I’m moving

I’m moving.
To Texas.
To “Silicon Hills”.

So “A nerd in Arkansas” no longer cuts it. I guess I should figure out a new blog, a new name, and something better to say. Maybe now that I’m almost MBAed out it is time to write about really nerdy stuff all the time. Oh, and get my Cisco & Red Hat certs.

My other loves: bicycles and vinyl

I love lots of things, but two I’m really into right now are bicycling and vinyl records.

Now I know biking is hip again if you wear tight jeans and ride a fixie.  Fuck fixies.  I said it.  If you’re not on a track (with some exceptions), you don’t need one.  They invented freewheels for a reason in the 80s.  The 1880s.  Now I like some single speed action.  It makes for simplicity.  Now riding them in a crowd? Get some fucking brakes.  I’m riding a 2007 Trek 7.5 Livestrong edition right now, but I really really want a say, Specalized Roubaix (or the Tarmac I rode that is on sale at the bike shop in Russellville.  Anyone got 1600 bucks they can give me?).  I’d look for another endurance/comfort road bike like a Sequoia, but the paint scheme in my book is ugly.  Oh well.  I’ll figure it out once I have enough disposible income to buy a bike.

My other passion is vinyl.  I love me some records.  The more obscure, the better.  Except when it comes to 90’s alt records.  I’m all about the bands you like, just maybe the records you don’t.  For example:  Pinkerton changed my life.  Weezer: reissue that and the blue album on 180gm vinyl. Now.  Stop issuing shitty records, and reissue your classics with some downloads.  See what the Beastie Boys are doing?  They are reissuing one classic a month (sans License to Ill for reasons you’ll understand if you know any Beastie history).  Check Your Head is coming in the mail.  I bought Paul’s Boutique, which is an epic album.  You must listen to it, if you like sampling.  Ill Communication comes out next month.  It is again, a classic, and not just for Sabatoge.  I guess in June we get Hello Nasty, which is another classic, and not just for Intergalatic.

Week ahead: Feb 23-28th

I’m going to start keeping track of my plans over the next few months in a weekly blog post, so I force myself to be better at goal achievement.

A economics post: kill the corporate tax

I was reading Greg Mankiw’s excellent blog today, and came across a bit of discussion about corporate tax rates. Now I’m pretty liberal (and Dr. Mankiw isn’t by any measure: he was the chief of the CEA under G.W. Bush), and I believe in progressive taxation, and the rich, who generally reap more benefit from large infrastructure investments and a healthy workforce for their factories, should pay more than the poor, who have to use government benefits.  But one thing, after thinking about we can agree on is corporate taxes.

They need to go.

Now you may think I am crazy – but here’s why.  Your 401(k) is probably pretty darn full of stocks right? Mine is: about 95%+ stocks, given my young age.  Corporations that are profitable pay a pretty high tax rate (albeit full of loopholes) – actually one of the highest in the world, the top marginal rate is 39%, albeit it isn’t fully progressive & there are loopholes big enough you could drive a couple dozers through side-by-side.  If you lose money, you pay nothing (with some exceptions – some items can not be deducted from taxes (like fines), so in theory you can lose money in the eyes of your shareholders in a given year but pay taxes, and there are differences from how the IRS does things and the SEC wants them done – again these are not common enough to make a significant impact).  More or less, we tax those who profit.  By allowing firms to retain more of their earnings, we increase value in retirement plans, personal investing, and give firms extra money to spend on projects and employees (albeit I could argue that the market will demand all of this back).

My one big problem with this is how we treat dividends as special, and tax them (at least long term) at lower rates than short term earnings.  We should do away with this, and treat all income the same on a personal level. Firms can be expected to pay higher dividends by their shareholders to make up for this change in tax policy (10-15% higher, given the current cap of 25% and top marginal tax rate of 36%, scheduled to return to 38.9% in a few years), however if P/E remains constant, the value created here will overtop any personal taxation policy changes, as enough stock holdings are tax advantaged to not cause a direct 1:1 correlation.

What’s so great about being in Arkansas

You’re always going to be the oddball.

That in life no matter what we do we’ll always be looked down upon by the New York elite who believe you must be bred to be President, or anything but their bellboy and the folks in California who forgot that three or four generations ago their ancestors were here, or some other off the wall place.  That I can look back at life and be proud of what I’ve done. 

I’m not going to say much about Owen Thomas’ off-hand comments about “Little Rock oddballs”, because well, those oddballs are still popular.  How did that bred president George W. Bush work out for us?  I’ll take that kid from Hope who had bad taste in twenty-something interns over him anytime, anyplace, anywhere.

What I’m looking forward to in 2009

Since I talked a bunch about what went wrong in 2008, let’s talk about what is going to go right in 2009

• I’ll have a MBA. First person in my family with a grad degree.
• Megan and I. I had to put this near the top
• Life. I’m going to start treating myself better. Buying less, saving more. Working out. Eating less fatty fried goodness.
• Work. It’s going to go good I hope.
• The Big Cats will issue a new record and I hope it kicks ass as much as On Tomorrow.
• Hope. Sure things look ugly now, but we will survive and have a new tomorrow
• I’ll eventually get a haircut. I promise.

