Subsidies and Rhetoric

Why is it Amtrak is a subsidy and Interstates are an investment? They both seem like the same principle to me... too bad I already bought my season pass for the interstates, I think I might like trains.

Idiots around everywhere

And I thought the crazies only wanted me to help them get their 10,000,000 US DOLLARS OUT OF ZIMBABWE. PLEASE DISCREETLY SEND YOUR CHEQUEING INFORMATION VIA FAX TO OUR EMBASSY.

From Yahoo finance comments:

sledkane - Sunday, June 17, 2007, 3:24PM ET

mr wheelan you got it all wrong! america has most coal in the ground in the world! if you were to change coal to liquid fuel.america would have enough liquid fuel to last for 300 years. every new technology needs subsidy to get get off the ground! as for environmental ! you said coal is as bad as oil, your absolutling wrong!their are new technology out their now, to turn coal into liquid fuel in a very invironmemtal friendly to the earth! the new technology that can change coal to liquid fuel is very friendly towards the earth! this proven technology will be proven in 3 to 5 years! america have to come to terms! most of the countries in the world are anti america now!they are unfriendly towards america ! example chivas, iran ect.america must find a way to get its own resourse and energy! it has to come from the usa or friendly countries like canada ! america have the most coal in the world in their ground! and turning the coal into liquid fuel is very invironmental friendly to the earth!the technology have been proven already! one barrel of oil cost america $70 dollar a barrel! one barrel of coal to liquid fuel cost america under $20 dollar a barrel! that is a $50 dollar in saving for america! it is a win win situation for america and maybe the world! first it is environmental friendly towards the earth! and consumers win! and america wins !because america does not have to depend on the middle east or unfriendly countries as much as before for their oil or resourse! and most of all america don't have to send their soldiers oversea to unfriendly countries to get kill, because they are trying to protect their interest! it is a win win situation for america and the world! america happy because they got their oil, consumer are happy it is cheap under $20 dollar to produceand it create jobs in a america,!and world happy because it is environmeantal friendly for the earth! at the end mr wheelan coal to liquid is very good for america and the world! because at the end it makes a happier world for everyone that cares.

Did I say it was easy

Well, the disillusionment of my choices comes fast. I looked at Vanguard, and apparently there was a bit of confusion. Instead of transferring the funds as asked, they have held to get information, reasonable enough, and maybe required by law, but still an unexpected surprise. The information solely says "Awaiting Client Paperwork," which is rather silly since I gave them instructions and they should follow them. Clock is ticking.

Update... Oh, my faltering faith in companies desire for my money was ill founded. Accounts funded and ready.

I am ready for the first in Stephen Colbert's new segment, Better Know a Presidential Candidate Who Will Talk to Me. Ron Paul, whoo!

Carne Asada

The mere mention of Carne Asada makes my mouth water... good in tacos, good in burritos, good on a plato with rice, and good with just about whatever... Steak. It makes me sad I don't live in shady neighborhoods in San Diego where it was a staple, and I could eat for less than five dollars a fat meal. Never had to worry about money when takeout mexican was speedily served. How could one place raise their prices without suffering from the shop across the street. Ah, that there should be plenty of asada for all!

From Chicago and Beyond

Well, well, a guest blog spot brought to you from Chicago. It was a big weekend here, with Ribfest, Bluesfest, Andersonville Midsommarfest, Old Town Art Fair, and the Printers Row Book Fair. I didn't partake in any of the festivities, but instead, skirted my way around a couple of them instead of paying the $5 suggested donation to walk down the street. Instead, I checked out a potential new apartment (it seems that the people living there have not deemed me suitable to room with, as the ad was re-posted on Craigslist today), ate some delicious carne asada tacos from my favorite taqueria, had some German beer in Lincoln Square, and at at the first certified organic pizzeria in Chicago that opened up here a couple of weeks ago. It was definitely worth the 40 minute bus ride, and a pizza is the perfect size for one person. Plus, they top most of them with fresh veggies, so it makes you feel like you're eating healthy.

Next weekend, Dan and Beth come for a visit, and it is something that I've been looking forward to for a while now. I'm hoping the weather keeps up to foster some outdoors activities. And this time, there will be no debutante balls to drag them to, where they will have to listen to loud music, drink beer, and do shots of Irish whiskey. Maybe tacos will be involved, maybe a Viking breakfast or two, maybe some organic pizzas.

Now why can't I blog in my own blog???

Edited about five minutes later: Turns out the girls did like me, and have offered up the vacant room in their place for me. I am very happy and excited about this!

