kirktastic

So yeah, I’m still alive. I still have a job. The pay cut kicked in so I’m making less. What is gone is my discretionary dinero. So this explains why I’m not at a Coffee Bean in LA even though there was the cheapest-weekend-getaway-price-I’ve-seen-this-century deal. So I’m spending less and thus not stimulating the economy. Just like everyone else. Which is making the economy worse. Which makes people spend less. Which makes the economy worse. Which makes people spend less. Which makes the economy worse.

The big “stimulus” package isn’t going to help. The $33 a month more I’ll get in my paycheck from the bill won’t offset the loss of income from the pay cut. That money will go right to paying off debt. Which doesn’t help the economy. Sure, there are things in the stimulus that may help jobs, but it isn’t quick and it isn’t enough.

The problem is the economy is based on consumers buying shit they don’t need with money they don’t have. As long as you believe that this will keep happening there’s no problem. But now there is a problem. Some like to paint this on poor people buying houses that can’t afford. If it were only that simple. The problem is in many places because money was so easy to get housing values rose at astronomical prices. Yes, I’m talking about you Florida, California, Nevada and Arizona. Even if you are that responsible person but you bought the maximum house you could afford, you are now boned if houses in your neighborhood are worth 48% of what they were last year. Imagine owing $500K on a house that would sell for $250K. Sure, it will be worth $500K again in several years but you’re stuck there for a while. Which is fine, unless your job moves to another city. No more “house flipping” It is pretty tenuous. But it is happening everywhere. Renting is going to make a big comeback.

So there will need to be what they call a “correction” on housing values. And banks are going to have to eat a bunch of loans they shouldn’t have made in the first place. People with shitty credit who got houses they couldn’t afford will now have shittier credit and now that people are checking will find it hard to find a place to live. People with good credit will have shitty credit.

And then there’s the next shoe to drop: Credit Card debit. There aren’t assets behind that debit. When people stop paying their credit card debit it will be very painful for the banks. Already we’re seeing banks cut the credit and raise the rates on people that have good credit. We’re going to have to go back to the days when not everyone got a credit card — and when they did, it didn’t have a high limit.

That’s at the micro level. At the macro level we need to pay down our national deficit before our currency collapses. Bailing out the banks that got us into this mess will cost real money the US does not have. And it can go on printing money so long until the creditors notice. The “tax cuts” in the stimulus bill are really just a cash advance against your future taxes. Taxes will have to go up. Way up. But instead of things like universal healthcare, world class free education, and a modern transportation infrastructure that doesn’t rely on foreign oil, we get to pay off shit we don’t even remember buying. Or we could just go bankrupt and return to an agrarian society.

And with that good news, I’m going to go play with the cats.

I’ve been playing with iPhoto 09 this afternoon. The big new features that it adds is Faces, Places and an easy way to upload photos to Flickr or Facebook.

Places will automagically read the GPS lat/lon data if you have a camera with GPS. My iPhone takes not-so-great photos but does have GPS so when I clicked on the Places view there were already some pin drops on the map. You can easily add location data to your existing photos. Unlike when you manually add location data to Flickr, for example, you can’t place the pin at a particular location, you’re instead stuck placing it in Paris rather than plopping right on top of where the photo was taken. iPhoto uses Google Maps, but in the little pop it will place the pin in Paris but not let you scroll around or move the pin. No biggy, since when you want to look at the photo on the global map you want a dot in Portland, not a million dots over Portland. I’m sure my next camera will have GPS so this should be fun. What sucks is how many places I’ve been to that I don’t have photos of. Pre digital camera era photos that I’ve lost (or didn’t come out due to some camera snafu — my whole N.California Redwoods trip, for example, La Paz and Los Cabos Mexico — or didn’t bring a camera).

It also demonstrates there’s so many places on this planet I haven’t been to yet. Like the Southern Hemisphere for example.

Faces has facial recognition technology to help you tag photos by people’s faces. It took about 45 minutes to scan my 5,000 or so photos for faces. I don’t actually take a lot of photos of people. I’m not one of those people that take a picture of myself in front of monuments I’ve visited either. But I do have several shots of my family and friends to it to look over. Once it scans all of your photos, you click on a photo and click on name and it will highlight the people’s faces in the shot. You teach it to recognize someone and then it places that person on a cork board library by their name. So after ID a person as Nancy, it would offer suggestions of other photos that might have Nancy it in. It did a decent job, but it also had some hilarious guesses, too. Many of the pics I have of my friend Dave have him wearing hats. When guessing faces for Dave, it appears to believe that a hat is permanently attached to his head.

