I just got off the phone with the RMV. After being on hold for about 30 minutes (annoying, but not a huge deal) I explained my problem to the woman who came on the line: that I gave them a California C & M1 license (passenger cars and motorcycles) and received a Massachusetts D license (passenger cars only) in return. She said she’ll pull my application, double-check that I did, indeed have a California motorcycle license and that my application was properly filled out to reflect that (both true) and then add the motorcycle endorsement to my license free of charge. Took about 5 minutes of actually talking to a person and hopefully things will be fixed soon. Sadly it will apparently take until Wednesday before her request for my application paperwork goes through, but whatever, I can deal with that.

After two years and far too many visits to multiple RMV offices I now finally have a Massachusetts driver’s license. A CLASS D driver’s license. The forms I submitted as well as the California license they took from me both clearly specified that not only am I qualified and certified for, but was applying for a CLASS D AND M license. Of course it’s well beyond business hours now, so I’ll have to wait until Monday morning before I can even attempt to rectify this situation in a way that doesn’t involve me having to pay money to take tests I’ve already passed.

And here I was all ready to start maybe being possibly very slightly less hostile toward the Massachusetts state government in all its various and sundry forms.

Why is everything that disrupts parking labelled an ‘emergency’ around here? When it snows enough to disrupt parking it’s a ’snow emergency’. When they’re forbidding parking so that they can paint lines on the street it’s an ‘emergency’. Last night we walked into Porter Square for dinner and passed no fewer than two different ‘emergencies’: ‘Emergency! We’re painting lines on the street! Please file calmly, but quickly to the nearest exit!’, ‘Emergency! We’ve torn up the sidewalk! Please …walk around it!’.

Seriously, people, these are not emergencies… Ok, there’s a vague case for the ’snow emergency’, but there is absolutely no excuse for labeling an event that has been planned for weeks if not months as an emergency.

Ridiculous fifth-grade name aside, I suppose this is a big day. Not for me, however. This morning I drove Jessi over to our polling place to vote in the primaries before work. I suspected it wouldn’t really work, but I decided to go in and see about voting myself. My name was in the rolls, but rather than the familiar D, R, G, W, or, apparently, U next to my name there was a very cryptic and unknown symbol: L

‘L, what’s L?’, said the woman checking people off in the book. ‘Do you know what L is?’ The gentleman next to her mused, ‘L? Liberal? That’s Democrat, right?’. My clarification that L stood for Libertarian didn’t really clear things up very much, and they ended up having to make a phone call to …someone who told them that there was no Libertarian ballot and that I wasn’t eligible to vote. I figured this was probably the case as I hadn’t heard anything from either the state or national party about primaries, but it was disappointing none the less, especially as we have a local, George Phillies of Worcester, in the running for the LP presidential nomination. Phillies also happens to be my favorite candidate for President being not only a Libertarian, but a science fiction author and college professor as well. With any luck he’ll get the nomination and I’ll actually get a candidate that I want to vote for this time around (in ‘04 none of the candidates I liked got their respective nominations: Dean, Nolan, McCain; I’m not longer a McCain supporter however so his likely nomination this year doesn’t really help things). Oh well, at least I won’t be barred from voting in November.

Which brings me to another topic I’ve been meaning to discuss: a particular ballot question. Come November there will be a rather important question on the ballot, the question of whether or not to end the Massachusetts state income tax. If you check out their website it sounds like they actually have a decent chance of passing this. It was on the ballot before in ‘02 and just barely failed with only 45.3% of the vote. That was with very little publicity and the media presenting it as a cause that couldn’t possibly succeed. However with that strong a showing in ‘02, no one can claim this time around that it has no chance. It very clearly has a chance, and therefore media reaction to it has been a little more positive this year. They’re also investing a lot more in publicity to spread awareness, so I think there’s a very good chance this might pass in November.

That said, I don’t want it to, I think we should keep the income tax. Well, that’s not entirely true either, I don’t want the income tax, but I think that repealing it right now is the wrong thing to do. This is Massachusetts, after all, and with a democratic legislature and Deval Patrick in the Governor’s office I find it unlikely that, even given an $11b drop in tax revenue, the state is going to put the brakes on any spending. Instead they’ll just look for different ways to bring in money like increasing the sales tax, increasing fees, and just generally taxing more things. One area where spending is probably likely to fall, however, is local aid. A lot of the cities and towns of Massachusetts are already suffering from anemic income and getting very little help from the state. This clearly isn’t going to improve if we stop giving the state part of our paychecks. So how are those municipalities going to keep making ends meet? Easy, they’ll keep doing what they always do and raise property taxes. I pay enough in property taxes as it is (about three times more each quarter than Jessi’s mom in Illinois pays in a year), and I find property taxes to be by far the more egregious kind of tax.