News & Notes – Jan. 2, 2009

Today’s been an interesting day.  I woke up to a call that someone had found the paperwork to my car in the street, which was weird. Until I noticed my passenger window was laying in the apartment parking lot.  Then it made sense: my satellite radio, which was my gift from the parents, was gone.  Oops.  So a crook steals something that has a grand total of zero value – a stolen satellite radio that has been turned in as stolen isn’t going to serve much good.  That said, I get to live with a $250 window bill (and probably some other work because some of the window trim is dented up, but not bad enough to require immediate replacement) and the cost of a new radio.  Life sucks.  After this, I decide I’m taking the day off.  No reason to go in at this point – my day is wasted.  One interesting thing: the cop said CSI is the worst thing to happen to small crime investigation – people know just enough to keep the standard cops from investigating, and the Crime Scene guys are not going to come out over a smash and grab, even if there is blood on the car (which there was, which in itself may be a sign of an inexperienced crook).

The big event of the day is this: I finally bought a new printer.  I’ve been on the same Samsung ML-1210 since June 2002 – seven and a half years of printing. 4,469 pages later, it still prints.  But it prints crooked, and isn’t officially Mac OS X 10.5 compatible (you have to hack a PPD from Linux Printing in after installing GhostScript & some other stuff).  Weird because it worked with 10.4 great. You think Apple would have left the official support in, but oh well.  I plan on keeping it around for draft printing and such, and when it dies, I’ll probably get another laser printer (one that works better with the Mac).  So what did I buy? An inkjet. I never thought I’d ever buy another inkjet, but I figured it was time to get something that prints color for less than 300 bucks (plus on occasion, I might shoot a few photos out, albeit most of my photo printing is handled at a lab, because for ~30 cents each, they will print it on a very expensive machine, vs. my 99 dollar Canon).  The nice thing about this printer is that it connects to my network.  No need to worry about getting the sharing to work, or other random things – I just install the drivers and tell the computer to find it.  Even has a small web management interface.  Makes my life much easier.

Oh the troublesome life of a nerd in fly-over, USA.

Concert review: The Big Cats, Ashtray Babyhead, Kevin Kerby + Battery

Ashtray Babyhead

Originally uploaded by atbartlett

Okay – so I occasionally visit gigs here in Little Rock (when I’m not on conference calls) and sometimes I try and take some pictures. So in order, I’m going to comment on the bands:

Kevin Kerby + Battery – Kevin’s a good guy, always wearing a cool hat. Mulehead (his old band) put out an album I should have bought when they had it for sale at the Tech bookstore back in 2002. This was pretty good stuff.

Ashtray Babyhead – I’ll admit I never heard these guys before, and most of the crowd was there for these folks (The Big Cats even commented on that). They rocked pretty hard, enough so that I came home and ordered an album and used a picture from their set for this blog post.

The Big Cats – Always a treat: when you’re Little Rock’s most (as individuals) accomplished band, and called the ‘Local Supergroup’, you should know you’re in for a treat. As always, these guys delivered: new songs, old songs, mixups (from not playing together much), and strong tributes to a former band-mate who passed too young.

Tools I live by: Subversion

Oh crap. I’m a Configuration Management type. I wake up every morning hoping that all my wonderful builds succeeded, the sun is shining, all the developers magically started using good commit messages and there is an end to world hunger. Sadly, most days only one of those is true: the sun does sometimes shine over flyover country.  Maybe every now and then I’ll get a good commit message: why did this change occur and what change request (JIRA case/CollabNet SFEE artifact/etc) did this relate to.

Generally, developers want to commit as much as possible – reduces the chance they get the dreaded conflict, which means more work.  I’m totally kosher with that: commit early, commit often. Makes everyone’s life easier. And that is what I like about Subversion: it’s easy. Most everyone understands how to use it after a few hours, and developer types are up to speed quick. Works with all the major IDEs out of box or with a simple plugin (Visual Studio – I’m looking at you here).  If you’re still on CVS, you probably should be giving Subversion a look for a variety of reasons, which are spread all over the Internet, so I will not go into them.  What I really like about Subversion however is it’s scripting ability, and multi-site capabilities (in 1.5+).  Now you can use a few tools and setup a multi-site slave (still single master because off the complexities of a multi-master CM setup (I’ll save that one for later), but having local read slaves saves time).  The commit scripts are pretty easy to handle and code against – at a previous job we used a bit of Rational, and had to have two people dedicated to it for 160 users.  Subversion generally runs without issue, and doesn’t require the constant maintenance of Rational.  It also works on about every platform known to man, which is more than I can say for all the commercial products (Rational is probably best in the respect with Perforce close behind, the rest all lag heavily and many are dependent on Windows).  I could spend all day telling you why you need to use Subversion, but I figure you put little faith in my words.

Year in Review: 2008

I like to write a good annual year in review post. Let’s start with the good:

• Megan and I have a very strong relationship after a year
• New Job has been going good
• Grad School is working out well
• I finally bought a Mac
• Obama won which is cool because it ruins some European’s view of America as this racist spot, when we can elect a minority as President, and you can’t seem to make that happen in your perfect world, plus he’ll do a good job I think.

And the not so good:

• Enormous Losses – a friend died too young, amongst many sacrifices we’ve seen this year
• The economy – it hurts to see people losing their job
• A lay off (or two) – I got laid off in March, while it sucked I was back at work in 3 weeks. I can’t say the same for some peers however

Overall, it feels worse than it looks on paper: the good of Megan doesn’t cancel out the still painful loss of a friend, and the bad economy. The lay off I got over quick because I was at a job quick (I was leaving anyway probably, but other lay offs have caught others, and they are suffering now).