chrischaos

2003-09-03T15:50:00.000-07:00

I'm changing my blog to a new address. I was able to transfer all my posts following these directions.

Why did I do this? I wanted more features. To upload pictures, to have comments, view site statistics, and have more control. Leo Laporte influenced me in my choice of where to go. He just moved to Typepad a few weeks ago.

I'm fairly sure this blog will remain here indefintely, since it's free...

See you at my new address!

2003-08-31T08:49:00.000-07:00

early retirement

One of my recurring interests since my twenties has been early retirement. I'm sure this comes from the last day of school, when all responsibilities were over and I had absolutely nothing to do. My childhood memories are fading, but I can still remember walking home from the last day of school, smelling the flowers, feeling the sun; it was literal ecstasy.

Aside #1: Here's one of the many influences of school. We are artificially kept "in jail" for 3-4 months at a time, doing what we are told by authority, graded, ranked and herded like cattle. This is, of course, our preparation for entering the "real world" where we once again do what we are told by authority, get graded with performance reviews and continue to be herded like cattle (rush hour).

Because of all this artificially imposed structure, my goal in life became "Make enough money so I have nothing to do." Now that's a sick goal if you think about it. 1) I waste all of my best years working and saving money at 2) a job I do not like, for a dreamed of future where 3) I will then get to do what I want: ie, nothing.

Aside #2: I don't know about you, but for me, there's no "job" I like. Whenever someone forces me to do something, it ruins it. Hence, for me, "job" and "work" implies I'm doing something I don't like.

As Kramer said to George in Seinfeld, "Do you yearn?" Well, I don't know if it's yearning, but I certainly wonder how I would have turned out, had I been unschooled. (What's unschooled? Having parents that let you literally do what you want. Another name is "child led" learning. Children are born learning machines and the idea is to keep that going. The parents only goal is to answer their questions and facilitate their interests. Google it!) My goal in life might be something other than "Do nothing."

Is the damage irreversible? It's turns out: NO. But it takes years of "vegging out" to get over it. An 8 year old that's only been in school a few years would recover in a matter of months. A teenager would recover in a couple of years. A 39 year old that exits the rat race, may take half a decade to recover (using myself as an example.)

So getting back to the subject at hand, early retirement, I've been reading retirement books most of my life. The best one, without a doubt was, "Cashing In on the American Dream: How to Retire at 35" by Paul Terhorst. In that book he comes down with a number: $500,000. That's how much you need. You can spend $50/day, travel all you want, live like a king, and keep your nest egg safe (and growing).

Now I think I can hear some people saying, "That's not enough." Well, Paul is still doing fine after 19 years of retirement! And he has a web page. He and his wife started out buying an apartment in Buenos Aires because it was so cheap to live down there. Vickie couldn't bring herself to sell her piano and actually had it shipped! From this state of affairs, they eventually evolved into what's known as PT's: Perpetual Travelers. Now, they own nothing but a laptop and a suitcase of clothes. They have no house or apartment, no furniture, no nothing. They fly around, and rent furnished apartments. Take a look at this article Paul wrote on the PT lifestyle. It's my new goal in life! Heather is not convinced, but I'm working on her.

2003-08-30T15:11:00.000-07:00

Closed mindedness

I hate to admit this, but I am closed minded on some things. It's not something I'm proud of, and I'm not going to try to defend it. Still, it's interesting to ponder when and why it happens.

1) If the person I am talking to is closed minded, but it's a subject I am not familiar with, I stay open minded.
2) If the person I am talking to is closed minded, and it's a subject I disagree with, but it's not one of my hot button subjects, I stay open minded.
3) in any case, if the person I am talking to is open minded, I stay open minded.
4) if he's closed minded but we agree, I stay open minded.

In short, I'm only closed minded, when I know the subject, it's one of my hot button subjects, and the person I am talking to is closed minded and diametrically opposed to my viewpoint.

Maybe the solution is to always think, "what would Socrates say now?" Here's man who questioned everything. Nothing was taken for granted. All assumptions were constantly reexamined. His constant questioning of the status quo for his time, got him executed.

