Category: Blog

Listening to KPBS on the way in to work this morning they were talking about a new “Paid Family and Medical Leave Act” that’s “working its way through” the California legislature at the moment. For only $40/year, shared between employees and employers, we may get some portion of our pay back if we take leave to assist a sick family member. (http://www.equalrights.org/legislat/sb1661.htm)

Just what we need, another tax. Call me a raving Libertarian (I generally consider myself a liberal Libertarian, or perhaps an anarchocapitalist) but I think that the government already takes way too much of my income away for questionable schemes. Why aren’t the politicians working on ways to reduce our tax load (easy answer, because money==power, and the more taxes, the larger the government, the more powerful the politicians).

I know taxes can’t be eliminated, and I have some pet projects of my own – I think the government should pay for NPR, sidewalks, efficient public transportation, and basic health care for the poor (because that costs us less than having them use the emergency facilities). And condoms for whoever wants them but can’t afford them (which costs a LOT less than the alternative).

People seem to think that businesses are there just to provide them with benefits and somewhere to sit around surfing the internet all day – when in reality, every employee has to EARN about 150% of their salary, just for a business to keep the doors open. I took a single day last month for jury duty (to sit there and not be selected) – I got a check from CA for $1.50, and it probably cost my employer $150 to have me gone (assuming there weren’t any major crises that day).

But there’s way way too much money being taken out of our pockets to pay for things like sports stadiums (tax everyone to support the super-wealthy?), wildly overpriced electrical power contracts, and bombing the poor in countries on the other side of the world – any yet when we’re forced to overpay income taxes, people think they’re being given a gift when they get a little bit of it refunded the next year.

Los Angeles Times, Liz Smith, 6/24/2002:

Casting About for a Dirk Pitt
NEW YORK – Author Clive Cussler has been in Hollywood looking for the perfect actor to play Dirk Pitt in the coming film adaptation of his bestselling novel “Sahara”. […] No word yet on which star will get to wear the orange-faced Doxa wristwatch featured in Cussler’s story. But to play Dirk Pitt, let us make a suggestion: Brad Pitt?

There’s plenty of street parking in my neighborhood – but everyone has too many cars. My neighbors to the left (husband and wife) have a Mustang, a pickup, a “hot rod” and a camper van; the new neighbors on the right (two guys) have a Neon, a pickup, an old Jaguar, and two motorcycles. And of course I’ve got the Pinz and the Rover.

Street parking is, of course, public parking – you can park anywhere you’d like if you get there first – but common courtesy dictates that you should park near your house causing as few problems for neighbors as possible.

The “lefts” have a single space in front of their house and have always parked their van there; they park the Mustang in the space in front of my house (and the other two fill their garage). I have the space taken by the Mustang and another 24′ space that’s about halfway in front of my house, and halfway in front of the “rights” (Pinz in the driveway touching the garage door; neither will fit into the garage thanks to a short door). They also have 35′ (two spaces) on the other side of their driveway in front of their house.

A few months after they moved in, they appropriated the space that’s partway in front of my house with their giant (16′) pickup. So I’ve been parking in front of my driveway (driveway is only 10′ long; Rover is 14′), or in the Mustang’s space (when I could get it), or wherever else I can find a space. Have discussed this situation with both neighbors, to no resolution. Have also researched and found that parking in front of a driveway (even your own) is ticketable (I once got a ticket for the Pinz blocking the sidewalk when I had left it out far enough to open the garage door).

I seem to always get home last, so have to park wherever there’s space left. The other night I came home late, and the partial space was taken (they like to park the pickup so it’s right up to their property line, leaving me about 8′ on my side). So I parked the Rover in front of their house.

All this by way of setting up for the note I found on my car the next morning (grammar errors and ridiculous nicknames SIC):

 

Good Morning Fred
I was surprised to come home from a business meeting late last night to find your rover parked on our property. Obviously you may have mistaken. Whatever. Popeye and I have bent over backwards, so to say, to accommodate your wishes, as well to be good neighbors. Actions such as this does not and will not resolve any issue.

