The Stand-up Philosopher

NatGeo: Inside North Korea

I signed up for Amazon Prime last year, partly to have free videos to watch while I'm living in a basement away from my family. I bookmarked a bunch of them through Read It Later, but haven't spent a whole lot of time catching up.

Tonight I was going through some of the videos I bookmarked, and came across a National Geographic on Inside North Korea. I figured that sounded interesting, so I watched it.

There wasn't much I didn't already know, but it was insightful. The camera crew had to come in under cover with a doctor on a humanitarian mission, because you can't just show up and start filming in North Korea. They had government minions with them every step of the way. One of the minions threatened to expell them because a cameraman had to lay down on the ground to get a large statue of "Dear Leader" into his camera's view.

I was particularly blown away by the outright worship of Kim Jong Il (who has passed away since this documentary was filmed). I have heard of heads of state being worshipped as gods, in fact, early Christians ran into a lot of trouble in the case of Ceaser worship. It's still disconcerting to actually see it in practice. 

The journalist wondered how many of the people were displaying true belief and how many were just acting out of fear. She concluded after so many generations of isolation and brainwashing, there probably wasn't a line between the two anymore.

If you get a chance to watch this documentary, it's interesting. It's free for Prime members to stream.

I Love Being Right: Haliburton Ditching RIM for iOS

I don't remember if I bothered to publish this thought, but I predicted a while ago that RIM is going to die the day large corporations and the federal government switch from BlackBerry to another mobile platform. Haliburton is apparently ditching the platform. 

I've had several BlackBerries issued by work. I won't buy one for personal use. On a previous job, I had a BlackBerry 7130, and a Curve. The only real difference between the two is the Curve had a full keyboard. The keyboard on the 7130 drove me nuts, since keys were shared between letters and "predictive text" wrongly predicted which word you meant to write, forcing you to spend twice the time correcting 75% of the words you type.

On my current job, I was originally issued a Bold. I now have a Tour. Even though the Tour has a new operating system (6.0), there is no noticable difference from the 7130 I had in 2008 with OS 4.2. 

The only reason RIM has done a decent business for so long is because it bent over backwards for every request the government and large corporations asked of it. The even make smart card readers for BlackBerries allowing government users to sign and encrypt emails from their BlackBerries.

Once the government finds a way to use iOS for mobile needs, I predict the demise of RIM. 

I Wonder If I Should Come Back to TypePad

I stopped blogging here in the middle of 2010 when my paid plan ran out and I was between stable paychecks. I went back to Blogger. Tonight, for some reason, I stopped back here, and discovered that even though I haven't touched this blog in over a year and a half, it's got triple the traffic as Blogger. I've worked my butt off to get past 10,000 views on Blogger. This blog, while growing cobwebs, has had more than 20,000 views in the same time period.

 

And it looks like even the free system I've been downgraded to has been improved significantly. 

As a final test, I'm going to embed an Amazon affiliate link for a book I got a review copy of recently. <> It works. I guess I'll come back to TypePad. Now to decide if I should import a year and a half of blog posts or just pick up now.

 

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from Thomas Nelson Publishers. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

 

The Most Read Blog Post I’ve Ever Written

I am, by definition, an amateur blogger. Nobody pays for for this. I’ve written close to 850 blog posts. I can’t tell you how many hundreds I haven’t written, or started writing and never finished. Those 850 or so blog posts were written over more than 6 years. I’ve written in spurts. Last year, when I found myself out of a job, I was posting four to six times per day in an effort to drive traffic and launch some kind of freelance writing career. Then I stopped posting. Sometimes I have a lot to say, and sometimes I have nothing to say. I’ve authored at least 7 blogs. All of them are still up. Four of them are duplicates of each other as I struggle to decide which one will be my main blog.

By far, the most read post I’ve ever written lies here: Sundance Vacations- Is There Really Value in Buying 30 Vacations Wholesale? That’s from my Blogger Blog, which is the one that pulls in the most views. I wrote that post in April of 2007, almost four years ago. And I still stand by it.

I’ve gotten a lot of comments on this post over the years. I lost most of them. I was using a service called HaloScan for my Blogger blog for a few years, but it went down and I was unable to recover my comments. Not all were positive. I’ve gotten quite a few comments with ad-hominem attacks and other dishonest debate tactics. I’ve gotten email about this post.

If you’ve been contacted by Sundance Vacations, I welcome you to read about my experience, and the tips I’ve provided to evaluate their offer. Or any other high-pressure sales offer.

Test For Coming Back To TypePad

When I cancelled my TypePad Pro membership this past summer, I figured my days here were over. I really liked TypePad, but didn’t have the means at the time to renew my membership.

But, my blog was converted to TypePad Micro, which apparently isn’t as limited as I thought.

