The recent retirement of Steve Jobs was as emotional for me as I think it was for a lot of Apple fans. Steve wasn’t just the CEO of Apple. He was the figurehead for not just Apple, but for a sensibility about what role computers should play in our lives.

My early childhood was in many ways defined by computers, mostly Apple computers. For as long as I can remember, I wanted to work for Apple when I grew up.

By the time the Apple retail stores opened, I had been fixing Macs professionally for 3 years, and informally for many years before that. I was really good at fixing macs. I knew OS 9 inside and out, and I had worked on every Mac that had been made. I could fix most modern Macs of the time without manuals, and could in many cases could be handed a pile of different screws and tell you exactly were they went in a machine.

By the time Apple hired me as a Mac Genius, I had put in much more than Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours.

By that time I had already seen a lot of Apple’s uglier side. Apple had started beating up on Apple Authorized Resellers, and their service organizations well before the opening of the stores. Apple service became much more like a supply chain management operation than a customer service operation.

So when I took the dive into the Apple stores, I thought “this is going to be different. This is going to be Apple’s chance to do it right”. I already had friends working in the stores, and the reports I heard back were good. So I took the leap, and I was finally working for Apple Computer.

The first year or had its ups and downs, but by and large, it was really great. But it rapidly went downhill. I eventually came to the conclusion that Apple didn’t really care about repairing people’s computers. By the time I quit, I was extremely burned out, and angry at Apple.

Since then, I’ve always wondered by Apple cared so much about developing new products, but seemed to hate fixing them when they broke.

It wasn’t until Steve’s retirement that a lot of things clicked for me. Apple has always wanted to make things simpler, reduce complexity, and get things right the first time.

When you have to fix a computer, that means you didn’t get it right. It went out the door with a flaw or a bug, and you’ve created a bad experience. Yes you can try and recover from that experience, but it’s not the same as never having had it happen.

What I ultimately realized is that Apple didn’t want people like me, people who had figured out all the flaws, and knew how to fix them or work around them once a product was already in a customer’s hands. Apple wanted people who would make sure those problems never happened in the first place. Steve didn’t want people who could fix broken products, he wanted products that didn’t break.

But computers do break. Don’t you want people who can fix them available to your customers? Nope. Here’s why. People who can fix them are also people who can pull back the curtain on all the complexity that goes into making something simple. They are the people who remind customers that Apple’s products are computers, not tools for getting things done, or windows into the internet, or ways to connect with your friends and family.

Why doesn’t apple publish details on RAM amounts or processor specs on iPhones? Because it should never matter. The phone should be able to do the things you want to do flawlessly regardless of its hardware specs. Witness the HP touchpad, better specs than an iPad, but can’t scroll a webpage smoothly. The experience matters.

I was a genius of the old school. I exposed customers to how computers worked. What I didn’t figure out until much later was that nobody gives a shit about how computers work except for computer geeks. A service person who knows a lot about computers reminds people how much they don’t know. And they really shouldn’t have to know.

Steve’s vision far preceded Apple’s ability to deliver a computer that “just worked”. It needed people like me, but it didn’t want them. So I eventually quit. But now I understand why I felt like I didn’t fit at Apple, or at least at Apple Retail.

His debate with Reza Aslan is an interesting one. Reza, while presenting some good points, is a terrible debater and does nothing to back up his positions. He also uses a lot of the logical fallacies I talked about a previous blog post I made.

The one point that he makes, but doesn’t communicate well, or back up with evidence, is that Religion is often the context through which people justify outrageous or anti-social behavior, but it is not the reason they commit this behavior. He says that there are a variety of reasons that people act this way, and religion is often the most convenient justification to put on this behavior by both the perpetrators and the victims of this behavior, but it can’t be said that it’s the principal reason.

Reza seems to be missing a lot of the points that Sam is making, chief among them for this conversation is that beliefs change your world-view, and when you have beliefs that are held sacrosanct and beyond question, you dismiss a vital aspect of what makes people act the way they do. While a particular religious belief may not be the primary motivation for a particular bad action, the overall world-view of that person contributes to all of their actions, whether they be political, social, moral, etc.

One of the points that Sam made in another interview is that a lot of people project the intensity of their beliefs onto others. More moderate religious believers tend to think that religion plays the same role in their lives that it does in the lives of those who are more fundamental. They believe that their more fanatical actions are driven by other purposes, and justified with religion.

