Rilian Rants:

Election

2009-11-04T01:48:28Z

I haven't posted for a while, but I'm sitting watching the election results on the computer--TV is showing sitcoms. Really? Seinfeld reruns? I'm so glad I don't pay for this.

So, election results on the computer. Not enough time to play video games, but lots of downtime between precinct reports.

Here in VA it's about as expected--GOP sweep, though my local delegate race is deliciously close. (49% to 50% with 50% reporting) That was a fun election cycle to sit through.

New Jersey looks to be an entertaining night as well. It's close enough that Corzine could still win it, but it looks solid for Christi from this angle. Though I'll be excited to see how many votes Daggett can pull out. It's sad that he has no chance just because he's missing that crucial letter after his name.

Which is why I'm so enthralled by the NY-23 race. Polls haven't even closed there, but that'll be the story of the night for me, I think.

Quiz!

2009-06-02T12:32:23Z

It's been a long time since I posted a quiz, and this one was fun.

I Am A: Chaotic Good Human Cleric/Sorcerer (2nd/2nd Level)

Ability Scores:

Strength-10

Dexterity-15

Constitution-16

Intelligence-17

Wisdom-13

Charisma-11

Alignment:
Chaotic Good A chaotic good character acts as his conscience directs him with little regard for what others expect of him. He makes his own way, but he's kind and benevolent. He believes in goodness and right but has little use for laws and regulations. He hates it when people try to intimidate others and tell them what to do. He follows his own moral compass, which, although good, may not agree with that of society. Chaotic good is the best alignment you can be because it combines a good heart with a free spirit. However, chaotic good can be a dangerous alignment because it disrupts the order of society and punishes those who do well for themselves.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Primary Class:
Clerics act as intermediaries between the earthly and the divine (or infernal) worlds. A good cleric helps those in need, while an evil cleric seeks to spread his patron's vision of evil across the world. All clerics can heal wounds and bring people back from the brink of death, and powerful clerics can even raise the dead. Likewise, all clerics have authority over undead creatures, and they can turn away or even destroy these creatures. Clerics are trained in the use of simple weapons, and can use all forms of armor and shields without penalty, since armor does not interfere with the casting of divine spells. In addition to his normal complement of spells, every cleric chooses to focus on two of his deity's domains. These domains grants the cleric special powers, and give him access to spells that he might otherwise never learn. A cleric's Wisdom score should be high, since this determines the maximum spell level that he can cast.

Secondary Class:
Sorcerers are arcane spellcasters who manipulate magic energy with imagination and talent rather than studious discipline. They have no books, no mentors, no theories just raw power that they direct at will. Sorcerers know fewer spells than wizards do and acquire them more slowly, but they can cast individual spells more often and have no need to prepare their incantations ahead of time. Also unlike wizards, sorcerers cannot specialize in a school of magic. Since sorcerers gain their powers without undergoing the years of rigorous study that wizards go through, they have more time to learn fighting skills and are proficient with simple weapons. Charisma is very important for sorcerers; the higher their value in this ability, the higher the spell level they can cast.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

If you're going to take it, be warned, it's lengthy. The results therefore are pretty detailed. I'm pleased with the results. Though you can craft your own image easily enough I, as always, tried to answer the questions accurately. I'm not surprised I came out Cleric. I've been noticing a tendency towards that in my life over the past few years.

I'm just frustrated that my primary stats are so low. I've got good Constitution and Intelligence and a solid Dexterity. I should be a Mage/Thief! But no. I'm a Cleric/Sorcerer and I've got crap stats. Maybe there's some extra meaning there.

More completion

2009-05-18T12:38:22Z

So, last I posted I mentioned completing a video game. Yay!

Over the last week since then I've finished off the last few percentage points on Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga as well. That makes two games complete in two weeks! Of course, they were both a long time in the making. The system clock says I spent 28 hours all-in beating Indy. Star Wars took 83 hours 45 minutes.

That's disgusting.

Supplemental Materials

2009-05-11T18:49:03Z

I did something this weekend that I haven’t done in a long, long time. I finished a video game.

I play a lot of video games. I enjoy them, it’s a good use of time for me. An investment of time which pays off in less stress, perhaps even lower blood pressure, though with some games the opposite may actually be true. I’m sure the same could be said of golf. But despite spending a lot of my free time playing them, I rarely beat them. This is because I am a ‘casual’ gamer. There’s more to it than that, of course, but the bottom line is I play video games for fun and relaxation, not because I’m compelled to, but because they are fun.

I also do tend to suffer from a bit of OCD, though, which complicates things. With books, this isn’t an issue. Pick up a book. Read it. You’re done. There’s nothing else to it. I mean if it has one and you’re feeling particularly self-destructive you can read the introduction, the foreword, the author’s note, the glossary, the index, the endnotes and the genealogy tree, but after all of that, you’re done. The end is clearly visible, even from the first page. Video games don’t have this.

Take the game I just beat. Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures. A casual gamer title if there ever was one. A gamer whose blog I read and enjoy, and who generally respects the casual gamer still spat venom at this game for being to overtly aimed at the casual gamer. You can’t really lose, you see. If you die, say by falling off a ledge into the bottomless pit, you just re-appear a few moments later. The worst that ever happens is you lose some in-game ‘money’, which is easy to replace. You can then use that in-game money to turn on all sorts of ‘cheats’ which take away even that minimal penalty. Brute-force, you have a solution.

So, since the game can be brute forced, it shouldn’t be hard to beat it, right? And depending on your definition, it isn’t. And here’s where things get complicated. We know what it means to read a book (and it generally doesn’t include reading the introduction). We know what it means to watch a movie, and even if we’re a special features junkie, we know that we watched the movie 2 hours ago and are just enjoying some ‘extras’ now.

Video games blur this line, then blot it out, then rub sand over it. Let’s look at Lego Indiana Jones again. It allows you to replay the first three Indiana Jones movies with Lego figures. It’s a style they made very successful first with Star Wars. Each movie is broken down into 6 ‘chapters’. And then each chapter is a level in the video game. E.g. Level 1-1 is the Mayan temple Indy is raiding for the idol at the beginning of Raiders. 1-2 is romp through the Himalayan mountains after reuniting with Marion. 1-3 is the Arabian city bazaar, etc. Each level takes about 40-60 minutes to beat the first time and 30-40 minutes to beat completely each time afterwards, and 10-20 minutes to run through ignoring everything but the necessary bits. Why would you even play a level more than once? Because this is a video game!

