Subprime mortgages and the American Honesty Index (AHI)

The failure of Bear Stearns in the sub-prime mortgage fiasco has the press all aflutter, predicting that this is the beginning of a long, painful downturn of the economy. (Well, Bear didn't really fail, it just got acquired by JPMorgan for about 10% of it's Friday value, rather than filling Ch. 11).

I am not an economist, nor do I watch the markets very closely. Not a whole lot of my money is in stocks, actually. But, when I look around, I don't see a whole lot of problems, contrary to doom and gloom stories like this one.

Actually, I think this is what will happen: people will get foreclosed on and will move to cheaper rental housing, or move in with the folks. Housing prices will continue to drop, and construction will slow tremendously. Lot's of people's credit will be ruined (well, it was already bad to only qualify for a sub-prime, so really it will just get worse). Some of the lenders (like Bear Stearns) will go out of business, or at least get gobbled up for nothing as with the JPMorgan buyout for 10% of it's worth. And the economy will keep chugging along.

This was a badly needed correction that anyone could see coming *years* ago. Housing prices were (and are) way too high. People started overextending themselves to get in on the action, and lenders were all too happy to play along. Both parties were acting unwisely, and now they're paying the price.

The people who bought that debt were also being unwise. Hopefully investors who buy debt will pay closer attention to what they're really buying. Indeed, I think a lasting effect of this fiasco is a critical blow to the American financial sector's credibility with foreign investors: apparently our institutions cannot be trusted to sell viable debt.

Many economists have said (but please don't ask me to list them!) that one reason the American economy has been so strong for so long is the fundamental honesty of the American businessman. Honesty yields huge efficiencies in deal-making because much less effort need be expended on fact checking and contract enforcement. Ever since Enron, I believe that the American Honesty Index (AHI) has been on the decline, and this mortgage crisis is just the latest big datapoint.

Institutions like Countrywide and Bear Stearns deserve to go out of business. Their investors deserve to lose money. Borrowers deserve to lose their homes. Home prices should come back down to earth. Yes, it hurts. But when you do wrong, pain is the inevitable result. The key is to take it, learn from it, and not let it get you down. It's just life, man.

With any luck, another long term effect will be a simplification of the home loan process. "Mortgage" is just a fancy name for a loan used to buy a home, and they can be fiercely complicated. There is an obvious market need for mortgages with simpler terms. Dare I say it, but there is also a need for mortgages with better terms, too. But you can't really get better until things get simpler first: markets don't work when the consumer is systematically kept ignorant. (This is also the problem with the healthcare industry.)

What direction are those Match.com ad girls getting?

Have you seen those kinda creepy voyeristic match.com ads? They are flash box ads that simulate you watching a web cam feed of a nice looking, young woman using her computer. She plays with her hair, bites her lip, and smiles. She is usually happy about something.

The ads imply that these young women are man-shopping on match.com, and very happy with the selection.

So the question is, what direction are these girls getting?

Announcing my new band: Anatano!

I was supposed to be in Mexico building a house for some poor people. But at the last minute I discovered that my Passport expired, which left me with some free time. But it left me feeling a bit restless, and I needed a todo list. Here is part of it:

1. Send in those warranties
2. File 2007 taxes
3. Do the laundry
4. Clean the kitchen
5. Make a grilled cheese sandwich
6. Put some original music on the web.
   

The last one is rather important, because apart from a (rather lame) video of me playing piano with terrible audio, I've put nothing of my work on the web. I think that's too bad.

But that has now changed.

Please do not have high expectations. This was strictly an exercise in getting the sounds from point a to point b. I expect that my process will change, and so will the music once I get used to my cool new tools (well, kinda new). [Basically I played into Ableton which recorded both MIDI and audio, then added some warmth to the whole track with an effect, exported as WAV, opened with Audacity to snip out the piece I wanted, add the fade out, and save as mp3. I then uploaded to googleapps, and linked to it from this blog post. Easy as pie! :P]

The track is titled "piano doodle" because it's typical of what happens when I sit at the piano. I pick a theme and start playing with it, experimenting as I go. Eventually the idea is to extract the goodness(es), add some layers, and actually make a song. But for now, this is it. I think there are pieces which are quite good, some which are quite bad, and some of it's just boring. But it's online. Yay!

Feedback is appreciated (both on sound quality and composition).

(The next step is to figure out how to embed a Flash mp3 player. I tried to embed XSPF, but the instructions are broken, and strictly speaking this wasn't on my todo list. However, I've created a new "band" on myspace, and uploaded there. :)

Wanted: Firefox Session Manager

Let's say you have 2 (or even 3) accounts on the same website, and you need to do something with both. How can this work?

