Taking a break from the internet and the news was interesting since while I was gone a ton of celebrities died and it took time for the news to trickle down to people on the cruise ship.  Things are going well and i’m staying pretty busy lately but will be on vacation/furlough again starting tomorrow afternoon so I probably won’t have any more updates until late next week.

I’m hoping that by shaming AT&T Apple can whip them into shape or make a really good case for ditching AT&T and going over to Verizon.  I know i’d switch back to Verizon in a heart beat if given the chance and i’m sure there are millions more of us who are irked at AT&T.

The pools are finally opening back up here at the University where I work so i’m thinking of going to them during lunch time to swim instead of just going to the gym every day like i’ve been doing.  It will make for a nice change of pace and swimming is a great low-impact aerobic exercise.  Plus, you can’t beat swimming to cool off in the summer heat.

The other tell-tale sign of the summer around here is the thunderstorms and we have had several brew up suddenly in the last few days.  The strange thing about some of the storms around here though is that you will hear some loud thunder and see some nasty lightning, but then in a few minutes the storm is gone without even dropping any rain at all!  It is basically like a dog that is all bark with no bite.  I think the main reason the weather patterns tend to do that around here is because of the mountains and the valley where we are at.  The mountains really can chop a storm’s power back by disrupting the winds and the weather pattern.  At least, that’s my “hey look I think i’m a weather guy” working theory :-).

If this is happening on your Blackberry see if you have Google Sync installed.  If you do, uninstall it and the problem should be fixed!  Google sync apparently gets confused with future appointments and wipes them out and then sends cancellation notices to all other meeting attendees, even if you aren’t the meeting organizer!  You can imagine that this could be extremely embarrassing for whoever’s Blackberry starts doing this!  Unfortunately this means you can’t use Google sync to keep your Google calendar synced with your Blackberry but I think the alternative (random appointment deletions) is worse.

This applies to Blackberries that have Google Sync on them and are also synched to Outlook (in our case through a BES server).

Let me know if this helps anyone out in the comments!  It was hard to find answers to this issue unless you search specifically for Blackberry google sync issues.

Check out the feeds here: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

It has been fairly busy lately with my master’s classes starting back up for the summer so I haven’t had the time to write much on the blog.  Hopefully i’ll get back to it more soon!

Overall, the new Star Trek movie was excellent and enjoyable, even though I went into it predisposed to not like the movie due to the blatant changing of certain aspects of Kirk’s background and the Enterprise etc. The movie actually did a good job of explaining away differences through classic Trek time travel alternate reality plot devices.  This allows them to move forward with any differences they want compared normal canon since this is an alternate reality.  That means everything we know and love is not negated, it just happened in a different timeline is all.

The new actors are mostly excellent in their roles, with Karl Urban as McCoy and Simon Pegg as Scotty really stealing the show.  Sadly, Scotty doesn’t show up until almost 90 minutes into the movie, but he definitely was hilarious and classic Scotty in every sense.

There are lots of nods to Trekkies with favorite one-liners being issued from familiar characters and even references to tidbits in the Original Series that I missed since I haven’t actually seen many of the episodes of the original series but friends with me pointed out neat references.  Overall, J.J. Abrams has definitely re-invigorated the series and the special effects are top-notch.  The action sequences are exciting and the music fit well.  The pacing was never slow even though the movie clocks in at 2 hours and 6 minutes.

The only negatives I have are that Scotty wasn’t in the movie enough, the villain was mostly just there to allow the plot to have a villain and he didn’t overly impress me.  I also wasn’t too keen on Abrams’ inclusion of lots of non-humanoid looking aliens which makes this feel a lot more like Star Wars.  At least the acting and lines were not wooden and terrible like most of the Star Wars prequels were.  The CG effects even though done by ILM (the same group that did Star Wars effects) were breath taking.  They used the shaky style CG camera moves just like Firefly and Battlestar Galactica to make the CG scenes feel more organic and real but I think in this case they were heavily over-used.  I’m not sure why film makers love this technique but it was found throughout this film even in scenes where the ship should be moving smoothly.  There were also lots of gaping plot holes but only true geeks can argue about how they didn’t account for the proper physics of something while in the same sentence talking about warp drive and transporters :-)  I’m willing to over look a lot so just go into it know that it is science fiction, emphasis fiction here.

