I’ve got to write this post quickly, because I’m on a year old laptop that won’t hold a charge for more than 20 minutes. I’d listen to my iPod while writing, but I can’t remove it from it’s charging station, as it hasn’t held a charge for 2 years. My Nano lasts a bit longer, but it’s scratched to hell.

I was going to bring up my Sony eBook for Mike to look at, but at 5 months old it no longer works. Reboot. Freeze. Repeat. So much for showing him this fantastic new eInk technology.

Oh, and I might be sitting in my living room watching TV, but my Sharp Aquos no longer turns on. It’s an ancient 18 months old. Sharp doesn’t want to have anything to do with it, and won’t admit that their Aquos series has power supply problems. Another letter for the BBB.

I look around the house and can not find a single gadget that is fully functional and over five years old. Nothing.

Funny, my twenty year old Kitchen Aid stand mixer works like new, and it’s been to Puerto Rico and back. My twenty five year old multimeter still works, but not my TV, my eBook, my iPods, my laptops (all three gave up holding a charge after a year). Why does the 19 year old Zenith laptop with a lead acid battery still run, but my Lenovo X61 with LiIon doesn’t?

Well, time to submit this post for publishing. My wireless network keeps cutting out, as I’m more than 20 feet from the router, so wish me luck.

While taking apart an old Epson printer this evening, I was reminded of one of the best ways of honing engineering skills: The Teardown.

When you are a child, people say: “He’s always taking things apart.” And it often has a negative connotation. In the adult world, it’s given a more respectable name: Teardown, AKA Reverse Engineering.

The end game is the same: Taking apart an object in order to understand how it works. Then to use that knowledge for your own work. It’s one of the best ways to get hands-on experience in understanding how things work.

As a society, we often bitch about how our children are failing in science. How they don’t know how to build things. And so on. Perhaps more annoying to me is that we seem to fixate on finding the source of the problem–playing the blame game–instead of actually fixing the god damn problem.

Build more schools! Be more involved in your childrens lives! Longer school years! All a bunch of bullshit.

Those who know me know that I’m no fan of formal education. I think it’s pretty much a colossal waste of time for most people. Smart people get stuck in rooms with morons. Mechanically gifted get stuck learning French instead of fabricating machine tools. It’s the Least Common Denominator at its worst.

Anyhow, enough of that rant. You want to teach kids mechanics and engineering? Give them an old piece of equipment, a screwdriver, and LEAVE THEM ALONE.

Back in September I talked about the percentage of ads in Wired magazine. Well, for the past couple of months I’ve noticed something I haven’t seen in a while: The Magazine Economic Indicator.

I first encountered the MEI back in the days of the dot com boom, way back in ‘99. At the time I subscribed to a magazine, might have been Fast Company, which tracked all the internet madness. At one point, right before the burst of the bubble, the thing was almost 1/2 inch thick!

As the bust progressed, I noticed the page count dropping. What was once hundreds of pages dwindled to under a hundred. Here was a reliable indicator of the economy.

Back to Wired: In September the magazine was 218 pages long, with 33 useless sheets (two page ads). What’s the current issue at? 116 pages. They have lost almost half of their page count!

Let’s look at the percentages. In September, 90 pages were actual content (41%). This month? 77 pages of content — up to 66% content. (Though, to be honest, many of the pages have a paragraph of text and a gigantic photo. Did I really need a full page image of a water bottle? I think not. Editorial filler.)

So, roughly, they have lost 25% of the advertisers since last September. That’s a huge decline, and is clear indicator of how bad things are. 

On the bright side, you can use Wired to determine when things are starting to get better (assuming that they don’t go under first). How do we know when the economy is improving? When their page count starts going up and not down. How well is the recovery doing? By looking at how many pages are being added per month.

I figure I can’t be any more innacurate than the economists.

Between work and home, things have been pretty busy as of late. Our current involved, though uninteresting, adventure is unboxing stuff in storage. The process goes something like this:

1. Dig through completely packed storage unit.
2. Pull out heavy boxes.
3. Load car with boxes.
4. Unload boxes into garage.
5. Open up boxes.
6. Look inside boxes and say “why the hell did we pack that?”
7. Repeat

It is amazing how much stuff we have. Pots, pans, sheets, old electronics, 60 different phone cords, pagers, cell phones, video game system, clothes, clothes we haven’t worn since 1990, worn out shoes, magazines, glasses, mugs, serving trays, roasters, and on and on.

Some of the stuff, like the tools, we are glad to see, since we now have a proper space to use them. Other stuff, like old clothes, are easy — donations to the Top Drawer thrift store. It’s all the middle ground stuff that is harder. Do we keep the electronics or give them away? Is there someone we know who could use some of this stuff? Toss, donate, or keep? If keep, where do we put it?

