Stever's blog

A leisurely Saturday

I’ve been working weekends for the past 2 months. Not at work, mind you, but random places like libraries, Blank Spaces, or at home or whatever. Basically doing shit that I can’t get done during the day at Model Printing. But Saturday, I decided to take the day off and have a “personal day”. Meaning, I turned off my cell phone and just did things that *I* wanted to do for a change – with no interruptions. So I went on an intense workout at Barry’s Bootcamp in the morning, had a breakfast at nearby Soby’s, and then went to Long Beach marina to catch up on some Koestler. Koestler’s books are MASTERPIECES of the written prose. He also has some unique insights into the human mind as well. Why most schools don’t teach this guy is a mystery to me.

Anyway, then at night I downloaded and played Diablo III, another masterpiece of a game. I have happy memories of playing it’s predecessor, Diablo II. And let me tell you, so far Diablo III is every bit as good as II, if not better. The graphics and animations are jaw-dropping, and the storyline is excellent. Already at level 8 and fulfilled a few quests, he he. There are 60 levels of play before you finish the game.

Work kills me sometimes, but I’m hoping soon I’ll have more time in the future to pursue my interests. It would be nice if I could devote my days to hacking and programming, evenings to my guitar and piano, nights to books and games, and weekends for for travel and adventure.

What a romantic lifestyle!

Jack and Jill

“Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.”

This is a cliche limerick, everyone knows it. But what information is missing here?

Well, for starters, what did Jack need the water for? Also, when Jill came “tumbling after”, was she hurt too? And why DID Jack fall down anyway?

Missing information never attracts our attention, and that can be a problem. ie, we don’t “see” it as missing until someone points it out to us – and sometimes that information is key in solving a problem. All too often, people zoom by and rush to the regular, standard conclusion before they actually stop and think about the problem first. Intelligent people are especially prone to this phenomonenon. They are “quick thinkers” and pride themselves on finishing first, it’s the source of their ego and pride. So one of the key things needed for good thinking, ironically, is to become a slower thinker and actually SLOW DOWN the thinking process.

The mark of a good thinker is someone who stops and thinks about things that no one else bothers to think about.

Losing Control

On friday I had to go for a walk because it was a particularly bad day at Model Printing. Anyway, I ran into a customer of mine, who was actually the writer/director of a film that was about to premiere at Laemmle. So I decided to forego my plans to go watch the movie. . . and I absolutely LOVED it. It’s a movie called “Losing Control” and the trailer is here:

The premise is intiguing. A woman gets a marriage proposal from her dashing boyfriend, but her best friend takes her aside and asks “how do you know if you’re marrying Mr Right if you’ve never been with Mr Wrong?”. So with that point in mind, the girl decides to go on a series of blind dates with men who all have something different to offer. But the movie is told from a scientist’s point-of-view. so her mode of thinking becomes dangerously logical which leads her into trouble (but in a funny way).

The writing is clever, the scenes unpredictable (in a good way), and I found myself laughing out loud during many of the scenes. It was a refreshing break from the traditional hollywood fare that I’ve grown so accustomed to seeing. It’s being shown in the Laemmmle next to my workplace in North Hollywood. I believe this movie beat even Hunger Games and the Three Stooges in ticket sales in that theatre last weekend.

Wow. . .

San Francisco

Work was dead at Model Printing. I think I did maybe $30 worth of online orders on monday. So I said “fuck it”, closed my place for a week and took off to San Francisco! It’s a welcome change of pace from my rather dreary life in LA. Don’t get me wrong, business is doing great and is only getting better, but I’m still the only employee and right now I’m doing 100% of the work. So it’s a lot of stress. Changing your environment is the most effective way of changing your psyche in my opinion.

Right now, I’m at Noisebridge, which is one of the great hackerspaces of san francisco. Some guy hacked his roomba to serve as a dual-way camera. Here:

It was actually pretty intelligent about avoiding obstacles in the room (I believe it’s programmed in lisp, he he). Noisebridge apparently has this big kitchen where a lot of cooking classes take place. So some guy came in and just made pizzas for everyone to enjoy. I donated $5 just for the “coolness” factor. Finally, someone is playing “The Rain Song” from led zeppelin, great song. Man, this is like the coolest place to hang out. The place is huge (i’d say around 4000 square feet or so) and there are tons of tools for doing hardware hacking (saws, soldering irons, etc). The community is great here too. Very intelligent and chatty community. If I lived in san francisco, I’d basically live here.

