There are going to be spoilers here, but nothing that actually ruins the novelty of the book, I hope.

What resonated with me were the times when Dan Freeman (the main character) questioned himself, because he was propped up as a bit too perfect for the role of lead revolutionary. As he left the CIA, he wondered, “Have I given in to this middle-class thing?” He marveled at how easy it would be to be his cover identity: to have the women, the “respect” of white people, the nice apartment and the money. To be a whole person, though, he had to maintain two lives.

There are so many revealing gems, great uses of language and parallelism, and instances of pushing beyond the comfort zone. Freeman asks several times in the book, “So, how’s that working for you?” about the well-behaved “just keep waiting for them to notice that we’re worthy” movement. The answers were, of course, desperate and avoidant. The idea that it’s that latent, suppressed fear that would cause an uprising, not just the frustration and anger, was carefully built up throughout the book. The idea of education having value in and of itself, aside from its worth in pursuing a career.

It was such a different time… and yet some things still shine through. Problem is, this book could incite someone like me to become an apologist. “I feel bad for being a product of the privileges of integration and good education and blending that’s gotten me where I am.”

I’m going to have to hunt down the movie now; the library system here doesn’t have it.

I’ve gotten very little app development done these last two weeks. I’m still about 16 hours from a working prototype of the character sheet system for Greg to beat up, but I’ve been relaxing a little more in my spare time. Torchlight is fun. So is Left 4 Dead 2. Spook was a great read. So was Not Becoming My Mother.

As I’ve been figuring out how people work on this retirement saving thing (speaking of being middle-class), two questions have come to mind:

1. If you can only contribute $5k a year to an IRA, how do you handle wanting to invest in 5-7 different mutual funds that each have $1000-3000 initial investments? Dump money into a taxable account and split your portfolio? Leverage your 401k more (even without employer matching), which doesn’t seem to enforce investment minimums?
2. If you use a discount broker like Sharebuilder, how do you handle 401k rollovers? I asked if I could keep the securities (investments) rather than having to cash out, and they said, “only for those securities Sharebuilder carries.” Which are, like, none. That’s partly why I’m using the 401k — to diversify more. So would I open a rollover account at a brick-and-mortar bank for the rollover? Or at some fund family site, like Vanguard or T. Rowe Price? I hardly want more bank accounts.

That brings me to another thing: asking for advice. I read Get Rich Slowly (awesome blog, by the way), and occasionally, J.D. hits on the idea of the “millionaire next door”. That person who lives frugally and drives the 10+ year old car and eats at home. (I’m happy to say that I know that guy. ^_^)

For those of us late to the game–and maybe I only feel so late in comparison to him–I think one of the most valuable things the millionaire next door can do is share their knowledge. Not lecturing about not eating out or clipping coupons or frowning on big-ticket purchases. I’ve found that frugality–like weight loss–is something internal, with the external aspects being the sharing of processes, not validation. So not frugality, but answering questions like the two above and:

• How and where did you start saving?
• What were your sources of info? (Esp. if it wasn’t parental.)
• What do you consider reasonable risk in terms of investing?
• Do you even invest? (I know a few people who feel the speculation of stock market isn’t something they want to be involved in.)

I get the feeling that people are wary of seeming like they’re passing on financial gospel, like we want the best stock picks, a formula for success, or the ultimate portfolio. I’d love to sit down with someone with financial experience who isn’t getting paid to sell me a product and just shoot the shit about financial organization and knowledge.

Most of the people my age are as new to game as me, and those who are older are much more risk averse or don’t geek about this. Money goes into the 401k and they don’t worry about it except to freak when the stock market plummets.

Hmm. I’ve been just soaking in knowledge and learning lately. Life is good.

