fling93 loves fishies

Clone Wars Gets Deep

I’ve been watching the animated Clone Wars “micro-series” on the Cartoon Network. Each episode is only three minutes, and up to this point, almost every episode has just focussed on one battle scene each. Pretty good fun, but there’d been very little plot or substance, so I didn’t feel compelled to recommend it.

However, I thought tonight’s episode, Chapter Fourteen, was particularly interesting. If you haven’t figured out where Lucas will probably be going in Episode III, you might not want to read this.

March for Women's Lives

On April 25th (3 weeks from today), seven women’s advocacy groups will be marching on Washington D.C. in the March for Women’s Lives. I’m sorry I didn’t mention this earlier, as I had planned, but there’s still time to arrange to go if you are interested.

The march’s purpose is, according to their website, to uphold choice, justice, access, health, abortion, and global and family planning. Note, the march was previously called the “March for Choice”, but the name and cause was broadened to help bring several other groups on board. However, the focal point remains abortion rights.

Great Courses from the Teaching Company

The idea for my The Message, Not the Messenger post (which urged people not to exclude sources of information) had been kicking around in my head for quite a while for various reasons. But I have to admit that one of the motivations behind that post was somewhat self-serving.

After all, I myself am not an expert in anything except my field, which’d bore you to death. I’m not an academic and don’t have a Ph.D. in anything. Not even a Masters. I don’t really regret the choice, given that my field of work is software engineering, which has been quite lucrative so far, but I’ve often wondered whether I am meant for this line of work, and whether I’d be better suited for a life in academia or some other field.

Or maybe even blogging.

Don't Wait, Open an IRA!

Argh! I still haven’t filed my taxes, and even worse, I still haven’t written my long-planned blog post on the Roth IRA!

Okay, until I get to it, here’s the gist of what it’ll say:

• If you don’t already have a Roth IRA, open one now and contribute to it!
• If you already have a Roth IRA but haven’t contributed to it for 2003, contribute to it now!

In a weird quirk of the tax laws, you actually have until April 15th to deposit your Roth IRA contribution for the 2003 year, although you could also contribute for the 2004 year as early as the beginning of this year (yes, there’s an overlap). Generally, it’s advantageous to contribute to it as early as possible (yes, I’ve personally already made my 2004 year contribution), but it’s better to contribute late than not at all, and note the restrictions on IRA contributions per year, while increasing (thanks to the EGTRRA), are still much more restrictive than your typical 401(k) plan, so it’s pretty important to contribute every year that you can.

This all assumes you are eligible (if you make less than six figures, you’re generally okay). Also, note that if you still have credit card debt, it’s better if you pay off that debt first because the interest they charge you will be much higher than you can earn. Similarly, if you aren’t already contributing the maximum to your 401(k) plan or equivalent, it’s better to fund that first. Note that capital gains and dividends earned within Traditional IRAs are tax-deferred and aren’t taxed at all in Roth IRAs. 401(k)’s are even better — they’re tax-deferred and the contributions are fully tax-deductible (again, I’ll explain what they all mean in my “real” post). Sometimes your employer will even offer matching funds to boot! So it’s generally the thing to fund first, and then funding a Roth IRA with money left over after that (or a Traditional IRA instead if you’re not eligible for a Roth).

Electoral Reform, Part I: The Problem with Plurality

Update 10/23/04: Tweaked the images, plus I’ve finally finished Part II.

I’ve been carping about our two-party plurality electoral system for so long now that many of you are probably wondering what I would replace it with. This will take quite a bit of explaining and illustrating, so I’ll break it down into several pieces. The first step is to illustrate the problem. In Part II, I’ll start discussing some of the alternatives to plurality.

For those of you who browse with images turned off, now would be a good time to turn them on. Don’t worry, these are small GIF files, so this won’t be bandwidth-intensive. If the images are too small, you can click on them to get a closer look.

Okay, this is a representation of the electorate, from liberal to conservative, where each ‘X’ is a voter. I know there’s more than one dimension of political thought (the whole Political Compass thing), but what I’m trying to show would still hold true for two and three dimensions, which I’ll illustrate in a later post. I’ll stick to the one dimension for now, for the sake of space and simplicity. Note that there are more moderates than extremists.