Think about what it means to have to pay property tax. Essentially, it means that you can never actually own property. In all but name, the State owns your property and you merely rent it from them. Don’t believe me? Try not paying your property taxes and see what happens: the same thing that happens if you stop paying your rent. You have to pay for the privilege of living on your own land! I say that rather than repealing the income tax, by far the better thing to do would be to repeal property taxes. This would a) strengthen the right of people to own property, b) reduce the cost of living significantly by lowering rent as well, and therefore c) reduce the prices of goods and services by lowering the costs for the providers and sellers.

Now, maybe repealing the income tax would actually be successful. Maybe next year we’d get a budget that was $11b lighter (wasn’t that one of Patrick’s campaign promises anyway?). Maybe Massachusetts will implement something like the FairTax on a state level, and prove one and for all that either it can work or it can’t. Probably not, but one can hope. Regardless, I think our first priority should be repealing property taxes. I would much rather see that happen, and I think it’s a revenue loss that could be more easily and quickly accommodated (rent assistance payouts, for example, would suddenly become much lower which would free up more money for local aid to compensate). But we’ll see what happens in November. I may even vote in favor of repealing the income tax just on principle; if it passes and our legislature and governor surprise me by taking it in stride there could still be some good that comes of it.

The power is out in much of Somerville and has been for about three hours now (since most of the way through the top of the 8th inning of the Sox/Indians game). The Porter Square area has power fortunately, but I recently returned from eminent local blogger Jesse Legg’s house where we had been watching the game until the power went out (afterwards I contented myself with cleaning everyone else out at poker), and from my bike ride back (not very fun in the pitch dark, even with a headlight) it appeared that pretty much everything on the other side of Elm St. is dark. The Ball Square area certainly is at any rate.

Power outages in and of themselves don’t really bother me, but several hours of nothing but candle light can start to get annoying. I can only imagine that for the power to be out for this long it must be a downed line or something similar that can’t just be routed around. Of course the wiring in this part of the country is probably so old that it could be just about anything. Hopefully I’ll know more soon. In the meantime, I just hope it isn’t another days-on-end without power scenario like we had in the Bay Area when I was a kid…

Edit: I just took a look at the City of Somerville website and apparently this is a ’scheduled emergency power outage’, whatever that means. It appears that the power will be out until 8am for the 100 through 400 blocks of Highland Ave. Of course it also said that it wouldn’t start until 12am, so who knows what’s really going on. Also, my Verizon DSL went out about 30 minutes ago. I wonder if that’s related.

Edit 2: Thanks to Boris for pointing out that the notice I found on the Somerville website was from 2002. Oh well, guess it was an unscheduled emergency after all.

Edit 3: Cool, if you do a google search for ‘Somerville power outage‘ this post is the number two result.

It’s been a while since I’ve written about anything political, but this seems like a good topic to start back in on. I’m going to start by making an admision—one that’s pretty much guaranteed to earn me a phone call as soon as my dad reads this: I don’t have health insurance.

Just to be clear, let me expound on that. I live in Massachusetts, a state that requires by law that all residents have health insurance. I am currently, as I type this, breaking the law just by sitting here minding my own business and daring to make my own decisions about my life. Starting in December (and I think it’s important that it be made more widely known that even though it’s currently illegal to not have health insurance in Massachusetts, you won’t actually start being punished for it until December) the state will theoretically even begin to fine me for not having health insurance (although, to be honest, had I not just make a public admission of it how would they even know?). And yet, I am among America’s uninsured. Funny how outlawing a behavior (or, in this case, a lack of behavior) doesn’t actually stop people from doing it, isn’t it?

There are a number of relatively cheap insurance options available to me, although not as cheap as I’d like since Massachusetts’ wonderful law making health insurance mandatory only focused on lowering health care costs for people older than myself. The truth is that I could afford health insurance. When I did some research a few months ago I think the cheapest plan out there was around $125/month (and I’m sure it would be possibly to get those rates even lower if I went with a high deductable plan that would actually save me even more money in the long run; more on that here). I can afford that. I just don’t want to. And why should I have to? I honestly can’t remember the last time I went to the doctor’s office. I can’t remember the last time I was sick for more than 3 days. I can remember the last time I went to the emergency room: it was when I was 12 and I broke my pinkie in a karate mishap. If there is anyone who doesn’t need health insurance, it’s me. Of course Massachusetts says I do. And they’re going to start fining me if I don’t get it by December.

