I’m still around, contrary to what this blog might lead you to believe. Sorry about the lack of posts but I seem to spend all my words on FriendFeed and twitter these days. I’ll try to do better but no promises. Before you continue, I request that you excuse the typos in this post. I’m working with new (cramped!) hardware that is affecting my typing but more on that later.

So!

What have I been up to of late? Let’s see, went down to Richmond, VA to visit with family and do some genealogy research. The visit was actually quite fruitful as there is stuff hidden in microfiche in the Library of Virginia that I would have never found elsewhere. <slight tangent>Why this data is locked away in microfiche format, I will never understand. Why hello 2009, you’re full of wonder and technology, surely this stuff should have been digitized by now. Alas no, and I’m fairly certain the Library of Virginia is not the only place that has treasure troves of information that can’t be found unless you visit.</slight tangent>

My trip led me to find out something I find quite important though. Up until then, I knew my grandmother died in her late 30’s but I had no idea my great grandmother also died very young. That knowledge freaked me out enough (I do have a fear of dying young you know) to finally bite the bullet and do the 23andme thing. I ordered the test last week, I should be getting the kit next week. I don’t know whether I’ll find out something reassuring or depressing but at least I’ll know. Perhaps I might hit the HIV resistant gene lottery too! Hey one can dream and if I do, I promise to share my DNA with my future kids.

Post Virginia trip, I drove up to Baltimore for the boyfriends birthday. I kind of arranged a nice get together/party thing for all his friends, with the help of his brothers and his best friends. He had a great time but people who get to bury their faces in cake-y cleavage usual have fun. I’d post the picture of him nose deep in cleavage cake but then you’d never hear from me again because I’d be dead. While I was in Baltimore, he got his condo on the market. The quicker it sells, the quicker he can move out here, finally. Then we can escape my current spider infested hellhole of an apartment and move in to someplace decent.

Post Baltimore, we flew back to the Bay area together and of course, we had the worst flight in the history of flying. I think the turbulence map that day showed nearly 60% of the contiguous 48 states covered with turbulence. I will be glad when I only have to fly once or twice a year. When we got back, his birthday present arrived; a Terps red Lenovo S10. It was so perfect and great that the next week, I blew my Amazon Associates money and got a pink one for myself. Look at the precious:

If you look closely at that picture, you’ll see my cute little S10 is running OS X. This is because I love OS X but the Macbook Air is far too expensive and doesn’t come in pink.

My eyelids force closing themselves tell me that I have stayed up later than they will allow. I’ll press post on this and come back with another post in 4-6 weeks when I have my 23andme results.

I work in operations at Google which means my work doesn’t usually result in the stuff you see and use every day. Well it does in a very indirect manner but that’s just semantics. Anyway, aside from a Gmail theme (Cherry Blossom if you’re wondering), stuff I do never sees the light of day outside the walls of Google.

With that said, ladies and germs, girls and boys, I will now take this rare opportunity to present to you, Yet Another Erica Created Theme: Large Type.

This theme is for Google Spreadsheets forms and was recently launched with a host of other spreadsheet form themes you can use. Check it out:

Check out this page if you’d like to learn how to add a theme to your form.

(This post will self destruct.)

Yep, that’s my mom being scared of Conficker. Sooooo annoying since I set up a Ubuntu machine in her office when her other computer was “slow” (it just needed more RAM). She wouldn’t use it because it didn’t have MS Office on it.

Can you tell how aggravated this makes me?

Look: >:-| This is my angry face.

My XBL Avatar

This post has been updated! Make sure you read until the end for the update.

Up until tonight, I had never been called a spook.

That memorable milestone happened while playing a game of Halo, courtesy of one JBlues2k.

My younger brother and I were playing Halo 3 together and I was enduring the typical “a female playing Halo must be fat/ugly/lesbian” litany when JBlues2k decided that I “sounded black.” I planned on ignoring that bait but my brother instantly responded “So what if she is?”

…Aaaand we were off. JBlues2k wasn’t alone in his show of hatred. Not to be outdone, our other teammate, x HEADSHOT 82 x, joined in. I won’t give the blow by blow but there was plenty of racism to be had. Not limiting themselves to “spook” our teammates ran the full I-hate-black-people gamut with “monkey” “cotton picker” and “pubic hair*” thrown around. They also started calling me “Kizzy” for good measure.

When the game finally completed, not content to go on to another game to harass someone else, JBlues2k decided he needed to send me a message to drive the point home. Have a listen:

Lovely, innit?

Of course I did the needful and filed a complaint against the 2 players with XBL. For once, I’m going to keep track of what happens

Kizzy...how clever.

to this complaint (you’d be surprised how often I make them because of racist remarks). Normally, I file the complaint and assume that nothing is going to come of it. This time I want to see what Microsoft is going to do.

