Hunting The Muse

My Christmas Haul

Stuff I got for Christmas:

• A Conspiracy of Paper
  
• The Speed of Dark
  
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
  
• The Revolution Will Not Be Televised : Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything
  
• The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring
  
• The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations
  
• Onimusha 3
  
• Various gourmet-ish dry foodstuffs (if that's not an oxymoron)
  
• A poinsetta
  
• A fine china wasp killer
  
• Some chocolate
  
• A hot water self-heating electric teakettle
  
• Some cool candleholders that are also like puzzles
  
• A milk frother for the coffee machine that I don't have.
  
• A Starbucks gift card.
  

Looks like I'm on my own for buying The Return of the King!

Tidal Wave, Iraq

Number of civilians killed by the tsunami, so far: 100,000

Number of Iraqi civilians estimated killed by the United States: 100,000

End Of Year

Business has certainly made the end of the year more complicated.

I've written about some of this before, but here's the general overview. I was a sole proprietorship the past couple of years. If you make more than a certain amount, it is to your advantage to incorporate. I incorporated as an S-Corp in August of this year. Most of my work was later in the year, so most of my year's income went to the corporation.

And now I'm figuring out how to manage the whole thing. I had to figure out my gross income, expenses, and net income for both the Sole Proprietorship, and the S-Corp. In addition, I had personally paid for several corporate expenses, so the corporation had to pay me back. The corporation also reimburses me for mileage, and pays rent for the portion of my house that is used for business purposes.

Then after I get an idea of my net corporate income, I decide how much to pay myself in wages. You're supposed to pay yourself enough in wages and distributions so that you mostly empty your corporate account, but leave some left over for the corporation to pay its expenses next year.

Finally, I had to set up my 401(k) by the end of the year. Fidelity lets you set up a "self-employed 401(k)". Highly recommended to anyone who is a sole proprietorship or a one-person S-Corp. Much better than an SEP-IRA.

I had to figure that all out this week. I ended up writing those three checks, which I had to do by 12/31. I still have a lot of stuff to unsnarl in Quicken. For instance, I have to calculate the percentage of house square footage that is used by the corporation, then take that percentage and apply it to my utilities, which becomes a deduction against the rental income. Yeesh. Then I have to figure out exactly how much money I'm sending to retirement.

On top of that, I had an SEP-IRA from the two previous years, and I've decided to convert it to a Roth. I have to Fedex a form to E-Trade by Friday so it will count for 2004.

This stuff is harder than programming! Unlike programming, all the details don't really fit together into a cohesive whole. Bleah!

Another Work Process

How to Save the World

I occasionally like to review different work processes to see if there are better ways to get things done. This appears to be a technique that a lot of people are using. I'm actually designing my own process that has to do with dependencies and label categorization.

Christmas Break

I'm taking a break for a few days. Spending time with family, taking pictures of nieces, eating amazing food. My family's tradition is oil fondue on Christmas Eve, and eggs benedict on Christmas Morning. There won't be as much time for the Internet, and that's probably a good thing. I might check in, but I might not be writing again regularly until just after Christmas.

And for our Jewish friends, we'd like to all wish them a happy... HHHaa.. CHHh... KHHaaaa...

(sorry, just a Daily Show reference there...)

Tearing Up

On September 1st, 2001, I lost my job. On September 11th, you know what happened. I knew there was no chance of finding a new job anytime soon after that.

So I decided to freelance. To make it a bit more legitimate, I started a business bank account and kept it all separate. Used the business debit card for business expenses, etc. It was pretty cool to have an actual business of my own that I could deposit checks to and buy equipment from. And I could also transfer money from it to my personal account when I needed money for personal things. It was nifty. I liked having that business bank account.

After about four months of looking for clients, I found one. A couple months later I found another, and started making more money than unemployment would have given me.

In a little less than three years, it became clear that it would make more sense to incorporate. You can make more of your money work for you, and it gives you some protections, as well. So earlier this year I incorporated, and I have my very own corporate bank account. I've learned how to do payroll, how to form an individual 401(k), and how to keep my business and personal lives even more financially separate.

And as a result, my little business account has been left straggling behind. It's stopped getting deposits since all the money goes to my corporation. After a while, it fell below the minimum balance that you need to avoid fees.

So it was time to cut the little guy lose. I transferred the remainder of the money to my personal account. When it had a zero balance, I called Wells Fargo and had them close it out.

It was just a todo list item, that's all. But when the guy said, "Okay, it's gone. Can I do anything else for you?" I froze. There was part of me that didn't want to get off the phone. I stammered a bit and said no, I guess that was it... paused a bit more, and hung up. His last instructions were to tear up my business bank card because it wouldn't work anymore.

