Two years gone

I decided to come back to Xanga as that's where my subscribers are. Also, many of my complaints with it it have become moot or been fixed. I quit because of a combination of factors. One was despite very careful tracks covering where I didn't use my usual user name or any search terms that would lead to me on Google, my Xanga was no longer private. I blame the metros and people who don't know how to take hints. The other issue is the 2008 floods that caused major damage in Iowa. I work for local power company Alliant Energy, which is headquartered downtown only a few dozen meters from the river. The building is twenty-one stories and I work on the seventeenth, so my cubicle was unaffected, but that doesn't do much good if you can't get in the building. I was shipped off to our other office in Centerville. The motel had alleged Internet access, but I didn't have a working laptop at the time and updating Xanga through the PSP web browser is impractical at best. Xanga was blocked from work, but I just found out that is no longer the case.

I am glad to live in Cedar Rapids. It's large enough to offer possibilities, but small enough that property values are quite affordable. While I was in Centerville, I had to read some short stories by Raymond Carver, who's hardly an obscure author. The local library had nothing by him. I was told the nearest bookstore was in Des Moines, which is not nearby. Perhaps I might it enjoy it more there under other circumstances where I had more control, but I had difficulty getting food and social life there was all bars and churches and I'll have nothing to do with either. I suppose if they had a Unitarian church I would have gone for something to do, but it was all Evangelicals, Catholics and Lutherans. It's not like I normally go places much anyway, but I had little in the way of Internet, either. I did use the opportunity to play through Marvel Ultimate Alliance on PSP rather thoroughly.

It was all bad though. I got paid a substantial extra amount for being displaced and parlayed the money into a down payment on a house. Two years later, I owe just over $10,000 and should be paid in full by the end of next year. Once this happens, I will have very little in the way of expenses and still be pulling in more than twice what I made when I first entered the working world. I have spent the last two years attending University of Iowa and now am only one and a half Spanish courses shy of graduation. Assuming i can scrape together a way to pay for it (this is where paying off the house comes in), I can be in law school in about a year.

My house seems to attract mice in the winter. This year I have made the best of it and trapped some to keep as pets. I have four so far. I think that's all, but I am not sure. I call them Bitey, Itchy, Bullet and Taye. Mice are the most adorable of all pest species, I think except maybe rats, but they are larger and pee more.

A lot of what drew me back to Xanga was matters I wanted to write about. The recent election put me over the edge. First up, the following constitutional amendment passed by a huge margin in Oklahoma. here's how it appeared on the ballot:

I think this is an excellent case in point why it's a bad idea to make any constitution too easy to amend. In this case, the only reason one could possibly vote it, in this form anyway, is a complete lack of understanding of the underlying legal issues. It's also a solution in search of a problem. I read a few editorials in support of it and the argument can be expressed as follows:

1. Sharia Law is a form of international law.
2. U.S. Courts are increasingly using international law to make decisions.
3. The application of Sharia law has caused bad things to happen in the U.K.
4. Oklahoma has the power to ban its courts from using Sharia and international law.
5. Oklahoma banning the use of Sharia and international is the best way prevent the bad things that happened in the U.K. from happening in Oklahoma.
6. Oklahoma does not want the bad things that happened in the U.K. to happen in Oklahoma.
7. This amendment, as written, does ban the use of Sharia and international law.

• Therefore: Oklahoma should pass this amendment.

Here are the problems with this argument: Premise 2 isn't exactly true. They are presumably talking about Roper v. Simmons, which was the Supreme Court case that established it was cruel and unusual to execute people for offenses committed while they were minors citing, among other things, that this is generally the rule in other industrialized countries with capital punishment. This was a controversial ruling for good reason, but keep in mind they it was only seeking to clarify the vaguest, question-beggingist part of the U.S. Constitution. Keep in mind this this was brought up to strengthen the point that many U.S. states have banned the practice. It wasn't really a matter of substituting international law for U.S. law, just one piece of an argument that there was a general trend toward considering execution of minors cruel and unusual. Let's assume however, that Kennedy, Stevens, Souter, Breyer and Ginsburg all did decide that they were liberal activists and if the U.S. wouldn't pass enlightened laws, they would just ignore them and decide the U.S. had to follow French law anyway. It still doesn't follow that all cases involving international law fall into this category and that wholesale banning its consideration is the correct course of action or that Oklahoma has the power to do so.

