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Today's Fortune: |
   
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Friday, January 25, 2002
Becaus of the winter conditions in this part of the world (the weather sucketh) I read a lot of books this time of year. One that I have finished rereading is Day of Wrath, by Larry Bond. It is based on a plot in which a rich Saudi Arabian prince with a hatred of the US purchasing a bunch of atomic bombs from corrupt Soviet military types, smuggling them into this country, and attempting to use small aircraft to detonate them over key American cities. The dastardly plot is foiled Rambo-style by an Army soldier and FBI woman, but the book is pretty realistic in several places. It was published in 1998. Rename his villain bin Laden and things get kinda familiar. Either Bond was prescient, or bin Laden did some reading. Could still happen; bin Laden has bragged about devastating the US in the near future.
.: posted by George 1/25/2002
Thursday, January 24, 2002
Shit! I must be sane after all. Boring.
There was a case in Louisiana several years ago about something like the zero point energy thing. Turned out to be an electric motor/generator.
.: posted by George 1/24/2002
It's not a perpetual motion machine. Perpetual motion is impossible! It just runs for ever and generates excess energy.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 1/24/2002
Wednesday, January 23, 2002
When business is dying, business is really dying. har har.
.: posted by Jeremy 1/23/2002
I don't buy this Stockholm Syndrome crap. I hate Patricia Hearst. "I'm a spoiled rich girl. No, wait, I'm a revolutionary! No, wait, I'm actually just a big victim. No, wait, now I'm a federal snitch. No, wait, it turns out I was a spoiled rich girl all along."
.: posted by andy 1/23/2002
Actually, she's working on it. She's going to tell Sarah to come here, and Mary might be considering it too, although she's in Honduras right now.
.: posted by andy 1/23/2002
You know, if Beth tricked all of her friends into moving to NC, then it could be Andy'N'Bethland and you could both be happy.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 1/23/2002
Tuesday, January 22, 2002
When we moved to North Carolina, Beth said I couldn't make this Andyland by tricking all of my friends into moving here, but I say "Screw that!" because she doesn't read this site, so I can get away with being rebellious. Everyone should move here, and then it will all be ok.
.: posted by andy 1/22/2002
Monday, January 21, 2002
An editorial about how MLK's family controls his speeches. I'd think that this would be a perfect case for the government to declare eminent domain on this intellectual property.
I made a plan at the beginning of my senior year of high school. I planned to improve my grades my senior year and to go to community college for a year, since I was sure I wouldn't get admitted to the EE program at UT based on my high school GPA. At the same time I planned on actually graduating from UT with an EE degree and to get a job. I figured I wouldn't have to plan to get a job after I got the degree, coz the way it was explained to me, companies were falling over themselves to hire engineers from UT. It was a lot harder to get a job than I was led to believe, but I know that had a lot to do with my GPA, which had a lot to do with the falling-through of another plan that I shouldn't have to explain. But anyway, I graduated none-the-less, and got one job offer out of 10 or 15 interviews. It hasn't been perfect, but mission accomplished. Here's my problem: now what? I feel like the guy from Fight Club when he's talking about calling his dad once a year to find out what he's supposed to do next. According to the caracature of society that he provides, my next big step should be to "get married." Well, I'm not really interested in getting married right now. For one, because I kinda do enjoy having a place of my very own. Also, My life is 100% stress free when I get home. All this is good and might seem enviable, but it's just about the most mundane feeling. When you live with someone that annoys you every day, it's pretty frustrating, but when you don't get annoyed like that, you don't get an antithetical feeling of happiness. So it's nice to live alone, but I don't look forward to years of living like this. At the same time, I rarely/never meet girls. It's not like they're there and I just don't say anything, they're just not there. This has a lot to do with the success of my plan of becoming an engineer, a plan that came together when I wasn't concerned much about my future position as a bachelor. So this really leads me to the conclusion that Andy came to two years ago: I'm doomed. I'm going to fall in love with the first girl I meet, she'll treat me like shit, and I'll die a miserable hen-pecked mess with no friends. So far I've avoided this fate with misogyny and my slightly geeky friends, but I fear the odds are against me. There are just way too many girls out there to avoid them all. Just this last saturday night I sat out on my balcony and saw at least a 4:1 ratio of girls to guys. I think if I were to move to north carolina I'd be safe for at least a while, but I don't think I can keep this up forever.
.: posted by Jeremy 1/21/2002
Devin, my first instinct is to tell you to come to Greensboro. Arguments can be made for or against living in Greensboro, and I frequently make strong arguments against it. And you've lived here, so you know what it's like. The reality of the situation is that I always want my friends to come here so that it's not just me and Beth and a bunch of North Carolinians, and so by suggesting that you come here, I'm not really taking your best interests into account.
I do think it's time for you to come up with a long-term plan. Even if it's a short long-term plan. Possible goals: pay off your truck, get a degree, get some certifications or licenses, or clean your apartment (note: if you've seen where Devin lives, you'll agree that cleaning it is a reasonable long-term goal). It seems like, up to this point, your philosophy has been that the most readily available opportunity was the best opportunity. That's created a very non-linear life for you with a lot of experiences I envy (going to California, for instance). You went from college student to doing something I still don't really understand in Cali to 7-11 employee to Dell tech support to web development, and making some insane money for a 23 year old college dropout. Now you're building barns and hauling hay and whatnot, which still isn't necessarily a bad thing, although you don't seem crazy about it. Here's my point--while you've racked up some pretty spectacular experiences, you're ultimately back where you started before your senior year of high school. So maybe now it's time to focus on something more distant, like being an importer or master carpenter or something along those lines. To that end, figure out a path to take to get there. For instance, if you wanted to be an importer, maybe you should get a job in Florida and save money until you can buy your own go-fast boat, and then make some Colombian friends... And once you've settled on a goal, you need to be able to pass up other opportunities that come up before you reach that goal. In my case, I can't quit school for a dot com, again. It may seem like a good opportunity in the short term, but ultimately that's not what I want to do, and so it will just be setting me back.
