New Blogger-driven prototype blog. I realized that I enjoy writing, but I don’t like the overhead of managing my own WordPress instance or the prospect of cleaning up several years of posts. So, I’m starting fresh.

No guarantees I’ll keep it current, but you never know.

I’ve been a very poor care taker of you. I post once a month, maybe; and, when I do, I post uninteresting stuff like the tale of my trip back to California. I don’t, through you, even tell the story of my trip to Berlin, Belfast, or Wales, or even about my trip ideas to Switzerland, France, Singapore, and Thailand. I didn’t even bother to tell you of my trip back to my homeland (to Florida) to see if I might catch a glimpse of the Space Shuttle piercing the sky on its final mission to the stars.

What I have done is ignore you. I don’t even fix my Blogroll links, a substantial portion of which have gone stale in the years since I’ve updated them. Hell, my About page still says I live in Colorado! If it weren’t for the security holes in prior releases, you’d still be running an ancient version of WordPress.

My online presence seems to circle around Twitter and Facebook nowadays, links to which I don’t bother posting in some vain attempt to prevent someone from very easily producing a complete graph of my Internet existence.

What am I going to do with you?

I have no idea. But I think I can safely now consider you “deprecated” until that idea comes.

Until we meet again,

Sean

With the fragile, but improving, state of the US economy, politicians seem to think they should get in and meddle with the various switches and knobs they have available to them. Things that might happen are tax cuts or credits for hiring, perhaps talk of removing regulatory obstacles, stuff like that. The one thing though that legislators often totally fail to do is look at the problem holistically. Sure, adding a tax benefit to recoup 6.2% payroll tax and for each employee you hire after February 2nd, 2010 and before January 1st, 2011 — and if you keep that employee on for a year, you can claim another $1000 — sure, this sounds like a good way to save a business money, but is it a good idea? It sounds like yet another accounting headache.

And yet, it is actually a tax credit, provided for in the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act of 2010.

For a country whose citizens and residents do the April tax dance, and where tax preparation is a consumer-level industry, perhaps adding another complexity to the tax code isn’t such a good idea. As a US citizen living abroad (an “expat” from the US), my problem is at least 4 times worse! Not only am I liable to taxation on my worldwide income, the menu of tax credits and residency rules mean my CPA has to run my taxes 4 separate ways in order to find the optimal combination for taxes due.  I can’t even imagine what it’s like for a small business who also has to track capital expenditures, loss, depreciation, etc.

Interestingly enough, a 6.2% of payroll tax up to $106,800 per year (employer’s share of the Medicare/Social Security tax) likely helps out large employers a lot, who already have tax departments to handle the complexities of the US tax code. That represents a savings of $6600 per year per employee hired; and if the company is already hiring, that’s just a cherry on top (note I am not a tax professional, but I am handy with a calculator). I’m not sure this is strictly helpful for the companies that are very tax efficient, like GE who reportedly paid no taxes in 2010 (link to a WaPo article that tries to put a bit more context around it, but not very successfully in my opinion), but as Tesco (a food retailer in at least Ireland and the UK) like to say: “every little helps.”

So, in a sense, new rules offer marginal increases in complexity to organizations already of sufficient size to handle the tax code but probably just make life more painful or everyone else.

Now, I think it’s time for the US government, if they’re serious about making small businesses succeed to start looking at ways to incubate and make small businesses thrive. I think this will have to come at the expense of large businesses and wealthy individuals; and by that I mean, I think the easiest way to get small business to succeed is to remove real barriers from them:

• Simplify the tax code. Lower brackets coupled with a large (massive, even) reduction in the size of the tax credit menu. Instead of talking about the tax man’s bill, let’s talk about how much it costs to actually pay the tax man. This will likely mean companies and individuals with lots of energy towards tax-efficiency will in some cases pay more, but that’s why the lower tax brackets.
• Figure out a way to take healthcare costs away from employers. One thing that has given me pause to go strike out on my own is the cost of individual health insurance (over $5k per year). Interestingly, I think the Affordable Care Act might exacerbate this problem at least in the initial adoption phase with the individual mandate (until it works its magic on the markets).
• Make compliance costs low (this does not necessarily mean fewer regulations) and interactions with governmental bodies rapid (for permits and the like), in areas where it’s not already.