First you play the level in ‘story’ mode, where the characters are the ones from the movie script, and you just follow along the movie. As different characters have different abilities which allow you to access different parts of levels, this means you can’t get everywhere, because the designers crafted each level to have ‘hidden’ areas which you can’t get to with the story characters. So once you’ve beat the level you can go back in ‘free play’ mode which allows you to bring in any character you’ve unlocked so far and thereby gain access to those hidden areas. It’s a clever way of adding new puzzles and replay value with relatively little extra programming time.

Each level also has collectibles. Not just the money I mentioned earlier, which is flowing fast and free, but also each level has 10 ‘artefacts’[sic] which you need to collect in order to put together a museum piece. Each level also allows you to collect parts to mail yourself a parcel. If you do, you can buy a new cheat as mentioned above. Naturally most of these 11 items per level are hidden in those extra hidden areas.

So you could conceivably play 18 levels, accumulate a handful of artifacts, maybe even a parcel or two, not to mention maybe one or two of the other secrets buried in the game, and you’re done. You played all 18 levels, you got through the story, you had your fun. Game over. You’ve finished the video game.

But not me. I’ve got that OCD going. I have to go back to each of the 18 levels and get all 10 artifacts and the parcel. Sometimes that means redoing a level a third, or even fourth time because I missed a critical piece and can’t go back. But that’s not so tedious, I can handle it. Got all 180 artifacts, mailed all 18 parcels. Now we’re done with the game, right?

Not so fast. Did you find all 5 Star Wars characters that were buried in the game code? Yes? Good job, you can unlock a special character now.

What about the museum? When you get enough of the artifacts new areas open up. Whole new levels in the museum! 3 of them to be specific. Better do those.

Did you buy all the available characters? Certainly you have enough in-game money now. Particularly with those cheats turned on. Got them all, good for you. Are we done yet?

Not quite. And this is because of my choice of system. I love having my Xbox360, but they designed it a little too well. Each player has an account they log on with that keeps their saved games separate. Very smart, but then they added to it. Games award your profile ‘points’ for accomplishing things. Most of them are trivial. You get 10 points for completing the story mode for each of the 18 levels. 180 Gamer Points, there you go Mr. I beat the game playing through once.

But for the OCD in us, there’s a total of 1000 points to get. Most of them are pretty simple. Buying all the characters, that’s a good chunk. But then there are the tedious ones. The ones that you realize you need late in the game play and have to figure out how to get. Am I even playing the video game anymore, or am I just gaming the system?

But on Sunday I finished it. The game is at 100% (one of the achievements, worth 60 Gamer Points) and I got the last achievement. There is nothing left to do. The game is finished. No one can deny this now, on any level. In a legitimate sense I beat the game some time ago, but only now can I really call it finished.

And it’s not as if Lego Indy is the criminal here. Lego Star Wars, my version at least, is even worse. It has 6 movies (36 levels), and it adds an extra replay per level. Not only do you need to collect 10 ‘canisters’ instead of artifacts, and a ‘red brick’ instead of mailing a parcel, but you have to collect 10 ‘blue canisters’ in a race against the clock. Navigate the maze of the level in under 10 minutes. Instead of 3 bonus levels, there are 6. And worse, there’s an entire collection of activities designed to get replay value by making you do the exact same thing you already did, except all at once instead of in 6 chunks. And don’t forget, it’s keeping score. Oh, and get some extra bounty hunter missions just for the heck of it.

OK, so Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga is pretty insane, no doubt. (90.9% complete). But we can’t just blame this on Lego video games. It’s prevalent throughout video games. Replay value is king, and I know hardcore gamers who blow through this kind of material. I don’t understand it.

But ultimately, the difference here is that it is a game. Not so much the designer’s looking for replay or the nature of video games, or our excessive free time as a culture. It’s the nature of games.

I mean, when was the last time you beat Go. I guess the computers finally solved Chess… at least better than any human can, or maybe ever will. Games are by their nature open-ended, that is without end. If anything, I should be complaining about actually completing one. I could always go back and play one of the levels over again. But I could also watch the movies again. Or read the same book again.

I think I will. Quicksilver is looking very nice right about now.

It's springtime

2009-03-23T16:14:28Z

A recent conversation with my wife as we are standing outside of a pizza parlor in Lynchburg:

Me: Mmm. I smell sardines.
Her: No, that's the tree. *pointing at a nearby tree in full bloom*.
Me: Why would a tree smell like sardines?!
Her: It's spring.

So, it turns out that she was more right than I was. It was a Bradford pear tree, which apparently are well known for having a smell which is most frequently described as that 'after-sex funk'. I guess that fits the general description of sardines too...

It really was quite unpleasant. Easy enough to ignore, but surprisingly strong. I tend to have difficulty with odors. This one pierced the nasal veil quite easily.

Other items from the trip: I had forgotten how much light pollution affects my night sky. Driving through midland VA, particularly just south of Orange the springtime clear sky was just littered with stars I never see anymore. Maybe some I'd never seen before at all, despite my years in the far less light-polluted Blacksburg. It was breath-taking. Not just for the sheer natural beauty, but because it's been obfuscated for so long for me. I saw constellations. I'm not sure that I could pick out what the ancients thought they saw, but I saw at least my own new ones. At home I can pick out a dipper and Orion and struggle to make sense of the rest because they are scattered so few and far between. I really wish it was something that could be displayed in picture format... because words cannot truly describe how substantial a difference there was.

I love my modern life. I like having a job that pays the bills and lets me play my video games. But there are costs associated with it, and sometimes we don't even realize they're there until we see a small dividend return of the costs not paid in the hands of someone else.

Someone from Orange visiting D.C. might look up, and if the night were clear, wonder about the lack of stars. But I don't think they would go home feeling richer for the possession of a beautiful night sky. I definitely came home feeling poorer for the lack.

Political Quiz

2009-01-22T15:46:23Z

My Political Views
I am a right social libertarian
Right: 6.22, Libertarian: 5.66

Political Spectrum Quiz

My Foreign Policy Views
Score: -4.15

Political Spectrum Quiz

My Culture War Stance
Score: -1.01

Political Spectrum Quiz

1) I think the results are pretty accurate. I consider myself a conservative libertarian, non-interventionalist, and liberally permissive. That said, I am not an anarchist, nor a neo-con. Nor am I opposed to foreign policies that require intervention. And while I'm permissive, there are certain lines that cannot be crossed. So, it matched up pretty well for me.

