Here’s a nugget from one of the finance blogs I follow Global Economic Analysis:

The official unemployment rate is 10.0%. However, if you start counting all the people that want a job but gave up, all the people with part-time jobs that want a full-time job, all the people who dropped off the unemployment rolls because their unemployment benefits ran out, etc., you get a closer picture of what the unemployment rate is. That number is in the last row labeled U-6.

It reflects how unemployment feels to the average Joe on the street. U-6 is 17.2%. Both U-6 and U-3 (the so called “official” unemployment number) are poised to rise further although most likely at a slower pace than earlier this year.

That’s right kids – We’ll round it to “one out of six people is feeling the hurt, big time.”

The solution is *not* for bankers to start taking profits again.

So, I’m getting my hair done cut, and there’s an ongoing conversation about family, the holidays, and so on. My stylist shared a few real gems:

1) A decent definition of “sufficiently drunk” is when you think that cows are really, really funny – but are still sober enough to think that running out into a cow field to try to push them over is a very bad idea.

2) “There’s something to that whole boy, girl thing,” because “women tend to be too cold, and men tend to generate insane amounts of heat. Two men in a bed is just too much!”

And finally, number 3) We were talking about travel with family, and how with some family members it’s comfortable to just sit and read – or to be in each other’s presence. At which point he exclaims “yeah, I’m like that with my mom. I totally should have married my mom.”

The salon murmured with gentle approbation, so he continued: “y’all – I’m from New Hampshire. We’re allowed to marry 1st cousins there.”

Someone allowed as to how that might, or might not, be over the line. He finished: “Damn, you’re all just jealous because you don’t have any hot cousins.”

On a lighter note, my cousin was telling stories over Thanksgiving. He shared the story of how his handgun safety instructor had actually shot a mugger. Apparently the instructor was up against a wall and had already handed the guy his watch and wallet. Then the story changed to “now I’m -a- shoot you.” He turned around, drew his pistol, and shot the guy 17 times. When the police asked why he shot the man 17 times he answered: “I ran out of bullets.”

Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

I really can’t say enough good things about the visa outsourcing companies that help travelers get to places like India and China. While there is certainly some incest in the relationship between these companies and the consulates they serve, they turn what could otherwise be a tricky, frustrating, and time consuming exercise (which consulate? where? when are they open?) into a pretty simple one.

I put my passport, an application, a utility bill, and a money order in a fedex pouch. In short order, I was able to see this:

I whine enough when things go wrong – this at least looks like it’s a well thought out process.

–UPDATE–

It appears to be done and on its way back to me:

1) A djinn appears and tells you that you must give up your rock-star life and technological prowess, but in exchange can grant you a small, local, successful business doing anything else you want. What do you pick?

I’ve got to work for a living? No caging out and cheating? I would open my holistic healing center. Healthy food, homemade beer, physical fitness, art, music, and self defense. Talk therapy available from the owner at any of these.

2) If you had the time and resource to produce one musical concert of your own that everyone you knew could come to see, what would you perform?

I would play all of Bach’s cello suites. I would love to have the time to work all of them up.

3) H. H. The Dalai Lama and a 2-year-old child you don’t know are dangling from a cliff. You’re certain you can only save one. What you do you do and why? (Sorry if that’s a little hardcore, but i had to balance the fate of humanity again raping and killing Sarah Palin, so i know you can handle it.) 🙂

Made me pause. There are merits to either, but I think that the odds are pretty good that even the 70+ year old Dalai Lama will help more people than a small child. Put it this way, change the question a little bit: I have to give my life to save one of theirs. I would save H.H.’s in an instant – but I would hesitate to throw myself under a bus for a random 2 year old.

4) You’re being sent on a mission to a remote place for 10 years. You will have adequate food, water, shelter, power, and a high-speed sat-link to the internet. Specify the computer system you want along with you.

Let’s get this out of the way first. You suck. No system that can play movies right now today is likely to function well for 10 years.

I want something that will be cast iron reliable and let me VNC into some system back in Boston. I’m gonna do as much as I can by remote. That probably means a nice linux server, underclocked, with three solid state disks in RAID 1, dual power supplies, all 16 RAM slots populated (so I can pop them out as they fail) and so on. I’m not chancing a laptop. I want a long display cable so I can leave the beast in a hermetically sealed vault and type from out in my lair.

Failing that, I want a DEC Alpha. Big blue pedestal. I know a few of those that have been running for 20+ years now.

5) In your feeling, what stands most prominently between you and Enlightenment?

Habituation. I feel like I’ve got the best luck / karma that money can buy. I’m healthy, bright, and have all sorts of opportunity. I know basically what I’m supposed to do. However I have these *habits*. I keep looking up and saying “yeah, that thing that I just did – I should do less of that.”

It’s just practice. Word is that it takes “numberless eons” to develop the stores of merit required from where I am now. I’ve got to let all the previous karma from previous numberless eons dissipate. That will take some time.

