02-08-10 - The Early Shift

I've been falling off the early shift wagon a little bit. I just can't figure out how to fucking LIVE !? In theory the early shift is pretty sweet. You get home by 3:30 or 4:00 so you have time to run around and exercise in the sun before dinner. The office is nice and quiet when you get in so you can focus.

The biggest win of the early shift is that traffic is so *reliably* non-existant. People often suggest shifting late as if that's equivalent to shifting early. It's not even close. The thing is, traffic problems are not of instantaneous duration. An accident during rush hour (or a bridge opening or whatever) will cause lingering traffic for *hours* afterward. That means when you shift late, you either have to shift *really* late, or you have to have a pretty high probability of at least moderate traffic.

The traffic density ramps up very fast in the morning, reaches peak in 7-8 and then bleeds off very slowly. (The best data I've found is UW HOV study ; click the green boxes to download PDF's or go straight to Congestion Frequency ). Congestion before 7 AM is reliably near zero. Then it trails off gradually.

To shift late to really avoid traffic you have to shift to 11:00 - 7:00 , and even then you're going to be hitting way way more traffic than you would at 7:00 - 3:00 ; something like an accident on the 520 can easily make traffic bleed way past 7:00.

So, shifting early is awesome. No, not really. It means you have to go to sleep by 10 or so, eat dinner at 6-7, so you never get to see friends at night. If you do stay up late one time, it completely fucks you up.

The worst thing is that my body clock just doesn't want to adjust even with about 2 weeks of pretty steady early schedule. I wake up and I'm just exhausted, I'm yawning all day. I don't feel hungry at the early-shifted meal times, but if I don't eat I get woozy. So I'm just a bit miserable all the time.

I don't know how to live!!

02-08-10 - Mike McGinn

I just heard a long interview on the radio with our mayor Mike McGinn (done by the hated Steve Scher). Wow, I'm impressed. He was very smart, direct, he listened to callers and turned their retarded emotional questions into rational interesting answers. A few things he said that I think were really cool :

He said Seattle is in a huge budget crisis. Obviously we have to find new revenue sources and also cut services. He generally didn't try to dodge or candy-coat the issue or make any stupid pledges to not cut this or not cut that the way most politicians do. One thing he said that was particularly good was that we need to find a long term sustainable budget balance where intake equals expenditure, as opposed to continuing the one-off tricks to make the budget work this year without thinking about the future (our previous government has done things like freeze hiring and freeze purchases of new buses - these things only push maintenance cost into the future).

He talked a bit about the whole viaduct broohaha. I actually didn't know that a big part of the problems it that the Seattle seawall has been deemed unsafe; engineers say it has a 10% chance of failure in the next 10 years, and in a big storm we could have a huge disaster like situation in the waterfront low areas. McGinn says the top priority is the replacement of the seawall whether we do a tunnel or not, so I think that's cool. He also said his vision for a non-tunnel alaskan way is a lot like what SF did with the embarcadero - just turn it into a regular street, and use the savings for public transit and improving I-5 as well.

They talked about the 520 bridge project a bit also. McGinn wants to have no HOV lanes on the new bridge and instead have light rail. Whether you agree with that or not (I do), his reasoning is just very mature and very sensible. 1. The reality is that HOV is not used as much as it needs to be to make sense as a dedicated lane, and buses can share the light rail lane. 2. we need to provide a means of transit for the poor in our increasingly 3rd-world country, and 3. this bridge will have to last 75 years, so let's think about the city we are building for the long term future.

However, before we get too excited, let us remember that McGinn has very very little power, the Seattle mayor is a weak executive; all the decisions will be made by the city council, and most of them have to be ratified by the state legislature and possibly the king county council as well. It's a huge beaurocratic mess of cross-organizational committees.

In these situations I wish we could just vote McGinn to be temporary dictator and let him fix our fucking mess without all the retarded interference from petty lawmakers protecting their pet interests.

02-08-10 - Happy Jobs

The standard trite advice for youngsters considering various jobs is "do what you love" and "follow your passion" and "forget the naysayers and the people who want you to be practical".

What a load of poppycock.

The reality is that pursuing what you love is of marginal value at best, and is harmful at worst. Many people like myself find that going to work in something you love (video games) strips all the joy out of that thing and in fact removes something positive from your life. Usually doing "what you love" means going into a crowded field where lots of other people also want to work, which means you will have trouble getting a decent job and decent pay.

What actually matters to happiness in the workplace ?