2) The questions were nigh-on atrocious. If they used political scientists in the creation of this quiz they need to have their degrees revoked. An example: "The state should deny women the legal right to an abortion." 5 options, along the scale of agreement with an option to enforce or mitigate an answer by saying it's more or less important. The style of question is quite popular in online quizes of this sort and the versatility is excellent, though it often confuses takers. To whit "If I agree, but then say it matters a lot, is that different or the same than if I strongly agree but only say it matters a little" The question in question is also an affront to political science. At all times, avoid biasing the subject. It's the societal version of the uncertainty principle and they just smacked you in the face. A right is something a government cannot infringe upon by nature. This is not some little qualm about a disagreement between the positive side of the question (allow abortion) vs. the negative side (deny access to abortion). The negative side is inherently seen as inferior. I'd live with that. I can't abide by them telling the subject it's a right, and then believing it doesn't affect their decision making process. "Oh, well if it's a right, then the government certainly shouldn't deny it."

3) Seriously, the questions were awful. "School science classes should teach intelligent design". As opposed to evolution? In addition to? How are we to agree with this statement without further information unless we believe evolution is fact (idiot) or believe intelligent design is a fact (also an idiot). Those are the only people who will have an understandable opinion on this statement. Evolutioners against, Designers for. In a quiz designed to pull the grey out, this is a failure.

4) One last time, these questions make me want to tear up my degree. "Government should ensure that all citizens meet a certain minimum standard of living". What minimum standard? By what measures? This is almost a meaningless question regardless of your politics. Everyone everywhere at some level believes in this, save those anarchists. For the anarcho-capitalist the minimum standard is a freely mobile society with opportunity. That is, his minimum standard is that the government stops other people from mugging him in the street. For a socialist, the standard might well be shelter, food, and a job. Even libertarians like me can fall further along the line to the 'left' than you might think. In addition to being relatively safe from mugging, I'd feel a lot better if there were a living wage, but not a minimum. How that would occur is a topic for a whole 'nother rant. But it works.

So, in conclusion, while the results are accurate, the methodology is flawed, and I am forced to wonder if the results are accurate in spite of the methodology, or because I took the quiz knowing what the outcome should be.

Icon?

2009-01-15T14:04:41Z

So... my next post was supposed to be on FOCA, but that'll have to wait.

What the freak is up with my icon? I may need to change my password but it doesn't appear I was hacked. It's just that D has been replaced with some weird Japanese anime chick. And not the good kind.

I wonder if livejournal's image database got wonked and I ended up with someone else's image with the same filename. If so, that person probably has my D. Wonder if they're as freaked as I am.

More on the life front...

2009-01-13T13:00:15Z

I guess this means my next post should be on FOCA...

In the meantime, God once again works a very strange form of good out of a bizarre and almost unclassifiable evil.

The evil is of course classifiable. That one was greed.

And it's never good for people to lose their jobs, and source of livelihood.

But if anyone ever needed to lose their job it would be those working at Planned Parenthood, and across that industry.

Brave New World

2009-01-10T19:43:41Z

I read Huxley's amazing book a short time ago, maybe a year and a half. I cannot recommend it strongly enough. The problem is that it is an adult book, and too often it's being forced upon minds that while intelligent enough to read and even understand the concepts, do not have the world view required to comprehend the issues.

Now, about a week ago, johncwright posted in his livejournal some 20 predictions for the next 50 years, carrying on a tradition in the science fiction writer's world. On the whole, it made for an interesting read, and certainly sparked a lot of discussion. Three of his predictions in particular rubbed me the wrong way, and so I commented on them myself. One of those was his prediction on healthcare.

Seeing as he is coming from a very conservative view-point, it's completely understandable that he would view nationalization of health care unfavorably. Seeing also as he's coming from a Christian, and Catholic to be specific, religious viewpoint, his life-morality issues with a number of health care choices are also understandably outside the 'mainstream' of modern medicine.

He argued that healthcare over the next 50 years would be an on the whole detriment to human life, in that we would live shorter lives and be less happy in them. It is a bold statement, and he has some rationale for them, but I disagree because on the whole preventative care has decreased in price in nominal terms, making the cost in real terms even lower. While at the same time extraordinary measures of non-preventative care have become more commonplace, allowing people to live substantially longer at greater cost. Even if the extraordinary measures are removed from the equation, the preventative measures alone, along with a moderate increase in medical technology and practice will continue to reduce the costs of medicine and increase the lifespan of people. I went so far as to boldly predict that inside of the next 50 years we might even have a preventative measure cure for cancer!

On the one hand, this is a bit of a pipe dream. Cancer is a very simple way of saying that the human body has microscopic limitations to life. And the more life happens, that is the more times our cells divide, die, slough away and are regenerated, the more likely cancer is to happen as well. Curing that is akin to curing old age, it likely won't ever happen, and certainly not within 50 years. But I'd be content with a prescriptive and specific cure for cancer. That is something that prevents cancer from starting until substantially later than it would have; or a wholesale cleanser that eradicates cancerous tissues while leaving non-cancerous ones intact, allowing life to continue--at least until the next batch. Obviously we have a number of those options, but one quantum leap in medical technology could make it much less traumatic an experience, and thus effect a 'cure' for cancer.

This is certainly not what I had in mind when I made that prediction. Neither is it something that either I, nor Mr. Wright are content with.

It makes me wonder if maybe he wasn't right.

Movies

2009-01-06T20:15:51Z

Since Katie got pregnant, I haven't had the opportunity to do many of the things we did when we were just dating.

Um... wow. Let me try that again--nothing like a train of thought post getting totally derailed.

I went out to the movies 6 times in 2008, that I recall. Twice to see each Wall-E and Iron Man, and once to go see Tropic Thunder, and once to see The Dark Knight. I may well be forgetting an instance or two. I also went to one concert, Apocalytpica at the 9:30 Club. That went poorly. And so, too, did going to the movies. These things have become harder because of the way my life has gone--not that I am complaining nor would trade, but having an unborn, and then later, born, daughter precludes some activities that I would normally enjoy partaking in. This can hardly be news to anyone. Those with children know the truth; those without must surely be able to imagine the situation. So 6 trips to the theater is for me low. In particular, since I didn't even pay for the ticket to go see Tropic Thunder, and the Dark Knight tickets were handled by a friend, but repaid those events did not feel expensive.

