Out of curiosity, I was wondering what benefits are worth to me.  So I did some quick math and figured out they're a scary lot more than I expected.  I was expecting a few hundred, maybe a thousand dollars each year.   No, the magic number I came up with was $7001.44.  That's not even counting the crazy amounts of overtime I was getting this spring either.  The most surprising part was the sheer number of benefits programs I've enrolled in over time and not comprehended how many I've gotten into; there's the 401(k), the medical, the dental, the tuition reimbursement, APS professional membership, sick hours, vacation hours, and the year end bonus.  Some of those are double-dippers, too, for example the medical and dental are cheaper since they're on a group plan and part of the premium is paid by Pace, but in addition the fee I do pay is pretax which saves another 25%.  The 401(k) likewise is pre-tax, and then there's the employer match.  They're thinking of adding on a benefit option to purchase Metro Transit passes at some huge discount, which I would definitely use.

I guess this little math exercise has taught me that it is more important than I thought. Granted I wouldn't be shelling out $115/year for the APS membership if it weren't free through work, and my health insurance could probably be a little crappier since I don't utilize it anyway.  At any rate, I always thought of benefits as an icing on the cake, and the salary was where the big bucks were. I guess the benefits are more like the chocolate ganache of the cake.  I'm getting really hungry... I think it's lunch time.

I have heard back from askalawyer.com and indeed, the privacy warnings I wrote about last week are bogus.  You can share whatever you like with whomever you like, the only "e-communications privacy laws" which have any standing are those which prevent government agencies from snooping into your mail and seeing what your latest order from p0rn*.com was.  Indeed, the Patriot Act has weakened even those to the point of laughability, so pretty much anything you send by email can be read by governments along the way, the intended recipient, and in addition anyone the intended recipient decides to share it with (or anyone who hacks your email account decides to share it with).  So weak are these laws that major email domains, such as Google's Gmail, put it in their Privacy Policy and EULA, stating that they will provide "relevant advertising and related links based on the IP address [and] content of messages".  So if Google is auto-reading your email, you better believe that the privacy statements don't mean a thing.

In other news, I currently feel like my stomach and most of my intestines have been stomped on by an elephant.  I went out trail running with an elderly British man over lunch, and he took me on what must have been 4-5 miles of hilly, damp ground while carrying on a conversation.  Then I went to Culvers for lunch with Jessica, and since the running made me hungry, ate far too much far too fast.  Oh, the pain.

(1)  sleep

(2) compute

(3)  Three nights with Jessica in the Riviera Maya

(4)  OK, so I actually used a third of it to pay off my credit card for the month and the rest will probably go into a downpayment on a condo. 

EDIT:  Idea #5:  I would like to print up and sell on eBay bumper stickers that say "I supported John McCain before he reached retirement age".  Those of you who knew me in 1999-2000 know I was a total Mccainiac before he lost to Bush in the republican primaries, when he was 63.

I think I've finally become a real Linux desktop user.  Not because I can code my way out of a guarded cell, or tap into the city's power grid/streetlight grid/CIA databanks like they do in every bad movie about geeks, but because I've pretty well forgotten about it.  Sure I still have some curiosities I'll have to sort out eventually, for example about 50% of the time my PDFs won't print and occasionally the screen just goes black on startup until I move the mouse.  These things are relatively easy to forget though, since they can both be overcome within seconds and so far haven't bothered me enough to research.  

What really made me think I may be a 'real' Linux user is that there's a new version of Ubuntu, my flavor of choice of Linux, available now and has been for a few weeks.  I have absolutely no desire to upgrade.  I feel I have all the functionality I need in the computer; it doesn't ever crash, it's fast, it goes online and does text editing and spreadsheets, and has some fun games.  Don't get me wrong, I still love learning about it, but I've lost the drive to dive into a whole new world of problems to fix and hours on the forums.  Perhaps it's because the weather is finally nice and I'd rather be out on the bicycle.

At first I thought I was just getting lazy, after all Linux would not continue to develop if everyone were like me and that would be a horrible thing.  I felt as though I'd betrayed the community which I was such an active member of while unemployed.  Now I have a job and less time and have left them in the past.  Then I realized, though, I'm doing my part just using it, submitting the occasional bug, and casting my lot with the free (as in both freedom and beer) crowd rather than Microsoft's or Apple's.  Eventually, this is what Linux should be.  Usable, free, open, with a sense of community that no maker of proprietary software can ever buy.  The old adage holds true; you can't buy love.

Do you ever get emails from work or banks or whatever that at the bottom say something to the effect of "this email is a private communication, you aren't allowed to share it with anyone because of privacy laws, you can't quote it or print it or even think it without our written consent"?  I have been wondering lately if that carries any legal weight.  What are these privacy laws they're referring to?  If somebody writes me something, why shouldn't I be able to spread it as I see fit?  I could see the case that it's copyrighted as the author's original work, so I can't quote it perhaps.  But if I got an email from Vice President Cheney saying "The United States is planning on staging a fake attack on a US convoy near Iran so that we have an excuse to attack them.  Signed, yours truly, Dickie.  Oh by the way you're not allowed to tell anyone" and the next day one of our aircraft carriers in the Gulf of Persia mysteriously sinks, you better believe I'm going to share that email.  So which e-communications are legal to censor and which aren't?  Is it legal for someone to put a blanket disclaimer in their signature line stating that nothing they write can ever be discussed with anyone else?  Where are these laws?  If anyone knows the answer, I'm dying to find out. 

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