I have worked as a waiter and I am regularly featured these days in the role of patron. My ex-wife is from Japan, and in Japan there is no tipping. She liked the simplicity and fairness of this model, and I can respect that. But I like — no, I love tipping. Why? It is that subversive little corner of our capitalist system that runs as a “gift economy.”
The act of giving, and the act of depending on the generosity of another person-these are both important activities required to build healthy people. In our society we have successfully taken the “guesswork” out of a lot of the giving-receiving relationships: you work for a specific wage, you pay a specific rent, a specific tax rate, you pay for food at a certain price determined by supply and demand, matters of government, and personal style. You subject yourself to the rule of law which is in turn mediated by your participation in Democracy.
We don’t live with the uncertainty of Kings, we don’t farm with the uncertainty of the weather. For those of us in the comfortable end of the middle class, the stressful uncertainties that mean more to people of lesser means mean a lot less to us: the price of milk, the price of gas, whether we are at war in Iraq . . .
It doesn’t take a lot of faith in the goodness of human nature to successfully live a life like mine. I’m insulated from a lot of the vagaries of the human condition. I’m not alone in this. And some of us, well, we forget about all that hassle: we are free to press our energies in to work, family, community, creative pursuits. I like this freedom, but . . . sometimes I open my eyes and see that the things that are stressing me out and challenging me are pointless, petty, or mundane. Especially in technology, victory becomes software shipped and larger numbers in the bank and retirement accounts.
We never go to bed hungry.
We will not wear body armor, carry M-16s and ride in Humvees through the garbage-filled streets of Baghdad, scared that we may not make it home from the cradle of civilization quite right.
We will eat until we are content, push the plate away half full. We will leave our lights on and run our dishwashers and our washing machines and stare into computer screens, trying to increase the zeros in those bank accounts. We will be constantly on the go, from climate controlled office to comfortable car to ski vacation to flights across the planet where we may dine on new foods, until we are content, and push the plate away again.
There have been a few times when I have been at the supermarket with not enough money. That kind of stress is memorable.
That kind of stress will be a part of anyone’s life. Your parents and grandparents will age and become infirm. Their hospital bills will eat up your savings accounts. You may in time return the favor of those diapers that were changed before you were too young to remember. You will be walking to your home one day and you will fall down and the doctor will explain that you have MS. Your wife will come home one day and tell you she needs to take a break, to go live with her new boyfriend.
The things that you take for granted today could change in an instant.
When I go out to eat, when I take a cab home, I have to make room in my capitalist business transaction for the tip. There are “rules” but the only enforcement is in your own character. When you give service, if you are honest with yourself, you accept that you are in an act of giving. Yeah, its your day job, and yes, chances are that the quality of your diet is a reflection of the quality of the tips you receive.
But, unlike the wage-earner, you are reminded every day that there is no guarantee, no law, nothing that says that your giving must be rewarded with anything beyond the minimum wage. So what do you do? There are no guarantees in life, you will do your best, and you will likely find that, despite some bad tipping and the occasional stiff, depending on the voluntary generosity of others actually works out okay.
You earn your income not merely with your Diligence, but with Trust and with Faith.
In my life, I have found that there are times when you have to depend on the voluntary generosity of other folks. I like that tipping remains a part of our capitalist economy. It is a reminder to those of us who are “comfortable” that we too, are subjects of fate. It is a reminder that our modern enterprise still relies a great deal in faith that the great majority of people can be relied upon to give. Voluntarily.
Vomiting is contagious, and with good reason. Within a household, or a tribe of homo sapiens, if someone vomits, it might be food poisoning. Since the tribe or household probably shared the same meal, then vomiting up the offending meal could save your own bipedal ass. Therefor, sympathetic vomiting confers a strong survival trait.
Well, how do you select for sympathetic vomiting? You need that behavior encoded in the DNA somewhere: a gene here, a gene there, that culminates in a behavior pattern where if you detect that someone is opening their mouth wide and involuntarily transferring a substantial volume that you feel a reflex to do the same. This encoded behavior could result in both sympathetic vomiting and contagious yawning.
My hypothesis:We have a reflex mechanism that expresses itself as sympathetic vomiting and contagious yawning. Since sympathetic vomiting is a strong survival trait, we get sympathetic yawning for free, perhaps using it as a social cue for when we should all get to sleep.
Come to think of it, yawning can often be such a powerful urge that one can not resist. Sometimes, laughter, too, can be a powerful, overwhelming urge. Laughter is believed to be catching as well: a comedian is funnier when other folks are already laughing. Perhaps . . . perhaps . . . perhaps . . . all three behaviors are the happy byproduct of the survival advantage conferred by behavior that produces sympathetic vomiting.
We need to split the country into 3 smaller countries. After WW2 we split Germany in two to make them less dangerous. Three mini-Iraqs would be easier to manage. Comments?