I think the deficit commission was probably a good start on the tax code (I don’t know that I’ve met anyone who was opposed to the deficit commission or their findings on the whole, I think they might all be in Congress), and the Affordable Care Act might do us well to get us to the next step in reforming America’s health care system.

With that, I leave you with a simple tale of the Irish tax system as I currently know it. I don’t have to file a tax return. There are 2 simple income brackets (20% and 41%), a few mandatory levies, and tax credits are applied first if you pay-as-you-earn. So, since I’ve taken my credits first, they apply to my tax bill as it’s withheld every pay check. At the end of the year, I’ve paid the right amount and I’m done. Nice and easy (if not a little expensive — but that’s another story.)

Interestingly, this guy doesn’t drink — but there was plenty of wine at his going away party. Which brings me to this blog post. I had a few glasses of wine (which rather mysteriously kept getting filled, thank you Cileia) and started having a bit of fun translating the back of the bottle of Château des deux Rives with Sylvain, another friend and colleague who is from France. I was reading and translating as best I could, and he was filling in the blanks. Actually, this turned out to be quite fun as the bottle kept getting more and more unbelievable (une bouche ample avec des nuances violettes! and so on)

I’ve always had an interest in languages, an interest that I’ve been rather woefully deficient at servicing. I speak English, of course (though a certain British colleague might disagree ), and a few words in French. I know enough French to parse simple phrases, and I can carry on a very basic conversation if I can remember the vocabulary. Living here though, in Dublin, has exposed me to all sorts of new and exciting languages (to my eyes and ears). It’s near impossible to not read things in Irish (As Gaelige), as it’s written everywhere: An Post, Baile Átha Cliath, An Taoiseach, Iarnród Éireann, etc). More than that, I work with folks from all over Europe (and indeed the world), so I’ve heard French, Spanish, German, Turkish, Italian, Russian, and tons of other languages I probably wouldn’t recognize.

And I want to speak them, too.

At least, some of them. I’d really like to study Irish, better my French, and learn German. At some point, perhaps study Welsh (which is a cousin of Irish, though not in the same language family — unlike, say, Scottish Gaelic), as indeed, at least some of my heritage descends from Wales. I can feel the influence of Irish on the native speakers here in Ireland; there’s a certain way they use English that’s unique to here and I think that’s in no small part due to their native language. Short of things like Rosetta Stone, I’m honestly not sure how I can pursue language study in my spare time. I’m not sure I have time for organized classes. Choices, choices.

Ah well. More wine, please.

It all started with the “weather delay of pain.” I got to Dublin airport (EIDW) bright and early at 6:30am for my 8:00am departure to Paris. I woke up very early to check the status of the flight, because that morning in the middle of December, Dublin was digging itself out of its recent snowpocalypse. Dublin Airport had canceled all flights and ultimately closed the airport to all traffic until 8am. Luckily, the airport opened as planned, and the people destined for Paris boarded “Clare Island” a CityJet Avro RJ-85 for a pleasant and sometimes humorous flight (specifically, listening to the pilot butcher his announcements in French). We arrived at CDG, took our leave from the plane, rode a bus (where I had a pleasant chat with a British/Kiwi couple enroute to Havana) to terminal 2E and… well, found that I couldn’t find connecting information to my San Francisco flight.

Not deterred, I walked up to the Air France counter and spent an hour with a lovely gate agent (Melanie, I think). She told me I missed my connecting flight to SFO and worked feverishly to get me out that day. After what felt like an hour (it was probably pretty close to an hour), she booked me standby on that day’s flight to LAX and got me a connection on Continental to Sacramento. My standby reservation was confirmed before we reached the gate, but sadly, we were delayed again to depart. I arrived at LAX having missed yet another connection.