1. Choose a job you can be very good at. There's just massive benefit to being one of the best in the world at something, or having a talent that's desirable or unusual. You don't want to be an easily replacable worker, because then you can be treated like this. This does not mean you have to be some superman, however. You could specialize in something that most other people don't want to do. Or you can get some licensing that makes you rare (like a crane operator or underwater welder).

2. Choose a job that doesn't tie you to a specific company or geographical location. Avoid jobs where there's basically just one employer in that field, or where all the companies are in the same city. Your power in controlling your life comes from the ability to move where you want to live, or change jobs if your employer treats you badly. You never know when something will go sour with a certain employer or you may have to or want to move for some reason.

3. Choose a job where the working conditions are pleasant. This means the physical environment of the office, the hours you have to keep, who your coworkers are. All of this is way more important than what you actually do for the work. A huge factor in this is the aforementioned freedom to choose from multiple employers - you don't want to be stuck having to accept the one job you can get, freedom to choose lets you pick an enjoyable place to be.

4. Choose a job with flexibility. This may vary for others, but for me the flexibility to work what hours I want, take vacation when I want, etc. is massive. Generally this means picking a job where you are judged by delivering some work product, not just putting in hours each day. Then you can choose your own path to make that work product. Obviously this could be software, but the same goes for custom bicycle frame builders, web site designers, etc. anyone who's running their own business or an independent contractor or just in a good employer situation where they give you product deadlines instead of work hours.

5. Choose a job with a pathway for advancement or a way to stand out.

6. etc... you get the idea

The important thing is freedom and power, not doing something you're passionate about. Passion is for love making and cattle. This is work.

02-05-10 - Friday Linkage

Waterlines Overview - page about the water/landscape history of Seattle ; kind of janky flash interface but some good stuff

The Singer 911 - okay I don't actually think the 911 is a great example of this, but I stumbled on this and it reminded me that if I had arbitrary money and multiple cars, what I really want is an old car that's hollowed out and filled with modern bits. Old cars just look *SO* much cooler than new cars, I love old-style paint jobs, and they have better functional designs too, they're smaller and lighter. I *LOVE* the minimal functional interiors with just simple switches and no computer bits. And with a modern engine and the light old car, this thing does 0-60 in 3.9 sec. Fuck yeah. (instead of the 911 I'd rather see an old Ferrari, like a 1970 246 or Ferrari 250 GT SWB , or an old Jag like an XKE or XKSS, or a BMW 507, or there's plenty of gorgeous old cars to choose from )

The Empire That Was Russia The Prokudin-Gorskii Photographic Record Recreated (A Library of Congress Exhibition) - some cool photos or the diversity that was Russia before communism

Southwest Image Gallery - more cool photos; holy shit Southern Utah has an embarassment of riches, and despite my constant road trips around that area I have never been through the good stuff at all because it's always too far out of my way as I'm trying to do the CA-TX route. I would love to cruise all through there some day and do Bryce / Canyonlands / etc

Security Driver Article Info Center - holy shit holy shit. This page is written for like Blackwater driver type people. Some creepy shit in here, and also some really good articles on just how to drive well.

Pashnit California Motorcycle Roads - really nice motorcycle touring page. Has tons of photos and route slips. Useful for cars looking for nice country roads, and even for bicyclists. Mostly California. I miss CA.

English Cut - Dave sent me this blog; pretty amusing

DIE ANTWOORD - Afrikaans Anti-Heroes� - awesome videos rave/rap semi-ironic trash - wow !

All the Strange Hours � Making and Thinking About Visual Art - I think his work is shite, but he writes some pretty interesting technical stuff about how artists look at color and the process of painting. I found him because I've been working on chroma and found these : flesh tones , chroma vs saturation , chroma

Munsell Color Science Lab FAQ is full of amusing stuff; it's not super technical, it's for lay people; interesting stuff on the eye and perception of color; this is also pretty amusing : Color Research Demonstration Images

02-05-10 - Car Dealers

Car dealers are such fucking cocks that they make me want to just walk away from the deal over and over. I swear they're like intentionally trying to make me not buy a car.

Some just intentionally lie to me to discourage me from being interested in cars. Like when I was looking at Caymans I was like "what about the 911?" and the guy was like "well that will run you $70k or more used, I think that's out of your range". WTF. I know it's more like $50k.