I have been keeping my opinions to myself for a long time, but I had to respond: (more…)
On the weekend of July 22 and 23, I and about 400 other folks attended WordCamp 2007 in San Francisco. This is a conference about WordPress blogging software, and blogging itself. I am usually a bit wary of killing my weekend by spending the bulk of it with a bunch of nerds. Especially bloggers. But then, I am a nerd, and this is, I admit, a blog . . . that and registration was merely $25 and covered my food for the weekend. That’s a pretty compelling deal for the unemployed! Added value was found at the open bar on Saturday night at one of my favorite bars: Lucky 13.
Here are notes I compiled during the Saturday presentations. (more…)
Vincent: Want some bacon?
Jules: No man, I don’t eat pork.
[ . . . ]
Vincent: Why not?
Jules: Pigs are filthy animals. I don’t eat filthy animals. . . . I ain’t eat nothin’ that ain’t got sense enough to disregard its own feces.
Vincent: How about a dog? A dog eats its own feces. . . . do you consider a dog to be a filthy animal?
Jules: I wouldn’t go so far as to call a dog filthy but they’re definitely dirty. But, a dog’s got personality. Personality goes a long way.
Vincent: Ah, so by that rationale, if a pig had a better personality, he would cease to be a filthy animal. Is that true?
Jules: Well we’d have to be talkin’ about one charmin’ motherfuckin’ pig. I mean he’d have to be ten times more charmin’ than that Arnold on Green Acres, you know what I’m sayin’?
Perhaps Jules is avoiding “mad swine” disease. Were the pigs to receive proper medication that addressed their poop-eating neurological disorders, he might find their personalities tasty delicious.
(I like what Yelp have done with their down page.)
The short story is that an underground transformer exploded downtown, and the 365 Main data center failed to automatically start their generators, and had to start them manually, cutting power for nearly an hour for some customers, many of which are smaller, trendier web sites like Craigslist, LiveJournal, Yelp and others. (I have interviewed with half of the companies mentioned in Scott’s post.)
You do not want to lose power across a production-class network. This can cause equipment failure, servers to delay boot because they need to run disk consistency checks, servers to stall boot noting a missing keyboard, disk errors, or whatever. Some services may wedge up because when they started they couldn’t talk to the database . . . in some cases you may have had machines running for a few years, which may have last rebooted three SysAdmins ago. The running state may be subtly different from the boot state, with no documentation . . .
A few years ago I had a chance to rebuild a production network from the ground up, with a decent budget to do everything the right way: redundant network switches, serial consoles, remote power management . . . I remember talking to my manager as to whether we might want a UPS in each rack. We figured that the data center is supposed to keep the power running, or else. Also, if the data center loses power then we lose our network access anyway . . . perhaps the whole point of this post is that data centers do lose power, so a UPS can be worthwhile. If nothing else, it may leave your systems up and ready to go as soon as the network is restored.
Data centers have UPSes too. Huge ones that you may get to walk through on a tour. The purpose of the UPS is to provide battery power between the time utility power fails and on-site generators begin to provide energy. I don’t know enough to comment on this particular case, but I do recall touring a data center in Emeryville, and the guy explained that batteries become less effective over time, and a lot of data centers fail to test their batteries regularly. When wired in series, one bad battery brings down the entire UPS, and so even though you have a generator on-site, the UPS can fail before you manage to transfer to generator power. While this stuff is beyond my expertise, I’m inclined to believe that this is what happened at 365 Main yesterday: a data center should not only test its failover-to-generator procedure on a regular basis, they need to ensure sufficient battery capacity to keep systems running during the time it would reasonably take to switch to generator power.
His big point is that programmers need to stop fretting over moving things between memory and disk themselves. He explains that on a modern computer system, RAM is backed by disk, and disk accesses are buffered in RAM, and a lot of work goes in to the kernel to ensure that the system behaves effectively. By managing your own RAM-or-disk conundrum, you end up making a mess of things, because when you go to move an unused “memory” object to disk, the kernel may already have paged the memory region to disk, and what happens is the object then must move from virtual memory on disk, to RAM, to a disk memory cache in RAM, and then back out to disk. It is simpler and more efficient to just ask for a big chunk of memory and let the kernel page things to disk for you.
He then explains some clever things you can do for multi-processor programming. It seems to boil down to trying to give threads their own stack space wherever practical, and managing worker pools as a stack, so that you are most likely to find yourself processing on the same CPU at the lowest level of cache, and least likely to need to pass memory variables between CPUs.
Not that I write multi-threaded applications, but if I ever do, I’ll try to keep this understanding in mind.
[NOTE: For some time I have been considering a series of short “Deathmatch” style articles, contrasting similar-but-different words. This post is the “Pilot” for such a series.]
Inhabitat has an informative and lightheartedly disturbing visit with the “Sustainable Agriculture Production and Research Center” at Disney World’s EPCOT center. The overall gist of the place is good old fashioned 1950s optimism that technology will make the future awesome, touched up a layer of 21st century “green washing”.
Next stop on the “Living With the Land” tour took us up close and personal with stacked gardens. While we love the idea of maximizing space and efficiency by vertically stacking plants, we can’t figure out why on earth a greenhouse preaching sustainability uses STYROFOAM pots for all their plants! A precocious 6-year-old boy on my tour apparently noticed the same thing and asked our intern-guide why there was so much styrofoam, since the foam plastic is not biodegradable and not really a “sustainable” choice for an exhibit on sustainability. Our guide, apparently not understanding the implications of the question, explained glibly that EPCOT uses styrofoam because it is cheap, lightweight and easy to toss out in order to get fresh new pots daily. Huh?