Over the weekend Katie and I dropped Theresa off and went to a movie. We saw The Spirit. It'd been out for a little while so the audience was not huge, but neither was it tiny. It was a small but acceptable number. The movie itself lacked. It was mostly fun, hardly good, far from terrible. The art was not unique. If this had come out before Sin City it would have been eye-popping, as it is, there wasn't anything new here. The acting was stilted. I can't tell if that's poor acting, poor direction, or intentional or some combination. And the plot was mediocre. All in all, a very passable middle of the summer movie.

The real pain, though, was the ticket prices. The local theater has upped them to $10.50 each! I was stunned, as I thought the $9 I recalled them charging during the summer was high, and here's a better than 10% increase less than a year later.

With prices like that, and other more important factors, I think my movie theater going days are essentially over. The lure of the popcorn still exists, and I'll want to see big films on big screens... but with my 46" LCD in 1080p and an upconverting DVD player, and an HD-DVD player (shut up Blu-Ray fans) and a Netflix account the staple movies can come to me just as well.

Reformat!

2009-01-01T01:16:15Z

So, over the Christmas holiday I've spent some time and reformatted my computer and am in the process of reinstalling those applications I use and wanted to reinstall. Of course, this kind of thing becomes necessary in computing because applications I no longer use have gummed up the system, or applications I still use just don't play nicely for a wide variety of reasons.

This is my first reformat/reinstall on this machine. I think I did about six on my last one, and it lasted me only about twice as long as I've had this one, so I was well overdue by my standards. One of the major problems had always been that this was something I'd planned, but never got around to. So as a result I was totally OK with the mindset, "Yeah, sure, I'll test out that program and see if it's any good--if I like it I'll keep it next time around and if I don't it's gone (completely) in the reformat. Obviously this led to some bad stuff, like ignoring the warning signs of various system instabilities, awful hack jobs and kludge fixes all because, "it'll be reformatted in a few weeks." It was an awesome display of procrastination.

But it's reformatted now. It's pretty awesome actually. The final compelling reason was I'd gotten Spore for Christmas and with a minimal desire to run up against their DRM, I decided I really needed to reformat before I installed that!

Two and a half years. That's a long time in the world of computers. Moore's law has gone off almost two full times. My hardware is still pretty spiff, but it's nowhere near as cutting edge as it was, and the relative price is way down. But it's been an even more interesting time in software apparently.

Now, I know Windows has never been particularly nice about 'control' for the end user. Microsoft wants to control everything, and then give the user the illusion of control through a couple of minor choices. I can dig that as it does simplify some things. But--my God!

So far all I have done is install the operating system (XP, quickly upgraded to SP3), my anti-virus (AVG-Free Version) and some hardware drivers, and one utility (WinPatrol) to help me keep the system clean. As a result, we're almost right back where I started from! WinPatrol is telling me about all kinds of start-up crap that the drivers are trying to pull, Windows is going nuts with the Automatic Updates, AVG isn't playing nice with anything. It's a bit of a mess.

And in the end, it's my own fault. If I would just give up that control I demand, this would all be over with. My computer would be a bit of a mess, sure. Wireless Zero would be fighting with the wireless card's drivers that I had to install in order to get Windows to even recognize that the card was installed this time. NVidia's stuff would gladly be chewing up my memory for no purpose. All sort of programs that I'm going to install would happily chug away and my computer would slow to an almost imperceptible crawl. All this despite being insanely faster than my previous computer. I really miss those days.

I'd normally take this time to argue that Linux is the way to go in the future with it's control and stability and end-user orientation. But that too has gone away. Apparently it's me that's behind the curves. Even Linux wants software to be installed 'just so' and most major distros have installers to help with that. They'll even recommend programs for the most common utilities. Do you want iTunes, or WMP or WinAmp? Obviously not those three, but the point is there. Take your pick, and the distro's installer does the rest and helps you keep it updated.

That's pretty awesome for the generic end user. "I want a program that will play MP3s, and I don't want to have to worry about keeping it updated." Done, says Linux. It has to be tremendously user-friendly.

But me, I want that control still. I want to know that I'm the one who installed the program, that I controlled exactly which features of that program are permitted to operate, that I'm the one who'll decide when to update it. Linux is of course better about all of that. You don't have to use the installers. But Windows has neither the illusion of that user-friendliness, nor any actual control anymore.

What to say?

2008-11-13T19:03:13Z

I don't think there's much more I could say.

But of course there's more to say. First, that apparently, I'm way behind the times. My wife has already posted this on LJ.

Second that this is but a mere glimmer of her cuteness. As you bask now, in a digital shadow of the whole; I live with the Platonian reality. It is staggering.

Third, she's not quite three months now. And she's teething. Sheesh. I would have picked something else to display her prodigy-ness, I think.

The joys of pregnancy

2008-05-06T18:29:07Z

I haven't posted on this topic yet. I wonder why that is. Certainly in the first bit it was intentional. We weren't telling people. Too much can go wrong, particularly with a first pregnancy. So Katie wanted it kept quiet, and I was more than happy to go along.

Now, though, it's common knowledge. And yet I'm still not talking about it much. Part of it is probably that I'm apprehensive about the future of this. It's a new experience which I know will be incredibly huge. More complicated than anything I've ever done before, more tiring too. It's easier to just slink away and mostly forget it for a few hours at a time.

But the time inevitably comes again when I recall it, or am forced to recall it. And don't get my tone wrong here, it's a wonderful thing, and I hope to demonstrate that by the end, but as to why I'm not writing about it... I'm also stressed by it.

I still have secrets to hide. My father has made it known that he would prefer not to know the gender of the child until birth. However, at the sonogram we tried to obtain the most complete information we could, so we have a good idea, though these things are never certain. And then there are other factors as well.

In many ways, the timing was good, in most ways the timing was terrible. We really did not expect it to happen this quickly. Inside the first year, certainly a possibility, but inside the first month? And as a result, I'm caught financially unprepared. I've been very fortunate that insurance has covered so much of our prenatal expenses. And medically, expenses will continue to be fairly minimal, but theres's about to be a host of new expenses I can't even fathom, even at this date. So, all my plans to get Katie and I into a better financial shape have been delayed. That also seems inaccurate. As much as they have been delayed, it is more that the impetus behind them has been accelerated. The actual progress is moving at the same rate as ever. Hurrah for the fiscal stiumuls package!

