Да побольше, побольше.

А то, говорит моя замечательная мотивация по имени Fear and Greed (term coined by one of my business advisors) – а то проспишь. Проспать не хочется. А еще больше не хочется ошибиться на очень много бабла.

Проблема, конечно, стара как мир. До фига придурков до меня покупали жилье; тряслись, подписывая кипы бумаг. Да чего тут скрывать, и я трясусь. Как некто со странной фамилией Раскольников давеча сказал, тварь я дрожащая. Ну и, конечно, от дрожания немедленно становится стыдно – как же, такой крутой, а дрожишь.

Дрожу.

Дрожу, и это естественно. Все дрожат.

“Но ты то блин вечно думал что ты такой рациональный! Все холодным разумом объемлешь! Ну такой крутой как пятьдесят два яйца сразу!”

Тьфу, Родитель у меня (в плане системы Родитель-Взрослый-Дитя) попался какой-то подъебанутый, простите. Иначе не скажешь. Разрушительный какой-то. А не пошлем ли мы его, друзья мои, благополучно нафиг. Примем свои недостатки как часть себя.

В системе правления США тоже есть всяческие “Checks and Balances” – системы, ограничивающие власть – и уверенность – даже самых сильных президентов. Потому как шибко умным быть очень вредно. Потому как только в сомнениях рождается истина. Но почему, мать его за ногу, почему тяжелые такие сомнения всегда? Живой вроде-бы, тьфу-тьфу со здоровьем все в порядке. Даже если я ошибусь немного, ничего не отвалится.

Ничего, конечно, кроме ну страшно гипертрофированного ощущения собственной крутизны.

Может, это полезно? Может, я мало ошибался, и в результате не умею быть скромным? Не могу быть в мире с идеей собственной не-идеальности? Вон кто-то там наркотиками увлекался, пил пол жизни, потом протрезвел, и чувствует – да, я грешен. Глупый очень. Много всего идиотского понатворил. Знает, что может ошибаться сильно, и наверное не пугается ужасно шансу того, что он может совершить ошибку. Потому как это ему привычно.

А может, это совсем не так. Может, он так радуется своему шансу – последнему, как ему кажется – прыгает на одной ножке, что смог себя перебороть, и боиться, дико боиться еще раз спрыгнуть в бездну. Уж он-то знает, что такое бездна. И опять туда не хочет.

А у меня все весьма теоретическое. Совершу какую-нибудь ошибку – ну, дом хреновый куплю, например – и на макароны переходить. Что это значит? Насколько это плохо? Страшнее ли страх смерти самой смерти?..

I was a good kid in school. I never hung out with a bad crowd; got straight A’s in school; went into a good university and got a great job afterwards.

Man, I was a model citizen all my life.

(Mid-life crisis, you come too early)

Why the heck didn’t I do bad things?

Why did I never take drugs? Yeah, there’s some stuff that will screw you up for life, but there’s other less-bad stuff that can make you stop feeling like such a preppy-good-boy.

Why did I never get so freaking drunk to pass out and puke all over someone’s floor? I barely have embarrassing stories to tell. Why didn’t I join a fraternity, participate in a wild orgy, finding myself in a low-grade porn movie?

What kind of dirt are journalists gonna be able to find on me when I go and apply for that Senate seat? LOL.

No, more specifically, what am I going to tell MYSELF when I look back and see all this boring nonsense in my 20’s?

Little boxes, on the hillside,

Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,

Little boxes, on the hillside,

Little boxes, all the same…

So, there is one word that describes my mood of the past few weeks. That word is RECKLESS. That’s exactly what I want to be.

RECKLESS to a point – I’m not planning on jumping out of the window or driving 120mph on a city highway. See, to a normal person, that’s the kind of stuff they’d consider RECKLESS.

To me, RECKLESS means “done without planning it 53 times”.

Let me tell you a story how we bought our TV. It took me 4 months (seriously!) to research the subject; find a good deal; and then finally jump on one. By that point, Irina lost all hope that we’ll ever own a normal television set. All excitement from the idea was already gone. The only thing that was left was thing nagging feeling: “did I check the deals websites today”.

One might argue that this kind of meticulous research is useful. I’ll say “yes, to the point”. It is useful with engagement rings; it is useful with houses. With stupid TV sets and cameras and MP3 players and the vast majority of everything you will ever own in your life, it is a total drag on your existence.