Some might say that this is a travesty. Some might say that someone should intervene to protect me from myself. Some—and I think everyone knows who I’m talking about at this point—might say that the government should step in and provide me with a service I’m not asking for and actively refusing despite being legally obligated to avail myself of it (the position of universal healthcare makes a lot less sense when phrased that way doesn’t it?).

Some might want to know why I’m bringing this topic up now. The answer is that I just read this post over at Clasically Liberal (a favorite political blog of mine) and it really gave me pause to think. Most of the information in there is pretty old news to those of a more libertarian bent: the cost of health insurance is so high not because of greedy insurance companies, but because of lazy consumers and moronic government policies that encourage that laziness. And it’s not a problem to be solved through government regulation, which repeated evidence in massive experiments carried around around the globe to the detriment of millions of unsuspecting and undeserving subjects shows only decreases the cost of health care by not providing it in the first place. Amazingly enough in this era of enlightened liberalism, and this is the part that really caught my attention, the market has actually provided a better solution.

Enter Dr. Jay Parkinson. Dr. Parkinson has introduced a totally new kind of health care: the kind that doesn’t cost a whole lot of money. When you sign up for his service he becomes your personal physician. He handles just about everything for you, but for very low costs. He keeps his costs down by not having an office: he makes house calls. But more than that, he’ll talk to you over the phone, or by email, or even a video conference to determine if you actually even need to see a doctor. And of course he charges less for that than for a house call. He also only takes patients between the ages of 18 and 40 (hey, that’s me!). When you need to see a specialist, or even go to an emergency room, he’ll help you make the arrangements. And more than that, he’s already done the price comparissons for you so he can make sure that you’re not getting overcharged by a hospital or doctor that’s used to people who don’t question their high prices. Basically he’ll help make sure that you get the best care you can for the least amount of money. He’s even done the research to let you know which pharmacies charge the lowest price for the medication you need. All in all, he saves you a ton of money by not making you pay for things you don’t need. For most people in the age bracket that he services, they’ll only be paying about $500/year, just 1/3 of the cost of the cheapest traditional health plan I could find that doesn’t provide anywhere near as good service.

There’s only one problem: he live in New York, and therefore only takes patients in the New York area. If he, or anyone else for that matter, set up a similar practice here in Boston I would sign up in a heartbeat. As, I’m sure, would a ton of other people. (You here that, Massachusetts doctors?) I’ll even help them out with their web page! But for now, I’m sitting here with no health insurance, breaking the law, just because the only guy out there who’s offering a service that would be worthwhile for me is a couple hundred miles away.

I’ve been getting bad about updating regularly, and I’m trying to fix that. I have, however, been very busy lately. Here’s a quick rehash of what’s happened since my last post:

1. It turned out that the work I was expecting to have to do while I was in Illinois ended up getting pushed back by my client. So I never really had to test out my Parallels/Gentoo/Lighttpd/SQLite setup for web development (although I did some very basic tests that worked out just fine).



2. I got to meet Jessi’s sister’s new daughter, and basically my niece, Maura, just hours after she was born at around midnight on Sept. 28. Here are some pictures of her meeting her aunt Jessi, her grandma, her great-grandma, her mom, and, of course, me, all taken on my iPhone (the one to the right is my favorite of the many funny faces she made).
3. Went to the wedding of some of Jessi’s friends from home.
4. Flew back to Boston.
5. Had a whopping 4 or so days before some other friends came from Illinois to visit us, and then got to show them around Boston and expose them to some of our favorite things here (like G’vanni’s in the North End and Tacos Lupita in Porter Square). Though in the process it finally dawned on me that since we have a car now the Providence and Manchester airports are within range so we can actually fly on SouthWest and save some money when we go places that JetBlue won’t take us (they flew SouthWest into Providence).
6. Finally sold the Mercedes. I didn’t get quite as much for it as I wanted, but I still got enough that it was worthwhile having repaired and sold it rather than just junking it when it died.
7. Finally got that project that I had expected to be working on while I was in Illinois. Ended up having to do the whole thing in two days (ah, the joys of sub-contracting).
8. I lived out my 9,125 day, remarkable only in that it’s a multiple of 365. This was the same day we ate at G’vanni’s, and afterwards got pastries from the North End’s Modern Pastry.
9. I put off development of my WiFi database site in favor of a different project. This one will be less flashy, but will have much greater personal utility. It will also probably be useful for a lot of other people too, so my plan is to make it a hosted (free) service and open it up for anyone to use. I’m considering the possibility of maybe some premium features that you have to pay for, but that will have to wait.
10. My MacBook, which I’ve had for approximately 17 months now, died. I’m fairly positive it’s a hard drive failure as when it happened there was no kernel panic or any other sort of error message. The computer was still running, but any processes that were trying to access the hard drive locked up. Then the hard drive started making a pleasant clicking sound. Upon attempting to reboot I sill get the starting chime, but then it just goes to a white screen and clicks. This all seems consistent with a hard drive failure as when it happened most of the system would have been running in RAM and so unaffected, and the startup chime is stored in firmware and so also unaffected.

