I can understand the business owner not wanting to employ any smokers, poor health care services combined with soaring health care costs are arguably the biggest problem in America today.

There is something odd that I’ve always felt about how subsidized health care works. It seems logical to me that because the goverment pays for health care, they ought to be able to regulate some behavior that is severely detrimental to public health, like not wearing a seat belt or smoking. I am all for people being able to smoke or not wear a seat belt as a matter of personal choice, but I’m not sure the taxpayers should have to pay for the consequences of it.

One thing I am a really strong advocate for is being an organ donor. I honestly think that is kind of silly for anyone to not want to be an organ donor. I can understand the fear of donating blood or bone marrow while you’re alive, but there’s really no reason you shouldn’t designate yourself as an organ donor when you’re dead. Are you saving your organs for some other special occasion? Do you think you’ve got a need for your organs when you are dead? Are you really concerned about how you’ll look in your casket without your organs? Here’s a list of

organ donation myths.

I don’t want to live as a vegetable. I feel sorry for Terri Schaivo and the battle to keep her alive. If I ever get like that, I’ve told Tracy to pull the plug. I don’t want to be a burden and if there’s really no hope of meaningful recovery, it’s just not worth it. Hopefully someone can make good use of my organs.

So I posted this on Patri’s blog, but I thought some other people might be interested in what to do if your company has given you stock options which are worth money and you want to hedge against a dramatic drop in value.

Shorting your own stock is of course illegal, but one thing that you may consider is to short a similar stock or a competitor. That way if the whole sector tanks(like the internet bubble bursting again), your short position will help you hedge against the drop of your options. You are limiting your risk to relative valuation of your options to the company you are shorting.

The risks are thus:

1: If you pick a similar stock that isn’t really similar at all, you are just shorting that stock and going long on your own company as two separate positions(you could short the NASDAQ or some technology index as a barometer).

2: Your short stock goes through the roof, forcing a margin call. This means of course that you’ll have to cash out on your options which are not quite as liquid. You may have to scramble to sell your options to cover the margin call. You probably only want to short enough to cover the options that you have vested(which is probably zero right now assuming a standard Valley vesting schedule of nothing for 1 year, then you get 1/4 followed by 1/48 monthly or 1/12 quarterly).

3: Not for the faint of heart. While this is a hedging strategy, it is possible you will lose significantly more than just the value of your options. This is not something I’d recommend to everyone, but some people can probably handle it both intellectually and financially if for some reason you get a unfortunate confluence of your stock options tanking and your short position rising phenomenally.

Note that I have never done this, but I may if I ever get the opportunity again.

The West Wing has the most thought provoking story lines. Tonight’s episode involved three different presidential candidates going to Iowa to win the caucus and talking to corn farmers. All of them privately knew that ethanol subsidies were a terrible idea for the country and a one billion dollar windfall for corporate farmers in Iowa, yet two of them supported ethanol subsidies publicly in order gain votes in the critical Iowa caucuses. The third candidate actually vocalized what all of them felt. It was a move that was principled, but political suicide.

One thing I wonder about is how well researched the show is. It’s easy to believe all the facts and views they present. They definitely present everything with an adoring view of California-style Democrats. If it is written without solid research behind it, they run the danger of presenting fiction as fact. Of course we know it’s television, but it influences how we view real politics and issues.

In many ways it’s an idyllic view of how politics work. In The West Wing, compromises are made frequently, but with a reason and always with a flair for political brilliance. My favorite episode was an episode called “The Supremes” wherein a Supreme Court Justice dies suddenly. While interviewing several candidates to replace the dead justice, they are struck with the dilemma of nominating a exceedingly mediocre candidate or nominating an amazing candidate but one whose liberal views made her unable to actually win the confirmation from a closely divided Senate. The bargain that they ask of the Republicans is to confirm the amazing candidate, but in exchange for support from Senate Republicans, the old Chief Justice who is also ailing in health will retire and the Democrats will confirm the most intelligent and zealous Republican nominee. The complementary confirmations would then usher in a era of great judicial decisions from both sides instead of having to settle for unimaginitive middle of the road judicial work.

They have also tackled other interesting issues, like Israel, Taiwan, and how politics and pollsters work.

Anyways, I love the west wing. You should watch it.

Buying a TV is incredibly complicated these days. Tracy and I spent most of the day trying to figure out what our solution should be. We have some space limitations, but we want cable/satellite, HDTV, DVR. The array of options and acronyms is enormous, plus each provider has limitations. HD-Ready vs HD-Tuner, LCD vs Plasma vs Rear Projection, DirecTV vs Dish vs Comcast vs Echostar vs Voom, Tivo vs Replay vs other DVR, 5.1 vs 6.1 vs THX, 1080i vs 720p vs 420i, HDTV vs EDTV vs TV.

A normally intelligent friend of mine who shall remain nameless(Dave) suggested that we play all Mississippi Stud and Mississippi Stud/8 or better for a whole poker session. This was profitable for me because I won. But the idea was widely disparaged by all players involved as being a bad idea and indeed we were right. It’s a bad game, far less interesting than Hold’em. It’s not the worst game ever to be widely played in casinos(silly home games like Anaconda don’t count). The worst game award probably goes to Razz.