Our goal isn’t to empty the storage locker (locker is a misnomer–it’s a 10 x 20 x 10 unit–completely filled, floor to ceiling). We still need the storage because we aren’t going to unbox any of the books. Instead, we are trying to wade though 20 years of stuff and make decisions on what stays and what goes.

Part of the problem is that I have a very large “antique” computer collection. Amigas, Ataris, Kaypros, TIs, Apples, and so on. All of them are working, and have a bunch of software, so I don’t want to just give them away. And I’m really not interested in dealing with the process of selling them (especially with the amount of fraud on the auction sites these days). Evelyn found a local computer museum, affiliated with Goodwill, so I’m thinking of working out some sort of permanent loan arrangement with them. We’ll see. At least they would go to a good home.

Oh god, and the papers. During our original packing process I shredded bags and bags of old paperwork. Most of this was used as packing filler — we have filled up our 90 gallon recycle bin four times over with just shredded paper! I wonder what the recycle guy thinks when unloading our bin? All it contains is shredded paper and beer bottles. And yet, we still have boxes of papers. Old expense reports. Old bills. Old everything in between. 

Some of the stuff is easy–if it’s over 7 years, it goes. But some of it, like 4 year old medical bills, I’m leery of getting rid of (especially after my recent encounter with Delta “whoops, we lost your 4 year old claim” Dental). At this point, I’m going to box together everything of a certain age, seal it up, and put “destroy on 2012″ on it. What a pain in the ass.

Going through all the old bills reminded me how much money we churned through. Utterly mindboggling. Exercise equipment, electronics, appliances, services (cell phones), big car payments, video games, DVDs. At one point my head was almost spinning–$700 here, $1200 here, $120 here. No wonder the economy was doing so well!

Another Friday evening, another flight from Chicago to Austin.

Cicero Avenue was pretty darn slow, so I was worring a bit that Midway would be busy. Well, we got to the departure area and there were, maybe, 5 cars up there. This is at 6:15 PM! There was no one in line at the Southwest Curbside–just four skycaps waiting around. The guy who helped me told me it had been dead all day.

Got to the security lines, part 1, where they check your ID. There was no line for experienced traveller, and three people available to check my ID. I went to my usual guy and was though that part in about 15 seconds. Wandered over to the two dedicated scanner lanes–part 2 of security. One line had one person, the other was empty. No one there. All the TSA people chatting with each other.

In total, it took me 15 minutes from saying my goodbyes to sitting down at the gate. And more than half of that time was walking!

Some flights from the west coast were delayed due to ATC problems, but mine left on-time. A little delayed to start boarding (waiting for connections), but otherwise fine. The plane had a whopping 60 people on it (pretty typical; only once had this flight been full) and I was able to get my usual rear-of-the-plane seat. A quiet flight, and we even arrived a half hour early.

Now it is Saturday and it’s in the 70s and I’m sweating in this ‘heat’. It is, like the last several weekends I’ve arrived back, cloudy and windy. I must bright the clouds and wind with me wherever I go. I need to change into shorts.

I’m up in Chicago again. Been here since last Tuesday and will be flying back this Friday. It’s been a busy week, as I’ve been training a new employee on our reporting environment. On the plus side, we now have a dedicated report writer. On the minus side, I’m so exhausted that I pretty much pass out at seven thirty.

Things I continue to reaffirm:

• Offices are too noisy. I get more done in three hours at home than I do eight at corporate. My words of wisdom? Be mean to stupid people so they leave you alone, otherwise you will be pestered all day long by a never-ending series of “quick questions”.
• Chicagoans have a lot of hate. At least the ones on my train do. Hate their jobs. Hate their lives. Hate their health. Hate hate hate. And yet, they rush onto and off of the train. I see people trampling each other to get on the train, only to find that the car is half empty. I don’t get it.
• Winters in Chicago suck. Snow sucks. Cold sucks. There are many people who love winter. I am not one of those people.
• People love, love, love to be martyrs.  Give it a rest, Joan of Arc.

Speaking of the train: I heard one of my favorite pet-peeve phrases the other day. It goes something like “All we can do is pray.” It rates right up there with “It’s in God’s hands.” Two of the great cop-outs of life. Let’s not actually DO something useful, let’s leave it in the hands of the Magical Sky God. Good luck with that.

In lighter news: An Important Austin Reminder: SXSW is coming up in March. It’s the week of 3/13 through 3/22. The badges to get in are expensive, but if you are into film and music, it’ s the place to be. We’ve got an extra bedroom. If you can’t make that, then consider ACL in October.

Nothing much else exciting happening. Evelyn has been busy pulling stuff out of storage, donating things, and whatnot. We’re going through stuff we haven’t looked at in five years, trying to figure out what to keep, and often wondering “why in the heck did we keep that?”