Viraj's Weblog

Saw a very good Frontline about retirement planning. Probably the most interesting thing from the show is that you really need to put away 15-18% of salary in your 401k for 30 years to have enough for retirement.

Today I had 2 wisdom teeth pulled out. Fun fun. It was not bad because I was under general anesthesia. Honestly, I was more frightened of the anesthesia than anything else. One miscalculation there and it could be very dangerous.

Pain is not so bad, yet. I'm taking ibuprofen only, but have a stock supply of vicodin. Food is the tricky part. Soups and more soups.

I never thought my ankle surgery would be a blessing, but the many months of recovery and pain from that makes me get through this alot easier.

Back in FL I used to have satellite (Dish network) with HD channels. Nowadays cable is providing "HD" channels as well. I have Comcast in CA.

Here's my problem with cable HD: whenever there is alot of motion on the screen, the image becomes visibly pixellated, much worse than non-HD! I believe this must be some sort of bandwidth problem and cable TV. Looks great if you are looking at fairly still images, but any action and it's just crap.

Maybe it is the crappy Tivo-wannabe that is my cable box that's doing it. But anyway, if you are thinking of getting a HDTV, you really should go with satellite instead of cable unless you can accept sub-par image resolution.

From the article:

Listening to music may have effects similar to that of relaxation techniques, Bernardi and his colleagues note, which generally require that a person focus his or her attention on something and then release it. "Appropriate selection of music, by alternating fast and slower rhythms and pauses, can be used to induce relaxation and reduce sympathetic activity and thus may be potentially useful in the management of cardiovascular disease," they conclude.

A quote on mothers from Kahlil Gibran:

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness. For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

When you think of credit scores, you would expect a lender to have all the information about your credit history. At least, that's what you would hope if you had good credit.

That's why I was kinda shocked by an article in the Epoch Times about credit scores, which had the quote:

"Some lenders appear to have stopped reporting positive information about their best borrowers to protect against them being picked off by competitors."

This seems to imply that you may have a lender that is not reporting your good credit for fear of losing you as a customer. WTF? How is this even legal?

• Reactions between Rubidium and Cesium and water
• Bush == dumb
• Skater Dog

Oh another interesting article claims that IT is more stressful than Medicine. I don't know if that's funny or sad .

From John Stossel's Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity:

By failing to account for inflation, the media have some Americans so alarmed that they can't think straight. "What costs more," I asked customers at a gas station, "gasoline or bottled water?" The answer I got from almost everyone was gasoline. At that very gas station, water was for sale at $1.29 for a twenty-four-ounce bottle. That's $6.88 per gallon, three times what the station charged for gasoline. It gets sillier. I asked gas station customers, "What costs more, gasoline or ice cream?" Again, most people said gasoline cost more. But at $3.39 a pint, "premium" ice cream costs about $27.00 a gallon.

We should marvel at how cheap gasoline is-what a bargain we get from oil companies. After all, it's easy to bottle water, but think about what it takes to produce and deliver gasoline. Oil has to be sucked out of the ground, sometimes from deep beneath an ocean. To get to the oil, the drills often have to bend and dig sideways through as much as five miles of earth. What they find then has to be delivered through long pipelines or shipped in monstrously expensive ships, then converted into three or more different formulas of gasoline and transported in trucks that cost more than $100,000 each. Then your local gas station must spend a fortune on safety devices to make sure you don't blow yourself up. At $2.26 a gallon (about forty-six cents of which goes to taxes), gas is miraculously cheap! But what we heard from the clueless media was, "Gas prices are at record highs!"

Speaking of pipelines, I recently saw The Yes Men, a hilarious documentary about some guys who pretend to be representatives of the WTO and actually get invited to conventions to give talks. Hilarity ensues when the presentation becomes absurd, slowly pushing over the edge to see what the listeners will take.The funniest skit was when they were invited to a university and they gave a presentation (including a hilarious CGI animation) of a new McDonald's invention to feed the poor and hungry in 3rd world countries.

The presenters brought in boxes of hamburgers just purchased from McDonalds and gave them freely to the students, setting the stage. They then said that the human body wastes about 80% of what it ingests. They proceeded to describe a new type of burger. The CGI showed a McDonalds bathroom. Someone goes to take a dump, and the human waste is then pumped through various pipes and tubes processing it and going all the way to a 3rd world country's McDonalds, coming out of the pipes to make new not-all-beef patties for customers in turbans.