The face recognition technology isn’t perfect. It does recognize faces in phot
os of photographs — like this tabloid cover. It recognized Katie Holmes and someone next to Jessica Simpson, but didn’t recognize Jessica Simpson’s face or the larger Brittney Spears face.

Then again sometimes it sees a face where there isn’t one:


Contrary to what I read on the interwebs, iPhoto 09 does not recognize a cat’s face. Or at least not my cats’ faces.

Flickr integration. For years I’ve been using Frasier Spiers’ excellent FlickrExport to get my photos from iPhoto to Flickr easily. I wondered if the Flickr sharing iPhoto 09 would mean I didn’t need this plug-in anymore. Turns out I do. In Apple’s zeal to make it simple, uploading to Flickr is too simple. No real options for Flickr uploading — you can decide who can view the photo you’re going to upload and if you want a low res or full res version to upload. You don’t get to name the photo, or tag the photo (or remove tags you might not want to share on the interwebs). To make it worse, it uploads the photo into a set based on the date. If you just upload on photo of your cat, it goes into a set of just one photo. And the set is named after the date the photo was taken. You can’t change the settings to not put things into a set, or to let you name the set, or put the photos into an existing set. And the icing on the failboat cake is for a photo I uploaded to test had GPS information on it it didn’t pass that data along to Flickr. So if I wanted to place it on my Flickr map, then I have to manually enter the information. Fortunately, FlickrExport can do everything I want and works just fine on iPhoto 09.

All and all, I’m pretty happy with iPhoto 09. It isn’t perfect, but it is a nice upgrade from the already great iPhoto 08.

iLife 09 also come with iWeb with lets you do these things called “blogs” as well as GarageBand and iMovie. I don’t use iWeb at all as it is way too simple. I only use GarageBand to create ring tones for my iPhone. And I don’t use iMovie at all. From what I’ve read GarageBand offers lessons — some free, some $$$. You can get Sting to teach you guitar, or Ben Folds to teach you piano.

I almost got to spend the inauguration ceremony stuck on MoPac in traffic. But I made it to the office in time to watch the pre-show and swearing in, and the speech on the interwebs. CNN.com’s website hiccuped a few times and I got the show about 20 seconds later than my coworker 15 feet away. That anti-gay pastor part could have been left out. What a douche. I was thrilled to hear the shout out to the heathens that Obama gave in the speech.

It does feel good that Bush is on his way back to Texas and the long nightmare is over. On the way to lunch we were listening to the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s coverage of the day and their correspondent in DC was giddy with excitement about America being back. And goddamn it I’m giddy too.

It was pretty dope that Whitehouse.gov went live with a new look and feel, a Creative Commons license on third party stuff (government docs are in the public domain) and more interactive with the citizenry.

It was the first time I had watched the US media since election night and god it sucks. Babbling on and on about nothing, and then when Kennedy got sick MSNBC cut away to the ambulance outside and missed President Obama’s words for the luncheon. In doing so, they missed Obama saying who had taken ill (they were just reporting “someone” but clearly not the president). And Chris Matthews is a fucking idiot.

President Obama has a lot of work cut out for him and nothing is going to happen overnight. I still might be unemployed in two weeks. Others may have the same problem. The troops can’t come home from Iraq overnight. Guantanamo can’t be closed today. It took Bush eight years to get us this fucked up, it will take Obama time to fix it. And of course, there’s a lot of stuff he can’t do. But with a strong person with charisma at the helm, it does a lot.

I’m happy to report that Peanut doesn’t seem to mind Obama’s speaking like she did with Bush. She’d give a low growl as if annoyed and would often time go hide under the bed when Bush was on. Cats are a good judge of character.

Somewhat unrelated, my dream girl Jessica Alba said on Bill O’Reilly’s show last night she thought he was an asshole.

