Today marked the end of a long ordeal for Michele and I. After going into business for myself four years ago I significantly under-estimated my annual federal income tax. With each attempt to catch up and pay what I owed it seemed we only got in deeper.
This summer, with my job future here in question, I finally came clean and admitted that I had a problem dealing with this and that I needed help. Talking to Michele allowed me to see that my addictive side was hooked on the sick thrill of having this incredible debt looming over me. Knowing that an authority figure could come crashing down on my life somehow satisfied me. In transactional analysis terms I had found the ultimate “I’m not okay, you’re okay” situation. Uncle Sam plays for keeps and I was walking a very thin line towards disaster.
Michele rightly expressed dismay and hurt that I had allowed this situation to get out of hand. She expressed a loss of trust that I hadn’t come to her sooner and told her the truth of our situation. There were a couple of days there that were the hardest I’ve ever lived through. Afterwards we talked about what I needed to do to gain control of this part of my personality.
We restructured our finances and obtained a large second mortgage on our home with the money earmarked for paying off our back taxes. We filed an offer in compromise with the IRS to see if we could bargain to pay back a reduced amount against the promise of no late payments in the future. I learned to honestly look at money and what it meant to me.
Our offer was rejected, and our appeal was also denied. So today I wrote the check and sent a full payment to the Treasury. The monkey that has lived on my back for nearly three years is no longer there. The monkey isn’t dead, he’s just not actively weighing me down. I understand better now what people mean when they say they are a recovering addict. I will always be addicted to tempting authority; a part of me still craves the sick, hurt feeling I get when an authority figure is mad at me and punishing me.
The monkey is gone for today, I don’t know what form he will take next. I only hope that I have learned enough to be open and honest about any part of my life where I am tempting fate. I do not ever want to feel like this again. Because I like the feeling, and giving into it will ultimately destroy me.
Some times a little information is a dangerous thing.
After upgrading to 10.2.8 on my Powerbook (eeyore) I discovered the ‘sysctl’ command. Among other things it purports to report the CPU frequency of the machine. You do this by issuing this command:
sysctl hw.cpufrequency
Only the output may upset you. It certainly did me. I have a 867 MHz G4 but sysctl reported my CPU frequency as 667000000. A difference of 200 MHz or about 23%. Not cool. Further investigation into the matter had me reseting my PMU every time I had to restart my laptop. You see after reseting the PMU (and reseting the clock from 12/31/1969 each time) sysctl would return a beautiful 867000000 for cpuFrequency.
Not being happy with this situation I have been searching for clarification about this problem and a fix to make it go away. Yesterday, thanks to live journal thread on cpu frequency I think I found out what is happening. Moreover, I have confidence that my understanding is now the truth.
The hw.cpufrequency is an undocumented parameter of the sysctl command. Its results are not accurate. With the help of the XCode developer’s disk included in 10.3 (Panther) I installed the Skidmark GT benchmark tool yesterday. Upon running it with sysctl reporting 867 as the cpu frequency I got benchmarks of 86, 86, and 86 for Integer, Floating Point, and Vector.
Rebooting and not reseting the PMU results in sysctl showing 667 once again. Running Skidmark again I got 86, 86, and 86. Skidmark rates a 1.0 GHz CPU at 100, so values of 86 would be correct for a 867 MHz processor.
In other words, if you have been chasing after the solution to the sysctl hw.cpufrequency “bug” like I have, you can stop. Hw.cpufrequency is undocumented and returns a false value for G4 processors. If you have 10.3, put the XCode CD in your machine and install the Skidmark GT tool (it’s part of the CHUD benchmarking package) and use it to evaluate your machine’s performance.
In ten or so years of personal computer ownership I have upgraded operating systems, office productivity tools, development environments, and a host of other applications large and small.
I’ve survived OS/2 Warp and it’s 20 plus diskettes, and made the hike up through Windows 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, 2000, and XP Professional. I made detours along the way to play with QNX, BeOS, and some Red Hat Linux distributions.
In all the upgrades, new editions, and “clean” installs I’ve never not had a problem. The closest I came was with Windows XP Professional that installed with no errors in less than an hour, only to blue screen on the first boot.
This week I upgraded to Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), upgraded that to 10.3.2, and then installed iLife ‘04 on two different Macs with not a single hiccup. Insert the disk, click on continue a few times, select an option or two and sit back and relax.
