Okay, perhaps not over the sea proper, but in an aeroplane nevertheless.

I'm cruising, with my 85 compatriots in flight, over the Sierra Nevada, a break in the clouds below me just now granting sight of the snow-spackled mountains, pink and black in the sun's waning light. Now the peaks are higher, with more snow and only ridges of exposed rock, like dirty divinity. Looking by on the rapidly receding Inland Valley, it's filled with smoke, fog, haze, smog, or whatever else people call restless earth and water suspended in air.

...

Okay, a spicy tomato juice and some air turbulence later (thankfully for my powerbook's sake, not in tandem), mountains are giving way to desert, the sand licking the foothills like a sea of its own. We've been airborne for a half-hour out of San Jose, and I have another half-hour or so before landing in Las Vegas.

...

Vegas: City of Lights. Whenever possible, fly in or out of Las Vegas at night. On nights like tonight, when the sky is clear, I've been told pilots can see the Luxor's beam of light from 200 miles away. We'll see if the right side of the plane is indeed the 'right side' for the show, landing in Las Vegas. I know it's right on the way out.

Sadly (well, from one perspective) my stay in Lost Wages will only last about 53 minutes, barely enough time to lose a milliwage at the quickie pizza shop in the Southwest terminal before hopping on another plane (which, unlike this one, will be completely full. I wonder if the person next to me will try to read my screen? Hmm.. just in case...)

...

Whirlwind Vegas was fun. An hour layover is just enough time to check in, try to win at the slots (won $10! woo-hoo!), and experience a little disappointment at the lack of pizza (it wouldn't have been a disappointment if not for the anticipation I expressed earlier...). I even found this airport shoplet that sold specialty hot chocolate mix and, more importantly, hot vanilla mix. I'm a vanilla freak and I love to see it get an equal footing with its dark brother. I didn't get the mix, preferring to save impulse airport buys for the inbound legs, 'cause who wants to lug around swag longer than necessary? I did get a vanilla frosty though (Mmm... Vanilla brain freeze...) and then it was time for me to board my next plane.

The plane was too crowded to write, and I just turned on my iPod and napped. I reloaded my iPod with 1149 songs before I left, so there's plenty to listen to. I even included 28 tracks of audio Spanish lessons, which is a little weird when it comes up on random shuffle. I just go with it though; after all, listening to good music seems like a great reward for making it through a 6 minute lesson. (Tengo que hacerlo porque necessito estudiar.)

I am Kevin's sleepy brain, arriving on the last flight of the night, and making my way to the hotel.

More to come...

In its 33rd season, Sesame Street is being reconstructed, due to a younger demographic.

I'm not sure how I feel about it. Though I haven't been a viewer since I was ten, I liked it for what it was. I've got to think that maybe the reason that it's getting a younger demographic (2-4 year olds), even in a world with Teletubbies and Blue's Clues, is because it doesn't pander.

The concept that a creative work should change itself to 'dumb down' to fit the perceived desires of the demographic drawn to it has created many shameful works, sprung from fine beginnings. Can't people get the concept that the audience was drawn to the existing product? Why second-guess your patrons, and tell them what they really want?

I wonder what these people would think.

Hah. I got this on one of my mailing lists (Fezziwigs). Anyone in a position to help out?

I have recently discovered the making of Victorian braided hair jewelry. What I don't have is an inexpensive source for hair long enough to braid. I need pieces at least 6-8 inches long in order to have long enough stuff to do interesting things with. Human-hair wigs available at thrift stores aren't usually that long (I've been looking). And fake hair (available cheap, anywhere) doesn't have the texture to stay in place right (picture tying knots in mono-filament Nylon).

(here's the embarrassing part:) If any of you happened to be getting a serious haircut, and if you happened to have several-inch pieces of hair left over that you weren't using anymore, I would be greatly appreciative (I would even offer to do a trade for it). Any colour or degree of curly-ness is fine with me.

Anyone with hair to spare? I know a few of my friends recently lopped off their tresses and donated them to charity.