The primary byproduct of the sustainable “Research Center” seems to be genetically-modified vegetables grown in the shape of Mickey Mouse’s head. Well, that and the styrofoam containers.
I had a friend from Indiana who said she knew someone from Florida, who thought that, compared to Governor Jeb, President George was oh-so-eloquent. I suppose it is fortunate that the state will mostly disappear when the ice caps melt.
“The coldest Winter I ever knew was a summer in San Francisco.”
It has been overcast, chilly and wet in my neighborhood throughout July. Monday the sun came out for about an hour in the morning, then again at sunset. I ran out of the house when that happened but it was too late in the day to get much sun. The midwesterner in me reminds myself that this is a temporary and “symbolic” Winter, without the snow. It is just weird the way the seasons work when you live adjacent to the Pacific Ocean.
(No, I’m not actually depressed. Well, this gray does make me blue, and that is why I am conscientious about getting out doors any time the clouds break. I am supposed to be starting work next week, so I should be getting more sun during the week.)
I use the Amazon.com Chase Visa. I get a “point” per dollar spent, and three points per dollar on purchases through Amazon.com. Every 2,500 points, I get a $25 gift certificate. Pretty neat.
Well, they hadn’t sent me gift certificates in a while, so I called and got the matter cleared up. I am currently working my way through $350 in gift certificates.
If you do the math you may surmise that I spend an awful lot of money. I will offer a tip that if you want to maximize your credit card rewards, you should manage IT for a small company that relies upon you to charge equipment to your credit card and then be reimbursed. Especially if you have earned a better credit limit than your boss’ corporate card.
I just completed a feedback form regarding my AppleCare warranty experience. Question 12a gave me a chance to bitch. Question 12b made me smile at my ridiculous expectations:
12a Is there anything else you would like to tell Apple about your recent in-store repair experience at the Apple Retail Store? (NOTE: 2000 character limit)
Replacing the optical drive on a Mac Mini is a simple procedure that takes fifteen minutes, requiring a screwdriver and a putty knife. That I should have to drive to a God damned mall and explain to a “genius” that he doesn’t actually need my password to log in to OS X, wait for twenty minutes as the “genius” engages in manual data entry, then wait “seven to ten business days” for the part to be replaced is FUCKING SAD.
(Note: Hold down command+s during boot, run to the appropriate init level and type “passwd” to reset the password. Even someone who isn’t a “genius” can pull that off!)
I read this quote shortly after a significant personal setback. I believe the author is alluding to the Holocaust, which puts things in perspective. For me, the take-away is that if you want to shine, you must be ready to be burned.
I had rushed in to marriage, and consequently took a conservative approach to feeling my own love and expressing it. I figured we should take things slow. I got burnt anyway. Nowadays . . . I’ll give patience its due, but I must shoot for giving light. Keep the senses keen for that flame within, and if it seems right, throw gas on the fire . . .
A photo of Tunji around 2004, that I stole from Tim.
Tunji was a friend of mine back at Allen Hall. He came to school from Nigeria when he was sixteen, so he was always younger than everyone else. He never lost his deep accent or dark sense of humor. A one-of-a-kind kid who liked to play chess online and was studying to become a Doctor. I don’t know if he made his MD or not . . .
Tunji was truly a one-of-a-kind man, whose uniqueness was only magnified by his distinctive accent. I never met his family, but I can only imagine how hard it is for your intelligent son and future doctor to die suddenly, and far from home. . . I have great sorrow for his kin.
I will update with additional information or reaction as I learn more . . .
The News-Gazette.com: Autopsy: Tunji Drowned also narrates more about the fatal accident:
“They had been out there all afternoon and were there into the evening. Apparently (Mr. Toogun) had been in the water in the afternoon with a life belt on. At this time, he was on the boat with friends and lost his balance and fell into the water,” Green said.
Contrary to earlier reported information, friends noticed immediately that he fell in.
“We noticed after a few seconds that Tunji did not surface and immediately six or seven of us dived in to attempt to find him. It was not until 15 to 20 minutes later that we did,” said fellow student and friend Lauren Jakubowski in an e-mail to The News-Gazette.
Tim Skirvin: Tunji Toogun Album, Tim is compiling of photographs of Tunji.
I read about this movie in “The Week” and then saw an ad for the trailer on my very own website. I am totally looking forward to this movie:
Last year I read Imperial Life in the Emerald City after seeing Rajiv Chandrasekaran on “The Daily Show” . . . someone saw me reading it on the train and inquired. “It reads like a Vonnegut novel,” I replied.
What I read in “The Week” is that this film is less Michael Moore-style polemic and more along the lines of people involved telling their stories as to how we managed to screw things up, over and over, in the worst ways possible. This is exactly how Chandrasekaran’s novel goes, but with a sort of wry feel, which yes, reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut.
