing a combination with Yahoo! was to provide greater choice and innovation in the marketplace and create real value for our respective stockholders and employees,� said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft.

Here’s my charitable translation, merely leaving out what may not be true (and is impossible to know):

“We continue to believe that our proposed acquisition made sense for Microsoft, Yahoo! and the market as a whole. Our goal in pursuing a combination with Yahoo! was to provide greater choice and innovation in the marketplace and create real value for our respective stockholders and employees,�

Dropping the 3rd person (hiding behind every company are a bunch of people):

“I believe that our proposed acquisition made sense for me. My goal in pursuing a combination with Yahoo! was to create value for me.�

Cheerleaders of all kinds (corporate executives, polititians, pundits) love to talk about motivations. It’s a great realm for spin - there is no evidence to accidentally contradict. Here’s my guess at what Mr Ballmer really thinks (based on how I’d react if I were in his shoes):

“What the fuck, Yahoo? We offered more than you are worth. I could have made a bundle, instead you’re making me look bad.â€?

But what do I know.

This reminds me why fake steve jobs diary is so funny :-)

When I was a young man I thought that Steve and Steve we dishonest scumbags who would do anything to make money. Of course I knew they were very smart, hard working and lucky too. Now I still believe pretty much the same thing, minus the scumbag part. Their behavior seems like a natural reaction. If no one accorded them more status than they deserved, if people accepted that other people think like they do but have have different motivations, they wouldn’t have to say the stuff they do. But it does matter. A lot.  If a CEO came up who spoke honestly about his motivations or his company’s behaviour, he would be either be fired immediately or skewered in the media and then fired.

“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

Trying to get a feel for the quality of the options here for running some Windows apps under Ubuntu Linux. The choices I know about are: VMWare, Virtual Box, and Parallels.

Besides this comparisson, which includes Qemu, any thoughts?

Oh, the host is AMD 64bit, and it would be easier if Windows XP was 32 bit.

Back when i had basic cable I used to watch Dr. Katz. It was a cartoon about a psychologist in Manhattan.  I would poop myself about once an episode.

Well yesterday I discovered Hey He’s Back. Same guy, similar style of comedy, but audio only. Funnier than anything on TV. Obviously comedy is a matter of taste. But this is funnier than the office, 30 rock or curb your enthusiasm, which are about the funniest things I’ve seen.