Premise 3 isn't exactly true either. Sharia law hasn't been imposed by courts in the U.K. Sharia courts are actually a form of arbitration. Basically in civil cases, litigation is expensive and vexatious. The parties in a dispute can make a contract with each other that some third party they agree on will decide their case and they will accept the arbitrator's decision and agree not to file suit about the matter. Arbitration has the same general restrictions as any contract. The parties must enter into it in good faith, so if someone is forced into signing, the contract is void. In the case of arbitration, it means the agreement not to bring the matter through the regular civil courts is not enforceable. If one party was deceived in some way about the contract, this is also bad faith, meaning that if the arbitrator were found to have taken bribes from one party or was otherwise not neutral, the arbitration contract would be void. Also, any contract with illegal provisions is invalid. This means that the arbitrator can't order anything contrary to law, such as corporal punishment for one of the involved parties. It also means arbitrators can't solve child custody disputes or criminal matters as these are not mere disputes between two parties but involve a minor who cannot enter into contracts or the state, respectively. Granted, bad faith is generally difficult to prove.

Premise 4 is also faulty and is perhaps the biggest problem. Article IV, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution requires "public acts, records, and judicial proceedings" from other states be respected. Article VI, Section 2 says treaties and the U.S. Constitution are the "supreme law of the land." This means states can't contradict U.S. treaties or the U.S. Constitution, even on the constitutional level and part of this requirement is that states must honor each others court decisions. Roper v. Simmons was hardly a typical application of International law and is likely the only decision to use international law in such a fashion. Most cases involving international law have to do with contract or treaties. Oklahoma can't, for instance, refuse to extradite someone to a country with which the U.S. has an extradition treaty because the criminal charges against them come from a foreign court, nor can they ignore a judgment from another state that was based on an international contract, but as written, it seems the amendment requires exactly that. Also, the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution bans congress from making any law respecting an establishment of religion. The Fourteenth Amendment states "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States," which has been held to mean that the bill of rights is binding on state governments as well. A law singling out Sharia is clear a law respecting an establishment of religion.

Premise 5 has related problems. The concern in the U.K. was that Sharia law is very patriarchal and Muslim women were being forced to accept it accept by social factors even though it was against their interests to do so and was essentially a form of exploitation and that the Sharia "courts" were overstepping their bounds and issuing illegal judgments. Let's assume these concerns are valid, applicable to Oklahoma and that the state can legitimately say adults are not able to consent to contracts beyond the usual restrictions. (I think all of these premises are shaky, but it doesn't matter in this case.) It would seem to me increased scrutiny and possibly restriction of arbitration would be a far more sensible way to deal with this.

Number 7 is also a bit iffy. As I said, the alleged Sharia courts are actually arbitration, not real courts. It's unclear whether the law as written would prevent arbiters from considering Sharia law or international law as they aren't actually courts. I presume it would under the general rule that arbiters can't make illegal judgments and because an arbiter's decision must be enforceable by a court to mean anything, but I can see an argument the court isn't considering Sharia or international law in any direct fashion when enforcing an arbitration contract.