It is the stupid economy. I learned that my company plans to lay off another 10% of its employees. For those that survive they will get a 10% pay cut. When I think about my salary I often thought I would like to make more and the thought of bringing up 10% less never crossed my mind. Many people I know have been laid off recently and I may join them at the end of the month. As my tweets and posts here have indicated, I haven’t been exactly been hyper enthusiastic about my job. I still do my job well, but I’ve felt it was time to move on. While on my cross country road trip back to Austin, I thought that given the recession I should just stay in my job until things start to turn around and then get out. Now, that decision might be made for me. That is never good, but it could be the kick in my ass I need to find something I like. If you know of a gig, let me know. I have pretty simple desires:

1. I don’t want to live in a place where it is cold.
2. I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.

It is finally over. Can you believe it has been eight fucking years of George W Bush? It is a miracle our republic survived. Obama has his work cut out for him. The psychological impact of Obama being president I hope will give us an optimism to get us out of the economic mess sooner rather than later. I expect no miracles, but the nation — and world really — has been in pretty despondent. Good luck Barack. I’ll be tuning in from the office for the inauguration provided the interwebs doesn’t stop working.

Fuck. I’m not surprised that much (really, it takes a lot to surprise me anymore). But I’m pissed off that many of the recipients of the bailout money — money that comes from our taxes — is going to firms which actively dodge paying taxes. Perhaps rather that look to the US government for bailouts, these firms ask the Grand Cayman government for help. A condition of taking the bailout money should be they have to pay taxes. Congress should close that loophole six months ago. Of course, they should have also had better oversight than just give these companies money and hope they’ll do the right thing.

Made with Obamacon.Me

2009 is not starting out so hot. There’s the Israel/Gaza situation that makes me sad. There’s the continued shitty economy and friends are losing jobs — and thus I’m stuck in my unsatisfactory job so I have that to look forward to. Cops in California executing a young black man in a BART station. Thank god for video on cellphones or we’d never know.

I know the guy hasn’t started yet, but so far I’m not blown away by Obama’s new cabinet. Instead of change we can believe in, it seems like the Clinton administration redux. I know it is important to have experienced people in the cabinet, but fuck. What is the deal with his CIA pick? He was chief of staff for Clinton. Panetta would have been better for secretary of commerce, but he gave that to Richardson (who was better suited for secretary of state but he gave that to HRC). And Sanjay fucking Gupta for surgeon general? Really? Perhaps he’ll nominate judge Judy for the supreme court? I’m also just a wee bit concerned his big economic stimulus plan seems a lot like what Bush did. A five hundred dollar tax break and tax breaks for small businesses. I wasn’t expecting Obama to be superman about all this, but I did hope for it to be a little more than business as usual. I still shudder to think if McCain and that dipshit Palin made it into to office where we’d be. We’d be fucking fucked is where we’d be. And George Bush is going back to his until-eight-years-ago white’s only neighborhood in Dallas. He and Cheney should be going off to the Hague but that’s not going to happen.

Despite the negative nelly paragraphs above, I still am optimistic about 2009 and the future in general. Really. No, stop laughing. I really do.

It is 2009 and so far it is great since I’m in the middle of a four day weekend. I’ve been back in Austin for nearly a week. The weather is gorgeous. It actually is 70F already. I’m not looking forward to Monday when I have to return to work and the nice weather goes away. Coincidence? I think not.

Being on a long road trip gives you a lot of time to think. Last year I was very successful in getting my ass back into the gym and working out regularly. Sadly, some time over the summer I took a few days off which turned into about six months and I gained all of the weight I lost and packed on another 15 pounds. I’ve been working out and watching what I eat again since returning from my trip. I’ve gotten myself to an unhealthy state and really don’t like it so hopefully I can keep up this week of good work forever. That is the thing: it isn’t a diet or exercise program it is a lifestyle change I need to make.

