Movie: Blood Diamond

So I saw the movie Blood Diamond on Friday night. Holy crap, was it intense. I was expecting something indie-esque and low budget, but it was a full-on hollywood blockbuster, with all the gun battles and explosions a red-blooded American could want. Except.... a lot of the gun battles were of civilians getting mowed down by psychopaths... and a lot of the explosions were of buses filled with journalists.

So yeah... it's not a happy movie. But the story it tells of Sierra Leone and the rebellion that was fueled by the irrational western lust for sparkley wedding rocks is incredibly powerful. The acting was solid, the staging and cinematography were fantastic... Amazingly, it wasn't filmed in Vancouver, but was actually filmed in Sierra Leone (and some South Africa and Mozambique). And it looks like a lot of African actors were used. Good job using local talent!

All in all it was a phenomenal movie well worth seeing. So do yourself a favor and rent it.

Clavicle Schmavicle

I broke my clavicle on Sunday. I was out biking with Kelly, trying to get into the habit of biking a couple times a week in preparation for my summer bike trip through Europe. We started from her house up in the NW part of the city (by Land's End), and decided to cross the bridge and head to the Marin Headlands Institute at Fort Chronkite. A nice ~20-mile ride, which was a good distance for me to start back in.

Well, on the way back we were headed through the 5-minute tunnel... it's a one-lane car tunnel that has bike lanes in both directions. Kelly let me go in front because I like to go fast downhill. And fast I went! I was up to ~38 mph at one point, basically pacing the cars next to me. As we emerged from the tunnel, this car in front of me started to drift a bit into my lane. I got nervous and braked, moving a bit towards the curb. Well, either I hit a patch of sand or my rear tire blew... either way I lost control of my bike... struggling to stay up, I hit the curb and somersaulted along the grassy edge into some bushes. I really don't remember details... it was all a crazy blur.

I was totally dazed, and next thing I knew there were people all around me asking if I was alright. Cars were stopped everywhere, and Kelly was rolling up shouting "that's my friend!!" I tried to make sure she saw me giving her the OK symbol with my fingers, cause I didn't want her to worry, even though I couldn't really speak and still wasn't sure what was going on. Finally, I sat up, and tried to assess the situation. I was sore all over. All the car passengers were really kind and concerned; one guy (I think the driver of the drifting car) offered me advil he had in the car. I turned him down because I was worried that I might need something more powerful, and the advil would interfere with the paramedics ability to dose me themselves.

A park ranger who'd randomly been driving by had stopped, and helped me and Kelly get to the other side of the road. He got traffic moving again, and asked if we wanted an ambulance. For a few mins I contemplated biking back to Kelly's (~8 miles, over the GG bridge), but decided it would be smarter to take the ambulance. I was seriously thinking how expensive it was all going to be... :(

So the ambulance picked me up and took me to St. Mary's, only because it's the only hospital I know of in the city (it's near Roger's on Stanyan!). The ranger drove Kelly and the bikes back to her place, and she met up with me later at St. Mary's ER. At the ER, they kept me sitting around for ~4 hrs in pain... the paramedic thought I'd done something to my rotator cuff, which was prioritized lower than a lot of the other people in there (rightly so; some were like 80+ years old and looked pretty bad). A couple hrs in, I got xrayed, and the technician caught the fracture in my clavicle, and decided that it wasn't a shoulder problem at all. She was right.... good call.

In the end, they put my right arm in a sling, gave me some vicoden and a prescription for more, and referred me to an orthopedic surgeon for a follow-up on whether I'd need surgery (eep!). After 4 hours there I was getting up to leave, and as I stood up I started to black out. You know how sometimes when you sit too long, and you stand up, and you get those black speckles in your vision and you realize you need to sit back down right quick? Well, it was like a super-charged version of that. Kelly said I went visibly pale. The nurse offered to get me food; I hadn't eaten much that day, and although Kelly snuck me a banana and some cliff bar, my blood sugar must still have been dangerously low.

So the nurse hooked me up with OJ, chocolate milk, graham crackers and peanut butter. OH MY GOD that was the best food I'd ever eaten.

After the hospital, Kelly took me to Thai Stick 2001 in Pac Heights and we got like 10 different things for take-out. We headed back and gorged, and I sent out e-mails to people at work telling them I wouldn't be in. I had actually called my boss from the hospital to let him know... I didn't even tell my family I'd been hurt until Tuesday. Is that sick? I'm not sure.... seems like it should be considered messed up.

In the end I slept... though the vicoden had remarkably little effect on my awakeness. I actually stayed up late with a beautiful painter I'd met on Friday night... he took care of me during an incredibly vulnerable time for me and it was one of the most romantic and deeply touching nights I've ever had... but more on that another time. ;)

ERA is back!!!

