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Posts published by “centaur”

One more followup on the Time Capsule

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So back in June I purchased a Time Capsule from Apple, a one-terabyte wireless hard drive.  It's supposed to make backups painless, happening in the background over the network.   Initially I had a lot of trouble getting it to work with my wireless network, having to hard-reset it so many times I eventually recommended "don't buy it".  Sometime in September Apple updated the firmware, and I recommended that it was worth trying out.


I didn't follow up with any further recommendations because for a while, it just stopped working again.  Well, this time it was not the Time Capsule's fault: the wireless network it was connected to was having difficulties.  These were orthogonal to the earlier problems, in which the Time Capsule couldn't even see the network no matter what I did; this time, after restarting the wireless router, the Time Capsule has been working swimmingly.


So, really, now you can get yourself a Time Capsule.  Seriously.  It's already saved my butt more than once, having files backed up every hour that my laptop is on my home network; I've already used the Time Capsule to recover earlier versions of a variety of files, rather than recreate them.  (I am obsessive-compulsive about saving many versions of a file, but having it happen automatically is even better than me manually having to remember to save a file with a new version number hanging off the back end - not that I've stopped doing that.)


-the Centaur


Political Diary: The Bailout

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So the bailout of the financial system passed this week.  And I breathed a sigh of relief, sort of, and wondered what I would have done if that was my decision to make.  I'm torn by two conflicting feelings: first, that we cannot afford to let the financial system collapse, and second, that we cannot afford to throw good money after bad.


Sometimes, of course, we have to let things die.  But the overall financial system is not one of them.  Financial instability is a vicious cycle: once the system becomes unstable, investors become afraid to invest money, making it hard for people and businesses to get money, causing more failures and instability.  Put another way, Main Street depends on the jobs provided by businesses that depend on Wall Street's ability to lend money.


As I understand it, currently many businesses large and small depend on short-term loans for everything from operating capital to pay for stock in their warehouses to emergency funds to pay for the roof busted in last month's storm.  They get this money from banks, who in turn get that money from you and me; they pay these loans back with interest, which the banks shave off as their cut before paying you and me our interest.


But banks right now are afraid to lend money, because so many banks, funds and businesses have recently collapsed.  On paper, the banks have enough assets to loan out, just the same way as the average American with a decent-priced home has enough assets to buy a Lamborghini.  However, most Americans can't buy a Lamborghini at the drop of a hat, even if they wanted to, because their wealth is tied up in longterm IRAs or CDs or in stocks which have dropped or homes with heavy mortgages.  SO on paper you have the money to spend on a midlife crisismobile, but in practice you don't.


 The technical term for this is illiquidity, which is just a fancy way of saying that have wealth on paper, but can't turn it into money without incurring terrible losses.  A lot of banks are in precisely this situation: they want to loan money to a potential new homeowner or to a businessman trying to repair his roof, but their money is all tied up in investments they can't move without losing big --- in this case, mortgage-backed securities.


These "mortgage backed securities" arose because over the past several years housing prices were going up and up, and the government encouraged banks to make loans to people who traditionally were at higher risk than normal.  These so-called subprime mortgages were packaged up into "investment vehicles" and "sold off"  --- essentially meaning the banks that made the loans sold the rights to the interest that the mortgages would make to other people.  That was a good deal while the economy was great because people were paying their mortgages or trading up to better homes.  Then the economy started to stall and the housing bubble burst ... and suddenly people aren't making those payments.


This led to a "liquidity crisis" which is just another big fancy word for "runs on the banks".  Perfectly good banks with great track records and billions of dollars on their books that hit a few rocky patches suddenly saw their money dry up in a number of weeks, leaving them with large short-term debts which in theory they could easily pay off ... except they couldn't move their mortage-backed securities.  One bank failed after the other and in the end banks got afraid to loan money to anyone.


So the point of the bailout: those mortgage backed securities are not actually worthless.  If the economy gets back on its feet (which, eventually, it almost certainly will) and home prices start to rise again (which, eventually, they almost certainly will), some huge percentage of those securities will pay off.  It's just a long waiting game, a game which banks can't play because they're constantly lending and spending, but which the government can play, because of its deeper pocketbooks and constant source of real income from taxpayers.   So the theory behind the bailout is, the government will buy those illiquid securities, allowing Wall Street to start lending money again, so business owners can stay in business, and Main Street can keep its jobs.


Which goes to my second concern, throwing good money after bad.  Our civilization has experienced Dark Ages.  Our country has experienced a Great Depression.  What if we go through ten or twenty years of economic depression, and most of those mortgage backed securities are essentially worthless?  That's over two thousand dollars out of the pocket of every taxpayer, another $700B on top of our $10T debt.  Or, worse, what if the problems in our economic system are more systemic, and other banks are about to fail for other reasons?  We might need that $700B for something else.


