The Brunch Table

A few random thoughts on orkut, the newest Friendster-clone on the block:

• If there’s one thing that social network services have done for us, it’s given people a straightforward way to tell the world that they’re swingers.
• Too many questions! I’d rather fill out a 1040—at least I get money for that.
• Can anyone really check off “my style is fresh from the city streets” with a straight face?
• It’s odd that while you can type in things that are “turn-offs”, you have to pick from a grab bag of “turn-ons” such as “long hair”, “candlelight”, “sarcasm”, and “thunderstorms”. (Hmm, a dream date with Janeane Garofalo during a power outage?)
• One nice feature that I haven’t seen before is that you can specify which group of people can see which bits of personal information.
• As nifty as viral marketing is, I don’t like pimping out my friends & acquaintances. (Heck, I don’t even like saying brand names out loud because it makes me feel like I’m in a commercial.) So if you know me and want the orkut hookup, let me know.
• “orkut” certainly is a memorable name.
• As Cory Doctorow points out, most of the social network services essentially make users ask each other, “Are you my friend, yes or no?” (Kicking it elementary school style!) I prefer being able to say “I like this person”, without any explicit pressure on them to respond. Upcoming.org does this the right way, I think.
• orkut lets you rate friends along the “trusty”, “cool”, and “sexy” karma axes, but right now there’s no disincentive to keep the system from turning into an eBay-style “A++++++++++++ GREAT SELLAR OMG!!1!!!” love-fest. If I were king, I would constrain the points to make it a more interesting economy. If you only had, say 1/4 of a “cool point” to spend for each friend you had, you’d have to be a little more choosy. Maybe if enough people had dubbed you “sexy”, you could have more “sexy buying power”. Etcetera.
• The most impressive thing about Friendster is that everyone and their mom is on there, even people who are—shall we say—Hotmail users. It’s become a great way of tracking down old pals who aren’t geeks (I can just google for the old pals who are geeks). With so many early adopters complaining of social-network fatigue, will any of the other services attract anything more than geeksters?

I just stumbled across this mind-boggling cult site–they have a curious explanation for the mysterious rashes that afflicted some children after 9/11:

The US school system, public and private, including Church schools, are under the power of Baal.  Girls are more susceptible to the influence of Baal than boys because it was Baal as the goddess of love.  Had it been Baal as the god of war, the boys would have been more susceptible.  When the children thought about the rash, it got worse.  That is exactly the same way scar tissue of the soul is manifest.  Thinking under the power of the Cosmic System aggravates the symptoms of scar tissue of the soul.  Rebound and thinking doctrine will remove the symptoms. It was no accident that President Bush was in an elementary school at the time of the September 11 attack.  The children in the schools were under the curse of Baal.  They had intimacy problems.  The rash began on Day 277, for reverse process reversionism, which is a problem with both adults and children.  But those responsible were the adults.  In other words, elementary teachers full of adultery bring Baal into the lives of their pupils.  The only way to protect children from Baal is to keep them away from the slaves of Baal, who may be adults or other children.  President Bush was right.  The schools do have a serious problem.  However, Baal is the problem – not reading skills.  When the rash hit Pennsylvania, it began around Reading, which was obviosly an angelic pun.

But wait, it gets better–the page explains how the woman who was killed at Kennywood during the storm that year was a freaking metaphor.

In West Mifflin, Pennsylvania a woman was killed when the roof of an amusement park pavilion collapsed due to the storm winds, and 54 others were injured mostly from storm driven debris.  The amusement park was on the banks of the Monongahela River.  The roof is a symbol of authority.  Having the roof crash down on your head is punishment for violating authority.  Spritual Rapport is symbolized by a roof on the Edification Complex of the Soul.  A woman killed by a falling roof represents the sin unto death for violating authority. With all these disasters beside lakes and rivers, the issue was Marriage Culture.  Lakes and rivers represent the female, and tornadoes represent the uncircumcised male.  In the area where Giuliani and Bush spoke, the weather angels blasted the region with vicious storms, hail, and tornadoes.  The residents of West Mifflin said they had never seen anything like it.  The thing New York and Pennsylvania had in common was terrorist attacks.  The weather angels were not impressed.  The only thing that can deliver this nation from Baal is the Church.  Christians with Bible Doctrine are the only ones capable of fighting the unseen enemy.

