Given that I switched from iPhone partly due to love of keyboard, I'm really bummed that the vast majority of new Android devices since the G1 seem to be kb-less, including the new Google-sold Nexus One. The Droid is the very notable exception, but its kb is somewhat crappy. I guess I could get an unlocked GSM Droid, that is looking like the best option for a kb-lover who doesn't want to switch to Verizon (at our phone usage rates, Verizon would be an extra $500-$1000/year for S&I to switch).

Maybe Android 2.1 will finally support BlueTooth keyboards. Hackers have managed to get it to work, so seems like the OS is pretty close to supporting it.

The indian food here is really good. Seriously, it's REALLY good. Also, there is a little lizard in our bathroom. We don't know how to let it out, hopefully it knows how it got in. It's cute.

Ok, that's most of the things I like so far. Everything else is weird. I was tired yesterday and not able to do much work, and I passed out at 8:30pm, after being up less than 12 hours, and slept poorly. Damn jet lag. Tonight I will try to stay up until 11 and see if that helps.

I guess I shouldn't be too hard on myself or give up on having a productive trip just because I didn't get much work done on the 25 hr LAX->SIN leg, or the first day in India. Long flights always seem to me like a good time to get work done in theory, but it rarely works out in practice. I just hate being tired and unproductive and "killing time", it's not what I want my life to be like.

got in last night. staying at fancy resort on outskirts of Hyderabad. Still tired & jetlagged. Have internet and quiet room. Traffic is insane. The retail sector here has not discovered economies of scale. I like that there are ads for brands of cement.

I can see why I didn't particularly want to visit :). Nothing here (except IVF, of course) makes me particularly feel glad to be away from the comforts of home. Nothing against India, but I like home.

Singapore was pretty awesome, though. I saw carlcoryell, and then we had a seasteading social on an aquaculture farm!

Shannon & I are lying around tiredly watching Supernanny

According to the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, a clinical diagnostic tool, sociopaths often display superficial charm, pathological lying, manipulative behaviors, and a grandiose sense of self-importance. After observing 700 children engaged in everyday activities, Mateo and his colleagues found that 684 exhibited these behaviors at a severe or profound level.

The children studied also displayed many secondary hallmarks of antisocial personality disorder, most notably poor impulse control, an inability to plan ahead, and a proclivity for violence—often in the form of extended tantrums—when their needs were not immediately met.

"Children will use any tool at their disposal to secure gratification," Mateo said. "And as soon as the desire is fulfilled, be it some material want or simply an insatiable and narcissistic desire for validation, they quickly become bored and lose interest in their victims, all the while thinking only of satisfying whatever their next hedonistic craving might be."

Mateo added that even when subjects were directly confronted with the consequences of their inexplicable behavior, they had little or no capacity for expressing guilt, other than insincere utterances of "sorry" that were usually coerced.

(America's Finest News Source)

p.s. There are only 5 LJ posts on my reading filtered flist for the entire day today. Are y'all out leading productive lives or something? WTF!

I'm glad that this trip is "to make a baby" and not just a vacation - otherwise all this visa crap wouldn't have been worth it. But as is, it's worth it.

I headed up to SF at 10:30AM, and I returned at 7PM, w/ passport & visa.

Now I have to pack for Tovar & I and do a million other things to get ready to leave. See you on the other side of the world!

The visa outsource processor (on Mission) said they got the passport this morning, and they sent it back to the consulate because the passport # in the visa was not printed clearly, it was smudged. They will get the next batch of stuff back from the consulate at 5:30pm or so, which will hopefully include my passport. So I am staying here in San Francisco and going back at 5:30pm to pick it up.

They will also try calling the embassy to see if I can pick it up there (near GG park) earlier this afternoon.

I have several theories about wtf is going on, but they aren't actionable so I will try not to spin my wheels. But I do need to figure out where to park & chill for the next few hours.

My present reality: sitting in a cute little bar in SF, drinking pear cider and french onion soup, reading my Kindle, with nothing to do but enjoy myself until the visa place re-opens at 2pm.

My mental instinct: "Aah! Change! Stress! Worry! Panic! Will I get my visa? Will I go to India? I have so much to do!"

Was listening to a podcast interview w/ Haidt on The Happiness Hypothesis on the way here, so ideas like "our mind creates our reality" are on my mind. I love (of course) that Haidt thinks the same I do about Buddhism: it's great, there is a lot of wisdom in not striving so much, but...eliminating all striving is not the answer! A little striving (think Flow) is good for us.

Anyway, trying to focus on my pleasant present and not worry about problems that I can do nothing about other than what I'm doing.

When I dropped T off at school this morning, the visa agent still hadn't heard anything (computer reported passport at consulate), and their agent was doing their morning passport pickup, so I headed to SF on the theory that if their agent got my passport, I could pick it up in person, and if not, I could harrass the consulate again. On the drive up, they reported back: no passport.