But what of the actual experience? The joy of the event, the magic. Well... frankly, it's not there. Pregnancy means hormones. Hormones mean potential mood swings. My primary goal there is to keep Katie as happy as possible during the process because I'm primordially convinced that her mood during gestation will impact the baby's overal demenor substantially. Throw in the horrible physical difficulties. Aches and pains, nausea, sleepless nights... and when Katie has these, I have them. Even the nausea. I'm not sure how that works. We called it sympathetic morning sickness.

There are other issues too, which I won't go into, but in short the actual process is a burden, not a joy. It could be a lot worse, certainly. Katie's morning sickness was mild, I am led to believe. Her mood has been quite excellent in most cases, and the few times she's snapped my head off, I probably deserved it. The household chaos is under control. But in the end, the pregnancy has not been 'fun'.

But last night I lay my head upon Katie's belly to listen to the swooshing and gurgling--mostly from Katie's digestive system I'm sure, but in the hopes of catching a hint of my child's early life.

Simi apparently didn't like being squished by my big fat head, so I got punched. That was amazing.

So--the pregnancy is full of little bits like this. And I'm sure they'll become more numerous, and I'll recall them better months from now. And these growing pains will fade from memory... particularly once I can hold Simi in my arms.

The joy of pregnancy for me is the birth.

Intolerable Impatience

2008-05-02T15:59:00Z

There is so much going on in life that I am utterly impatient to have... progress. It’s not even that I necessarily want it to end, or get to the proper teleological endpoint. It just has to get moving already!

Of course, it is not that things are not moving; but rather that they are moving very slowly. I thought I knew patience. But I have learned that the patience I know is very different from the patience I lack for these issues. I am proficient in patience when it comes to things in my own life. I can wait handily for a half hour, or a day, or a week as need be to perform some fun task. “Oh, I can’t play Titan Quest tonight, I need to clean.” It is perfectly reasonable. Similarly I am, I believe, sufficiently patient with my immediate neighbors. My friends, colleagues and acquaintances. “No, no. Take your time. It’s more important to be right than quick.” These are both over-simplifications of course, but having lived with my parents, and now having lived with my wife, though more having dated my wife, I am patient. And I am grateful for the patience I have learned from them because it serves me well almost every day.

But then there are these major shifts in life which move at glacial pace. Let me look at two financial ones briefly as an example:

1) The overall economy. It is my firm personal opinion that we are en route to a particularly long/deep recession. The financial implements of doom and torture lined up against us are more intense and less well understood than I think most people want to admit. There has been sufficient hyperbole comparing this time to the time coming up to right before the Great Depression. Most of that, hyperbolic as it was, has merit. I cannot even say “it is widely agreed that the primary cause of the Great Depression was the over-extension and use of credit” because it isn’t. Certainly a lot of people think so, and there’s historical evidence to suggest it, but it is also argued that the Federal Reserve Board essentially created the Great Depression through its monetary policy at that time. These people also tend to like to argue about whether it was World War II or FDR’s New Deal that ended the Great Depression. In the end, all four groups are wrong, because no one factor forms the basis for such a complex beast as an entire ecosystem of economics. So before I get too far off a digression, here, let me just restate, it is my personal opinion that we are coming up on a particularly harsh recession.

This does not bother me much. It is apparently not bothering the majority of Americans, either. Recent polls show they are perhaps even more pessimistic than I am about the immediate-term. The bulk of Americans believe we are already in a recession. Not according to official figures yet. First quarter growth was 0.6%. Not even the first quarter of declining growth. We can’t be in an official recession until at least September. That’s the problem with stupid definitions, I guess. A recession does not bother me for many reasons. The primary one is that my job is secure. I am in a recession-proof business catering to another recession-proof business which caters to yet another recession-proof business, and if any of those business cares to continue on: I remain employed. Provided I stay here. The secondary one is that in a recession, there is opportunity. Classic capitalist economics says that a recession occurs because of malinvestments. The recession clears out those malinvestments and redistributes the capital to new and properly innovative investments: hence opportunity. As long as I remain convinced that I am an above average specimen I must also embrace this kind of change because it allows me to exert my superiority and leverage it into beneficial circumstances. This is absolutely all about me seeing the chance to squish my fellow man and take what is his for myself in a legal and moral fashion.

As a result, I am impatient for this change to occur. If such change is to allow me to do these things, then let it hurry up and come! But money does move at a glacial pace. The stock market seems to move so fast, but it moves incredibly slowly. So incredibly slowly. Warren Buffet was quoted as saying something along the lines of “Wealth transfers itself from the impatient to the patient”. It is very easy to see things are going poorly and try to back that horse, but if you do it wrong and then realize you’re wrong and back out, you find yourself in very bad positions. It’s ruthless, but from the other side when you’re in the superior position you have to wring it out for all it’s worth.

The truth of the matter is of course that there is opportunity every day in this slow-moving dance towards a known target. Every day bounces around a little, perhaps even completely unexpectedly. But the macro beats the micro in the long-run. So, patience. Find the short-term opportunities and ride them into long-term ones.

2) The housing market. It is now widely acknowledge that there was a national housing price bubble. Getting people to go that far even a year ago was difficult. And still today there are people who claim that the bubble is not as bubbly as everyone thinks… but they’ve at least all agreed to use the terminology.

If the stock market moves glacially, the housing market moves at a pace roughly equivalent to a snail marching backwards while getting its mucus frozen to that glacier. There is another saying “Prices are sticky on the downside”. The rationale behind that is pure psychology. “Bob, my neighbor, sold his house for a million dollars. With prices going up I should get a million and change. But no one’s offering to buy my house at a million and change. Or a million. Well, I’m certainly not going to go less than a million!” In addition to the other wonderful factors like people not having cash on hand to cover gaps down in equity caused by depreciating values. The exacerbation of that effect caused by the prevalence of $0 down house loans and the other gimmicks, though I am convinced the $0 down loan was the biggest culprit, is pronounced. Basically anyone who bought a house in the past three years with a $0 down loan is underwater. If they have to sell because of job loss, job transfer, death, family commitments, anything that can make a person need to move—they have to bring money to the table. Most people can’t, as they live paycheck to paycheck. Oh, they could keep up with the mortgage OK, that was budgeted into the “howmuchamonth”. But people have no safety net anymore. Price appreciation was guaranteed. All of this is ignoring Realtor commissions, and other closing costs. So you get short sales and the banks have to eat the loss or risk getting a depreciating asset on their books in the form of a foreclosed house.