When I was working at Ikonic Interactive, err... (let's see: Yahoo, UCB, Eleven, CKS) five jobs ago, One of our interaction designers was a woman named Susanne Goldstein who, among other things, had been an associate producer on the movie Captain Ron, but that's neither here nor there. More to the point, Susanne had a philosophy so profound that my coworker Evan and I coined it "The Goldstein Principle"

The principle worked like this: Susanne was a contractor and figured that she could accumulate as many billable hours as she had available time. Based on the assumption that she enjoyed her work more than she liked most more mundane tasks, she would try to find people that she could pay to do things for her that she would otherwise have to do herself. Housekeeping? Done. Laundry? Outsourced. As long as she was paying less for the service than she would get (after taxes, naturally) at her own hourly rate, and she actually used the free time to work more, she was actually making money by paying others to do these things for you. (It's a good thing she wasn't married. I don't really want to know exactly how far she'd push the principle.)

Anyhow, I've ues the Goldstein Principle several times since then to rationalize paying for professional services (Webvan, Cook Express, laundry services, etc.). Even when I haven't been working for an hourly wage, I've tried to figure out how much my time is worth to me, and how I can make more of it.

Unlike Susanne, I don't use the principle to justify doing some work instead of other work, for net profit. I use it to justify spending money in exchange for unfettered time. The saying goes that time equals money, but for most, this is usually a one-way function. Short of giving up our jobs, there's sparce opportunity to exchange a little money for more time. Sure, laundry, cleaning, shopping, but it doesn't add up to enough time to allow a real lifestyle change.

So, like I mentioned a few days ago, I've decided that if I stay on the Bay Area side of the middle, and continue at Yahoo! for the foreseeable future, I've decided to move. The reasoning for this is my largest application of the Goldstein Principle yet.

Posit:

• I currently leave home at 6:45 am to get to work by 8:45. I leave work at 5:30 to get home by 7:30. Going by car is roughly the same, since on car days I just tend to stay at work around 12 hours instead of 9, and it's still between one and two hours each way to drive. Average commuting time per day: 4 hours. Average commuting time per month (16 days/mo, after telecommuting, vacation, etc.): 64 hours.
• My commuting costs right now are $100/mo for Amtrak (after commuter check discount), and another $150 for the six roundtrips by car (90 mi/day, $0.28/mile 6 days a month). Total commuting costs: $250/month.
• A hypothetical new place would be less than 8 miles from work, and cost $500 more a month than where I live now (giving up rent control is so hard to do...). Commuting costs would be 18 roundtrips, hence 288 monthly miles, hence $80/mo.
• Commuting 8 miles to work would take roughly 15 minutes each way. 30 minutes a day. 16 days/mo at 30 min/day is 8 hours.
• Total time saved per month: 48 hours.
• Total cost change: $500 more in rent, $250-$80=$170 less in transportation. Net cost: $330/mo.
• Result: I can buy 48 hours every month for: $6.87/hr.

Of course it's more complicated than that, but more than three extra hours every workday is a powerful incentive, representing a 75% increase over the 4 hours a workday (7:30pm-11:30pm) I get now, and minimum wage isn't a very high price to pay for it. On the other hand of complexity, I really like my current apartment. I love the light, views on three sides, pizza 'till 2am, and the space that, while currently cluttered, I've spent the last six years slowly shaping into a home instead of a college student's crash space. In a sense, my apartment has been my own chrysalis. I went into it a juvenile with a futon-and-milkcrate mentality, and emerged having graduated to an Ikea mesa. It's like watching Fight Club in reverse.

I also have to think about my friends, and how while those who lived in Berkeley are all gone now (with rare exception), spread all over the bay: Alameda, Hayward, Santa Clara, Mountain View, San Francisco. Maybe something closer to the middle (ugh. ;-) ) like Union City would make more sense.

Anyhow, thanks for listening. It's good to get these thoughts down on paper (err, it feels good to get them down on microscopic ferromagnetic spots on the platter of a hard disk in a computer who knows where. Pasadena, I think).

Meanwhile, I wonder what Susanne's up to. I wonder if she's making enough an hour now to let her justify paying someone else to live her life for her?

