Since I’ll be married in a literal handful of days, I’ve been giving some thought to what it is all about… Here is what I’ve come up with:

fundanity - noun - the quality wherein the commonplace and ordinary is considered enjoyable.

That Melissa and I have a solid fundanity base gives me a great feeling going into this weekend and beyond

As I said yesterday, I’m capping off two weeks in our new home in San Mateo, today in fact. One unique thing about these two weeks is that I’ve been without Tivo for them. For some perspective, my average television consumed while I had Tivo was 2.7 hours/day, and since then it has fallen to 1.0 hours/day, with my solely watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report at their 11pm air time. If I miss them, I miss them, and the world goes on. In addition, I’ve spent about a half hour a day watching streaming programs, typically on the train, and most lately Showtime’s Dexter, which is quite well done. 

For many, television is somewhat addictive, or at least it’s a hard habit to break, because shows are fairly specifically designed to keep you hooked, using appointed ritual air times, cliff-hangers, and empathy-driven character development, along with other ways of getting you emotionally invested in various programs. I’d compare the withdrawal to an emotional “jones” versus the physical addiction of, say, cigarettes. The key to success in handling this sort of habit is to replace the activity with something else. I suspect wedded life will come in handy here, along with sleep and exercise. Speaking of which, time for a jog!

For the Thanksgiving holidays, Apple was kind enough to give all of its non-retail employees this whole week off. While I didn’t get enough notice to make plans with my family back east, I was able to get a flight out to Los Angeles to spend the week with my girlfriend. She and her roommate are unique compared to most people in that they do not own a television. While some television shows are still watched by the two of them, television viewing is directed (watching DVD episodes or web streams on a laptop) rather than idle channel surfing.

My first observation after only a few days here is that I have a lot more time to do the things that I want or need to do. It’s only 7 pm and I’ve already accomplished everything I set out to do today and had dinner. There is an empowering feeling that the evening is my oyster to enrich myself through reading and writing in my journal or to do any other of myriad activities. To be clear, I don’t think that television programs are a bad thing - I enjoy watching several, including almost nightly viewings of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I do, however, want to do away with the notion of surfing the channels to pass the time until bed. My Tivo has already helped a great deal to reduce my surfing, but some of it has been replaced with watching reruns or “suggestions” that the Tivo picks up for me.

I think one of the first things I do when I get back to San Francisco will be to turn off Tivo Suggestions to rid myself of the temptation of low-hanging entertainment fruit. Similarly, shows like House that I Tivo could just as easily be picked up on DVD and watched in a binge on a sick day. My hope is that one day I won’t be scared of the prospect of not having a dedicated device in my house to record television for me - I’m getting steadily more confident that I’m not missing out on anything other than life.

I was just looking over my Wells Fargo statement online, and discovered that they have hidden (not indicated clearly at time of service) fees for everyday banking activities. I was charged $1 to check my balance on one of their ATMs, and I was charged $2 for accessing my account over the phone. Oddly, these sorts of fees will simply lead most people to go into a branch and occupy a banker, costing Wells Fargo more than if they just let the customer use the ATM.

The bank also automatically transferred $25 from my checking to my savings, untold to me when setting up the account (and I read everything!). This seems like a nefarious scheme concocted to make people bounce checks… I only keep what I need for a check to clear in my low-interest checking, leaving my savings, well, in savings. Here they go moving $25 out of checking into savings as some sort of favor to me, and had I written a check it would have bounced, leading to fees and hassles. As a further kick in the stomach, WF deducts any fees from your checking instead of your savings, also in an apparent effort to get you to bounce a check.

Now that I’ve been bitten by them three times to me in as many months, I will no longer do banking with Wells Fargo. That’s their loss, particularly when I leave before they recouped their investment in me, and warn potential customers in this review. I’m moving to E*Trade bank after next month’s rent check is taken care of. E*Trade will reimburse my ATM fees anywhere, and has the highest checking (3.25 APY) and savings (5.05 APY) interest rates in town. I guess I’ll be moving my ING account, which hasn’t kept up interest-rate-wise into E*Trade as well. At this point I have no idea how brick-and-mortar banks will survive much longer now that online banks are better across the board.

I ran across this article on Lifehack yesterday, and it resonated with me:

Many of our problems come from within our own minds. They aren’t caused by events, bad luck, or other people. We cause them through our own poor mental habits. Here are 10 habits you should set aside right away to free yourself from the many problems each one will be causing you.

I’ve reproduced the list below, but click over to the article to read more than just the summary:

1. Stop jumping to conclusions.
2. Don’t dramatize.
3. Don’t invent rules.
4. Avoid stereotyping or labeling people or situations.
5. Quit being a perfectionist.
6. Don’t over-generalize.
7. Don’t take things so personally.
8. Don’t assume your emotions are trustworthy.
9. Don’t let life get you down. Keep practicing being optimistic.
10. Don’t hang on to the past. This is my most important suggestion of all: let go and move on.

I have to hand it to the author — most people who I have seen unhappy have tended to suffer from one or more of the above afflictions, particularly #10. I’m doing pretty well here, but I know I need to be less of a perfectionist sometimes. My job has taught me about the notion of “as perfect as possible under the circumstances”, and I think I’ll roll with that in my personal life

A coworker forwarded me an interesting piece from OSNews on how Microsoft can prevent another poor development cycle like it had for Vista when it engineers “Windows 7.” The crux of the piece is that Windows should abandon its current userland code and break binary compatibility with the mountains of code that has been written for the WinTel platform ever since DOS was all the rage.

Quoth the article:

… For programmers, however, this desire to maintain backwards compatibility is a potential hell. This means that if you, as a Microsoft employee, have come up with a new killer feature, or maybe something less significant like a fix for long-standing minor bug, it needs to pass through a long process of testing to ensure backwards compatibility is not affected by your code. And if it does affect compatibility, your code needs to be rewritten, or, new patches need to be made to fix the compatibility breakage caused by your original patch. You can easily see how something like this is a restraint on many developers, and how it can hold back many envisioned improvements.

The author suggests freezing the “legacy edition” codebase with Vista or Windows Server 2003 and then only maintaining it with bug fixes and security updates while pressing on with development of a new codebase that is based on the NT kernel but with a new userland to be filled with new APIs and applications:

… Removing backwards compatibility means business users would never buy into Windows 7, and that would mean a serious lack of cash-flow for Microsoft. Therefore, Microsoft needs to cater to business users and other people concerned about backwards compatibility by maintaining a version of Windows based on the ‘old’ Windows NT; call it Windows Legacy, if you will. This version of Windows would be Vista (or, more preferably, Windows Server 2003), receiving only security updates and bug fixes.

An alternate and arguably preferable solution would be a black-box compatibility environment for the old apps, similar to Classic and Rosetta, which have helped ease Apple through some operating system and hardware architecture transitions.

The author somewhat underestimates the engineering effort involved with maintaining an operating system fork (winning quote: “Would this require more developers than are currently needed? I doubt it.”) and too easily casts aside the reasons for application compatibility. A particular failure is that the author only seems to consider how businesses would handle the issue, and doesn’t consider end-user impact. Namely, every user would be forced to replace every application they own, and a large number of “fringe” applications will never be revised. The user is left with the choice of paying to stay on an outdated operating system (no sale, frustrated user) or paying more to get onto an incompatible one (sale, frustrated user).

My take, of course, is that maintaining compatibility with at least the bulk of the most important apps on the platform is worth the engineering effort. I could be biased, though, given that it’s part of my job