Even though it was grueling, I woke myself up at 5:00 AM to attend a meditatoin session at the San Francisco Zen Center. Here:

This was a famous center (back in the late ’60′s/early 70′s) where a lot of hippies came to learn transcenendental meditation. One of the abbots at the time was Shunryu Suzuki, author of my favorite book on buddhism Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.

My 6:05AM meditation session was quite possibly the most serene I’ve felt in recent memory. It was early morning (still dark, in fact). No cars were on the streets, everything just felt very still. The environment inside (and the cultural attitudes) are very eastern. Seriously, if you guys really want to understand meditation, you have to go to this place: http://www.sfzc.org/ Even the walk back to my hotel room was serene, watching the sun rise on the way back. Wow.

I have to go to San Francisco again, 2 days simply isn’t enough.

Occupy LA

I went to Occupy LA on sunday, here’s a picture:

I’d estimate there were 1500 people there or so (possibly more). It’s gotten a lot bigger since I first started going there a few weeks ago. They actually have sections now – a kids section, a medical section, a food section, etc. NoFX played a benefit concert today (which I annoyingly missed), but it’s cool, it’s still a great place to hang out and meet people.

It also turns out the police just evicted everyone yesterday (tuesday night). About 1400 cops made about 200 arrests or so. People stayed anyway. I’m also a bit irked that the lapd got to decide which media outlets got to cover the eviction. What is this, communist china? hhhhhh. I got most of my news from twitter, it ends up being a more accurate source than Big Media anyway. It will be interesting to see what happens. My guess the occupiers ultimately won’t leave. At most, it will reconvene at pershing square or something, no big deal.

That’s it, I’m bringing my tent there next weekend and sleep there. I need to catch up on some reading on some hacker shit and it’ll be best to do it there.

Customers. . .

A customer came in today asking “which icon turns on the internet?”. Jesus Christ this person was stupid. Oh, and I had to show him how to print his email too.

Pathetic. . .

Model Printing is taking off

Some random teenager walked into my store on Thursday asking for some headshots. I was like “yeah, sure”. So I got to talking to her while the headshots were printing. Turns out she’s from Creative Artists Agency. She’s not signed with them or anything, but she’s apparently doing some work for them. Apparently, one of the agents there recommended my company to her. I looked up this company on wikipedia (because I kinda sorta heard of them) and they represent a bunch of big names that we’ve all heard of (Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Oprah Winfrey, etc). Ha ha, Ari from Entourage basically knows of my company now.

Wow. . . I wonder if I’ll be doing autographed headshots for big stars soon. Business is taking off in a major way and my customer base is increasing to the point where I can no longer recognize everyone. This is a good sign I suppose.

Freedom

What does it mean to be free?

Imagine you decide to take a road to a particular destination. You are perfectly free to travel along this road. No one is forcing you to go or not to go, it’s totally up to you.

Does this mean you are really “free”?

Let’s say a friend points out an additional road – a road that you didn’t even know about before. The new road could be more scenic, it could be an unknown shortcut to your destination, or it may lead to a different destination entirely. The person now has more choice and now becomes freer than he did before.

Freedom is more than just the lack of tyranny. True freedom involves freedom of choice. One thing that we can do to increase or freedom is to work on our perceptions. IE, if we can concentrate on generating alternatives instead of just choosing between them, we will be in a freer position to choose. But this requires us to perceive the world in more than one way (not just in the way that everyone thinks is “reality”).

wall street

Get ready guys, August 2nd is 8 days away and wall street is bracing for a possible downgrade of US bonds. If there is a loss of confidence in government debt, interest rates will skyrocket and investors will need more collateral. If they can’t, then THEY default. Also, although most people don’t realize this, most trades are done automatically by computers using learning algorithms. The problem with this is that you can get a cascade-type of effect where selling begets selling and market crashes occur.

Gold, silver, commodities, and bitcoins should hold up well in the event of a market crash, at least in theory.

Anonymous hackers

More news from the underground. . .

Hacker group “Anonymous” just busted into florida’s voting database and got the pollsters usernames, accounts, and passwords. Also voting records. Here: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=AKMhKTvK

These voting machine things aren’t very secure. Not only thats, these things have probably already been hacked before, only we didn’t know it (in my opinion. . .). If Anonymous can get into these things, how secure is our democracy anyway?