The students in the audience stop eating their burgers and are appalled. They actually believe it! This skit is just absolute genius, and the movie is worth seeing just for this. It perfectly conveys the concept of shitting on other people.

I had a chance to attend a talk by Jane Goodall, a person who spent many years studying chimpanzees in Africa. Her talk was very moving and was essentially a call to action to help save some the world's precious environments. She described many of the activities being done in Africa that are essentially causing chimpanzees and many other species to dwindle in number. Among many, one reason was a popular desire to eat 'bushmeat'. Extravagant restaraunts are making alot of money on this. Lumber companies, even though they may abide by certain deforestation agreements, build paved roads which itself ruins life there as it gives easy access to hunters. The whole situation sickens me and reminds me of overpopulation and the wasteful and excessive lifestyles we all live.

I think we, as Americans, are very insular to the world around us. We waste uncontrollably, and buy things only to fill landfills. We take long showers while others in the world can barely get a glass full. Honestly when I look outside and see all the children we are making, I have to wonder what we are doing. Do we really need more people on earth? How much do we actually do to make things better for the world, rather than just for ourselves or small family? More and more the words 'unsustainable lifestyle' gain more meaning to me. Sooner or later the rest of the world will encroach on our apparent security and we will be forced to change.

Goodall talked about when we as humans have our backs to the wall, that's when we are truly innovative. I'm also reading her book "Reason for Hope," and in it she quotes Eleanor Roosevelt: "people are like tea bags; you never know how strong they are until you dump them in boiling water." How true. I think we all need to be put in situations like this, so that we are forced to find solutions to the world's problems. Our consumerism breeds a culture of apathy. We really need to be woken up.

There's an interesting passage from her book where she talks of coming to England after being in Africa:

After months in Gombe I saw the "civilized" world that we have created with new eyes: the world of bricks and mortar, cities and buildings, roads and cars and machines. Nature was almost always so beautiful and so spiritually enriching; the man-made world seemed so often horribly ugly and spiritually impoverished. This contrast between the two worlds struck me, with increasing sadness, every time I arrived back in England from Gombe. Instead of the peace of the timeless forest and the simple, purposeful lives of its inhabitants I was plunged into the materialistic, wasteful - terribly, terribly wasteful - rat race of Western society. Instead of the soft rustling of the leaves, the gently sighing waves on the beach, the singing of the birds and crickets, my ears were assailed by the sounds of traffic, too-loud rock music, strident voices - and no silence. The fragrance of the white nighttime flowers, and the smell of dry earth after rain, were exchanged for the stink of gasoline or diesel fumes, other people's cooking, disinfectant overriding stale urine in public lavatories. When I was away from Gombe and plunged into the developed world I found it harder to sense the presence of God. I had not learned, then, to keep the peace of the forest within.

The more I think about it, I wonder just how much our spiritual enrichment is dying. I read in a newspaper about one of Jay Leno's 'jaywalking' segments where he asked people on the street what the Golden Rule was. The majority of the people had no idea, and one even thought it was a mathematical formula. This is one of the saddest things I read, because it makes clear just how little we are taught to care about others.

Picked up a Honda Civic Hybrid this weekend. Below are some stock photos of the color I got. Great, now I have 2 cars that I don't drive . The weather is so nice that I bike to work every day. I even picked up the car by biking to the dealership. Here's a tip, if you want car salespeople to leave you alone, come into the dealership with a bike and sweating like a pig. No one will want to sell you a car .

The Civic is a neat car. I can actually sense the charging when using the brakes which is interesting. It has an aux in for my ipod and a navigation system. It has all sorts of futuristic lights that make me feel warm and fuzzy. I got the 'bass speaker' upgrade, but really it doesn't compare to my Infiniti. Hey, it's a Civic after all, what can I expect. It's not bad though.

My lease is up in a few weeks for my Infiniti, so I should be back to 1 car soon. I paid for the new car cash, no financing bullshit. That feels good to not have car payments.

Now I gotta find a condo or something to invest money in rather than wasting it on rent. Ahh the endless rat race...