I installed 10.3 on my Powerbook sans backup, I took a leap of faith and trusted that the “archive and install” option provided would be all the safety net I’d need. I was amply rewarded. The upgrade to 10.3.2 and later installation of iLife was a breeze.
My wife who has been subject to the horrors of “a simple install” before was reluctant to upgrade her iMac. Not that it wouldn’t be working in the end, but that it would take hours and hours with extreme amounts of frustration. We installed 10.3, upgraded it to 10.3.2, and installed iLife in about 3 hours. Everything works, out of the box, no sweat, no worries.
Years ago I remember running across the term “out of box experience.” For my money no one beats Apple’s OOBE. Nothing will beat the original OOBE, when we first brought our Macs home, but this software “refresh” comes damn close.
Kudos to Apple.
Thanks to Inluminent, I now have a full entry RSS feed. Scroll to the very bottom of this page and select the rss 2.0 link and you are in business.
Thanks to John’s generosity I was literally able to copy and paste his template into a new template in my movableType set up. Very cool.
This morning I spent an hour or so installing a new wireless router to replace the wired router we have been using since February 2000. The process seemed simple on the surface; unplug the CAT-5 cords and power supply from the old router and drop the new one into place. Access the build in web accessible configuration and we’re surfing the Internet wirelessly.
In the actual doing of these steps I made two minor, easily correctable mistakes. Either of these taken individually would have been easy to diagnose and correct. Taken in tandem they proved to be difficult to overcome. In the end I was forced to contact my broadband provider to sort out what had happened.
In the process of installing the new router I was presented with a choice. When my connection didn’t work after making what I thought was the correct selection I should have backed up and tried the other option. Instead I decided that I must have another “problem.”
In my efforts to correct this nebulous other problem I introduced the second error. When I called for assistance the technician quickly zeroed on the incorrect choice as my problem. Once I made the correct choice every thing would work he assured me. Only, because I had wandered off the reservation earlier, it didn’t. It only took him a few minutes to locate my gaffe and correct it.
The thing I find interesting in all this is the whole paired problem paradigm. I often see situations in my employment as a programmer where outwardly it appears as if there is one problem. But upon examination you discover there are really two problems (or three), one behind the other causing the situation. I think that in life we have paired problems as well. Only without the concrete (if somewhat obscure) error messages and indicators that software gives us, life’s paired problems are much tougher to identify and correct.
In the interaction that occurs between a software developer and their code there are lots of cues as to the understanding of the problem domain by each side. The development tools provide feedback to the developers commands and from that feedback the developer (hopefully) knows what to do next.
In real life, interactions don’t happen via some magical interface that provides cues and hints as to the other participant’s understanding. You may think you are communicating clearly when in fact you aren’t. We have to develop our listening and intuitive skills to provide us with feedback about our interactions with others. We need to have a safe place to develop these skills, a place where we can stop the other person and say, “Is this what you really mean?”, or “I’m hearing this, is that what you are saying?” If we never develop our ability to debug our own life, we’ll spend most of our time being frustrated and angry.
I am fortunate to have a loving and very safe relationship with my wife. I have a place to develop my human interaction debugging skills. Within the safety of our relationship I have learned to trust my instincts and intuitions so that when I am out in the world I can believe what I am telling myself.
Without a safe place to develop these skills I would be suffering from masked problems on a daily basis; life would be much harder and more difficult. I’ve learned through hard experience to call for help when I get in over my head technically. (And to call earlier rather than later…) I’m also learning to actively look for feedback from my trusted companion.
Yesterday I upgraded my Powerbook to Panther (10.3.2) in a relatively painless 2 hour process. After the process was completed I was having trouble with my copy of CodeTek’s Virtual Desktop application.
I was using a 2.x version and knew that there was a 3.0 beta out. I went to their site and got the 3.0 beta and installed it. This morning I restarted my machine and went to my applications folder and started “CodeTek VirtualDesktop.” My finder crashed and I was forced to restart once again.
Back at my desktop I fired off an e-mail to the president of the company, Bill Goldstein, explaining my troubles. Mind you it was just before 7 am Central time. After sending the e-mail I tried installing the beta a second time. Before I could log out to put the install in to place I got a reply from Mr. Goldstein.
He expressed concern that the beta was performing in the manner I described. He said he was passing my issue on to the company’s CTO. Wow. This time I sorted the application folder by name instead of kind and discovered an icon for “CodeTek VitrualDesktop Pro”. Oops. I had accidentally run the old version after the first install.