A wise man once said to me: Don’t worry about enlightenment. Enlightenment will come. Time is long. Worry about doing the best you can today. Today is nearly gone already.

rossja had this thing about questions in her journal. Basically, reply to this and ask for some questions. I’ll ask you questions. You can reply to them here or in your own journal. It’s a party game. Everybody play.

Here’s what she asked me:

1. At what point did you realize that you were in love with your wife?

If it wasn’t love at first sight, it was darn close. We met at a party, and wound up stalking each other over the course of the next two or three days. She hacked the umich mail server for me! By the end of the third or fourth day watching the sun rise together – I think we owned up to the fact that we were in love.

The second time it happened was when she beat up a gypsy who tried to rob me in Pisa. That’s just hot.

2. If someone made a movie of your life, what would it be called?

“Often in doubt, Very seldom wrong.”

3. Who would you cast as the main characters?

I’ve been told that there’s an actor who looks a lot like me. I say: “screw that.” I want Pierce Brosnan to play me. Actually, no, I want Hugo Weaving to play me. redmed wants David Bell of District B19 to play me … and she wants to play herself.

4. What appeals to you most about judo?

Good one. Buncha stuff. At core though, I think it’s that it’s difficult, worthwhile, and I’m bad at it. I can see myself working really hard to become competent over the next decade or so. I find that I lack good long term goals right now … so it’s filling that role.

I like the fact that I can go full force. This was the disciple that was invented, in part, to civilize the samurai. A whole caste of men were being made to put down their swords – and they found meaning and structure in judo. I like the raw insanity of having a structured way to pick a fight. I love the single point nature of the matches. One point wins. It can happen 3 seconds in, or in the last seconds of the match. It forces an explicit balance between caution and aggression. You just have to make up your damn mind about how to stand and what to do. For a career compromiser, that’s refreshing.

Fine, I love washing other men’s blood out of my gi. Is that what you wanted?

5. Of all the places you’ve traveled or lived, where is your favorite place & why?

Home is where the cat is. I love my current house, and I hope to live there for a very long time.

Ate last night at Jake’s Famous Crawfish, a pretty spectacular seafood restaurant in Portland. When we walked in, something started tickling in my brain stem, but it took until I saw the cedar plank salmon on the menu to realize what it was.

I had been there once before.

The year was 1996, and I was graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. These were the good old days when any idiot undergrad could come to the West Coast and command $80k. My friend Seth had made the trip in 1995, and settled with a testing group at Intel. He encouraged me to come out and interview. I resisted, since I was happily dating , and she had four years of med school in front of her in Ann Arbor. Also, I had a job and a Master’s degree lined up. Seth kept pestering, and eventually I asked to talk to his boss. I explained the situation to the boss, who replied “give us a chance to convince you.”

Game on. As long as everyone knows the score, I have no compunctions about being wooed.

So I flew to Portland. They put me up in a decent hotel downtown, and I had a day of interviews. I hit it off with the boss immediately, and the rest of the team as well. It was clear to me that I wasn’t going to stay, but it was fun. Towards the end of the day, the boss called me and Seth to his office and said something along the lines of: “, we all like you a lot. You would do well here. Seth, here’s a corporate credit card. Go out, have some fun, and convince him that he wants to live in Portland.”

Bad thing to say to a couple of 22 year old college buddies.

As I recall, we went to Jake’s and put our names in. Told that there was an hour or so to wait for a table, we found a nearby bar and settled in for a couple of pre-dinner drinks. We got back to the restaurant and absolutely gorged ourselves on – if I recall correctly:

* A dozen oysters
* A dozen crawfish
* salads
* dinner entrees (I had the cedar plank salmon)
* Two bottles of wine

My recollection gets fuzzy around dessert. Did we have dessert? I don’t think that we did. I recall that we spent a few hours at some nightclub where women in scanty dresses would dance in cages that were up on pedestals. I’m pretty sure there was more drinking there too. I’m relatively certain that Seth made use of my hotel room rather than trying to get home. At least, I hope we were that smart.

I didn’t take the job, and I’m astonished that I remember that night in as much detail as I do. Who knew that all that detail was still in there?

I’m out in Portland for the Supercomputing conference. This is my favorite conference of the year for a number of reasons:

* Everyone is here. I can stack up face to face half hour conversations with a dozen people in my industry
* The right people are in the booths. I can talk to the project manager and the VP of sales for a the products that I care about
* I’m known here. I walk around and see a decade’s worth of colleagues, customers, employers, professors, and so on.
* The best technology is on show. I just took a picture of a completely water cooled motherboard.

It’s also annoying as all hell:

* Grad students are terrible presenters
* Sales and Marketing types give me hemorrhoids.
* Certain buzzwords are tied to the stake and flogged mercilessly (Grid, Cloud, Green).
* Thousands of geeks plus free beer = massive ass-hattery.

