Journey Within: Wilderness Getaway 2008

Five years ago, I went on a week-long trip to Hawaii and took the journals I had written with me. (five years' worth) I spent my days reading my life like a book, noticing tendencies about myself, and distilling the insights into a foundation for intentional growth that propelled me in in a very positive direction.  18 months after that trip, it was hard to recognize me as the same guy in the areas of self-worth, ambition, and tolerance.  For example, I no longer approached dating out of fear of loneliness or a position of need.  My deeply felt position had become, "I am loveable, and I generously share my loveableness with others."  The results in my life were dramatic, from income to relationships to my sense of purpose and beyond.

I now have five more years of journals in my library.  I decided at the beginning of this week to get away for eight days, starting Sunday Sept. 28, and repeat this process. This time I'm renting a remote cabin in the mountains of West Virginia.  No Internet, no cell phone reception.  Just what doctor ordered.

Back in 1992, I heard Jim Rohn talk about journaling.  He said, "Too many people try to just get through the day.  I've got something better for you to go for: learn to get from the day. Capture the insights and ideas.  Don't trust your memory."  I can be a bit slow on the uptake (as can we all) so I didn't formally start keeping a journal until 1998.  In fact, my first journal entry went something like this: "I probably won't keep this up, but here's what happened today..."  I've since learned not to dismiss a day of small beginnings in my life.  Starting journaling earlier would definitely be one of those things I would counsel my younger self to.

My dearly beloved friends and family think this trip is about my next career step, and to be fair, that's how I've presented it to them.  But quite beyond that, I foresee it as a launch pad for areas of personal growth I can't even imagine as I write this.  Wiping the white board clean and starting fresh with a clean set of markers.

Playing Chicken With Wall Street During the Crisis

I've been a stock investor for 10 years and I personally trade the stocks that make up my IRA.

A couple weeks ago, I closed out a position in a technology stock after making a respectable gain.  Stocks in a different industry sector began to show some signs of weakness, so I used the money that was freed up from selling the tech stock to bet against that industry using what is known as an ultrashort exchange-traded fund (ETF).  This is like a mutual fund that goes up if the stocks it is following go down.  The beauty of these shorting ETFs is that it is possible to trade shares of them in an IRA, whereas regular shorting is not allowed in an IRA.

(No, it wasn't the financial industry I bet against, or you'd be reading now about how surprised I was that the SEC prohibitited short selling of financial company stocks last week)

My position in this ultrashort ETF has fluctuated from being up 20% just before the economic crisis was announced last Thursday to being down 10% today when congressional leaders anounced that there is basic agreement on the framework for an investment banking bailout.  I've asked myself a few times  why I didn't just exit the stock market when the crisis was announced.  After all, there is an old saying on Wall Street: "Bulls make money and bears make money, but pigs get slaughtered."

And yet, there is a reason why I've maintained my position in the shorting ETF.  Even though it has declined a good bit from where it was last week, it has done so on drastically lower daily trading volume than average.  So, far fewer people now think it's a bad idea to bet against this particular industry than those who thought it was a good idea when I got in.  This has intrigued me, and convinced me that the actual destiny of my investment will not become clear until the daily trading volume returns to normal.  

When I look at the basics - the fact that this industry's stocks peaked in price last month, that the recent strength of the dollar caused further erosion, etc - it seems to me that the fundamental reasons for investing the way I did are all still there.  So I'm not blinking yet.  Wall Street has certainly humbled me in the past.  But I feel that now is a good time to "keep your head when all around you are losing theirs..." ask Kipling mused.

The Cure Is Worse Than The Disease

Velcome to Soviet United States of America!

In order for protekting our citizens and their interests, we have establish strong centralized institutions with broad authority over various aspects of their lives. Our latest plan is one of best ever. You vill like.

