Tsaiberspace

The Inside Man combines the personal cop/crook relationship of Heat with the intricately planned bank robbery of Ocean’s Eleven. Jodie Foster and Willem Dafoe give uninspiring performances in admittedly bit roles, Clive Owen does a great job with the part he is given, and Denzel Washington executes unsurprisingly well the lead role. The one minor deficiency is that the motivation for the whole heist, while alluded to multiple times during the dialogue, is not sufficiently explored.

I’m paranoid about RSI, so I use Workrave during the workday to remind me to take breaks away from the computer keyboard. I’ve configured it for a 30-second break every 7 minutes, and a 7-minute break every 53 minutes. Everyone has to choose what’s right for them; these values work for me.

One interesting thing about this program is that it keeps track of your keyboarding and mousing activity; you can see these statistics in some of the UI controls. I wrote a script to extract the historial statistics and graph the number of keystrokes over time, just to see how “productive” (as measured by keystrokes) I’ve been over the past two years:

workrave-dump extracts the statistics from the workrave historical statistics file. Run it like so:

% workrave-dump > workrave.out

gnuplot-workrave reads in the workrave.out file generated above (the filename is fixed) and generates a PNG graph like the one shown above. Run it like so:

% gnuplot-workrave

These scripts are distributed with the Workrave source as contrib/plot.

Other Unofficial Workrave Scripts and Links

• Gary Benson at inauspicious.org has a Python-based workrave stats-dumper: wrstats.py.
• Barry Irwin at lair.moria.org has graphed his own workrave activity: Workrave Statistics.

The Marketplace of Perceptions in this bi-month’s (March-April 2006) Harvard Magazine describes an effort to quantify what most people already intuitively know to be true:

• People like to procrastinate (”People act irrationally in that they overly discount the future”). A company insisting on a yes/no answer to 401(k) participation within 30 days (with frequent e-mail reminders) yielded a 30-percent increase in participation rates over a different company that simply waits for the employee to make a phone call or submit paperwork.
• People’s thoughts are heavily influenced and framed by the present. A lending bank sent different versions of mailings to get people to apply for loans. The variables included providing photos of “employees” of varying race and gender, loan tables of varying complexity, stated deadlines (”limited time offer!”), and gimmicks (”enter a lottery for a free cell phone!”). Among men, a letter including a woman’s photo instead of a man’s photo yielded results equivalent to 1-5 percentage points of interest.
• People value revenge. It was found that people are willing to pay to punish “unfair” behavior, even (especially) if the “unfair” behavior generates a gain for both parties.

The article references the paper: $100 Bills On The Sidewalk: Suboptimal Saving In 401(k) Plans, James J. Choi, David Laibson, and Brigitte C. Madrian.

The findings are rather sad. The loan experiment found that even with a “big” loan at stake (10% of monthly income), people were easily influenced by framing irrelevant to the proposition. The 401(k) paper found that even when allowed to make discretionary penalty-free withdrawals from their 401(k)s (people over 59½ years old who are still employed), and even when explicitly educated on the matter, people still “chose” to forgo the “free lunch” (the employer match, on the order of $3000 per year).

This is a record of my daily commute by foot from Boston to Cambridge and back, perhaps 1½ miles and 25-35 minutes each way (my walking pace is reflected in the photo timestamps). The stylistic rule I made up for this alliteratively-titled photojournalistic masterpiece: all pictures must be taken within 180° of the direction of motion. On a practical level, this means I am always looking where I am going. On a technical level this also works out well: the outdoor portion of my morning commute is due north-west-ish from home, which means the sun is at my back for all the outdoor pictures in both the morning and evening. On a deeper philosophical and artistic level, this style symbolizes the always-optimistic forward-looking-ness that is me.

Actually, I kind of suck. My camera ran out of batteries halfway across the bridge on the way home. But it was getting dark anyways.

MyHeritage will accept your uploaded pictures, find faces in them, and compare the faces against its database of celebrity faces. The face detection itself is pretty good (much better than my crappy grad school project); the celebrity matching isn’t that great (or maybe their database is not very well populated, or maybe I just don’t look like any celebrities). It’s still fun to play with. Here’s a sample of a relatively good match (we got matched up with Chinese and Thai celebrities):

The software was successful in usually matching us up with Asian celebrities (dark hair and light skin), but we also got a few interesting mismatches based on other similar characteristics. My high forehead and receding hairline matched me up with Governor Schwarzenegger and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (hmm, their software is pretty good, now that I think about it :)); Patrika’s cheeks matched her up with Charlize Theron.

We’ve moved to http://www.patrika-online.com/. Please update your bookmarks.

Glen Carlou is a South African vineyard; the Syrah grape is more commonly known in the USA as Shiraz. Removing the label from a bottle of wine is not difficult and is much like removing a label from any other kind of glass bottle, but this particular label took more time than I expected. All you have to do is run the bottle and label under warm water until the adhesive degrades enough for the label to be peeled off. If you are too impatient, you can end up leaving the back of the label still attached to the bottle, leaving the removed label much more fragile. This particular label had a lot of adhesive. Next, you wait for the label to dry. If you are too impatient, you end up with a crinkled label that doesn’t scan very well (like the one pictured here).