There's also an assumed eight premise: this law won't cause a bigger problem than the one it seeks to prevent. Unfortunately, in order to solve a problem that was at worst, hypothetical, it makes a complete clusterfuck of the law if it does anything. If something is alleged stolen in Mexico, then trafficked into Oklahoma, the usual standard is to determine whether it was considered stolen under Mexican law if an ownership dispute comes up. Without this rule, trafficking becomes a major problem anything with questionable ownership can be moved by the possessor to a jurisdiction where their claim is stronger. This does come up. For instance, the case over Portrait of Wally required the courts to consider whether the Austrian owner had good title under the laws of Austria, where they purchased it. It would make no sense to try to determine if the sale was valid under U.S. law just because the painting was in the U.S. at the moment as the sale didn't happen under U.S. jurisdiction. Stable claims of ownership are a necessary part of civilization. How are Oklahoma courts supposed to handle this kind of case? It's also not terribly uncommon for international business contracts to specify disputes will be handled under some particular country's law. Blackberry may require disputes with U.S. contractors to be resolved under Canadian law, for instance. What happens to the existing contracts? Also, this is a serious disincentive to do business in Oklahoma. Also, like every other U.S. state except Louisiana, Oklahoma law is based on English common law. They have possibly erased the foundation of their legal system.

In a related point, a Texas Appellate court recently ruled that requiring disputes to be settled under Biblical law as part of an employment contract is perfectly legal in Woodlands Christian Academy v. Weibust and that this requirement does not amount to substituting religious law for U.S. law. I would think the same principle would apply to Sharia. I bring this up because of the rank hypocrisy of people who want to keep that crazy foreign law away from our legal system, then turn around and claim U.S. law is based on the Ten Commandments or something, which is foreign law if ever there was.

Cagey has moved

That Home Theater Post I've Been Planning

Yesterday, I was trying to tell a story abotu watching King Kong with Kitty. We were watching it shortly after the election and she drank one and a half liters of wine in the process and got really upset, then wanted to watch Rent, which is hardly a cheering up movie. Rent was really hard on me because it isn't a good movie to watch when worrying about a friend's substance abuse problem. She had kept calling her boyfriend and telling him to buy her more wine, then when he got home, accused him of being ashamed of her because she was under the impression he had been going to invite people over, then didn't.

My point with this story was that, like many people with more money than audio expertise, her boyfriend has tiny Bose speakers. I'm sure they were quite expensive, but my RCA speakers from a cheap home-theater-in-a-box kit sound better, mainly because of poor bass rolloff on the Bose. When Kong roars, it should put the fear of God in you. That's how it sounded in the theater and that's how it sounds at my place, but it was rather unimpressive there.

I bought my current TV under less than ideal circumstances. Namely, my old TV died, wrecking my plans to wait another six months. My current TV, a Westinghouse TX-47F430S, has its good points. It was cheap for its size when I bought it and has a sharp image. Unfortunately, it also downmixes digital audio to two channels for some reason and, most upsetingly, has terrible black levels. Some games were unplayable until I messed with settings to essentially make them not dark like they were supposed to be. When I watch “Smallville”, Lana's hair is a solid, dark-grey mass. The lack of shadow detail means I miss out on a lot of Blu-rays high-definition advantages.

The quality of your equipment can effect your movie experience. This also applies to media and is why I've been big on Blu-ray. In the past few days, I have ordered forty-one movies and two TV seasons in addition to buying two movies in stores, nearly doubling the size of my Blu library. One of the movies was an accident, though, and I'll have to find a way to get rid of the copy of Rambo I bought when intending to buy the Rambo trilogy and didn't catch in time. Only seven of them, including Rambo, were over $10. I also got some, but not nearly as many, DVDs. This gives me a good number of now-redundant DVDs to dump. I would normally give them as gifts, but my parents no longer want DVDs and I don't think Kitty wants Die Another Day. I may start exchanging gifts with Grammarboy again as there are some I'm sure he wants.

One of the great things about being single is you can drop $2000 on a new computer and a bunch of movies in a week and no one complains. Granted, that is a lot, but I think I'll be basically buying movies once a year with only a couple sporadic purchases between. In fact, I think I'll aim to watch and review at least one movie a week. I have a home theater plan in mind for about $4000 which should be damn good, but I am quite clueless on speakers. I'll likely build this next summer unless I decide to wait for the 2009 projectors, which should be even better than the current ones.

