In case you haven’t noticed, the economy is bad. In recession. Like what happens to men when they jump into cold water. Or so I’m told. It is especially bad in places like Michigan. Michigan is having trouble because it produces only two things, cars, and mosquitoes. And only the mosquitoes are impressive. (In fact, President Obama was able to sell Michigan to Canada for $37 at the White House garage sale last Saturday. Suckers. They totally paid too much.*) Just kidding, Michigan.

So like I was saying, the economy is in really bad shape. For example, the price of a six pack of my favorite beer has gone from $7 to $9. I want to know what Obama is going to do about that, dammit! When this terrible, terrible thing occurred, I began to pay attention and started learning about economics and stuff. I even read some stuff in Wikipedia. I would like to share what I have learned with you.

First, the main reason the economy is really bad, and not just a little bad, is you! Yes, that’s right, you: the average American. Our economy isn’t doing well unless it is growing, and it doesn’t grow unless the vast majority of you spend an ever-increasing amount of money. But what did you do, when you heard a little bit of bad news about real estate, and the credit market, and the stock market? You stopped spending and started putting your money in savings accounts. Selfish jerks. We’re not going to get out of this mess until you go out there and beg your credit card companies to let you have some more money and then buy eight or nine big screen TVs and a couple Cadillacs. Got it? Also, it would help if the population grew faster, so either have some more kids or quit bitching about illegal immigrants.

The second thing I learned is that economic hard times aren’t always bad. When money gets tight and times get tough, people go back to basics. They spend more time with family. They play board games. They drink more cheap beer. Most importantly, they draw upon strengths and abilities they had forgotten they had, in order to make it through. Many people are growing vegetables in their gardens. Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian are both working on new sex tapes.

I’m finding ways to get through, too. I tried making my own beer last month, ’cause I’m not paying no $9 for a six pack. Unfortunately, it tastes bad enough that college frat boys won’t drink it. And they’ll drink Old English out of a mossy toilet bowl. So now I’m working on a sex tape …

* Ha ha, I can say that cause I was born there.

I love ninjas, I like doctors, and McDonalds is ok. But I LOVE Dr. McNinja.

If you have a lot of accounts and passwords, you can get password-management software that will keep track of them for you. All you have to do is remember one password to view all the others. Some of this software is free, some is not, and you can get it for most operating systems, or even for your smartphone or PDA.

My problem is that I use multiple computers, running both Linux and Windows, and I want to be able to access my passwords from all of them. There are password managers that are “portable”, ie., you can put them on a USB drive and run the software from different computers, but most of these will only run on one operating system.

Password Gorilla is free software that you can use to create a secure password database, on a USB thumb-drive, that you can access from Windows, Mac, or Linux.

I’ve written instructions here.

(The instructions are specifically for Windows and Linux. If you use a Mac, you can probably figure out what you need to do from the Password Gorilla website.)

1. Take off your clothes
2. Stand in front of a large mirror
3. Start jumping up and down
4. Flex all your muscles
5. Observe how much of you appears to be trying to catch up with the rest of you.

Optional step for added “fun”:
6. Perform before and after each holiday meal.

Merry Christmahannukwanzika!

This XKCD cartoon basically explains how I got into my career: link.

In my case, the critical experience occurred after college, when I was doing data entry at Sun Microsystems, and it was Solaris I was messing with, not Perl. (Although I am pretty good at Perl, now, too.)

If you have no idea what I’m talking about:
1. Perl is a programming language.
2. Solaris is an operating system. (Like Windows, MacOS, etc. But way betterer.)

Interesting quote from Timothy Ferriss (author of the 4-Hour Workweek), from his blog, on why he doesn’t do much stock-market investing:

Here’s the deal — to beat the market consistently, you have to: 1) have better information than most people, 2) have superior analysis of the same information, or 3) have better luck than a Leprechaun.

Discarding luck as a strategem, and personally discarding better analysis because I don’t want to spend my life poring over annual reports or evaluating algorithms, there is a simple conclusion: don’t invest in anything that you don’t know inside and out better than most of the world.

I’m on-call at the moment, which means that I get paged any time a customer has a problem with one of their computers, or any time a monitoring program thinks one of those computers might have a problem. The monitoring program has obsessive-compulsive disorder, and it likes to send a lot of pages at night for things that I really can’t do anything about, other than to wake up and curse my pager and then toss and turn for an hour until I finally pass out again so that I’m ready for the next page. I have been on-call in some fashion for several weeks now, and life has lost all meaning. Here is a Haiku I wrote:

Colors fade to gray
There is no joy, no beauty
On-call yet again

Here is another Haiku I wrote:

Nostrils fill with stench
Last night’s meal was a mistake
Now I fart onions

It does not really have anything to do with on-call, but I like it.

It’s going to be hard to trust the election results when electronic voting systems are so easy to hack.

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/evoting.ars

Postscript, 11/19/2008: In the end, regardless of who won or lost, I’m glad that the outcome wasn’t ambiguous as compared to polling data. If there was any monkey-business going on in either direction, it seems unlikely that it affected the outcome.

I often hear or read people who argue that the reason we shouldn’t move to a universal healthcare system, like every other developed country has, is that we would lose our status as having The Best Medical Care in the World. The self-evident truth of this status is often thrown about as though it were part of the patriotic article of faith that we are The Greatest Nation on Earth. Anyone who questions it is in danger of being labeled “un-American.”

And yet, is it really true? Consider this story from CNN: Being a bad patient can save your life. Of course, it is certainly possible that the patient in this story merely had an extraordinary run of bad luck, and it is also possible that he would have fared worse in any other country. But stories like this should make us at least wonder if we really are benefitting as much as some people think we are from our collective decision to keep our medical system private.

Personally, I feel much safer knowing that once something is designated as “suspicious” by our security professionals, it cannot become “unsuspicious” until it has been blown up.

Bomb squad members further investigated the packages and determined they were simply several hot dogs in foil wrappers. Sadly, the wieners were detonated as a precaution. Full story.

Apparently, duct tape and tin foil on anything is considered suspicious. I’m glad that my college days are behind me; there was always the risk, in college, of waking up wrapped in tin foil and duct taped to a pole. “I’m sorry Mrs. Smith, but your son was clearly suspicious. We had to detonate him as a precaution.”