LAX, for those who have been there, is a special little level of hell. It’s 8 or so mostly unconnected terminals, without a coherent way (as far as I could tell) to shuttle between them. I heard there was a bus (which seems eerily appropriate for LA) but I wasn’t about to risk it (note to LAX: install a monorail or some dedicated means for terminal to terminal shuttling, and you’ll be in a much better way!). Unfortunately, when I arrived, the Air France desk was closed and I wasn’t sure at this point who to contact to get me enroute again. I decided it wasn’t Continental’s problem (despite my now-missed outgoing connection), since they didn’t own my original reservation. I went to Delta in terminal 5, figuring that because they were in SkyTeam with Air France, and even brandished Air France’s logo behind their counters, that they would be able to help me. No; the Delta agent was incredibly unhelpful and almost bordered on rude. She did suggest I purchase a ticket, but flatly refused to help own the situation on behalf of their airline partner. So, a pretty big fail in my book for Delta.

I then decided to go over to Continental. 180 degree difference! I explained the situation to the Continental agent, and he started digging around the system. He asked if I had a FIM – a Flight Interruption Manifest – after doing a cursory look in his system for my reservation. I dug in my bag and ‘lo and behold, I did. That FIM was like a magic key; all things were possible (FIMs are products of Zombocom apparently) with it. The Continental agent rebooked me on a United flight to SFO, and apologetically directed me to United to check my bags, since their systems weren’t entirely integrated yet. All told, I ended up in San Francisco only 10 or 12 hours late.

I’m 640 words in now, and I haven’t even started describing my actual trip! I think I might need to go with a bit more pith. So, to summarize: Air France gets 1 points (+1 for rebooking, -1 for having a closed desk in LAX, bonus +1 for a pleasant flight), Delta gets -10 points for an unhelpful gate agent (usually -1, 10X multiplier because I was a frazzled traveler and despite my politeness was met with an absolutely useless agent), and Continental gets 2 points for helpfully getting me back to where I wanted to go (United gets 1 for actually flying the route, having channel 9 tuned to ATC, and letting me claim that flight for miles). LAX stands at -100 because I’ve never had a positive experience navigating that airport.

Crap, blew another 100 words.

That began my trip. I spent Christmas Eve with the cats, Mom, and Dad. We had our customary indonesian cuisine on Christmas Eve, then Christmas breakfast with more family in the East Bay, then back home for a pleasant Christmas dinner. As I recall, we also had an absolutely delicious prime rib dinner with an unbelievable red (a Cab, I think) a few days after with Mom, Dad, Grandpa, and Margaret. In the week after, I went to San Luis Obispo to have a few beers and craic with David and the Bostwicks. Good times were had.

Notice, the pith? I’m going for an economy of words now.

New Years came, the ball dropped, then it was 2011. I went to Mountain View.

I spent 2 weeks in Mountain View working at my company‘s headquarters. Talk about a packed few weeks! I got to meet the Mountain View sides of my team — a great group of lads (and a few lasses if you include the backend folks!). Got to learn a lot about a new bit of code my team will be supporting and got to hangout with the developers behind that code — a valuable relationship to have, if you might have to wake them up at 3am to help triage and fix something unusual and catastrophic. If any of the SREs, SWEs, or PMs referenced here read this: Cheers to you! I had a great time hanging out, learning, and getting to know all of you! Thanks!

That brings me to today, in the airport.

Part of this trip, in addition to the main work component, was to visit with family (check!), do cool things at work (double check!), and get my cats enroute to Dublin (check!). I’ve been working with Pet Express, a pet moving company just north of SFO. I bundled up my cats this morning into their new crates and dropped them off. They’re taking care of (most of) the vet work, the health certificate, the USDA stamp on the rabies titre results, and the various other bits and bobs related to an international move. Max and Alex took the drive OK (lots of crying, but that’s normal) and are now relaxing in a kitty condo at Pet Express (basically, an enormous crate with 2 levels, a litter box, food, and water). They’ll be enroute on Delta (opportunity to earn some points back Delta!) on Wednesday morning to JFK, and 3 hours after that, Aer Lingus to Dublin.

It’s traditionally Irish, in my experience, to offer guests tea or coffee (indeed, the question is often posed: “tea or coffee?” as if those were the only two drinks anyone would ever want). Aer Lingus is no exception; their transcontinental service is actually pretty pleasant and they do make plenty of offers for tea or coffee. I wonder if that’ll apply to my cats? (I doubt it.)

