Stever's blog

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?

iphone

I recently got an iphone.

Business has been stellar lately and I can actually afford the ass-raping monthly charges that at&t gives. In any event, I’m absolutely delighted with the product. I’ve been learning all the nuances of the phone now and love the little tips I’m learning. I also, of course, jailbroke it so I can tether my iphone’s internet to my laptop. God damn at&t wants $20 more bucks for that!

It’s great I can take my laptop and ipad anywhere and know that internet will work. The maps/geolocation is great too. I never realized how much time smartphones save you once you have them, it’s making my life soooo much easier in so many ways.

the exponential

I have a strong computer science/math background and I often concepts related to these subjects in the real world. Most people miss “the exponential”, which is a steady rate of change that accumulates very quickly after it reaches a critical mass. This is why our economy is doomed – the amount of debt the nation needs to fuel itself is growing at a steady rate. The use of bitcoin might exponential, but it is too difficult to tell at this point. Anyway, watch this video:

Also watch the second part:

Jim Gates

What Jim Gates thinks he looks like:

What Jim Gates actually looks like:

hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. . .