Christmas was a blast - we even got some white, in the form of a Christmas Day thunderstorm (complete with hail). Most of the items I received were flat enough to stuff into bags and carry on the plane, but a crock pot should await my return home.

The prime rib was fantastic, and the long visit with my sister - someone I hadn't seen in some seven years - was great. All in all, a wonderful holiday with friends and family.

1:51 pm | Comment (0) | Print | Categories: Adventures, Holidays

Yesterday morning I flew back to California for the Christmas holiday. I took a direct flight from Dulles to San Francisco on Virgin America, where I flew on a First Class upgrade. Though the flight was slightly delayed due to being overbooked and too heavy (some bags were even left behind), flying First Class was the best experience with flight I've had. And who can complain about a dedicated security line, a dedicated check in line, and a nicer lounge chair than I have in my living room? Certainly not I. And, being direct, I missed the mess in the Midwest.

My mother picked me up along with my brother, and we headed up to San Francisco where we visited Macy's, Neiman Marcus, Crate & Barrel, Apple, and other stores downtown. We finished the day off with a great dinner at the rooftop Cheesecake Factory, which is on top of Macy's. There we had outdoor seating (something you can only do in California in December!) and a wonderful view of Union Square Park.

Tomorrow we have a Christmas party planned, followed by a week of shopping and celebrating. I've bought my train tickets for when I head back home, and I'm looking forward to a great vacation. For those I'll see tomorrow I look forward to it; the rest of you I will see soon!

6:11 pm | Comment (0) | Print | Categories: Adventures, Holidays, Travel

4:12 pm | Comment (2) | Print | Categories: Soapbox

Recently, a person posed a question on Twitter, asking whether or not Generation Y would begin to appreciate their jobs in the receding economy, rather than approaching the world as they have been.

It's very well known that Generation Y, with its twenty-somethings have a very different attitude about the workplace. By our older, perhaps more seasoned colleagues we're seen as lazy, inept, fraught with attitude, and lazy. The tweet regarding Generation Y was a classic clash between the older and younger worlds: "don't you young yuppies appreciate what the company is doing here? You should be thankful to have a job!"

Though it may work like that for the moment, I think that a monumental shift will be taking place in the workforce in the next few years. And so, in response to this question, here are ten things I think Generation Y will do in the next few years (tip: show "appreciation" isn't one of them):

1. We'll show even less loyalty to the companies we work for than we do now. It used to be that if you got hired you kept your job, and if the company went out of business there were lots of jobs. Then the seventies came, and the word "layoff" entered the public consciousness. Our unwillingness to display loyalty has nothing to do with our lack of loyalty - it has to do with YOUR lack of loyalty, Baby Boomers. You've shown us, quite effectively, that you don't give a damn about us - your employees - or our needs. We're expendable. Fine; but don't expect us to consider you unexpendable either.


2. We'll end Social Security. None of us actually think we're going to get it anyway; you and your government policies of the 1980's saw to that. Boomers might get their checks, but we're going to plan for our own retirement, we're going to invest on our own, and we're going to stop funding a failed system.


3. A huge number of us will be self-employed. This goes right along with #1. We don't trust the company. Besides, most of us have highly technical skills, we know how to use the internet, and we can make more money working for ourselves than we can working for you. I see this already in the community I work in: more than half the developers have their own side businesses. Many of them make six figures when you add in their day jobs. Plus, it adds a second source of income, reduces the reliance on the company, and increases flexibility.


4. We'll shrink the size of government. You clearly cannot be trusted to run the government. See bailing out criminals with $700 billion in money that you know you'll never have to pay back as Exhibit A. To be sure, we'll engage in more social and political causes; that is to be sure. But you can bet we'll also shrink the size, scope, and reach of the government, leaving more up to NGOs and the goodness of people who care about particular causes.


5. We won't retire. We've watched you all work for decades, expecting to retire, only to find the economy tanking and the values of your investments destroyed. Instead, we'll take mini-retirements: short periods of time, not lasting more than three or four years, where we travel, explore, and experiment. After all, isn't it better to take two years and travel with the kids when we're 40 than to be too old to do it when we're 70?


6. We'll have 20 jobs in our careers. It used to be you joined a company and stayed there. Not us. We move too fast, learn too quickly, change too often, and want to accomplish too much. Good employers will know this, and invest in keeping us around, not with the old "delayed rewards" like higher salaries after a period of time or two weeks of vacation after three years, but immediate things like catered meals, free health insurance, increasing retention bonuses, and signing advances.