Effidently, bad, evil, greedy corporations tricked millions of Americans into signink legal contract documents known in the venacular as "mortgages". Ve know this must have been bad idea since etymology of vord "mortgage" transliterates into "death note". No von would ever sign death note, yes? Vell, anyway, by usink of flashy, hypnotizing marketing campaigns, these nasty corporations lured our dear dependents, I mean, citizens, into takink on of financial obligations linked to value of their homes. It is fundamental right for all Americans that home value should go up, up, up, and never hit snag. Somehow, however, snag did occur. We're not too sure who caused snag, perhaps CIA can look into this. It gets compicated and I von't bore you now vith details about how Wall Street firms ended up owning bundles and bundles of these death notes. But anyway, Wall Street firms have been sufferink also from snag.

Normally, businesses are allowed to make bets with their capital, flourishing when bets vin and dissapearink when bets lose. Ve dislike this chaotic arrangement yet citizens showed up in town squares with firebrands and pitchforks when we tried to interfere previously. This time, however, talkink heads on televised finance programs have convinced the people that certain of our Wall Street companies must not to be allowed for dissapearink. So here is plan. We, the caretakers of the American citizens, shall create federal entity. Led by vice diktator Paulson, it vill have authority for absorbink these bundles of mortgages from Wall Street firms. No pesky courts or lawsuits vill be allowed to interfere with vice diktator's dispensing of the death notes. So now, instead of the company dissapearink, only debt from company's bad bets will dissapear. It is thing of beauty, no?

Some organizers of previous pitchfork protests are voicink concern about plan. These are same guys who got upset when we started listenink in on phone calls without warrants, created authority to arrest citizens and not let them tell their spouses or lawyers what the charges were, and used army for toppling of foreign government. Yet it seems that crises mute the voices of dissent. I vonder what crisis will open the door for next big plan. Who knows? But for sure we will be ready for respondink to it with smart ideas for new centralized caretakink.

Do svidaniya comrades, and God bless the USA!

A Test Of The Emergency Disappointment System II

Yesterday marked the abrupt end of my professional relationship with the computer game company I joined in mid-May. (and relocated across the country for) I won't pretend that my emotions are not upset, there is presently a sense of sadness and disappointment that the collaboration didn't work out.

Mozart is said to have composed entire symphonies in his head before furiously scribbling them down. Another anecdote has Michelangelo saying he "saw the angel in the marble and then carved to set him free". This is how I write software - I grok a given system as a whole over a period of time and then expend myself in a fit of creative coding that sometimes spans 24-hour periods. I like me this way - it is my own personal garden patch of genius. (we all have one somewhere, neglected or not)

I kind of wish I had done a better job communicating my style to my handlers at the company. I must have seemed a bit insubordinate when they asked to see incremental progress occurring every day in the codebase and all they got back was (in effect), "Just wait, you'll see what I can do!" In the end, the system I was working on was proven and I got buy-in for the next steps, but someone somewhere had already decided to drop the hammer. The termination was handled by the company's legal counsel, "without cause"; nobody I worked for directly attended the exit interview or gave any feedback. It was certainly well within their rights to handle the matter this way - like virtually all Americans my employment arrangement was "at will", meaning I could have left them at any time for no given reason as well.

I say "kind of wish", yet I don't really wish. Like Bono of U2, "I still haven't found what I'm looking for." I'm looking for a situation where the Mozarts and Michelangelos of code can brood and spew their masterworks together with the only criteria being whether it is beautiful and it works when it all comes together. Perhaps that stand will push me into Open Source or to starting my own technology ventures. (something my friends must be bored of hearing me perpetually threaten to do)

I am satisfied that both I and my former employer each did his best. The company is made up of a very sharp group of people and I would not want to be in their market space when they launch their product.

Yes, I used the word "disappointed" in the first paragraph and that is what is real today. Yet it is not "I" who am disappointed. Though the emotions are upset, though they calm and tempest and calm again, the self is not the emotions. The self is the one who observes and honors them and then whispers, "This, too, shall pass."

