A Reasonable and Nondiscriminatory Journal

Coping Lessons, 2006

Sat, 30 Dec 2006 23:45:51 GMT

On the positive side, it has been a fantastic year. I learned about depression, what it means, and how I have it. This is like a 15 year breakthrough, a first for my adult life and an identification of an issue. Issues can't be resolved until they are first identified, and it's a huge relief to gain understanding here.

As far as lessons learned, I learned that Depression fucking sucks and I've got it for the rest of my life, so I better deal. I have a feeling, though I'm not sure, that I will never experience happiness, motivation and productivity in the same way that many other people do. On those days, several times a month, where getting out of bed seems impossible and nothing seems worth doing, getting through the day will require superhuman effort on my part.

I'm pretty sure that my happiest life would be with a highly extroverted alpha female, someone smart and effective, a woman with no time for bullshit but still some capacity for nuturing. I also learned that my core self-image as a weak and sentimental lover prevents me from talking to or even being in the same room with these women. But I also learned that I can change this self-image if I want to. I've always thought these women just didn't exist but now I'm pretty sure it's my own self image that prevents me from seeing them.

Most suprisingly, I've discovered a few very simple and inexpensive things that give fast and effective and sometimes instantaneous relief from a depressive state:

* music - just turning on the music can make the difference between me laying around the house all day vs getting a bunch of stuff done and feeling good about myself.

* caffeine (coffee, red bull) - I was always under the impression that caffeine was for energy, and anti-sleep agent. But I've discovered that when it feels like I'm wearing a wetsuit made of lead, can't move, can't think, everything sucks ... a quick jolt of coffee will make everything better.

* friends - I can now actually physically feel the effect of being around people that make me feel good. It makes me feel safe and happy. Typically I need coffee, music or both to get out and see friends though.

Given the above, I have no idea what my 400mg/day dose of Wellbutrin is doing for me. I'm afraid to get off it to find out. I put a lot of faith in the drug, which is probably a bit of a crutch at this point.

I'm very optimistic for 2007. I feel like I have much more ability to execute. I am still learning to detect when I am depressed and take action, but I'm way above where I was last year. I also feel that if I can't perform to the level of my own expectations (in terms of productivity, effectiveness, etc), it's really up to me to reset those expectations for myself and feel good about myself.

Layed Out

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 00:02:11 GMT

One of annoying things about taking anti-depressents is the half-life is so long, it's impossible to any scientific experiments on yourself (hold all variables constant except for one) and still continue living your life. To test all the things I'm curious about with Wellbutrin I would have to be my life on hold for about four months.

Having said that, I think I nuked myself today by taking a little to much. I've noticed that it's hard for me to wake up and get started with the day. But after I'm up and out, and especially after I take my afternoon dose, I'm happy and interactive well with people ... it feels great. I'm up to taking 400mg a day (200mg AM and PM), although I haven't noticed much improvement from 300mg. So I tried taking 300mg around 9am, which is pretty early for me these days. I was hoping that extra 100mg will boost me out of bed and spash out into the sunny day ( for about 7 minutes, and then work at the office for 12 hours).

I think it actually had the opposite effect. After taking it I immediately went back to sleep. When I next woke up it was after 11am, and I was supremely unmotivated. I checked some work and personal email and the dread of facing people at the office was building up. After spending about 30 minutes in the shower (which usually helps get me motivated) I realized there was no way I was making it out of the house today. The embarassment of emailing work to say I was staying at home all day for no good reason was eclipsed by the reality that the best outcome for this day would be just rest up try again tomorrow.

I was downstairs at this point and I crawled under the plaid comforter. I was on the bean bag thingy, and wrapping in warm things felt so, so good. I slept for about four more hours, it's almost 5pm. Now I'm ready to eat something but the food is waaaaayyyy over there in the refrigerator......

So I think this is due to the extra wellbutrin but it's hard to say. Other activities this weekend included hacking for about 16 hours on Saturday, staying up till 4am at Urban Wasteland that night, sleeping really late on Sunday and then a totally unplanned (and anomalous) make-out session with this girl that is adorable but I don't want to be her boyfriend, at my place, until night time. Then this morning I was afraid TR got hacked, but it turned out to be just some corrupt mysql tables. Any of those things could have been contributing factors and I think they all probably were. I'm hoping if I hit the gym tonight and go down to the prescribed dose tomorrow AM that I'll at least be functional again.

I really need something to get me up and happy in the morning. Could be as simple as coffee....don't really know

I'm feeling better .... who's next?

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 09:29:26 GMT

I've changed the name, if you know me this is pretty obvious ...

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi Mom,

I talked to Katie tonight for a while. She was feeling depressed but we were able to talk for a while. She is distressed about things that are reasonable to be distressed about: that she hates her job (USDA), that she hasn't be able to motivate and do the things she wanted to do in the past year. I think this is due to depression, and I tried to explain that it's out of her control. Her negative experiences with therapy have taken their toll, she is frustrated with the process, and lacks confidence that it will help at all. She said she doesn't like her therapist, but then talking about it more she said she doesn't want to start with a new therapist and explain her story all over again. It's an annoying and painful process so I can see how she feels that way. I am also certain that therapy and self-exploration is the only path towards Katie feeling happier and better about herself.