And frankly, that’s the only thing that’s causing any movement in the housing prices at all, aside from builders who built on speculation trying to keep some bit of cash flow. In Prince William County where I live there were over 3000 foreclosures in the first quarter of 2008. Up from slightly over a thousand in all of 2007, coming close to a 1200% increase YOY. Almost every house I’ve been watching go up for sale has been a short-sale where the lending back is taking a hit in order to get the deal done, or a foreclosure.

Foreclosures always sell for less. There’s the real risk of damage to the property during the process. Previous ‘owners’ who clearly didn’t own enough of the house to make it work can be vindictive and strip out appliances, piping, wires, or just do vandalism on the way out. And even if not, the houses tend to sit vacant for a month to six before the bank gets far enough along in its paperwork to actually try selling it. A vacant house, even without vandalism, is a ripe target for disasters to occur. Nature reclaims her own, and that still holds true in a suburb.

The absolutely startling thing though is that even with the massive price reductions I’m seeing…

a) Across the street from where my parents live (in the same county) a house went through the fore sale, short sale, foreclosure dance. The difference between the initial for sale price and the current asking price on the foreclosed property: -48%. Hundreds of thousands of dollars lost by someone. And it’s not even close to the cheapest house on the block. It sits vacant and unrepresented. No one comes by to be shown the property or to make an offer.
b) In my neighborhood of townhomes a house went immediately to the short-sale route. Came on the market at what I thought was quite reasonable given the other asking prices in the neighborhood. No takers, so after two weeks they knock $50,000 of the asking price. That’s a huge chop, both in real dollars and in percentages. A month and a half later it’s still for sale at the reduced price. The bank may be dragging its feet, sure, but the fact remains, it’s not selling.
c) New today, early 1980s pricing spotted in my county. Almost certainly a gimmick being used by the bank that now owns the property to try and get any interest in the property going. They did this before near where I live. A single family home was reduced to prices unthinkable for the past 15 years. They did spark interest, and generated more than one bid, so it was bid back up in price. But when it finally sold, it was for about $200,000 less than what the bank ‘paid’ for the house when they foreclosed.

The simple fact is that despite numbers showing up in the Washington Post’s local section listing tax records for sold homes, the story on the ground is not bearing that out. Houses here are not selling at any price. This is not a slow-moving market, this is the absence of a market.

That is what I am impatient about. Maybe more of me than I want to admit is wishing for a bottom already so that we can get back to the ‘good old times’ and my retirement dreams will come true. But I know we have a long way to go before we get close to that bottom. And that feeds my impatience because I want it all to hurry up and get over with. Let’s get the pain out of the way. Rip off the bandaid.

But the shock is too much to bear. So we go slowly. And I wait. Impatiently.

The other woman

2008-04-23T15:13:49Z

So, I've started yet another blog. Why? I never really even post to this one, right?

Well, I started the other because it's an experiment in writing, and dedicated to a single subject, whereas this is sporadic musings on anything with no deadline at all. The other blog will be posted to at least weekly. This one--maybe not even yearly.

So, you can see the need for this. It's not that this blog is insufficient, it's that I think I can be so much more.

But don't worry, we can still be friends.

Kaiser Soze!

2008-04-15T22:33:45Z

So I break the hiatus with one of these? It had better be awesome.


	Xpovos was the biggest gangster since Al Capone.
	... afterward, Xpovos walked across the desert for no reason.
	'How will you be remembered in history books?' at QuizGalaxy.com

It's been 10 months since you looked at me.

2008-04-13T21:33:47Z

Oops.

To be fair to myself, it's not like I've not had good reason. It's been a busy time. Sure, I've had plenty of good stuff to talk about, but never any time to talk!

So, you're left with the highlight reel version, and what fun is that? I mean, at least with sports highlights, they are highlights. This is just a list of things that has happened to me in the past almost year.

Two vacations, though it doesn't feel like it. One to Florida, the other the honeymoon a cruise to the Bahamas.

Got married without a hitch, except the one that was supposed to happen.

Honeymooned abroad without a passport. It's not that I don't have a passport, it's just that something has to go horribly wrong on the honeymoon, so apparently I subconsciously decided it should be the passport. Worked out well, actually.

Successfully integrated two independent finances into one and somewhat less successfully integrated two independent piles of modern shit into one. "Honey, where's my ---?" "Uhm? In a box?"

Found out I'm going to be a father. That took far less time than I expected.

Turned 27. I completely missed my anual birthday post. WTF!

Got much better at Magic. Gave up video games for Lent. And watched the first two seasons of both Babylon 5 (again, as though for the first time) and Boston Legal.

Got another raise at work. Huzzah! Keep on loving my performance. I only need to double my salary... again. Rough estimate.

If you think that there's more to one of these, you'd be absolutely right. I could have, and in a lot of senses probably should have written an entry on pretty much all of these. But I didn't, and I'm sure not going to start now.

But who knows, I may actually post on something new that happens to me when it happens, for a change.

Gone and done bitten off more than I can chew?

2007-06-14T01:12:07Z

So, this isn't 'news' to most of you, I'm sure, because I've mentioned it to a number of you as in the works, but yesterday I made it all official-like and proposed to Katie. She said yes.

We'll tentatively be getting married in December, more details to come as they become concrete.

Of course, this means I'm now looking for groomsmen. So, gents. Start dodging my phone calls, etc.

Oops.

2007-03-02T01:17:49Z

Your Scholastic Strength Is Deep Thinking

You aren't afraid to delve head first into a difficult subject, with mastery as your goal.
You are talented at adapting, motivating others, managing resources, and analyzing risk.

You should major in:

Philosophy
Music
Theology
Art
History
Foreign language

What Should You Major In?

The one philosophy class I took I did well in, but I got strange looks from pretty much everyone and was rather bored most of the time. Maybe I should have become a Jesuit.