1. You can login to account 1, get some info, login to account 2, do something; repeat as necessary.
2. You can use two different kinds of browsers; e.g. Firefox and Safari, and login to account 1 on Firefox and account 2 on Safari.
3. You can tell your browser, on a per-tab basis, which credentials to use for the site.
   

#1 is what I observe most people to do, and I've even done it when working on machines that only had one browser type installed. #2 is the workaround that I use. It's actually quite a fine workaround because in this scenario, it's usually about moving information from one account to another, so the lack of a "comfy" UI in the "off browser" isn't critical. #3, though, is ideal. One small problem: it doesn't exist.

Sure, there are plenty of password managers and macro recorders for Firefox. But these only make #1 a bit easier by storing and automatically entering user credentials. But most websites will first check a digest authentication token and only prompt for a username/password pair if that token is missing or invalid.

A (site, username, password) triple isn't enough. We need (site, username, password, token(s)). (Note that (username, password) pair is strictly optional, but username is very useful for identifying the cookies you want to use.)


Since I have to put the kabosh on my iPhone Meditation Timer (I tried to score a Powerbook from work, but it didn't happen), I suppose this is a good alternative.

Zotero Firefox extention for tracking and attributing research

I think this is a neat idea. It looks like it's oriented toward academics, but I think it could be handy for anyone doing lots of research on the net (which includes most web developers). And for web developers it may have the happy side-effect of making them more aware of the people behind the tools and technologies they are researching. Perhaps future generations of developers won't suffer from this ailment, but 20- 30-something developers seem to want to treat software as "nameless faceless products". In reality, every piece of software, especially in open source, has a personality behind it. Well, at least all the successful ones. :)

Zotero :: Firefox Add-ons

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources...

Online Video Editing: Jumpcut

Who would have guessed that something like video could be usefully edited online? And yet, it has happened. Jumpcut.com (apparently owned by Yahoo!) is doing it. No doubt there are several competitors in the space already.

It's not easy, but you can trim, truncate, add transitions. I get the feeling that it will be very easy to outgrow the tool; but for simple things, it is just the trick. Here's a video my mom took during her trip to Hawaii of some sea turtles:



I've added a title and little else. But still, pretty neat.

The Wire: American TV at it's best

I saw the last episode of this amazing series just now. Creator David Simon wrote a touching letter about it, and I thought I'd say a few words, too.

There was always something about the HBO series "The Wire". It was often brutal, intense, profane, and violent. It always had an air of honesty, and of introspection, and more than a hint of authenticity. It was an enthralling, extended essay about urban reality at many levels: the personal, the political, the psychological, the social, and the economic. For one born and raised in relative quiet of affluent suburbia, The Wire was a peak into a world only a few miles away. A world you normally only see at the edges.

I always felt that The Wire used violence correctly in that it almost always made you feel sick, or sad. There was never a vicarious thrill to it; it was never portrayed as righteous, with the possible exception of some of Omar's scenes. Violence is unremittingly shown as senseless, evil, and pointless. The same could be said of political maneuvering: no time (or credibility) is wasted defending corruption. It is depicted as the almost reflexive instinct to survive. The view is left to make their own moral pronouncements, and I for one enjoy having my judgment respected.

If anything, The Wire makes the point strongly that "success" on the streets is ultra-violent and short-lived, and that "success" in society requires expert play of the game of manipulation, where a conscience is a sure way to lose. It is an extremely cynical thesis, and I for one truly hope that it's wrong, but I'm grateful for the all-too-believable glimpse into a pathology of American urban culture.

Clever Animation by Alan Becker

http://alanbecker.deviantart.com/art/Animator-vs-Animation-34244097

(Basically, an artists Flash animation takes on a life of it's own and seeks to escape the Flash interface itself!)

Geometric Shapes in Photoshop; Interesting CSS things

Geometric Shapes in Photoshop

Let's say you want to create something that looks like this:

Creating geometric shapes laid out in a grid is surprisingly tricky in Photoshop. The natural place to start is with the Shape Tool. I think this was actually a bad place to start. (It would have been better to start where I ended up: with the pen tool, paths, and stroke options.)

By default, the Shape Tool does four things at once:

1. it creates a new layer,
   
2. creates a path,
   
3. makes a vector mask out of that path,
   
4. then fills the layer with the current foreground color.

This works because the clipping mask only allows the correct shape of the layer contents to shine through. (Interestingly, this is one of the few times in which layer contents don't affect inferior layers).

If you don't want your shape to be filled, you are out of luck because it is not possible to select a "transparent" fill color with the default shape tool.