Katie's defense mechanisms right now are standard: victimization ("this stuff keeps happening to me, I'll never been able to do what I want to do"), and pessimism ("that will never work because ... "). These are defense mechanisms. It's a reaction to a world that's not fair, doesn't make sense, and seems impossible. The only antidote, unsurprisingly, is optimism. I am certain that Katie will be happier in less than a years time, perhaps 6 months.

Depression is weird condition, everyone's experience is different. What I have found incredibly remarkable about myself in the past few months is that when I'm feeling bad about myself, when I have negative thoughts, when I'm certain that I'm going to be laid off from my job because I'm not useful anymore, when I feel like I have no friends because they are all married .... those are trigger thoughts for me now. Those thoughts mean I have forgotten to take my medication. It has so many times in the past months that I am certain of it. I don't know what the long terms effects of this are or what this might mean, but I also don't care. I have something that works for me now and if at some point in the future I want to get off the medication I can deal with it at that time. I'm not as happy as I would like to be (as usual, I set my goals high), but I'm functioning. And I have enough understanding about myself and my situation to be able to continue improving my situation.

Katie met almost every suggestion I had with a reason why it couldn't work or why she didn't like it, etc. This is chatter and defense. It's important to hear beyond the words and try to understand why they are being said. She's not being difficult for the sake of being difficult. She's saying those things because in a period of depression, it is impossible for a person to have a positive attitude.

So I've noticed something about my boss Max while working at Slide. He has the most amazing attitude. He is free of outbursts and he has unending optimism. For example, when someone mentioned that our "numbers" were low, he said "oh, but that means they have so much potential for growth!" I could cite hundreds of similar examples. I find his attitude both remarkable and inspirational. It is rare that such an intelligent person (true genius in my opinion), with such a positive attitude, is also in a position of power. And even rarer that I am working at that person's startup. I'm sure at this point that this is a once-in-a-lifetime ... unless of course this exception situation leads to other exception situations. Things do tend to work out that way.

Anyway, Max has inspired me to be more positive, or at least try. And I do think it's working. I feel better. Things do turn out better if I envision them turning out better. Not for hokey reasons, but because a positive vision inspires me to find a positive solution.

Katie is depressed but in a stable and safe position. She has a secure place to live with minimal costs and we could easily cover those costs if necessary. She has a car. She has a desire to do great things and feel better. She has all the tools she needs to get better.

Katie's process of feeling happier is going to take a long time. The best way to help her is to be positive. That means finding something good to say about whatever she says. That means ignoring anything negative she says because she's not really saying it, her condition is causing her to say it. It's a challenge. But it does help. I know there are often flash points between with you and her, so if you do interact with her, please be positive. For real. Forget about anything bad that "might" happen, because those things are not going to happen. As a family we have been worrying about "what if" for a long time. I think we can stop now.

I remember being depressed and hanging up the phone and feeling bad but if the person I was talking to was positive I did feel better. This is just a salve, it makes an unhappy person feel slightly better. She will still be depressed even if she gets positive reinforcement. My opinion is that recovery from depression can only happen through therapy, through the subject's own personal desire to feel better, and in my case and I think Katie's case, some form of antidepressant. Of which I think Wellbutrin is the best option on the market today.

Another thing that I found really nice was to be around people that liked me. If you know Katie's friends or other people that like her and have an opportunity to facilitate some quality time, that would be a good thing. Mostly I think that is happening as best it can right now though, her housemates seem largely supportive.

For whatever reason, Katie said she is scheduled to take the CBEST test this saturday. In some ways I hope she cancels but actually if she shows up to the test that will play right into my hands. She said the is in SF and I'm dog sitting for Raj and Jessica this weekend, and we know Katie likes dogs, so I am hoping she will come over and visit me and zara the dog after the test. There is a great dog park near Raj's house at the top of bernal hill.

I'm also going to take a more active role in getting Katie together with a therapist that she actually likes. I am confident that we can find someone good and affordable, and I have plenty of income at this point to contribute to the cause. Besides my job at Slide, DropDV continues to be successful beyond my expectations. I will be asking around of my therapist friends for recommendations, but also I want her to try once more time at Kaiser SF. Kaiser Oakland sounds terrible. I also don't think Kaiser Marin is a good option because it's inconvenient and also I think there is a smaller number of therapists she would connect with there, perhaps zero. So please send me her kaiser number and whatever other numbers I need so I can schedule Kaiser appointments for her. I'm guessing that therapy won't work out with Kaiser, but for psychiatry kaiser is very useful. You talk to a boring doctor for a few minutes and walk out the door with a prescription for the medication that allows you to get out of bed in the morning. Also getting Wellbutrin through Kaiser is inexpensive (at least with the plan that I have).