Interview with a Xpovos

2007-02-28T20:40:12Z

THE RULES:
1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."
2. I respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better!
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

As interviewed by nemomori.

1. What is your dream job and what steps are you doing to secure it?
2. Which of our freedoms (freedom of press, to assemble, of religion) do you feel is most important in modern society and which do you feel is most often taken for granted?
3. What is the biggest regret you've ever had?
4. At what moment in your life were you the proudest of yourself and why that moment above all the others?
5. Do you feel you are going to be remembered after you die, and if so what would you like your legacy to be?

Answers are below the cut, as they're likely to be long. I do so like to listen to myself type.

1) I have no freaking clue. I love Office Space. It's a great movie and an excellent commentary on being completely without a source of navigation in terms of careers. I think that one of the major impediments to my career is simply that I'm above average at pretty much everything. Put me into any role and I will succeed or excel. So, since I'm pretty good at everything, I should either pick the job the pays the best or the one that I love. Since I'm all about practical, I'm in the one that pays the best right now, and will likely stay there until something comes along that pays better. If I'm going to be a wage slave, I might as well admit it and get the best I can for the deal. However, this question is about 'dreams'. I don't so much have dreams, as I have goals. And those goals have nothing to do with a job. Again, with the Office Space: if I had a million dollars, I wouldn't do a damn thing. Shit, I don't need a million dollars to do nothing. I've got a cousin, hasn't got a dime, doesn't do jack all day. I look at how I spend my free time. I program a little, I read a lot, on vacations I'll tend to relax and have fun, I'll go to amusement parks, or movies, or even Lazer-Quest, I play video games, I listen to music. None of these things, except the programming is a job. And I don't kid myself. I've gotten a lot better in the past three years, but my programming is still piss-poor. It just gets the job done for the tasks I want. After many more hours than a half-way competent programmer would have needed. But I do it because I like the results and it gives me a feel of a DIY kind-of-guy without the greasy hands or sore back. So back to those goals again: I want a house, I want enough money to support myself and any family I might have, I want my cats, and I want a quality of life not too dissimilar from what I'm used to. Therefore, my dream job is one that provides me with all of those things. It's the one that pays me the most. And then, it's the one that paid me enough so that I can stop working once I've got my nut of "forget you" money. What's my job then? I won't have one. I'll do lots of stuff, but none of it will be work. What am I doing to secure it? I'm stocking as much away into retirement plans as I possibly can, I'm putting lots and lots into short-term savings plans. I'm living on a shoe-string budget when I could at least be eating real spaghetti. End result: more money later and no job, dream or otherwise.

2) I think freedom of the press remains the most important, particularly as we enter into the digital age headlong. The 'blogosphere' may be mostly self-congratulating back-slappers, but they serve a purpose, which is that the concept of citizen-journalism is gone from the main-stream media. As is all of local coverage, and increasingly, all of foreign coverage, leaving us with just the national 24-hour news cycle. It's important that it works like that, but having real information presented on different topics available in public forums like that, particularly ones that are free to access except for your ISP fees is the most critical for maintaining freedom into the future. If the internet press wasn't free, I could see all freedoms quickly becoming dominated by a government, or many governments. While it would be fun to talk here about the freedom from an institutionalized religion, I honestly think that the right that people forget about most is the freedom to assemble. I live close to D.C. so I usually know when people are assembling en masse. For some reason they think they have to assemble here to be heard... regardless the most recent example I can recall was a major anti-war demonstration. All sorts of celebrities showed up and demanded an escape from Iraq. This got a fair bit of media attention. However, there was also a (much) smaller counter-protest. They'd found out about the protest, and in protest of the protest more than being in favor of the war, they showed up to have their say too. Naturally, as with any heated debate, things got a little ugly at times, and the anti-war assemblers were quite nasty to the 'pro-war' assemblers. But they had every right to be there. The police were involved to ensure that there was no provocation, no incitement to rioting. With relatively few exceptions the anti-war movement assemblers were the aggressive ones. Irony? It's important that we let everyone who has an opinion feel safe to express it, even in coming out and attempting to beard the lion in its den. And that's just the national level, where it is still easily forgotten. Let us not forget that the initial intention was to make sure that the Founding Fathers could all get together at the pub some nights and talk revolution because they were disgruntled without having the red shirts banging in and throwing folks in jail for seditious talk. These days it's hard enough to find a pub, let alone go to one where you can talk without having the wife send the dogs after you, but the analogy grows weak. We need to be able to move about and get together with people to discuss our grievances and be a community and a society. We do that more online these days, at least I do. And again, I'm touching on the same issue. Being able to congregate online is just as important as being able to publish my blog, because in the end, they're both about the same thing. Being able to speak my piece in peace.

3) Oh, God. Now that is an ugly question to ask. I have so many to choose from. Perhaps oddly, some of the things in my life that I regret the most are not things I had any choice in. Funny how that works. So I'll limit this to simply my own choices. In that event, then, I think my single biggest regret would be pursuing Sarah. It is not that it was a poor decision. It is more that it was poorly executed at every step of the way, and in the end, actually damaged things later on that really shouldn't have been. Why do I regret it? Because I should have known better that things in reality are not as they are in fantasy, e.g. novels. I filled my head with romantic nonsense, and it really bit me in the ass there, and I should have known better. Also, the pain that it caused, not just me, and the stress it has caused so many people for years afterwards--just not worth it, and in the end, regrettable.

4) I guess it should have been graduating from college, as that is arguably the most impressive thing I've done so far, but that didn't really make me feel proud. Relieved is the better word. Five years and two degrees later it was all over. I can only think of one moment of 'pride', really. I mean there were moments were I won a game or something, e.g. the Redskins overcoming the Chargers, an epic I posted about in this journal, but those do not count, because the pride, though real is for a fake thing. The real pride for a real event was working my 'first' job. It wasn't a good job. It was peeling labels off of bottles at a factory 50 miles away from my house. The commute was understandably atrocious. Took me two to two and half hours to get to work and about three to get home. Working 8 hours plus the half hour mandatory lunch for $10 an hour with no benefits and no real hope of getting benefits. Oh, yeah, and the bottles contained biohazards. Why did this, of all things make me proud? I'd gotten a job, on my own merits, and I was doing well at it, and would impress people and as a result move up. The paycheck I earned was my own, and won. And I wasn't at home sitting in front of my computer composing another version of the resume to send to another opportunity that wouldn't respond, let alone hire me. Going from unemployed to employed, even in a miserable job made a real and instantaneous difference in my perspective. Working that job was also the only time I have met a co-worker who I did not get along with.

