Librarians tried to save society, and failed

/ Shane / 2 Comments

The other day I had a thought that so completely stunned me, that I just stood there with the shower water running down my face: librarians were so ahead of their time!

Librarians have been stalwart defenders of our information privacy before we even knew what information privacy or data mining was. Even in this digital age, libraries don’t keep records of what books you’ve checked out. This is not just poor record keeping, but a conscious effort to ensure people cannot use our own information against us. 70 years ago, librarians were already envisioning the case where someone could use the fact that you checked out a copy of Mein Kampf to blacklist you from getting a job.

Nowadays, companies like Google and Facebook keep track of every move we make online, correlating it, cross-referencing it, and (of course) selling it. If you search for a product, Amazon immediately sends you an email about similar products. Then it sends an email to your friends, who might also like products that you like. If you buy peanut butter, Yahoo puts you in touch with singles who have jelly. If you fart, Steve Ballmer bursts through your window with a can of deodorizer (the one that your best friend gave five stars on Yelp) (Yes, I know it doesn’t make any sense that your friend is rating fart deodorizer on Yelp, except that 1) your best friend is kind of crazy, and 2) this was the fart deodorizer sold by a special “beans only” restaurant. It’s downtown) (And by the way, that wasn’t exactly the craziest part of that sentence anyway, so lay off alright?).

We hardly exist as people anymore; we’re just chess pieces in the game of mass consumption. Our very existence generates money for other people. Every product we buy, every link we click on, ever celebrity we tweet about is stored in a database for later use. Employers are Googling job applicants and demanding access to their Facebook profiles before hiring them. All of a sudden, you’re wishing you hadn’t done that review of Mein Kampf on GoodReads.

And librarians saw the writing on the wall, tried to stop it, before it was even technically possible to do it.

Good job librarians. Sorry we didn’t listen to you before it was too late. Anything else you want to warn us about?

“Look at my bottom!”

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Since we last spoke about Oliver’s potty training 3 months ago, things have been going very well.

He really never puts up a fuss about going to the potty, and he hasn’t had an accident in I don’t know how long. It doesn’t even occur to me to bring a change of clothes when we leave the house anymore. The only slight hitch is that he always makes us take him to the potty downstairs, but that is manageable I suppose. At least he always goes.

He can sometimes wear underpants for his nap, but it is very unpredictable.  He can go for hours without going, so he aught to be able to last through his nap, but even if you have him go right before he goes to bed, he sometimes still goes. If you think he will, he won’t, but if you don’t think he will, he will.

However, the one nut we haven’t been able to crack is poo poo. He *always* goes in his diaper at night (or at least first thing in the morning). It has been very difficult to convince him to go in the potty. He has gone several times in the potty, but it hasn’t quite translated into any sort of desire to go with regularity. Even M&M’s and a prize bucket hasn’t helped.

However, lately he has started to notice when he has to go, by suddenly announcing, “Look at my bottom!”. And I have to admit that, even though I know this is what he always says, it still makes me nervous. I always have to look at his bottom. When you get such a pronouncement (or sometimes just an emphatic “I do not have to go poo poo!” out of nowhere), you grab him and run. And then he goes, just like that.

Of course, he still goes in his diaper at night anyway, but hey, it’s going in the right direction, right?

Quote Monday likes potatoes

/ Shane / Leave a comment

::Evie coming out of her room at bed time and finding us on the computer::
Sara: “Did Evie just catch us watching illicit cookie monster videos?”

People at the Library: “Carrots are good for your eyes! What is good for your ears?”
Children shouting: “Broccoli!” “Celery!” “Potatoes!”
Oliver, getting upset: “No! No! Potatoes are good for my mouth! No! For my mouth!”

Oliver can tell you where to stick your other vegetables, but don’t mess with his potatoes. Them’s for eatin’.

Me: “Oliver, I’m going to be cutting onions in here, they might make you cry.”
Oliver: “No, they make me happy!”

Me: “Evie, just…I need a little quiet for a second okay?”
Evie: “Am I getting on your nerds?”

Ben Folds

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Just to finish off the week of “things we’ve been doing lately”, two weeks ago today Sara and I actually got a babysitter (*gasp*) to go see the man, the myth, the legend: Mr. Ben Folds.

I have been a fan of Ben Folds for such a ridiculously long period of time (though not quite as long as Sara, who claims I “stole” Ben Folds from her, despite the fact that I had a couple of pirated mp3s before I met her!) that it’s almost hard to remember a music landscape without him. Actually, I just remembered that “Whatever and Ever Amen” was the first thing I ever bought off this crazy new website called eBay. Sara and I danced to “The Luckiest” at our wedding. My mom liked the song so much, that years later she danced to “The Luckiest” at her wedding.

Previous to this concert, I’ve seen Ben Folds four times, and each one was unique and totally awesome. I sat in the front row of the balcony at the University of Illinois in a venue so small that I probably could have sweat on him. I saw him at a true college show at Purdue as part of my bachelor party, where he was hilarious in between songs. He was very chatty, telling all kinds of stories about growing up when we saw him in his home state of North Carolina. And finally, we had the truly unique concert experience when we saw him with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

Still, through all of that, I had never actually seen Ben Folds Five together in concert (Sara saw them once in the ’90’s). So when our friend Dabu informed us they were coming to Chicago for the “World’s Largest Block Party”, we knew we had to go. It was every bit as awesome as I could have hoped it would be. They played all the best old stuff, and I heard every song that I hoped I would hear.