Why Adults Don't Get Star Wars Movies

In 1977 I was nine years old. The country was "going to hell in a handbasket" (according to my grandparents) with stagflation, the specter of nuclear holocaust, ERA, communism knocking on the door of Latin America, and gasoline approaching $1.00 per gallon. My father occasionally taught a weekend seminar at a hotel in my home city and there was a movie theater next door to the hotel. While he led the seminar I would either hang out at the hotel pool with other kids or go watch movies.

At nine, I wasn't too conscious of mass marketing. To be honest, I don't believe I had heard much about the release of the original Star Wars movie before I wandered over to the theater that Saturday. I most likely chose to see it at the time because it was the next film available on the viewing schedule. I sat down and after the previews and then the 20th Century Fox logo, I thought it odd that the movie soundtrack hadn't come on when the text appeared on the screen:

A Long Time Ago In A Galaxy Far Far Away...

I considered, briefly, whether to go out and tell someone that the sound wasn't working, when suddenly

**** BLAST ****

From the instant that John William's score assaulted my ears until the credits rolled 121 minutes later, I was rapturously transported to a world of magic, destiny, adventure, and danger. A world where an insignificant boy from the boondocks of his social order was inexplicably selected by fate to save all that was good and right and beautiful from the terrifying forces of evil. I watched that movie three times straight that day and twice again the next day. From that point on, I wanted to BE Luke Skywalker. I swore to my parents and to anyone else who would listen that I could hear the voice of Obi-Wan Kenobi assuring me that the force would be with me always. Luckily for me, this was before the days that mentioning something like that could get a kid prescribed on Prozac or Ritalin.

More than anything, experiencing Star Wars at that time in my life bought me just a few more precious weeks or months of pure, unadulterated childhood from the ever encroaching onslaught of pressure to grow up and be serious - to become yet another one of the lunatics running the asylum of civilized Western life. I would find other children younger than me and play an unnamed game with them that I guess would be called "Clash of the Superheroes" if we had bothered to name it. I'd always let them go first. "Who do you want to be?" I'd ask. "Batman!" or "Superman!" They'd answer. Then it was my turn. "Who are you going to be?" They'd ask. There was always only one answer. "Luke Skywalker." After looking at me like I was the strangest kid they'd ever met, we would begin. I would ALWAYS win. Batman has a hard time throwing a Batarang at you when his arm has been chopped off. And it's difficult for Superman to fly when he's been separated from his legs.

One of the more infuriating conversations of my life happened a few months later with some young adults. They started talking about the movies. Of course I brought up Star Wars. "What a dumb movie!" One of them exclaimed. I was outraged and demanded an explanation. "My college physics professor tore that movie apart. You wouldn't be able to see laser gun blasts as short cylindrical colored bullets of light. And if something exploded in outer space, there would be no flames since it is a vacuum without any oxygen." I tried in vain to argue, but I had nothing to counter their smug scientific facts with. I was heartbroken. It was almost as if someone had tied up Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy right in front of me and then had shot them there at point blank range. But along with this painful disappointment I had a sense that they had somehow completely missed the point. I couldn't put my finger on what it was, but I felt it very, very strongly.

Time passed and the rest of the original Star Wars movies came and went. 22 years after Episode IV was released, I flew to Austin, Texas to interview with an up-and-coming dot com company called Trilogy. I asked the HR lady about the company's name. "Oh, the founders are big Star Wars fans," she replied. "In fact, the company is going to rent out a movie theater for a special premier of the the new Star Wars prequel that's coming out soon!" Talk about the power of first impressions - I instantly knew this would be a company I'd like to work for. It didn't work out that way for various reasons, however, and Trilogy later became a casualty of the dot com meltdown. When I went to Episode I, though, I became that nine-year old boy once again. I loved everything about it, especially the way young "Ani" was able to destroy the droid control ship by using his instincts to pilot a space fighter for the first time.

Boy was I ever the odd-man out in discussions about the new movie. It seems that Jar-Jar Binks was nearly universally reviled among amateur and professional movie critics. "You can't even understand him!" "Why did he walk in that funny way?" "He didn't even use the English language correctly!" And that same old feeling rose up within me, the one I had felt when the college kids had shot down the original film with the laws of science. Only this time I was far more articulate.

"You're missing the point." I would offer.

"What do you mean? How can you say that to me?" Was the typical response. So I would explain, "Lucas created Jar-Jar's character as a culturally diverse person for a reason. He's showing that people groups with apparently very little in common need to find a way to discover common ground when their mutual interests are threatened. The Naboo and the Gungans were cultures that would not have allied together under normal circumstances." It didn't always endear me to others when I'd point out that the mainstream discomfort at Jar-Jar's dialect and mannerisms could be due to our own Western Caucasian racial hang-ups.

Wait. Stop. Now I had missed the point.

See, I wanted to have a chance to be that kid again and come back with an equally smug and scientific-sounding riposte to the ones who had put down the film I loved in 1977. But in my zeal to do well, I neglected to notice that I had become just like the ones who I felt had wronged me. I was reacting from a position of defensiveness, which (I now understand) typically creates an unintentional feedback loop. By putting out defensiveness, I received defensiveness. These conversations did not usually result in harmony and understanding.

Adults don't get Star Wars movies. They never have. If you were around when the original series came out, think back for a moment. What did your Uncles and older cousins, siblings, and family friends say about them? Nothing encouraging to a child, I'll bet. Even Freddie Mercury sang (in Bicycle Race) "Jaws was never my scene and I don't like Star Wars." It's interesting to be an adult now who was a child back then. Interesting because we don't notice that we are now "them", the ones who put down the original Star Wars movies back in the day. We are no longer nine years old, we are the smug, scientific, socially stratified muckety mucks who want to seem like clever people that can poke holes in other peoples' stories.

The animated feature, "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" was released this weekend. I went and saw it last night. So many kids in the theater. And then the text flashed on the screen. Then the blast. Then the fantasy and adventure, action and thrills. You may read a number of reviews panning the film. It was only rated 27% on rottentomatoes when a co-worker checked there the opening day. Don't you believe it. It's become fashionable to put down George Lucas and claim he has ruined the franchise. But I saw in the faces of the little ones who were filing out of the theater afterward what they must have seen in my face. Wonder, giddiness, and at least one extra day of recovered childhood.

You've Never Seen Anything Happen

Some event happens before you in a lighted environment.

Light bounces off of the entities involved in the event and some of it meets with your eyes. It travels through your cornea, then the aqueous humor, the lens, and the vitreous humor. When it strikes your retina, cells convert the light into electrical energy and route these impulses to the optic nerve. After traveling the distance of the optic nerve, the electrical signals are processed by a special region of the brain into the sensation of seeing. Finally, other parts of the brain generate a storm of electro-chemical activity to recognize and classify the elements of vision that has been generated. Since all of this happens without your awareness, the conscious part of your mind is free to busy itself with rationalizing the classifications and their significance to you.

All of this happens at a rate of speed that is consistent among human beings. This rate of speed roughly corresponds to the 24 - 30 frames per second that film and video technology uses to fool the mind into thinking it is seeing things move on a movie screen or television. (instead of noticing the actual still images which make up each video frame) If activity happens at a speed faster than 30 times per second, all you notice is a blur - such as the beating of a hummingbird's wings or the spinning of the spokes on car wheel rims.

Think of all the processes visual information goes through in order to produce the experience of sight.

