It just occurred to me how freaking weird the phrase “know, in the biblical sense” is.
You know we have a problem when a slang term for sex comes from the inerrant word of God.
I basically have no credit history. Applying for a credit card has been on my to-do list for a long time, but it’s one of those tasks that’s very easily displaced by almost anything.
The more I think about it, though, the more I don’t want to. I need to do something to build up my credit, but I see it as giving in to them. And what scares me most is that I’m not sure who they are. Who determines my credit score? What variables do they use? They won’t say! They made up their own game with their own rules, didn’t tell anyone the rules, and expect everyone to play the game.
If I go to apply for a loan, I don’t like the idea of the bank telling anyone. I don’t like the idea of the bank asking someone about me. And I certainly don’t like them asking someone I’ve never even heard of about me. Especially when that someone is only obliged to tell me what they have on file about me once every three years. (Sort of.)
And so far I’ve only described my issues with credit ratings. That’s the least of my worries.
What scares me most is all the horror stories. Some of them aren’t that big of a deal to me. I’m very averse to the idea of spending money I don’t have, so I don’t see myself ending up in credit card debt, and would expect to pay off my balance immediately. So in that way, the interest rate isn’t a big deal.
But that’s just one of their shady tactics. One company apparently tried just adding a nominal fee to what you owed, so that if you owed nothing, you’d end up accruing charges. Others make it all but impossible to cancel your card.
The overall impression I get from the credit industry, in a word, is deception.
Signing up for a credit card to build my credit history, to me, is basically saying, “Let them abuse you now so that they don’t abuse you later.” I’m sure 90% of people don’t have issues with their credit card companies. (Actually, I’m not sure at all. I’m sure that more than 10% don’t have issues, but I’m not comfortable putting the number at 90%.) But the fact that the majority of people don’t get scammed/abused/raped doesn’t mean that I want to sign up. (The majority of Iraq soldiers come home alive and well, but I’m not going to enlist.)
I have a check card from my bank. I can use it as a credit card, or a debit card, or an ATM card. It’s all I need. The things I can’t do with it are things that I don’t want to be able to do: I can’t buy a car and charge it to my credit card, for example. But it would be financial suicide to do that anyway.
I intensely dislike the idea of playing by their rules. I’m not sure I have a choice, but I’m not jumping up to do it, either.
You know how they say that people who live on ships come onto land and sway back and forth?
I bought an XBox 360 for the school. (I’m being reimbursed, of course.) While I was there, I couldn’t help but pick up the VGA adapter for XBox, since I have a spare 17″ LCD monitor and a spare XBox here with me. I can now play at 1280×1024 (nice!) Still no match to the 1920-ish that we’ve got on the ridiculous LCD TV that Kyle bought, but still… It sure beats trying to play on, say, a 17″ CRT TV.
So I spent the past half hour or so playing a demo of Blazing Angels. It’s kind of fun, but it takes a long time to get used to. When you keep the camera focused on your target, you can easily lose perspective of whether you’re flying up or down or what. So I died one too many times and got sick of it, so I moved over to the computer.
As I moved the mouse, I was rocking back and forth, and even more disoriented when the whole world didn’t sway with my mouse movements. It’s way more disorienting than I’d expect. Remind me to never become a sailor.
No shirt, No shoes, No service!
Has anyone else ever noticed that these signs fail to require pants?
Here’s a list of words I screw up almost every time I try to spell them:
(Ironically, I got every one right on my first try here.) Curiosity is the surprising one, because it’s a simple word. But why the heck isn’t it curiousity? I guess the key is that you drop the “u” sound when going from “curious” to “curiosity,” but it still messes with me. Ubiquitous just has way too many vowels. Silhouette is French, and I always screw up French words. There’s no reason for there to be an h in it, nor a u, really. And the problem with schizophrenia is that it’s prounounced “skit-za-phrenia,” so you expect a t in there, and you don’t expect it to start sch. But it does.
Introducing a new measurement: an e-mail junk quotient (JQ), defined as e-mails deleted on sight divided by non-spam e-mails received over a given period of time. N.B. that JQ doesn’t factor in spam. It’s actual e-mails sent to you.
The past two days, my JQ has been at about 95%. It’s typically below 50%. It’s actually pretty remarkable how bad it is: I’ll check my e-mail, have four new messages, and just seeing the subject and the sender, I delete them. I don’t care about a marketing internship, because I’m not a marketing major. I don’t care about a study-abroad trip in London, especially when it’s the third e-mail I’ve had about it.
Am I alone here? So much of the e-mail I receive is just utter junk!
This is from my, “Really abstract thoughts” file…
Often you try to recruit leaders internally, because they’re familiar with your existing procedures. On some level this is good. But “familiar with your existing procedures” also means that they see things with blinders on. Sometimes I think you have to bring in someone without any of that institutional knowledge, to shake things up and move you in a new direction.
For example, there’ve been a rash of thefts from the library. People will sit there working with their laptop, get up to go the bathroom, and their laptop is stolen. (Part of this, of course, is their own negligence.) I couldn’t possibly know the full story, but it looks to me like CP is content with just writing reports for each theft and letting insurance handle it.