It's all gone

Happy Belated Birthday to Me

My birthday was Monday. My parents gave me their old washer and dryer from when they used to live at a house that took electric dryers.  They rented a truck and an appliance dolly and we hauled them in and hooked them up.  They couldn't be tested ahead of time as my parents, as I alluded, did not have the proper plug for the dryer and my mom says she can't unhook her own washing machine because it's too difficult to prevent leaks when hooking up. This led to the situation of spending $70 on a truck and dolly and a great deal of effort hauling them out of my parent's basement and somewhat less effort placing them on my first floor without knowing if they would actually work.  When it came time to hook up the washer, we found that the hose my parents had assumed was for the drain wasn't. It was a rigid plastic that certainly couldn't be clamped to make a watertight seal. They did, however, by proper hoses for the inputs. My spouts were unhelpfully both painted blue and unlabeled, so we had to find a bucket and run a bunch of water to figure out which was which. My dad said we should test the washer to make sure it ran water and agitated correctly. I told him we should hook up the drain first. He said that wasn't necessary as it wouldn't drain until it got through the first cycle. As it turns out, I was correct and had to do a lot of mopping. Once we got a hose and hooked it up, I didn't tighten it enough the first time, leading to another big leak. Eventually, all was well. That night, I did a long-overdue load of laundry and discovered that while the dryer spins and blows, it doesn't really get anything dry. I am reluctant to get a service-person out as that will run $100 minimum and a new dryer would only cost about $300.

My mom cooked some falafel and some yellow cake and as of now, I still haven't gotten to do anything with my friends. Dorothy got a a $10 Gamestop gift card in a miniature fake Wii, which was much appreciated.

Other than that and a bag of soy crisps from Kitty, no one got me any presents. This was at my request. I've become one of those people with more money than time and have stacks of unread books, unplayed video games and unwatched DVDs all over my house. I have now lived here two and a half months and have yet to get around to connecting the TV.

I got to thinking I haven't really gotten myself much this year. I got a house, which was quite expensive relative to my salary, but have bought just above zilch in video games, movies and books which I don't need for class. Maybe I should get myself something for my birthday.

I haven't mentioned it thanks to my moving in here roughly corresponding with when I quit writing, but I haven't set up my computer since moving, either, mainly because I'd have to set up my desk first. I've been using my laptop. My Dell Inspiron 5100 is quite old by computer standards. I bought it more than three years ago (for $600) and it was about two years old then. I considered replacing it this summer when I needed a working laptop for use in Centerville, but it's a funny thing about computer technology lately. My computer was a high-end laptop when it was released in 2003. It falls in the desktop replacement category and indeed beat my 2002 HP Pavilion 760n by several measures. It has a 2.7 GHz Pentium 4 Mobile processor and an SXGA+ (1400x1050) resolution display. My desktop has a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4 and at the time, the display was set to SXGA- (1280x960), because that was a high as my cheap monitor could resolve with any accuracy. I got looking this summer and many laptops were below 2 GHz. I couldn't even find any faster than my old one. Laptops in the price range I paid for my old one usually had a WSXGA Wide XGA+ resolution (1440x900). This should not be confused with WSXGA+ (1680x1050), which is what my replacement desktop monitor runs at. It seemed the same amount of money would now get me a laptop 30% slower and with 13% less resolution. I knew that I had gotten a good deal before, but this was just weird considering the usual direction of computer technology. Today's computers did have larger hard drives, so I just replaced my broken hard drive and was right on top of the curve again. I should add that I cannot find the DVD player software my laptop came with. I got the feature working, but I can only watch DVDs in a tiny portion of the screen.  I think I can fix this after I go through some more boxes.