Overall I give Star Trek a 8/10 and it could have been even higher with just a few minor things being fixed.  I look forward to the sequel which is reportedly already being written.  Star Trek has a 95% on rotten tomatoes from over 140 reviews so the critics definitely like it as well.  Be sure to check it out this weekend, I may actually go see it a second time!

Social Security started in 1935 by Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of the “New Deal” programs after The Great Depression.  The original program was much more narrow in the nature of what it provided and was billed as being insurance-like in its nature.  People paid payroll taxes and then when they retired based on what they paid in they would get monthly social security benefits for life and a lump-sum death benefit would be paid to their beneficiaries when they died.  It sounds nice on paper but there are numerous issues with it (and we won’t even get into Medicare / Medicaid and Nationalized Health Care!).

First of all, the Social Security system as it is currently behaves as a ponzi scheme.  The new investors (new workers) pay for the returns of the old investors (retirees).  This works as long as the new workers out number the old workers which when social security started the retirees in the late 1930s and 1940s were small in number and the when the baby boomers started working in the 1970s there were plenty more of them than there were retirees from the preceding decades.

There are some differences of course but the basic idea is that of the ponzi scheme.  But here is where things get really dicey.  In a ponzi scheme the goal is generally to get new investors to keep investing until a critical point is reached when the whole thing collapses and the swindler makes off with all the money.  In the case of Social Security there are TRILLIONS of dollars invested in a trust fund somewhere that represents where all of our tax money is going each month in payroll taxes right?

Wrong!  Our payroll taxes for social security (and medicare/medicaid) are taken out each month and handed over to the treasury department.  The majority of these are being used to pay out current beneficiaries (remember the ponzi scheme analogy?).  This is the key point to remember, in a normal retirement program money that you contribute each month actually goes directly into investments to pay out to you later.  Social Security does NOT work like this - most of the current payments into the system go to pay out to current beneficiaries.  This is why people are afraid of privatizing social security - if we did that then we’d all actually have our own private accounts based on what we actually paid in which of course means the current system (and its trillions of dollars in unfunded obligations) would have to be funded completely from the federal budget if new workers were contributing to these new private retirement accounts.  The part that is invested is from the excess money collected which is then used to purchase non-marketabled treasury securities which are “backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. Government” and these are put in the “Social Security trust fund”.  When interest is paid it is also paid using these non-marketable securities.  Benefits are projected to exceed the money coming in by 2017 at which point the treasury securities will have to be redeemed to pay out benefits.

What are treasury securities used for?  Well, when you hear about the National Debt this is part of what that is, the government sells treasury securities (in various forms) to raise money to use for whatever they feel like.  So basically your payroll taxes for Social Security are getting laundered by the U.S. government so that they can be used for whatever they want and then “paid back later with interest”.  This all assumes of course that the U.S. is actually good for the debt which so far we have been, but as the costs increase for Social Security the amount of treasury securities in the so-called trust fund will not be enough to cover the costs incurred to pay out the benefits each year.

For reference on how this works, during fiscal year 2007, the total benefits paid out were $585 billion while $785 billion in payroll tax revenue was collected.  That is a $200 billion surplus.  In a normal private insurance or retirement system, this money would then be invested and could presumably make a good return.  In Social Security it is converted into more government debt and isn’t really invested in the traditional sense unless you assume that the government itself is producing something and generating profit that will result in a return.  Instead we loan the money to the goverment for pathetic interest rates and then hope that they will pay it back at some point.

To summarize the point i’m trying to make above - don’t count on any social security benefits if you were born after 1960 or so since the system will be insolvent by then and by the time my generation retires (born after 1980) benefits will far exceed payments into the system and the “trust fund” will also be empty.

We already know that both Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid will be flipped in terms of benefits paid versus taxes collected in less than 10 years, so why are we proposing to add National Health Insurance as well?  So that we can rob the future generations even more?  If a grandpa stole money from his grandchildren, we would call it wrong.  Why approve of the government encouraging us to do the same?

I know my goals aren’t that high and I could definitely spend more time on it, but i’m learning a lot which is all that really matters to me.  I’ve already found ways to apply some of what i’ve learned on future projects in my college.