I’m speechless.

(I suppose it’s worth mentioning, though, that the best official explanation that I’ve found for the rash phenomenon was that it was psychosomatic and coincidental. I can see why some people might find the Hand of Baal to be a more satisfying explanation.)

I saw Bush’s address tonight…the speech was the usual, but there was an added touch–after every main talking point, there was spirited applause, and a bunch of people in the back of the chamber yelled something in chorus. It sounded kind of like “Heyyyy!” and kind of like (depending on your mood, I guess) “Hail!” or maybe “Hurraaaaayyy!” Anyway, it was nicely martial in spirit–well-suited to a sports event, scary as hell in a Presidential address.

Did anybody else hear this noise? This was the first Bush Jr. State of the Union I’d seen–does he always get folks to do the noise? Did Clinton have ‘em do the noise for his State of the Unions, and I just didn’t notice?

While I was googling for more context on the whole presidential primary process this morning, I came across this speech from the year 2000. It’s an interesting look at the history behind the current obsession with the early state primaries. The speaker argues that even though the primaries have a reputation for giving underdog candidates a chance in the nomination contest, the candidate who goes into the primaries with stronger popular and financial position almost always ends up with the nomination. (Also, look for an amusing bit about W and McCain’s contrasting campaign styles in the 2000 New Hampshire primary.)

If he’s right, it means that Dean still has a decent chance of ending up with the nomination. Not that I have anything against Kerry or Edwards–it’s just that I don’t find either of them particularly inspiring. (I’d still vote for either one as the “not Bush” option.)

I faced an interesting challenge this morning: how to travel twenty miles back home, in suburban LA, on foot, on a Sunday morning. Now, it’s generally accepted that “the buses” don’t run here on Sundays…but I had company on my way back, a guy who’d been here a while and who was also (although in his case, temporarily) carless. He knew which lines were still running, and where the printed schedules were wrong. One dollar bought a ride and a transfer, and two buses and a relatively brief hour and a half later (the ride is 20 minutes by car), I was back.

All told, a pleasant surprise. Except, after it was done, I thought back about what those two buses were doing. The first alone would’ve taken me there…but the second bus was required to cross the freeway. Without that, there might as well have been a fortified wall between me and home.

“The basic enterprise of contemporary literary criticism is actually quite simple. It is based on the observation that with a sufficient amount of clever handwaving and artful verbiage, you can interpret any piece of writing as a statement about anything at all…’Deconstruction’ is based on a specialization of the principle, in which a work is interpreted as a statement about itself, using a literary version of the same cheap trick that Kurt Gðdel used to try to frighten mathematicians back in the thirties.”

I found this on one of our mailing lists at school…it’s an article written by an engineer (with the very Lucasesque name of “Chip Morningstar”) who takes us with him as he tries to read Derrida and Baudrillard.

What’s odd, though, is that after a lot of funny insights, he reaches the conclusion that communication in engineering is superior because “At the very least, in order to remain employed I have to convince somebody else that what I’m doing is worth having them pay for it.”

Well, where were those communication skills when General Electric handed off toxic depleted-uranium artillery shells to the Pentagon, without telling the military that tank and air crews who handled them would need to wear protection? Mr. Morningstar may have a point that practical concerns tend to hold engineers to a higher degree of intellectual honesty, but this smells like the same old Reaganist argument about the sanctity of the market.

Back in the early 90’s, the Cypherpunks made a lot of noise about how cryptography was going change the world, keep people from snooping on your email, tell you who you can trust, and the like. Well, the math may have been sound, but getting the stuff to work for ordinary people has been much harder.