Just do it.

Think for a little while, maybe an hour or two, research the subject area, find 3-4 vendors, compare the reviews, and just fucking buy it. That’s the kind of RECKLESS I’m going to be from now on.

P.S. Oh wait… there is one memorable embarrassing story: me drinking 2 bottles of vodka with Irina’s dad, then sleeping in her little cousin’s room, waking up in the middle of the night to puke, finding a big TOY TRUCK and using it as a.. ahem… container. Fun times.

I grew up in environment where everything has to be repeated five times before the transaction finally happens.

Heck yes I’m pissed. I can’t believe that I’m carrying that legacy  around; that cultural legacy has been dragging me down for most of my life, and writing about it is one way I acknowledge the evil. Shrinks love to think that affirming the existince of a vice is the way of healing, so what the heck.

So yeah, I’m a total victim of an environment where…Uhh, how sorry-for-myself does that sound. Let’s try that again.

There’s a classical pattern in relationships between people. Person A offers something; person B declines. Person A thinks that trying again will yield better results, so they do. After 5 more times, person B decides to give in – they are so irritated by the situation, they just want it to be over. And giving in after this many times teaches person A to keep asking again and again in the future – because person B will eventually give in.

This pattern has been plaguing my relationship with my family. It’s a total fucking disaster.

Yes, it’s a classical Jewish-mother relationship: “put on your coat, honey, you’ll be cold” – “No thanks” – “it’s really cold outside” – “NO thanks, I’m OK” – “Just put the coat around your waist, it won’t bother you” – “@#!@#!@#”.

HOW MANY times do you have to say the same fucking thing. Man.

Yeah, understated is not the way of my family. But I want it to be my way.

I want to politely ask, and be heard the first time. I want to have a healthy transaction: offer -> accept or decline, where each person hears the other. Where there’s no automatic declines. Where’s no nagging. Where there’s actual respect in listening to each other.

I want to whisper commands to my dog.

I want every word to be cherished and heard.

I want every moment of my transactions with others to be over-analyzed. I want meaning in little things.

Yours truly just got engaged, so it’s time to deliberate on the rubbed-to-the-point-of-bleh subject of love.

Don’t expect anything particularly original; vastly smarter individuals tried, and still sounded cheesy. Others tried to be explicitly cool-and-not-cheesy – by denying love’s existence – and even that sad-and-lonely point of view is now yawn-inducing.

Heck, why am I even writing about this.

I think I know. Because I finally know what love is.

Love is a very calm feeling. It’s a lasting state. It’s as far as it gets from an adrenaline rush – I’d even say that if you feel an adrenaline rush in someone’s presence, if you are obsessed with them, that’s not love. That’s obsession, hehe.

Obsession might turn into love; obsession is easy to mistake for love. Like a rocket ship, a relationship might get a jump-start through obsession; the sad part, of course, is that if it does, it will always go downhill from there.

Love is calm.

I will say that again, love is calm like an ocean that has seen it all. Love may produce a storm, love may go up in a hurricane, but on average, it’s relaxed. It goes on. It doesn’t have crazy ups and downs every day. It continues in a subtle, understated dance, replacing tidbits of sorrow with a little bit of happiness.

Love is homey. It creates a feeling of this mothership from which anything can happen, and where you will be supported, no matter what. You will be forgiven, no matter what. You will find solace and comfort, even when it’s your fault.

I am so lucky to share my life with such an amazing woman. You are my ocean. You are my home.

A loyal customer of Washington Mutual of 9 years, it was quite a shock for me when Chase took over. OK, I said, I’ll give them a shot – even after they’ve taken away the excellent rewards program that my WaMu credit card had. Even after they removed the Credit Score Monitoring service that WaMu offered for free with that same card.

Now, however, my patience has come to an end. When Chase was migrating the accounts from WaMu, they lost all the automatic payment information that WaMu had on file for me; when I received a courtesy call from a Chase representative 3 days after the due date, suggesting that the electronic payment did not go through, I was pleased – hey, they care. I, of course, paid the full balance right away, over the phone. The nice representative suggested that all related fees that were posted to the account would also be removed (the late fee, and the finance charge, incurred as a result of this transition).

After a week, I find none of these charges overturned.