See, this week I learned that Microsoft has a policy to suspend any player for stating their sexual preference on Live. That seemed ridiculous to me, what with all the other crap that gets said on Live (full disclosure, I play in the Underground zone because I curse like a sailor while I’m playing). However, in the process of reiterating this policy to the Consumerist, they also said this:

“Harassment of any kind is not condoned and is taken very seriously; we strongly encourage Xbox Live members to immediately report inappropriate behavior through the compliant tools in the service so that it can be investigated and the appropriate action taken.”

Well, Microsoft, here’s a report of harassment, now what?

*Pubic hair bit throw you off? Yeah apparently God hates me so he put pubic hair on my head.

Update! Stepto, he who leads the brave souls that wield the banhammer on Xbox Live, made sure these guys got handled. A 2 week suspension was their fate and if they keep up the behavior after their timeout, a permaban awaits. Read the comments for more information. Thanks for keeping XBL a fun place to play Stepto.

I caught up on and became addicted to Lost in 2007 when recording of American TV were the only things I could watch in Milan.

This post is sure to be full of spoilers so I will include a jump (I think the second ever for this blog) so you don’t accidentally see something you shouldn’t.

Ready? OK! (Which translates to “More after the jump”)

Lost Theories:

• The polar bear came from a point in time when the Island jumped to the Ice Ages.
• When the Dharma Initiative found the Island, they figured out a way to stabilize it. This is why Jin was all suited up in a Dharma uniform and acting like he’d been at that time for a while.
• The stabilization method the Dharma initiative discovered involved putting in the Numbers 4 8 15 16 23 42 every 108 minutes (which leads to my next theory).
• The Island does a time jump every 108 minutes.
• The Dharma initiative people referred to “saving the world” by putting in the numbers because they incorrectly interpreted the flashes as affecting the entire world instead of just the Island….OR
  
• Maybe they are trying to prevent the Island jumping to a point in time where the Island doesn’t exist. The existence of the Island is crucial to the existence of the world.
• Accidentally making the specifics of the second crash even more like the first, Kate will end up pregnant to mimic the pregnancy of Claire. Remember she and Jack went all bow chicka wow-wow right before leaving.
  

Stuff I still don’t understand (mind you there is much more, these are just the BIG ones):

• Where the monster came from. Maybe a point in the future where the monster exists?
• Why does the Island jump through time?
• Why is Jack’s father significant?

So that’s all. I’m tired and the bed is calling me. Let me know your thoughts on this (if your into Lost as much as I am).

So California can’t afford to pay tax refunds. It is instead looking into delaying tax refund checks or issuing IOUs. 2 ways this seems entirely fucked to me:

1. A tax refund is money you overpaid in taxes. The govt shouldn’t spend money that doesn’t rightfully belong to them. To be fair, the govt shouldn’t even be getting anymore money than the proper amount of tax. Why do we have income tax again? Oh right, to pay for wars. I wonder what wars any of the states that collect income tax will be fighting.
2. If California issues IOUs (or checks since they’re both pieces of paper guaranteeing money) why would any bank honor these pieces of paper? They know that California has a $42 billion dollar deficit. Imagine you write a check to someone and the bank knows you have a -$4,200 balance. You think they’d cash the check? Hell no.

Expanding on thought #2, I highly doubt that banks aren’t going to cash the checks/IOUs as chaos would quickly ensue (more on this thought later). So banks will knowingly accept a less than worthless (worthnegative?) piece of paper thereby extending an unwritten, unguaranteed loan to the state of California.

We know California is broke right? What happens if they don’t pay the banks back for these IOUs? Last year Cali paid out $10.7 billion in tax refunds. After the bank bailout and ensuing bankruptcies, I don’t think any bank can afford to be stiffed on a billion dollar loan (we’ll assume most of the refunds will end up in ~10 banks because we can).

See the cycle here? The loans and the debts go round and round because nobody wants to let stuff hit ground. Returning to that bit about banks not cashing the IOUs, I would welcome the resultant chaos if it would ultimately lead to true market correction.

People are talking a lot about the economy “bouncing back” to which I say bullshit. There is nothing to “bounce back” too. That joyride we were having for the last few years was just Monopoly money. Once you take all the pretend money out of the equation, we’re right where we’re supposed to be. Unfortunately all sorts of businesses made big bets on debt and lending and are now feeling the pain.

BUT WAIT!

Government to the rescue, ready to print more real money backed by nothing thereby devaluing the real money you already have. Why? So these businesses that made bad bets don’t crash.

The free market can’t really work if the government is going to rescue businesses that don’t do well.

Pop quiz:

You have a car that you use to get around and also cart around your little sister for your parents. You total your car while driving recklessly. You still seem committed to driving recklessly even after you’ve crashed. Your parents:

A) Give you another car.
B) Tell you to save up and buy another on your own.

Makes less sense when put that way right?

Oh but what about the jobs of the people? Won’t you think of the people? The fact is, business is just a big bet. When you go to work for a company, you’re saying that you trust the company won’t fail. You’re making a bet on the business just like the owners are. While we like to think jobs are guaranteed, they are not.