Why not set up a “sting” in the library? Put a few plainclothes cops (we have several!) in the library, “studying.” Get someone to leave their laptop unattended. Wait for the thief, who clearly is comfortable stealing things in public. And then, arrest him.
Similarly, there were two crimes this week where they caught the suspect on video camera. (Neither was exactly a major crime, though.) In both cases, though, they say they can’t identify who it is, and that’s the end of it. Why not show it to a student, who may well recognize it? Or why not publish it? The school newspaper is always desperate for material. We’d love to run a few stills from the tapes.
Too many people seem to assume that you need to master all the ‘cruft’ that existing leaders have. I don’t know nearly as much as the police chief, so far be it from me to have ideas. And yet I’m fairly certain my ideas would work. The “sting” might be a little over the top, but it beats the status quo of doing nothing!
Oh, another example! My digital SLR camera is basically a film SLR with a digital sensor instead of film. I never quite understood why you needed things like a complex mirror array or a shutter. Couldn’t you just take them out, and just sample the sensor for whatever time period you needed for the exposure?
It turns out, yes. There are a few little “gotchas” I wasn’t aware of, but mostly, they’re holdovers from the film world. People designing the cameras just still have that leftover baggage of the film era, so they keep making cameras with shutters and mirrors. A tiny little bit of R&D could probably eliminate the problems with simply removing them, and you’d end up with something with increased reliability, the ability to take faster exposures, and added versatility. But it looks like it’s going to take an “outsider” to get this done.
Yes, you need some existing knowledge to keep you in reality. But people seem to averse to letting ‘new’ people have ideas. And in my experience, they’re the best ideas. Getting the record industry to distribute music over the Internet took Shawn Fanning and, finally, a failing computer company in California. Why didn’t the record industry, with a multi-billion-dollar budget, think of it? (And, even now that lots of evidence shows that it’s doing well, many record companies are still digging in their heels!) Organizations get too big, crufty, and narrow-minded, which causes them to think that only the biggest, cruftiest, and most narrow-minded of them should be allowed to try out ideas. Why?! Do people like the “stability” of their old ways — selling CDs and booing the Internet, using unnecessary moving parts in cameras, and not catching criminals — even when the old ways are clearly the worst possibly way to do things? Are they so bent on sticking with what they know that they’re willing to lose?
Kyle has a book called Gigs that I’ve been reading. Basically they interview hundreds of people with various jobs about what they do. “We feel that the world hears too much from ‘experts’ of all political stripes, and not enough from the people for and about whom they presume to speak,” one of the editors writes. Reading just a bit of the book so far, I’ve realized a few things:
There are so many more I haven’t read. Slaughterhouse human resources director? Chief Executive Officer? (I’ll do it!) Clutter consultant? Crime scene cleaner? Taxidermist? Bar owner? Buffalo rancher? Food stylist? Anchorwoman? (Err, man, in my case.) Television station receptionist? Carnival worker? Squash instructor? Transvestite prostitute? Mother? The possibilities are endless for me! College professor! Bounty hunter! Prisoner! Town manager! Psychiatric rehabilitation therapist!
I signed up for an account with Grand Central. It’s a limited beta, but they eventually had a slot for me.
Essentially, I give out my GrandCentral number, which rings in multiple locations. (Currently, my cell phone and my school desk phone.) But it treats calls more like e-mail: I can set up ‘rules’ on what calls get through and what calls don’t. There’s voicemail which I can listen to via the Web.
I have a few invites, if anyone is interested.
All questions asked must receive a bunch of completely pointless answers.
Most recent example: I discussed how my camera was massively overexposing pictures. I explained that I shot in aperture-priority mode, meaning that I set the camera’s aperture and the camera will select an appropriate shutter speed. Shooting a bright white sign in direct sunlight, with an f/4.5 aperture, it selected a 1/45 second shutter speed. This was wildly inaccurate. I also walked through a, “You might think what I first thought” thing where I debunked a few of the answers I knew I’d get: that I’d maybe shot at ISO1600 or something, and that I had maybe switched to Manual mode by accident. I explained that neither was the case. I also explained that I ended up switching over to full-manual mode, where I got some great shots, so that it seems to be a problem with metering.
A few people gave helpful answers. But I also got a lot of replies like, “Your shutter speed was far too low. It should have been 1/1,000th of a second.” (Thanks, Sherlock. Do you understand aperture-priority?) Someone else suggests that I was maybe in manual mode by accident. Despite having already stated that I wasn’t, I explained that I had last been doing night exposures, so manual mode was set for a 30-second exposure. “I’d definitely have noticed,” I explained. Another helpful person suggested that I could have just switched to manual mode and set an appropriate shutter speed myself. Thanks for not answering the question of what was wrong and not even reading the whole thing, where I mention that I did just that in the end.
And I started a huge argument in another thread by pondering aloud why no one ever made a zoom lens faster than f/2.8. I wondered if it was some physical limit that I didn’t understand. People are now talking about how on the 5D you can use ISO6400 which offsets the need for a fast lens, and arguing over whether or not an f/2.0 zoom for a non-35mm body is the same as if it were for a 35mm body, and whether f/2 really means f/4. And then someone argues about, “What is ISO, really?”
Seriously, be careful about asking questions on the Internet. Most of the answers you get probably won’t answer your question at all.