I know you are concerned for Katie, but I don't think there is reason to be. Katie is in a safe place and everything is going to get better. Showing concern, while well intentioned, is not going to make her feel better. Remember, right now, everything thing Katie says is a good idea. Everything she does is a useful experience that will help her in the future. Katie is not self destructive ... things could be so much worse, but they're not. and they're not going to be. All of the challenges Katie has faced in the past 6 years can be overcome through therapy, and work, and a desire on her own part to get better. But she has to believe it herself that the process will work, and she has to overcome these challenges on her own. This will take time. All we can do is stand on the sidelines and be positive in a sincere way. It really is a challenge. So many times I just wanted to end the conversation, after all it's such a pain to deal with a negative attitude and I could be eating ice cream or something. But I was able to detach from those reactions and think of a positive way to spin things.

It's also helpful for us to be having fun ourselves. Remember fun? My new attitude is to do whatever I want if it makes me happy. As it happens, it doesn't take much to make me happy and it's well within my means. But it's also about attitude, about making that decision to have fun just because you feel like it, and not worrying about saving the world, and not worry that having fun today might prevent having fun in the future, and so on. So I asked Katie what she was doing tomorrow and she said "going to work and therapy" in a way that was ... well she wasn't exactly excited about either of those things. So I told her try to do something fun for herself tomorrow. To try to think of something she likes and just do it. It's easier said than done.

-

big rocks

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 20:13:43 GMT

I'm about to take off to Kings Canyon with Melody, Sati and Heather. We are going to go here:

http://www.ptone.com/canyoneering97/thumbnailerOutline.html

and doing this:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1396102360867024883

I feel great. Just a few minutes before I go but I wanted to write a blog entry when I was happy for once. I wish I could freeze-dry this moment. I feel positive and optimistic, it would be great if this could last forever....

---

I've got a draft going concerning my life on drugs .... more later.

et Kaiser vinco

Sat, 20 May 2006 21:48:33 GMT

This whole process has been very successful. I asked several close friends (some of whom are therapists) about their experiences with depression and it was great to hear some different perspectives. The summary is basically "the drugs work....go find a therapist you like." I was able to navigate the Kaiser bureaucracy and see both a psychiatrist (who was OK) and a therapist (who I think is great). I super happy about my Kaiser therapist. It can be really hit or miss at Kaiser, but I scored. The psych doesn't matter anyway, she just writes the prescription. The costs for medication and therapy are about 10% of what I would pay for a private therapist and out of pocket medication (I have a $15 copay for therapy sessions, and a 450mg dosage of Wellbutrin is $10/month, a price so low as to be ridiculous). Not that I don't have money to spend on medical care....I'm just bad at spending money (probably one of the many topics I will explore in therapy). I'm also an advocate of public institutions, and I consider Kaiser to be quasi-public healthcare).

It turns out that my grandmother (my mom's mom) attempted suicide twice: once after my mom was born (second child) and once around the time I was born). Also my mom took antidepressents in the late 90s and also received some psychotherapy. None of this was known to me until I started asking about it. A lot of things make a lot more sense now. My mom, me, my sister, other family members....we all have a similarly mopey attitude.

The psych asked me a bunch of pretty basic questions about my physical symptoms (do you sleep a lot? are you suicidal?) She drew a picture on a scrap of paper that looked like a sinusoidal curve but instead of peaks and valleys it was valleys and flatlines. "So it sounds like over the long term you feel like this: depressed and then normal for a while, depressed and then normal". Totally, that's pretty much the way my life has been for years and years. I do sometimes feel really good for a few days at a time, but apparently these feel good times are not high enough to qualify as "mania," which I guess which push me over into the Bi-Polar spectrum.

At the end of the session the psych basically gave me the choice between Wellbutrin (Bupropion) and SSRIs (e.g. Prozac, Zoloft, etc). She almost didn't give me Wellbutrin because she said it doesn't go well with anxiety (and I feel anxious sometimes). But Wellbutrin sounds pretty cool so she is letting me try it out.

The whole thing is a scam. The "list" price of the drugs is super inflated by the pfizer/insurance complex. It is so weird navigating the medical system. Where is my freaking shaman with some mental tea?

I have explored a bit more into general mind alteration. For example a fantastic looking book called PiHKAL. The title comes from "Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved: A Chemical Love Story" by Alexander and Ann Shulgin, pioneer masters of mind alteration and its relationship to life and love. This guy has single handedly synthesized almost all the phenethylamines. I bow down in total reverence. Check out one of the recipes for synthesis. Simply amazing.

Wellbutrin (Bupropion) is a phenethylamine and therefore in the same class as 2C-B and whole bunch of other brain science. The psych has me starting at 150mg/day for one week, 300mg/day for three weeks, and then going to 450mg/day. They are cautious with the dosage because there is about a 0.1% chance of causing a seizure. Frankly I think it would be cool to have a seizure. I've never had one. Just as long as it doesn't happen while I'm cycling.