I'm a packrat. Given the options of tossing junk or storing it in a box or closet on the off chance that I might need it one day, I almost always opt for the save. Mostly it's a fear of needing something a month, year, or decade down the line, and the possibility of frustration, remembering having tossed it out.

It's funny, because I let the future possibility of discomfort lead me to store telephone records from 1994 and peripherals two technological generations removed from my current computer (make that three. I found my thunderscan and macrecorder in a Mac Plus carrying case yesterday, (looking for something else non-tech, and very much wanted, which, ironically, I seem to have lost (but not thrown out. you don't throw out your favorite bedouin cloak you got in Morocco three years ago, but I digress.))).

Anyhow, I save and store to prevent the possibility of future frustration, yet I ignore the fact that dedicating two closets to boxes of what, until I have a sudden need for it, is crap, carries with its own discomfort, a discomfort that is certain, and is there every day. (Anyone watch Friends last week?)

Anyhow, with the prospect of moving, either across town or across the country, I'm finally consolidating and purging. 95% of what I use on a weekly or monthly basis represents only about 50% of my stuff, and I'd like to see how much of the remaining 50% I can find permanent homes for, be it gifting to friends, donating to charaties, setting out on the curb, or simply tossing.

The first thing I'm doing is consolidating my music. I'm MP3 encoding every CD I own, no matter how often or rarely I listen to it (I'm over halfway through, and the number looks to be around 240 discs). Those that I don't listen to often I'm going to burn to MP3 CD (so, 12 CDs on a single CD-R). Actually, I'm going to burn all the CDs onto MP3 CD-R, for archival purposes (yes, irony noted. Thanks.) and then get rid of the rest of the bulk. I rarely use single CDs anyhow. somethng about picking one artist that I want to listen to for an hour... I love surprises that come from the random shuffle of what will be when I'm finished encoding, a library of 3500 songs. I also like being able to carry that literal 9 days of music around in a single 12-cd case, or about a third of it in my iPod.

The next job is to get rid of all those 'old tech' audio CDs, and officially begin to lighten my worldly load.

First, thanks for all the feedback on what life-decision to make and, more importantly, how I should go about deciding.

That said, I'l also like to say thanks to Dinah's Mom for her advice, forwarded to me via Dinah, and included in her post (linked above).

The concept of 'do it or don't, enjoy that decision or not' is an important one for making single 'yay-nay' decisions, but it's also useful to apply to both alternatives in an either/or decision. Definitely a lot to think about.

In any event, I'm glad that this discussion inspured comments that helped Dinah with her own difficult choice.

The Open Source TiVo Webserver Project lets you view what shows are in your TiVo's to-do list, season pass list, now playing list, and more, all via an ethernet interface you can hack on to your TiVo.

A web interface for choosing shows to record is still forthcoming.

So two of my friends lost their jobs in the last week. One was laid off two days before the company laid off everyone else and closed its doors, making severance that much harder to get ("HR department? They went home for the day. Err, I mean forever. Try back later?"). The other, after pulling so many 12 hour days to support thousands of users, picking up the slack of her coworkers, closing trouble tickets at twice the rate of her three coworkers combined, was informed that she wouldn't be getting one of the spots available once the current project finished. Reason? Not a team player. Makes me sick...

Anyhow, today another friend of mine is interviewing for a spot in my department at Yahoo!. I really hope he gets it (and not (just) for the referral bonus). Ernie's been doing this kind of work for so long, and has such a passion for it, that if anyone has the spirit to bring more to the job than is just required, it's Ernie. After whoring himself out to one flailing dotcom after another, he deserves it. Heh; he also feels guilty for interviewing at the 'hoo 12 days after starting a contracting position at the largest US office building after the Pentagon. Well, we'll wait and see.

Like one of you said after my 'middle' post a couple days ago, there's good-good decisions, good-bad, and bad-bad decisions. Sometimes the thing to be most thankful is that you have a choice in the first place. I shouldn't take it for granted that two choices is infinitely better than no choices.