A fact here. Popeye’s truck is parked within “our property” boundaries of which we rightfully lease. He has never parked on your property. We have a right to park our vehickes where they are and will defend that right if need be, rest assured. We are not at fault that your neighbor parks on your property to accommodate storage of his RV, that is between you and him, NOT US.

I ask you again, to be a good neighbor and follow your own rules. Call if you have questions.

Thank you.

Too Cool

Just because.

(BTW, I like the article about Ron Popeil!)

One of the things about Burning Man is that you can rationalize buying, building, scavenging, or “turning into art” nearly anything.

For years I’ve had a picture in my mind a four-wheeled pedal car. And of course I’ve never seen one that matched the picture – either they’re kiddy cars, or modified wheelchairs, or super-high-end-ultra (Which are very cool. And $5000 and up.). A pedal car (my thoughts went) would be great for Burning Man, because it should work better in the silty parts of the playa than a bicycle, but more imporantly, there isn’t the tenative am-I-stopping-here-or-not you get when you’re standing straddling your bike. Besides which it’d be cool to turn into art.

So I was going to build myself one. Somehow. I have no experience welding, but I can turn a wrench and I’m not bad when it comes to plywood and 2x4s. Fortunately, I never got to that.

Because one day while “surfing” I stumbled across the Trailmate Xcelerator. Which, as far as I could tell from what I could read about it, exactly perfect. I called the company and verified that it would work for a 6′ tall, 250 lb desert freak; then ordered one through my local bike shop.

That was about two months ago. Trailmate isn’t exactly speedy, and I ordered a custom paint color (green), and they have to ship it out ground, in a huge box. It arrived yesterday!

I took off work early (if you know me, you’ll be amazed at this), and drove the Pinz out to pick it up. It fits me perfectly, and its one gear (the three-speed would have been too difficult to install, they tell me) was great for flat, a bit much for a steep uphill, but otherwise perfect. I circled around in the parking lot, spun out a few times (the hand-steering is very cool, but a bit to get used to), and took it home.

So I was showing off for my neighbors (not the parking problem neighbors, the other ones) who were sitting out having their afternoon beers – let them try it out. Then I got in and raced down the street and back a few times, and was coming back; spun out and rolled it! Damage to vehicle – a few plastic spokes broken (which may be fixable with the wondrous five-minute epoxy aka liquid duck tape). Damage to me – a little road rash on the hands (builds character!). So much for the stress testing!

I’m planning to take PVC, zip ties, and garbage bags, and make wings and a tail so it looks like a stingray, then if I can find it, EL wire so it’ll light up at night. More pictures to follow, of course!

I’m not bragging or anything, but I’ve now got about 20GB of MP3s (of CDs or records I actually own, or freely available material, in most cases!). I keep them all on my Mac which sits under my desk at work, set on “random play” which means I get to hear the Dead Kennedys, then Mozart, then the Pogues, then Charles Bukowski, then Gershwin… Short Attention Span Radio.

I’ve been looking longingly at the iPod; 10GB and Firewire is really great. 20, or 30, or removable/replaceable harddrive would be better. IP and OSX Lite and a little keyboard, would be better; it could even be a little bigger, that would be fine. Till then my (most excellent) iBook will have to make do (it helps that I use that for development of PHP and mySQL, and Quicken, and everything else, too!).

But I’d also like something to take my music with me to Burning Man; some sort of a waterproof boombox that could play MP3s. The Sony S2 looks pretty cool, and it’s only about $150; I have the previous non-MP3 version (CFD980) and it’s taken a lot of Fredabuse(tm). But the S2 only takes MP3 CDs. Why can’t they drop in a standard (replaceable) IDE hard drive, and throw an IP port on the back? Or at the very least, give it a line-in jack so I can plug in an iPod? I actually disassembled the yellow one and tried to figure out where I’d jack in external audio, but haven’t had the nerve to start cutting wires to test it!

I think there’s a market (of at least one!) for portable (not pocket-sized) MP3 players with off-the-shelf hard drives and a network interface. Playa-dust-proof, if you please, and by some company that has some design sense, like Sony or Apple.

In case you didn’t know, the most important part of my job is to prepare telephone bills for a small long-distance company (Cybertel). This means I spend most of my time manipulating data in databases, using either Perl or ASP or SQL (or occasionally Visual Basic).