I grew up in a small rural community that was dominated my fundamentalists and evangelicals. And let me tell you, religion played a very large part in their lifes. Reza contends that at it’s core, religion is merely a language that people use to understand our experiences with the transcendent. I strongly disagree. I do believe that is one aspect of religion, but hardly its core. Religion is heavily tied into concrete actions taken by its believers and prescribed by its leaders. It is not merely a lens through which we understand the world, but a system of prescribed actions through which you interact with the world. That’s what makes it dangerous in some cases, and what makes Reza’s description of religion short-sighted.

Reza makes the off-handed comment that religion is most misunderstood by the religious. And this kind of argument, that “those who themselves define the thing I’m talking about should be discounted as its measure, and you should instead accept my definition” drives me insane. If we aren’t allowed to judge a religion based on its outcomes i.e. the people who subscribe to its beliefs, we remove any way of evaluating its worth as a human institution. Reza would like us to judge religion according to his own criteria, which seem to have nothing to do with the people who actually practice the religion.

Reza also says, and reveals much by doing so, “Science may have a monopoly on facts, but it doesn’t have a monopoly on Truth”. Sam lets that one go, and mentions that he didn’t contend that it did. I’m not so willing to let this rhetoric slide.

Firstly, science doesn’t have a monopoly on facts. Facts just are, that’s why they’re facts, they don’t depend on us to make them so. Science is just one of the better ways of uncovering and documenting them. As Sam says in another youtube clip, it’s more about intellectual honesty than about science. Science just happens to promote intellectual honesty because of a good process, and a system of fierce competition within the marketplace of ideas. Something we don’t have in religion.

Secondly, Truth as used here, is so nebulous as to be meaningless. When truth is divorced of fact, what does it actually mean? If we’re talking about personal subjective truth, what is it you’re trying to say? I’ll give you my guess, and why I find the comment so revealing. What I read between the lines here is “My beliefs (and the experiences that lead to them) are meaningful, even if not validated and supported by fact or reality. I feel threatened by the proposition that the standard for acceptability in society might be raised to require that validation and support.”

And my question to him is, in what way are they meaningful? What makes them meaningful? And here lies what I think is the great schism between people like Sam, and people like Reza. Some people are okay holding beliefs that are, to them, meaningful in and of themselves. While others require a standard for meaningfulness that somehow correlates to something outside themselves that isn’t subjective.

Funnily enough, Reza mentions that much of the “spiritual experience” that people have has been linked to chemical processes in the brain, and protests very loudly that this does not prove they are not real. At least not any less real than any other experience we have because every perception we have of the world is passed through a neuro-chemical process of some sort.

Sam let this one go as well, and it’s another one I would challenge if for nothing else but principle. Real is another one of those words that can mean anything these days. What do you mean by real? Most other things that we experience while interacting with the world can at least be experienced by others as well, and documented. If you go for a walk with a friend, it doesn’t matter whether or not you’re happy or depressed, you can both agree that you went for a walk, you may have been seen by other people on the street, been seen by cameras, have rubber worn off the bottom of your shoes, etc, etc. We have a mountain of evidence that you went for a walk. Some people would require evidence that it happened as a requisite for saying it’s real. Now when you talk to jesus in your head, there is a neuro-chemical process happening, we can verify that. But we can’t currently establish causation. We can’t say for sure that the chemical process is simply causing a hallucination, or if the process is a by-product of some connection with the divine. We can replicate it though, we can stimulate the mind in such a way as to induce a spiritual experience. Sure, maybe we’re just forcing open that god-doorway, but Occam’s razor would suggest otherwise. We have no evidence you talked to Jesus, we only have evidence that something happened in your brain. The exact same amount of evidence that we have to substantiate alien abductions. To compare the reality of our everyday neuro-chemical responses to stimulus from our external environment to the kind of things going on in the brain during a spiritual experience is incredibly intellectually dishonest.

I wasn’t planning on writing about this, but today I found a good example of just how profound the consequences of religious belief can be: Read through this article about christian evangelism at the Air Force Academy. Page three contains this fun quote:

West Point graduate and evangelical Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, involved in the investigation of Tillman’s death, stated publicly that Pat Tillman’s family was not at peace with his death because they are atheists who believe their son is now “worm dirt.”

What we can surmise from this quote is that Lt. Col. Kauzlarich is “at peace” with Tillman’s needless death at least partially because he believes that Tillman is resting comfortably in heaven. One has to wonder if our nation’s leaders would be less cavalier with the deaths of thousands of our troops and a million Iraqi civilians if they really believed that death was the end of existence, rather than the beginning of an eternal paradise.