So, as I understand it, the bailout is needed.  But, as I understand it, the bailout is risky.  So what would I do if I was in charge?  Well, here are a few rough ideas:



  • First, go before the American people, and explain in clear terms what we are doing.  Main Street's jobs depend on Wall Street's ability to lend money to businesses, but that's crippled right now because Wall Street tied up a lot of money in mortgages Main Street is having trouble repaying in this weak economy after the housing bubble burst.  If the government takes over those loans, banks can start lending money again to keep business doors open and paychecks flowing, ultimately paying off those loans so that the government (and the taxpayer) is paid off for its investment.

  • Second, demand oversight and accountability.  This is seven hundred billion dollars we're talking about here.  That's a year and a half's worth of defense spending, or almost enough to pay for the fireworks at the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics.  The original version of this plan gave massive powers to Treasury Secretary Paulson and made his actions immune to court challenge.  That's a non-starter --- we understand the need for swift action, but it should be open, transparent, and if necessary subject to legal challenges.

  • Third, demand foresight and forebearance.  A necessary step in this process is to not just review the needs of the banks with mortgage backed securities, but to look at the health of the entire financial industry and to make sure there are no other trees that are rotted to the core and about to fall down.  If other big problems are discovered, Secretary Paulson should have the authority to delay or defer spending that money and should go back to Congress if need be to ensure he has the right to apply this money where needed.

  • Fourth, think outside the box.  Could this money be applied in other ways?  Could we take $70B of the $700B and use it to help homeowners who face foreclosures?   I understand that homeowners taking on responsibilities they weren't prepared to handle helped cause this, but the banks are also to blame for lending the money.  If we make it possible for the homeowners to pay off the banks ... how does that hurt the banks? 


Some people have decried the culture of greed and called to make sure that none of this money goes into CEO's parachutes.  I empathize with that but ultimately don't understand it.  The problem here wasn't greed --- it was risk.  We want people to be "greedy" in the sense we want them to take actions that benefit themselves --- to make a profit, in short.  But in business you have what's called a "fiduciary duty" to make sound decisions for your shareholders.  Some of the people who are involved in this really fucked up --- be they homeowners who got too big for their britches or CEOs who chomped one too many expensive cigars.  But many other people played by the rules and then got caug ht by extraordinary circumstances.


Like a response to a hurricane, we need to come in and help the survivors without recriminations --- and then make sure that when it is time to rebuild we don't encourage people to put themselves at risk.


Frost Moon Submitted

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Friday afternoon I finished revising Frost Moon, and Friday evening I submitted it to a publisher.

Frost Moon was my 2007 Nanowrimo entry and is my second completed novel. 9 beta readers helped me out: Sandi, Barbara, Wally, Fred, Diane, Gayle, Mel, Liza and Keiko; sorry to everyone who didn't get a copy but if you don't really bug me about it I'll forget.

The final document that went out was the 42nd revision with a word count of 87737.

Cross your fingers!
-the Centaur

Happy Anniversary

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2 years married, 6 years together. Would have posted something yesterday, but we were busy.

OMG: LOLcats can has upgrade

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cat

Wow. Tigers are more impressive than they appear on the pictures on my current calendar. I want this as a poster on my wall.

-the Centaur

The Housing Market: AKA Apollo 13

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I'm not in the market to sell my home, but thanks to the site Zillow I have a rough gauge of how my home is doing on the market. In the first year that I owned my home, I have reason to believe it appreciated between 1% and 2% of its value. More recently ... that's started to change for the worst.

Two months ago, according to Zillow's "zestimate", it had dropped 2% of its value.

Two days ago, it had dropped 10% of its value.

Today, it has dropped an additional 1% of its value.

Fun fun fun! I see "not moving anytime soon" in my immediate (and not-so-immediate) future.

-the Centaur

Ok, So NOW You Can Buy a Time Capsule

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Apple updated the drivers on the Time Capsule, and for the past ~month it has done a good job of backing up my Mac. I was waiting to tell you guys because previously if you looked at the Time Capsue funny it broke down. But it survived the acid test: I went on a trip to Atlanta, and when I came back the backups resumed with no hiccups.

It still took me a whole evening's worth of work to get it running, but it is running. So you can go get one now, if you have a Mac and want trouble-free backups happening without you even having to think about it.

-The Centaur

P.S. In the first version of this post I called it a "Time Machine" ... that's actually the backup/restore software that writes to the Time Capsule. My bad.

Do Not Buy A Time Capsule

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I have invested immense amounts of efforts trying to get the wireless functions of this thing to work and as far as networking goes it is a 1TB brick I have to tether my laptop to in order to back things up, which precisely defeats the features I bought it for as opposed to some cheaper hard external disk solution.  Meh.

