A Viajar!

Kind of a belated entry, but I am now backpacking in Europe. We started on May 30th and I'm just getting around to writing that fairwell-for-now post I had meant to put up. I doubt I will really have time to read up on anything technical and comment on it here, so I think it's best I just take a break from writing until I get home.

That means my next post will probably be on July 27th or there abouts.

I'm really enjoying the complete vacation so far, and look forward to having some disconnection time to freshen up. I'll still be online at times, but mostly to make travel plans, and I'd rather not fill my blog with ramblings about that.

So, adios for now.

(Too Much) Free Money

I found this article on YC News today that claims that the recurring boom and bust of the Valley is somehow the Federal Reserve's fault. His only backup for this claim is a link to this article about the dangers of inflation, and the Wikipedia entry on the Fed itself. If you read the inflation article, you'll note it is from during World War II. While it rightly claims that inflation itself can be bad, the purpose is to support higher taxation and government borrowing during the second world war, not to talk about Fed policy in relation to economic bubbles. I'm not defending the Fed as perfect, the Wiki article has a whole list of criticisms, but I would ask what the better alternative would be... both to the Fed itself and (mild) inflation. The Gold Standard has been tried and found wanting, for numerous reasons. (The first link by a conservative writer, the second, by a liberal one, in case you think I am politically biased.)

Anyway, the point is that I'm confused at how the bubbles in the Valley (plural because maybe one is happening now, maybe not, time will tell) are the Fed's fault. There have been economic bubbles throughout history (South Sea Bubble, etc.). They always happen when what is normally a process played out by a small percentage of the economy (starting and funding businesses) gets popular and the rest of the economy tries to participate. Suddenly you have way more money (everyone is trying to fund small businesses and get rich) than you have startups (why come up with an idea and start your own company when you can just throw your money at someone else's Sure Thing™?).

After the bubble burst in 2000, the rich people that fund the VC firms and bought ridiculous IPO shares pulled back. They didn't pull back because it made economic sense, they did it because all the other rich people were pulling back. Markets are fickle and, much like high schoolers, move as a herd. It took a couple fantastic successes to get everyone on the bandwagon, and a couple fantastic failures to scare everyone back off it.

Here is my alternative explanation for why bubbles occur. No offense to the author of the other post, but I don't think it's due to inflation at all.

When dot coms (or Web 2.0) get popular, money comes flooding in to fund them, in the hopes of hitting the next Microsoft or Google. The thing that creates the bubble is that the number of startups doesn't increase proportionally to the money supply. There is a lag. In order to put all this money to use, everything under the sun gets funded. This is why people get money for doing nothing, as the post author claims. It's not because the Fed maintains a policy of low inflation. It's because you have too many dollars (that were probably up until recently chasing opportunities in the housing market) flooding into too few businesses.

In this case, supply creates demand. Funding becomes easy, even if you are creating no value for anyone. So, anybody with dollar signs in their eyes and a copycat idea gets funded (think Pets.com here). Of course, eventually one of these companies that is funded by easy money but has no profit potential fails as it should, and people start examining their own holdings. Maybe a couple more go down in flames, and suddenly startups look risky. Now our famously fickle investors want their money back before the next failure happens to be one they invested in. They try to dump their startups to acquirers or the IPO market. Above all, they tell themselves they will never get suckered in by dot coms and investing fads again. (Of course, two years later they create the housing boom by speculating in residential real estate.) In the sudden money vacuum, good startups get hurt because they can't find funding. The situation has reversed and now there are too many startups chasing not enough money.

My point is, the Fed has the power, and sometimes (as in the case of the housing boom/bust) the dubious honor of helping or exacerbating the boom/bust cycle. They can try to deflate bubbles by tightening up money, sucking away some of that extra funding. They can try to prop up markets by flooding the market with liquidity and cheap rates to keep people/companies spending. The thing they don't do is create the bubble to begin with, nor create the bust that invariably follows. The blame for that rests squarely on the herd mentality investors have, and the willingness of Pets.com and the like to take advantage of it.

Top 10 Dead Technologies

So YC News (or maybe it was Slashdot) had a link to the Top 10 Dead (or Dying) Technologies. Lo and behold, check out number 5 (I'll even save you the clicking and quote it here:

5. ColdFusion

This once-popular Web programming language -- released in the mid-1990s by Allaire Corp. (which was later purchased by Macromedia Inc., which itself was acquired by Adobe Systems Inc.) -- has since been superseded by other development platforms, including Microsoft Corp.'s Active Server Pages and .Net, as well as Java, Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP and other open-source languages.