And that brings us to today. Currently I’m waiting until it’s time to head over to the Apple Store in the CambridgeSide Galleria to have them look at my MacBook. The problem is such that they’ll spend a few minutes looking it over and then tell me that they’ll have to send it in to the service center for repairs (they only do work on desktop locally, laptops are always shipped out). It should be a fairly quick repair though, so I should only be without my laptop for probably a week at the most. Fortunately I bought AppleCare for it, so the repair will be free.

I’m also working on designing a home theater setup for the condo. Currently the only screen we have to watch the few tv shows and movies we watch is my monitor. This isn’t as bad as it sounds, as it’s a Dell 24″ LCD with greater than HD resolution (1920×1200), but it does mean that we have to sit in the office on our desk chairs which isn’t as comfortable as it could be. The other day we tried moving my computer out to the living room to see if the screen was big enough to use as a tv in there. It isn’t quite, but it wasn’t actually all that bad. However since my MacBook just died I had to move the computer back into the office so that it would actually be useable. So now I’m planning out what will become our home theater system. I’m fairly positive that for the screen I’ll be getting the Olevia 342i, a 42″, 720p tv without an HDTV tuner. This may seem lacking, but it isn’t. At about 8-10′ away, the difference between 720p and 1080p on a 42″ screen won’t really be noticeable. And we dont’ need a built-in HDTV tuner, because I’m going to be using the TV with a SiliconDust HDHomeRun. The HDHomeRun is a much better choice for us becaues it’s a dual-tuner device, and it’s compatible out of the box with MythTV, which is what I plan on using to manage our video library and for it’s DVR capabilities. That leaves only the question of how to implement the MythTV system. I’ve narrowed that down to two options:

1. A Mac Mini. Actually, that’s a vast oversimplification. The Mini would only be running the MythTV front-end. The back-end would be running on a Linux box. I already have a suitable machine to use for the Linux box (I built it a couple years ago as a gaming rig, and it’s more than up to the task), I just need to reformat the drives and install MythTV. So the only cost there would be the Mac Mini (about $600) and the drives for storage ($330 for a 1 TB drive to start). So the total initial cost of that MythTV setup would be around $1000.
2. A TVease Zodiac. I’d get the $900 base model, because I don’t need/want the analog tuners and it’s cheaper to use the HDHomeRun than to get a model with HD tuners; also it’s cheaper to add more storage myself. This ends up being a little costlier, but significantly easier in terms of setup and usage. It also reduces the number of components the system has by allowing me to put the MythTV front-end and back-end in the same box without significantly reducing my storage capacity (it has room for three drives, so a maximum of 3 TB, but I can always add external drives as well so the maximum storage capacity is essentially infinate). I probably wouldn’t get a new HD for it right off the bat. Even though it will only come with a 250 GB drive, I can point it to the 500 GB RAID that I currently store my digital video collection on over the network so I think it will be sufficient for now. Of course eventually I’d probably want to put another TB or more into it. The total initial cost of this MythTV setup is also about $1000, but much easier to accomplish.

So I have to figure out which setup I want to use. The Mac Mini will look better, but the Zodiac doesn’t look that bad, and the eventual plan is to recess it into the wall anyway which will look pretty cool no matter which I use. I’m really leaning towards the Zodiac right now, but I want to do a little more research before I make any sort of decision like that. In the mean time, I can at least get the TV and see about hacking it into the current setup (perhaps using KnoppMyth on my PC (the reason I’m not going to just go with a plan like that is it won’t look as good and will be loud, should be perfectly fine for a temporary setup though).

According to The Somerville News, Somerville is being considered as a site for a new soccer stadium. This stadium would become home turf for the New England Revolution. At the moment, I have mixed feelings about this.

