How do you survive for a weekend with only $20?

I’ve been following this series of posts by Sudhir Venkatesh on the Freakonomics Blog for a little while now. Venkatesh is an economist who did his PhD in the economics of a drug running gang in Chicago, as featured in Freakonomics. He has been studying how people at the poorest end of American society survive, and he has also been consulting for various young and inordinately rich kids who are interested in philanthropy, but has no idea where to start. In this installment, Venkatesh brings Michael, a multi-millionaire, and Curtis, a squatter who lives on $5000 per year, together so Michael can get an idea of what it is like for the poor to live.

Meanwhile, Michael drove his rental car around the neighborhood. When he returned to meet us he was exasperated. “The food here is awful! No fruit, vegetables are moldy. Only meat, canned food, and soda. What do kids eat? The guy at the store told me no one would eat fruit unless it’s in a can. Is that true?”

Curtis shook his head. I told Michael, “When we get back to New York, I will talk with you about diet and quality of food availability in poor neighborhoods.”

I am not a multi-millionaire, but I have never been lacking for anything that I needed, nor most things that I wanted. It was an eye opener to read about how people can live with such little money, and how creative they were in managing what little they have. It’s a great read.

The smartest interview I’ve seen in a while

Dear Blackberry

If you’re making a phone that you hope will be an iPhone Killer, lose the Comic Sans. Seriously, don’t you have a single designer working for you any more?

A brief rundown on what I think of my Treo 500v

The battery life is horrible. Admittedly I push mine very hard, I have the data connection on most of the day for push email (more on that later), and I like to read the news, and occasionally listen to music on it. I’d struggle to make it last much more than 24hrs, especially if I throw in a little Google Maps use.

There is almost no user-generated information about this phone online, which tells me: people who are likely to write about this stuff isn’t interested in this phone, or it’s not selling very well. Which is a shame, it’s actually a pretty good phone.

The microphone is very loud, and has excellent noise cancellation. I’ve been asked to speak softer by a few people on the other end of the line even in noisy places.

The keyboard is very good, I’d say as good as a Blackberry Curve. It is a tiny bit stiff, but the keys are well spaced and I can almost touch type on it. The only thing I didn’t like is the spacebar, there are two separate buttons on each end, and when you press it feels a bit inaccurate.

The “carousel” menu, which is only on the Vodafone version, is very good — if you’ve never used a smartphone before. It provides no customisation options, it’s hardwired to show only the programs that the phone ships with, so if you prefer Opera to Pocket IE, you have to navigate deeper into the menu structure into the basic Windows Mobile menus to find it. On the other hand, the menu is very clever, displaying favourite contacts, messages (email and sms/mms), recent programs, upcoming appointments and the like in a slick interface.

There are very few user customisable features at all, although this may be because this is the Standard edition of Windows Mobile. It is rather annoying that Microsoft ripped out all the bits that would be too hard to navigate without a touch screen, rather than spending a bit of time solving the UI problems.

(If you are comfortable with digging through the registry, I’ve found a few of the keys that can be edited to customise the phone. More in a later post.)

The UI itself suffers from all the general Windows Mobile problems, but the smartphone verison isn’t as fiddly as the touchscreen version, and can quite easily be used one-handed. One thing it does fall down hard on is you can’t quickly switch from one active program to another, the way that you can on a Symbian phone (which uses a special hardware key to do it). It’s pretty dumb, given that you can’t actually exit most applications from inside the application, you have to dig through a billion menus to find the Task Manager program to close applications. But, overall, it’s not too bad, and it’s snappy enough most of the time.

Push email and Activesync in general is awesome. This is my first exposure to Microsoft’s Exchange/Activesync/Outlook triangle, and I have to say that I am very impressed. I can definitely see why this is so popular for businesses, and why Apple licensed Activesync. That’s not to say that I haven’t had problems, though the problems seem to be network related rather than phone/server related. Combined with Mobipush, a free push email service, I now get push email straight from Gmail, with HTML, without having to pay Blackberry tax.