With me so far?

Partners and Marriage, by Nerburn

I generally prefer not to repost other people’s material, but I’ll make an exception. I ran across this old e-mail I received a long while back, and I recalled that it served as some of the inspiration behind my own marriage post. I figured, like most forwarded e-mails, that everybody would have seen it by now. But I didn’t find many copies on the web, so I think it’d be worth reposting.

Update 5/3/04

I guess I should have looked harder. I have discovered that I have misattributed the author. It was not written by Eduardo Calasanz, but by Kent Nerburn as Chapter 26 for Letters to My Son: A Father’s Wisdom on Manhood, Life, and Love, a book of essays he wrote with Richard Carlson. I contacted Nerburn (and incidentally, he has a blog), and he has graciously allowed me to leave it up on my site.

Anyway, I think he got it right on. And I know I’m very blessed to have lucked into my marriage, becoming best friends with my wife before I realized a sexual relationship with her was even possible (some background here).

Enjoy.

Partners and Marriage

by Kent Nerburn

I have never met a man who didn’t want to be loved. But I have seldom met a man who didn’t fear marriage. Something about the closure seems constricting, not enabling. Marriage seems easier to understand for what it cuts out of our lives than for what it makes possible within our lives.

Microsoft and Bundling

There’s been some discussion of bundling and Microsoft lately. Some of it is really interesting and eye-opening, but I thought I’d clear up some misconceptions myself. Warning, this is pretty long.

Various Site Changes

Yep, I’m still here. Apologies for the lack of updates in the past week. As I’ve mentioned earlier, I’ve been a bit sidetracked by a few real-world distractions, like my Fantasy Baseball team (which is doing even worse than the Giants) and my new set of Great Courses from the Teaching Company, as well as a bunch of new CDs and keeping up with Angel and The Sopranos. Realistically, I think I’ll have to cut down my updates from 3-4 times a week to 1-2 times, but we’ll see.

I have been working on a couple of substantive posts, but in the meantime, I’ve made a few subtle changes here and there in the past couple of weeks I’d like to call your attention to.

My cousin’s doing a triathlon!

First of all, one notable addition to the blog roll is my cousin, Rich (yes, the same guy from my “What others are saying” section on the sidebar), who’s created a training log for the Wildflower Triathlon. He is, like me, a typical computer nerd who figured these things were for athletes until a coworker convinced him that there was really no reason he couldn’t do it with some training. Check out the full story, and please help sponsor him. Proceeds go towards the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. The Triathlon is on May 2nd (a week from Sunday), so there’s no time to spare!

Myths of Drug Price Controls

Via Steve Burnap (incidentally, the author of the excellent RoboDJ weighted shuffler plugin for Winamp and a coworker of my cousin training for the triathlon), I see that Kevin Drum is talking about the drug price controls issue (yeah, I typically read Kevin for myself, but I’ve fallen far behind):

Foreign methods for lowering drug prices are apparently too Stalinistic for Republicans to consider, but it’s OK to let other countries use these methods and then import the drugs from them. That’s nuts.

He’s right, it is nuts. That’s politics for you. However, he goes astray in the next paragraph:

Other countries use both legal measures and massive buying power to negotiate lower drug prices. Pharmaceutical companies go along with it because presumably the business is still profitable for them even at these lower prices.

Common misunderstandings like this is probably a big reason why politicians do strange things. Doing the right thing is often a harder political sell (and I’ll return to this theme in several future posts). This doesn’t excuse it, I’m just pointing out that Kevin’s contributing to the problem.

Me R a Litturit (allmoast)!

Via Sebastian Holsclaw (who got it from Mrs. Tilton), some bloggers are spreading around a list of books that you are supposed to have read if you’re really a literate person (although many say the list has some glaring flaws), and they’re highlighting the ones on the list they’ve actually read. I guess I’ll participate in this meme cuz someday, someone might be able to use a crawler to gather statistics on it or something. Plus it makes me look hoity-toity.

Well, come to think of it, I seem to have the most unforgiveable lacunae of anyone who’s participated, including Abiola. Heck, who am I kidding? I didn’t even know what “lacunae” means (it’s a hoity-toity way to say “gaps”).

Anyway, on to the list: