The Rich get Richer and the poor get... no more damn Scooby snacks!

One of these initiatives will include discontinuing the snacks and refreshments historically provided by Prodigy. I know you all understand that drastic times calls for drastic measures and will support this initiative."
- from a leaked internal memo

I don't know how much the CEO of Prodigy makes, but my guess is it's in the millions of dollars a year.

A few months ago, I read an article about how the CEO of E-Trade's salary and compensation totaled over $100 million. That's surely nauseating enough... and made even more barf-inducing when you realize that, at least as of the time of the article, E-Trade isn't even profitable!

Compare these obscene amounts of money with the moolah likely required to provide a modicum of snacks for a few hundred or even thousand people. For instance, a super-large pretzel bag at Costco: $2.39. $100 million bucks... that's a lot of pretzels for hungry and often probably overworked employees.

$2.39 * a hundred or two a month would undoubtedly be a tiny tiny sliver of an executive's salary. But taking away that seemingly silly perk probably does a hell of a lot more than $2.39*x damage to a company's morale.

Those that know me are probably chuckling at least a bit, since I'm widely known as a super-snacker... someone indeed obsessed with food and eating overall (in, I think, a good way :-). But I hope my main point here is still taken seriously:

In this age when our politicians are hypocritically railing against "abuses" in our system, no one is daring to raise a peep about how maybe, just possibly we have an more serious problem: leaders of even unprofitable companies are making hundreds of millions of dollars a year while the same companies and even sometimes their employees can barely afford ramen noodles.

It isn't this way in other countries, at least not in most European countries I know of. I firmly believe that there'd be a huge public outcry in France, for instance, if a company instituted significant cutbacks or layoffs and the CEO was still making more than 100x what the rank and file people of the country earned.

I'm not a communist. I believe in hard work and bootstrapping and the overall American Dream and so on. But I think that something's gotten way out of (invisible) hand here with our economic and social systems, and I also think that something needs to change. I wish I knew how.

Happiness is...

• Having one of my friends give me three separate bear hugs and remind me how much I've been missed and how much I'm loved
  
• Getting an unexpected IM from an amazing Russian girl that I met in Sweden
  
• Seeing actual blue sky and sunshine outside in my usually foggy neighborhood
  
• Listening to really awesome a cappella on a free Live365 station
  
• Hearing the knock at the door from the FedEx guy bringing my Treo

Sometimes everything goes wrong. But sometimes everything goes right. :-)

"Security" that's not so sharp

I recently came back from a 5 week trip in which I took nearly a dozen flights to, from, and around Europe. Almost all of my travel was in the blissfully comfy Business Class section of the planes for the first time in my life, and amidst all the friendly service and generally tasty food, one thing stood out:

Plastic knives.

Okay, so I don't mean to sound insensitive to the victims of 9/11 or National Security yadda yadda and Mr. Ashcroft if you're reading this please don't arrest me, but this is one of the most friggin' stupid things I've ever seen.

Confiscating eyebrow tweezers from my younger sister at the airport security checkpoint ranks up there, too. But I digress.

Anyway, I guess no one stopped to think that, gee, if someone is hell bent on hijacking a plane, a metal fork is likely to do just as much if not more damage. Or how about broken shards from the wine glasses? And as they (sort of said) in A Christmas Carol, watch out for those metal spoons, 'cause they'll gouge your eyes out!

Why do we have such a history in this country of taking not only the easy way out, but the absolutely moronic dumb-as-rocks way out when faced with real problems? In fairness, even Air France dumbly offered the same surprisingly sharp plastic knives, but I'm guessing that none of this silliness would have happened without American gov't/airline decrees.

Am I the only person to be so annoyed by this symptom of knee-jerk stupidity?

No Beating around the Bush

"The Bush polls have to be outrageously misleading. Someone suggested that most people called by pollsters simply hang up on them and wondered if there was a way to gauge their political views! I don't know about that, but I can't remember the last time I met anyone who can even stand the guy. Maybe I need to get out more. "
- FarrFeed, July 29, 2002

I'm almost embarrassed to be letting my site get so blatantly political already, but the bluntness in the quote really resonated with me.

This is especially the case since during my recent vacation in Europe, I was on the receiving end of unbelievable amount of Bush-related teasing... and even more than that, Bush-related sympathy. People -- some of whom I barely knew -- seemed almost eager to offer me their condolences for living with Bush in the White House. "Aren't you [Americans] angry about it? I mean, that he wasn't really elected...?" is the sort of question I got more than once.