Rain and Sun

I woke up pretty late today (it is Sunday), and just as I got up, a huge blast of wind and rain came falling out of the west. It was loud... and unpleasant. I went to Lowes to pick up more paint, and it started to rain when I got back, just a small drizzle.

Invited contributors

As if having the meaningless details of my life here, I have sent invitations to contribute to Beth and Buzz, since I think they are the only ones reading, why not let them leave more than comments. I don't expect much interest.

Maybe changing the dynamic will give me some discipline.

I didn't care enough about the burritos

I guess it shows how little I think about food, as the 2 entry site last updated Jun 06 has gone away. Nobody really cared what I ate at Que Bueno in Denver anyway, least of all me. Plus a dry spell of time in Canada and there was nothing to say. I am, as always, open to new burritos, or old burritos any day of the week.

Oddly, however, I can track all the qdoba orders I've ever made at the Qdoba webpage. It's a little strange to see exactly how many times I got a side of chips and guacamole. Well, they owe me a free burrito someday.

Angle of Repose

Beth is always questioning why I don't read anything written more recently than the age of trains... it is a little silly of me to keep reading stories about middle class girls struggling to elevate themselves through love into the upper class. Either the Becky Sharps who do this callously and suffer accoridingly, or the milk maids and governesses whose true loves find them, or the failures of dames like Moll Flanders. I took up reading 18th and 19th century English novels in 2004, on a whim, for the same reason I started to read philosophy at 17. Why read about literature when you can read it. Why settle for analysis when you can take straight from the source. Maybe my opinions of the things I read are less startling than some you may have gotten in college, but I tend to think that an honest opinion; Beth's "Moll Flanders was a whore!" is as clean as anything I'm likely to get from the preface written by some PhD making a name for himself. I quote RT Jones from the recent Wordsworth Edition (bought for a dinar and an half in a Supermarket in Bahrain) "... and in the account of the young Moll's seduction by the power of gold there is a nice contrast between two points of view presented simultaneously: that of the old Moll, who sees in retrospect how she could easily have got a higher price for her favours, and that of the remembered young Moll, for whom the money is valued mainly because it is a thrilling expression of the young man's passion." Surely anybody who read this also had the same thoughts, and laughed at what are very funny moments when the sinners biggest remorse is that she didn't sin well enough.
So tonight I finished Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. Everyone can be proud, here's a man who died in recent memory, writing a novel set in 1970. I was shaking in the last chapter when he is being disrobed by an all too nubile young hippie coed and he is shamed. I was crying when I listened to him scold his wife and admit the traumatically cold facts of his families history. I took it on a recommendation from a local public radio program about 8 months ago, as one of the best books ever written. It's a wonderful book for me, a story of moving out west, dragging a lonely wife along to pursue a dream that will scorn you your whole life, and being cheated by people you are forced to work with to get what you need. There is trust, and distrust, and death, and a beautiful and familiar landscape. The cottage where the character is residing is just outside Nevada City. I went there once, to a church where the basement had no walls, and I opened a door to a dirt slope. It's far and near at the same time. Where can you go that doesn't have Subway and Motel 6? Nowhere that has an exit from the freeway. I am completely satisfied by it, and would thrust it into the hands of anyone I thought might read it to the end.
I read a lot, and I wouldn't normally expect anyone to do the same, dragging their heels through the garbage I choose for myself. I think I would buy anyone a copy of Angle of Repose who could genuinely be expected to profit from it. I hope I did.
So I've moved on, my bookmark is making its way now through Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. The use of allegorical names is one of my favorites. I learned about this struggling through Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and had it reenforced as a dramatic device through a composition class in 2002. Now I try and spot as many possible ways this is used, and its an incredibly common trick. I guess my last English teacher was right, the only advantage to being well read is getting all the inside jokes. When your so well read, you call those allusions.
So, maybe a seed will be planted, and grow into a tree, and I will pay someone to have chopped down that tree and stained it with ink, in a series of marks telling a story. Or maybe necessity will plant its own needs, and the terribly gravity of a body like Dickens will pull me in like a candle ensares a moth.

Front of Garage

Front of Garage, originally uploaded by djuber.

This part doesn't look so very bad now.

Side of Garage

Side of Garage, originally uploaded by djuber.

Getting there... also you can clearly see the rain falling, and the wet awning.

Corner from the porch

Corner from the porch, originally uploaded by djuber.

Painting in the rain, ran out of paint after two sides...

Stubborn and Sodden

Painted anyway. Garage is 2/3 done with first coat. Ran out of paint. Next trip is 3 gallons of yellow.