I've only been dosing for 3 days, and supposedly it takes weeks for the medication to reach stable levels throughout the body. But either I'm crazy or I feel a pronounced effect within an hour of popping the pill in the AM. The feeling is difficult to describe. I don't know what to say other than I just feel good. I feel less hypersensitive to noise than usual. I'm less hypersensitive to anything that is annoying, really. I'm more likely to start a conversation with someone. I'm less likely to make rude or cutting remarks. I feel somewhat dissociated, detached. Like I don't care about anything but not in a despairing kind of way...it's not caring in a way that feels healthy. Also I feel what seems like somewhat increased ICP, a slight headache. Rather than feeling bad like a normal headache, it's more like a "ringing in the ears" -- but in my head, not my ears. This feeling reminds me that I'm here and that I should be *doing something*. So this morning I went to the gym. I think next I will finally be motivated to clean up some stuff in my apartment.

I hope my body gets used to this stuff because if the past few days is a predictor of future results, I am going to be freaking *flying* when I get up to 450mg.

Situationally though, I'm pretty much in the same place. Instead of being depressed and bored and lonely in my apartment, I'm happy and bored and lonely in my apartment. I find it quite humorous.

State sanctioned brain science....who knew?

The FDA approved Wellbutrin as an antidepressent in 1989. I've been a Kaiser member all my life. This means I could have resolved a lot of these issues and gotten access to this medication over fifteen years ago, before I was even in highschool. At any given time, 10% of the population is experiencing depression. If you suspect at all that you are living with chronic depression, like I have been, get off your ass and try to undo the effects. Do not listen to this bullshit about "you need sunshine, you need to exercise." I've been hitting the gym for 30 minutes every day for the past 5 months *and* riding my bike to work and it hasn't done jack. If you have a family history of depression and look back on your life and can identify repeated episodes of depression, then your brain is almost certainly broken in a way similar to mine. The symptoms checklist is pretty straight forward and you can read about it on the NIMH website.

I wish I had done this stuff ten years ago. But better late then never. It feels like evolution. It's very exciting. It's too bad nobody ever wants to talk about this stuff.

Radio Silence

Mon, 01 May 2006 05:28:59 GMT

I've been letting social events slip for the past couple months, but I wanted to hold off writing about it until I had turned the corner.

It's been an interesting ride. I have had periods of depression before, but nothing this dark while also holding down a job. The intensity of this most recent episode is what I refer to as "Princeton Quality" which translates in my head into "pretty freaking bad." (the language invokes my college years, which were the darkest I've ever experienced).

Radio Silence refers to me canceling all social plans, leaving my cell phone at home so I don't have to answer it, not returning calls, and not answering email unless someone asked me a question. The only way I could hold things together was by retreating within myself to the extreme. I've been holed up here in my loft, venturing out only when required for work or due to extreme hunger. It was kind of nice in some ways. I liked the Zen of it. Coming home to voice mail hearkened back to the good old days of the answering machine.

For most of my life I have pondered the cause and effect of my depression. Am I depressed because I am stupid and worthless, or because I am somehow medically broken? (If you want to skip the essay, I think it's the latter). Am I depressed because I don't have any friends* and a life partner, or are those things missing from my life because I am depressed? I find that the two are pretty closely intertwined. Seeing happy families throws me into a dark emotional state (presumably because that is something that I want but don't have). It has been increasingly difficult for me to have fun in social situations. I don't have emotional incentive to go out if I don't feel like it's going to be fun.

(* The phrase "I don't have friends" is more of an emotional thing on my part and means something very specific to me. It's obviously not literally true. Despite how it sounds, it refers to the fact that my isolationist behavior often *prevents* people from being friends with me. Even with this sabotage, people still continue to hang out with me. God bless you guys! )

What is interesting to me is that I can recognize many of my negative behaviors on an intellectual level, but I can't seem to overcome them. For example it is obvious that I can't maintain existing friendships, make new friends or meet new people if I continue taking actions to be alone in my apartment. But when I find myself in social situations, I just freeze up. This means exhibiting closed body language, not talking, and killing conversations, don't know what to say. In my mind, the topic is "boring", the people at the party aren't "serious" enough (for what?) and from there it's just a downward spiral. Lately I've just been skipping the events entirely. I have missed company parties, send off parties for friends....important stuff. I have no excuse except "I didn't feel like going." I was just too depressed to go.

Recent weekends have mirrored a very prominent experience that I had at Burning Man in 2002. After rocking out all night and having a totally awesome time on The Playa (by myself), watching the sun rise and feeling the temperature increase to a million degrees, I thought to myself: "How am I going to make it through the day?" It was so hot during the day that I often felt like I was struggling to survive.

