Schedule for Week Ending 4/5

The schedules just get more and more interesting, it seems. My project has shifted into super death mode with 24/7 operation, and you know what that means, kids! I'm even changing up the format so it makes more sense, since I only have day-straddling shifts this week (save one).

Monday into Tuesday - 19:30 to 04:00 (8.5 hours)
Tuesday into Wednesday - 19:30 to 04:00 (17 hours)
Wednesday into Thursday - 19:30 to 04:00 (25.5 hours)
Thursday into Friday - 19:30 to 04:00 (34 hours)
Friday into Saturday - 15:30 to 04:00 (46.5 hours)
Saturday into Sunday - 15:30 to 04:00 (57 hours)
Sunday - 15:30 to 24:00 (65.5 hours)

I feel so ridiculous typing this, but it wold be amazing if I had to pull this off. We'll see. Also, eight to four takes on a whole new meeting with the weekday shifts.

Don't Look Back in Anger

True Affection

Can't get this out of my head.

Long Beach, New Jersey (3/21)

Ah, so today I had nothing to do. I poked around at a couple folks and it seemed they were quite busy as they tend to be, but no matter! I can certainly improvise given the right amount of desperation. And the muse struck; with the addition of the new GPS to my gadget arsenal, I could safely wander and not worry about having a repeat of last weekend. And with that, I was off.

I wandered down Route 73 and to Route 70, heading east toward the coast. I wanted to think, and I supposed that the ocean pummeling the shore was a good soundtrack for that. I was soon barreling through the pine barrens. I stopped to take a few photos, since it was pretty refreshing to see these sites in my new state. It had been awhile since I had escaped the concrete and glass of the cities and suburbs.



Anyway, it was a pretty enjoyable ride. I hadn't traveled on the state routes for very far, so it was good to head to a portion of the state that didn't enjoy an interstate pass-through. After taking two or three photos, I realized that the in-camera memory would only hold a grand total of five; a new memory card was in order. When I was nearly to the Garden State Parkway (which shoots north all the way to the New York City area from South Jersey), I noticed a plaza with a Best Buy and Target, so I pulled in. The shopping center was in a place called Manahawkin, which to me is such a ridiculous name for a city.



As you can note in that last image, those spaces were for fuel efficient or carpool cars only. I should have scolded that lady riding alone in an SUV, but I didn't care enough. I would suppose that my car fits the bill, though.

Regardless of proper parking etiquette, again I was off, heading down Route 72 toward Long Beach, New Jersey. I really didn't know that this was my destination until I got there, honestly; I just wanted to wander somewhere that involved water and sand, and a moderately long drive. The pines gave way to smaller trees, which gave way to land too soft and sandy for anything of height to grow in. A couple of bridges later and the reason for Long Beach's name became pretty evident.




In the map above, obviously, Long Beach is the super long strip of land jutting into the sea. The last photograph was taken facing west, clearly, since the mid afternoon sun was in that direction. I kept driving and eventually I got to land's end, complete with a nice public beach that was desolate thanks to the mid-forties weather.

Just the beach.

I'll keep this in mind if I find any unexploded shells.

Don't get ripped...

My shadow. I know there's a super deep thing that I can say here, but it escapes me.

Footprints and a gull.

I spent a bit of time pacing about on the beach before heading up into the city to look for something to eat. It's strange sometimes to walk around coastal cities, as everything seems to have one or several decks, and the feeling that you get when you glance oceanward and see nothing but sky over the buildings.

Familiar territory.

I'm sure they have a million of them, but this would work well on Planet Money's signs of the economic downturn.

The kind of surf shop my dad would love to see.

I walked around a bit before spotting the Wawa above, and decided that would be a pretty good option for food, since the sunset was approaching pretty quickly and I wanted something quickly. I'm not a big fan of eating in restaurants alone, anyway. So I went in and got dinner.

Yes, welcome. I hope nobody noticed the flash when I took this.

Would have been an okay food option had it not been boarded up. And by boarded I mean cardboarded.

Tasty fish.

Dinner. Only a little bit sandy. And yes, that's a scary claw of some variety!

So I ate up my sandwich while sitting on a nice log bench, waiting for the sun to sink lower and lower in the sky behind me. I watched a few guys in full body wet suits surfing for awhile, and assumed they were ridiculously cold in the ocean water. I snapped a few more shots as the night started to creep in.