Some are just bizarrely unhelpful. Like when I drove the Mazdaspeed 3 and I was like "hmm I really like it but these seats are pretty awful, do you think I could swap them?" and the guy was just like "I don't think so, and it would be really expensive anyway". WTF.

Some are just super sleazy and weird. They love to ask you about what other cars you're considering and then tell you just absurd retarded negative things about them. Does that actually work on people? It just makes me want to get the fuck away from you.

In general they are just shockingly lazy and actually not pushy. I gave the Porsche dealer here a spec and told him if he could get a car like that in I'd probably pay their premium just to not have to deal with it. He can source cars from any other dealer around the country. Of course he makes no effort to actually do it, and I can see on the web searches that various matching cars exist.

Now the assholes I'm dealing with are just incredibly inflexible and dickish. They make me fight tooth and nail for every tiny concession. Jesus I'm trying my hardest to hand you a bunch of fucking money, do you want to sell or not? WTF. I'm so fucking tempted to walk away from the deal, but then I have to start all over again with someone else. URG.

Like for example, the inspector I sent found out the battery was dead, so I call and I'm like "yeah it looks okay but the battery is dead so you have to replace that" and they respond "I dunno if we can do any repairs at that price" ; WTF you're just being a dick for the sake of being a dick, we both know perfectly well that you will not sell me a car with a dead battery in it, and if I just complain a while you'll cave in, but you just want to add some extra unpleasantness like a shit cherry on this shit sundae.

I swear right now I'll never buy from a dealer again. If I want to buy used, I'll buy from an individual (and only the 1st owner). If I want to buy new I'll use one of those online car direct sites. It should be a nice experience buying an expensive car; it should be like flying first class. They should give you hot towels and champagne and call you "sir". Instead they stuff their shit-covered gangrenous cock in your face and yell "suck it" in your ear, and if you refuse then they don't let you buy a car.

02-04-10 - Pit Bulls

A couple more recent pit bill attacks ( man killed on Jan 18 and girl mauled on Feb 2 ) should remind us all that it's fucking absurd that people have these dogs.

I'm not convinced that they should necessarily be illegal to own (or controlled, like owning a tiger is). But certainly the owners should be prosecuted for assault with a deadly weapon or negligent homicide or some shit like that.

The arguments that are made by the pro-pitbull lobby are so absurd. Like "they're really sweet dogs if you raise them right", "my dog is my companion how dare you outlaw it", blah blah - you know what? a Schnauzer is also a really sweet dog if you raise it right, and it could be your companion, and it won't bite off your baby's face. There's just absolutely no justification for why you would have that dog instead of a safer one.

This is also another one of those cases where I wish social scorn would step up. We shouldn't really need the government to intervene here. When someone says "hey wanna meet my pit bull?" you should respond with "keep that dangerous thing away from me, you deranged psychopath".

02-03-10 - Car Pricing

I've noticed some interesting things looking at all these cars.

One funny thing is that *year* affects price a lot more than mileage. That is, a 2002 with 10,000 miles will generally be a lot cheaper than a 2004 with 30,000 miles. Now in some cases that makes sense because the older car has less features and is thus less desirable. But in many cases that makes no sense at all. The actual "age" of a car in terms of lifetime is its mileage. And car models tend to change discretely, not continuously from year to year. That is, there will be a major revision some year, and then it basically stays the same for many years. The reality of pricing is that people basically price by year and then just make a small adjustment for mileage; that's a big mistake which means you can exploit it by buying an early year car from a certain revision (though you usually don't want the first year of a revision).

For example with 911's there were major revisions in 1999, 2002, 2005, and 2009. Another thing I've noticed is that some year models are specifically known to be bad, but that is not particularly well reflected in the price, so you just have to avoid those years. So for example 2005 is known to be a lemon year. So you get maximum value by buying a low mileage 2002 or 2006. You get the worst value by buying a high mileage 2008 or 2004-05.

Another funny thing I've seen is if you search around a bit, you can often find the same car listed in multiple places with different prices. For example I saw a used car on a dealer's web site listed for $59k, then listed again on autotrader for $56k , then on ebay for $54k. You could probably get it for $52k if you fought hard; if you just saw the $59k on the dealer's site you might think you're getting a deal at $56k but in fact that's just their asking price on autotrader. In another case I saw a car on the Porsche.com dealer-swap network listed for $56k , on the dealer's own web site for $54k, and on autotrader for $52k.

Another useful thing I've found from searching is that you can use the google cache to see how long certain pages have been up, so you can tell how long a car has been advertised on the net. Obviously if it's been sitting for sale for many months you're gonna have a lot more opportunity to bargain.