When similar thoughts occur in Real Life, I take it as a warning sign. When I go out dancing on a Friday or Saturday night (by myself of course) and then wake up at 8am, sun streaming into my room, wondering "How am I going to make it through the day?" .... that can't be good. An observer might say I need to get some hobbies. Maybe something or someone to do on the weekends. But I think something else needs to happen first. I need to get over my social anxiety. I'm afraid of what people think about me, and it's getting worse.

I think some of this is due to getting older. I used to think older people were less self-conscious. But if my experience is any guide, that is just smoke and mirrors. It's true that some people do grow more confident in themselve as the mature. But older people also become experts at manufacturing their own reality. With increases in wealth and experience come the power to avoid most uncomfortable situations. People who aren't happy by 30 seem to me to get even more morose. The perceived failures of adult life tend to build up and reinforce themselves at this point.

Depression is weird to talk about and has been hard for me to deal with. In the first place, it's not something I want to talk about anyway. When friends ask "How are things going?" I hardly want to be truthful: "Well, I have every material thing I could ever want, but my day-to-day life is miserable." Who wants to say and/or hear that? Not me. And then a friend is going to have an honest desire to fix the problem. That makes sense. But even talking about the problem just makes me more upset about it. Just thinking about it makes me mad. So the simplest social banter becomes a horribly detailed problem for me. "Things are good." And then I descend into darkness because I feel like I am being dishonest with both myself and the person I am talking to.

But for this episode I have weathered the storm. Yay! Yesterday I did laundry. Over the years I have noticed this as a signal that I'm not depressed anymore. When I start picking up all the stuff I've scattered around the house and start doing laundry, happy times are ahead. Plus I just finished dancing around the living room to a sick Gabor Deutsch track ("Strange Tale", nice beefy jungle). That's a good sign too.

I am now convinced that my issues are due to something physical in my brain and not "just a phase." The few people I have talked to about it (including therapists) think that I am "mostly OK" but it is difficult to explain when one is not happy. Also, I only got through three sessions of therapy before I freaked out and stopped going (it was expensive and weird). My family has a history of depression, including my grandmother, my cousin (who was recently hospitalized for it), and I think my mom, and definitely me and my sister. I've read a few articles about depression and it seems that there is scientific evidence for depression as a medical condition (and I've got all the symptoms baby!).

I'm going to read The New Antidepressants and I'm going to try to work my way through the Kaiser bureaucracy and see if I can get some happy drugs. I know a lot of you out there know a thing or two about serotonin (wink, wink). If you have any advice, drop me a line.

I think this is the way to go for me. My only fear is that I won't be an interesting personal anymore. I'm pretty sure depression has driven me to do some interesting things that I would not have done otherwise. My hope is that I can keep the good, interesting aspects of my personality and lose the bad. But if I had to make a choice between happy and boring vs. sad and interesting, I guess I would rather be happy and boring.

The Dead Zone

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 23:22:14 GMT

There seems to be some sort of post-holiday funk going on. Maybe that's why every year I either moderately or super depressed around my birthday (1/19). I haven't had a birthday party since I was a teenager and mom took me and my friends ice skating. A couple weeks ago I was psyched to have people over for dinner and then go out to Sublounge (a couple blocks from my house). But I'm not really motivated for it now. I never ended up getting the stuff I wanted for the party, namely a projector and speakers. I think it will still happen, but on a more subdued level.

I kind of like this no-sex-and-very-little-drinking pattern I seem to have fallen into somehow. While most people were hung over this morning i went to IKEA to *finally* pick up the 16 bolts that were missing from my bed (they were supposed to mail them to me, but dropped the ball apparently and I don't feel like calling again). Then exchanged this super cool drink shaker from BB&B (It was missing the cap part. It's a bit gauche to have to your hand over the top of the drink shaker to prevent your martini from sloshing out, right?).

And now it's a beautiful day and all I have to is go through the last 15% of my boxes and deal with 10 years of photographs. Hmmm.....seems suspiciously similar to the previous 27 Sundays.

How unique are we?

Mon, 02 Jan 2006 03:43:16 GMT

Growing up, it's probably pretty important to feel like you're important. Parents around the world generally go out of their way to make their kids feel special, that they're the bestest, the most wonderfulest children in the world. Even in cultures where that kind of love isn't expressed out loud, it is implicitly communicated in the fact that parents care for grandparents, etc.

But how special are we, really? Fight Club is one of my favorite movies. It's a riff on the frustrations of manufacturing our uniqueness (if any) through the consumption of completely generic goods. For example, even if I do take a welding class and make my own bed, I'm not going to mill the steel myself. We all want to be special, or at least feel special, but we all only have access to the materials that earth provides and that our budgets allow.

I recently saw a high school friend at a holiday dinner party. Apparently single, she is responsible for several million dollars in revenue at AOL.com and is just as hot as she was in high school ("lots of male attention" as grandma would say). She say's it's hard to meet people, a common complaint among educated singles.

This reminds me of one of my favorite mathematical formulas which is called the Drake Equation. It's an attempt to calculate the probability that non-earth based intelligent life exists in our galaxy, and I love the equation because it consists of seven variables most of which are completely unknown to the current state of science.