In any event, I’ll see my cats again on Thursday, Dublin time. Hopefully they make it through alright. Pet Express seems to know what they’re doing, so I doubt there’ll be any issues.

So, in retrospect, this trip will have been almost a month. I got to see lots of family (Aunt, Uncle, Cousins; Grandpa and Margaret twice — and even walked around the Lafayette reservoir with them!; my Mom and Dad who graciously hosted Malex for the duration of their “quarantine,” and me for a good portion of my stay AND feeding and taking care of all 3 of us to boot — thanks Mom and Dad!), friends (David, Myles, Kim), and of course the cats. My travels put 1563 miles on the rental car (a Chevy HHR), consumed almost 60 gallons (~227 litres) of gasoline, drained $30 in T-Mobile credits, and saw me drive on the following roads in California: I5, I80, I280, I380, I680, I880, SH4, SH41, SH46, SH160 (the River Road), SH237, SH262 (Mission Blvd), and US101. I crossed the following bridges: The Bay Bridge (both directions), the Carquinez bridge (both directions), the Benicia bridge (both directions), and the Antioch bridge (to Sacramento County).

It’s been a fun trip, but now it’s time to go home and resume my normal programming.

First, I find that Nintendo were not lying when they said the power adapter for my Wii was indeed just 120V/60Hz (what the US uses). So, I release some secret smoke, trip a breaker, then drop €15 on a replacement from the UK.

Fast forward a week and a half (well after the weekend on-call shift I wanted the Wii for): the replacement power adapter arrives. Yay, Wii powers on.

But, the DVD player, SCART (which, near as I can tell stands for: Shitty Connector for Asinine Radios and Televisions) connector, the RGB end of that connector, and/or the projector are damaged or broken. Since I’m working with kit provided in my rental, I don’t have handy replacement cables or equipment to isolate what pieces and parts are indeed at fault.

All I wanted to do was play Mario and maybe a bit of Zelda. Is that too much to ask?

So, I did what any reasonable person would do: I threw all the equipment to the ground as hard as I could. It was a veritable electronic orgy as bits of plastic, copper, circuit boards, and wires exploded together in release of energy so powerful as to render the original components unrecognizable. Well, that’s what happened in my head anyway. It was awesome.

I suppose I need to go to Maplin and buy some parts to test with.

If you’re unfamiliar with Boxee; a good way to think of it is as a media aggregator. It turns your TV-connected computer into a media center that can access movies and shows from Netflix, Hulu, Fox TV, CBS and music from Pandora, et. al. It’s a cool way to bring your digital media into your living room (and may let you cut the cord from your cable co!)

So, real quick,

The Good

• Neatly wraps up the content sources I like to use: Hulu, CBS, Fox, Netflix, Pandora.
• Works with the Apple Remote
• Provides a way to queue up TV content automagically, to give me content to work through.
• Provides a handy way to provide Boxee-specific proxy settings, for the direct proxy I will use when I get around to setting it up.

The Bad

• Netflix and Pandora are “applications” within Boxee; they live on their own. Separate queues, separate interfaces, etc. It’d be nice to have one queue of TV and movies.
• The TV watching interface is pretty clunky. If it drops out to Fox or to Hulu, it does so inside a browser (that you can see but not drive), and it requires you to press the “any” key to get full screen.
• It does not integrate with my Hulu queue.

The Ugly

• If content is available from 2 sources, say from both Fox and Hulu, it will prefer Fox. Sometimes it gives me the choice between Hulu and Fox, and sometimes not. This is really frustrating, since Fox-over-the-tubes is at a substantially lower bit rate than Hulu (it looks worse).

That all said, Boxee serves about 60% of my needs. When it can’t do what I want, I just drop back out to a web browser and call it good.

I’m with Allied Irish Bank (not Anglo Irish). However, like its acronymical twin, it sucks. The whole customer experience lacks.

Firstly, the internet banking is terrible. It’s based on two things: a numeric registration code and a PIN (not your ATM pin). While I understand this is convenient for telephone access, come on, it’s 2010! The internet age is here, it’s not going anywhere, and it’s supplanting the telephone age. Get with the times: let me use a username and password. I guarantee it’s more secure than the 10^5 combinations for PINs.