The problem for you, I think, is that you learn too quickly, and so are too quickly bored. That means you need to find something that will constantly challenge you. I think the job at MarketEcho might have kept your interest, if the company had survived. I doubt that 4 years of college will be able to keep you focused.
The other thing, of course, is that you can't keep spending money like you do. I'm sure you'll say that you don't really spend that much money anymore, and make some somewhat convincing arguments to that extent, but I'll bet that you've spent more money on frivolous stuff in the last month than Beth and I have between the two of us, and the dogs and the damn cat. You should switch gears and become an ascetic. You have a lot of stuff you don't need or use. I'll bet you still have that remote control car somewhere, and maybe you have some vague plan about doing something with it, someday. Some of that stuff you might consider selling or throwing out, and some of it you ought to put in boxes and stick them in your brother's barn. You should also not eat out as much, and you should definitely not go out in the evenings as much.
I propose a three-fold path:
1.Pick a goal.
2.Eliminate distractions/clean your living space.
3.Spend less money.
You can pick a goal anywhere, but Texas is chock-a-block with distractions for you. While you could potentially spend very, very little money in Denton, you could also spend very little money elsewhere. In Greensboro, you can easily find work in any trade you want to learn, or you can go to school, or you can get certified.
Beth has two things to contribute: "Live for your dreams" (she said that in the high-pitched voice she uses to imitate idiots, so I think she was being cynical, but you can never tell with her) and also, more reasonably, she suggested that if we buy a house with a basement, you can rent the basement from us for cheap. This is actually not too far-fetched--one of the places we're thinking of buying even has a finished room in the basement, and another has a fairly large unfinished basement. And you can get consistent unskilled work here just for the asking, so you'd be able to tide yourself over until you found a real job. I guess my advice is basically that you should come to North Carolina because I'm bored and lonely, and what's keeping you in Denton other than your family, a few friends, and free rent?
Blah. Beth says that everyone's motivation is ultimately selfish, and that there's no real altruism. I just wrote a proof for her.
.: posted by andy 1/21/2002
I'm in the throes of an existentialist dilema. I feel like Hamlet or some shit. I was so unhappy about so many things before, and I left to escape, and now I just have a new list, most of which are things I had before; like dinero. It's like I'm following some heirarchy of progress, and I got unhappy with a stage so I jumped back a step and now I'm trying to get back up that same step. I ran into an old friend who was a philosophy grad student years ago and is now an assistant prof or something and was talking about life in Austin and not producing anything or making anything better in any real sense in any of my jobs, just manipulating bits that got erased when everything went to asset auction, and he replied, "sounds very buddhist." I started thinking about it and that's true, kind of a Confucian/Hindu/Buddhist version of Fight Club and existentialism and nihilism, only the eastern philosophies are like 'this is how it is, so status quo is a great way to be' and the western versions are like 'we're all nothing anyway, so fuck shit up, coz it will all end the same'. I reject the latter, but cannot content myself with the former. I wanna be Ozymandias GAWDAMMIT! I want to be the king of kings! I want the mighty to look upon my works and despair! I want Bill Gates and Simon Bolivar and Genghis Khan and Louis XVII to be footnotes compared to me. Or at least I want to do something that isn't nothing. I want to go beyond this nothingness that I am, if only for a short while. I have a lot of things I believe strongly in, but have run into difficulty trying to do anything about any of them. And I do still carry the zero end sum belief, so a lot of trivial things a lot of other people that fight for causes scream about make me want to get earplugs. And that brings me to the main hurdle in front of me: lack of capital. When I was one rung higher on the yuppie life ladder (or most likely a lot more that one rung higher), I had the capital but lacked the time and energy and drive to seek my end game goals. Now I've got a list of end game goals, and no path to take to get there. And I never was one to follow some plan anyway. I believe too much in opportunity. Pretty much everywhere I've ever gotten has been because of opportunity and luck, not planning. In fact, I've rarely had a plan work out half as well as I arranged, and I've gone some pretty amazing places on opportunity. Now I sit and wait for opportunity, only I sincerely doubt it's coming to knock on my door out in the middle of nowhere.
I went to recycled books the other day and got a bunch of stuff by Mark Twain. One of my favorite quotes from him is: "All you need is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure."
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 1/21/2002
Or perhaps a central Asian Sean Connery? "Most things in here don't react well to bullets, Miss Moneypenny."
.: posted by Jeremy 1/21/2002
Sunday, January 20, 2002
Is it me, or does Hamid Karzai look like a thinner, wiser Jahan?
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 1/20/2002
Some people don't deserve to breathe. This guy makes me think of what Jeremy might have become if he'd dropped out of high school, started shooting speed and moved to Beaumont or Vidor.
As for the pawnshop deal; first the whole thing looks entirely too high-rent. Pawnshops are supposed to be little hole in the walls, one step up from junk dealers. They're not supposed to have mahogany panelling and brass light fixtures and antique fireplaces. And you left out arms dealer. Did you see that gun wall? 200 long guns at Store #1. I've never in my life been to a pawnshop with that many guns. I've been to a lot of gun stores that didn't have that many guns.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 1/20/2002
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