Drake's states that the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy is equal to the rate of star formation in our galaxy times the fraction of those stars that have planets times the fraction of those planets that can potentially support life times the fraction of those planets that actually develop life times the fraction of *those* planets that actually go on to develop intelligent life times the fraction of those planets that are actually willing and able to communicate with us times L, the expected lifetime of these hypothetical civilizations. I would add that in the next 100-1000 years humans will either be able to calculate this result, or understand why it is unsolvable.

I like to think about a similar equation for human relationships. It seems reasonable that we would fall into the same boxes. So for example most of my friends are college educated, on the smart end, and close to my age. Given that about 15.3 million students attended college in 2003, we can extrapolate that there are about 38.250 million college educated americans within a ten year band of a given age (e.g. between 25-35 years old). From there the reduction begins. Taking the top ten percent of this ten year band of college grads takes us down to 3.8 million, and then we can nitpick on personality, religion, preferred types of music, food preferences, appearance...however it is that we pick our friends. So let's ballpark and assume there are 100k-1m people that a given college grad is compatible with (this compatibility could be platonic or not). That's from American colleges....there are probably an additional 100k-1m from India, Europe, Asia, etc. That's the supply side.

On the demand side we can think about our rate of interaction with other people. Everyone has their various levels of contacts with different friends: daily contact, weekly, monthly, yearly at the hometown holiday party, etc. But what about new people? This is broken down into the quality and type of the interaction. For example just by going to work every day when I lived in New York, I would see thousands of different people every day. Not that straphangers ever talk to each other, but it's a drastically different amount exposure to new people than I get on my daily commute today. In the rainy season I see about 50 people on the bus, and maybe 10-20 more as I walk on the street to work. But in the common case, I'm riding my bike to work, where about 50 cars pass by me while I ride to work and maybe 10-20 pedestrians.

All of that is all very interesting, but where *do* we meet people? A college friend found his most recent girlfriend by spilling coffee on himself at a cafe. Very endearing, but pretty uncommon. Most people meet "through friends", at work, or through some activity interest (which could be anything from oil paintingto funny car racing). Using our 100k-1m estimate above, and assuming an even distribution on the street, and a population of 250m, we can estimate that the probability that we would potentially enjoy hanging out with a random passing stranger on the street is somewhere between 0.04-0.4%. In practice, my guess is the probability is actually much lower than that (or at least differently calculated) because friendship choices are based much more on personality than educational background.

If we actually had access to the statistics we could do the math and find out, for example, how many ivy league, burning man, stock car racing fans will be at the race track next season. Unfortunately those kind of data aren't readily available (e.g. from google) so we are just left to our own devices. As with Drake's equation, we don't really have the numbers to fill in the human interaction equation. And even if we did, we would just be doing the same thing anyway: going to parties and hoping to meet new friends. But I like to think about the probabilities because when somebody says I met so and so at blah-blah isn't that SO RANDOM???? I can think about exactly how random it is.

A bit of a wet blanket thought...but it's a rainy day.

IKEA and hapiness extraction

Sat, 31 Dec 2005 00:33:15 GMT

A lot of people talk shit about IKEA. It's got this McDonalds reputation about it, and the source of frustration for many. I find the more inconvenient experiences I have with IKEA, the more fascinated I become with the place. One the one hand it's the source of cheap stuff if you know what you are doing. On the other hand, one slip (either theirs or yours) can trigger a series of events that turns into a complete pain in the ass.

My desire for a new bed finally reached critical mass last night. I was pretty intimidated after Raj told me about the Bed Nerds. Bed Nerds? I sleep on the freaking ground. Anything I get is going to be an upgrade. These people are talking about how if you get X kind of foam, it might have problems in 10 years. In ten years I might be living on the moon. Anyway, I decided a moderately priced foam mattress from IKEA would probably do me just as good as an expensive foam matress that I don't even understand. Then there is the bed frame. What to do there? I would love to get something like this 10 Drawer Bed. It's custom made, looks cool, and has storage (a must for my cramped bedroom area). But the custom making part means it costs more than my van and won't be ready for 2 months.

When I got to IKEA I figured I would just get the queen sized FORSBACKA mattress. As luck would have it, the one I tested out was sitting on a cool bed from that lifts up and has storage under it. This frame wasn't on the website so I didn't know about it.

So here is where it gets hairy. I walk over to the help desk and point to the bed/matress combo that I want. My help types up the order, but there is a problem: FORSBACKA is out of stock. Nooooooooo!!!! This is a feeling that only an IKEA shopper can sympathise with. You drive all the out to IKEA, navigate through the bullshit display areas, and get all the way down to get your stuff, and they don't have it. The humanity!

After getting over the how-can-IKEA-be-out-of-stock shock (they are actually out of stock all the time, so why am I suprised?), an idea shines down upon me: downgrade! So we key up FORESTAD, the next less expensive IKEA foam mattress. Genius! They have 3 left. So my helper orders that up and I go downstairs to get the goods.