Debates continue over whether ColdFusion is as robust and scalable as its competitors, but nevertheless, premiums paid for ColdFusion programmers have dropped way off, according to Foote. "It was really popular at one time, but the market is now crowded with other products," he says.

The real tragedy is that pretty much all my professional experience (i.e. worthy of putting on a resume) is with ColdFusion. Talk about a waste.

To make matters worse, management recently chose (god forbid they leave it up to the people actually writing the code) the only language that competes with ColdFusion in the over-engineered-stupidly-verbose-mind-and-soul-killer category: ASP.NET 2.0.

Time to put on some Incubus to make the pain go away. Anyone know how I can make $20k a year part time?

Summer Vacation

Growing up, summer vacation just meant the end of school to me. It was intrinsically a good thing, because I got to sleep in and every day was like a Saturday. Ninety Saturdays in a row. Now that I don't really have a summer vacation anymore, I have come to realize what it really was.

When you are a kid, summer is the natural demarcation point of age. Birthdays are always an occasion, but we really measured time by the passing of summers. Each summer brought the end of one epoch, and every August brought the beginning of an entirely new one. Kids can reinvent themselves over the summer. Some come back completely different. I remember a guy that used to get straight A's who came back after our sophomore year with a mohawk and a new penchant for getting high before school. I knew another guy that had piercings, tattoos, and a penchant for pot that came back after one summer with a crew cut and a new goal to be a Navy Seal. I have no idea what happened to them to affect such a change, but I'm willing to bet it wouldn't have been possible without summer vacation.

I think kids live in two entirely artificial worlds. One of them is school, with all its strange social pressures and crises. The other is summer vacation. School is a rather lame artificial world, summer is artificial only in that 'real life' sadly doesn't resemble it at all. In school, you have this contrived responsibility to do your homework and pass your classes. During the summer, however, you suddenly have a responsibility vacuum. School has its own hierarchy and social norms, while during summer vacation you only see the close friends you make an effort to see. School makes you work towards external goals (those of the teachers), while summer forces you to set your own.

Now, I wouldn't say that most summer goals are too lofty. When I was 17, I saved all summer to buy a computer. Going back further, I'd bet my goals as a ten year old were probably more along the lines of finishing my road in the sandbox or adding to my tree fort in the woods behind my neighborhood. The point is, in the absence of external goals, kids create their own. They don't stop to think about whether the goal is profitable, or even possible, or any of the silly things grown ups consider before setting out on a project. They just decide to do it.

Somehow this changes when you grow up. You wake up one day and think to yourself: "I don't want to go to work." At first, this feels kind of like school again. Who wants to go to school most days? But when you get to that point in school, you make the last push to make it to the next vacation. The thing is, work is not like school. There is no summer vacation from work. No time to check out for 90 days in a row. Even if you could just take a break from a job, it wouldn't be like summer vacation as a kid. You'd still have to keep up the house, run errands, and worst of all, pay for stuff. If you haven't experienced it yet, taking an unpaid vacation doesn't have quite the same carefree quality as a worry-free summer does.

The worst part about this is that, without a summer vacation, there is no time to reinvent yourself. To reinvent yourself, you need a break from routine. This forces you to examine yourself (usually subconsciously) and figure out what to do. When you have a daily routine, time passes almost unconsciously, and if you change at all, it's to be more like those around you. Without a routine, you suddenly have to find something to fill the time, and that something usually leads to a personal change.

Personal reinvention aside, routine also affects your goals. When you spend five days out of seven working towards someone else's goals, it's hard to justify making more of your own. Suddenly you spend time analyzing whether an idea is 'worth the effort' before you start it, and sadly, this is where most ideas die. A kid doesn't analyze anything, they just do it. A grown up wonders if it will fit in.

The point to all of this rambling is two-fold. First, if you are a student now, don't replace one routine with another. I know for most students it seems prudent to get a summer job to save up money for the coming school year, but don't do it. This is your time to be creative, to figure out what your passion really is. You can't do that if you never form your own goals and instead work towards someone else's.