So the next time a Baptist evangelist comes up to my door and asks me if I'm saved, will I

1) Ask him sincerely: "What do you mean by being saved?" And listen precisely to what he has to say. Sincerely think to myself, "Maybe I want to be saved! Sounds interesting! Let's hear more!"
2) Smile and gently close the door.
3) Hit MUTE on the TV and hide behind the door.

hmmmmm.....

2003-08-30T08:33:00.000-07:00

1. Are you going to school this year?

No. The word "school" raises the hair on my neck, kind of like the word "Jesus". Most of us have been forced to go to school all our young lives. The dire consequences of this are many which I'm not really prepared to discuss here. One consequence though, is the idea that you must go to school to learn something. POPPYCOCK! I would wager that the stuff you know the best, you taught yourself. This idea that you need a teacher to learn something is the way "school" self perpetuates itself. Think of school as an organism that needs to reproduce to survive. This idea is one of the mechanisms it uses to reproduce.

The sig on my private email address reads:

===========
Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion
obtains no hold on the mind. -- Plato

nuff said, and i refuse to answer the remaining friday five questions (Grin).

2. If yes, where are you going (high school, college, etc.)? If no, when did you graduate?

3. What are/were your favorite school subjects?

4. What are/were your least favorite school subjects?

5. Have you ever had a favorite teacher? Why was he/she a favorite?

2003-08-25T07:50:00.000-07:00

Took the presidential candidate test. Thanks Hanje! Here are my top 3:

1. Libertarian Candidate (100%) Click here for info
2. Dean, Gov. Howard, VT - Democrat (61%) Click here for info
3. Kucinich, Cong. Dennis, OH - Democrat (60%) Click here for info

Here goes on the Friday Five on Monday! Sorry I'm late, can't seem to remember it.

1. When was the last time you laughed?

I can remember losing it (ie, uncontrollable laughter) with Quentin about 3 or 4 days ago. Can't remember what from. There was an email a few days ago, that made me laugh out loud about Arnold's election bid:

"They're saying Arnold will get 95% of the vote. At least according to his brother, Jeb Schwarzenegger." (Craig Kilborn)

See all the Arnold jokes here

I can't remember laughing yesterday, which is sad. We all need to laugh out loud everyday.

2. Who was the last person you had an argument with?

I'm sure it was Heather, (Hey we're a normal married couple.) But I can't remember....

3. Who was the last person you emailed?

I had to go to my sent folder to find it: I sent Heather a quick login link for her Hushmail account.

4. When was the last time you bathed? Maybe 5 years ago? It was at our old house in Lewisville, which had a big enough tub for me. Our house in Tucson has no tub in the master bath.

5. What was the last thing you ate? Kentucky Fried Chicken last night. I try to hold myself to once every two weeks. But I violated that rule this last week.

2003-08-19T08:39:00.000-07:00

Reading the newspaper or Let's find out who got raped, murdered and decapitated! Yeah!

There was nothing I loved better than waking up, making coffee and getting the newspaper in the morning. It was what my dad bred me to do I think. He's the same way. Well.... I stopped reading the newspaper about 4 years ago. Why? I think our whole american way of life is too much focused on violence and fear. (Work too, but that's off topic.) The movie "Bowling for Columbine" really sums up the problem well.

Canada and the US have the same number of guns per capita. But the yearly death rate from gunshots in Canada is like 10 people, while for the US it's 10's of thousands. One of my canadian friends said that if they hear what sounds like a gunshot in Canada, they think, "Well, it couldn't be a gun, so what was that noise?"

Canadians don't lock their doors. Michael Moore, the creater of "Bowling", actually went up to about 5 houses in the movie and opened the doors and went in! Funny. The people inside were nice and asked him if he needed anything!

Bottom line: We in the US are too fearful. Why? The media and the government.

Let me just give two examples, before I sign off, because I know most fellow americans aren't buying this.

Example #1.

The terrorist warning levels the government issues. Why are they doing this? It's serves no purpose, right? Oh yes it does!