It was hard. 9/11 was the first time after college that I was ever looking at long-term unemployment. And before then, I always felt slightly victimized when I was working in cubicles for large companies, since it didn't fit my personality. That bank account kind of symbolized my transition away from feeling completely helpless, to self-sufficient in a way I that I never felt while working a 40-hr week job. I also am not sure I would have gone this direction if 9/11 wouldn't have happened. I saw my choices after 9/11 as acknowledging that the rules had temporarily changed, and that I needed to improvise in some ways I normally wouldn't have had to do. So in a way, I saw my freelancing career as a bit of an asterisk.

So I guess tearing that card up brought it home that that transition is over. It doesn't have to do with 9/11 anymore, and this period of my life isn't an asterisk anymore.

The Medieval Religious Right

There is a great, great article on 12th century political and religious battles over at salon right now. The parallels are uncanny.

Especially interesting are the explanations about reason being applied to religion, and how this was what led to the coining of the word "theology" (God logic).

Troops

So, regarding my own journey in how I see soldiers.

As you get more into politics, this becomes more of an issue. It's kind of odd. It's very possible for someone not politically engaged to go through life not even considering joining the armed forces, not thinking about war, and just basically believing that soldiers and war-making has nothing to do with oneself as a person.

But then you start to care about how the country works. And even if you are just focused on things like domestic policy, you start to get pulled into the subjects of war, and justifications for war, and whether to protest war, and what that means about how you feel about the troops.

It is hard to reconcile. Violence is bad. That violence is ever even necessary means that a failure has already occurred. Succumbing to violence means that you accept that that failure cannot be rectified. Other abuse may have already happened, but the beginnings of violence is always an escalation.

And, there are times where removing oneself from a situation that has nothing to do with you is the right way to go. I would leave a relationship that was physically violent. I would disown that relationship. And it is considered healthy to feel no personal responsibility for the fact that the other person in that relationship is a violent person.

And yet, if I leave a violent neighborhood for the next neighborhood over, do I feel entirely unconnected? Probably not. What happens if the entity you want to disconnect from is something you actually can't leave?

And for the people that join the armed forces - an entirely different way of life than I am accustomed to - it is easy to feel, "That is their choice. Their choices are not my responsibility. These soldiers create their own reality. And these soldiers, even though they are taking orders, are choosing to make war, to kill. And that is their responsibility."

I think this is a snapshot of how many "beginning liberals" feel. I see it a lot over at Daily Kos.

The journey starts at feeling uncomfortable at how we are painted. That our war protestations are seen as against the troops. That's a tough reflection. It's maddening because it's manipulative, but because we can also see how people would believe it. So we labor to stress that we are anti-war and yet support the troops.

We explain it by saying that we want to support the troops by wanting to bring them home and not waste their lives in a needless war. And yet, it's unclear to us whether this is an entirely honest explanation, or if it's also a bit of a rationalization. It's easier in this war, because it is painfully obvious how many of these soldiers really are being completely victimized by this administration, and how many of them know it and just have no way out. But there have always been soldiers, and the victimization is not always this clear. And what of the soldier that is fully signed on to the cause of the war? Or of the soldier that trusts the leadership implicitly? Is it right for us to think for that soldier, and support that soldier coming home even when they might not be wishing for that? Is it morally right because their life is being wasted? Or is it morally wrong because it goes against the soldier's wishes?

I guess this is where I am now. I would never join the armed forces. It is so centrally incompatible to who I am. There is more than one way to serve one's country. I believe I can better serve my country by following my own passions than by following someone else's orders. But the examination of the cultures that make up our society is important if we want to try to change our society. And implicit in this is an acceptance and understanding of these different cultures. Acceptance does not mean advocacy, not in this sense. But I have made the transition towards believing - not just coaching myself to say, but truly believing - that the military culture is linked to our culture, and must be understood and accepted in some sense.

Beyond that point, I don't know what to do. It doesn't feel right to reject it to the point of just acting like it doesn't even apply. It doesn't feel right to declare it irrelevant, when I do have friends of friends who are serving. It doesn't feel right to ignore the dynamics in our society that create the demand to join the armed forces. But I also have my principles, that too much structure and discipline robs us of life and love, that an organization that is trained only to see problems in terms of oppositional conflict is not a good organization to solve those problems, that violence remains bad and that we resort to violence too quickly, and that even the most downtrodden amongst us still has a choice other than state-sponsored killing.

So, that's where I am now. I'll keep working at it, because I don't like unresolved feelings. As they say, developing...

Kerik And The Nanny

Now, I don't really have a lot of patience for stories like this, but Josh is really on top of the whole thing about whether Kerik's immigrant nanny, his reason for withdrawing, actually ever really existed in the first place.

Like I said, I don't really care. But, replace "nanny" with "WMD in Iraq". Finally the press seems a bit invested as to whether claiming proof of a negative is all that credible. Wish they had spent this energy into investigating whether the claimed Iraqi WMD actually existed or not.

Left With Right

Daily Kos :: It's People Like This That We Let Get Away

A really great article about a liberal's long-term conversation with a right-winger.

It's really about what I think is the key of the issue. The folks on the right aren't stupid. They're being conned. And in order to fix a con, you have to break their trust in the con man and create the trust for your side. That's a huge challenge.