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1. Mo’ money, mo’ problems: a retirement app idea
2. Take a vote
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• louisgray.com: Why I Turned In My iPhone and Went Android – I love this article. I've written before that I'm considering switching, and at this point, it's only the cost of breaking contract that's holding me back.
• YouTube – heavymedic dance work in progress – unfinished – Y'all know I'm a doc/heavy shipper.
• Penny Arcade – The Sound Of A Klaxon – Regarding the iPhone 4: "She sees that phone the same way she would see a hat, or a ladle. If you had a ladle and you tried to get soup with the ladle but the soup came out, or fell out, or whatever the culinary equivalent of a lost call is, she would try to break it over her knee before throwing it in the garbage."
• Prince Declares Internet Over – Yes, that Prince. The Artist Formerly Known As might actually become "formerly known" among the next generation with his mysterious disappearance from the Internet. Strangely, I hear his music on Pandora. Maybe that won't be for much longer. "Unlike most other rock stars, he has banned YouTube and iTunes from using any of his music and has even closed down his own official website."
• Narrower Towers: 20 Of Japan’s Thinnest Buildings | Design + Ideas on WU – From Greg, this is a really cool look at very slender architecture — 7-story buildings with 1,200 sq. ft footprints (feetprint?), a building that looks less than 10-feet wide, but supposedly has a Chinese restaurant on the ground floor, etc.
• The Lazy Way to Investment Success – I'm not sure I like the term "lazy" for this style — you still need to do your due diligence on picking the index funds or ETFs, but I like the simplicity of the style.
• Buttersafe – Updated Tuesdays and Thursdays » Archive » 11 Bad Comics – Clowns and frowns.
• 2 officers out of jobs in wake of repeated Tasering of woman  | ajc.com – Um. Read this.

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“Yeah, sure,” Markos said. “When are you coming home?” he whined. “This place is all big and lonely without you.”

“Markos, it took forever just getting here,” she said. “We’re just getting into the swing of things. It could be a while before I’m set to go.”

Markos’s pout became a frown and Hardi realized she’d protested too much.

His chuckle was forced as he said, “You sure you aren’t enjoying the sights while you’re out there?”

Hardi’s smile was weak. “Well, it is a lovely planet.”

As I mentioned earlier this week, from here until Witches is done, I’ll only be posting Witches stories.

Prometheus 6 posted a video last month of an interview with Sam Greenlee, who wrote The Spook Who Sat By the Door and made a movie by the same name.
The title of P6’s post was “Sam Greenlee. You don’t need another title,” but, you know, I did. Never heard of him, never seen him. I am such a child of modern, integrated America — which my parents reinforced — that my knowledge of more militant, separatist, not yay-integration viewpoints is next to nothing. My parents didn’t expose me to it, even though my father claimed some odd ties back in his heyday. Schools certainly didn’t teach it in Texas.

I’m about halfway through the book The Spook Who Sat By the Door (the library here had it, which was a surprise to me). It’s a very skillfully written book that’s doing a good job of touching me, despite the generational and cultural gap. I definitely need to finish it before I can really start processing it, though.

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I’ve been in the world of software development for a hot minute now, starting in the high school classroom, through an internship at a startup, to doing fast-paced client work, and now to big corp. One thing I’ve consistently found time and time again, is a correlation between computer UI usage skills and problem-solving efficiency. This is all anecdotal, of course.

I baffle people with number of Firefox tabs and windows I run. I put up with a fair amount of computer slowness to have the ability to put things on the back-burner very easily without losing them completely. I do that through tabs and windows when my work is in Firefox, and through lots of open text files in Notepad++ when coding.

There comes a point — usually mid-afternoon — where I have to stop and clean up or I start to lose track. Where I can’t just glance at the little title snippets and know what tab to use. (I never ever use Windows’s “collapse my taskbar items” feature — that’s a killer for me.)

Objectively, I know this is a subpar setup. Not only am I hindered by slower page load times, slower JS execution times, and more browser crashes, my home computer (which isn’t a beast to begin with) churns and chokes in task switching. I’m not one prone to tech rage with my computer; even sitting at 4GB of memory of RAM with an admittedly old processor, I can rarely watch full-screen video without stuttering, or play Left 4 Dead (2) without accuracy-killing shoddy performance. I’ve given up my latest-greatest rush, and with that comes the requirement to be patient.