This wine was OK.

This year I settled on TaxACT. The price is right, it’s a quick 10MB download (an easily electronically-archiveable size when compared to a multimedia-laden CD), and the software interface is perfect (for me). There is kind of a text-based interview (no multimedia mini-lectures like with TurboTax), but really, all any tax software can do is ask you to perform basic data entry of various numbers from various forms, and then go figure out how to put those numbers together.

I’m pleased to say that TaxACT saved us some money :). I had changed jobs mid-year, which meant I had two employers withholding social-security taxes. However, since social security tax withholdings are not coordinated between these two employers, one can end up paying too much social security tax. This is known as “excess social security and tier 1 RRTA tax withheld”, in form 1040 line 67, which you get back as a refund. Cha-ching.

My odyssey through tax software:

• In 1996, I filed my taxes for the first time, using TurboTax. I think it came on a single 3.5″ floppy disk. Life was simple back then.
• For 2000, I switched to Kiplinger’s TaxCut (now H&R Block TaxCut), partly for the sake of experimentation, but mostly because it came with a rebate for an effectively free upgrade to the latest version of Microsoft Money, which I had been using using 1993. I remember it working well enough, but not liking it that much compared to TurboTax. It was rather unfriendly going back to parts of the tax return that had already been covered by the initial interview. When I did revisit something to make a correction, I remember feeling rather uncomfortably unsure whether or not the software had re-done all the resulting cascading computations based on my changes. But it would be unfair to give TaxCut today a negative review based on my 6-year old fuzzily-negative impressions.
• For 2001, I switched back to TurboTax. I think this was the year of the big hoo-ha surrounding Intuit, TurboTax, and the introduction of the surreptitiously installed and not-so-surreptitiously un-installed “Cedilla” DRM (anti-piracy) software. TurboTax came on a CD, and a ton of multi-media videos that wouldn’t play on my old slow laptop. Aside from Cedilla, it worked well enough. It also integrated pretty well with Quicken. (In what can be a complete discussion of its own, I had switched away from Microsoft Money to Quicken this same year. But let’s stick to taxes.)
• For 2004, we paid an accountant to do our return. The accountant was selected based on glowing recommendations from my wife’s co-workers. This was a very terrible experience for me. There were numerous errors in the return (which the accountant acknowledged and corrected) ranging from misplaced decimal points and mis-reading various forms (irritating, but honest human mistakes, I suppose), to a final exasperated “well, tell me what you want me to enter for this line of the form and I’ll enter it”. Please, lady, have some professionalism! She should have simply told me she couldn’t do my return and that I should find someone else, rather than hang on to my business (which was rapidly become less and less worth her while, and making me more and more angry). To her credit, when she mailed us our copy of the prepared return, she also included an unsolicited partial refund. She probably does a fine job for my wife’s co-workers; all this means is that everyone’s tax situation is different, which means that everyone will have a different ideal accountant.

  Having lost all confidence in the accountant after the first error (discovered by my own paranoid cursory examination of the return), I had done my return myself by hand (which had uncovered the subsequent errors). This was an extremely painful but rewarding exercise. As can be expected, it was extremely painful. However, it was also extremely rewarding because by the time I had finished setting up my tax forms in my spreadsheets, I could see exactly how every number affected the outcome of my taxes, in a manner far more transparent than any tax software I’ve ever used. By plugging in different numbers in different fields, I could play with various “what-if” scenarios to help minimize tax consequences. How much more (or less) could I have donated to charity? Should I have splurged more on the home-office expenses for itemized deductions? How much stock can I sell? And so on. And ultimately, I felt better. It’s my money; why should I completely trust someone else to take care of it?

• For 2005 (this year), I simply copied my spreadsheet work from last year. I also purchased some tax software to double-check my results, and for the e-filing functionality. It’s really stupid. Rather than openly publish the technical interfaces for e-filing, the IRS restricts e-filing to some small list of approved software, which you of course have to pay for. More tax dollars at work: the e-filing taxpayer saves the government money, but often ends up paying more than filing by mail. Aside from the excess social security tax withheld, my spreadsheet agreed with TaxACT, so we’re either both right or both wrong.

My sports-fan-related complaints are usually related to Boston Red Sox home games. After the games, the streets directly below my apartment are filled with the sounds of celebratory car honking, drunk yelling, etc.

We must have new tenants in my building or something. All evening I’ve been treated to the sounds of jumping up and down and hoots and hollers after nearly every basket from upstairs; I don’t remember this from years past.

I suppose I should be thankful there isn’t a baseball game tonight; otherwise I’d be getting the full sports-fan treatment in upstairs/downstairs stereo.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. After putting my website online, the first visitor arrived within 5 minutes, browsing for an unpatched IIS server:

... "GET / HTTP/1.0" 302 319 "-" "-"
... "SEARCH /\x90\xc9\xc9\xc9\xc9\xc9\xc9\xc9..." 414 378 "-" "-"

and

... [error] … request failed: URI too long (longer than 8190)
… [error] … File does not exist: /home/rtsai/web/_vti_bin

For now, all I really have is a photo gallery:

The photo gallery software is a heavily-stripped-down and slightly-modified version of QuickyPix.