There would certainly be advantages to having a sport stadium in Somerville. For one, having it would bring a lot of attention and money to the city. Just the fact that we’re being considered for the stadium I’m sure will help raise people’s awareness of Somerville which, in turn, will probably bring some increased investment in the city. Not to mention the tax revenues on everything that’s sold at a stadium, parking, and incidentals bought by fans while they’re here. And certainly Somerville has a large soccer fan base. There’s even a grocery store called ‘Gol!!!’ on Somerville Ave., not too far from our condo. Obviously a sports stadium can be a big money maker for the city.

But there are also negatives to this. First and foremost, we’re basically in Boston here, and Boston sports fans are …an interesting bunch. I don’t know how much overlap there is between Revolution fans and Sox fans, but just ask anyone who lives in Kenmore Sq. how they like their neighborhood on game nights. I sure wouldn’t want to see the same thing happen to whatever neighborhood in Somerville gets the stadium when the Revolution has a home game (and I’m sure the people who live there have even stronger feelings about it). There’s also the question of where the funding is going to come from. A whole lot of professional sports stadiums are subsidized by the cities they’re in, and I really don’t have any desire to pay more taxes just so that we can have a soccer stadium. Then there’s the issue of space. Somerville isn’t that large of a city, and unless they’re going to pave over some park land, building this thing will require demolishing some existing houses and/or businesses. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but what if the people in the proposed spot don’t want to leave? Will the stadium simply go away, or will eminent domain be exercised to force them out? And what about traffic? I don’t think there’s a single city in Massachusetts with well designed roads. Can we handle the influx of traffic that a stadium will bring? Or is Somerville going to have to basically shut down the roads to everyone but fans on game nights like certain areas of Boston?

So, like I said, I have mixed feelings on this. My general inclination is that that bad would outweigh the good, but I don’t really know enough about the issues to make any sort of real determination. Seems like it would be a good topic for a municipal referendum, if such a thing is possible.

Today was supposed to be a nice, lazy, relaxing day. The Restaurant Week Project is finished, and I’ve got nothing pressing to do. So I decided to take my new bike (Oh yeah, last weekend I bought a bike off Craigslist. $25 for an old Schwinn hybrid in pretty good shape.) for a ride and get some things accomplished.

First things first, I decided I’d go back to the RMV to try again to get my California license converted to a Massachusetts one. So I got on my bike and headed towards Boston. I got all the way to the Boston Common before I ran into my first problem: a nut on my rear wheel had come loose and my wheel got pulled out of position so that it was rubbing up against the fork. I had foolishly not brought any tools with me, so I just locked it up and went the last few blocks on foot. I got to the RMV and got in line with 51 people ahead of me. One hour and 30 people later, I figured I was finally going to be getting my license. Then, all of a sudden, things slowed down. Up until that point they had been calling a new person every couple minutes.

Then for a long time nothing happened.

Then, as before, in a flash of smoke and brimstone an RMV employee appeared and announced to us all that the Social Security computers were down. AGAIN!!!

This is now the fourth time I’ve been to the RMV to try and convert my license and failed. It’s the second time that my trip was a failure thanks to a crappy Social Security computer system. Had I previously had any faith in the state of the RMV, the Massachusetts state government, or bureaucracy in general, it would now be lost. Having never had such a thing, I’m simply wallowing in despondency and despair at the thought of having to try yet again.

So I left the RMV thwarted yet again and contemplating the issues involved in getting my immobilized bike home. Fortunately, I was able to borrow some pliers from a friendly bus driver and get my rear wheel mostly straight and my bike ridable again. So I continued along my planned route to the Copley Square branch of the Boston Public Library where I checked out a copy of Charles Stross’ Accelerando, then bike back home via Storrow Drive and the Harvard footbridge.

All told, my main accomplishment of the day—which was supposed to be getting my Massachusetts license—turned out to be the fairly pedestrian achievement of biking ~12 miles. It is, at least, a very nice day for a bike ride.

Most of you probably know about Boston’s Restaurant Week. For those that don’t, it’s a week (or more) that happens twice a year during which participating Boston area restaurants offer meals from a prix fixe menu at very low prices. For example, Excelsior will be offering a three-course meal for $33.07 (I might just have to give that a try).

What you probably didn’t know is that there’s a fantastic website at restaurantweekboston.com (offered by bostonchefs.com) that will show you all the participating restaurants, the details of their participation, the prix fixe menus that they are offering, and a Google maps mashup to help you locate and get to those restaurants.

I helped create it, so you should go use it to help justify my services.