Initial Reactions…

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MacLife magazine for July 2008 has an article on "The 30 Best Mac Apps You've Never Heard Of".  Out of these, three really stood out:



  • Witch corrects Mac OS X's crappy alt-tab behavior.  Thank the Good Lord!

  • Celtx so far looks like a fantastic scriptwriting app for comics and video and it's totally crossplatform.  Yum.

  • Twitterific is a neat way to quickly send Twitters and to visualize your friend's Twitters using Growl ... but it somehow blew me past 70 requests to Twitter just after I turned it on.  Not boding well, but this may be a startup issue thing.  Doesn't appear to have broken posting to Twitter, just the reading of what's posted via itself. Hm...


More news as I know how well these work...
-the Centaur


The plan for June…

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... dig up all the draft posts I never finished, and do one of:
  • Finish and publish them
  • Abandon and delete them
  • Decide they need further work
Up so far: deleted a post which was an early draft of "He Has No Idea", and refurbished (as best I could, three years later) for publication a draft post on "I Hope No-One Closes Off the Internet". Enjoy.

-Anthony

Oh hai … I can has writing novels now?

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... we're over 30 posts in a month now.  Mission accomplished, and without even using fake fill-me-up posts like this one.

There are a few topics left, but they can wait till June.

I can has novel writing now?
-the Centaur


For the time being…

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... we're going back to the setting that makes Qumana put in extra line breaks.

Because if I leave that setting on, apparently Blogger reformats all of my old articles, removing the line breaks.

Not good enough.  Not good enough at all.  It's easier to fix the twenty or so Qumana articles and to use shift-breaks in future to accomplish my will than reformat all 200 previous entries in my blog, so Blogger wins.


Me too me too

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So my buddy Gordon has beat me to the punch (yet again) by finding the site FaceStat, which does wisdom-of-the-crowds rating of pictures.  His came out pretty good; I used one of my favorite pictures of myself, which turned out ... not so much.


tailless lizard


Ok, so I already knew my beloved missing cat is more attractive than me.  But did the crowds in their infinite wisdom have to put down "repulsive" for my level of attractiveness?  Sure, maybe they're referring to the prominent surgery scar on my arm.  But that doesn't explain why the crowds thought I was "definitely not to be trusted."


Stupid crowds.  I didn't want your wisdom anyway.


-the Centaur


Just a little bit more than you want to…

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In my life, I've often found it necessary to work hard to get what I want.  (Whether this is the right thing to do is another matter).  But how much is too much, and how much is enough?


Sometimes I've been in startup and crunch mode where I had to work weeks or months on end, sometimes to good end, sometimes not.  Once I even worked thirty-six hours straight when a surprise bug forced a rearchitecture of a key software component - but the work was clear to do, the results easy to test, and the deadline ultimately easy to meet.  But you can't do that all the time, and from time to time I've had to look at what I'm doing and dial it back.  I find if you're not working so you spend most of the time ready and refreshed, you don't have the jazz to go to crunch mode if you have to.


Other times I've had so much going on - recuperation from illness, moves, life issues - that I've had to look at my work and say: hey, buddy, you need to do more.  I've never had a boss tell me that that I can recall; I try hard to figure out when to tell that to myself.  In the end, I want my employer to feel like they're getting their dollar's worth, so they keep on giving me the dollars; and I don't want or need supervision in order to do that, I want my employer to get that level of performance for free.


But if you feel like you need to get more done, how do you do it?  Go to crunch mode?  And if you're in perpetual crunch mode, are you trapped there?  Is there really no way out?


No, and no.  In my experience, when things are going well at work --- when it's not an actual emergency --- you need to put out just a little more effort than you want to to really get things done  That's it.  Not a huge amount; not crunch mode, not ten hours a day.  Actually not much at all.  It might take you an hour - even just a few minutes - to:



  • Drop in on your boss and give him a status update, or get one on something pending

  • Take the time to compose that email to your co-worker summarizing the meeting he coudn't make

  • Re-run the unit tests, and identify the bug you're going to start on tomorrow morning

  • Package up that small changelist and send it to your coworker for review

  • Go visit that collaborator you haven't heard from in a while and find out how he's doing

  • Write your Monday morning report ... Friday afternoon


If I take on a big task at the end of the day, I end up tired and drained and go home late, often defeated.  You can actually create for yourself a perpetual crunch by wearing yourself out so much you make mistakes!  If on the other hand --- right when I'm tired and worn out and want to call an early end to my day --- I instead hunt around for the small tasks, the little things I need to do but have been putting off, I find I can do two or three of them.  Or maybe one, small, self-contained programming task.  It usually takes between an hour or two to nail all of these things that I can.