I’ve been going nuts trying to figure out which blog to stick with. I could link many posts from my archives about the blog services I’ve tried. Wordpress is elegant, but I can’t embed Amazon Affiliate links. Blogger requires me to use a CAPCHA for each and every post, and I can’t turn it off. MSN Spaces sucks. I can’t even get the page to load tonight. Supposedly, they’ve converted to Wordpress.

I like to write, whether anybody reads or not. I need to not have to worry about leaving a blog platform and moving my posts. For some reason, if I write something, even if it’s bad, I have to keep it. It’s a record of where my mind was at in a certain point in time.

I’m going to try to embed an Amazon link. I was in a rush. This is for a book Amazon recommended based off another book I bought. If this goes through the posting, I’ll just switch back to TypePad.

Never mind.

When Thinking Ruins TV

Sometimes I wonder if I think too much. In many cases, my enjoyment of entertainment is ruined by my thinking.

Star Trek

For instance, last week, I finally got to see the new Star Trek movie. After the final Star Trek: TNG movie, Nemesis, I wasn’t planning to see another Star Trek movie. I figured the franchise should remain in my past where I enjoyed it more. But, I’d heard good things about the new movie, which sort of departed from the present by visiting the past. I saw it, and loved it.

However, as a former Navy man, and as an engineer, my thinking in some ways ruined the experience for me. OK, what would a sci-fi action movie be without some epic fight scene in some vast space with small platforms suspended in mid-air? But still, during the final fight scene between young James T. Kirk and that Romulan miner-turned vengeance guy, I spent the whole scene wondering “what freaking idiot would design a ship with that much space, populated by tiny platforms? It’s not like you’d design a mining ship just so Kirk could fight a bad guy at the end of a movie.

I also had some minor issues with the whole “3 year cadet becomes Captain of a starship after 1 mission, no matter how successful”. The military can certainly violate its own rules, but career paths are there for a reason. In the Navy, line officers must do so much time in each department. I had several division officers who transferred from or to engineering after a brief stint in my division. It’s only the specialized officers (chaplains, supply, medical, dental, etc) who only do one thing for their entire careers. If you want to be a captain of a Naval ship, you have to do time in engineering, deck, operations, combat systems, etc. Sometimes, you go back. The first captain I served on the U.S.S. Oldendorf under was promoted to O-6 and left to be the Chief Engineer on an aircraft carrier. From CO to department head.

Stargate Universe:

I enjoy SGU. But, especially in the 2nd season, I agonize over one annoying detail: only 1 member of the crew has managed to find the pilot house. I know, the show centers around Air Force personnel. It may not naturally occur to them that ships have a central point from which they’re operated or navigated. But still, had I been a member of the crew, the first thing I would have done is locate the pilot house (bridge). Also, I would have looked for something like a CIC. But they spend the entire 1st season using some “control interface room”, then in the 2nd season, Dr. Rush “accidentally” stumbles across the pilot house and decides not to tell anybody he found it. And since the concept never occurs to the other members of the cast, he is able to keep it hidden for a while.

I would have found it long before that. But again, I only grew up in the Air Force. I didn’t serve in it.

Why I ’ m (Rationalizing) Enduring AT & T

I’ve been complaining a lot lately about AT&T. I’m sorry. I tend to talk to my wife in the evenings while I’m sitting on my laptop and it’s easy to open Twitter and complain while I’m trying to reconnect the call. I guess I should stop. I’ve always had a problem when I get frustrated and have easy access to Twitter. You have no idea how hard it was not to rant on Twitter while I was working as a Realtor. I had other people’s businesses at stake, so I forced myself to keep my digital mouth shut.

I have no love for AT&T. I’ve endured them for a long time. I’ve been with “The New AT&T” since 2005, but before that I kept bouncing between Cingular and AT&T Wireless for 5 years prior to that as I’d leave one for the other only to be bought back by the one I left.

I used to be a Windows Mobile user. Microsoft rebuilt the platform from scratch and calls it Windows Phone now. I still see the same problems that have plagued it all along, except that none of the Windows Mobile applications I’ve bought over the years will work with Windows Phone, and most of the developers of applications I like to use have no plans to develop for it. You can’t even get Kindle for it, and Amazon has written a Kindle app for just about every other platform with more than 20 users.

People helpfully recommend that I switch to Verizon. I’m sure it’s a much better carrier, especially considering Consumer Reports rates AT&T as the worst U.S. Cell Phone carrier. My experience validates that. It’s nice to have some objective data to back experience. And it’s not like I live in the sticks. The majority of our time is spent in the Washington D.C. and Philadelphia metropolitan areas, where all cell providers should have a full and reliable network established.

So why don’t I just switch to Verizon and get a Droid of some kind? No doubt, there are some nice android devices. A coworker of mine just got an Incredible. They sure are nice.

I heard somewhere that we never make an objective decision. We mostly make decisions based on emotion THEN look for objective reasons to justify those decisions. Yes, my wife and I bought a timeshare once.

