Brandon's Blog

10/2/2009 #

By Jingo

I’m sinfully avoiding stress for a few minutes to write this, but I’ve been here long enough I feel empowered to write a couple of things that have been stewing for quite some time in my mind.

Number A

Christian love actually is unique. Sure, it’s a universal language and it’s all you need, etc., but it is still unique. This of course is not visible in the ‘burbs, because Christian love is at least the dominant vision of the cultural norm.

A lot of Turks criticize Americans for not being truly devoted friends, for being guarded for far too long in a relationship. I would posit that people hold back because a true loving relationship for us is so intensely focused that entering and exiting casually, even amongst brewski buddies, is somewhat horrifying.

Number B

English is, quite frankly, the bomb. I couldn’t really fairly say that after just studying Spanish, but this new language is related to Russian, Arabic, Japanese, maybe some Farsi, maybe some Greek (I didn’t say that, though, if anyone asks, but the word for “port” is common between the two).

The turns of phrases, the playfulness, the puns, the inflections and betrayed intentions of stitching together and delivering an English sentence is so vigorously awesome that it’s really hard to describe.

The whole “in Eskimo there are 12,000 words for snow” thing, like most cross-cultural self flagellations pimped by our education system, really short changes English. We have five words for everything useful for us to split. We have copious slang, even imported from other languages like Yiddish and German and Computer Scientist.

It is versatile, easy to learn the basics, and nearly impossible to learn the sophisticated parts as a second language. We have little quirks like “who” and “whom” that separate the linguistic men from the boys. We speak almost entirely differently in formal situations versus casual ones. We do things in speech that cannot be written properly.

How many sounds can you get out of the letter “a”? Can you imagine writing in a phonetic English alphabet?

9/29/2009 #

Bachelor Time

I’m home alone for the week, and I’m finding my way back into domestic activities much easier than I expected. I’ve been spoiled, especially since we’ve been in Turkey.

Appliances here do a fairly poor job and make no sense. I think the closet icon on the dryer dial is for linens, but the sun I don’t know. The iron is permanent press. It would be much easier to translate Turkish than hieroglyphics. The dishwasher makes even less sense, and it needs a P-trap installed like nobody’s business. Whew, stinky, yuck. I’m washing everything by hand because I’m scared to open the thing up.

We don’t have a microwave, which makes leftovers challenging at best. I light pan-fried some pounded out chicken breasts last night, making little kaşar cheese and chicken mini-sandwiches, which had the nice combo of easy to clean up, portable, fast, and tasty.

In work news, we’re on our third wire transfer attempt to the second bank to try to get my relo benefits paid. We have no medical insurance cards (I made some myself, but I doubt they would carry any credibility here), but otherwise payroll is working and I’m actually an employee here. This wire transfer business is disgraceful.

If the stock market tanks in the meantime, they are forgiven.

9/28/2009 #

Venting

LiveLink is so incredibly evil. How can they not have some sort of TinyURL feature? I was just sent a 220 character URL (that doesn’t work, of course, nothing works in LiveLink). Filled with percent sign URL escapes and executable files. Yuck.

https://[don't look!]/knowhow/livelink.exe?func=ll&objId=104537563&objAction=Open&viewType=1&nexturl=%2Fknowhow%2Flivelink%2Eexe%3Ffunc%3Dll%26objId%3D104537562%26objAction%3Dbrowse%26sort%3Dname%26viewType%3D1

9/27/2009 #

For the GQ Guy in All of Us

I know a lot of guys my age I’ve talked with have wanted to try shaving with an authentic straight razor, mainly because shaving with something so openly clumsy and dangerous just has a cool badass edge to it that’s hard to pass up. I definitely considered trying it at one point.

I think the general verdict is that it’s not worth it. Too much chance of a bad cut, hard to hold and line up correctly, sharpening is inconvenient, etcetera.

What I would recommend, from very recent personal experience, is to pick up a decent shaving brush and soap. The pros online are saying badger hair is the best; I don’t know (the store here only had one, which seems good enough though very cheap).

I’m using this stuff for soap, which seems pretty good and I believe is available in the US at least online. If you can get the cake-style soap and accompanying (properly-sized) bowl, that would probably be better. I think Wal-Mart carries something like this stuff.

You lather up old school, which while obviously unable to match the Dirty Dozen-esque masculine intensity of the straight razor, has a pleasant feel and seems to work quite nicely, even with a fairly basic disposable safety razor.

This stick deal that I got is wetted, as is your skin, then you kind of rub it directly on the skin until you have a good film spread out, then in comes the well-wetted brush (linear sweeps worked best for me) to lather stuff up a bit. The cake stuff, as far as I read, involves taking the wetted brush directly to the soap in the dish, forming up a decent lather and then going to the face with the soapy brush. This is the barbershop way to go about things.