The masters program I am in only requires 6 6-hour courses, so with one done I really do only have five more classes to go!  I’ve already registered for my 2nd class for this summer now I just need to fork over the $1000 or so for in-state tuition/fees and then also spend about $150 to cover the books.  Luckily I just sold my jet-ski so hopefully that will cover the schooling.

In other fun news the State of NC is furloughing all of the state employees (teachers included) for 10 hours worth of pay by July 1st, 2009.  That basically means we get a 0.5% base pay cut that is being applied over the course of 1-2 months instead of throughout the year.  This is yet another example of the poor financial health of our state right now, hopefully things will get better but I don’t see that really happening for 2-3 years at the state level, but maybe i’m just being pessimistic.

I’ve started a new book called “Liberty and Tyranny” by Mark Levin, it is fairly interesting thus far and i’m probably going to mail it to my older brother to read once I get done with it (if he doesn’t have it already).  Much of what Mark has said in the first few chapters i’ve gone through is basic common sense of what conservatives adhere to as far as philosophy is concerned - and amazingly there is this document called the U.S. Constitution as well as the Declaration of Independence that guides conservative principles and ideals.  The so-called moral smugness we are often accused of is actually sprinkled throughout the consitution, bill of rights, and declaration of independence.  The founding fathers were deeply religious and while promoting separation of church and state and being against theocracy, religion definitely influenced their ideas and framework for governing.

What scares me so much about what Mark Levin calls the “Statist” philosophy is the continual erosion of individual rights and liberties in favor of more conformity and unity of thought and action.  If you don’t think like others, the new thing to do is to label you a bigot, a racist, or a homophobe to marginalize your viewpoint and ostracize you in the media.

Interesting stuff to think about for sure…

Fast forward almost a year later and the game runs a whole lot better and almost all of the annoying bugs have been fixed.  I have been playing again for a month now and am really enjoying it and have gotten several of my friends to come back and join me in the game as well.  I have a character to level 55 so far (out of 80) as well as a bunch of alts to play with friends and my brother.

The game always appealed to me beacause of its high quality graphics, but it just didn’t run well enough to be worth playing before.  Now that I have a new computer and they’ve patched a lot of the game’s flaws, it is really growing on me.

There are still plenty of issues that need fixing, mainly items being garbage but that is being fixed in the next patch supposedly (1.0.5) that is currently on the test servers and should hit the game sometime in late May (just a guess).

I’m hoping that Age of Conan can keep me entertained longer than Warhammer Online did, Warhammer got really boring after a couple of months because the PVE was terrible and the PVP was just scenarios over and over because nobody would do ORVR.

Anyone else have any thoughts on Age of Conan?

The way it would have worked is that the lowest bandwidth users could pay $15/month or so for 2 GB of monthly bandwidth and then each successive pricing tier allowed more bandwidth and there were “overage” charges per GB that you go over your cap.  Sounds a lot like how cellphone plans work to me, and I know we’ve all been socked with massive bills from those at times!

Time Warner attracted the ire of several people in congress and now legislation is being crafted to combat some of these hare-brained schemes.  Slashdot is linking to this article in the New York Times on the cost of providing bandwidth and it has some really interesting points in it.  One of the most interesting tidbits is that Time Warner has told their investors that they can double the bandwidth in a neighborhood for around $6.85/home!  Sure would be nice if we could all just cough up a Happy Meal and get our bandwidth doubled!  Apparently, the networking equipment used to provide the service has been getting cheaper and cheaper even while they are raising their prices when offering higher bandwidth plans.

I’ve seen this issue first hand with Verizon’s DSL service in my area as the rated line speeds have suffered more and more each passing month since they have over-subsribed our carrier office with new subscribers without adding more routing capacity and bandwidth even though they are now receiving more income from a larger number of users.

One thing that the NYT article is a bit off on though is the idea that a day when nobody is using the network costs the same to Time Warner as a day when everyone is streaming YouTube videos all day.  Time Warner may have one-time fees with the infrastructure itself, but they do have to pay bandwidth costs to internet providers such as Level 3 so if all their subscribers are using bandwidth it does in fact cost Time Warner more.  What we’ll likely never know is exactly how much they pay Level 3 for their bandwidth, but I’m guessing they are making a tidy profit off of each subscriber.  It has always been a problem when natural monopolies exist such as phone service and other utilities.

Hopefully somebody will come to their senses and the country that invented the internet will be able to have decent internet along with the rest of the world.