A cool looking house/whatever it was.

I took a bit of video, too, though I'm sure the quality isn't that great. The soothing ocean sounds are pretty nice though, I must admit.

After it started to get darker I decided to start heading back, so I walked up to my car and marked the beach with my GPS. To my surprise, it automatically named the spot "beach", though I wanted to be a bit more specific, so I changed it anyway. Pretty impressive, though, that the little thing realized I was at the coast.

Walking back - my car's on the right side.

This was a pretty cool view, I thought.

Made me laugh on the way out, so I snapped a picture on the return trip.

I liked the name of the road.

And I arrived back home at about 8:30. A pretty good day trip, I must admit. The GPS handled everything mightily, with naught a discouraging word as I deviated from its planned trip and it had to compensate. I chatted with Adriana on the way back for a few minutes to discover she was also on the road from Duluth back to Minneapolis.

For those of you interested, the coordinates of my GPS marker are as follows: 39.649839, -74.173553

Schedule for Week Ending 3/29

Nothing much to say. This is preliminary at best.

Monday - OFF
Tuesday - 00:00 to 04:00 and 15:30 to 24:00 (12.5 hours)
Wednesday - 19:30 to 24:00 (17 hours)
Thursday - 19:30 to 24:00 (21.5 hours)
Friday - 00:00 to 04:00 (22.5 hours)
Saturday - 15:30 to 24:00 (31 hours)
Sunday - 15:30 to 24:00 (39.5 hours)

Odd, lots of weekend stuff. Can't really bring myself to care, currently, though.

Impossibilities

Ah, so I'm two hours into my current shift and just the right combination of tired and thoughtful that I feel like writing one of these. It's been too long; I'll summarize some of the things that I've glossed over in the past weeks. I'll see what new stones I have to turn over, too, in the process of detailing all this.

First and foremost, I'm still pretty sane. I'll admit that the logistics and timings of this last week have not necessarily been the most conducive to this orientation, but it'll all be over soon enough. The weekend looms just ahead, and now's time for the sprint to the finish. I'm actually surprisingly lucid for how little sleep I've been obtaining in the past week or so.

Leigh hasn't spoken to me in over a month, and by now the spite I felt has faded. Spite born of hypocrisy, mainly, considering the method of her departure - as a key is designed to fit an exact lock, the punishment was clearly designed to fit me specifically. I no longer feel much about the situation, but mainly sit in objective observation. I simply find it curious and a bit amusing that the person who commiserated with me about being abandoned by a friend over a small fight would mirror the exact behavior? I chalk it up to the same syndrome that drives battered children to become more violent with their own offspring.

I bought a pair of toys in the past week, a GPS unit and a new camera. The camera was originally purposed to snap photos of an ill-fated trip to the beach on Friday, but it will serve me well in other endeavors. I'm getting the hang of the GPS, figuring out what it handles well and what it has trouble with. Another daytrip may be in order, if I can convince someone to come with; perhaps to rural Pennsylvania - Centralia's always been a fascination of mine, one of the most famous ghost towns in America, with its ever-burning foundations.

My wanderlust is becoming more and more pronounced with every hour I spend in these windowless rooms at work. I find myself missing the naive plans of the summertime to sojourn halfway across the country to some place not all that remarkable, the only souvenirs long-winded stories of using the last gas fume partway between St. Louis and Kansas City. The promise and potential lie dormant for now. Too far out on that limb.

Well, Maybe Sometimes

Never has fifty-four degrees seemed so warm. It's gonna be a great week of sun and spring weather! Here I'll show off my new digital camera a little - more about my new toys later, though!

Outside of my awesome apartment.

View from my front door.

Car, complete with less-than-month-old Jersey plates.

Pretty picture Adriana made for me!

Schedule for Week Ending 3/22

I haven't been posting much, how sad. But here's a schedule anyway; hopefully I'll find the time to post some from work, since I'll be working some odd hours.

Monday - 12:00 to 15:24 (3.4 hours)
Tuesday - 14:42 to 24:00 (12.7 hours)
Wednesday - 00:00 to 02:00 and 15:30 to 24:00 (22.2 hours)
Thursday - 00:00 to 05:00 and 15:30 to 24:00 (35.7 hours)
Friday - 00:00 to 04:00 and 19:30 to 24:00 (44.2 hours)
Weekend - TBD

REVISED 3/18

So lots of fun. Overnight shifts, uuuggggh.