I send a polite email to the customer service, asking for a fix-up of this small misunderstanding. A day later, they revert the late fee; I suggest that the finance charge should be refunded, too – as promised by the earlier rep. They refuse. I ask again, suggesting that they are failing to keep their own promises; all I get back is the “sorry we aren’t able to meet your service expectations.”

Damn right, you aren’t. I will be closing all my Chase accounts; I will make sure every single friend of mine knows not to bank with this pathetic institution. WaMu made thousands of dollars on me in the past 9 years by being courteous and respectful. The $20 in finance charges that I will, of course, pay to Chase, will result in thousands lost for Chase.

Don’t deal with Chase. It’s a disgrace of a bank.

Oh, and! And! A totally hot transparent electric kettle from Crate and Barrel.

• Login name
• Password
• Remember me checkbox
• Submit button

This stuff has been there for years… And we all have developed our own ways to fill out these simple forms.

I, for example, do this: I tab through things, and I use the spacebar for pressing buttons and setting checkboxes. So my sequence of operations is:

• Type login name
• Tab
• Type password
• Tab
• Space [sets the remember me checkbox]
• Tab
• Space [presses the submit button and submits the form]

You might ask, why don’t I just press the Enter button? Because of the habit, and because my fingers are already on the Tab and the spacebar.

And to this day, this habit worked just fine on every form out there on the net. Except for Facebook, after its redesign.

What do smart people at Facebook do? They add a new checkbox to the login form, a checkbox that appears conditionally, only when you set the “remember me checkbox” – the “set as homepage” checkbox.

So what happens with my workflow that I’m so accustomed to? The last “spacebar”, instead of logging me in, sets the stupid new checkbox that appears out of nowhere! Argh!

Moral of the story: do usability testing on a set of participants that’s diverse enough! One of the 6 or 7 usability participants that you’ll encounter will definitely be “different” from your expectations.

Do you think anyone at Facebook blinked twice before making this call? No, I’m sure they’re completely oblivious to the user experience mishap they created for me. Basically, they failed to meet my expectations from the UI on the login screen, and that’s so much of a no-no that I’m still irritated, even after many weeks since they introduced the change.

Don’t let this happen to your software.

T.: We were still waiting until we got this mail. Quite awkward really as we ran out of things to say at 5:03/9:03. And while we waited, my stock in AIG tanked, D. practiced playing bagpipes (badly), my house was flooded, my kid was left waiting at the school gates, N. decided to become a plumber, my car got a parking ticket, and I stood up my wife – for dinner – on her birthday – and now she’s leaving me – for a plumber!

But hey, no problem.

Oeufs en meurette
Two poached eggs served on garlic croutons with pearl onions, bacon and champignons
in a red wine and foie gras sauce served with pommes frîtes  15.

I might not be able to make the divine sauce they serve with the poached eggs, but heck, I thought this evening, why don’t I learn how to make poached eggs? So I did. YouTube is your friend, and I stumbled upon an awesome video explaining how to do it. The key, of course, was to use white vinegar. Everything else just fell into place afterwards.

Here’s the result:
 

 (yes, it is the Gorgonzola cheese on the sandwich, and yes, the bread is the Graines (multi-grain) bread from Le Panier)

I integrated a little Wordpress plugin to show the latest few twitter posts on the right side of my blog at http://alexweinstein.net.

Strange, I’ve caught myself twittering more than once a day for a few days already; plus, you can send the updates to Twitter from your cell phone, which is just awesome.

Who, just tell me who, is supposed to judge the language by the number of functions that start with the letter A. Who, in his right mind, will go and browse through the alphabetical categorization of the functions and based on that, make a judgment on the language.

I’m a PHP fanatic. I’ve started with PHP 5+ years ago. And yes, my start was spaghetti SQL in more spaghetti PHP in incomprehensible HTML. But allowing spaghetti code is not the fault of the language – on the contrary, it is an advantage – a secret weapon of luring script-kiddies like myself, who was just learning to write code. Without any skills, I was tempted to write simple webpages, and I had zero interest to learn the “java way”, with extremely clunky, 100-line code-behinds for most trivial pages and horribly convoluted API’s for accessing the databases.

I just wanted a simple programming language that would let me run the very first version of my very first website (OK, lying here a bit, the first version was in ColdFusion, but that was a big mistake). And PHP was perfect for it. Great community support, super-simple API’s for everything I needed at that point… That got me started on the web technologies.