The problem is, those metrics I just quoted you are misleading. Modern computers don't use Pentium 4 anymore. In fact, these were rather short-lived in laptops because they are huge power hogs. The poor battery life is one reason I never got as much use as I would have liked out of my laptop. I believe overheating, a known problem with this model thanks largely to the processor, is also what wrecked my original hard drive.  Besides practicality issues, you cannot directly compare the speeds of different kinds of processors because the are not performing equivalent functions in each clock cycle, so the 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 in a modern low-end laptop is, by many measures, faster than the 2.7 GHz Pentium 4 Mobile in mine. Also, many other aspects of technology have marched on. It has a combo drive which burns CDs and reads DVDs. Thanks to the proprietary nature of laptops, putting a DVD burner in it would cost about $100 and just isn't worthwhile. The screen, while decently sized (this is a 15" system, which was the largest you could get in 2003), doesn't have great viewing angles. Video card updates are available, but again, thanks to a lack of intercompatibility between brands on laptop parts, this would be expensive and no modern cards are made for the slot. In practice, I am stuck with the Radeon 7500 Mobility. Memory is another big issue. The 5100 has two memory slots on its motherboard. One can only be configured by Dell at time of assembly. The other is user-upgradeable. I have no idea why you would design a computer that way. Dell put a 256 MB in their slot. The other one is 128 MB, giving me a total of 384 MB. Luckily, memory is one of the few parts that is standardized. I could upgrade to 768 for $13 or 1280 for $26. The latter would be enough to meet Vista's minimum, but I'm not sure it would work and I still wouldn't have a video card capable of supporting DirectX 9.0, which is also required. This would probably help the poor browser performance I've been getting. I can't see anyone wanting the old memory. Plus, bus speeds are better these days so even if I could configure it the same as a modern laptop, I couldn't get the same performance.

Besides all this, the computer is just shy of ten pounds, which really hurts its portability. Back in August, I saw an ad on Craigslist for an ASUS Eee PC. This is a netbook. This is a relatively new class of super-portable laptops with no optical drive. A couple days and  $325 later, I had purchased the 701 model, which has a 7" WVGA (800x480) screen and is about the size of a 200-page standard hardback book. It has a 4 GB solid-state internal drive, a 900 MHz Celeron M processor, Windows XP Home, 512 MB of memory and a built-in webcam. For the price, I also got Microsoft Streets & Trips, a GPS device and an 8 GB SD card. This worked out great for portability. The computer is smaller than most of my textbooks and only two pounds (about 900 grams). Unfortunately, it soon became clear that it wasn't so great in other ways. If you follow the link to the Wikipedia article on Windows XP and read about its system requirements, you will see it lists SVGA 800x600 as the minimum resolution. If you attempt to run XP on a screen that is only 480 pixels high, you will find some dialogue boxes don't quite fit and have to do awkward dragging or set the screen to a faux-800x600 mode where you scroll a lot. It also isn't enough to view more than about a third of a page at a time. Space requirements for XP are listed as 1.5 GB for SP1, 2.3 GB for SP2 and 3.2 GB for SP3. SP3 came out shortly after I got the computer. I quickly found I did not have enough space to install the update and had to turn off features like hibernate, virtual memory and system restore that take up drive space. At this point, I was able to squeeze in an OpenOffice.org install, but the hard drive runs way too close to full and many programs don't support install on a secondary drive. Also, the battery life claims don't really seem to work out in reality. It run for about an hour and a half from a full charge when wireless networking, which I generally need, is on, even with the brightness fairly low and the sound off. The battery drains quickly in sleep mode (less than 24 hours from a full charge to dead). Since I can't use hibernate, this means I have to save everything or lose my work if I'm going to be away from an outlet for long. To top it off, shortly after I bought it, a new model was introduced which was the same size, weight and price, but with twice the memory, twice the storage space, twice the processor speed, a 9" 1024x600 WSVGA screen and several times the battery life thanks to a combination of a higher-capacity battery, more efficient processor and better power-management features.

As further background, I just got a raise from $13.20/hour to $14.94, effective today, which I hope to tell more about later.