After waiting on the heinous line and paying for everything, I get my order ticket. As luck would have it, I am a restless person so I ask for an IKEA catalog to look through while waiting for them to get the bed stuff. On a whim I just look at whatever was on my order ticket. Lucky I did, as my helper had ordered this monstrosity:
MÖRKEDAL. That's not what I pointed at! We were standing right there and she ordered the wrong thing....

So great. Now I have to return this thing to IKEA, and I haven't even received it yet? Did I mention that it is 9:30pm on Thursday night and IIKEA is closing down?

I hop over to the returns place and explain my whoas to another helper. She's a bit confused, and actually never really understands what went wrong with my order over the next 20 minutes, but is still able to help me somehow. She says I can't cancel this MÖRKEDAL thing, I have to actually received it and then bring it over to her to return it. Fine. But while I am with her I have her order the bed that I actually *do* want.

This wouldn't be so bad except that in the end they didn't have the FORESTAD matress, even though the database said they had 3 left. The official IKEA term for this is "oversold" which means, in brief, that I was shit out of luck. I got two beds, one of which I never even asked for, and no matress at all.

I think a normal consumer would pretty much give IKEA the "fuck you" at this point, but I'll still go back there if I see something that's cheap and interesting. In fact I'll definitely be going back to get a foam mattress. To me, IKEA is a part of the natural landscape. There's no point in getting mad at IKEA just like there would be no point in getting mad at a river whos water is too cold or a tree whos bark is too scratchy.

But here's some advice: if you want something specific from IKEA, for gods sake check stock availabililty on their website first! I don't know why I didn't do this....especially with the holiday shopping, IKEA is going to be slammed and struggling to keep up with demand. If the item is in stock, call the store and see if they will hold and reserve the thing for you. Finally, go to IKEA in the *morning* right when they open. At this point they have spent the night restocking the shelves and everything they have is ready to be picked over by enthusiastic and savvy consumers.

Why did I got to Palm Springs for Christmas?

Sun, 25 Dec 2005 00:45:28 GMT

I guess the answer is "because I can."

I found this website called site59.com. Last minute vacation package deals. I don't think it's much cheaper than buying a package vacation through normal channels (but I've never bought a package vacation before so I don't know), but site59.com makes you *feel* like you're getting a good deal. Which is about the same thing.

As for my fascination with the Coachella Valley, I don't know. I'm frightening myself. This is one of the most wrongest ever places to put human habitation. I guess I have a sort of morbid curiousity about desert communities. In 300 years, are we going to be laughing at them, or are they going to be laughing at us?

I've also given up on whining about paying for wifi. I payed the tmobile tax...$9.99 for the day. I'm blogging. I'm working on the upload feature for the mac client. I'm using city search or whatever to conduct the business of having a good time. I'm in my Hotel Room. Life is dope.

I just wish I brought an mp3 player. Why do I keep forgetting that? (buying one, good headphones, remembering to bring it). Ambient noise at airports, etc is just pure torture for me. It's all about noise cancellation. And MP3 CDs would round out my pimpin' Chevrolet Cobalt rental (Orange!!!). Gotta make that shit bounce...but unfortunately the closest thing to Miami Bass in this town is "Californication" (Red Hot Chili Peppers on 93.7, "from Palms Springs to Coachella").

I figured if I was going to wander around aimlessly and write a bunch of code I might as well do it in a weird place. Things seem to be working out well....

camptown

Sun, 18 Dec 2005 20:36:40 GMT

I would like to see a documentary on the similarities (if any) between hackers and heroin addicts.

I woke up early saturday (before 8am, which is ridiculous). I messed around with various programming ideas, mostly work related, including using the javascript/Cocoa bridge in a WebView. I fixed some difficult bugs. There is no food in the house so as I get hungrier and hungrier and I getting more and more desparate. I don't want to wait on a line or deal with the brunch crowds. Trader Joes on weekends is a madhouse. Noon rolls around and I find some crackers and eat the whole box. More software geekage. I've got my own projects as well. I've been thinking about doing a reminder/notetaking application with AppKit/CoreData, but I only have time to do the design, all my programming cycles are focused on Slide right now (The Mac client is coming along well and I hope to have some cool stuff for macworld).

The crackers bring on a carb-overdose nap attack. No problem, my bed is not far away. After nappage, you guessed it, more coding. I don't even remember what I worked on at this point, I would have to go through the Subversion logs. But it was good stuff, hard bugs, stability issues.

Around 9pm I realize it's saturday night and I have no plans. Nothing's going on, no email traffic on my email lists of friends, it's raining, everyone is married or might as well be and watching netflix or whatever. So I call Spicy Bite (you can order online, but it's flakey...they need ichat or something).

I think the point I am trying to make is that there is a remarkable similarity to eating ramen in the Van during a rainstorm in the middle of the Mojave Desert Preserve, and eating indian food in the Van during a rainstorm up on Bernal Hill. I love the sound of rain pounding on the roof of the van.