Rainy Days in Puget Sound

O, Fortune, what offering have I failed to make? Last weekend there was a string of 80 degree days and sunshine uninterupted, the weekend before that another perfect string of sunshine for our outing in Vancouver. I finally arrange for my father to come down to help spray a coat of paint on the house and it start raining, somewhat harder than normal, shortly after 830 this morning. The lady at starbucks asked what fun things I had planned for the weekend, and asked that it not rain for me... did she make out too well in the tip jar, and her balance of luck skewed me wrong? Did my failure to tip in exchange for 20 seconds of banter offend you so? Fortune gives, fortune takes away! Cruel, cruel fate!

Dissapointment and Renewed Hope

Well, I cashed out my Roth IRA from ING Direct (high fees, low performance, not using the convenience it afforded). I had intended to open an account with T Rowe Price, since I have had mutual fund and brokerage accounts with them in the past, and my 401K is there, I thought I might get more mileage out of online analysis tools if all the money was under one management... but unfortunately, both the IRA account application and IRA Brokerage account applications did not comfortably fit my situations (I took a distribution thinking it would actually be easier to send a check and justify it later to the IRS). It seems Price spends a great deal of time thinking about how they'll get your 401K dollars when you switch jobs, since most people do that often. They would take assets from an existing IRA, or try and start a rollover IRA (none of these were what I wanted to do), or they'll let you make an initial annual contribution (I don't want to make a 2007 contribution! I want to credit my prior year contributions). Well, I fished around, since calling them seemed like a bother (yes, this is me explaining how someone lost my business due to a poorly thought out application), and Vanguard had me set up in five minutes... didn't even ask for Beth's SSN. That's convenient, just check the 'give my wife all my money, since she'll get it through the courts anyway' box, and away we go. When I got to what I started expecting to be an awkward explanatory page, there was a check box for "Money from an existing Roth IRA", with no contribution limits... great!
Plus no fees if you sign up for paperless statements (ING only mailed prospectuses and tax info), and the sweet life is mine. So I just grabbed a few mutual funds, spread the money in the least defensible way, and clicked agree. That really was too easy.

This is reminiscent of the terrible time I had trying to figure out how to get my Federal TSP account into an IRA... I have since come to my senses and realised that there probably isn't a better place for my money, I can expect to be charged less than 0.25 percent and can shuffle between options on a daily basis with no penalty. That and it takes 15 notaries to get your money out. Try to add a beneficiary, it takes two witnesses to sign, neither can be a beneficiary. This is what happens when the federal government gets their fingers on something. Hello privatised social security! Look at all the control we'll have. More like subsidised mutual fund companies... but anything beats having contributions taken out of my earnings every year, with no accounting for where it goes after that.
I would be comfortable with a bankrupt social security if thats what it was. That this ponzi scheme lasted longer than one lifespan (that the first generation born under it will die under it) was only made possible by the Reagan era rebalancing. If the system were made voluntary, who would volunteer? If the system were made private, who would be better off. If the system were abolished, who would feed the old people, who are off in palm springs, playing golf? Forgive me for painting a rosy picture of retirement, most people aren't wealthy when they work, or when the retire, and some don't get to play golf at all. I think that comfortable and affluent retirees, like comfortable and affluent boomers, and comfortable and affluent late twenties fashion magazine editors in the big city, are a Hollywood commodity. They seem more common than they are because they're shown so often. Yes, I have been to orange county, and there are smelly people on the buses there, too. Not everybody has crazy hijinx outside the banana stand. And plenty of old people are alone, lonely, sick, and getting gradual poorer as inflation eats away their fixed incomes. Actually, I know plenty of twenty somethings with the same problems.

In N Out Burger

I ate lunch at in-n-out in Millbrae this afternoon... I opted for the double double animal style; I like the onions raw instead.

New Photos Up

Posted some photos on Stanley Park trip last weekend. See them here

Incovenient Truths about filesharing

from an arstechnica article 10 inconvenient truths

1. Pirate Bay, one of the flagships of the anti-copyright movement, makes thousands of euros from advertising on its site, while maintaining its anti-establishment "free music" rhetoric.

2. AllOfMP3.com, the well-known Russian web site, has not been licensed by a single IFPI member, has been disowned by right holder groups worldwide and is facing criminal proceedings in Russia.

3. Organized criminal gangs and even terrorist groups use the sale of counterfeit CDs to raise revenue and launder money.

4. Illegal file-sharers don’t care whether the copyright-infringing work they distribute is from a major or independent label.

