Erik’s Blog

I was one of the first owners of an iPhone in Spain, buying my iPhone 3G on July 14, 2008. Just a couple weeks ago, almost two months after the launch in the United States, the iPhone 4 began to be announced in the local mobile shops. In 2008, I paid 359€ for my phone, a decision I do not at all regret. So I was pretty much prepared for a similar amount of cash to be exchanged for my upgrade two years later. Here’s what happened when I bought my iPhone 4 yesterday:
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In general, for just about any academic topic you want to know more about, you can find information on the internet to satisfy your curiosity. Luddites complain that “We know less these days because we can forget things and look them back up with such ease!”, but I think that’s a load of bollocks. Having more knowledge at our fingertips means we can learn more, and, even more important, we can recheck our current knowledge more often to keep it accurate.

Several times a day I find myself in a situation in which my understanding of a subject is unclear, so I look it up on the internet to clarify my knowledge. Over the past week, however, I have had the same rare experience twice: that the all-knowing internet was unable to clarify my foggy understanding.
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I’m pretty sure that I will never understand clothing fashion. It seems to be a futile conundrum of combining the desire to be like everyone else with the desire to be unique. But then I don’t get a lot of social customs. Every once in a while, however, a new style comes along that makes me think, “Wow, you are going to be so embarrassed in ten years to look back at photos of yourself wearing that!” In the last five summers in Spain, there has been an explosion in the popularity of capri pants, called “pirate pants” here, that I have successfully avoided. C’mon, people! Having trousers that stop at your calves is a ridiculous idea.

It was about one year ago, last August, that my wife showed me some new trousers she had bought. They seemed to me to be the most ridiculous thing ever, and I was unable to stop from laughing at the idea that someone would wear them. I’m not sure if I hurt her feelings or what, but she ended up giving them to her sister. The only way I could think to describe them is with the term “Aladdin pants”. Some googling, in preparation for this post, has revealed that they are actually called that! Perhaps the correct term is harem pants? Much to my chagrin, they are huge this summer.
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The more I research retirement savings plans, college savings plans, and think about my investment portfolio, the more I come across the phrase “tax deductible” or “tax free”. My 401K contributions come out of my untaxed gross salary. The interest gains of my IRA are not taxed. Up to $2500 of my contributions to my daughters college fund are tax deductible. In the US, up to $3000 of stock market losses are tax deductible. Think about what that means. You can lose up to $3000, and the government covers your losses, making your final total the equivalent of someone who did not play the market at all. It’s almost like every American being given $3000 of poker chips to be played on the stock market every year. The term “tax deductible” is like “free money from the government…if you know how to use it”.
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Recently there was a soccer match that I wanted to watch, but that was not broadcast on my basic cable television. Investigating around the internet for a site that would stream the live game, I stumbled upon a very well designed website called watchlivefootball.tv. If you go there, you will see a nice listing of today’s fixtures with the time the match starts, the players, past results for each team, and the logos for each team as well as the league or tournament the game belongs to. It looks very professional. On each match page, there is a video player. When you click play, you are presented with this:
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Nora, the weekend that is now ending was our first one back in Spain after recovering from jet lag. We had no company (your aunt visited Thursday and Friday), and we were looking forward to a nice rest. On Saturday we went to the closest mall, in Santander, to pick up a few items and research car seats for you. We learned that you still need to gain a few kilos before we can face you forward in the car, no matter how cramped you are facing backwards. I’m not sure if it was the experience of seeing so many people around you in the food court, but you didn’t want any of your vegetable puree for lunch or the yogurt either. You were only hungry when Mommy and Daddy were eating bread. And your cookies. During our trip to the States, you trained us to give you cookies pretty much non-stop when you’re in your now-crumb-covered stroller. When you finish one, you spin around, reach out your hand and screech. It was cute the first dozen times.
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The weather today has been very, very odd. Everyone is using the word huracán for what is in store for us tonight. Nora and I spent much of the afternoon outside in the unseasonably warm temperatures and brisk breeze. We saw several dumpsters that had been tied down to keep them in place. There were a few strange occurrences, such as when it rained from a perfectly blue sky.
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There’s a big hubbub lately in Spain because the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE), the Spanish equivalent of the RIAA, are beginning to enforce a silly law that has existed for a while: that it’s illegal to play the radio in a hair salon without paying royalties for the songs. Not CDs, THE RADIO!! This is quite possibly the most ridiculous Intellectual Property argument I’ve heard, and there are some doozies!
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Nora, for these first ten months, you have always been sort of lazy, choosing the path that involves the least amount of work. When it was time for you to breast feed, you opted to have the milk extracted for you and, first syringed drop by drop into your mouth, and eventually placed in a bottle. At the moment you’re at least a month behind your contemporaries (our friends’ early 2009 babies) in the area of locomotion. It probably hasn’t helped your progress that you have never liked being on your stomach. Especially ever since you learned to roll over, we barely even have time to snap back-fastening your pajamas closed sometimes.

In my search to rationalize your shortcomings, I’ve come up with a theory:
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Today I stumbled on this awesome speech written and given by Michael Crichton back in 2002 about speculation, and how the media – which he defines as movies, television, internet, books, newspapers, and magazines – is, to a large extent, a gurgling blob of useless drivel. It’s a shame that he probably didn’t get to watch much of the farcical climax of vacuous speculation that was the 2008 US presidential election, as he died on the day Obama got elected. My favorite part of the article is how he talks about the fallacy that we all commit (a recent favorite topic of mine) when we read the newspaper, or receive information from any news source for that matter.
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