I may be in the middle, but only for as long as I choose to be. I wonder if it's the security blanket of alternatives that's so hard to cast aside and make a choice.

Next time you're interviewing someone for a web development position and you wonder if they're overselling themselves, pick a random letter of the alphabet, and prepend it to 'html.' Ask the candidate how familiar they are with (for example) 'rhtml' and, if they claim any skill, ask them for an on-the-spot code example.

Of course this could backfire, if they actually do know it, and you didn't think it existed.

For you employers out there, here's a little cheat sheet. Let me know if I missed any:

• dhtml
• jhtml
• phtml
• shtml
• vhtml
• xhtml

So I have two lists in my pocket. The first is a list of reminders of things I want to blog about. The second is a list of pictures to take from Chatterwaul's Collectivo project, where each participant takes 10 pictures on a theme. This one's theme is 'The Daily Routine' and the individual pictures are things like '1. The first thing you see when you wake up' and '5. Something that requires your daily attention'. I've finished taking most of the pictures, and I'll point to them when they get posted to the site.

Two of the instructed pictures are giving me trouble though: '8. Your most loathsome daily activity' and '9. The thing you look forward to most each day.' I've been thinking about it for three days, and I can't find anything particularly loathsome that happens daily. I mean, how loathsome is taking out contact lenses really? Similarly, I'm having trouble finding the thing I look forward to each day. Again, how much can you look forward to a Chai? And even then, I already took a picture of that ritual for '3. A food or beverage you consume on a daily basis.'

I hadn't realized how low-contrast my life seems to be getting.

I'm living in the middle.

...

In my love life, that thing that keeps happening outside of fury.com's view, there's a coffer full of untold stories and those still unfolding. I'm neither saint nor satyr, looking for love, but unable to give myself up to it. I have the opportunity for love and commitment, or I could be sated with my friendships, but my own feelings, desires, and emotions are constantly conflicted, to my own detriment and sorrow and that of some of those who touch my life.

I'm living in the middle.

...

Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of my application deadline to Carnegie Mellon's graduate HCI program. Tomorrow, hundreds of eager hopefuls have to have their own applications postmarked. Last March, with a job offer from Yahoo in one hand and an acceptance from CMU in the other, I chose to defer grad school for a year. I told my manager of my intent to get my Masters degree the following year, and he said that after a year at Yahoo, I wouldn't want to leave.

In two months today's applicants get their thin-lipped letters of rejection or grinning packets of admission. I'll be getting a joyous packet, one year deferred, and I'll find myself weighing the same choices, options, and futures, albeit with a year's more perspective. The needle keeps wavering, and right now it's at the balancing point.

On one hand, I love Yahoo. The people there are the most capable I've ever had the pleasure of working with, and I feel that I get to exert my capabilities more and to more meaningful ends than ever before. Even more telling, in my CMU app statement of purpose, I talked about how I want to be able to design interaction models that will be used by millions, eventually being emulated by competitors, and finally being accepted as simply 'the way things work.' I'm incredibly lucky to have that opportunity, designing Yahoo! Messenger, and I'd be a fool to leave it.

On the other hand, CMU's HCII program is the best in the world. Coming from a university of 30,000 people, and a high school of 3,300, going to a graduate program of 40 people, on a campus with one eighth the population of UC Berkeley, I'd love an educational experience that doesn't involve feeling like a number. In short, I feel like I got an invitation to Hogwarts, and the Dursleys are inside a corner of my brain, crying things like "too much money!" "Pittsburgh? For a full year?" and "The perfect job isn't good enough for you?"

If I choose to go, I hope to continue at Yahoo when I finish in 12 months. There will be packing, storage, the sharing of furniture and furnishings with friends ("Will you take my big TV, oh please?"), and the slow but steady purge of unneeded junk, papers, etc. from my life, in preparation for one carful of stuff on a cross-country sojourn to a new, brief, life. If I choose to stay, I've decided that I need to move. (More on that later. I'm writing it on the list of things to blog about now.)

Gah. I just need more information, and I'll make sure I gather it in the next couple months, both about Yahoo and CMU. But for now, and for the next several months --

I'm living in the middle.