So my setup isn’t optimal. I can usually keep track of what’s going on, though, because I keep a careful watch on alt+tab orderings. For example, If I need to switch between a Word document, two Firefox tabs, and Notepad++, then the second FF tab gets bumped to a new window and I make sure the top four items in my alt+tab rotation are those four items. Odd, but that works pretty well.

But a lot of those people who think I’m weird most definitely trump me in their inefficient setups. I’ve worked with someone — let’s call her Sarah — who started the following apps simultaneously on loading Windows XP (on an encrypted hard disk):

• Lotus Notes 6
• Firefox with saved tabs requiring several HTTP logins
• Dreamweaver
• IE 7

This is on top of the standard big corp load of Office Communicator, encryption manager, Symantec anti-virus, etc. Sarah also opened multiple Firefox windows and tabs… eventually, when all that other stuff finished loading. It could be literally 10 minutes from Windows login until she had the ability to check and read her email. I was up and running in no more than 3 minutes in the same big corp load.

Trouble is, this affects our ability to problem-solve quickly. I work slower than Nathan, who runs a much cleaner setup, and Sarah works slower than I do. (Dreamweaver. Honestly.) Not just slower at the physical completion of work (although that, too), but slower at understanding the problem and designing the solution. Years of experience don’t seem to be much of a factor, either. Sarah has years more experience than I do, and Nathan and I are neck and neck.

What does seem to be a factor, though is… hmm, shall I call it “computer literacy”? The deftness with which one uses a computer. For instance, if you don’t know that you can search for and install a Firefox plugin through Firefox itself (Tools -> Add-ons -> Get Add-ons), then you end up opening a new tab, going to Mozilla’s add-on site, searching for the add-on, sifting through search results (with the busyness of a larger screen), etc.

I promise, I’m not arguing for finding the absolute-most-efficient way to do things. I’m just curious about the differences here.

Anyway, this lack of deftness goes along with many of the behaviors that hinder non-technical users:

• They don’t read things as well and tend to just click away alert boxes.
• They can’t pick out content on a page as will by skimming. This (most notably) slows down finding solutions via Google/Bing searches.
• They can’t manage more than about 2-3 windows without finding themselves cycling again and again through the alt+tab list until they stop and read the titles.
• They don’t use keyboard shortcuts well or effectively.
• They do “too much” for actions that can be done more simply. As an example, imagine that you sometimes search a subset of the content in a text document in Dreamweaver or Notepad++. You can do this by selecting the block of content, then doing a search; the editor will automatically limit your search to that content. But if you need to search everything in a document, it’s silly to select everything in the file with your mouse, then search, but I’ve seen that habit get established.

All of means that we miss clues because we don’t see them or we’re distracted by the conscious acts of stumbling with shortcut keys.

It seems like a good usability lab setup could capture all sorts of information about how developers work and where problem areas are.

My big question, though, is what can I do about it on a one-on-one basis? When I’m sitting with Sarah, helping her diagnose and fix an issue, and I’m struggling not to tell her how to do things or rush her… How do I gently train her to work a little smoother, especially when she is as unbothered by her setup as I am by mine? For that matter, should I?

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So we won’t be moving until the house is sold, and I had to argue for an amendment that would let us terminate the lease gracefully when the house is sold, regardless of whether the new owners want us to move out. I’m kicking myself in the teeth today. I feel like a damn idiot.

No harm done in the long run, though, and more importantly, I’m not even slowing down on the shrinkage process. I’ve been steadily scanning in documents in the evening between stress-relieving bouts of Left 4 Dead 2. I’m well into the C’s in my file cabinet, and finding all sorts of things to get rid of.

Regardless of Greg’s scanner being a flatbed, I can’t find a great way to automate the scanning process. Each document needs a descriptive name (usually also dated by original receipt) and to be put in a particular content-relevant folder. Even with a sheet-fed scanner, I’d still only gain the benefit of having multi-page documents only require my attention at the beginning. Good thing is that it encourages me to throw away crap. I don’t have a shredder, but I can do pretty good with hands and scissors.