My freshman year in college I got what at the time was a great job. It was the spring of 2002, and the dot com bust was in full swing. Computer Science grads were coming out with diplomas and no jobs, so I counted myself lucky to get paid to program. Granted, the language sucked (ColdFusion), and the site I worked on was neither hip nor bleeding-edge by any means. But it was a job that paid $14/hr to write code when everyone thought my field was dead. I counted myself lucky.

Looking back now, I realize how unlucky I was. Sure, returning to that job each summer allowed me to graduate without any debt, and gave me a couple years experience on my resume right out of the gate. At the time, it seemed like all upside. The downside is simply that I robbed myself of all that creative time. Three months, once a year, to both reinvent myself and work on crazy projects without a care in the world.

So, if you are a student, don't get that summer job just to fill the summer. Get that dream internship in your field if your field needs internships, but if your field is like mine (computer science), then you don't. What you need is an idea, a case of coke, and a computer. What you need is to do something you are passionate about. If the summer job at Target makes you jump out of bed every morning in eager anticipation, then, by all means, work it. But if (more likely) you are doing it for the cash, then just don't.[1]

For the non-students out there: quit your job. It's that simple, really. If you don't wake up every morning and nearly forget to shower because you are so excited to get to work, then quit going. (Or try and get a three month sabbatical if you think they'd go for it.) If you made it this far in my essay, odds are that you aren't that happy with your job. You need a summer vacation. Worst case is at the end you find a new appreciation for your job and come back rejuvenated. Best case is you reinvent yourself and at the end find a new passion. Maybe you'll start working on an idea you have always wanted to 'get around to' but haven't. Maybe you'll find out that you'd rather be in field X instead of your current one. Maybe you'll just remodel your basement. The point is, you'll accomplish something and feel refreshed. This is the the great thing about summer vacation: by the end you are new again.

Granted, you'll have to plan a bit more carefully than a college kid does. You don't have the mom and dad safety net nor the access to cheap capital (student loans). You do, however, probably have other financial tools at your disposal. Home equity, if you own a home, is a cheap source of funds if you know you can repay it later. Simply saving up three months expenses is another way. Might as well put that fat paycheck to use on something besides new cars and suits. There are small business loans if you want to go that route, and credit cards always allow you to put off expenses for a few months. Bram Cohen wrote Bittorrent while living on no interest credit cards that he maxed out in succession. If you can reasonably pay them down before the no interest period ends, this is like a zero interest loan.[2] There is no free lunch, but there is no reason you can't eat two weeks worth of dessert upfront.

Summer vacation is important, and as soon as you don't have it, you stop changing. It needs to be long enough that you can't glide through it by goofing off (you need to get bored). It needs to be totally free of routine (again, you need to get bored). Most of all, you need enough money to get through it without focusing on the money part. A little planning ahead can get you all of this, and it is well worth it.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking that summer vacation is a luxury for kids only, and if you are still in school and have it, don't waste it trying to work like a grown up. Go apply to Y Combinator or Google's Summer of Code instead. Spending years in an unchanging environment without a chance to remake yourself isn't healthy or natural, as much as cultural stigma tells us to the contrary. Do it for too long and you might never find time to grow as a person, work on that crazy idea, and chase that dream, whatever it may be. So here is to hoping you have a great summer vacation.

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Footnotes:

1. If you are wondering how to pay for all this free time and don't think your parents will spring for the idea of you not working, there are these great things called student loans that are just made to take advantage of. Everyone looks at student loans as the refuge of last resort, but I'd argue they are infinitely better than summer jobs. You get a chunk of money upfront without giving away any time in the present. It's like mortgaging your time in the future (when you trade your time for money and then use the money to pay it back). You get three months now to reinvent yourself and find a passion in exchange for some time spent paying it back later. It's a total win because the amount you borrow to live as a college kid is going to seem like peanuts by the time you get around to paying it back.

2. I got one the other day from Chase that was no interest for 18 months. The $2000 credit line will reasonably buy me two months of living, and who can't pay back $2000 in 18 months (live on it for two months, then dedicate a whopping 72 cents of every hour for the next 16 months to pay it back in time).