I waited in line a bit at the consulate, and when I got up, the guy recognized me and said "I released your passport yesterday!" He double-checked on the phone. He released it to the consulate's monopoly visa processor on the other side of SF, rather than directly to my agent.

So I drive over, get there at 12:10, and see they are closed 12-2pm (long lunch). So...hopefully they have my passport and I am about to end this madness. But who knows - the uncertainty is not yet over. I'm having a bowl of soup and a glass of pear cider and reading my Kindle for the next 1.5hrs...

(BTW, I totally believe all of you who say the US does this even worse to non-US citizens.)

P.s. I like that this is a problem we can talk about with Tovar. It was easy to explain that mean people weren't letting daddy go to India, and S&I were sad b/c we wanted to go together to make his new sibling. He knew that was the plan, and he readily sympathized with my grumpiness.

One funny thing about this to me is that I originally wanted to stay home while Shannon went to India. I was excited about getting some (very rare) personal time to focus on my own goals and projects. But Shannon convinced me it was a bad idea b/c of the risk of a bipolar flareup of hers due to sleep disruption of jet lag. (And many other reasons - but that one tipped the balance for me).

So now we are in a situation where I am super-stressed and worried that....Shannon might go to India w/o me, and I might have to go later (my contribution isn't needed till the end of process) or in the worst case, send a frozen contribution. Having gotten really into the idea of going, and planned the trip, now I am really committed and it is stressful to maybe have to change.

Minds - they are not good at dealing with change!

went there in person, they were at lunch, I went to lunch and came back, talked to someone who said the guy was still out, waited, talked to him, waited, talked to him, eventually they said that the name on the latest hotel confirmation didn't match our names (due to my weird hyphenated last name). Said they could release the visa today if I got them an updated hotel confirmation, which I faxed them a little while ago.

So we will see.

Suckage 1: I give it 3:2 that we manage to get the visa in time. Which means we still don't know - I hate this massive uncertainty! Hard to plan anything when I don't know if I am spending the next 3 weeks in India or not.

Suckage 2: How does it make any sense at all to gate a visa application on a "confirmation" with ZERO security value? Anyone can register at a hotel under any name - there was no validation at all by hotels.com! The hotel registration is meaningless as a security measure. Security theater...

There was no explanation of why my app got this unusual level of scrutiny, maybe it was just random?

We may hear later today that they released my visa. Or in the morning. Or not at all, in which case I will drive up to the consulate again and be annoying in person again.

After weeks of back and forth about my visa, the Indian consulate has just rejected the latest set of logistical information, without a reason. Shannon's visa was granted right away. The visa agency said this is very unusual and they have no idea wtf is going on. I am going to try going there in person to the SF consulate to see if that will help.

It seems very odd for me to be singled out for a visa denial. Have my blogging or politics finally started being a problem? It's a narcissistic theory, but I don't know that I have a better one. An alternative is that I just got a crotchety bureaucrat, but if so, this should happen more regularly and not be such a unique thing for the visa agency to see.

Anyway, on my way home to get some supporting paperwork, then to the consulate.

Lots of poly books coming out, list of seven here. I'm most excited about Practical Guide to Polyamory by Franklin Veaux, whose xeromag poly page are by far the most sensible writing on poly that I've come across. Unfortunately it doesn't have a publisher yet.

Merlin Mann: NaNoWriMo advice, including the Top 1 Habits Of Amazing Writers: 1. They write. He has a great series on not answering email, and the slides w/ notes of his Time & Attention Talk are great and really quick to read.

This guy seems to be the real deal, by which I mean, normally when I see a blog of a productivity guru, it has a lot of long posts. Merlin Mann's is the first one that instead has occasional short posts. Like, weeks go by between them. Months sometimes. Almost as if...he a) values his audience's time, and b) spends most of his time doing things besides blogging.

Interesting NYT article today: Married (Happily) With Issues. "That night, the image that came to mind, which I shared with Dan, was that I had been viewing our marriage like the waves on the ocean, a fact of life, determined by the sandbars below, shaped by fate and the universe, not by me. And this, suddenly, seemed ridiculous....So I decided to apply myself to my marriage, to work at improving ours now, while it felt strong. Our children, two girls who are now 4 and 7, were no longer desperately needy; our careers had stabilized; we had survived gutting our own house. Viewed darkly, you could say that I feared stasis; more positively, that I had energy for Dan once again."

I just finished Pride & Prejudice (sans zombies). It was quite enjoyable, and definitely similar to Georgette Heyer, if not quite as well-written. Guess I'll have to read Sense & Sensibility next (without sea monsters, I think - I doubt the mashups are as good).

I'm thinking about buying out of the money calls & puts on gold. (Straddle?) The theory is, either the dollar collapses (maybe fiat currencies in general) and gold goes way up, or this period of fear and anti-dollar sentiment ends, and gold goes back down to its usual range. Although the bet only works, of course, if the options sellers have underestimated gold's volatility.