The camera, in good light, is exceptional — for a phone. In bad light? Forget it.

A Practical Guide for Asian Men, Redux

So, quite some time ago, I wrote about a book by Adam Quan called How to Date White Women: A Practical Guide for Asian Men. An influx of comment spam reminded me of that post, and I thought I’d go check out any new comments about the book on Amazon… and I found this one:

GREAT!!, December 17, 2006 Personally, I am an Asian man. And by Asian, I mean Asian. When I got this book, I realized the error of my white-woman-hunting-ways. Now that I’ve seen the light, I can lure them in like moths to the fire. THANKS Adam Quan! My love life is more bubbly than a 100 degree pot in high altitude.

I’m not sure what he means by “Asian”. But at high altitude water boils at lower than 100 degrees due to lower atmospheric pressure, so a 100 degree pot in high altitude would mostly consist of hot gas… which is a pretty clever piss-take comment.

Now we wait for the Guvernator to save all our arses

The Brits have just finished launching a series of satelites that give their military worldwide control over autonomous military assets. The name of said satelite system? Skynet.

No shit.

Best quote ever

From Gizmodo, about the USAF Cyber Command’s, uhm, options:

“It depends on our target; it depends on our rules of engagement—are we conducting open warfare with an adversary? If that’s the case, then we don’t really need to be discreet about it. When we drop a JDAM [Joint DIrect Attack Munition aka "big mofo guided bomb"] and leave a big smoking hole, that’s not very discreet.”

Indeed.

Get the full Windows Live experience

Upgrade to a newer browser:

0806_hotmail.jpg

I applaud Microsoft’s effort to encourage people to upgrade their browsers (because IE 6 and lower is, in a word, fucking-awful), but didn’t they even google browser detection (or Live search) when they built that part of Hotmail?

Proof that the weirdest things do happen in Japan

So. You’re home alone, but something strange has been happening. Food that you swear you saw in the fridge keeps disappearing. So what do you do? Well, a 57 year old man in Fukuoka had this problem, and he installed a security camera to monitor his home while he was out. And he was rather surprised, to say the least, to discover than a homeless woman had been living in his closet.

“She told police that she had nowhere to live,” the spokesman said. “She seems to have lived there for about a year, but not all the time.”

A year! And she stole nothing but food! If that’s not the mark of an honest person, I don’t know what is. If I could afford it, I would seriously consider just letting her stay; I think she’s earnt squatter’s rights on that closet!

So, “Top chefs say no to GM food” eh?

Well it’s all very well to bitch about GM crops when you’re that fucking rich, isn’t it? Sure, if you charging 50 bucks a plate then you can afford to buy the best and freshest organic produce, but spare a thought for those in the world for whom 50 bucks is a year’s wage; or hell, all those single income families in Australia which make less than $20,000 a year. I bet they’re not looking at much more than the price tag.

This kind of mindless knee-jerk protest crap really drives me insane. How can a bunch of people who should be experts on food not see through the whole GM scare-mongering led by those not-quite-all-about-the-environment Greenpeace hippie freaks? We have, for centuries, been genetically engineering food, even before we knew about this “genome” business. By selectively breeding certain traits we have been creating, and destroying, different lines of animals and plants for human consumption. As more and more mouths need to be fed, people have been figuring out ways to increase yields to feed those people — up until some braindead automatrons decided not to bother researching anything and start spreading crap about putting monkey genes in apples blah blah blah. So now when Australia goes into drought, it has a tangible effect around the world… which may not have happened if we had invested in creating new strands of rice that is more disease resistant and has a higher yield. So, repeat after me: ORGANIC FARMING KILLS. Not those who eat it, but those who can’t afford it.

So please, Neil Perry et al, unless you can think of a way to feed 5 billion mouths and counting without new growing technologies, sit down and shut the hell up.