Why credit cards are bad (and good)

So I got this email today from Providian (provider of one of my Visa cards) about a past due payment. I, being as drewish as I am, freaked out a bit and went to check on that account. Sure enough, I had a balance that was due April 14th, that I had never paid. After seeing it, I remember getting the last payment notice. I had gone to the site to make the payment, but their site was down for maintenance, so I just decided to come back later. Of course I forgot, and it never got paid.

This is mainly annoying for two reasons. First, I made it a point of pride to never pay the credit card companies a cent in interest. I have always paid my balances in full, before the due date. To me, a card is a means of increasing my liquidity and simplifying my planning. Since they give me a month lag between purchases and paying for them, I can know ahead of time how much of my paycheck is going to be spent (since it was in the past) and can put the rest towards savings and such. It's a nice system, and has worked wonderfully for years. I only carry $100 in my checking account, for cash emergencies. The rest is in high yield savings at ING Direct at all times.

Well now I have paid a credit card company my first cent. And, since I'm so generous, I paid them 2337 more cents for letting me spend my money through their service. I guess this was bound to happen eventually.

The second annoyance is that this will probably dent my credit score for a bit. Not that I need a better score or anything... it's already in the 90th percentile... but it's just the principle of the thing. I won't be buying a car or house anytime soon, so it doesn't really matter.

Anyway, I think when I get back I'm going to take a couple cards out of my wallet. I have four, and I really don't need them all. I had two to begin with, just in case, but then I got my American Express card, which I prefer to use for the rewards points when I can. Then, before coming to Spain, I got the Chase card because of the no interest offer. I plan to use it to cover this summer when I have no paycheck and am spending money all over Europe. When I get back however, I think I'll just ask Capital One for a higher limit and cancel the others. Keeping track of four accounts is a major time suck, and really I don't need that much credit. I have enough revolving credit at this point to live on it for two years. Obviously that would be stupid, since at the end of two years I'd be paying interest like crazy, but I could do it if needed.

Anyway, I still think cards are a great way to increase liquidity and plan ahead. They are also handy for unexpected expenses. Plus, I have enough points on my Amex card at this point that I'm planning to buy computer parts with them when I get back. So they aren't all bad.

Small Joys

So today has been a day of small joys. Little things keep making me happy.

For one, Google updated the style of their custom homepage to give everything a border and some tighter margins. It's just more visually appealing, and I find myself looking at my homepage for no other reason than that it's pretty.

Secondly, I ran across this (rather old) post about "real databases" that I thought was priceless. If only I could go back in time and hand this to my bosses at work when they laughed at me for suggesting we move our app to MySQL. We pay well over $100k a year for database licenses, and frankly I don't think MySQL lacks anything we need. Oh well, I am mainly bitter about being laughed at in the meeting, the fact we are wasting a ton of money isn't really my problem.

Also, now that I understand how to user rdoc at a basic level, I managed to generate the rdocs for various plugins I have installed, as well as the ruby standard library. This means I can accomplish more programming without the internet.

To top that, I found that hostal in Nerja that I like online, and sent them an email. Hopefully we will be able to get a room there. I was just happy they had a website.

Ademas, (I'm running out of synonyms for 'also' so I'm using some Spanish ones), I'm slightly less sick than yesterday. On the upside, I used my sick time today to read up on acts_as_ferret, and now have a general grasp of how to use it. Just found a page defining the query language used by ferret (FQL) and was delighted to find it already does prefix queries, which is what I was prepared to implement. Overall, I think using acts_as_ferret will be easier than my existing MySQL search.

Anyway, I'm off to find other fun things to read about. Happy Birthday (in a couple days) Bob!

Aire Comprimido

Note to everyone: Using compressed air to remove dust from your laptop's heatsinks can lead to a 40 degree celsius (72 degree fahrenheit) difference in your CPU and GPU core temperatures. I highly recommend doing this once every six months.

So yeah, my laptop is much happier now. It took me an hour and nine stores to find compressed air in a can, and it cost me an absurd $13, but it was worth it. My laptop no longer turns off during DotA games (it doesn't even break 60C anymore), and my left hand no longer rests on a furnace when I type.

Also of interest, I am withdrawing from classes here for the month of May to focus on Magic site stuff. Hopefully some good will come of this!

Contraption

So the new Magic set is on Gatherer now. The cards generally look sweet, and since it is supposed to be a set of cards pulled from future Magic sets, there are a ton of new keywords and weird abilities. Fortifications for one... and hints of strange new card types like 'planeswalker' and 'tribal' (in addition to creature, enchantment, land, etc). Also, one card mentions 'contraptions' ... but the set itself has no contraptions. Quite mysterious, but well themed.