I looked at one car at one of these luxury car consignment shops; the dealer guy there admitted to me that they don't really care that much about selling consigment cars, and he would try to get the owner to eat a low price to get it sold. Obviously the dealer is still trying to fuck you, but if he's also trying to fuck the owner then at least the fuckage is shared.

One cool thing about buying used cars in the modern age is they all have computer chips that record faults, so if you have them inspected by an independent mechanic who can pull the computer codes. The manufacturer uses these codes to see if you have done anything that would void warranty, so they're pretty good. It will tell you things like over-rev red line events, overheating events, low oil events, etc. Obviously the computer can be tampered with, but if it's been cleared you can see that too.

Something else I looked into a bit are the CPO (Certified Pre-owned) programs. They give you an extended warranty (usually 2-3 years) and perhaps more importantly they mean the car passes some checklist of basic problems, has decent tires & brake pads, etc. If you're buying a local car or a cheap car, this doesn't make any sense, but if you're buying a car that's far away, there's a pretty big bonus value to knowing it at least passes the CPO check before you fly out to see it yourself. Obviously extended warranties are always a bit of a ripoff, but say the CPO adds $3000 to the car price, the actual expected value of the warranty that you get back is maybe $2000, but the value of the inspection is $500 or so when you live far away, and the time savings is worth $500, so you wind out okay on the deal.

Oh, another thing that's useful to know is geographic variation is really severe. Long ago I wrote about the weird fact that used Subarus sell for so much money up here in WA that you can almost buy them in CA and drive them up here and make a career out of it. The same is roughly true of the 4WD Porsche 911 - it's around $10k cheaper in CA or AZ. Even aside from the 4WD / rain car variation, used cars are just way cheaper in the west/south, particularly in LA, Phoenix and Houston. They have way more selection down there, much bigger market, more competition.

02-01-10 - Google Autocorrect

One of the fucking annoying things Google has silently added recently is auto-correcting searches. For example, try any of these searches :

prosac

forman

oper labs

and what you will get is searches that have results for :

prozac

foreman

opera labs

note that I'm not talking about the "did you mean" - I mean it silently decides to give you results for a different word. Awful.

Fortunately there is a trick to get around this. Just put your search word in quotes. Apparently you could also use a +, though that also makes the word mandatory.

See for example : here

It seems to me at least part of the problem is that the stemming is not aware of changing word meaning. eg. obviously if I search "widget" then results that contain "widgets" are probably good, but changing "prosac" to "prozac" is giving me completely unrelated results. You should only automatically broaden the search to word variants that are actually related.

01-31-10 - Relationship Work

The crucial things for making a relationship work are flexibility and understanding. You also have to want to be with the person enough that you are willing to bend on anything else in your life for them. Not that you should have to give up things you love, or they should expect you to, but there has to be an overriding value of them that is greater than any loss, so that in hard moments you can think "okay this sucks but I still want them more than anything else and I'll do what's good for the relationship".

Obviously you have to be flexible and not push things; say they get really offended anytime you say "banana" ; you might think "that's fucking stupid and illogical" but still you should refrain from saying banana, you can't try to reason with them about the unreasonableness of their offense. You have to just respect it and let it go. Say you really like musical theatre, they don't, so don't try to force them to go to musical theatre. And they also have to be flexible and understanding enough to let you go to musical theatre on your own in that scenario.

A crucial aspect is being sympathetic. You have to care about their feelings and sympathize even if you think they are being illogical or unfair or whatever. I find that whole "I hear that you are saying you feel insecure because of the way I looked at that other girl" kind of repeat-back mantra to be really repulsive since it's just a surface act, maybe it helps, I dunno, but the real thing you have to do is much deeper. You have to actually care that you hurt them and not care why, even if you think they are being totally unreasonable, you have to try to see the way they are experiencing the situation and how you can make it better for them.

One of the hardest moments is when you do something that hurts your lover and they lash back at you. In this moment they can say things that are really hurtful, because they know all the things you are most sensitive about, and also because coming from their mouth it stings doubly. The ideal response is to ignore their words (since they didn't really mean them) and hear what they are really trying to say which is something like "you hurt me", and try to stop yourself from responding with anger and instead look at what you did that made them act that way. This can be very hard to do in practice, it requires great levels of self control and confidence and awareness.

