dannyman.toldme.com

When I was younger and earned less money, I was encouraged to save. Put a little away each month into savings! That is a wonderful sentiment, but after meeting expenses, what is ever left over?

Some years back after hard times I took a new job, set up new bank accounts, and had my paychecks direct-deposited into Savings. Using the online banking interface I set up a monthly recurring transfer from savings to checking. I began saving money without effort.

It is hard, though, to start from nothing. A windfall helps. If you are me you don’t want to squander good fortune, which is what one naturally does without some sort of system. It is harder, though, to start from nothing.

When you have some savings, you see interest accumulating on the monthly statement. You’re getting money for free! Neat! Sure, it isn’t much but dang it is nice to get ahead of the curve. Times have been good these past years, my savings account has enough money in it to maintain my normal monthly allowance for 3-6 months. (And somewhat more than that if I am layed off and collect Unemployment Insurance.)

Once I have about six months worth of expenses saved up, I usually purchase a CD, which means the bank holds on to my money for a certain period of time, with a certain guaranteed return. Anything beyond six months of income I invest in stock market index funds (ETFs) because I have read that over a long enough time horizon, the stock market provides a better average rate of return than banks do. I can afford that risk, but it is nice to have that one pool of money in a CD coming back to me with a certain return at a certain date, in case things have gotten squirrelly.

While we are in the middle of a nasty recession, my own job is fairly secure. Last time I had savings enough to roll over, I decided to forego the currently-low interest rates and instead buy straight into an ETF. This was in March, when the market had pretty well bottomed out, so although my other stocks and 401(k)s and the like have lost value, that lot of stock purchase has grown in value by 40% and I can smile and claim to be a financial mastermind.

Oh yeah, those 401(k)s . . . and my employer’s stock-purchase program. Times are good: my salary is considerably more than my expenses, so lots of money is drained away from my paychecks into retirement savings, and another pool of capital, before it hits the reservoir of my savings account, which I then tap into my checking to meet expenses. A wiser person than me would manage investments such that one pool is for retirement, another for a house, or a college fund, or whatever . . . I’m not that clever, which is why contributing to 401(k)s is nice: that money is set aside by government mandate! My main financial ambition these days is to buy a house, probably after I get married. (That is a different topic.)

Another financial ambition I have been putting off is college money. For the one part, I don’t have kids of my own yet, and there’s no guarantee I ever will. But I am also an Uncle and a God-father: there are children I know whom I want to succeed . . . on the other hand my own experience is that after I was discharged from the Army, I was a non-dependent and eligible for a lot of financial aid, and I attended an inexpensive state school. It is nice if you can rely on your parents’ generation to help you through school, but I also know that “God bless the child that’s got his own.” That’s not to say I don’t want to help, only that I know that even if I can not help, a way can be found.

All the same, it is a challenge and a strain sometimes to live on a “fixed” income, when there is plenty of money that could be spent so easily. To be sure, I kind of enjoying saying “no” to fancy stuff, and driving around in my old car, making do with less, as generations before have done. But I also like to eat out for lunch, take my girl out, fly home for holidays, buy nice clothes, and support my hobbies. I’ll squeeze a little extra out of the piggy bank for the holidays, maybe a vacation, and other one-time expenses like maybe a new computer, and the occasional needs of broke relatives, but I am mostly tight-fisted. The past few months I have had a growing credit-card balance. I raised my “allowance” for the first time in years to pay it off quicker, but I’d rather endure the sting of interest rates that encourage me to say “no” more often than to raid the piggy bank . . . even when times are good, money is a hassle.

If things continue to go well, I like to think there will be a day in the future where I stand proudly in the newly-purchased house that is the fruit of my labors and discipline. Then I’ll have decades of mortgage payments to look forward to. I’ll feel even more nostalgia for the earlier lean times, when life was full of possibilities. But I will also have the thrill of knowing that my settled, successful, middle-class life offers possibilities of its own.

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0-14:22 djh@ratchet ~> ls -lh mail/archive-*
-rw-------  1 djh  djh    18M Jun 14 17:17 mail/archive-1997
-rw-------  1 djh  djh    29M Jun 14 17:16 mail/archive-1998
-rw-------  1 djh  djh    18M Jun 14 17:13 mail/archive-1999
-rw-------  1 djh  djh    26M Jun 14 17:13 mail/archive-2000
-rw-------  1 djh  djh    25M Jun 14 17:11 mail/archive-2001
-rw-------  1 djh  djh    18M Jun 17  2004 mail/archive-2002
-rw-------  1 djh  djh    25M Jun 14 17:09 mail/archive-2003
-rw-------  1 djh  djh    15M Jun 14 17:08 mail/archive-2004
-rw-------  1 djh  djh    63M Jun 14 17:05 mail/archive-2005
-rw-------  1 djh  djh   202M Jun 14 16:54 mail/archive-2006
-rw-------  1 djh  djh   362M Jun 14 18:06 mail/archive-2007
-rw-------  1 djh  djh   202M Jun 14 19:17 mail/archive-2008

I recently went through, and using mutt’s date-range filters, revised my e-mail archives, most notably saving messages stored in Gmail into these annual mbox archives.