And now, Jeff, you’re faulting the language that pulled me in through its simplicity, arguing that because of that simplicity, there’s so much poorly written code out there. That’s just plain wrong. You can write Fortran in C#. You can write the worst spaghetti code in Java, with all of its great MVC frameworks, and I’m sure you’ve seen lots of it.

The language has nothing to do with the quality of the code that’s written in it. The API’s, and the way you use them, on the other hand, make a heck of a difference. And here you have a point – if I was still using the built-in mysql_* functions of PHP, I’d be making a mistake. Do you have to use them, though? Is it the language’s fault that they offer a simple way for you to start?

During my career in Microsoft, I’ve many times heard of teams writing their own Textbox controls, because ASP.NET one didn’t do the right thing for their requirements. Every software development team out there has its own String class. Does it mean that ASP.NET Textbox sucks? Does it mean that the built-in String implementation in C# sucks? No. It doesn’t. Use the tools at the point when they’re helpful; if you outgrow the tools, your language should allow you to use your own constructs – and in all cases here, it does.

You don’t like the built-in libraries? Oh my god that function is not thread-safe, everyone, evacuate! OMG you’ve never found a bug in .NET or JVM? Boo hoo, find a workaround. With the community of this size, by the time you find the problem, thousands of people have already found a solution, wrote it up, and published it in an easily consumable summary. PHP documentation: dozens of community comments and code snippets on every single method.

With PHP, if you’re writing spaghetti code, if you’re not using an MVC framework, if your HTML is intertwined with application logic, if there are random SQL statements all over your code – take the blame for the article Jeff wrote. It’s your fault, not the fault of PHP.

If, on the other hand, you’re using frameworks like QCubed (my personal favorite – have been using it for over a year now), if you practice rigorous code reviews, refactoring, unit tests, test automation, and other practices of a serious software development shop – well, it doesn’t matter which language you use. It’s just a matter of preference.

I like my curly braces. I like the syntax of C that I learned back in UCLA. I don’t want to re-learn the basic syntax, and that’s why every time I tried switching over to Ruby on Rails, I just couldn’t force myself to continue past the first evening.

So, I proclaim again: the language doesn’t matter. Use the right software development methodologies, and you’ll be fine in any language.

… and don’t even think about giving me crap about performance and scalability, thank you. http://www.facebook.com/home.php be the judge.

There’s no such thing as people getting used to a democracy. You can’t get used to something you didn’t deserve. Why do most lottery winners end up just as poor a few years after their multi-million-dollar jackpot? Because they have no idea what to do with their wealth; because they did nothing to earn it; because they obtained it too easily, and now take the wealth for granted.

Allow me to now extend this example to a wider, political arena. I’m about to make a claim that some countries don’t deserve democracy: not because they don’t deserve to have a good life, no. Russia, and most of the Arab Middle East, is deeply entrenched in traditions of customary violence, medieval poverty, and a culture of a “hive”. The West, on the other hand, is all about individuality, personal success, property.

Being a vastly Asian country in its culture, Russia does not place the interests of the individual on the pedestal; instead, it’s about the “common good”, the communistic “светлое будущее” (“bright future”). Look at Russian history: it was the only European country to enter 20th century with a full-powered monarch. Classically, the belief is that the tsar is “placed on his throne by the gods”, and you can see a clear sense of nostalgia for a strong king throughout the last 100 years of Russia. People were admiring by the mass-murderer Stalin, they were ‘bored’ during the quiet years of Brezhnev (when the quality of life actually increased). They were “ashamed” of their poor destiny during the turmoil of the 90’s, but now! The king is back! Long live the king!..

Does Russia even want democracy? No, I claim, they’re much more about “world dominance”, not feeling geopolitically inferior, and having a country united around a charismatic leader. Putin’s it. He’s the returning Tsar that they’ve been dreaming about through the turmoil of the 90’s. Did he bring prosperity? No, he took away freedoms – precisely those that Americans feel to be so precious: speech, peaceful demonstrations, and dissent [heard about Garry Kasparov in jail recently?]. Do Russians feel bad about it? Hell no, Putin’s approval rating is sky high. Barring the assumptions that the approval statistics are an order of magnitude incorrect (I can see how you can falsify 10-20%, but not 10x), this clearly means that Putin is doing what Russians want.