Much of the data I have to deal with is dollar amounts – buy rate/sell rate of calls, payments and credits, total invoices, past due, commissions, etc. When you put information into a database, or in most programming languages, you must specify the data type. Is this particular piece of information going to be words? numbers? yes/no? And when you decide it’s going to be numbers, there are even more choices: INTEGER (“whole” numbers only: 2, 3000, -123; nothing to the right of the decimal point), FLOATING POINT (4, 4.1, -4.1234567, 5.64E-10 (scientific notation for .000000000564), FIXED (5.001, 3.222, -9.543 with a setting of 3 for decimal). There are actually a bunch more choices.

Well, obviously when you’re talking about dollars, you want x.yy – an integer plus two digits to the right of the decimal point. Four dollars and twenty cents is $4.20 not $4.2; and half of a quarter is 12 or 13 cents, not 12.5 cents. It doesn’t see anything wrong with telling me someone owes 1/3 of a dollar .33333333 unless I specifically tell it – and I have to explain how to DISPLAY as well as how to STORE the number (since this might be different).

Microsoft SQL, which we use for our primary database, has data types for INTEGER, FLOATING POINT, and even a special one called “MONEY”. Seems like that would be the one to choose, right? Actually, no – money STOREs FOUR digits of decimal; but DISPLAYs two digits!?!?! And the number of decimals stored for data type MONEY is not adjustable! So if a customer owes $4.21 (4.2100!) and I add a 10% late fee, the amount becomes $4.6310. And if I add up numbers with these wacky partial pennies I get bizarre results: .244 (“$0.24”) + .383 (“$0.38”) + .684 (“$0.68”) = 1.311 which might “display” as “$1.31” – which is just different enough from $1.30 to be annoying.

(By the way, this is commonly known as the “Superman” problem – because in one of the Superman movies, Richard Pryor was a programmer for a large company, who added up all the partial pennies left off from people’s salaries and added them to his own – and showed up at work the next day in a Ferarri.)

Why hasn’t Microsoft fixed this? As far as I can tell, this is the way it worked in Sybase which Microsoft bought, added pretty graphics to, and renamed SQL Server; and they haven’t bothered to fix it. And people like me aren’t willing to spend $500 on a support call to ask them to fix it, which they probably wouldn’t bother to do anyway. But I think next time I have to buy something from them I’d like to send tens of thousands of checks for $0.0049.

Perl, which I use for much of my bulk processing programming, is even worse (tho otherwise I love using perl!): it only knows “numeric” or “alpha”, so $1.456785 is fine (tho I can “sprintf” to display $1.46 if I want to but it still stores the entire number). To make matters worse, floating point numbers are stored in binary as integers plus calculated FRACTIONS!!! $4.20 is stored (hidden in binary) as 4 1/5. What this means is that if you add .70 + .15 you might get .84999999!

The solution? One of the data types I hadn’t considered, DECIMAL. DECIMAL lets me specify the number of digits to the right of the decimal. Unfortunately, unlike floating point, I also have to say how many digits to the left, too; so I have to guess what the largest number I might ever have is. Is it possible to have a $1000 phonecall? Maybe. Could a customer have amount due more than $100,000? I hope not, but it’s possible.

(The reason I’m ranting about this now is I’m waiting for my database to convert the cost of 5 million calls from MONEY to DECIMAL(10,2), and some of my bills last month were off by a penny – a tragedy of epic proportions!).

Don’t even get me started on NULL, because it’s 12:4 and time for lunch.

The music industry would like us to think that when we “buy” a CD, what we’re actually buying is a limited-use licence to listen to that particular music, conveniently packaged with a plastic disk containing the music. We’re allowed to make “backup” or personal use tapes or MP3s of the music (well, they’d really rather we didn’t, but since the technology to do it exists, and there’s that pesky backup/personal use clause in copyright law, it’s hard for them to stop us – but they’re trying) but we’re not allowed to play the music publically for profit, or make copies and give them away. Fine, this makes sense to me so far.