(They don’t look this young anymore)

I believe we have 16 Ben Folds or Ben Folds Five CDs (technically four of them are just EPs, and one is a DVD), and every one of them is awesome, start to finish. I love the old, ironic nerd rock, Ben Folds Five stuff. I love the slightly more serious solo Ben Folds stuff. Even the very newest stuff is good, the last new album “Lonely Avenue” is one of my favorites. And the new retrospective “The Best Imitation of Myself” is probably the best compilation I have ever heard from any artist. I even loved Mr. Folds on the now-defunct acapella show The Sing Off.

You know the old saying, you have to know the rules to break them? I think Ben Folds’ deep understanding (intuition?) of music is what allows him to get away with the things he does. Like writing a beautiful song about something ugly, or an upbeat song about something sad, or to have a harmony-driven-piano-centric-with-no-guitars pop band, or to call three musicians “Ben Folds’ Five”.

I don’t know what it is exactly about the music, but the best I can say is that it’s just beautiful. It’s beautiful when it’s about the human condition, but it’s also beautiful when it’s talking about Americans over-consuming. It’s beautiful when it’s talking about love, but it’s also beautiful when it’s talking about breakups, or relationships gone wrong, or abortion, or a bad acid trip, or people who wear fanny packs. It’s just always, unceasingly, heartrendingly beautiful.

Ben Folds Five is preparing to release a new album, and you can pre-order it here. In fact, if you do, you instantly become a “Vice President of Promotion”, which you should go ahead an do, so we can be co-Vice Presidents together. It will be very nice working with you.

The Old Car

/ Shane / 1 Comment

My “new” car is not so new anymore.

My Malibu is the only car that I ever bought new from a dealership, so I still think of it as the “new car”. However, a few things here and there have started to break down recently, which caused me to reflect on the fact that it’s actually ten years old. I recently passed 166,666 miles (the mileage of the beast!), making it no spring chicken. (Side note, that puts me almost exactly dead on the average miles per year of 16,550 as calculated by the Federal Highway Administration, which is especially amazing considering how many different phases of life and locations of living the car has covered. They must be doing some good math over there at the Highway Administration!)

All of this has caused me to reflect on the fact that my Malibu might be nearing the end of it’s life. Sara and I thought back to all the old cars we had, and we realized that every single one was jettisoned when it was somewhere between 12 and 15 years old. Based on that, we came up with the following metric: barring anything unusual like an accident, you should expect to get 10 years out of a car. If you get to 10 years, you can’t be disappointed. However, anecdotally we usually got at least 12 years, so if you’re lucky you should get an additional 2 unexpected, “bonus years” out of your car. You shouldn’t necessarily plan on them, but I think it is reasonable to expect that you can get them. In a perfect world, you could get as much as 15 years. Plan on 10, expect 12, and hope for 15.

Now of course the 10/12/15 isn’t a hard and fast rule, but more of a guideline. This actually correlates well with another anecdotal metric of mine, which is that you should be able to get about 200,000 miles out of your car. Well, assuming I continue to do about the average miles per year of 16,550 on my 10 year old car, I’ll cross the 200,000 within 2 years.

I’ll hold on to it for as long as I can, but it does sort of feel like a death sentence for the old girl. She’s been given two years to live. All in all, the Malibu is a very good car, and I am very satisfied with it. However, I probably won’t buy a new car again.

My car had a price tag of around $22,000 when it was new 10 years ago. So that averages to $2,200 a year (not counting car ownership costs like insurance, plates, oil changes, etc.). However, according to edmunds.com, a 2012 Malibu costs $22,110 and a 2010 Malibu costs $13,603. So we could say a Malibu loses about 38% of its value in the first two years. I’m making a lot of assumptions here (although not crazy assumptions, since Edmunds predicts you will lose on average 31% of the value of a new car in 2 years), but if we apply that same formula, that would mean that if my Malibu new in ’02 cost $22,000, I could have gotten it used in ’04 for about $13,640 (which actually seems kind of high for a 2 year old used car). If I then owned that car for 8 years (because I expect 10 years out of a car, but it is already 2 years old, so I only get 8), it would only have cost me around $1,705 a year. I would have saved $495 per year by owning the exact same car, just purchased at a different time. In other words, I just gave myself $3,960 of free money.

My quick calculations assume you paid cash for everything, so none of this includes the 7% interest rate I had on my 5 year loan. So if I spent those two extra years saving up to pay cash for my car rather than taking a loan, I give myself an additional $4,137.58 in free cash, for a total of around $8,000 in free money.

Of course, these numbers are just my quick calculations, and I’m no expert. There are mitigating circumstances on both sides. Hypothetically, if you paid cash and got a phenomenal deal, you could be the one who beat the system, but even then you just come out even with the used car case, not ahead. Chances are you didn’t beat the system (and you don’t really even know if you got a good deal or not until you can compare used car sales in a few years), so if you are a betting man, the odds are on the used car.

Anyway, the numbers work fairly well as a rough guideline for me, and it gives me an opportunity cost number to consider. Even though buying a new car is never cost effective, it might be other things effective. For example, most of the time I had my new car it was hassle and stress free. That’s got to be worth something I suppose, but for me personally it was probably not worth $3,960 (Of course, I didn’t have any trouble with the car in the first two years, so if you think about it, buying it at two years old wouldn’t have given me any more hassle or stress than buying it new). On the other hand, I bought my Malibu when I got my first job out of college, both as a sign of independence and a splurge to celebrate my new financial security. So I guess those might be worth something. And if money is not an issue for you, then the “cost penalty” might be lower for you (i.e. if $3,960 isn’t a lot of money to you, then it might seem like a small price to pay compared to other things). For example, you might value “looking good” more than $3,960.

Anyway, we’ve had a good 10 years together so far, and if the Malibu dies tomorrow, I’d be satisfied that I got my money’s worth. However, we’ll keep our fingers crossed for at least another 2 and hope for the full 5.