I need to find something to do with the books, though. The local used bookstore isn’t accepting books for about the next year (‽), and it’s not worth doing individual sales on Amazon, except for maybe the textbooks. The local library takes donations, and they sell the books to raise funds. They’re having a lousy budgetary year, so I might let them make money off them.

Hey, wait. A yard sale might get me somewhere. Money to pay off that student loan (or, you know, that wedding thing I’m supposed to have some day).

I’ll be introducing myself to craigslist to pawn off the desk and filing cabinet once I get a new desk picked out and my documents scanned, and I’m excited. I went and looked at the Ikea desk that Travis mentioned having, and like he said, it seems like the various bars and rails would get annoying. I found a couple more, but I wouldn’t be able to see either in stores.

I’ve been so low-energy this week: fighting off some bug; screwing with this lease thing; living in a dirty, cluttered house (the dirt is fixed, although the clutter isn’t); struggling with social and home drama. I’m tapped. I’ve even bantered around the idea of hiring a temporary personal assistant for the next couple of months. Someone under an NDA to de-paperize the office, make appointments, and help with some of Greg’s “meta” work for Ludus Novus. It’s a nice idea, but impractical.

All the cruft in my space — and the mental space that cruft takes up — is leading me towards something like Dave Bruno’s “100 Items” idea. (Good reading on that includes Mind the Beginner’s thoughts and Zen Habit’s process.) Not necessarily 100, not necessarily following Bruno’s stipulations, not necessarily anything. Just bouncing the idea around.

This isn’t a week for decision-making except where I absolutely must.

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“Who are you, Jayden?” we asked.

He giggled, then stopped suddenly and said in a hoarse whisper, “I’m not who I should be. Instead of being born the wrong person, I was born not anyone. Just like an artie.”

We weren’t sure what to say to that. Anima sat down cross-legged on the floor. “What do you do?”

He glanced up at Lonnie, then back down at us. “I do what I must, what I have to, what I shouldn’t.”

This is a very talky story — not a whole lot of plot going on — but I wanted to play with his early relationship with Lina in a fairly isolated environment.

They’ll be getting into plenty of trouble soon, trust me.

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When we moved into the house last year, I loved having 1400 square feet to play in. Greg and I have separate offices, and I have room for books on top of books. We have a big kitchen and a large common area.

But it was a very painful move — we have a lot of stuff, and we moved ourselves (which we swore we’ll never do again). Add to that the accumulation that comes from having more space in which to put crap. More books (although I’m cool with my Kindle, despite the Big Brother aspects), more furniture, more kitchen appliances (good god, the kitchen appliances!), more stuff.

I’m pretty much done with that.

I’m not trying to squeeze Greg into a 400 sq. ft. apartment, of course. He’s plenty fine with lots of space and lots of stuff, so there are concessions to make there. But I can get rid of plenty of my own junk without impacting him.

Warning: I’m going to use words like “need” to describe things that feel silly for me to even say, like that we “need” a three bedroom apartment in order to have enough room for everyone to be happy. I’m engaged to a great person and he’s totally worth some excesses.

First up: clothes

I’ve been carting around clothes from all my body sizes, stuff I wouldn’t wear now even if my weight were ideal: t-shirts with holes from chemistry lab, college shirts with off-color engineering jokes on them, scratchy sweaters more appropriate to Indiana winters than North Carolina ones, etc. Thirty minutes of collecting and a 15-minute trip to Goodwill took care of that.

Next up: a “paperless” office

I half-assedly follow the Getting Things Done methodology, which means I file a fair amount of things away. And so I have a 4-drawer-tall metal filing cabinet. It’s awesome and cool to have, but it takes up a lot of space, is heavy as hell, and about 95% of the stuff in there be safely stored digitally without any loss of validity. That would leave me with something like this, which can easily be stashed in a closet.

I’m in the process of doing this digitization using Greg’s scanner, but his scanner is a flatbed, what with him being an artiste and all. I’ll keep churning at it, but it’s not the fastest process, especially since I’m rarely at the desk on my office.

Other steps I’m taking to be “smaller”:

Books

I’m not entirely sure how far to go with this. I’ll definitely be selling books I’ve read and won’t reread to Book Buyers here in Charlotte, NC. Books that I have that are no longer under copyright, too, since I can get them digitally for free.

I truly wish that I could get digitized versions of non-technical books I own paper versions of without just repurchasing. I might have to price some trade-ins. For instance, if I can sell a book for $5, and it costs $4 for the digital version of it, that could be a winner. It’d be a crap-ton of work, though.

For now, I’d be fine cutting down from four bookshelves to two. Greg can have my unused ones.

Desk

Just a few months ago, I got a super-cheap, super-huge desk. All cherry-ish wood, L-shaped, 5- or 6-feet to a side, glass top, etc. Horribly heavy. Took three of us to move it (and Greg’s matching one), and we dinged the walls good in the process of getting it upstairs.

I enjoy the desk, truly, but it’s covered from end to end in junk. Papers, in-use books (what are all those bookshelves for, again?), borrowed books, magazines, office paraphernalia, scanner, DVD drive, file labeler, and unprocessed “inbox” items. It’s a hot mess.

I’m fascinated with the idea of going vertical, but I’m not sure where to find desks with hutches that aren’t $300+. I’ve found things like this Ikea contraption, which is just the right width for my 2-monitor setup, but I’m not sure about the upper area, especially since it’s attached.

What I’d really like is one of those Resource Furniture space savers, but have it be a combo desk and wall shelving, or desk and treadmill, or desk and life-saving hospital unit.

Knick-knacks

I have approximately 890 candle holders and platforms, 2,000 little turtle figurines, and various other cutesy things.

I have about 3 candles and very few available flat surfaces (see above re: the junky desk). All of those things are still boxed up or strewn about haphazardly.

So… what’s the point?

Digitizing music

I guess CDs are technically “digital”, but my point stands. I have ~300 CDs of music that are sitting in and around a busted Sony 200-CD Changer in my living room. Those are getting MP3ed at 320 kbps and the CDs stashed away on old CDR spindles.

I’d love to have an HTPC-type setup where both my and Greg’s media were playable downstairs on my surround speakers, with Hulu/YouTube viewable on the television. Since I’d still need my trusty 10-year-old receiver (HDMI didn’t exist when I bought this!) to manage the gaming consoles and HTPC, I can’t justify spending $400+ on yet another computer.

Things I’m not doing:

1. Moving into a significantly smaller space. A two-bedroom space wouldn’t be healthy for my relationship with McGregor unless I replaced my desktop with a laptop and (therefore) didn’t need a dedicated office. (See, this is one of those silly instances of “need”.)
2. Getting a laptop. I just can’t justify the $2k+ expense I’d have to make to get a true desktop replacement. I have a computer that works perfectly fine and doesn’t need any upgrades. If it tanks in some catastrophic way, I’ll reconsider.
3. Getting rid of kitchen appliances. The kitchen is largely Greg’s domain, and he’d be grumpy if I snuck behind him and threw out the (oddly specific) salad spinner.
4. Buying a sheet-fed scanner. That’s a $400 cost that I also can’t justify, especially since Greg has a flatbed. Honestly, though, haven’t we been making consumer scanners successfully for 15 years now? Why are they still so expensive?
5. Getting rid of useful, specific-use items. It’s been a while since I made clothes or repaired them, but I’m not kicking the sewing machine out yet. Same with my yarn.

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If I lived alone, I’d totally get a small apartment and use something like their queen space-saving beds. I especially like the Ulisse Dining set. Unfortunately, they don’t list any prices. From the arduous process described in the video, I’d assume it’d be thousands and thousands of dollars. Several of these thousands, even.

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