The result? I feel energized, rejuvenated.  Instead of leaving tired after seven hours feeling like a slacker, or defeated after ten hours feeling like a loser, I go out on a high note after eight to nine hours feeling like a winner.  When you do this, you realize that no, there really isn't anything more you can do in the day, and that all the little grease-the-wheel tasks you just did just made your tomorrow clearer, cleaner and brighter.  In fact, often those little tasks are much more useful to your work and everyone else's  than if you started some "big task" that you wore yourself out on not making progress that you'd have to practically restart, exhausted in the morning.  You become more responsive, more effective, and get more done.


All it takes is to realize:



I don't want to work any more today, but if I do just a little bit more, I won't have to work any more today.



Or maybe this should be phrased, do some more of the little bits.  This strategy works far better than when I'd club myself in the head at the end of the day with big tasks so I could feel like I was "getting things done".  Now, I am getting things done - leaving work today, for example, with eight former "Next Actions" now tossed over the cube wall to co-workers and comfortably sitting in the "Wait For" state, and two more sitting even more comfortably in "Done" --- and knowing I can come in to work Monday morning not worrying about my weekly report, all those emails or anything else; just the two or three big tasks on my plate, the way for which I cleared before I left today.


This isn't how Dad did it, but it has been working out pretty well so far.  I'll keep you posted on how it goes in the future.


-the Centaur


So by my math…

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... I've done 29 posts in 30 days, so I have a little catching up to do to meet my post-a-day-in-May goal. But actually I have the following options:
  • Work hard to finish the articles I haven't written yet
  • Write a few short lame posts to finish out the month
  • Leave the month unfinished as a way of motivating me to do future blog posts
  • Recognize that I have many more important things I'd rather do, like writing novels
  • Bail on the goal on the grounds my wrists are hurting, which they are.
Or I could write a short self-referential post that actually counts towards my total while not killing my wrists or taking too much time from my novel-writing.

Hmm ... tempting.

-the Centaur

A lot of my friends are already on Twitter…

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... and apparently use it regularly.

I got my first a computer when I was ten years old (and had actually done some programming before that). When did I turn into such a Luddite?

Oh yeah, that's right ... I went to grad school. :-P

-the Centaur

Aftermath…

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One consequence of finishing a paper is that there's a bit of debris left over...


the piles


Fortunately, now that my library is more organized, it's easier to reshelve:


the mess


No, seriously! Take a look:


the categories


I wuv my library. It feeds my ego. Or do I mean my head? Or both...


-the Centaur


I want to say something snarky about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull…

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... but I'm not.  I really respect what Messrs. Ford, Spielberg and Lucas pulled off and I really enjoyed it, so I shouldn't say anything bad.  And as a couple of friends pointed out, they worked hard to make the movie accurate: they used the 48-star flag as was flying over America at the time of the movie; they used period-appropriate villains (Communists) and monsters (aliens) and I've even heard that they used shots more typical of a 50's B-movie.


But...


A friend who hates a lot of modern movies described the 48-star flag bit as "the only good thing in the film, if it can be called that."  A lot of us made fun of him saying, of course he'll hate the movie ... but when The Last Crusade came out, he hated that movie right away, whereas I was lulled into enjoying it for at least 15 minutes - and that movie has aged very badly (more like milk than cheese, no offense to Messrs. Ford, Spielberg and Lucas).


On some fundamental level, I can take Raiders of the Lost Ark seriously ... and the rest of the movies, I can't.  And I don't think it's just "saw it when I was young" or any such nonsense ... I will argue that the on-call troupe of swinging monkeys that appear in Crystal Skull are somehow goofier than anything that showed up in Raiders, and that cheapened the movie without aiding it.   In fact Crystal Skull has oodles of the same X-marks-the-spot goofiness that makes Last Crusade so embarrassing to watch.


But at least it was a *pretty* movie and was nowhere near as astonishingly gawdawfully craptacular as the Temple of Dumb. And I had a lot of fun, and there are scenes in it which I will probably remember for the rest of my life, particularly the "this is how they should have done it in the Mummy Returns" ending.

But, I recall the snark I made before seeing Kingdom: "Wouldn't it be nice if they made another Indiana Jones movie? Cause they haven't made one yet." At this point, I tend to think, yes, at this point they have now indeed made a second Indiana Jones movie, and I'm glad. Maybe 15 minutes from now, I will go over to my buddy's side and think they still haven't.

Or maybe not. After all, I'm the guy who saw Phantom Menace 10 times in the theater, so what do I know from bad?
-the Centaur


I’ve got 2 hours …

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... so do I blog or work on my next novel?


Sorry guys.  Work calls.


-the Centaur