Something I always struggle with is the idea of "fairness" (like wah wah it isn't fair). You feel like you are putting in all this work and the other person isn't matching, or you feel like you're compromising more than them, or you're doing so much and they don't appreciate it or whatever. You feel like they're mad at you and they don't have a good reason to be; "wah wah it's not fair, I've been so good". You feel like they should suffer as much as you. Or you know that you could smooth over a fight by compromising but you don't think they've earned the happiness that you can give them. It's important to get past all of these ideas. For one thing, you may well be wrong - it's easy to see the work you are doing, it's not always easy to appreciate how much the other person is doing for you, so your idea that you have been compromising more might just be total hogwash. For another thing, even if you have been doing the lion's share of the work, so what - if you can make the situation better, you should do it, because you should be working with your partner for improved joint happiness. There's no contract that you both have to put in the same amount of work; it's really hard not to hold a grudge about this; in the extreme case maybe your partner puts in hardly any work at all and you do all the comforting and compromising, outside observers might call you a "sucker" but if it is a pathway that leads to your joint happiness, then it's the right one.

That said, you don't want to just eat abuse. Sometimes your partner just serves you a shit sandwich and you don't want to eat that over and over. I'm still really not sure how to handle this situation. Sometimes there's an excessive tendency of the mature sensitive male to always find blame in himself. That is, once you reach the awareness that you are working towards joint happiness and that your actions are always part of the puzzle, you start thinking, oh this situation went really bad, what could *I* do better next time, or what did I do that caused this? Certainly that's a good line of thought, and you should pursue it a bit, but you can go too far and just degenerate into martyrdom.

01-30-10 - Cars

.. I know, it's getting old, I promise it's almost over. The web posting anyway, not my agonizing.

Last time I lamented how the beautiful ATTS technology in the Prelude seemed to have died out. Not so! In fact it appears to be almost identical to the Quaife Differential which is in the Ford Focus RS, which is responsible for it being such a fantastic handling FWD car (except that it seems they goofed a bit and didn't get it quite as right, or the Focus's much higher torque is just harder to control). (all that mechanical technicalia about struts and diffs is fascinating but gibberish to me).

Sadly we don't get the Ford Focus RS here. Or the Scirocco GTI. Or the VW Golf R. Or the Civic Type R. Basically car companies see America and think "there's a load of fat gits who only buy rubbish cars, no need to sell any good ones there".

One of the annoying things about buying something like Porsche is that they are severely price-inflated and quality-deflated by the devoted van boys who grew up dreaming of having one and will pay outrageous sums for a shitty product just because of the brand and the image. I on the other hand, just want a car that feels good and actually would really rather not have the brand, but I have to pay for it anyway.

It sucks when you are trying to pick something based on merit and find that the best thing is this brand which causes you to overpay. It happens all the time in clothes; I just want the jeans that look good and fit well, I would hapily buy Sears brand jeans if they were good, but I wind up buying Diesel or Seven for All Mankind or whatever the fucking thing is now just because it's the only one that's actually a decent quality product - but then I'm paying a 50% markup for the damn brand which I don't care about at all. (and in fact I try to hide the label as much as possible because it's embarassing)

I think the new hatchbacks are fucking fabulous. Unless you are buying a super high end sports car, there is absolutely no reason to buy anything but a hatchback. They are way more practical, and you sacrifice very little in weight or handling. The only possible reason to buy a sedan over a hatch these days is for vanity. And it's stupid vanity, it's trying to look boring and fit in to some old fashioned idea of what looks good which makes you totally uncool. I don't love the long hatches like the BMW 1 hatch or the Mini, a key part of the advantage is having a tiny wheel base, which makes them so nifty and fun to drive and easily parkable.

I was thinking how much I hate all the new turbo engines for their lags, and it occured to me that of course the obvious thing to do would be to have some kind of supercharger that took care of your boost before the exhaust pressure was sufficient, and then you switch to turbos after that. Of course this has been done, see for example the VW Twincharger ; the newer solution is Variable Vane Turbos ; BTW these come from the stonkeringly good Autozine Technical School ; my god that web site is good.

Today I was parallel parking my shitty rental car and of course bumping it against the cars on each side and thinking to myself how not fun that would be in a fancy car. I would much rather park a tiny thing like a Golf GTI and hell, I'd like a rubber ring all around the car like a bumper car. So anyway, for random amusement, I present some parking-related youtubes : how to repo parallel parked cars , french car bumping , FWD torque steer parallel parking