I quickly replied to Mr. Goldstein and explained my gaffe. He replied, saying he was glad I had solved the problem, and if I had any more trouble I shouldn’t hesitate to contact them again.
The “Pro” version works extremely well, and I will be happy to pay for the upgrade when it goes live.
In this day and age when companies are hiding behind impersonal feedback forms and obscuring their contact information on web sites, it is a treat to interact with a company that shares the president’s e-mail address. And moreover, a company president who responds to customers immediately and with real concern.
CodeTek. Good stuff. Go get some.
Michele and I have been spending a lot of time and energy talking about moving. For the past few weeks we’ve kicked around a couple of potential destinations but we’ve been unable to find a reason to move.
In the 8 years we’ve been together there have been 3 major cross country moves, 4 if you count her moving from Colorado Springs to Illinois to be with me. Each of the moves was done to accommodate my career, each was disruptive and emotionally draining. We’ve learned some hard lessons about taking care of ourselves before, during, and after a major upheaval like moving.
We knew coming back to Illinois was not forever. At various times, depending upon our mood and situation, we’ve thought it would last as long as a decade or as short as sometime next week. We are now painfully aware that the fantasy of achieving some measure of financial independence as a result of working for myself was just that, a fantasy.
As our blinders have come off regarding the monetary aspects of living here, we have come to be less tolerant of the short-comings of life in rural, small town Central Illinois. Our liberal leanings, and humanist stance on world events set us apart from the conservative and closed society here. We feel isolated and cut off here.
In our effort to learn from our past experiences we want to make our next relocation about meeting our real needs, and not just to satisfy some external validation need. Trying to enumerate those real needs is not an easy task; they are more ephemeral and elusive than money or jobs. How do you identify and measure your happiness with a new city’s cultural outlook on human rights or the political direction of the country? Or measure it’s liberal to conservative ratio? How much importance do you give the new city’s weather or scenery?
So in the coming weeks we’ll be asking ourselves, what is important about where I live? And what needs do I have that might be addressed by a geographic location? Once we have a handle on that I think the right future home will become apparent. At least I hope so.
This afternoon Michele and I watched “Bruce Almighty” on a rented DVD. While DVDs maybe better than VHS tapes in many regards there is one area of the DVD viewing experience that I could live without.
Forced watching of previews.
This particular DVD forced us to watch previews for not one, not two, but three movies. Repeated attempts to break out of the previews using the “menu” button only generated the “This function prohibited” message. Turning the DVD player off, and restarting the disk, thinking there may have been a tiny window of opportunity to access the menu before the previews started allowed us to watch the same damn previews all over again.
Even if “Bruce Almighty” was on my list of movies to purchase, in all likelihood I would not buy a DVD copy of it, since any time I wanted to watch it I’d be forced to sit through several minutes of trailers for movies long since forgotten.
Come on Hollywood, let us watch the intellectual property we’ve PURCHASED the we choose to and not according to some pea-brained marketing putz’s idea of how to make more money. (The irony here is that in the movie, you can’t mess with free will, whereas in reality you pays your money and lose your freedom.)
I’ve switched the navigation elements for my site from a vertical list, positioned on the right side of the page to a horizontal navigation bar. I used the List-a-matic web site to find a look and feel I liked, finally settling on Seth’s horizontal list.
I also added a “fieldset” tag around each blog entry, which gives me access to the “legend” tag for the entry titles. I know that I should really use CSS for the all-around border, and still more CSS for the title box, with a negative top margin to position it, but for today fieldset and legend will work.
I have looked it the new pages with all the browsers I have access to at home (Safari 1.0, Mozilla Firebird, Camino 0.7, and Microsoft IE 5.2), and via all the user agents Safari can spoof (Mozilla 1.1, Netscape 7, 6.2.2, 4.7.9, Windows IE 6.0, and Knoqueror 3). Except for some very slight rendering differences every thing looks good and more importantly works.
If you have any problems please contact me via the contact link on my colophon page.
I just read an interesting posting which asked the question, “Do you tell your family about your blog?”
The comment I posted on Makiko’s site went like this:
I guess I would be okay with them reading it since I would not expect feedback or to get my needs met through them. For all I know they are reading it now and just not saying anything to me.
Beyond immediate family and friends, I am curious to know who reads my site. I can see by referer logs, and site counters how many of you there are, and where some of you came from. But I really have no interaction with the people reading my thoughts. It makes this form of communication unique.
Click the comments link below and let me know who you are, and whether or not you have a weblog.