More than anything, my conversations with people from Paris to Tallinn (Estonia) confirmed my worst fears: In every conversation where the topic of Bush was brought up, it was made clear to me that Europeans think Bush is both an idiot and frustratingly an impediment towards world peace and understanding. So he's not just seen as a clueless moron, but a dangerously obstructionist one.

I'm used to getting commentary on U.S. politics when I travel, since I was in Europe several times during Clinton's, uh, escapades. But at least then, I got more jokes than sympathy about our American President. Since he famously "couldn't keep his trousers zipped," I think my European friends felt right at home, with the only difference between Clinton and their various leaders being that the prudish Americans were freaking out about his behavior. And on top of that, Clinton was viewed -- by my European friends at least -- as an undisciplined but at least highly intelligent and generally competent leader, especially in the sense of global awareness and understanding. He may have been distracted, but he wasn't stupid.

If only we could say the same about our current leader.

"Would you like to SuperSize that, sir?"

"Drivezilla" breathes fire at 200GB. Drive maker Western Digital
begins shipping a new drive with up to 200GB of capacity--a whopping 80GB more
than found in most high-end consumer PCs. [CNET
News.com]

200 GIGABYTES!  200,000 megabytes.  As Keanu would say: WHOOOA. 

And how the HECK do you back something like that up?  Buy a 210 gig drive?
Whew!  Either way, that's a lot of MP3's porn scholarly reports!

New Handspring Treo 180 and T-Mobile / Voicestream service

EDIT on 3/12/2003: Just discovered that the Treo 180 has been discontinued, so the links below do not work.

---

Though I had sadly a bunch of valuable stuff stolen in Estonia, two of the
replaceable things that I have been, well, eager to replace are my cell phone
and PDA (Palm Pilot).

My new cell phone and plan: Handspring Treo 180 and T-Mobile /
Voicestream service

After stumbling upon the

amazon.com wireless section and noting an amazing after-rebate price of $149
for the

Handspring Treo 180 (phone + PDA), I had to grab it :-)  I even shelled out
an extra $11 or so to get expedited 2 day shipping... so I should get the phone
on Wednesday.

My experiences so far with T-Mobile / Voicestream

This, of course, hasn't stopped the relevant wireless carrier -- T-Mobile /
Voicestream -- from overeagerly activating my account and starting the clock on
my monthly bill even before Amazon shipped the darn thing!  Sheesh. 
And adding insult to injury, when I received a "we've shipped your phone" e-mail
from Amazon today, I noticed that my new phone number listed was in the 514 area
code.  San Francisco, where I live, has a *415* area code.  What the heck?  Do
they have folks manually entering in area codes or something?  Sheesh!

• I placed a call to the number listed on the e-mail.  That, however, was
  the ACTIVATION number; I had to call the customer service number.  Okay.


• I called the cs number, waited for thankfully not-too-long, and spoke with
  a polite but unsurprisingly not-all-that-informed rep.  She changed my calling
  plan with no probs, and also assigned me a new number without much hassle. 
  But when it came time to adjust my billing period... whoops!


• Apparently, their computers can't assign a billing period that goes from
  the first of a month to the end of the month.  So I had to accept a billing
  period from the 2ND of the month to the 1st of the next month.  Oh well, I
  guess that's not too painful.


• And to their credit, I was issued an one-time extra 100 anytime minutes to
  make up for the early billing (before my phone arrives).

What I get from T-Mobile / Voicestream (my calling plan)

So now I'm on their T-Zone Talk and Text $29.95 plan, which includes 300
anytime minutes, unlimited weekend minutes, 1 meg of T-zone (limited "internet")
access, 300 text messages (additional at 5 cents per), and no extra charge for
long distance or nationwide roaming.  So on the weekends, I can yack it up with
friends across the country for free.  Of course, with
BigZoo offering 2.9 cent-per-minute long
distance on my landline and with my Treo having only an expected battery life of
2.5 hours talking-at-a-time, that's not SO exciting, but oh well :-)

To be continued...

I'll keep you posted on how stuff goes when I get my Treo and try out the
wireless service; hopefully the reception is decent in SF, and hopefully my
friends get far-fewer "all circuits busy" messages when they try to reach me.