1) It allows them to cover their ass. "Not our fault, we warned you!"
2) It keeps us cowering so that we give away our hard won personal freedoms in the name of security. This one is the worst one. The sig on my emails reads:

=====
"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security,
deserve neither liberty nor security" --Ben Franklin

Example #2.

My parents were telling me that there was an article in the newspaper about geocaching, one of the fun things my family does with our GPS. Go to: http://www.geocaching.com/ to learn all about it. Basically, you go to the web site, find a treasure location near you (you enter your zip code for example), enter the coordinates in your GPS and go find it. You can take something from the treasure if you leave something. It's a great incentive for kids. Most adults just find it without taking anything. Anyway, guess what the newspaper had to say about geocaching. Well, they said, it turns out that there is a geocache somewhere hidden in poison ivy. So you want to be extra careful when you do this. The media had once again been able to inject fear into something harmless and fun.

How do you counter this BS? You can't let any of this into your consciousness. The only way, short of leaving the country, is to stop reading and watching mainstream news. Now, when I buy a newspaper, I go right to the "Life" and the "Business" sections. I toss the "front" and "local" sections. I read slashdot too.

nuff said.

2003-08-16T21:20:00.000-07:00

Friday Five (on Saturday). Just found this friday five stuff at: http://fridayfive.org/, and it sounds like a good idea!

1. How much time do you spend online each day?

varies dramatically. But I average probably 3 hours. Some days a couple of minutes, others all day.

2. What is your browser homepage set to?

yahoo mail inbox

3. Do you use any instant messaging programs? If so, which one(s)?

nope, never. have no "buddies"

4. Where was your first webpage located?

cyberramp.net. I started my business there in 1995. It's long gone. Oh, you must mean where was my first BLOG webpage. Right here.

5. How long have you had your current website?

July 2003, so 1 month.

2003-08-10T19:45:00.000-07:00

Just wrote this email to a few friends. Thought it would be a good post to the blog as well....

Hi all,

Heather and I are tired of sending our personal emails as if they were postcards where anyone can read them. We wanted to at least have the OPTION of privacy, which we didn't have until now.

You can now send us email at:

(My private email address is below in a link....Sorry but trying to keep spam to a minimum)

and it will be totally encrypted end to end. Even hushmail (the company providing this service) can't read it. But the hitch is that you must have your own hushmail account. The free account you create will disappear in 3 weeks if it's unused. so, conceivably, you could create new account whenever you wanted to send Heather or I a private email. It's easy to create
an account. Just go to:

http://www.hushmail.com

(you do have the option of paying to get a more permanent account if you so choose.)

Here's the cool part (for us). If anyone sends us an email to our new addresses, our old email addresses gets an email saying a new email on the hushmail account is waiting. So this saves us from having to check two email accounts. It's just an account sitting there that serves a purpose. ie, PRIVATE CORRESPONDENCE.

Wish it didn't require any action on your part, but end to end encryption unfortunately must be agreed upon by both parties, hence this email.

thanks and best regards,

chris and heather

P.S. Our old email addresses still work. You don't HAVE to do this. Only if you want to.

P.S.S Heather and my accounts are private from each other as well, if that matters. We can't read each others mail.

2003-08-03T14:23:00.000-07:00

I was just commenting to a friend who will recognize himself, that I am content. I have nothing burning in my gut to do before I die. And I actually don't like being in this state. I want something to occupy me and to cause flow. (Finding Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi ) Well.... I may have found it. Read on.

I was doing one of my favorite things last week: Browsing books and drinking coffee at B&N. I found a book that really grabbed me. It's called "Stealing the Network, How to own the box." It's so good, I actually bought it ($50) and dropped a Clive Cussler in mid-book! Basically, it's a collection of fictional short stories by internet experts in security. The grabber for me is that it is just barely fiction. The stories are about hackers breaking into some computer network and the technology and techniques they use are real. I've always wanted to REALLY understand what's going on behind the scenes on the internet. Because I feel like I'm halfway there already. I'm an electrical engineer, I've built computers from the chip level. I've written a simple operating system. I've programmed calculators at Texas Instruments (Z80 machine language.) I also know Linux fairly well, and have an internet business that's heavy in C, PHP and MYSQL programming.