The other day I was somewhat motivated by these shows about obesity in America on TLC. Although I’m fat, I’m not morbidly obese — or as some of these people featured in the show “super morbidly obese” bedbound and pushing 1,000lbs. There’s something more to their story than liking to eat 30,000 calories a day. It is a mental illness. But since these people are bound to their bed it isn’t like they’re making a run to Dairy Queen for a few gutbusters. No, they have people in their lives feeding them. Loved ones. What the documentaries completely didn’t talk about is how the families of these people were also fat. A 29 year old woman from Austin weighed in at 900lbs and her sister probably weighed in at 300lbs easy (on a tiny 5′1 frame) and she didn’t see that she’s heading down the same path. One person that did see light was the 13 year old daughter of the 29 year old woman. The girl was chunky when she was younger but she now is in good shape because she doesn’t want to end up like her mom. After getting the gastric bypass surgery the 29 year old woman died a few weeks later of heart failure. Imagine losing your mom because she ate herself to death. The whole series of shows were depressing. The bright side is at least I’m not that fucked up. But I am somewhat fucked up and need to change my ways before they change me.

So perhaps 2009 will go down as the year I got my shit together healthwise. The facts are simple: I feel better when I’m getting exercise and I’m eating better. But in the past something happens and I stop working out and then I start overeating. Last July it wasn’t an injury or illness. It wasn’t a decadent vacation. It wasn’t stress or a project at work. One morning I stop going to the gym. Then I’m having waffles for breakfast instead of a protein shake or egg white breakfast tacos.

I’m at a Townesomethingorother Suites in Lubbock Texas. I left Austin yesterday around 1pm and it was a balmy 80f but the weather people said a cold front was coming so I decided to head west before any chance of problems.

When I go on these road trips I always like to get out of Texas on the first day. You drive all day and you’re still in Texas just makes the trip longer. But this time around Abilene I realized I wasn’t feeling super hot and decided I would not get all the way to Clovis, NM and so set the TomTom on a course to Lubbock — proud home of Buddy Holly and the the Texas Tech Red Raiders. And wind. Cold, cold, win.

Outside of Sweetwater, TX I saw they had built a lot more more windmills for power generation. There’s still a little oil in these parts but now days the energy is from the wind. So that was nice. This is the area where my electricity for my apartment and work come from. They say the problem with wind power is sometimes it stops blowing. I don’t think that is the case here.

What was interesting is about an hour outside of Austin the Obama stickers went away on cars. Haven’t seen a Prius since I left Austin. Lots of McCain/Palin stickers and large yard signs on people’s farms. These counties out here went 80+% McCain/Palin. I wonder if they are in denial.

Just outside of Lubbock my “not feeling too hot” turned into OMFG I have to pull over and puke. Thing were also percolating on the other end as well. I don’t know what came over me but I thought I was going to die and was feeling nauseous as I got to town. Lubbock built some sort of interchange thingy that TomTom didn’t know about so my trip was lengthened by about 15 minutes as I TomTom and I argued over whether or not where I was actually existed on the map.

Got to the room and took care of some business and then fell asleep. So now it is 5:15 in the morning and I’m fully rested. My GI tract seems OK, I just have this lingering headache I had last night for the last hour of the trip.

So now I’m in a warm toasty room and looking at weather.com to see it is the coldest I’ve experienced since I was in Moscow last year. Those heated seats that I have in my car that I thought were stupid just might come in handy.

It really is kinda sad.

I got back home about a week ago. Which is a drag, sorta. I miss the beach and the tranquility. And although I thought it was hot the whole time I was down there, it got cold here this week and I’d rather have heat.

Papers Please…
My journey home was pretty uneventful. Except my flight from Monterrey to Austin was scheduled to leave at 6:50am. vivaAerobus wants you to be at the airport 2 hours early but there was no way that was going to happen. I got there at 6 am and there was a Mexican woman with her two kids and their dog in front of me and only one guy working the check in counter. There was something wrong with her visa so the guy didn’t want to check her into the flight (the rule is the airline is responsible for sending the person back to their home country if the customs and immigration officials don’t let the traveler in). She was raising her voice same something in español about going to many countries and never having a problem. Blah blah blah. Listen señora I’m tired and I really want to get on that plane. And you’re embarrassing your kids. It also turns out the airline doesn’t let you travel with pets internationally so the same person that brought her current visa had to take the dog. The check in guy was relieved to see me since I had my documents in order and odds are the Americans would let me in.

Like many flights I’ve been on internationally flying into the US, security has a table set up at the gate and they rifle through your shit to make sure you don’t have more than the 100ml/3oz of liquid. Most of the people in front of me didn’t read the sign or follow the direction from the check in guy and had larger than prescribed bottles and/or no little zip lock bag. I feel this is a really stupid restriction but I had my shit in my little bag ready.