I finally got my 401k set up in Quicken, which was no small feat. I’d love to have online access to it, but currently my 401k management company only supports the PC version of Quicken. Supposedly, the new 2007 quicken mac has much better 401k support, but only 4 of their online ready 401k companies actually support Mac.

I’ve considered moving over to Moneydance, but they have less online support than Quicken, and their app is just ugly. They do allow for child and parent accounts, which is fantastic, but not enough to move me over.

I did find out that my bank supports online use through Quicken, so I set that up. Was that an easy and fun process? No. Not at all. It was in fact a lot like pulling teeth. But it’s working now, and that’s awesome.

I’ve been doing the Dave Ramsey thing for a while, but I’ve just recently moved over to the envelope system for budgeting. Most of my bills get auto drafted from my bank account, and I’ve been using a debit card to pay for groceries and eating out. While it can be nice to have a record of every transaction, it’s a level of detail I just don’t need, and entering in every $1.58 transaction was becoming burdensome. It was also hard to tell when I was coming close to hitting my budget limit. I’d have to run a report whenever I wanted to check. So I’ve switched to cash only for eating out and groceries. I pull money out each paycheck to fund the next 2 weeks, and it’s been working out really well. Less time spent in Quicken, and it’s easy to know when I’m nearing my limits.

In general, I’ve more or less switched from a monthly budget to a paycheck budget. I laid out all the bills that happen from the 1st to the 15th, and from the 15th to the 30th, and plan the money from each check accordingly. Pretty much anything left over from bills and food in the budget is popped into the emergency fund right when I get the paycheck to reduce the temptation to spend it on other stuff. I’m trying to get the emergency fund stocked up as soon as possible so I can bring my retirement contributions up to 15%.

I’m currently investing 6% in the 401k with a company match. I was planning on investing the other 9% into the company Roth 401k, but may change that to 6% Roth IRA, 3% Roth 401k, in order to have a better choice of securities. That allocation will max out the Roth IRA, but won’t max out the 401k yearly limits.

From there, it really comes down to bringing up my income. I’m on a pretty good track at work, but I’d love to start bringing in more income from photography sales.

I’m roughly following Dave Ramsey’s plan with a slight modification. I suspended my contributions to my company’s 401k plan while hammering hard on my debt. Technically the next thing I have to do is build a “3 to 6 months of expenses” emergency fund. In my case this would mean 6k to 12k. I’m shooting for 10k by the end of the year. Where I deviate from Dave’s plan is that I’ll be investing in the 401k up to my company’s match until that 10k is built. It’s just too painful to let more time pass without those company dollars working for me.

After the 10k is in the bank, the plan is to invest 6% (the company match amount) of my income into the standard 401k which I’m doing now, and another 9% into the company’s new Roth 401k. I also plan on putting another couple of percent into mutual funds. But I might put that couple of percent into a straight savings account instead to fund a future house purchase. At my current salary, I won’t hit the yearly dollar limit on contributions to the 401ks.

I’m wondering if it would be beneficial to put a little less in the 401ks, say 10% total, and plop 5% into a Roth IRA, which gives me a little better selection of funds to choose from. Anyone playing around with this that would like to leave a comment?

I should be able to swing the 10k in savings by the end of the year (i.e. 10 remaining months) even with the 401k contribution of 6% as long as I have no big ticket purchases, i.e. photo or computer gear. This might make me sad. But I’m also expecting a raise and a bonus in about a month that might give me a little leeway. Also, if a couple of people who shall remain nameless can repay some outstanding loans this year, I’ll be 40% to the goal from that alone. Once the 10k is in the bank, I’ll probably sit down with a financial planner and look at the investing side of things.

2 days ago I made my final payment. What started out as a 5 year loan became a 35 month loan, and I have a paid-for car. Whoo.

Of course, this happens in the month that I renew my insurance and registration as well. Good times.

I should also mention, that this was my last bit of debt. I am now completely debt free. Of course, I am renting, so this was a little easier for me than for people with a house. But it feels good regardless.

Most of the Ballot measures in AZ this time around involved punishing gay people, mexicans, smokers and land conservationists. I ended up voting down almost all of them. There was one measure on increasing the minimum wage that I liked, and 2 or 3 more, but I’m sure you can guess which way I went on each measure.