It's all about the Peshawari Naan, dude.

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 20:12:20 GMT

I had a weird dream last night.

Mail.app still sucks, four years later

Sun, 11 Dec 2005 21:21:33 GMT

When we were shipping Mac OS X (Cheetah) in 2001, Apple Management mandated that engineers use Mail.app for all email. It was terrible. Mail was crashing all the time, losing data, and just generally being un-cooperative. Productivity was in the toilet.

Now nearly five years later Mail.app is still a dog. My use case can't be that far off from the typical power user: I have one IMAP account for work, and one IMAP account for personal email. I want to access them both from any Macintosh. But this turns out to be difficult to set up, as it takes an fair amount of configuration for both accounts (and this config is stored on the client) and caching messages...don't get me started. I have a moderate amount of email (a 100MB or so) and Mail's caching algorithm locks up when trying to deal with it. Now that it has *finally* downloaded all my messages (took about a day) things have calmed down and Mail is usable.

But Mail.app doesn't respect the IMAP subsription list? WTF guys? so now have two mail folders "probablyspam" and "reallyspam" that I keep around for various reasons, not least in case something important gets dropped into the spam folders. Mail.app helpfully downloads all gazillion of these messages and gives no mechanism to say "stop fucking downloading all these messages I don't care about!!!"

Berkeley Marina Green Flash

Mon, 14 Nov 2005 05:14:12 GMT

LG reports this recent green flash sighting from the Berkeley Marina. The original site is http://www.well.com/user/pk/photos/, and I've archived the site at http://bostoncoop.net/~jesse/green-flash. An fantastic macintosh compatibile AVI movie clip is also available.

When I was a kid I saw this TV movie called "The Green Flash". Judging from the imdb entry, it was a pretty obscure production:
http://tinyurl.com/cdkcx

For years after that I would check for the green flash anytime I was watching the sunset, but I've never seen it.

The green comes from the sunlight passing through denser air near the horizon. If the air is cool and wet enough, the sunlight will been bent into the green zone. Theoretically, if the air was dense enough, the light could bend all the way to violet, but I don't think that ever happens on earth.

The Principle of Command-Tab

Sat, 12 Nov 2005 20:59:15 GMT

What is an application? I find that for the Power OSX user, an application is an icon, something you can switch to quickly and do something useful. Of course there are the traditional applications that are huge and with massive functionality (Final Cut Pro, Microsoft Word, XCode, etc). But often wrapping a service in an "application" gives a huge boost in usability.

Here is an example that came about when I tried to create something that makes it easier to keep track of events. Or as jwz would say, "how are we going to get laid?".

The first thing to note is that things to do are transient. They happen in different places in different times, are not repeatable events, and therefore entering them into applciations like iCal is a bit of a pain. Calendar apps are business oriented pieces of groupware goo. Very useful for what they are meant for, but annoying to use for social purposes. The workflow or events is like this: you hear about the event somehow, then you try not to forget about it, and then you try to go on the actual day it happens. In iCal this means:

* Receive event notification in email (this is the usual case)
* Switch to iCal, create new event
* Munge around with mail window and iCal window, because ical is a big window and it's hard to read the information and type it in while they overlap
* Enter the useful information: title, date, time (usually 6pm, 8pm, 10pm or all night), place and a URL

Now that is not so bad, and if you go through the pain of setting up WebDAV, or pay for .Mac, you can sync this calendars among your various macs and so can your friends.

But doing the above for 10-20 events every week is a pain. Really all you want to is have a flat text file and type into it like this:

11/25/05 10pm Supper Club 657 Harrison
11/29/05 6pm INFORUM IDEO CEO
12/03/05 7pm INFORUM The Tribe 401 Van Ness
12/08/05 6pm INFORUM Iraq Soldiers

A nice bonus would be to hyperlink those lines so you can click on them to get the full story.

Here is where the OSX application piece comes in. I created a CGI script to manage the above text file on a public web server. This allows anyone to view the list, and makes it easy to enter events. I created an application called myCal and it looks like this:

To enter an event, you just type everything on one line. (I haven't shown it in the text field but the input is exactly as the lines in the webview below, except with a URL tacked on the end). The line begins with a date and that is used as a sort key. The rest of the line is free text, you just type in the title and enter the approximate time if necessary. At the end, you can type optionally type a comma and then paste in a URL that will be used to hyperlink the event line.

This is one of those cases where relaxing input restrictions can make something a whole lot easier. Now when I am going through my email entering events, it is done in a user centric way. I just type in the bare minimum and it gets recorded to a public place on the 'net with backup. The list is sorted for me. What I hope to do next is add functionality to convert the event list to iCalendar format. Then people can subscribe to that file and see in iCal. The bottom line is iCal is nice pretty candy and does the meetings thing well, but it's not much fun for inputing a bunch of events that you probably won't go to anyway.

TODO: rajlist integration!

first post

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 18:49:07 GMT

blah