Anyway, it's about to pour here, so this will be a quick one. I have mainly been working furiously on my AJLA stuff to get it done in time, and it has been going well. Magic site has sadly been on hold as a result though. I have been writing down ideas as they come to me however.

Holy Cards Batman!

So a new Magic set comes out in two weeks! I wish I was back so I could participate in the joy of opening boosters. Oh well.

Stayed up late last night (a whopping 2am, how weak) working on the site. It was fun times. I hope to get some more done this weekend. I am trying to get it together enough to deploy a test version to another machine so I can do payment integration. That should be a fun problem to solve. Also a few big areas to rough out, and some general prettying up to do. Hoping to show it off to Bob and Mark soonish.

Also, to continue my drewishness, I added a sheet to my spreadsheet to track the balances of my credit cards, in an effort to control spending like I used to. My freshman year of college, I lived on $600 a month. I know that is impossible now (my rent was a paltry $188 back then), but I'd like to try and shave $100/mo or so.

Of course, I could just go back to Ramen and Spagetti-O's and shave a couple hundred right there. But I like Chipotle and I like Taco Johns, and recently I have been quite proud at my fledging ability to cook. For instance, yesterday I took drum sticks and covered them in garlic and oregano and cooked them. That is an accomplishment for me. I also found that fruit is good when you don't let it rot on the counter.

But I still miss Chipotle.

Rain

So it has been rainy and cold for about two weeks now. It has rained nearly every day. I just want some warm weather!

Just read this excellent article on hiring and retaining high quality programmers. It reads like a laundry list of complaints I have about my current job. I have been working away on my work requests, trying to get stuff done in time enough to not get fired. Sadly at this point I almost kind of want them to make the decision for me. If only it weren't for money and my need of it. Just hoping to stay employed through the end of May.

In other news, steadily improving my Ruby-Fu. I desperately need a graphic designer though... harry? I take comfort in the fact that Google is so minimal because Larry and Sergy were bad at graphic design too, but I'm not trying to create the next Google either.

Yesterday I was reading a wiki about blocks and procs in ruby. I'd forgotten how much fun this stuff was. It brought back my Scheme and I'm resolved to read through Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs again. Need a way to not have to worry about money and just nerd it up again. I'm determined to find a way!

Anyway, back to coding.

Examen y lluvia

Today was our monthly test. Considering I only studied for about 5 minutes before they handed it to me, it went really well. Pretty sure I aced the Conversation, unless she grades my essay down a bit for the usual gramatical mistakes. I think I write at about the 8th grade level, so you can picture the red that covers my papers when I get them back.

Grammar went pretty well too, but I'm only seeing maybe an 85 on it. Oh well, a 50 is all I need.

Last night I finally straightened out my subversion issues, and can move forward on the site again. Only problem is that I really need to get my AJLA work done this month, so I should probably just start on that and get it out of the way.

Bob: Since I never see you online anymore, if you read this, you should think of ways you think it would be easy to add cards to your collection/deck on the magic site. My current thought is have search results with a link to 'Add to Collection' ... but I didn't know if this would be clunky. I don't want the user to have to go a million places in order to accomplish something like adding new cards to his collection or finding cards to build a deck with.

Anyway, the battery is about dead on my precious computer, so I'm going to tromp home (in the rain) and do some chores. Adios todos!

Externals

I hate going 10 days without writing.

Internet is still on hold. They needed on the roof to install the antenna, and I don't have the key. The process to get the key involves asking my management company, which asked my community president (of the neighborhood), who has to ask everyone in the community if they object to the antenna. It's a wonder anyone makes any improvements at all to their homes with such a process. Sadly, I'm sure many neighborhoods in the US operate similarly. Something tells me this will drag on for a week or two, at which point, if they say yes, I'll have to get a new installation appointment and wait another few weeks. If that is the case, probably not going to be worth it.

This week a group of high schoolers from Burbank, California is here. I guess it is their spring break. Unfortunately it has been raining and cold all week, some spring break for them. They seem to be making the best of it though. Three are in my class and they are amusing. Talking to 16 year olds makes me feel ancient though. When they asked what I studied, I told them that I had already graduated. Then they asked what college I was planning to attend. It took me a second to realize that they thought I was talking about graduating from high school. Heck, I've been out of college well over a year now. Crazy.