7. Health care won't look the same in ten years. We're smart enough to know everyone gets sick and you shouldn't have to be wealthy in order to afford a doctor. Medicine will once again be a service industry, and we'll redesign the way we pay for health care in America.


8. We'll enforce work-life balance. Dozens of popular artists have written songs about how horrible it'd be not to live life to the fullest: Rascal Flatts, Mark Shultz, 33 Miles, Five for Fighting, Tim McGraw, just to name a few. We get it. Life is short. And we don't want to spend it behind our desks. We don't know when life will be over, and we want to spend time with the people that matter. Working to live will beat out living to work, and the companies we work for will have to understand that.


9. Our lives will have a point. Tired old mission statements are useless to us. You'd better show up with a vision or we're going to yawn and change the channel. We've all read Dilbert and we find The Office funny because we see it as YOUR life, not ours. We're going to have a vision for the future, and we're going to pursue it relentlessly.


10. We'll keep learning, keep inventing, keep growing. The greatest inventions of 1990's and the early 21st century were invented by people 30 or under. Amazon.com by Jeff Bezos (30), Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg (20), Netscape by Marc Andreessen (22), to name only a few. Ideas come from young people too, and we'll embrace that. (The ages reflect their age at the time of the invention)

8:11 pm | Comment (2) | Print | Categories: Soapbox

Wanted: prime parking. Must be able to store 10,000 tour buses. Contact Washington Inaugural Planners.

The Washington Post has been running articles all week talking about the Inaugural, saying that planners estimate that 2 million to 4 million people could come to Washington to see it. It's expected that they'll come in cars and tour buses, planes and trains, and place a strain on the local infrastructure never before seen - or for that matter, planned for.

Some of the items the local news media believes might happen in the apocalyptic event known as the Inauguration:

• Cell phones may fail to work due to the crush of activity.
• So many media outlets want to cover the event that many may not get full access.
• Broadband internet access may be slowed down by the large number of visitors.
• Metro delays could be substantial, with Metro planning 15 hours of rush-hour service (a record) on inauguration day [WMATA].
• Hundreds of thousands of people may remain in DC for days before and after the inauguration, tying up traffic for those of us who live here.
• 10,000 tour buses may arrive, with no place to park.
• DC government officials are urging local residents to stock up on essentials like bread and milk, because supply trucks may not make it through and stores will be inundated.

2:26 am | Comment (0) | Print | Categories: Washington, DC

Last night we got our first snow here in Washington. Though we'd had a few flurries in November, this was the first snow to either accumulate or make the streets wet. Some cars (like mine) that hadn't been moved in a while accumulated a quarter-inch or so, which was a perfect reminder to me that I needed to purchase an ice scraper - a task I performed last night.

Friday night my church went to Build-A-Bear and built stuffed animals to give to Toys 4 Tots. We then went back to the Fullerton home to watch Across the Universe, a musical built around many Beatles songs.

In two short weeks I'll be home for Christmas, and I'm looking forward to seeing many of you while I'm there!

9:54 am | Comment (3) | Print | Categories: Holidays, Washington, DC, Weather

The FDIC criticized banks today for fee policies that prey on the young and low-income. No longer content to simply hold your deposit as a revenue-generator, banks are looking more than ever at their deposit accounts as fee-generating revenue enhancers, and they're targeting the group most likely to do things like overdraw: those who are poor and those who are just starting out.

Though I have only overdrawn one time in life (in South Korea after making an exchange rate error with some four hours sleep), I side with the FDIC in that some of these practices are exceptionally shady. In particular, one shady practice is when banks reorder transactions not in the order they are received by the bank, but in the order of the largest transaction to the smallest, thus generating extra overdrafts for themselves.

For example, imagine you begin the day with $1,225.00 and you spend $3.75 on coffee at Starbucks, $26 on gasoline, $79 on cable TV, $32 on dinner and $1,130 on rent (since checks are presented at the end of the day). If processed in the order in which the transactions took place, your rent check would overdraw your account by $45.75 and generating $29.00 for the bank in overdraft fees. However, if you place the transactions in the order of largest to smallest you actually overdraft after dinner, incurring three overdrafts for a total of $87.00 and the most expensive latte you've ever had in your life.

These fees hit young and poor customers because they are most likely to have small amounts, which are detrimental to the bank (since it likes large, stable amounts to fund its lending department). Still, though, these customers need bank accounts, and these fees are helping drive them deeper and deeper into debt, especially if they're on fixed incomes (e.g. Social Security recipients).

The government should end this practice, or limit the number of overdraft fees per day, to protect consumers and ensure that banks try focusing their mathematics efforts on their balance sheets where they belong.

11:17 pm | Comment (0) | Print | Categories: Economics