5) If I were to die tomorrow, I would be remembered for a while, but slowly forgotten. If I am to be remembered long after my death, it will have to be for something else entirely, not the life I am living right now. I'm not entirely convinced I want to be remembered forever. However, I can't help the I guess very human desire to do something to etch this world and make it for the better. Rolling shopping carts out of the parking lot and picking up trash makes the world around me a little better, but to be able to do something on a grand scale to make the world better? That's worthwhile. And it would make me remembered after I die, too. Particularly if people didn't agree that it made the world better. I'll have a lot more free time for that kind of stuff once I get my dream job.

Quizzles

2007-02-20T21:47:27Z

Take the Villain quiz.

Take the Role-Playing Stereotype quiz.

I am hugely amused by that.

Which File Extension are You?

Oooo-k

Maus

2007-02-16T01:00:31Z

I'm done with mice.

I've always prefered navigating with my keyboard. I type faster than I can 'drag and click' anyway. And that was true even before I became a moderately proficient typist. Now it's just insane. And practice has taught me that I can do just about anything with a mouse.

However, I have to admit that having a GUI is a good thing, and that there are sometimes when I just want to have a pointing device that works. So the fact that this mouse has gunked up on me and totally stopped responding in less than two years has me up in arms.

From now on, I am making a point of this. No more mice. I'll use them at work, or at another person's terminal.

But my terminals will henceforth and forever be trackballs.

Update?

2007-02-02T18:14:13Z

For those who I have not yet told, you're probably not interested but, here it is anyway.

In April, VNV Nation releases a new album, and will have a U.S. tour to coincide. 4-12 they will be in D.C. 4-13 they will be in Philly.a 4-14 they will be in N.Y.C. That is a Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Katie and I will be at all three shows.

If you are at all interested in going, particularly to the D.C. or Philly show, I recommend buying tickets early. The 9:30 club will likely sell out and the Troc definitely will.

Other news:
Jaguars are 9-3;
I am back to 'one' job;
The next ~10 months are going to be particularly insane;
Probably a lot more than that, but I'm wiped.

Fat Charlie Nancy

2007-01-25T13:26:22Z

So I finished Anansi Boys, and per Aparna's request, I am making my final comments known. The most overwhelming aspecet is that I really want to go back and read American Gods more now than ever.

Ultimately I thought that it was an imperfect novel, and that it just didn't flow as well as I'd hoped. There are moments in the novel that just jut out like a sore thumb and made me wonder if it was still the same novel. In particular the more violent episodes. While this had a real artistic point, I found the transition so rough as to be distracting.

It is far and away better than I would give it credit for just based on plot. As I mentioned earlier, it is a little cliched at times. The basis of the plot is that a man meets his estranged brother who is a 'free spirit' type and causes much misadventure. The roots dig right back to the earliest stories, as well it should based on everything else being discussed in Anansi Boys.

And of course the ending is a little too pat, again all too fitting. It is very hard to fault a book when every fault you can think of was done intentionally with artistic merit.

Statistics

2007-01-24T01:41:58Z

I want to win the lottery. I mean, who doesn't want the free money. On the plus side, I figured that being somewhat smarter than average and gifted with numbers and statistics I could find any irregularities in the lottery system and then use it to my advantage.

The short answer is that I couldn't. And I was impressed by this sufficiently that I felt a need to post about it.

The first step was to collect good data on all the valid drawings to date. There have been 165 Mega Millions drawings under the current system as of this posting. The 166th will be tonight. 165 drawings of 5 balls ranged 1-56 (plus 165 drawings of one ball ranged 1-42) gives a mathematical average per ball drawing number of about 14.7. Obviously some have been drawn more, others less. Statistics tells us that in a random sampling the balls will follow a pattern, known as a Gaussian curve, which has interesting mathematical properties. One of those properties is that 95% of the random sampling will occur within the boundaries of +/- 2 sigma. Uh oh... let me back up.

Everyone knows average. Most people understand standard deviation. In case you don't, here's the short version. Every sample has a difference from the average. Now take the average of the differences of the average. That's the average difference or 'standard' deviation. With this sample, the standard deviation from the mandatory average of 14.7 was about 3.13 which means that our two critical points of 1 standard deviation (one sigma) and two sigma were 8.4-11.6-14.7-17.8-21.0.

Recall, I said that 95% of the samples should fall between +/- 2 sigma. Therefore 95% of the balls pulled frequency counts should be between 8.4 and 21. There is one ball that has been pulled 8 times (below -2 sigma)and three balls that have been pulled more than 21 times (above 2 sigma) there is also one ball at each of the two sigma points. Due to some rounding errors, and the necessity of working with whole numbers for frequency of draws, the gaussian is not perfect, nor would I really expect it to be even in ideal circumstances. The most strange and obvious thing about predicting randomness is that it remains random.

Therefore there are between 4 and 6 balls outside of the two-sigma range for the 5 ball pick set. How does this compare to our 95% confidence? Well, 95% of 56 balls is 53.2 balls. So having 4 outside is -slightly- above expected and having 6 outside is more unusual.

The other useful feature of the gaussian curve that I'm going to discuss today is the one-sigma position. We also know the confidence level that a certain number of draw frequencies will appear within this range. 68% of the draw frequencies will appear inside of one sigma in the event of a gaussian distribution. 33 balls were definitely within the one-sigma range with an additional 5 close enough to the range to warrant calculations due to rounding error. 33/56 = 58.9%. Substantially lower than expected. 38/56 = 67.8%. MUCH closer.

Results: with 165 draws down, it's clear to me that the Mega Millions lottery is sufficiently random to prevent mathematical tampering from people like me. I may still play the lottery. I may even play my 'least likely' candidates. As a note to that end: 25 had been pulled 24 times, enough to warrant a 2.99 sigma. 7 was pulled 23 times and gets a 2.64 sigma. Though these are not statistically significant according to my gaussian test, it's still unusually high. But then again, in any distribution kept long enough, or with sufficient data you'll get very high sigma results. After all, there is a reason I call professional athletes 6-sigma.

Hey, who knows. Maybe 7, 14, 25, 36, 52 and the mystical Mega 4 are my lucky numbers...