Poor Blog

I'm sorry my blog
I have been ignoring you
Here's a haiku post

Mexico

Schedule for Week Ending 3/15

Been a rough week so far, but at least the prelim schedule came out early!

Monday - 19:30 to 24:00 (4.5 hours)
Tuesday - 7:30 to 20:00 (17 hours)
Wednesday - 11:30 to 20:00 (25.5 hours)
Thursday - 14:00 to 24:00 (35.5 hours)
Friday - OFF
Saturday - 11:30 to 16:00 (40 hours)
Sunday - OFF

REVISED 3/11

So it goes.

Popsicle

I like them.


This image is incredibly creepy.

How Banks Work

Another week, another amazing This American Life episode. This week they tackle the economic crisis for a third time, and they explain things in plain English for everybody to understand in easy terms. They have a great explanation involving how exactly the banks got into trouble. You should listen, but here's a quick and dirty explanation.

Let's make up a bank. We call it "Bank A", and Bank A starts with $10 capital. That means that initially, the bank has ten dollars to loan out, to invest, to do what have you with. Of course, just sitting there, the bank makes no profit. Right now, their balance sheet looks like this:

Since the bank has $10 in capital, the bank is worth about $10 all in all on the market; the liabilities and assets minus the capital. Now, to make money, banks take deposits and make loans. Let's say that Andrew deposits $90 into the bank, and is promised a 3% interest rate. Now the balance sheet looks like this:


For now, we'll ignore that interest rate; let's say this all happens on the same day, as the interest rate is largely unimportant for the purpose of this explanation. Now, the bank has $100 total in its vault, but if it just sat there, the bank would of course lose money. In a year, the bank would owe back that $90 plus the 3% rate if Andrew returned to withdraw his money. But then, someone else comes along, Scott, who wants to purchase a house. He needs $100 in order to do this. Bank A gives him a loan with a 6% interest rate:


So now, in a year, Scott will owe $106, and the bank owes Andrew $92.70. They would make a profit of about $3.30 after this timespan. This is how banks make money - loan out money at a high interest rate, and take depositor money and give it a lower interest rate.

Anyway, the housing crisis comes along. Suddenly Scott's house's value plummets 25%, down to only $75. Scott, falling on hard times himself, loses his job because of layoffs. He defaults on his loan, and the bank must foreclose and take the asset for itself. This creates a significant problem. Here's the balance sheet:


Now the bank owns a house that is worth only $75. If Andrew came back and wanted his money back from the bank, the bank would be unable to pay it, even after selling Scott's old house. The bank could thus be said to be worth about $75 + $10 - $90, or -$5.

This is obviously a bad thing. The bank is no longer solvent. It no longer has enough capital and assets to pay back the people who put money into it. This is exactly the situation that the banks have been battling; struggling to keep their capital and assets combined above their liabilities.

Obviously, the problem arises when Andrew comes to withdraw his money. The money is not actually all there; if the bank went out of business (and the FDIC did not exist), then Andrew would only be returned $85 of that $90 he initially put in, and the bank is now worth nothing and goes into bankruptcy.

The solution so far has been to give money to those banks in order to ensure that they can pay off the people who want to withdraw their own money from the banks. What the banks have been advocating is that the government uses tax money in order to purchase those homes from the bank, essentially. The homes have a market price, but clearly even if the government paid $75 to Bank A, Bank A still would not have enough to repay Andrew. So the banks have wanted essentially the highest possible price the government could pay. The problem is, though, that banks wish to avoid nationalization at all costs; this essentially means that the bank's "life" as a corporate citizen comes to an end.

Herein lies the problem. If the government gobbles up the assets of the bank, and takes over 50%, it effectively has the majority say in the direction of the company. It can veto things the company tries to do or propose and hammer through its own opinions and methods. Of course, this would probably be temporary; the government would almost certainly sell the company back to private hands once the coast is clear, so to speak.

Anyway, listen to the podcast here for plenty more great talk about what's actually going on.

March

New month, new set of responsibilities and thoughts.

Just typing this up quick at work to post something that is both depressing and inspiring: Sagan's Pale Blue Dot.



"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."