Having a good show. Thinking big thoughts.

I just had a really positive experience, and I want to share:

and I were taking a walk around the neighborhood to enjoy the unseasonably gorgeous weather. We stopped off at the local coffee shop for a pair of hot chocolates, and settled on the bench out front to sip them and watch the cars go by.

Sundays are slow, and they usually have either one or two employees in the afternoon. Today both of those employees were sitting on the other bench chatting when we arrived. The man got up and came in to make our chocolates, and then returned to the benches after we were set.

After settling in, he looked at me and said “hey, what’s your name? Chris? I’m Matt. It’s nice to see you. You come here a lot, right? Hey, just wanted to say – we’re happy when we see you walk in the door. A lot of the people around here can be a pain – rude and all that – but you’re always considerate and nice. We appreciate it. Thanks.”

So apparently I’m (a) a regular, and (b) nice.

I’ll take it. I’m totally fine with being the nice one. All I do is try not to walk around snarling, and remember that the people working behind the counter are human beings. Apparently that’s noticeably more than most people around these parts do.

I took second place in my division at the Pam Ams yesterday. I was in the M1 (30 to 35 year old) novice (non black belt) under 81 kilo (< 178 lbs) division. There were three of us. One Canadian (green belt) and one other person from the US (white belt). Here’s how it went down: The other two guys fought first, and the white belt beat the Canadian pretty handily. Fight 1: Next it was my turn to go against the white belt. He was a lot stronger than he looked. Easily as strong as me. We moved each other around for a while, and he threw me twice for a half point each time. Fight 2: Then I had to go against the green belt. That match lasted 11 seconds. I came out, got my grip, moved him where I wanted him to go, and hit an o-uchi-gari (major inside leg reap). I hauled down and forward really hard on his left shoulder. That made him step forward with his left leg. Once the leg was there, I hooked my right heel behind his left heel and drove forward and to my right as hard as I could. Observers said that I “laid him out.” Fight 3: Our bracket was a “true” double elimination. That meant that at this point the green belt was out, having lost twice. I, however, was not yet eliminated. So it was back out with the white belt. This one I won in about a minute, using a combination we’ve been working a lot. It’s a shoulder throw into an outside leg reap. Me any my long legs like the sweeps and reaps. I stepped in and pivoted counterclockwise so my right side under his right arm – as if I was going for a shoulder throw. Actually, I totally *was* going for a shoulder throw. He blocked me by hunkering down and pitching his weight backwards. At that point I hooked my right foot around the outside of his right foot, clamped on to that right arm, and spun back clockwise to face forward, throwing my weight forward. He couldn’t step or block, and down he went. A second ippon.

Fight 4: At this point he had beaten me once, and I had beaten him once. So, it was back out for a third fight with the guy. He hauled me to the ground and choked me until I tapped, giving him the win.

Turns out that the white belt had cut weight down from 195, which explains the “unusually strong for our size” thing.

Overall, I’m totally happy with my performance. I achieved my goals for the tournament, which were:

* Win at least one fight
* Use the techniques we’ve been working on
* Throw combinations rather than just single attacks.
* Win or lose, but not on points. Play good judo.

I also learned some stuff: My endurance was still not where I want it to be. I feel like if I had more gas on the ground, I could have taken the gold. Also, my ground game needs work. I still get too defensive and wait for the referee to stand me up. Instead, I need to attack. Again, win or lose, but attack.

One more thing: A woman from my school brought her son, a curly haired 5 year old with bright blue eyes. As I was leaving the mat area, they congratulated me and said that they had taught the boy to cheer for me. On cue he said in a piping little voice: “Go Chris Go!” It was just about the most adorable thing ever.

Then and came over and we all stayed up until stupid late (like, 4am) watching the Watchmen movie. They’re still asleep, I think. redmed on the other hand, got up early and made apple crisp.

Sat Dec 12 :
7:15 Depart Boston (BOS) Jetblue 1003
8:30 Arrive New York (JFK) Jetblue 1003
10:40 Depart New York (JFK) Emirates Air 204
Sun Dec 13:
8:10 Arrive Dubai International (DXB) Emirates Air 204
13:30 Depart DXB (Emirates Air 572)
19:15 Arrive Kolkata (Chandra Bose Airport, CCU) Emirates Air 572

Mon – Wed: Work with customers in Kolkata

Wed Dec 16:
20:55 Depart Kolkata (CCU) Kingfisher IT 604
23:00 Arrive Delhi, Kingfisher 604

Thu – Fri: Work with customers in Delhi

Fri Dec 18:
23:10 Depart DelhiAir India (Business class - Booyah!)
Sat Dec 19:
4:45 Arrive New York (JFK) Air India
6:55 Depart New York (JFK) Jetblue 1002
8:09 Arrive Boston (BOS) Jetblue 1002