So, reading this new book, has gotten me all fired up to learn more about worms. The worm chapter (ch 2) is the one that got me. Because I don't really give a hoot about breaking into computer systems. I would like to know how they do it, so I can take countermeasures. But anyway, worms are the really interesting things. Why is that?

I think it has something to do with changing from being prey, to being a predator. There's things called "honeypot's", that sit on computers and look like sitting ducks for worms. They're not. They are actually biding their time waiting to trap the latest circulating worm. Once you've trapped one, and have a copy of the source code, it's then a big race to see who can figure out how it works, how it spreads, what it's "payload" is and how to clean it. This process involves detective work, and a vast knowledge of exploits, and of how prior worms worked. Winning the race to figure out a worm, would give some level of fame, but the fame is not what I'm after. I want the unsolved mystery and the good guy fights bad guy aspect of it.

Obsessions like this one don't last long. I give it 2 weeks tops. Of course I hope this new "interest" is the exception to the rule.

FYI, let me quote the teaser from Chapter 2, "The Worm Turns" by Ryan Russell and Tim Mullen:

"After a few hours, I've got a tool that seems to work. Geez, 4:30 A.M. I mail it to the list for people to check out and try.

Heh, it's tempting to use the root.exe and make the infected boxes TFTP down my tool and fix themselves. Maybe by putting it out there some idiot will volunteer himself. Otherwise the tool won't do much good, the damage is done. I'm showing like 14,000 unique IPs in my logs so far. Based on previous worms, that usually means there are at least 10 times as many infected. At least. My little home range is only 5 IP addresses.

I decide to hack up a little script that someone can use to remotely install my fix program, using the root.exe hole. That way, if someone wants to fix some of their internal boxes, they won't have to run around to the consoles. Then I go ahead and change it to do a whole range of IP addresses, so admins can use it on their whole internal network at once. When everyone gets to work tomorrow, they're going to need all the help they can get. I do it in C so I can compile it to a .exe, since most people won't have the Windows perl installed."

2003-07-28T22:23:00.000-07:00

Another week has gone by. Our Seattle adventure is about half over. Yikes! We haven't been to Rainier or St Helens yet. We haven't been to the Pike Place market. We haven't even gone hiking yet! Still, I'm starting to feel at home here. With the help of my handy dandy GPS, I can't get lost, and following the directions it gives causes me to learn new driving routes, that I wouldn't have otherwise taken. We are gradually meeting people. We have 3 babysitters now. By far, the most prolific "friend maker" is Sierra. Everyone around the apartment complex knows Sierra. She sits outside pretty much all the time, and says hi to total strangers as they pass. She single handedly taught herself how to ride a two wheeler bike, a few weeks ago, and is now trying to do tricks while she rides, like put her feet up on the handles. But I digress.

I need to plan a little bit better. I'm very lazy in that regard. I could blame it on loss of spontaneity. But that's a cop out. It's simple procrastination.

Now I need to write an entry in my book blog....

2003-07-21T11:14:00.000-07:00

connections between existentialism and meditation?

Intermittently, I make connections. I would say this happens maybe 3 or 4 times a year for me. (I'm not a deep thinker.) One just happened while I was reading a new book (from the library) called "The big bang, the buddha, and the baby boom" by Wes Nisker. Existentialism and meditation are two things I've studied in the past. But I had no idea these things were connected.

Background: I've been attracted to existentialism for some time. I've read books about it, and I still don't have a decent grasp of it, but what I do understand about it rings true for me. Basically, existentialism is taking a non-belief in deities, and exploring the logical implications of that assumption. As Sartre likes to say "existence preceeds essence". In my words, that says, there is no "soul" inside you. You are born into the world with no essense. Existentialists think the universe is "absurd", ie can not be figured out by a rational mind. in fact the rational mind is part of the problem. The curse of the human condition is the desire to figure everything out.