Of course, true Photoshop users know that the default is only the beginning of the story. In particular, you have some handy options for the shape tool, that look like . Unfortunately, changing options to "Paths" (the middle option) doesn't really fix things, but it does obliquely point in the right direction: we need to be thinking about paths. Needless to say, messing around with canned paths wasted a lot of time (for example, you can kind of composite shapes, and even edit anchor points, but it never worked well), before I started seriously working with the pen tools, and the paths palette.

Basically, all of the above can be drawn with the pen tool using a minimum of fuss, once you've turned on the Grid. The grid is one of Photoshops handiest and most hidden features. It's basically a grid of guides that your tools will snap to, including the pen tool. This makes perfect horizontal and vertical lines easy to make.

You'll be drawing a relatively abstract thing called a "path". This path must then be stroked using a brush. Paths in Photoshop consist of anchor points and guide lines - some anchor points do not have guide lines. I'm not going to go into detail on how to use the pen tools, because it's pretty easy: all of the above were first made as polygons, then using the convert point tool you can turn the corner into a curve, and adjust the guides (along the grid!) to get nice even curves.

Some gotchas: the fill option will be disabled if you have a "bad" layer selected. I'm not sure what makes a layer "bad" - a shape layer with a vector mask certainly is. The easiest thing is to make a new layer and stroke onto it. Once stroked, those pixels are rasterized, and can no longer be edited like a vector.

My understanding of this aspect of photoshop is incomplete. For example, if I attempt to create a shape "by hand" (make a path, create a vector mask, then style the layer with an outside stroke) nothing appears. This is too bad, because it would be nice to be able to keep the vector representation of these shapes around, and just just the rasterized "stamp" when they are stroked.

(Interesting, I found it a lot easier to create these shapes with Sketchup, and they were in 3-D to boot! But Sketchup costs $500 for non-commercial use, and I wanted to know how to do this in Photoshop anyway! Here's the Sketchup output:



I think the reason Sketchup was easier was that I was never mislead into thinking I could use a tool that I really couldn't.)

2 interesting CSS Things

1. Absolute positioning is relative to the parent element, not the page.
2. background-repeat: repeat-x; is a very handy trick when you have a one pixel gradient background that needs to terminate into a specific color. (BY default, it will repeat on both the x- and y- axes, which is often ugly on longer pages).
   

The Satipatthana Sutta

I found a good resource for the Satipatthana sutta (as well as other suttas), which are freely available both as text and audio. The recording of Sally Clough reading the Sutta is excellent - she has a strong voice. (I have to admit it sounds a bit odd hearing the Buddha's words being read by a woman :)

Meditation in an isolation tank?

The thought occurred to me that meditation in an isolation tank would be an excellent opportunity for the mind to focus on the subtlest of sensations, and on the mind itself. In the next few weeks I plan on hiring a tank for 90 minutes (there's a location in Venice that offers this servuce), and see what it's like. I'll be sure to report back my findings. (it's heartening to me that people like Richard Feynman found the experience useful).

More Firefox crashing woes

It's happening now in other places, not just Gmail. It's particularly painful when I loose a ScribeFire blog post (which happened just now as I was noticing the similarities between traditional ISPs and the central nervous system, and newfangled wifi networks and the peripheral nervous system).

At this point I'm going to disable some of my plugins and see if that helps at all. I'll keep just firebug and scribefire and see if that helps.

iPhone SDk released - let the fun begin!

You can go here or here to get the ball rolling. The site is experiencing heavy traffic, needless to say, so there may be delays. But the process is simple:

1. Get an apple id (you should already have one if you have an iPhone - it's usually your email address)
2. Sign up as an iPhone developer.
3. Click on the link in the signup confirmation email
4. Wait patiently for Apple's servers to unmelt.

(I wonder if they considered going with Akamai for this rollout?)

The first thing I will write for the iPhone is a meditation timer. It will have the following features:

1. Gong or chant alarm sound
   
2. No repeat option. (e.g. just sound once)
   
3. Volume selection. (e.g. sound quietly)
   
4. Brightness option.
5. "Don't turn off the display" option. (sometimes it's nice to peak)
   
6. "touch anywhere on the screen to shut off" option
   
7. Multi-alarms (such as 60 then 5 minutes - useful for some kinds of meditations).

Meditation timers should be quiet, shouldn't repeat, and should be easy to turn off. The default timer is none of these things. It should also support custom sounds.

The next thing I'd like to write is an interface to the MINI's navigation system. :)

Vipassanā 2008

Vipassanā means "insight" in Pali, the language the Buddha Gotema spoke in India some 2500 years ago. There are many kinds of Vipassanā extant today; the type which I enjoy practicing is quite minimalist, and depends purely on one's powers of concentration and observation. Without mantras, visualizations, commentary or vocalizations one simply observes physical sensation in a concentrated, systematic fashion.