This all goes back to the lack of responsibility and consequences. For some reason, our nation has been moving toward a mindset that consequences don’t exist, that someone will be there to pick you up will you fall.

Sorry, that was a tangent. Money?

So this whole cycle of debt business? It has to stop. Let the value of homes fall (sorry homeowners) since their pricing and value was based on fake money. This will make it so people don’t have to go into significant debt to buy a home.

College tuition should not be what it is. Kids should not have to start their adult lives by piling on debt. I mean, what IS that? “Well kids, you’re 18 now, and since most people need a college degree to have a career you should go to college. Here’s $40,000 in debt to start you off.”

More debt.

I disagree with the notion that anything worth having requires you be in significant debt but that is the notion that has been fueling our society and bubble based economy for the last decade or so. Maybe more? Probably.

Personally, I want this whole house of cards to fall so the value of things can be adjusted to their value based on real money and not debt based money. Do I think that will happen? No. Chaos, remember? People would go nuts because while the market was correcting itself, we’d look like we were in a recession (depression?) and all the fake money would go away and then the govt would step in and…

…oh wait.

Well until that whole govt-stepping-in-to-catch-the-economy-when-it-falls stuff stops, we’re fucked. The cycle will perpetuate because the market will never be able to correct itself.

I’m done rambling about this now.

Disclaimers: I fix computers not money for a living, these are just my based on common sense thoughts. The place where I fix computers has no idea I have these crazy thoughts about money so these words are mine, not theirs.

Daemon is now available in Kindle format. FTW!

Today Daemon by Daniel Suarez was released as a hardback book in many major bookstores.

You want this book.

You need this book.

Go forth and purchase one for yourself or more importantly, for the person in your life who doesn’t understand the importance of information security.

A brief synopsis:

Confronted with a killer from beyond the grave, Detective Peter Sebeck comes face-to-face with the full implications of our increasingly complex and interconnected world—one where the dead can read headlines, steal identities, and carry out far-reaching plans without fear of retribution.

Sebeck must find a way to stop Sobol’s web of programs—his Daemon—before it achieves its ultimate purpose. And to do so, he must uncover what that purpose is. But Sobol has his own plans for Sebeck.

Daemon looks at what could possibly happen tomorrow by utilizing the power of voice recognition technology, artificial intelligence, game theory, sonic weapons, automated vehicles and zombie computers in conjunction with each other.

See? I told you that you wanted this book.

Barack Obama will be my next President of the United States.

It’s been over a month and it’s finally begun to sink in. I feel like I can talk about it without jinxing something. I’m no longer shell-shocked. I have stopped expecting the worst.

Barack Obama will be my next President of the United States.

Finally. A President I can call My President. I turned 18 in 1998. I voted in the 2000 election. My candidate did not win. I voted in the 2004 election. My candidate did not win. I didn’t give up after these losses, I got motivated. On Tuesday February 5, 2008, I voted in a primary for the first time.  It was also the first time I volunteered for a Presidential campaign. Handing out flyers in Hillary country was an exercise in futility. I didn’t care. If I reached one voter, I’d accomplished something.

Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States.

On Tuesday November 4, 2008 at around 8am, I voted for Barack Hussein Obama for the office of President of the United States. I got a provisional ballot as my name wasn’t on the rolls at my polling place. No worries. I brought all my registration paperwork. Nobody was going to stop me from voting. I went to work after voting. I didn’t get a sticker but I didn’t really need one to tell me or the world that I voted. The jacket adorned with Obama buttons probably did the trick. I left work at approximately 6:45 pm. I could have left earlier but I found myself riveted by election return maps and numbers. I went to my friend and coworker Brandon’s house which ended up being packed with Obama supporters. I brought a bottle of wine and some cookies. Luckily he had the champagne.

Barack Obama is the next President of the United States.

We got the official news when NBC called it. The house was buzzing up until that point but when NBC said that Barack Obama had enough electoral votes to be the President of the United States…silence. I think this is where I became shell-shocked. We drank champagne and we talked about things I don’t remember because I was too busy thinking about everything this meant. Change. Hope. Happiness. Mostly the idea that the leadership of this country would finally be someone who would buck the status quo and do what is good for the people.

Barack Obama will be the President of the United States

I left early, drove home, called my family who seemed to be shell-shocked too. I got home and started searching for information about the Inauguration. I have to be there. I emailed the office of Senator Dianne Feinstein to get tickets but I don’t hold out much hope of getting those. No matter. I’ll stand at the back of the Mall if I have to but I will be there.

Barack Obama is the next President of the United States and Person of the Year

I got an email a couple weeks ago from Heather Champ stating that Time Magazine would like to use one of my pictures. I bet you can imagine my response. After communicating with others who got the same email, I realized that Time was working on their Person of the Year issue and that person is Barack Obama. Not at all surprising really but well worth it. I think Obama has earned that title this year. I hope he affects enough change in this country to earn it for the next 8 years.