I think it was around late 2005 that I started using Flickr, so the ramp up in sizes is pictures being e-mailed from mobile devices.

I delete most e-mail that I receive, but I pretty much archive all personal correspondence, and anything I send.

Also, I was disappointed that when I tried to copy archival messages into Gmail, via IMAP, Gmail would interpret the message date as the date it was copied in to the archive, and not the date the messages was created. That was disappointing. I like Gmail’s search capability, so it would have been nice to give it access to my corpus.

Mainly though, I dig Gmail’s interface, especially while traveling. But I recently got mutt running again because it is a much faster way to step through an Inbox and delete / reply / Archive than clicky click web interface. If only I could give it access to my Gmail contacts . . .

March 1997 was when my server hard drive crashed, and after that I began to take disaster recovery more seriously.

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This quiz gets it right:

Donchya know, eh?

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There’s a new billboard at the bus stop at 19th Ave and Taraval. I could read the first three characters with my own little brain:

保 Insurance
我 I
安 Safety / shelter

Looking up the fourth character: 全 (all) I see that the last two characters together mean "safety". 安 is easy to remember, because "woman under a roof" means safety / shelter / security.

保我安全
bao3wo3an1quan2
Ensure My Safety

There are many insurance agencies in the neighborhood.

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Back in 2005, Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products & User Experience at Google, stated:

“There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever.”

Apparently Google lacks the same sort of respect for the web sites of its AdSense customers, because they started putting animated advertising on my site.

“Say it aint so.”

According to Google’s “self-service tech support” there is no way to turn them off, short of reverting to text-only ads.

This is wrong on a few levels. And I’m not sure if Google is just being its regular sloppy self or if they are getting desperate for revenue such that they’re finding more wiggle room in the “don’t be evil” philosophy.

Whatever is going on down in Mountain View, I will just get along without the $10/mo or so I’ve gotten from AdSense revenue.

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I hate spam at least as much as the next guy. Heck, fighting spam is my day job. But I just gotta say, this little guy who made it through the Gmail spam filter this morning just made me smile:

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Perhaps they are just being self-important, and I can’t help but imagine that the government is blocking them, but if this is even 10% true, well, Twitter and their network provider are doing the right thing in rescheduling some network maintenance:

“Our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran. Tonight’s planned maintenance has been rescheduled to tomorrow between 2-3p PST (1:30a in Iran).”

I mean, if there is something for which Twitter could be genuinely useful it would be to quickly gather people together for public demonstrations.

Thanks, Linky.

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Not long after the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, the young people of Iran are on the streets protesting autocracy in their country. In 2009 I root for these young people just as I cheered on the young people of the Eastern Bloc in 1989.

The best video footage I have been able to find is from John Simpson with the BBC. The government is cracking down hard, beating people in the streets, and blocking communication, but all the same, people are spontaneously gathering in the streets and fighting back. There are stories and even video of police riding motorcycles in to scare crowds, who then turn on the motorcycles and leave them burning in the streets. As John Simpson points out, Iranians have since upped the ante and are driving their cars to block the streets: it is harder for riot police to thrash you that way.

Iran’s future: who does it belong to? (CC: Faramarz Hashemi)

SMS, web sites, and satellite TV are blocked as the mullahs broadcast reassuring images from Ahmadinejad’s victory rallies on domestic television. The government seems to be nervously botching the thing, because soon after the polls closed they very quickly announced lopsided election results. Why bother to even count the votes and fudge the figures if you think you may lose badly: just jump straight into repressive crackdown.

The political opposition is acting in unity. According to The New York Times, “opposition leaders have cataloged a list of what they call election violations and irregularities in the vote, which most observers had expected to go to a second-round runoff . . . Two of the three opposition candidates and a clerical group issued fresh statements requesting an annulment of the election on Friday . . . Those resisting the election results gained a potentially important new ally on Sunday when a moderate clerical body, the Association of Combatant Clergy, issued a statement posted on reformist Web sites saying that the vote was rigged and calling for it to be annulled.”

I saw one blog post that mentioned that it was student protests in 1979 that led to the overthrow of the Shah and the birth of the Islamic Republic. The rapidity with which that entrenched autocracy was overthrown and replaced surprised the world then. Today Iran has a 30% unemployment rate which means a lot of young people full of passion that their best years not be wasted, with plenty of free time to organize, with or without the advantages of SMS technology.

So, this week will be interesting: the progressive elements within Iran will fight hard and win some sort of victory, or they will be beaten down with greater ferocity. Although I have no power in the matter, I know who I am rooting for.