Spent the last hour or so fixing my screwed up vendor directory in my rails project. Not entirely sure what was going on, but it would error when I tried to update, commit, cleanup, delete, or change the svn properties. Finally resorted to nuking it completely in the Repository Browser and exporting the latest rails tag and all the plugins instead of using svn:externals. In the process of committing all that now. I think I like the idea of keeping it cleaner anyway.

Bah, today is just not my day. Commit won't work because of a subclipse bug. And, long story short, have to wait for Joe to do something tonight before I can finish committing it.

Tonight I have to write a paper for conversation class. Que Guay! I'm just going to quit writing before I start whining.

UI

The last couple days I have been schlepping my laptop around to various places to use free wifi. In the process I have had to reboot many times (I dual boot gentoo and windows [for games]) in order to play a random game of DotA in between programming sessions.

If you are like me, by the time your computer boots up, you already have about six programs in mind that you need to start. For instance, booting into windows for DotA, I open up the healthbar hotkey script, the war3 banlist, gaim (to see if any of my friends want to play), and War3 itself. When I boot into gentoo, I usually open gaim, firefox, eclipse, a terminal or three, etc...

The continuous rebooting this weekend led me to discover the single most annoying UI problem ever in the existence of man... focus grabbing.

For instance, in windows, I get the hotkey script and banlist open right away, while war3 is loading up... but then after I'm into War3 trying to get on bnet, gaim decides that it is very important that I see my buddy list load up. After this annoyance, I'm back in War3, maybe even into a game, when someone IMs me. If a convo window is already open, no problem. If it opens a new convo window, obviously it's necessary to rip me out of my game and show me my new message (*sarcasm bleeds*).

You would think that Gentoo would be better to me, but every new app I open demands my attention at random after loading. Azureus grabs focus every time I add a new torrent to it. Gaim acts the same as in Windows. Eclipse plays nice mostly, but firefox pops up windows demanding my attention all over the place. (Although I did find the awesome download bar plugin that minimized some of that.)

Grabbing focus should be on the canonical list of UI no-nos. It destroys the user's flow. It's like a forceful context switch for your brain. I believe this is why popup ads are so annoying. They are basically a forced context switch. Instead of continuing with whatever you have at hand, you must pay attention to this interrupter. It is both disorienting for novice users and downright death-by-1000-annoyances for experienced users.

If software needs your attention, it should flash in the taskbar. It can play sounds. It can blink it's systray icon. It shouldn't just assume that whatever it needs is more important than whatever you are doing.

The same goes for forms in webpages. I can't count the number of times I have been typing in my password to a bank/credit card site and the page finally finishes loading and an asinine onload event moves the focus to the username field. This is especially annoying when someone is looking over my shoulder. Nothing better than having my password shown in plain text.

So I make a resolution to never manipulate the focus in any software I write. I will use a message area, blinking taskbar items, whatever. I only wish others would do me the favor of removing their focus grabbing shenanigans.

Das WiMax!

Well finally got a notice that they are coming to install interweb access in my apartment on the 23rd. This means 24/7 net access, which means that I will just sleep less and get out less. On the upside, I won't have to move around constantly searching for net access. Also, instead of 4-5 hours a day (mostly work), I'll have on the order of 10-12... not to mention I'll finally have something to do on Sundays.

Magic site work is coming along. Can now add/remove cards to/from your cart. Next up is the actual price/availability matching. That should be pretty fun. Hoping to work through it Saturday.

Today has been an odd day in general. I just feel like doing nothing at all. I just want to watch a movie, eat junk food, and sleep. No idea why. Hopefully it passes soon.

Paris

So my brother is stuck in Paris overnight. Te lo juro, nunca debes volar al aeropuerto de Paris. (I swear, you should never fly to Paris' airport.) Not only did they lose his bag for a week (he got it back about 12 hours before he left), but now he is stuck there for a 24 hour layover. I guess at least his Europe trip was interesting.

Not much else is new with me. Battery is about to run out, so this will be a quick post. Trying to get as much as the new SG-1 downloaded before that happens. Also looking up vocab to use tomorrow when talking to Joaquin about withdrawing from class.