Just seems awfully unlikely to me that a jump like this is to a new sustainable level, as opposed to being a spike or a transition to a Moldbug-ian price.

I was in a big hurry at airport security to catch an earlier flight home yesterday, and I left my fancy brand new $300 external laptop battery at the X-Ray machine. The good news is, the airport has it, and they keep these things for 30 days. I really want this battery for our trip to India.

I would greatly appreciate it if someone could pick up the battery for me at John Wayne airport in Orange County, and FedEx it to me (at my expense of course). I have an item claim number and phone #, it sounds like the pickup procedure is very straightforward.

Thanks!

Very impressed w/ quality of speakers & people at #hplus, very inspiring. Mindshare kicked ass as a partner. Next time I think I might do a random talk on something besides seasteading, for variety. Diet&exercise, maybe. Or self-dev in general.

Tempting to re-run for the board next year, but I think I need to pare down my commitments a bit and focus on some core things in my life in 2010. (And hopefully w/ a baby in 2011). But I like being a board member, and I want to do a lot more of it in the future.

It was a nice extroverted idea sharing networking weekend to end my US year. I'm leaving for India next weekend, and really looking forward to the time to reflect on my priorities, "honeymoon" with Shannon, and isolation period to pound out a rough draft of the seasteading book.

From Bryan Caplan, nurture may not affect much, but it does affect how your kids feel about and remember you:

one of the most important exceptions to the behavioral genetic conclusion that parents have little long-run effect on their kids. The exception: How kids feel about and remember their parents.

This Swedish twin study, for example, finds that parents leave a lasting impression. Even when your kids are in their fifties and sixties, they'll remember if you were kind or cruel, warm or cold, encouraging or discouraging. The article confirms some genetic effect - how your kids remember you depends partly on them. But unlike many behavioral genetic studies, this one (like several others) confirms a fairly large nurture effect. Identical twins are only moderately more likely than fraternal twins to see their parents the same way.

I'm thinking of setting up Google Voice, so I can have one phone number that, for example, rings my SkypeIn phone number while we are in India, so that calls go to my laptop there rather than just my inaccessible cellphone. Not only does this give us a shot of getting the call, but also makes it easy to get our voicemails.

Anyway, I am facing the paradox of choice - with so many exchanges and phone numbers to choose from, what 7-letter word will convey the essence of my being? Here are some of my favorites (from among the 3-digit prefixes Google Voice has access to in local area codes[1]) appears below the cut. I expect to use this # to replace my cell, which means it will be my main personal & professional number.

Upon searching, most were taken. Here is what is actually available from those I liked:

glitter, enliven, malefic, nakedly, majesty, softest, psyches, psychic, askance, aplenty, minimal, minimax

[1] Not that localness really matters for price anymore, but it makes it much easier for local people to remember the number, as they don't have to remember the area code as 3 abstract digits, but rather, they have a single variable that just thinks "San Jose / Peninsula / SF/ East Bay"

Apparently Eric Drexler has been blogging for a year at metamodern. I am not actively interested in nanotech (there are far more interesting things like it than I have time to keep up with), so I'm not going to read his blog, but his collection of most popular posts of the first year is excellent. Short yet interesting posts on the nature of science and multidisciplinary knowledge. Some teasers to get you interested:

"Note that the title above isn’t “how to learn everything”, but “how to learn about everything”. The distinction I have in mind is between knowing the inside of a topic in deep detail — many facts and problem-solving skills — and knowing the structure and context of a topic: essential facts, what problems can be solved by the skilled, and how the topic fits with others.

This knowledge isn’t superficial in a survey-course sense: It is about both deep structure and practical applications. Knowing about, in this sense, is crucial to understanding a new problem and what must be learned in more depth in order to solve it."

"It takes far less knowledge to recognize a problem than to solve it, yet in key respects, that bit of knowledge is more important: With recognition, a problem may be avoided, or solved, or an idea abandoned. Without recognition, a hidden problem may invalidate the labor of an hour, or a lifetime. Lack of a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
...
This sort of knowledge is a kind of specialty, really — a limited slice of learning, but oriented crosswise. Because of this orientation, though, it provides leverage in integrating knowledge from diverse sources. I am surprised by the range of fields in which I can converse with scientists and engineers at about the level of a colleague in an adjacent field. I often know what to ask about their research, and sometimes what to suggest."

Do you often get people's contact information in emails on your desktop, and type them into your Android phone?

Since Android contacts and Google Contacts are the same thing, you can instead go to:

http://www.google.com/contacts

And manage your contacts in a nice web interface. I find it much quicker to copy & paste phone numbers and addresses to Google Contacts than to open my phone and manually type them in.

Hypothesis: humans have a strong attraction to interpersonal drama because in a 100-person tribe, everyone's lives are intertwined and you can't ever get away from the people involved, so drama was more relevant and important than in our modern society with looser, larger social networks.