Secondly, the internet banking site attempts to block out robots (or something, easily defeated by a little screen scraping) by making you type random PIN variations (e.g; enter digits 3, 1, and 4 of your code). What they’re trying to accomplish here confuses the hell out of me; it’s just annoying. I think of my PIN serially, having to map number position to the corresponding value just slows me down.

Again, if robots hammering the site walking through the PIN combinations were a problem, it’s solved by the auto-lockout if you enter bad data three or so times. And you’re not locked out for an hour or so. You’re locked out until they fucking mail you a new PIN! Fuck you guys!

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Once you’re into their damn system, you’re not able to do basic account management functions; like, change your address or telephone number of record. Oh, but I can transfer €10000 to another account in the world.

One thing they do right: they require a third-level of authentication; a one-time password from a card of codes they post out to you. So, if I want to transfer out that €10000 to an account not already setup in my standing orders list, I need a 2-digit code from the card.

But if I want to transfer €10000 to my savings account from my current (Americans call it ‘checking’) account, I can’t do that. Not even €100 or €1000, or any amount of money. I can’t transfer to my savings account at all! I pointed this out to AIB via email, and instead of fix it, they told me to ring their customer service department. Because the person answering the fucking customer service email address WASN’T WITH THE FUCKING CUSTOMER SERVICE DEPARTMENT.

You’d think that be the end of my issues. Oh, no.

You see, here in Ireland, they have this debit card system called LASER. It only works in Ireland. If you want to use it abroad, they interoperate with Maestro. Except AIB. They don’t. So I can’t use my AIB Laser/Maestro debit card to buy goods and services from abroad, from such dodgy retailers like Amazon. They even say this on their website. So, naturally, I order a credit card.

At least, I think I did.

Until I get a hand written letter in the post asking me to fill out the application again and post it back.

So I do, and 2 or so weeks later my shiny new AIB Visa card shows up. With a €500 limit. €500?! What the fuck, AIB? There’s a fucking €30 per year stamp duty from the government — if I hold a balance on that card (€500, I’m in debt! Oh noes!), the APR is THIRTY TWO PERCENT. THIRTY TWO FUCKING PERCENT. I waited 2 months for this? (I applied over 2 months ago, and re-applied 2 weeks ago).

FFFFUUUUUUU.

As those of you who follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or even Buzz are likely to know, I’ve moved to Ireland. Dublin specifically. Dublin 4 to be precise.

I’ll pause for your gasp, it’s quite alright.

I’ve left the the fair city that I love (Fort Collins, Colorado) for the opportunity to work overseas. I now work as a Site Reliability Engineer at Google, where I help put the “Go” in Google. Someone here described the job of an SRE as 2 dashes software engineering, 1 dash of system administration, 1 dash of project management, and hold the administrivia and politics. That pretty much sums it right up. It’s been just over a month and I’m still ramping up, but it’s been a blast so far. I’ve learned a ton about how Google handles scale, and it’s made intractable scalability problems (from prior organizations/projects) seem startlingly trivial. I suppose it sometimes just takes a change in perspective.

Maybe not unlike the perspective one gains from being a foreigner in a foreign land. On that note, I thought I’d share a few interesting deltas from modern American English to Irish English (which is heavily influenced by British English):

That’s all for now folks.

If this is a major problem — then I must say, there are some providers on the vanguard of this here.

I just went in for my annual (where annual is defined as 12 +/- 6 months) physical, and my doctor wanted to see a lipid panel (cholesterol screen). I see a doctor at Associates of Family Medicine here in Fort Collins. I casually mentioned that I had a blood draw for just that purpose last week over at Poudre Valley Health System’s Harmony Lab for my cardiologist over at Heart Center of the Rockies. So, my doctor on her laptop, logged into their system and pulled the results — just like that. No sweat at all.

I have to say, that’s not bad for coordinating 2 providers (and accessorily the third provider, my cardiologist).

Still some work to go — a unified patient record would be nice, so I don’t have to mention that I had the test done. But, I have to say, Associates in Family Medicine and the Poudre Valley Health System, at least, are very solidly on the right track.

By the way, my health is good.