Hoping for an 80% refund... considering I got a 15% discount originally and my cheap living conditions, I can live with a bit of wasted money. If not, then I guess I'll finish out the courses.

Granada

Well my brother and I have been tourists the last couple days. I took him to Gibraltar on a day trip yesterday to see the Monkeys and the coast of Africa. Today we came to Granada, and are about to head up to the Alhambra.

I must confess that I am looking forward to getting back on the magic project. Problem is that with school and work, this isn't likely to happen for several days. Oh well, at least I can try and squeeze it in. Honestly been debating about withdrawing from school to work on it more full time. I think I might go talk to Joaquin about it on Monday. Part of me thinks its a waste to be in Spain and not focus on learning Spanish, but I don't feel very focused on it anyway. Work I have decided to put up with out of necessity, but at least I can focus on being nerdy most of the time.

Anyway, I feel like I rant about the same thing a lot here, so I'll drop it until something changes.

The weather has been awesome the last week. It's getting into the 70s pretty much every day, with lots of sun. Hopefully the cold days and nights are behind us now.

Well, Ben is back... time to run...

Taxman

Accomplishment for today was doing my taxes. Only getting $71 back though. While normally I would be happy about this, (since I think I can allocate my capital far better than the government can allocate it for me while I loan it to them for a year) my Kansas tax owed was close enough to the penalty line that I think I will adjust my W-4 claims.

Not much else to report, as that consumed most of my internet time. I read a bit about Rails and the stock market. I also caught up on all my work email. How exciting!

Well, off I go to eat some dinner and find something to do with Ben. Hasta pronto!

Que Mala Suerte

Well Ben finally got here. His first flight was delayed an entire day due to bad weather in the US. Then his second flight got into Paris two hours late, so he missed his third flight and had to take another one 7 hours later. When he finally got to Malaga (31 hours later than originally planned), his bag was still in Paris. It was supposed to arrive the next day, but it wasn't there, so now they are supposed to send it to us. At least we are about the same size, so he is wearing my clothes. Hopefully we will get it tomorrow!

Had my monthly test this morning. It was harder than I expected, but I only needed a 50% to pass, and I know I easily got that. Considering I didn't study at all, it was a success.

Randomly read a really good idea for solving the options backdating issue. I agree completely.

Speaking of IRS changes, I should go finish doing my taxes and submit those. Yay (tiny) refund!

Dia en el Parque

Today is El Dia de Andalucia... so everything is closed and everyone is out in mass to enjoy the warm weather. Last I checked it was 68 (but very sunny). Since things are closed, I logged my hours for work in the park today on a bench. I'm speaking in the past tense because I only have 15 mins left.

In about an hour in a half Kathy and I catch the train for Malaga. It should be a fairly relaxing ride with a short stop in Bobadilla to change trains. I won't be taking my computer (or really anything electronic) with me, but I hope to waste about 30 mins a day checking email in the bus station in downtown Malaga, and I'll most likely blog there as well.

Been reading a lot of stuff over at news.ycombinator.com today. I like the site, as it functions equivalently to Reddit.com, but stays focused on technical and cultural articles related to startup websites. Since I am trying to be in that crowd, it's nice to immerse myself in it.

I have also been actively trying to ignore the outside world. I get too bogged down in reading news and blogs about news and financial news... and just generally news. Really knowing what is going on in the news changes my daily life not one bit, so why should I waste hours a day on it?

I wish I had my Rails books here with me. If I knew what box they ended up in, I'd have my mom send them over. Oh well, when I'm connected to the web I can find stuff just as fast (if not faster), but the books would come in handy at home.

In other news, my financial situation dramatically improved today because my supplimental paycheck finally appeared. Yay for having money!

Gauntlet

So I almost never see Bob, John, or Mark online anymore... so I am calling you out. Not like you need to sleep/work/do things during the middle of the day when I am on... you sacrifice your careers and education for me! (Not really.)

Today I worked more on my gentoo install... did some stuff for AJLA... and finished downloading the magic images. Also went 7 and 1 with Skeleton King in DotA. Right now I'm installing newest firefox...

Not much time left, just wanted to get an entry in for the day. Ben comes to visit Saturday... so that is exciting. I'm going to spend my weekend hardcore studying for the test on Monday. Hasta luego!