Monday, April 24, 2006
I can see the end of the tunnel!
Sorry for the sporadic nature of my posts. Its been a hectic month, between projects for work and looking for a house. Still a number of things are coming together:
We found a house. It is in Ahwatukee, which is on the south side of Phoenix, sandwiched between South Mountain and the Gila River Indian Community. We managed to find a place with 5 bedrooms on 3 levels, with a nice pool and even a basketball court. Best of all, it has almost unobstructed south-sky views with little to the south but mountains and scrub, so it should be nice and dark if I ever get that telescope I've been hankering after.
Project work is getting done. At one point I was working one two to three projects at once, but thankfully thats backed down some now and I have more of them behind me than in front.
I got my new notebook. The company got me a shiny new Alienware Aurora m7700, with the AMD 4800+ dual core proc, 2GB of memory and dual 80GB 7200RPM SATA drives in RAID 0 (striped) configuration. It is soooo fast compared to the Dell Inspiron I had before. Drive performance is off the hook. Only problem is the video card seems to overheat, causing the screen to go black while the machine blue-screens and reboots. Hopefully backing down the hardware acceleration and helping the ventilation will do the trick - I'd hate to have to send it back at this point :(
The wife and kids just went to Japan. Our annual ritual of them going to Japan for two months started with us waking up at 4am yesterday and stumbling over to the airport. The good news is I'll be able to get lots done at the weekend. The bad news is that I'll be moving all the stuff into the new house by myself. Oh, and I won't get to see the wife and kids for two months. Last couple of years my 3 year old daughter would forget how to speak English in that time, but would become fluent in Japanese. This year should be interesting.
Buying a new house in a much more expensive (than Austin) area is also leading me to consider trading in my car for something cheaper and more fuel efficient. I'm only a year into the two year least on my Infiniti M45, but between the monthly payment and the cost of gas, I'm highly tempted to go totally the other way, on cost, fuel efficiency (and sadly performance) and get a Scion xB. I love those boxy little guys. I don't have to decide quite yet. Once we get in the house, I can see how the finances hold out, and where gas gets to in the traditionally high summer months.
On a related note, I just got done reading (or more accurately, listening to the audiobook of) American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips. Phillips was an advisor to Nixon and is very thorough and broad in his perspectives rather than just toeing one line or the other. Phillips is also credited with having sowed the seeds that got the Republican party where it is today (which I don't think he is too happy about - he's no big fan of either Bush). The book is actually quite scary, in that it makes the case that a lot of what is going on in the broad sense in the US today in terms of religiosity, indebtedness, resource dependency and getting into wars they couldn't afford are all boilerplate symptoms of the ultimate downfalls of the previous major hegemonies - the Spanish, Dutch and British empires. While some may argue that the US has this or that capability that China doesn't have (say, inventiveness) that doesn't change the fact that the US is horribly in debt and China holds a lot of the debt paper. Once their own consumer market gets to a size where they don't feel the need to support our economy anymore, things could turn nasty real fast. One other interesting observation in the book was that while Spain, Holland and England all were super religous towards the end ("Onward Christian Soldiers" was written in England for WW1), none of them could be called religous nations today, so the US is probably as religious now as it is likely to get.
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We found a house. It is in Ahwatukee, which is on the south side of Phoenix, sandwiched between South Mountain and the Gila River Indian Community. We managed to find a place with 5 bedrooms on 3 levels, with a nice pool and even a basketball court. Best of all, it has almost unobstructed south-sky views with little to the south but mountains and scrub, so it should be nice and dark if I ever get that telescope I've been hankering after.
Project work is getting done. At one point I was working one two to three projects at once, but thankfully thats backed down some now and I have more of them behind me than in front.
I got my new notebook. The company got me a shiny new Alienware Aurora m7700, with the AMD 4800+ dual core proc, 2GB of memory and dual 80GB 7200RPM SATA drives in RAID 0 (striped) configuration. It is soooo fast compared to the Dell Inspiron I had before. Drive performance is off the hook. Only problem is the video card seems to overheat, causing the screen to go black while the machine blue-screens and reboots. Hopefully backing down the hardware acceleration and helping the ventilation will do the trick - I'd hate to have to send it back at this point :(
The wife and kids just went to Japan. Our annual ritual of them going to Japan for two months started with us waking up at 4am yesterday and stumbling over to the airport. The good news is I'll be able to get lots done at the weekend. The bad news is that I'll be moving all the stuff into the new house by myself. Oh, and I won't get to see the wife and kids for two months. Last couple of years my 3 year old daughter would forget how to speak English in that time, but would become fluent in Japanese. This year should be interesting.
Buying a new house in a much more expensive (than Austin) area is also leading me to consider trading in my car for something cheaper and more fuel efficient. I'm only a year into the two year least on my Infiniti M45, but between the monthly payment and the cost of gas, I'm highly tempted to go totally the other way, on cost, fuel efficiency (and sadly performance) and get a Scion xB. I love those boxy little guys. I don't have to decide quite yet. Once we get in the house, I can see how the finances hold out, and where gas gets to in the traditionally high summer months.
On a related note, I just got done reading (or more accurately, listening to the audiobook of) American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips. Phillips was an advisor to Nixon and is very thorough and broad in his perspectives rather than just toeing one line or the other. Phillips is also credited with having sowed the seeds that got the Republican party where it is today (which I don't think he is too happy about - he's no big fan of either Bush). The book is actually quite scary, in that it makes the case that a lot of what is going on in the broad sense in the US today in terms of religiosity, indebtedness, resource dependency and getting into wars they couldn't afford are all boilerplate symptoms of the ultimate downfalls of the previous major hegemonies - the Spanish, Dutch and British empires. While some may argue that the US has this or that capability that China doesn't have (say, inventiveness) that doesn't change the fact that the US is horribly in debt and China holds a lot of the debt paper. Once their own consumer market gets to a size where they don't feel the need to support our economy anymore, things could turn nasty real fast. One other interesting observation in the book was that while Spain, Holland and England all were super religous towards the end ("Onward Christian Soldiers" was written in England for WW1), none of them could be called religous nations today, so the US is probably as religious now as it is likely to get.1 Comments:
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there's something to consider though about the American experience that might preclude, at least for awhile, the type of downfall experienced by those other regimes. The same thing that allows Americans to be insular in their thinking about themselves and other cultures is the same thing that will allow the religiosity at least to continue unabated. We seem to think that we're special and have some sort of inalienable right to do whatever vis-a-vis the rest of the world. The Manifest Destiny complex I'll call it. Our right to buy big cars and drive them from horizon to horizon. There's something unique about that that MAY forestall this type of downfall. Obviously i could go on all day and write a dissertation about it but won't. So there...thtptptt!!! | ||
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By Anonymous, at 4/26/2006 3:11 PM |
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