Oh SWEET. The Dems are planning to reintroduce the Equal Rights Amendment, also known as the ERA. For a great history on the ERA, check out wikipedia's entry. And for a great blog entry on this, check out salon.com's Broadsheet.

Basically, the ERA is a constitutional amendment that guarantees equal protection for women. It was first introduced in 1982, but failed ratification by just 3 states (Illinois was one of them... dammit!!!). The right-wing froths at the mouth over this, claiming all sorts of insane things like women being too frail to serve as firemen or combat troops, despite the fact that thousands of women do both of these things every single day.

But realistically, this amendment would lead first and foremost to equal pay for the same job... and how nice would that be. I'll never forget that Gillian Anderson made less than David Duchovny on X-Files, despite the fact that there was no show without both of them there.

So yeah, I'm a huge supporter of the ERA. And I'm really excited that it's back. Hopefully it'll make it through this time... it's been 25 years since the first introduction, and I'd like to think we're a better country these days than we were back then...!

India Sucks!!

.... and I mean that in the nicest possible way. But I just got off of a 3 hr conference call with them (9pm-midnight on a Tuesday!!!), because it's their morning and it's the earliest we could meet.

Why am I talking to India, you ask? Well, I'm a project manager on a custom software development team, and of the 9 people on my team, 4 of them are based in India. They cost roughly 20% of an on-shore resource, and that's with a margin mark-up that's like 4 times the US resources. So not only is it cheaper for my company to use them, but it's far more profitable!!!! [Note: those numbers are very rough guesstimates; I don't know the exact ratios and would likely be crucified if I publicly stated them.]

Anyways... the offshore team's been staffed for the last 2 months on my project, but they've literally been 20% efficient. That means that in a given week, they work one of those days. What the hell are they doing the other 4 days?! No one knows. But it sounds like a sweet deal to me... maybe I should transfer. Mumbai's a great place, I hear.

So if you do the math... 20% efficiency means that they still cost about the same as an on-shore resource (20% efficient vs. 5x the work done per dollar). But then you factor in the fact that the margin's like 4 times higher... and wow. Per hour India costs the same, but ACN makes 4x as much from their work. No wonder I'm obsolete.

And an update... I just got off a 2nd call in a row. I actually really like the India team members... we've just been having communication problems across the 11.5-hour time difference (shocking, I know!). Hopefully this 3-hr ordeal will help correct those problems. But for me, I still have a couple hours of work to do before I can go to bed... and it's already midnight. Oy vey!!!! Or rather, as they would say in Bambaiya Hindi, Vaat lag gayi!!!

Origin of Jamoke!

So back in college (6+ years ago), my friend Kate got me using the word "jamoke", as in "i had a meeting with those jamokes and it didn't go anywhere." I had no idea where that word came from, or what it literally meant... I just knew that it was a fun and easy term that was interchangeable with jokers, yahoos, folks, etc.

A few years back, I used it in a conversation at work. My friend Dan was horrified, claiming that the term was a racial slur against certain European groups and that I should be ashamed of using it. Man, did I feel awful... I apologized to my co-workers and swore to strike the word from my vocabulary. Well, it turns out Dan's a bastard and he was totally lying to me, cause he knew how I'd react. Of course, it's fucking hilarious that he pulled that off, but at the time I wanted to stab him in the eye with a fork.

Regardless, I'm back to using jamoke, and I finally realized I could probably learn the truth behind jamoke using that thing called the "internet". So I googled jamoke, and came up with this definition: "Jamoke is usually said to come from Java plus Mocha. When it first appeared, at the end of the nineteenth century, it literally meant coffee, and was sometimes written as Jamocha, which makes the origin a bit clearer (despite the coffee associations, linguists would say that the word is a clipped compound, not a blend ...)." OMG!!! Jamocha, as in JAMOCHA SHAKES!!!!

But more likely, the definition can be found in the next paragraph on that page: "Professor Jonathan Lighter, in the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, suggests that jamoke was probably a nautical term to start with. He points out, too, that the evidence suggests it was a World War I soldier’s nickname, perhaps for somebody whose colour or intellect resembled a cup of coffee. Sometime before 1946 it took on a sense of “a stupid, objectionable or inconsequential fellow”, as Mr Lighter puts it. This sense has further evolved in some quarters into one for a dupe or sucker, and was a 1960s slang term for the penis. It has also been used more neutrally for guy or man."

So....... it's basically a slang for "guy", but apparently also can be used for "penis". I'll have to keep that in mind. And apparently it could even have a slight racial tinge to it, after all. :( But that usage is soooo uncommon, that I think I'll just go ahead and keep using jamoke for "guy", cause I just really like the word.

But now I know, and knowing is half the battle!