Traveling, pictures, and memories

If you don't have pictures to remember your travels, did they really happen?

While we all would initially no doubt insist that we travel for the "experience," we should also ask ourselves to what extent we travel to "collect" things... trinkets, pictures, etc. Without those things, what do we really have left? When the memories fade, what then?

I came to this hard realization after getting my backpack stolen while on a 5-week Europe trip...

... losing not only my camera and hundreds of dollars of other stuff, but also my travel journal and *400 pictures*. And of course, I hadn't looked into travel insurance with my Amex card, which I new realize was a mere $22 for $5,000 in insurance. Argh.

400 pictures. Gone. Poof. Part of me felt so resigned as to almost think, okay, trip's over, let's go home. Beautiful scenery? Why bother. Captivating architecture? Unless *I* capture it, why not just buy a book and save the time and money?

Of course, I didn't cut my trip short, and I went on to have a truly wonderful vacation. But there is (and clearly was) still that nagging sadness of a loss... a deep, depressing loss far beyond what one gets after having a wallet pickpocketed or a car stereo pilfered. A part of my EXPERIENCES, a part of ME was taken, and from the type of place (a youth hostel) where I've historically felt carefree, at-ease, safe.

And throughout the rest of my trip, I kept having these frustrating and reoccurring reminders of "oh, this'd look beautiful on film" which, in a deeper sense meant, "wow, by capturing this, I can communicate to my friends, family, and future-self about what this trip really MEANT to me."

But that's bull, really, when you get right down to it. 20 years later, that beautiful scene will have only the meaning I assign to it, not really transferrable to others. And the 15 seconds I spent taking that picture could have perhaps been spent talking, listening, touching, smelling, resting, dreaming, planning, doing. Those 15 seconds add up. And who really loves a detached shutterbug anyway?

Three weeks with no camera. No pictures. Not even from a cheapo disposable camera. Beautiful places, beautiful people, beautiful memories. All mine.

I'm still sad, but now I'm sad and confused. Why take pictures anyway? Such a fuss to organize, annotate, publish, and so on. What does it mean in the end?

Aren't my travels worth it for the moment?

But damn, I still want a new camera. I want my pictures back. And I want the wistful sadness to go away. It was easier being an unrepentant and happy shutterbug.

A smart alternative to Hotmail

Okay, so I'm a bit behind the blogtimes here, but I just wanted to chime in and say that OddPost is da bomb. It's a mail service that -- gasp -- isn't free, but it's worth every penny a day that the $30/year amounts to.

30 megs of space. Drag and drop e-mail. Fast fast interface. No ads.

There are, I admit, a few downsides to it: currently no filtering at all, doesn't work with EVERY system (and in fact requires IE 5.0 to work), and it gets a little depressing seeing all the free Hotmail terminals at airports.

But overall, I give it a big thumbs up, and have already personally registered. Give it a try: there's a free 30-day demo.

Those wacky French!

Okay, just to provide a minor amount of amusement for those folks who've scarily stumbled upon my oh-boy-is-this-under-construction Web log, I submit for your viewing pleasure this strange-but-true photo taken in Strasbourg, France last year.

Bonus points to those who know what it is. Extra special bonus points to those who have no frigging idea what it is, but are brave or entertaining enough to throw out a guess or two via the comments option below.

The competitive Geek Spirit

Wow, this is scary. It's 2:22am, I should be sleeping, and instead I'm noting that I'm pretty high up on the Salon/Radio blog ranking thingy... just from innocently (really!) tinkering with this new blogging software and refreshing my page when I make changes. So, though I almost hesitate to even ask this out in the open, what's to keep some unscrupulous Dr. Evil fame-mongers from hitting their refresh key one MILLION times?

The fact that I even ponder this issue highlights just what a geek I am.

And yes, dear, I promise to post less navel-gazing stuff as this blog gets into full swing. I warned you that I and my blog weren't ready for a closeup yet! ;-)

Traveling and angst

I just got back from a 5 week vacation, and 4 days later, I'm still feeling jet-lagged, at least emotionally jet-lagged. And I'm asking myself many questions:

• Am I capable of taking a vacation that's not an 'adventure'... a week or more when I'm just sitting by the seaside sipping a drink, sans schedule, without worries about monetary conversions, train schedules, walking tours, and so on? And if so, when?
  