These are the rationalizations I’ve chosen for continuing to endure AT&T, even though it sucks and I can’t talk to my wife for 10 minutes without the call dropping 5 times:

1: I really do like the iPhone- Yes, I’m a true believer. I like the iPhone. I just got my iPhone 4 a few weeks ago, and I’m really happy with it. It’s far from perfect, but it does what I need it to do. I’ve long since integrated iTunes into my workflow for music, podcasts, and audiobooks. That’s probably what I use the iPhone for the most. In the dark days of Windows Mobile, I had to manually transfer podcasts to the device each and every day, and delete those that I listened to. It just happens on the iPhone. It’s beautiful. It works for me.

Also, I already had to rebuy some of the apps I used on Windows Mobile for the iPhone. I don’t want to have to buy them again for a droid device, and again if I switch droid devices.

2: I’m afraid a droid device will end up with some of the same problems I had on Windows Mobile- I agree, droids are wonderful, but hear me out. I know Apple is a “closed” platform. Steve jobs calls it integrated. Rather than “open”, he refers to Android as a fragmented system.

This is one of the biggest problems I had with Windows Mobile (beside the fact that it sucked). I would go out and buy a new Windows Mobile phone. Then Microsoft released a new version of the OS. Microsoft made the OS, then released it to the hardware manufacturers. The hardware manufacturers would then integrate it into their devices. They’d often add extra software. They also wrote the drivers. But they often had many different models of phones, and I’m not convinced they tested them well enough. They’d release a buggy phone to the market and not support it. Even if support was provided, it took months to come out, leaving the paying customer with a buggy product. Then, when Microsoft releases a new version of the OS, it’s up to the manufacturer to provide an update for the device. Most manufacturers had the attitude of “You want a new OS, buy a new phone”. Even if the last one was under 6 months old. I went through that when I bought an HP 68xx not too long before Windows Mobile 6 came out. HP had no plans to provide an upgrade for the device.

I’m afraid of that happening with Android, because I’ve lived through it on Windows Mobile. Then, with all the different versions of the OS floating around on different devices, it becomes a nightmare for developers to support. They often discontinue support for older devices, leaving you unable to use some good apps.

Don’t' forget, Verizon was originally offered the iPhone. They turned it down, because they wouldn’t bend to Apple’s demands. As much as I don’t like AT&T, I’m happy not to have an iPhone full of stupid icons and apps like “AT&T Music”, “AT&T Navigator”, and all that other pointless junk that never gets used. Can you imagine how much crap Verizon would install on the iPhone? Don’t forget, Verizon neuters Bluetooth and other capabilities on phones that run on their network. Even though AT&T objectively sucks in the service they deliver, at least they were willing to bend on those issues.

If I could only delete “Stocks” and “Game Zone” from my iPhone. But thanks to iOS 4, I have them grouped in a folder “Undeletable BS”.

So that’s why I’m making the choice to endure AT&T’s crappy network and lack of service until I can get the iPhone on a real network.

The Continental Congress of 1776 With Twitter

Matt Silverman at Mashable came up with an amusing comic exploring what it would have been like if the founding fathers were using social media.

I thought it was funny.

Ramit Sethi- Useless Black Friday Advice

OK, Black Friday was yesterday. I didn’t have a chance to write a blog post until now.

Ramit Sethi is one of my favorite bloggers. He’s the blogger behind I Will Teach You To Be Rich. He wrote a post yesterday about how the typical financial pundit the media digs up for segments will whine and complain about typical Black Friday behavior.

Black Friday: the biggest consumer spending day of the year. And also the day with the most annoying advice in the world.

Seriously, guys, you would not believe how many press releases I’ve gotten about how what a terrible, scary, foreboding day this is going to be for our country. And every “expert” is eager to take advantage of it.

“Americans are spending too much!” these so-called “experts” will cry. “They just need to _____ (keep a budget/stop spending/resist evil marketers).”

They’ve been repeating advice like this for decades, but has anything changed?

No. We spend more and save less than almost ever before.

When your entire philosophy rests on urging Americans to NOT do something they want to do, chances are very good that you’ll fail. It’s like trying to push back a tsunami.

I’ve been reading Ramit’s blog for years now. He puts an interesting perspective on personal finance. Rather than telling you to be frugal in all your ways, he suggests spending what you want in those areas that you value, and cut costs mercilessly in other areas. A friend of his greatly values eating out, and spends about $21,000 a year doing it. But he lives in a smaller apartment and drives a smaller car, as those things don’t mean as much to him.

I don’t quite understand Black Friday. I used to go Black Friday shopping with my wife, but eventually I got fed up with it. I’m not convinced the bargains were that good, and getting up at 0300 to save a few dollars on something that would end up on sale for the same price a few weeks later didn’t make sense to me. I started staying home with the kids.

This year, she did the midnight madness thing. She was out all night shopping. No thank you. It made me feel refreshed to get up at 5 for work.