I've also been attracted to meditation for 3 or 4 years. I've always felt a key to life is being as close to "NOW" as you can be as you go about your daily business.

To quote from Nisker:
The existentialists wanted to turn off their rational minds and just "be". Jean Paul Sartre wrote: "Being has not be given it's due." They unfortunately had no way to break out of their rational minds! There were no meditation classes for Nietzsche or Sartre, no dalai Lama around to say, "Hey, Camus, take it easy. Just try paying attention to your breath for a while. For the most part, the existentialists remained depressed, martyrs to the game of reason"

Meditation is the solution to existential angst.

2003-07-15T19:58:00.000-07:00

what is my typical day like?

Well, today I woke up around 7, made coffee, and got my laptop off the floor in the office and brought it over to the kitchen table to check email. (I have to move it somewhere for dinner.) I can usually clear out my email in anywhere from 30 seconds to several hours. usually it averages about 5 minutes. This morning, I cleared it out in about an hour. My email IS my job. It's how my customers tell me something is wrong with my website. This morning QQQ and MO had some old leap symbols mixing in with the regular option symbols in the January 04's. Turns out, July 14th is the last day for Jan 04 leaps in all options. But my data feed keeps sending out old symbols! So I have to filter them out. This kind of thing should not happen with a professional data feed. Our data feed needs help.

I then got it in my head to start clearing off some long overdue tasks on the website. Heather was kind enough to take the kids out to swim lessons and mcdonalds, which gave me enough "quality time" to get a bunch of items done.

I'm very bad about putting things off and letting work build up. Then, out of nowhere, I will do an incredible amount of work, before I go back into my "procrastination" state.

It's now about 4:40PM. I just got back from taking a 45 minute walk on a 2 1/2 mile walking trail loop near my apartment. AND.....

I just got a call from John, my business partner. Users are getting server errors! Holy SH*T. How can this have happened. I made alot of changes today and it turns out I made a change that was not tested well, and is causing a major bug. After a few minutes of frenzied thoughts, I put a saved version of the site software back online. this was a backup from the morning. everything works now, so I can relax and figure out what caused the problem. After about 20 minutes I find the problem and correct it. but I'm not putting the new code back until tomorrow morning.

I'm now watching the kids while Heather takes a much needed break. Sierra's playing outside, Quentin's playing UT2003. I'm having a beer and watching Star Trek.

One day in my life is almost complete. Much was left out, but that's the general idea. Other days, I screw off completely and do nothing.

2003-07-14T08:56:00.000-07:00

this is my first public blog post. we are currently in seattle temporarily, enjoying "summer" here. We are from tucson, az where temps are now around 106 or so. we love telling our friends back in tucson what the weather's like here.

why are we here? i'm lucky enough to be able to do my work with just an internet connection. so i can follow the 72 degree isotherm as it moves around the country. i'm chris, my wife is heather, my kids are quentin 7 and sierra 4. i'll be willing to bet that's enough info for a PI to find out who i really am without the last name. but i don't care.

one of the problems for me in living in a new place is meeting friends. i have no employer and hence no coworkers. since this is a google blog site, let me enter some search keywords so a like minded potential friend might be able to find me:

self employed, atheist, existentialist, Robert Kiyosaki, meditation, wireless internet, unschooling, unitarian universalist, red hat linux, laptop starbucks, early retirement, c/mysql programmer, futures options short straddles, ut2003, techtv screensavers, tivo, bluetooth-nokia-pocket pc, electrical engineering automatic control systems, real estate investor, west coast swing dance, borders, barnes and noble, reading books, time travel, international living subscriber.

if any of these keywords match your interest and you are in seattle currently, lets have coffee!

i own my own business, and like bs'ing with "business types." it's hard to meet those types when you aren't a member of a chamber of commerce or a rotary club. I'm not interested in handing out business cards or trying to "network". I've got plenty of customers. I like discussing what I do and hearing what other people do. especially with folks who have managed to get out of the rat race.

early retirement is one of my favorite topics. Does the name Paul Terhorst ring a bell?