• Is this the last 5 week vacation I'll have before I'm retired? If not, what kind of job am I gonna be able to find that'll let me take such an extended time off?
  
• Why do I feel so unmotivated and unrefreshed now?
  
• Am I ever going to feel at "home" in America, or I will continue to have nagging suspicions that I may be happier in some other country?

Of a more urgent nature, though, I suppose I ought to clean my room, find a job, and basically get around to handling the 1,318 tasks on my burgeoning to-do list, 98% of which are holdovers from before I began planning my big vacation.

Blah.

Is this e-mic on?

Hello world.

College students and the Election

[I wrote this essay for Simon and Schuster's College Online section on AOL soon before the 1996 Presidential Election. -- Adam]

The excitement and hype of the Olympics... the confusion and tragedy of the TWA flight... all soon to become a distant memory for most of us as our media-driven consciousness becomes subsumed by...

* * * P O L I T I C S ! * * *

That's right... from here through November we'll be living and breathing Clinton'isms, Dole'isms, and Independent-But-Likely-Not-Perot'isms.

That is, unless you turn off and tune out. Which brings us to the question... what does Politics mean to us college students anyway?

Some would argue not much. Year after year, throughout Republican and Democratic leaders alike, our taxes go up, college tuitions increase, our homework load intensifies. And there's still no explanation in sight for that 1.73% of socks that become mysteriously transported to the post-laundry netherworld of invisible single sock congregants.

In other words, many disgruntled college students just ignore the world of politics, not because they don't feel affected by it, but because they just can't see their vote changing anything.

Others, myself included, see the Democrats (including President Clinton) as the lesser of evils, and about as close to "champions for the college student" as we're going to get. Why? The Democrats have supported AmeriCorp, which has helped thousands of young people like ourselves afford college. The Republicans have fought to gut this program. The Democrats have similarly supported greater loan-repayment grace periods, and a standardized (and simplified) national educational loan system. Once again, the "other guys" have opposed these pro-college student positions.

Of course, not everything is as it seems. Closer to home, on the college campuses themselves, I often find myself admiring Republican-sponsored initiatives and positions more than the contrasting liberal views. But I'll leave that for another column :-)

In the meantime, why not make your voice heard on our message board, in the Politics topic? [Keyword: COLLEGE ONLINE on AOL] Conservatives, I'm especially interested in hearing you defend your party's record on higher education and college student interests.

And lastly... no matter where you fall on the spectrum, let me assure you that your vote DOES count. Register today. It's painless. It'll make your parents proud. And then people will respect you more when you whine about the state of affairs today.

Written by Adam Lasnik sometime in 1996, for Simon and Schuster Publishing's "College Online" Forum

Nice guys? Yeah, right.

[I wrote this tongue-in-cheek column for Simon and Schuster's College Online section on AOL back in 1996. Not terribly groundbreaking stuff, but at least mildly entertaining and worth saving at least somewhere for posterity :D -- Adam]

Okay, Mr. and Miss Nice Persons, time to face the facts. You're in short supply, yet low demand. Admit it. Most undergrads don't want someone nice. They want someone sexy. Daring. Cool. Hip. Popular. Strong.

Oh, sure, you always hear "I just want a *NICE* guy / girl!" but then you see these same underage men and women sneaking into bars, beer goggling at frat parties, and spending the night with folks their parents don't know about and DEFINITELY wouldn't approve of.

In fact, that's the name of the game. Rebellion. Experimentation. Going wild.

Men, if you're really lookin' for that sweet gal to discuss your mutual love of literature, flowers, and kittens with, why are you instead scoping out the "chicks" that have larger breast mass than brain mass?

Women, if you're really looking for that "nice guy to marry," why are you batting your eyelashes at guys who've got the muscles of Arnold but the brains and maturity of Bart Simpson?

Wouldn't it be a lot easier to just be honest with each other? If you're looking for folks to do the horizontal hoola with, just say so. If your idea of commitment at the moment involves being committed to remember your date's name at least two out of three times, then be up front about it.

And to those of you who really, in your heart, ARE among the "nice" people, let me reassure you that all hope is not lost. If you're crazy enough to go on to graduate school, you'll find that it becomes much easier finding other nice people to date. Whether you'll have time to go out, of course, is something else entirely, and perhaps material for another column :-)