5. Reduced revenues for record companies mean less money available to take a risk on "underground" artists and more inclination to invest in "bankers" like American Idol stars.

6. ISPs often advertise music as a benefit of signing up to their service, but facilitate the illegal swapping on copyright infringing music on a grand scale.

7. The anti-copyright movement does not create jobs, exports, tax revenues and economic growth–it largely consists of people pontificating on a commercial world about which they know little.

8. Piracy is not caused by poverty. Professor Zhang of Nanjing University found the Chinese citizens who bought pirate products were mainly middle- or higher-income earners.

9. Most people know it is wrong to file-share copyright infringing material but won't stop till the law makes them, according to a recent study by the Australian anti-piracy group MIPI.

10. P2P networks are not hotbeds for discovering new music. It is popular music that is illegally file-shared most frequently.

Lindsay sent photos from Brussels...

And now I'm getting a bit jealous. I need to find something better to do than look at other peoples lives.

The hole is to patch a smashed sewer line from the garage... but where is it... how far should I go left or right. How long until I have a ridiculously long trench in my yard.

And then what? Do I cut in and replace a section. Do I really want to cut in?!

Spring

Ah, yes, Spring... Time for smelling the roses, and digging holes!

This can't be that interesting

I wonder if I could come up with a flag to alert potential readers to what might be of any interest... sort of a < content="interesting" > tag.

This of course would involve me being able to identify what that was ahead of time. Well, here's something then.

I am going to Nashville on the 11th, flying back to Seattle, turning around a few hours later and flying to Chicago (previous itinerary via ATL), and spending the weekend in Chicago. I then will be flying directly from Chicago to Nashville on Tuesday the 19th, and returning to Chicago on Friday the 22nd. From there Beth and I will drive cross country to Seattle, completing my transcontinental ping pong rally! At least I didn't end up passing through Texas (orignal plans had me going from Chicago to Seattle via Houston, then back to Nashville via Denver!)

html worked

looking at the list items, that seems to be fine. I wonder why the text under the list didn't realign... probably something I am not aware of influencing things.

Found it, I tried to close a UL tag with a /OL closer. That won't work... using the Dashboard in blogger it identified the error and refused it! Go error checking!

Back in Blogger... apparently the tool I am using doesn't actually set the title, but it does have a top line, that looks suspiciously like a title bar. Shame.

No email status?

I just tried this once, and two things I notices were:

• The title was not bold
• I didn't receive an email confirmation

This is strange in so many ways, but not the end of the world. I am now testing html tags in the text field.

From the top of the desktop

I am writing this from the blog tool in gnome. Now there can be plenty of spontaneous nothing here! Just when I thought I might need to think out clearly what I was going to post!

I won't be inconvenienced.

This is a nice article I just read on Salon about Pelosi's pilgrimage to our far northern neighbor, Greenland. Apparently, the House Speaker is the highest ranking official in our government to have ever visited Greenland. Wow, Greenland... I hear they got their independence recently because the Danes forgot it was a territory of theirs. Now that's a revolution.
Quoted from the article:

How did this happen? Pelosi says "that the American people are way ahead of all of us in Washington, D.C. -- the Congress, the White House and the rest. They know that we need a serious initiative and a serious commitment to making the change that is necessary." I'm not entirely sure that's true. The American people also want cheap gas. More than anything else, the American people don't want to be inconvenienced. But one thing's indisputable, American politicians are now convinced that voters take climate change seriously, enough so that passing a cap-and-trade bill on carbon emissions is seen as strategically advisable.

Chronology

What does time have to do with this? How can you make a clean narrative that reads backward in time? What can I say today that measures against anything I have said in the past? How much filtering is appropriate to ensure that only the right amount is written, and that a single idea is expressed, or many ideas with a theme less broad than that they occur to me?

What kind of dedication or curiosity is needed for someone to read, let alone try to understand, what is recorded here. I think I want to try to track what I read, maybe some of what I see, and a bit of what I think. Is it a selfish whim? A compulsive self-involvement...

I mowed the lawn today. Beth is gone, so I needed to witness the short grass myself. It's one of her special pleasures, or at least something I can give her, if it's mundane.

I started to dig a hole in the yard to get at a sewer pipe that has some issues... I don't see the problem, and am torn between continuing to dig, or to start cutting and look inside... neither sounds too good.

On the Beach

Watching 'On the Beach'. It's shocking how few Australians had accents in the 60's, maybe there was a softening on account of the war. The creepy 'Waltzing Matilda' score is a bit trying sometimes to handle. It's a shame, since I like the song enough.

Gregory Peck... ah, reminds me of Roman Holiday...