This just in: Evil Death Flu Could Cost Us Money!

zomg! According to CNN, a severe flu pandemic could cause a 5.5% drop in US GDP, costing our economy roughly $683 billion! Who knew that the deaths of over 2 million people (and the sickening of another 90 million) could wreak so much havok! Oh, the humanity!! And that's not even including the losses in that elusive "core sphere" of economic activity!

So yeah... it seems profoundly stoopid to point out the economic costs of such a pandemic... as if millions of deaths would slide off the economy like water off a duck's back. Still, I guess it's good to quantify it. It gives us an opportunity cost against which to compare the cost of developing a robust vaccination infrastructure. So I suppose it's not all bad... just very silly, on the face of it.

World Water Day

... was yesterday, on Thursday, March 23. Oops. Check out their website here: WorldWaterDay.org.

Water is likely to be the single biggest cause of war, famine, destruction, etc this century. Like most all of our resources, we've just assumed that water will persist in its current cycles and flows indefinitely, and that it will always be relatively clean and safe. In reality, the climate change we've triggered is altering existing water flows (rivers significantly shrink if their source glaciers no longer exist!), and at this point most water globally is at least mildly toxic. Not to mention the inevitability of global sea levels rising as the ice caps continue to melt. Which is one of the reasons I'm reluctant to buy a condo in South Beach in SF...

Hold on to your seats, it's gonna be a fun century!

Terra's impending Ragnarok... and it looks like I'm Loki

This is a post I did for school, for my Principles of Sustainable Management class. The assignment was to take a look at our emissions impact using various carbon footprint calculators found on the web.

=================================================

This has been such a great discussion to follow... I've really enjoyed witnessing the revelations (and horror) of pretty much everyone in the class around their carbon footprint. It really impresses on me the magnitude of the problem we face when some of this country's most carbon-self-aware people are so collectively shocked by their estimated impact.

And I'm no exception. Like Shuli, Hunter, and others, I too am a road warrior. For over 5 years I've been traveling weekly (~100 flights/year) to cities 500-2000 miles away, due to my job as a consultant. Chicago->SF, Chicago->NJ, Chicago->Portland, SF->Portland, and now SF->SoCal. So as I opened the carbon calculators one by one, I felt myself cringe in anticipation of just what my results would be...

ecofoot.org tells me my lifestyle demands 30 acres of land... not so bad, only 6 acres over the national average. Of course, that means 6.8 planets to support everyone alive today if they lived like me. Yikes. 600% more than my share.

climatecrisis.net tells me my carbon impact is 18.1 tons/year. Hey, that's not so bad... of course, using the methodology many in the class have been using around that number being just 40% of my total, bring me to 45 tons/year... ok... that's worse.

fightglobalwarming.com... omg, this is the doozy. Their calculation pegs me at: 62.3 metric tons, 94% of that coming from my ~100 flights/year. Eeep. If that's 40% of the true number... my total is closer to 150 tons/year... that has to put me in the top 5 worst offenders in our class... The average energy-hog American only emits 8.4 tons, up to 20 using the 40% rule... that must put me in the top 1% of offenders on Earth. Humbling? Damn right it is.

So what am I doing about it? Well, I just moved to the city (SF), and actually live across the street from the CalTrain station. I did this because it gives me super-easy public transit access to the South Bay for work, and gives me easy bus access to the rest of the city. It's an expensive neighborhood, but I can offset the extra cost by getting rid of my car (anyone interested in a used 2005 Prius? only 18k miles!), since I can now bike/bus/train (and worst case /cab) everywhere in the city from within one block. There's a Safeway literally across the street, with a decent organic goods selection, so no more driving for groceries. I'm investigating moving into a LEEDs certified building this fall in the same neighborhood, and thanks to PoSUM, I now wash all my clothes cold (though I still machine dry).

Is all that enough? Hardly... they just ding that non-airline 6%. But the good news is this: my company is seriously starting an investigation into offsetting its carbon emissions. This is a company with tens of thousands of people who travel at the same or greater magnitude as I... I heard an estimate on the order of 2 BILLION km/year. The cost to offset that... would not be minor. Will anything come of this? Who knows...

But our leadership is interested in doing *something*... so I think my efforts will be most effective if I can work to encourage an enterprise-wide offsetting solution. If I can get my firm to do something for all 150000 employees.... that should offset my own carbon emissions for like, the rest of my life, right? =D

Onion Statshots... so informative!

Dear god, I so totally heart The Onion...

Happy Pi Day!

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm............... Piiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.

How the World Works

I'm a huge fan of the news website salon.com. It contains great original investigative journalism (they were the first to break the scandal around Walter Reed several years ago), wonderful writing from its book/tv/movie reviewers (Heather Havrilesky is an incredibly clever writer and tv reviewer), and some fantstic blogging around both politics (War Room: my fave blog) and globalization.