Perl Threads are cool. I’d never looked at them in depth until today.

I finally finished most of my blogger changes. Hope you like the new format. I put up a newer picture and made some minor tweaks. I improved the archive page, but it still needs some fixes.

I’m not sure if I want to keep the blogger navigation bar though. It’s amusing to click through to the next blog every once in a while, but it suffers from the following problems: About 10% blogs are spam blogs, another %10 have less than 5 posts total on them, another %20-30 are not in English(it’s possible some of those have interesting images that I might want to browse, but that’s very rare), another %20 are not that interesting to me. So if you add it up it’s pretty rare that I look at another person’s blog for more than 10 seconds.

It’s also annoying that the blogger search toolbar doesn’t come up with the same search results that I expect. It is labelled “Search” and it’s supposed to search the site you’re on with google, but it doesn’t do what I expect at all. When you type “site:www.chen.net linux” into a regular google search, it shows all the occurences of “linux” on “www.chen.net”, which is a terrific feature. The Blogger toolbar does not do this unfortunately. It comes up with no hits when I just type in “linux”.

I’ll keep up the blogger navbar for a while longer, if anyone has opinions, feel free to share.

I have a new layout and style, sort of. I stole the Minima Black scheme and adapted it to make it something just a bit different. I don’t think it’s any better, but I just can’t stand having the same template as every other person who owns a blog.

Unfortunately the archive page is based on the old version of my blog, and it looks really terrible with the main page being a different style. So I will fix that this weekend I hope.

Also I need to update the rest of the site to use the same style. At some point in the future, I should also upgrade my version of Gallery and get the pictures to fall in line with the style.

It’s times like these that I want to move to a complete content management system like Plone, so that I don’t have to integrate a bunch of different pieces of technology(and style in this case).

I’m using libcurl for some stuff at work, it’s a fine C library for doing HTTP retrievals, and it has bindings f or a variety of other languages in case you wanted to use it in PHP, Perl, Python or whatever your language of choice is.

I’ve added titles and links to my blog. I didn’t realize that I had to turn them on.

I really liked the first episode of Battlestar Galactica. The pilot of the miniseries and “33″ are some of the best sci-fi I’ve seen in a long while. The second episode “Water” was pretty good as well, but not as good as the others. So far this is the best sci-fi I’ve seen since Star Trek: The Next Generation. But even ST:TNG sucked the first couple of seasons, it only got good starting about season 3 or 4 and then it was really good for most of the rest of its run. Though I have to confess I haven’t been watching that much sci-fi the past few years so I don’t have a good basis for comparison. Everyone else seemed to like Babylon 5, but I didn’t. I didn’t like ST: Voyager or ST: Deep Space 9 that much. I never even saw an episode of ST: Enterprise, so I feel like I’ve lost some of my geek credentials. Firefly was supposed to be good, but I missed it. But now I have Tivo so I can go back and catch some things that I should have. Sliders suffered from being a bit simplistic I felt, but I saw less than 5 episodes of it. Stargate: SG-1 has been on so long that I should have seen more than a couple of episodes, but I haven’t. It is popular enough to be spawning a spinoff, Stargate: Atlantis, so there must be something to it.

I am on the left of the American mindset, I admit that. One of the few areas that the left and right wings agree on these days is civil liberties. The things that have happened at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib make me sick. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised about this recent case where a judge ruled that law enforcement could put a GPS tracking device on a suspect’s car without a warrant. Here’s a link to the article. Maybe we’ve thrown out the whole concept of “innocent until proven guilty” for the more acceptable “innocent until you do something suspiciously guilty”. There was also a recent study which said that %43 of Americans think civil liberties of Muslims should be restricted. I guess we’ll soon be getting rid of that pesky First Amendment too.

If you didn’t notice, I made some tweaks to the style on my blog, just because I was bored with it. It’s not really that much of a change and it’s not that good. At some point I need to do a major site revamp, but HTML frustrates me so much that it takes a while. I also really need to make my site more modular so I can move it off my home server. The HTTP hits I’m getting on my home machine(which aren’t really that many) sometimes interfere with my bandwidth when I am playing Counter-Strike.

Apple released several new products at Macworld. I think the iPod Shuffle is a great idea. Apple created the whole portable digital music player with the original iPod and iTunes. They took a bold move and it paid off. Now they are attempting to parlay their digital music dominance and brand and move into the flash mp3 player market. The flash mp3 player market has almost no differentiation currently, and the shuffle is the right size, price, and style. I think it’ll be huge for Apple.

I am not so sure what to think about the MacMini. It of course doesn’t have the horsepower of a comparably priced PC, but that has never been what the Mac is about. These days though the software doesn’t need that much hardware anyways. With the advent of the net, the system requirements for desktop machines is decreasing relative to the power of the hardware. Most people just need a web browser, some simple multimedia, and a word processor. A toy mac has enough power to do what almost all users need. Will a low priced Mac actually be able to sway a significant number of Windows users? People love OSX, and I ought to give it a try. I admit I have a tiny temptation to buy one, but Steve Jobs disillusioned me so many times in the mid 90′s that I swore I wouldn’t buy another Mac. It’s been 10 years though and I can forgive him eventually. Not quite yet though I don’t think.(The ipod mini I got was a gift).