A political orientation test I took put me solidly in the ranks of the libertarians, and I found some of that reflected today. I just couldn’t bring myself to vote in favor of banning smoking in all public places except for a very few exceptions. Yes smoking is bad for you, yes, second hand smoke is probably bad for you. But if you don’t like smoky bars, don’t go to them. Let business owners decide whether or not to ban smoking in their establishments. Why do we have to legislate this?

Surprisingly, only 2 libertarians were on the ballot, which was a little disappointing, but I did my duty to try and eject the sith lords… er republicans from the house and senate. While I hate party line voting, I’m repelled by the thought of allowing Bush 2 more years of a yes-sir legislative branch that kowtows to every insane request he makes.

If you haven’t voted yet. Go do so.

In it’s original form, this is a 4GB photoshop image, which takes my dual 2.0Ghz G5 30 minutes to save to disk. It is 1.5 feet by 9 feet at 240 dpi. It is stitched from 17 Canon 5D images.

For this print, I decided on 12″ by 90″ to fit within the confines of my humble Epson 2200. The Epson driver cannot accept single images over 44″ wide. So I had to dump out a flattened file, open it with Illustrator and tile the image onto essentially 5 13×19 pages which the epson driver prints without seams onto the roll paper. Lame, but better than spending $1k on a RIP that could do it natively.

Autopano Pro was used for the stitching. It can do some amazing things. No joke. You can literally hand hold shots in a circle and the SIFT algorithm will figure it out. Impressive technology.

It probably took close to an hour to print this bad boy out, but man is it impressive. I’ve got a couple more to work on, but this might be it for today. In all reality, this is just too large a pano to hang in anyone’s home. It would have to go to a business with a big hallway, but I might be able to find some customers like that….

So while I wasn’t able to get as much discussion in as I would have liked (I was almost half an hour late), the deal is: Physical Therapy for 7 weeks. From what I have read, bulging discs have something like a 90% recovery rate with no pain. What is not clear however, is what this means for the martial arts going forward.

I’m not supposed to have any contact to the head or body for those 7 weeks at least. Doc was pretty serious about it too. I’m going to talk to the PT people about what the prognosis is for ongoing training during the sessions. Considering that Tito Ortiz had a full out fight with Forrest Griffin while nursing a lumbar disc bulge, and supposedly has completely recovered, I have a lot of hope that I’ll be able to train normally again after the PT. Of course, Tito might have just gotten steroid shots and is willing to deal with ongoing problems later on in order to be able to fight.

Thankfully, it’s not bad enough that I’m having any issues in day to day stuff. Really I’m just whining about a reduced ability to train. So not really a huge deal here.

Today the office called me to let me know I have a bulging C5-C6 Disc. From teh intertubes:

“Symptoms of cervical disc disease include neck and arm pain, which may radiate down into the hand. This pain may be associated with numbness and tingling over the arm and hand, which may feel like it is “asleep”. Additionally, weakness of the hand and arm muscles may develop.”

Beside the tingling and numbness, this is pretty much me to the tee. While most of the pain is gone now, there’s some lingering muscle pain, and my right arm is pronouncedly weaker than my left, even after a month.

Next Thursday I head in for a follow up and discussion of treatment and physical therapy. I have no idea what this might mean for my martial arts training, but chances are, it’s not great news. I won’t speculate too much before hearing the exact details, but I imagine there will be some restrictions to prevent further damage.

To be clear, it’s not certain that martial arts caused it in the first place. In reading around, it looks like this stuff can happen in your sleep, which is when I first noticed it.

For the record:

Chiro – did x-rays, told me I had bad posture, had no idea what was causing terrible shoulder and arm pain, simply continued adjustments.

ER Doc – listened to symptoms for 2 minutes, diagnosed jacked up trapezius muscle.

My doc – didn’t screw around guessing, ordered an MRI to see what the hell is going on.

Good times. Anyway, like I said, it’s not hurting too much these days, so I’m not terribly concerned going forward. Might start to be a bother when I get older, but medicine is advancing at a fair clip, so who knows.

Kelli got her a decent little used ’95 civic for 3k last weekend which she paid for in cash. She’s back to the easy life of no payments, and only liability insurance. Awesome.

Once mine is paid off, I will still be carrying full coverage obviously, but I sometimes wonder about fully insuring 15k in depreciating steel. There are definitely times I wouldn’t mind dropping back to a 4k car.