The globalization blog How the World Works is a fantastic blog by writer Andrew Leonard covering the myriad of social, political, economic, and technical issues that are being created by the force of globalization. Leonard routinely posts articles related to biofuels, global warming, workers' rights, GMO, and other sustainability-related issues. His angle is generally well-aligned with sustainability, but he often avoids drawing conclusions due to the incredibly complex nature of global interconnectivity.

Some examples of recent articles that I've really enjoyed:

Rain forests, they come, they go: Apparently, indigenous peoples in South America were slashing and burning the rain forests before Euros arrived on the scene. Leonard's conclusion: "When global warming or bird flu or nanotechnological gray goo or nuclear war between the U.S. and China wipes out civilization as we know it and, temporarily at least, ends humanity's reign of terror upon the planet, you know what's going to happen? The rain forests will grow back. Sometimes, taking the long view can be very relaxing. "

"Switchgrass is cool, dude": Review of Congressional hearings around biofuels. "In fact, if there was a consensus on anything at the hearing, in which testimony was heard on prospects for nuclear, solar, geothermal and wind power, along with biofuels, it was that federal and state governments get by far the most bang for their buck by setting, enforcing and encouraging increased energy efficiency." And: "Only when the external costs of climate change and fossil fuel dependency become shared by individuals filling up their gas tanks and utility companies building coal-fired power plants will there be a real market incentive to deploy new technologies." Sounds familiar, eh?

Organic farming: Not sustainable?: Verrrry interesting discussion of how buying food produced on distant organic farms is more harmful to the environment than buying local food. And also, driving to the grocery store has a greater negative impact than buying food produced 1000s of miles away!

Plastic fantastic bottle recycling: Great discussion of the macroeconomics of plastic bottle recycling. "The vast majority of water and plastic soda bottles consumed in the world are made of PET, aka polyethylene terephthalate. And perhaps contrary to expectations, this is one petroleum byproduct that is eminently recyclable. Indeed, and here's a second baffling peculiarity, producers of ground-up recycled PET "flake" cannot keep up with demand. Prices per pound are strong, propelled by Chinese buyers who will buy all the flake or bales of flattened bottles that they can get, to turn into pseudo-polyester and other materials. ... What's wrong with this picture? Why hasn't the market solved this problem?" And he goes on to answer those questions. :)

The anti-Crichton: Discussion of Kim Stanley Robinson's novels on global warming. KSR is one of my favorite authors, and is disturbingly prescient about the political and meteorologic challenges we'll be facing in the coming years.

Enjoy!

jaunty's dark past

omg... according to Merriam-Webster, the word jaunty derives from the French word "gentil", which is pronounced, well, like jaunty. who knew!

Prius Math

Man, owning a car sucks. It's so damned expensive. I've had my 2006 Prius for ~18 months now, and I just pieced this all together...

So, as of today, the Kelly Blue Book Private Party Good Condition value of the Prius is $21840. There’s an additional $1500 for the extended warranty (from 3->7 years), and another $500 for the value of the Lojack. So that comes to a total value of $23840.

Sadly, if I paid it off today, it would cost me $22804.81. So I’d net about $1000, minus the $8000 I’ve lost since I bought it for $32k, minus the ~$3600 I’ve spent on insurance, minus the ~$1000 I’ve spent on repairs and maintenance. Ah well. I guess in the end it’s only cost me ~$650/month to own, plus gas costs.

Dear god that’s a lot of money. That doesn't include costs to park the thing, which since moving to SF I've been doing for free at my friends' place in Mtn View. Given that I'm traveling 4 days a week to San Diego, and most wknds I don't use it... It costs me at LEAST $100/day to drive on the days that I actually drive it. And that's not including gas.

So yeah... definitely time to sell it. I could do wknd rentals with Avis for FAR cheaper than the cost of car ownership. Especially if I charge those rentals to my employer, in lieu of taking cabs to/from the airport. ;)

So... say buh-bye to the Prius! Unless you want to buy it off me for roughly $23.5k. =D

zomg, Avis totally <3's meh

Yeah, so both last week and this, Avis hooked me up with a Mitsubishi Eclipse. No, it's not a Ferrari, but for a rental car it's pretty damned sweet!!

And the week before that, they hooked me up with a red Mustang convertible!! Man! Avis totally hearts me!! I don't what I did to deserve this... but whatever it is, I need to keep it up!! =P

Holy shitballs! 1000 calories per scone?!

I heard on NPR that Starbucks scones are like 1000 calories. Must be the 14 lbs of butter per square inch and the thick coat of 100% sugar frosting on top, but still, that's insanity. No wonder it took me hours to finish one. After my fast, I've been even slower eating them because I can taste all that fat so acutely and it's just overwhelming. But I guess now I shall have to add those scones to my DNE list. Ah well.