Democracy is fundamentally about allowing everyone to weigh in on the big decisions of the society; it’s a great privilege that is usually driven from the inside, through revolutions and immense bloodshed (18-th century France) and selfless leaders (“Give me liberty or give me death”). When the democracy is forced upon you (Iraq), you not only have no idea how to use it best – you outright resent it. Someone came in and is telling me how to live! Plus, they took their laws and are telling me that their way is better! Doesn’t that remind you of the Crusades, with democracy replacing Christianity?

Russian democracy has really been a democracy only over the brief years of the early 90’s, with revolutions of 1991 and 1993; very soon afterwards, it turned into a classical aristocracy, with Berezovsky and the rest of thief-oligarchs controlling the throne. Desires to “take care of the people” dissipated on a whim: why didn’t leaders care to maintain some sort of democracy? Because it wasn’t the core issue people cared about. When the country forgets about the purpose of their revolution so quickly (< 10 years), it didn’t really want democracy in the first place. It just wanted a different tsar.

Now, the tsar has come! He’s exactly what his country wants, precisely what it deserves. He managed to gather Russia behind him; note how, unlike other tyrants, he’s not using hatred as a primary unifying force (Ahmadinejad), he’s not using massive violent repressions to control the throne (Stalin, Mao). He’s leading only through his charismatic, close-to-the-folk image. Yes, he’s dangerous for the civilized world – because of his “opposing force” support for clearly terrorist states (Syria, North Korea, Iran), but he’s perfect for Russia. Russia that’s hungry for pride, hungry for the world that’s afraid of it, hungry for international influence that it enjoyed throughout the Soviet era.

He makes them proud. Heck, he even makes me, a liberal American dissident, proud – even if I’m slightly ashamed of myself because of that.

It is a time to be especially grateful for the considerable blessings we enjoy… food, clothing, shelter, freedom…. it’s these essential and basic things that give human beings security and dignity… and it shouldn’t be lost on any of us that these aren’t universally shared assets. I believe it’s important to remember this or we’ll take our blessings for granted… thinking that we have some right to them… or that we deserve them… in fact… we don’t… let’s face it, we’re very lucky to live as and where we do… with good fortune comes obligation… with such a platform underneath us we have no excuse not to be of use… think of others less fortunate who are highly productive while fighting through obstacles we can’t imagine… and we also have an obligation to act with regard to the common good… we should and really must extend ourselves to help ensure that these essential and basic assets are available to more…. whether it’s a sense of equity that drives you… or venal self-interest. The latter is pretty important… as we fill up our planet and the world flattens, our children and their children will face new and unusual challenges and the world will need access to all the talent it can get to develop matching solutions… much of that talent is hidden… where we can’t see it and know it and benefit from it. Brilliance lurks in unexpected places. We can, each of us, through awareness and good acts, extend ourselves to help uncover more of it.”

So I’m kicking off this holiday season with the two most dearest to my heart – Alex and Pixel! My thanks are endless for Sasha’s devotion, patience and love! I’m greatfull for our special baby – rain or shine Pixel worships me!

BEST WISHES TO YOUR FAMILY!

   Pixel and I

    Happy Birthday Sasha

http://www.ishopitalian.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=I&Product_Code=AN-C6-AMORE&Category_Code=CCCP

Happiest day of the year!!!!

So what does a trillion look like?

“It is estimated you can get 50,000 pennies into a cubic foot – a trillion pennies would fill two St Paul’s Cathedrals.”

Alternatively you may want to compare a million to a trillion by placing a credit card next to Ben Nevis.

Then again you can illustrate the scale of this number by comparing the fact that a million seconds equals 11.5 days, a billion seconds is 32 years and a trillion is 32,000 years.

Or, if your brain has not exploded already, there is another calculation you can make, according to Michael.

“If you take the typical annual salary as £25,000 a year – how long would it take you to spend a trillion pounds if you spent £25,000 a day.

“The answer is 109,000 years.”

There is a dangerous virus being passed around electronically, orally, and by hand.

This virus is called Weary-Overload-Recreational-Killer (WORK). If you receive WORK from any of your colleagues, your boss, or anyone else via any means DO NOT TOUCH IT. This virus will wipe out your private life completely.

If you should come into contact with WORK, put your jacket on and take two good friends to the nearest grocery store. Purchase the antidote known as Work-Isolating-Neutralizer-Extract (WINE) or Bothersome-Employer-Elimination-Rebooter (BEER). Take the antidote repeatedly until WORK has been completely eliminated from your system.