• Manipulation: The eye lens focuses the light, flipping it upside down in the process


• Conversion: the light photons are chemically converted to electricity


• Transmission: the electric impulses are routed to the optic nerve which carries them to the brain


• Synthesis: the occipital lobe of the brain processes the impulses at a coherent rate, producing the sensation of vision


• Filtering: the temporal lobe of the brain pre-screens the data to point out elements linked with our emotions (such as a spider if we are afraid of spiders)


• Analysis: the frontal lobe of the brain associates visual elements with memories and produces reasonings about their significance

What a wonderous mechanism! And all you ever do (in your conscious state) is concentrate on the reasonings and interpretations provided by the frontal lobe. The rest of it "just works" (most of the time). Now, all of this processing takes time and there is undoubtedly information lost at all of the junctures of the system. There is no doubt that you see something.

But you've never seen anything happen.

Project: Quad-CPU Server (Intro)

I've built my own computers for years, now, and I once set up a client/server lab in my home to research and practice distributed computing. But that was back in the dotcom bubble days and I'm feeling the urge to play with technologies on the bleeding edge again.

The convergence of multi-CPU motherboards, multicore CPUs, and the ability to access gobs of RAM memory (thanks to 64-bit technology) means that it is possible to cram an incredible amount of distributed processing power into a single PC case. (albeit a very large one) Companies are interested in this because it means they can consolidate many separate servers into far fewer physical boxes by using virtualization software. This software lets you boot up several instances of Operating Systems on a single computer. (these instances still seem like separate computers to the outside world but doing it this way saves money by using less space, hardware, power, cooling, etc.)

However, I have bigger fish to fry than playing with virtualization. I'm interested in working on the kinds of problems that only a small army of CPUs can solve by working together. To make this work, I need to create two software systems: the first one divides up the work, sends it out to the army of CPUs, and then receives and collates the answers from them. The the second system is the code that actually runs on the army of CPUs to solve the broken-down problem. Basically I'm talking about creating a small-scale supercomputer. If virtualization means treating one computer as if it were many computers, my research will involve treating many computers as if they were one.

My platform of choice will be the AMD Opteron 8000 series of quad-core server CPUs. This is the only mature "commodity" processor series with an integrated memory controller supporting four (or even eight) CPUs in a single case. Intel's Xeon 7300 platform supports 4 CPUs, but it seems like a bit of a hack to me since it goes through contortions to compensate up for its external memory controller, plus it is much more costly. Intel's new "Core i7" CPUs will have integrated memory controllers, but they won't be available for quad-CPU solutions before some time in 2009.

A reasonable question to ask is, "Why not just buy four (or more) regular PCs that each have a single multicore processor and network them together?" Indeed, it would be far cheaper to do it this way due to the price premium of the processors and motherboards that support quad-CPU configurations. But AMD uses a chip-to-chip interconnect called Hyper Transport that allows messages between processors on a single motherboard to happen at far higher speeds and lower latencies than Ethernet can handle. Also, each multicore CPU on the motherboard has it's own local bank of RAM memory. Accessing that local RAM is much quicker than being sloppy and borrowing some from a neighbor CPU's bank of RAM. (this is referred to as NUMA or non-uniform memory access) So, part of the research I intend to do will involve writing software that is aware of these things and able to organize the rest of the code to make the best use them.

Another good question would be, "Why go to the trouble of building such a complicated computer when you can buy one that just works from an established vendor who offers service and support?" Beyond all of the reasonable-sounding answers I could rationalize for this one, it boils down to the fact that I just like to scrape up my knuckles playing with hardware from time to time. Plus, I just know I'd open up and muck around with a pre-built server anyway, instantly voiding the warranty and ensuring myself a place in phone-system purgatory if I ever hypothetically called for support.

One great feature of these quad-CPU Opteron motherboards is that you can use them with one, two, or four CPUs. Nice! Instead of having bite the bullet and pay for all four processors at once, (as well as four banks of RAM) I'll be able to initially buy just one processor and start using the computer during the time that I'm still upgrading it on the installment plan.

So, lucky you! You get to follow along as I progress along the path of building my quad-CPU server. My plan for purchasing the components is to buy the foundational items first that tend to have stable prices (like the case, the power supply, hard drives) and then add the items later that tend to go down in price over time (the CPUs, the RAM).