When we got to Austin it was nice since about 95% of the people on the plane were Mexican nationals coming to Austin for the weekend to shop and help our economy. This meant the US Citizen line at the customs line was just me. The DHS did decide to let me in and did not even noticed the 23 kilos of cocaine I had in my bag (or the 5 Mexican babies I was smuggling in my carryon)

Technology Getting Me Down…
If you had been following my tweets, I complained that my battery on my MacBook Pro seemed to be getting sick. So I made an appointment at the Genius Bar and after plugging a special iPod into my MacBook they said my battery was bad and gave me a new one. Computer batteries (Sony makes them for Apple) can be pretty finicky and do wear out, since my Mac is only 8 months old it was way too soon to have the battery worn out. Anyway, as usual, Apple was awesome and gave me a new battery. While I was there I brought in my old computer’s power adapter as it had some fraying at the mag-safe connector and even though it has been out of warranty for two years, they replaced it too. So I still am a big Apple fanboy. Macs rule. Everything else sucks.

Apps…
I did break down and buy the $20 Spanish/English dictionary from Ultralingua for my iPhone. Considering it costs about a billion dollars a byte to do international roaming, it paid for itself after looking up the second word. I actually smartly only used Wifi when I was down there so no surprises on my phone bill. And even tough I have 2 tiny Oxford Spanish Dictionaries, I will either leave them at home or back in my hotel. The other app I like this week is SnapTell, which I learned after reading about the Amazon app, what makes this different than the Amazon app is that it magically looks up stuff much like Shazam does with music. You shoot a photo of a CD cover or book cover and it will go out on the interwebs and let you buy it. The Amazon app can work with many more things but it takes a while since it actually relies on a human looking and the pic and matching it to a product. I JUST DON’T HAVE TIME MAN! The idea of having your phone out in the store and being able to see the pricing and availability in other places is pretty powerful. The other app I found is called vlingo and it is sort of like the Google app, where you can say something into the phone and it figures out what you are said and gives you an answer. You say “what’s the capital of Vermont” into it and it will go google that shit. The Google App uses an undocumented feature in the iPhone that knows when you hold it up to your ear and uses that to start and stop listening. vlingo isn’t so lucky, for that you have to push a button on the screen. vlingo does go far enough to let you say an update to Facebook or Twitter and post it. The next feature I want is speech to text SMS.

Movies…
I caught up on my Netflix queue. I saw a film that didn’t get good reviews that I wanted to see anyway called Vantage Point. The plot is the US president went to a conference in Spain and gets assassinated and the story is told from the vantage point of several people. I wanted to see it because I WAS IN IT (don’t bother looking in IMDB, I’m uncredited). But faithful readers may ask, how could you be in a movie set in Spain? You’ve never been to Spain. But I when I was in Cuernavca back in 2006 (I have about 1000 photos from that trip but only uploaded a handful to flickr). I was on the street outside the cathedral and they were shooting a film. I noticed the cars had Spanish license plates and so I figured they were using Mexico as a proxy for Spain. In the most pivotal chase scene if you look really closely (about 30 minutes in) you can see people on the sidewalk. I AM ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE! Yes I am in a mix of people and totally unrecognizable. Otherwise the movie is meh. It had a lot of potential, but seemed flawed to me.

I also saw the BBC miniseries State of Play and I really enjoyed it. It had a great story and lots of twists and great characters. It had to do with a MP (that’s member of Parliament) whose aide dies of mysterious circumstances. The report covering the case has a past with the MP. Again, hard to explain. Just add it to your queue. I saw when I went and found the link at IMDB, it appears that it has been remade and will star that talentless hack Ben Affleck as the MP (but since Americans don’t know what that is, it looks like it is taking place on this side of the pond so he’s a Congressman). Rachel McAdams, who I adore, is playing the female reporter but probably not like Kelly MacDonald did. The guy that played the newspaper publisher was outstanding. They got Helen Mirren for the USian version. I don’t know how they’re going to get around the plot point about the evil oil company being able to keep the newspaper from publishing the story since we have that crazy first amendment here. Perhaps the only thing that will save this film is Jason Bateman is playing the freelance PR guy.