A post-shave upstroke on the mustache/goatee area proves a much closer shave than with the space-age gel. The soap coating is much thinner, more soap-like than the whipped cream puff of the canned stuff. The accumulation on the blade is blessedly minimal. The blade glides very well, and honestly just being able to see what you’re doing unobstructed by a mounding marshmallow foam helps ensure you won’t have to go back for seconds all that often.

Have some after-shave on hand. Not sure if it’s because I shaved twice today to test the stuff out, but a little cooling blue helped things out a bit afterwards.

9/27/2009 #

Another One Ruined

Thanks to Gob on Arrested Development, I can’t possibly take any situation seriously that involves the song “The Final Countdown.”

9/24/2009 #

Shameless

Well, as opposed to the Vista launch fanfare, which by my recollection primarily consisted of press feed where Super+Tab was pressed to get that awesome 3-D Alt+Tab thing that nobody really seems to use practically, it appears the Windows 7 method is to have hapless Joe Users footing the booze bill to host a launch party at their houses.

The Windows 7 launch party at my place of work will consist of a massive Vista and Office 2007 roll-out over the next year or so. When it hits a large environment like US Manufacturing, if you put your ear to the ground you might actually hear the shrieks of pain as twenty year old spreadsheets begin to crumble, and people realize that every single toolbar and menu option has been moved, replaced, or renamed. Otherwise, getting rid of the ridiculous Excel 2003 and below row limit will be a boon to guys like me.

Well, even if the promotional activity is totally cornball, it can’t get worse than the Polish catastrophe.

9/19/2009 #

Efendi 1.0.2

Efendi, fortunately for my database, has always used UTC time for its inner workings. It now ensures this (in case of a different server configuration) and reports UTC as the time zone with every output of time.

9/18/2009 #

We Are Sick in the Head

I have diagnosed us with a special disorder called RIPD: Resort Initial Panic Disorder. Both times we’ve been to a beachy sort of resort together we have freaked out in some way, only later to find that everything is awesome and there are no problems.

My orange ribbon (I don’t think that’s taken) society will sell t-shirts that say “Don’t Get RIPD”, but I think some people will probably read that wrong.

Have a great sugar festival, everybody!

9/14/2009 #

Behaviors

Interesting to see financial advice coming from the slow emergence of a recovery in this economy.

The yield curve relates the return on debt at each maturity. Percent yield is on the y-axis; time to maturity is on the x-axis. It’s relatively hard to understand the behavior of the yield curve when it is presented intellectually, typically by an academic.

But if you listen to (sound) financial advice at a certain point in time, it becomes obvious what’s going on.

If you think interest rates are about to start going up, you will buy short-term debt out of a desire to avoid getting locked into low rates.

If demand increases for something, the buyer will inevitably expect to pay more and therefore receive a smaller return for it. For debt, this means the effective interest rate changes. If debt is heavily bought, the effective interest rate (yield) will decrease.

The way this happens to work with debt is that the buyer pays a higher price upfront for the privilege of receiving the fixed interest payments. This explains the opposite movement of bond yield (benefit) and purchase price (cost).

In other words, whenever something is desired, the buyer who actually gets one is the highest bidder, namely the buyer willing to get the least benefit out of the asset for their dollar. High price, low effective yield.

Buying up short-term debt (as the article advises) drives prices on short-term debt upward, thus short-term yields are pushed downward. This effectively rights the yield curve into an upward slope (the part nearest the origin of the graph dips downward). Statistically, the economy promises improvement when this happens.

What is fascinating about this is that finance classes often treat the inversion of the yield curve like reading tea leaves or forecasting the weather. But, there are real people making real decisions that drive these movements. And the wisdom of the crowd generally follows enough of a pattern to provide real futuristic insight into market outlook. Just listen to a good financial adviser.

Eventually, the economy will grow, and interest rates will come up along with it. The people who righted the yield curve will be proven correct; now their short-term debt can be sold off (or matured, for that matter), and they can purchase long-term debt at a high interest rate.

This will become especially prevalent as expectations of lower interest rates (and thus a threateningly bad economic outlook) become commonplace. As the long-term securities are heavily bought, yields will decrease and the curve will invert. This is a sign that the economy will go into decline.

The circle of debt.

Now, all those Ron Paul devotees who think the Fed and the commodities markets and the central bank and fiat currency and whatever the heck else are better off dead, explain why that behavior - the interaction between the well-intentioned central bank and reasonable individual investors - should not happen.

And these guys who don’t like the GDP multiplier effect because it “creates imaginary money.” Talk about only attending the first three weeks of high school Economics class!

Look, the Fed doesn’t always make good decisions, but they’re just another player in the market, trying to make some money (or at least spend less money). The fact that it’s a somewhat autonomous institution is a good thing. Otherwise, the Prez and friends (whoever that may be) would start thinking a bit too much about the USW or the American Tire Manufacturing League or whatever else, and ultimately make a bad call that will upset our little dingy.

Let it be! It works, and it above all makes a little sense.