A decade has passed, and just about everyone still sends email that the feds (and anyone else who’s watching the network) can read without breaking a sweat. Sure, it’s possible to send private mail from most modern mail programs, but setting it all up is such a hassle, and how many people would actually know how to decode it once they received it?

As for the trust thing, trust certificates are better than nothing when you’re giving Amazon your credit card number, but they’ve got their own issues. I got an email today from someone I’m working with, asking if this Sun alert affected the program that I’ve been working on. Essentially, one of the most basic Verisign certificates that many programs and websites use to express trustworthiness expired recently, causing some websites and Java programs to toss up confusing error messages, and prompting Norton Antivirus to go on a Windows-hobbling rampage. Sure, there are some good reasons for these certificates to expire, but the fact of the matter is, software is built by humans who forget things like certificate renewals. The potential for end-users to suffer for the negligence of others is all too great.

So now software and website publishers are scrambling to install fresh certificates, and in the meantime, VeriSign is telling people that it’s OK to ignore the “invalid certificate” error messages–which kind of defeats the purpose of having them in the first place.

Ultimately, cryptography has turned out to be more of a user interface problem than a math problem.

Apple’s new GarageBand software is apparently going for some sort of 80’s home stereo look.

…and Frodo (Elijah Wood) finally destroys the titular piece of bling in the…

That’s all. As you were.

I had some lean times after I moved up to Boston, but thanks to a good job and a low-overhead carfree lifestyle, my savings have been building back up over the past year or so. My relationship with Quicken has run hot and cold, but lately my financial strategy has mostly consisted of glancing at ATM receipts and brushing off the occasional thought that I should do something more productive with my spare change than leaving it in my checking account.

Lately, I’ve finally gotten around to doing some reading. The current inflation rate has been on the order of 2-3% lately, which means that money that you leave sitting around under the mattress or in a typical checking account is losing value at about that rate. Now, the way to make big money is to invest in volatile securities like stocks and mutual funds and the like, but I got burned quite a bit by them in the recent downturn. However, there are plenty of lower-risk savings products that will help your savings keep pace or exceed inflation while keeping your money relatively available to you if you need it.

The most common options are savings accounts, which are insured and generally allow ready access to your money; money market funds, which are not insured but also allow easy withdrawals; and certificates of deposit, which tend to offer better interest rates at the cost of only being able to withdraw your money after a specified amount of time (often 1-5 years).

If you check out bankrate.com (which is a pretty good reference on financial matters), you’ll see that current interest rates are pretty low. Most savings accounts only have something like 0.5% APY (annual percentage yield, the amount of interest you’re likely to earn on your initial deposit over the course of a year). However, there are a few online banks which are offering savings accounts around 2% APY, which is closer to the inflation rate. According to Bankrate, money market funds are also at around 2% APY right now. The interest rates on CDs depend on how long you’re willing to wait, from about 1.5% APY for a 1-year certificate to about 4% APY for a 5-year one.

(warning, pimping ahead) Last month, I finally opened a savings account with ING Direct, which is an online savings bank. They currently offer 2% APY on savings, with no minimum balance and no fees. The mailing they sent me gave me a bonus $25 just for opening the account and keeping some amount of money (again, no minimum) in there for a month. They don’t obviously offer that deal online, but they do have the PayPal-style thing where I can offer you the $25 bonus (and I get $10).

I’ve been very happy with my account so far–you can manage everything online, and you can easily transfer money between your ING savings account and your checking account at your local bank via EFT. I just got my first statement today (which is what reminded me about all of this), and I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of interest I’ve earned already. (OK, I’m done pimping)

There are several online banks that offer savings rates in that range, so I encourage you to check them out if you aren’t earning much interest on your money right now. And remember, if you’re carrying credit card debt right now, paying that off is usually the best investment you can make.