It is not an easy technique because you are never shielded from these sensations, and they may be quite painful (they may also be quite blissful, which is far, far worse believe me!). But somehow, if one perseveres and is patient, these various pains dissolve seemingly on their own, and it's quite interesting to watch it happen.

Another great difficultly with something this minimal is that it's quite tempting to add to the technique. I believe that one continues to add subtle things to the technique until one gets very far along the path. I think that "noticing the things that you're adding" is actually an important part of the path. These additions tend to sneak up on you!

Of course, this is all well and good, but the "proof is in the pudding", so to speak. When considering any practice, the key question is: Does this make life better for you and those around you? Unequivocally the answer is yes, at least in my case.

Use a laptop as a keyboard, monitor, and mouse - finally!

When I used to fix people's computers, it seems like a lot of the time I couldn't rely on their KVM working, and had to lug around my own. It occured to me at the time that it would be really cool to use a laptop for the purpose: after all, it has all the necessary components in a nice, easy to carry package. And now Epiphan has done it:

http://www.epiphan.com/products/product.php?pid=27

It's a small $400 USB 2.0 box that does frame capture and sends keyboard and mouse signals (which are also recorded, hopefully). What a great way to audit PC repairs!

Gmail consistently crashing Firefox

The crash usually happens when I try to navigate away from or close the tab containing Gmail. For now I'm just using Safari for Windows as my Gmail client. (I sent a bug report with logging information. I'm just blogging it in case anyone thinks they're alone on this.)

want: InFocus IN81

I know! Accumulation is bad, the things you own end up owning you, etc. But the really neat DLP 1080p front projector that would work really well in my 400 sq ft apartment! :)

...then, once I get a PS3 and some great Blu Ray content (especially Ratatouille!) I would be quite pleased.

(The options for content delivery are increasing, and it's hard to choose between them. What with HD Cable, Apple TV, Blu Ray, and DVD (but thankfully not HD DVD anymore! Yay!) it's a tough call. But this article really points out how wonderful Blu Ray is. Of course, the real clincher was seeing Ratatouille on a recent 1080p flatscreen at Fry's.)

Telecom Amnesty

I agree with Tim Lee of Slate when he writes, "Congress should stop lawbreaking, not reward it—as the Senate's spy bill does."

Tellingly, Clinton did not vote. Obama voted NO. Good for him.

Why the 2008 election will be a joyous celebration

I am so happy that the election is coming. I would be happy with ANY of the current candidates. Hilary would be fine. Obama is a bit of a risk, but he'd do fine. McCain would do fine. That's why these kinds of articles don't make sense:

BBC NEWS | Americas | Is Obama's momentum unstoppable?

There is no drama to this election. It's a celebration, not matter what the outcome. We can finally say goodbye to a corrupt, violent, and brutally insensitive Bush administration. The next president's most important task will be to restore luster and honor to the presidency, dismantle huge executive branch excesses, and declare an end to the ill-defined, unwinnable, and illegitamate "War on Terror".

America is an honorable, vibrant culture. We are a country of warriors, and scientists, and artists, and teachers, mostly immigrants. We don't do preemptive wars. We don't do torture. We don't have secret military tribunals. We don't spy on our own people. We don't allow our public institutions to become corrupt. We don't ignore the rest of the world. George Bush has done all of these things, and his ouster is a time of great celebration - we can get back in touch with our strong, powerful identity as Americans.

Thank you, President Bush, for taking away my American identity. The old saying is true that you don't know what you have until it's gone. I very much look forward to getting it back.

Logo Evolution!

Neatorama has a cool post showing how various logos have evolved over time. For example:


Or how about this one:

"In 1930, Goro Yoshida and his brother-in-law Saburo Uchida created
Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory in Japan. Four years later,
they created their first camera, called the Kwanon. It was named after the Kwanon, Buddhist Bodhisattva of Mercy. The logo included an image of Kwanon with 1,000 arms and flames."

No wonder I went with Canon instead of Nikon!

My personal vote for most improved:

Free Firefly novel from Steven Brust

Firefly is a very cool universe with a memorable cast of characters. Steven Brust keeps it alive in his 160-page free fanfic novel.

The Joy of very few safety laws: Chinese New Years

Brian McNally, philosopher extraordinaire and (temporary) expat to China, took this amazing video of New Years in downtown Beijing.

(When I was in China, I personally enjoyed the high-speed go-kart track that also had a fully stocked bar.)

Flickr poeople protest Microsoft takeover of Yahoo!

Very creative. I particularly like this one.