But what if that disk gets scratched or damaged by the sun? Or what if you own an LP and you’d like to convert it to a CD? Your only option currently is to repurchase the CD, or “steal” the MP3s. What if suddenly technology changes and music comes on a solid-state memory chip of some sort – you’re going to be asked to repurchase that. In my opinion, this is where the licencing argument breaks down. Failing some other certificate or licence, he damaged or old format plastic should be viewed as my “proof of purchase/proof of licence” showing that I indeed have rights to a single copy of said material – and if I need to replace the plastic it came on, I should be able to do that at any record store for a nominal price ($5 or less sounds appropriate to me for materials and labor and overhead). I’ve got a stack of LP albums, some of which I’d really prefer to have on CD (which I would then convert to MP3, of course, keeping the CD as a backup). The nice thing about downloaded (purchased) MP3s is you never have to do this (till that technology becomes obsolete); but by the same token they have to keep track (in a database) of who has what licences. By the same token, if a friend has an LP of a particular album, it should be perfectly legal to give that friend a copy of the MP3s (of the exact same album, of course) – because she is licenced for it, and it’s for her personal use.

The same arguments should be applied to books, magazines, newspapers, movies.

The source of the problem is of course the dichotomy of corporations wanting to maximize profits, versus people wanting something for nothing – and both capatalizing on the fact that this issue is unclear. I think the best solution (for the moment) is for someone to create a very simple legal media licence (backed up by more specific legalese if necessary) that explains what everyone’s rights are. Heck, make it retroactive! If you haven’t purchased (and have physical or electronic proof of) a licence for media, you aren’t allowed to have any copies of it, anywhere. If you HAVE purchased it, you are allowed to use it as specified, no more, no less.

Update (020614.1839) Even more absurd: now they want to charge a royalty on USED CDs! I say fine, as long as we get a full rebate for the royalty we paid on buying it new (nearly the entire price of the CD).

Instead, just make it clear that when you sell a CD you lose all right to using the music that was contained on the CD – since the CD _is_ the (manefestation of the) licence. Hey – that’s basically what happens now: the original buyer might get a few dollars for the CD for which they paid $15.

“If I had $1.00 for every one of these ideas…hmph, wait a minute…”

Last weekend was another “beach burn” gathering of San Diego Burning Man folx at South Shores boat ramp (near Sea World). This is a seldom-used beach area on the backside of the boat ramp parking lot, in a back corner of Mission Bay across from Fiesta Island (where the drunken louts and tweakers seem to hang out). We like the area because we can play drums and wear wierd costumes and burn effigies and noone seems to bother us much.

At about 2130 people were still arriving, and we were standing around the fire chatting, and the local LEOs (Law Enforcement Officers) showed up. “What kind of a party is this?”; none of us were sure what sort of answer they were looking for. One person had driven his truck out, to drop off firewood, speakers, and green blinkey lights; hadn’t made plans to drive back to the parking area so he got a ticket for parking on the beach; another person got a ticket for having a glass container (alcohol also isn’t legal on the beach in SD but they didn’t seem to hassle anyone about that). They didn’t seem to notice that several of us were wearing chef’s toques.

As they were walking off, the LEOs stumbled across a small cache of fireworks – not bottle rockets or m80s, but (apparently) actual small tube-launched “stars”. At previous gatherings there have been occasional displays of these; they seem to be done safely, by someone who knows what they’re doing, and though I guess we all know they’re illegal, they’re also very cool and the general ethos among the group is to ignore “victimless crimes”.

Not so with the San Diego PD however. Who reacted to the discovery by telling us that if the person who owned the fireworks didn’t come forward we’d all be cited (which they might have been able to do, but most likely would not have stood up in court). Strangely, no one came forward. So the LEOs confiscated the fireworks (the expected result).

As they were driving off, they came across the OTHER box of fireworks. This one somewhat larger and (apparently) prepared for an impressive time-performance presentation. This time the reaction from the PD was “We aren’t going to give out any tickets here, we just want whoever built this to come forward and defuse it or tell us if we have to call the bomb squad.” Several more police cars showed up. Strangely, no one came forward. At that point we all sort of gathered up our chairs and blankets and wandered off. The last of us to leave could overhear the police laughing and exclaiming how impressed they were with what they had found.

No one was there long enough to hear them say “Dude, they’re gone – let’s spark this up!”