Smart Crowds

According to The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki (might make a good holiday gift for someone you know), there are four criteria that need to be met in order for a crowd to display collective wisdom that is greater than its individual members:

(1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions. The diversity brings in different information; independence keeps people from being swayed by a single opinion leader; people's errors balance each other out; and including all opinions guarantees that the results are "smarter" than if a single expert had been in charge.

Innnnteresting. This is all the kind of thinking that I'm partial to...

Wyden Wins Another Race

Wyden's other race wins him key Senate role

Our Senator Ron Wyden has been given a seat on the Senate Finance Committee. A good article about it in the Oregonian.

Where Am I?

Boy, a couple of priorities change and everything gets all scrambled around. Where have I been lately?

Musically? I'm taking this course on film scoring, and our final project is to write around four minutes of full orchestral music for a student film. We're at a key phase in the project right now where we get our theme ideas approved - after that point we can start developing the material and syncing it with the film itself. This is all before we start actually orchestrating it. Needless to say, it's taking up a bit of time.

Business? As the year is wrapping up, I've been involved in all sorts of corporate planning. Since this is my first year of being incorporated, I don't really know what I'm doing in a few areas - specifically, taxes and retirement. It looks like I'm signing up for an "Individual 401k" plan, which is different than an IRA, Roth, SEP, SIMPLE, or the type of standard 401k that one's employer might give them. But as is always true with these sorts of things, there are right ways and wrong ways to go things, and you don't always know until after the fact what it was you actually should have done.

Politics? I'm still looking into graduate school, but I'm taking my time, because one of the things I know about myself is that I'm always coming up with project ideas, and that it's not usually worth immediately starting any of them, because many of my ideas don't age well. So it's usually wise for me to sit on my ideas for a while to see which ones stick around and which ones don't.

Socially? Hard to say. Dating's been a bit aggravating lately.

Weblog? Changes are afoot. ;-) Stay tuned.

Innocent Man Executed?

Texas man executed on disproved forensics - I've been wondering for a while if the U.S. has executed anyone later proved innocent in the modern era (since death penalties came back in the last 40 years). This doesn't quite qualify, but it's close.

Gay Marriage Arguments

Just because a lot of people don't get it.

You know that whole thing about the way to oppose the arguments against gay marriage was to talk about "equal rights", and "individual equality" and all of that jazz?

That was because of the election. That's all. It was a cynical gauging of the political winds. How much oxygen folks believed there was for the gay rights side.

It's bullshit. It's not about equal rights. It's not about individual equality. That's just waving hands in the air and trying to make it sound palatable. It's just "framing", which people have evidently decided means the best way to not talk about something.

And another thing. This whole nature versus nurture thing? Where the Republicans say that gays make a choice to be gay, and Democrats say that it's genetics, and not their choice?

That's crap too. It's a repugnant argument to have. Come on now, everyone, let's have a national discussion about whether it's they're fault that they're gay. Same thing with that whole "lifestyle" versus "orientation" semantic bullshit. It's pathetic.

It's not election season anymore, so can we get back to the discussion that we should be having about gays?

What's the truth? What's the point that every single Democrat on the airwaves should be making right now, over and over again - as early as possible so it is embedded enough in the national consciousness in time for the next election?

How about, There is nothing wrong with homosexuality.

Come on, just think about some random Democrat going up against Jerry Falwell on Hardball. "You know Chris, I just don't think there's anything wrong with homosexual behavior. There's nothing wrong with it." What is Jerry going to say that isn't going to make himself look like a bigot next to that? He'll try, but it won't go so well if you just oppose it straight up.

That's the whole thing about gay marriage. The GOP believes that everyone has the capability of being gay, but that it's a perversion, and that there are people that make the choice to control their perversion, and there are immoral people that don't make the choice to control their perversion. They see gay marriage as the ultimate societal stamp of approval for perversion. So they have to draw the line there.

So you call them out on it. Don't just say there's nothing wrong with homosexuality. Say there's nothing wrong with homosexual behavior. With the homosexual orientation. With the homosexual lifestyle. Whatever.

It's not a threat to national security. It's not a threat to economic security. It doesn't contribute to poverty.

If they want to get married, let 'em. Who cares?

And just watch the bigots start to argue their feelings honestly. Then it'll be easy to mock them mercilessly, for the backwards, hateful, distasteful, repugnant trolls that they are.

Washington Governor Deadline

Daily Kos :: Breaking news - WA recount update - In the state of Washington, which is something like five miles away from me, the Governor's race currently has a margin of 42 votes, with the Republican in the lead. A hand recount can be held, where several ballots that are only examined in the case of a hand recount (which is ridiculous) likely benefit the Democrat.

However, they need to make a $750,000 deposit by close of business today in order for it to happen. They only have $500,000 so far. Otherwise, the Democrat will concede.

So if you'd rather have a Democrat hold the governorship in WA, make your donation through MoveOn, here.

Update: Correction, it's end of day Friday 12/3.

Update: Hey, they did it!