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To make up for my snarkiness in my last post . . . it is an easy matter of fetching the WebRss node from Twiki and running it through the Universal Feed Parser:

# Twiki RSS Feed
twiki_rss_url='http://localhost/twiki/bin/view/Main/WebRss'

import feedparser
import time
import calendar

# http://www.feedparser.org/
d = feedparser.parse(twiki_rss_url)

for e in d['entries']:
    # e.updated_parsed = tuple UTC
    # calendar.timegm = seconds UTC
    # time.localtime = tuple locale
    print time.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M",
            time.localtime(calendar.timegm(e.updated_parsed)))
    print e.rdf_value # Author
    print e.title
    print

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Seriously, WikiWords are the dumbest idea for marking a link to a document node. But when you generate HTML that looks like this, you are doing it wrong:

<body class=”patternViewPage”><a name=”PageTop”></a>

<div id=”patternScreen”>
<div id=”patternPageShadow”>
<div id=”patternPage”>
<div id=”patternWrapper”><div id=”patternOuter”>
<div id=”patternFloatWrap”>
<div id=”patternMain”><div id=”patternClearHeaderCenter”></div>
<div id=”patternMainContents”><div class=”patternTop”>
<div class=”patternToolBar”>
<div class=”patternToolBarButtons”>

I mean, that just means that you have gone batshit insane.

Anyway, back to learning how to parse information from HTML documents using Python . . .

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Dialogue from two ChinesePod lessons: Can You Use Chopsticks? and Does it Have Bones?

Man: 你会用筷子马？
ni3 hui4 yong4 kuai4zi ma?
You can use chopsticks?

Woman: 当然会。 你看！
dang1ran2 hui4. ni3 kan4!
Certainly can. You see!
Man: 哇！ 真厉害！
wa1! zhen1 li4hai!
Whoa! Truly awesome!

Woman: 这个很好吃！
zhe4ge hen3 hao3chi1!
This is so delicious!
Man: 有没有骨头？
you3 mei2you3 gu3tou?
Does it have bones?

Woman: 有！ 很好吃！
you3! hen3 hao3chi1!
Yes! Very tasty!
Man: 我不吃骨头。
wo3 bu4 chi1 gu3tou.
I don’t eat bones.

会 = hui4 = can do something
用 = yong4 = use
筷子 = kuai4zi = chopsticks
好吃 = hao3chi1 = “good eat” = delicious (面包个很好吃！)
有没有 = you3mei2you3 = “have-not-have” (does it have . . .)
有 = you3 = “have” (yes)
没有 = mei2you3 = “not have” (no)
骨头 = gu3tou = bones

Yeah, it has been awhile. This time through, 骨头 threw me for a bit of a loop because the character rendered differently in a certain font. According to my dictionary, 骨 is a compound of a skull-with-vertebrae (冎) over flesh (肉) though the bottom particle is drawn as a moon (月) except in one font it came out with the skull facing right, and the two horizontal strokes in the moon slanted downward in opposite directions to better resemble flesh. This appears to be question of style.

骨？

Meanwhile, if you combine a dog (犬) with a bone (骨) you get sly (猾). It seems that the homonym 滑, water (水) plus bone is more common but I like that the sly dog gets his bone.

The other thing I did is after scanning the drawing I ran the scan through the Potrace bitmap tracing engine in Inkscape, which converted the lines to a vector graphic, smoothing things out somewhat.

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I will never forget a day in high school when I was sitting on a crowded bus, headed home, and the lady in front of me, who was not old or pregnant, had what looked to me to be a pained expression on her face. I wondered if maybe her legs hurt as the vehicle lurched around, but I was a shy kid scared to offer her my seat in case really I had just totally misread the situation. After a while the crowd eased and the woman took a seat near me with obvious relief. I had failed on that day to give my seat to someone in need, and ever since I have made an effort not to repeat that mistake by paying greater attention to my fellow passengers.

Priority Seating (CC: Dan4th)

I still ride transit most weekdays, and I have noticed especially that younger people tend to fail at the whole courtesy thing. Part of it may be self-involved rudeness, but part of it I think is a combination of shyness, and a fear of making contact with strangers in a public place. My generation was raised on the lessons that the world outside our homes is extremely violent and treacherous and that the most dangerous thing a child could ever ever do is to talk to a stranger. I like to think that with time most people grow out of their shells and feel more comfortable taking the initiative for social responsibility.

My own strategy is that if I see a person who might better deserve my seat, I try to make eye contact, at which point I start to get out of my chair. Then they either move forward or gesture for me to sit down. (It is better to err on the side of getting someone a seat. Also, I think people looking for a seat know to look others in the eye.) In other cases if the vehicle is crowded and eye contact can not be achieved, I’ll often just stand the heck up anyway, positioning myself in such a way that the person who could best use my seat finds it most accessible. (I would hate for a young punk to ignorantly snipe my seat.) (more…)

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