So this left me wanting to buy something for my birthday and with good financial backing to do so. I've been wanting a home theater (more on that in a future post), but thanks to all the remodeling this would require (and the $4000 or so in equipment), this is not practical at the moment. I've also been wanting a new laptop, preferably one that functions as a portable Blu-ray theater. A bit of poking around on HP and Dell's sites showed me it was quite possible to get a large laptop that could play Blu-rays at full resolution on either a 1920x1200 WUXGA display or a 1920x1080 Full HD for about $1500. Then, I searched on Amazon and found a Sony VAIO VGN-FW285 J/H open-box item for $1240. It has a 1920x1080 16.4" screen, Blu-ray burner, 2.26 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4 GB of memory, a 320 GB hard drive, Radeon 3650 graphics (despite the number, five generations after the 7500), a built-in webcam and bluetooth. I quickly ordered it before someone else stepped in. Then, I checked eBay, where I found if I used a promotion, I could get an HP Pavilion HDX 18t 18" that was largely the same, but with an 18" screen, 2.4 GHz processor, 3 GB of memory, remote control, fingerprint reader and 250 GB hard drive, GeForce 9600M graphics, numeric keypad on the keyboard, Blu-ray combo drive than only burned DVDs and no bluetooth for $1175. If I got that instead, I would be gaining $65, a fingerprint reader, graphics that seem to be better judging by the price of stand-alone cards, a better keyboard, a remote, 20% larger screen and 6% faster processor.  However, I would also be gaining about three pounds of weight and losing a GB of memory, 70 GB of hard drive space and, most importantly, the ability to burn Blu-rays. Some reviews seemed to say that the Sony also had much better battery life and better viewing angles on the display, but I wasn't able to get a definitive answer. This put me in a quandary. I wouldn't use the fingerprint reader and I could use my PS3 remote with the Sony laptop, but that was a significant increase in screen size. On the other hand, Blu-ray burning will likely prove useful in the future when blanks get below $15/each. I could get an external burner if needed, but that would limit its usefulness. I might be able to haul the seven-pound Sony to class on my back, but ten for the HP was stretching it if I wanted to carry anything else, which I did. Also, it likely wouldn't be useable in the standard desks. It is the size of the entire little table I am using my current laptop on. This would mean I'd still need to keep a second, more portable computer. I decided the HP was the way to go despite this. I went to cancel my Amazon order and was told I couldn't because it was being prepared for shipment. This was only about an hour and a half after placing the original order on a Saturday evening. I rethought it some more and decided to stick with the Sony. The numeric keypad could be replaced with a USB calculator, which can be had for about $10, and the extra screen size was putting it into territory that's just silly for a laptop. Something that's roughly the size of my torso, only thinner, is not practical to carry to class. Also, I couldn't find any backpacks made to hold a computer that large.

So in addition to the laptop, I am buying a new Targus backpack to carry it. My old backpack has been in use since I was in high school, about eleven years ago, and its zipper has developed a tendency to split apart in the last month or so, recently getting a bunch of rain in there. It also just isn't suited to a laptop of significant size thanks to a lack of padding and a non-rectangular shape. It has a crushproof pocket for sunglasses. This is great for me as I won't go out in daylight without them, but am often in Iowa City past park and left with nothing to do with them. It also has pockets for a cell phone and a PDA or MP3 player, with a hole to let you string out earphones. This got me thinking: I could easily install my GPS software on my new laptop, but a 16.4" model is not practical for car use and using it while walking is right out. I'd rather not keep a netbook around as well if this is all I needed it for. A PDA would give me highly-portable functionality without adding much weight. It also would work as a music/video player. Unfortunately, when I tried to research this, I found everything terribly confusing. I was unable to determine how useful most PDAs were for productivity. Basically, some features are so long-established that no one mentions them because they assume you know. I have never used a Windows Mobile device, nor have I known anyone who used one. I can't seem to find information about stuff like whether handwriting recognition is present or you are expected to tap out messages on an on-screen keyboard, which makes a big difference in usefulness. Most PDAs have bluetooth these days and I understand that can be used for things like controlling a bluetooth phone and syncing your address book, but can you use a PDA as a remote control for a bluetooth-enabled laptop? If your phone has built-in GPS, can you use this to run navigation software on the PDA? How do I get the right information to compare a smartphone to a PDA? How do I tell if my phone can play Doom RPG? Looking into technology in an area I hadn't been paying attention to makes me understand how old people feel.