Look around you. With each day, the new world progresses and those of the old world scream more about the base nature of the latest changes. How before — it’s never quite clear when this was, but assuredly not today — Things Were Better. Television had a more wholesome approach, music was created by actual musicians and not greedy producers, shots in a movie lasted longer than 50 milliseconds, and everything wasn’t commercialized. People had to communicate face-to-face, and they were patient enough to actually wait for things. Politicians had more of a sense of patriotism or honor or duty. Children obeyed their parents. Sex meant something.

Have I made my point? No? I’m talking about the perpetual love affair with the great past that so many people have. I used to just think that it was a personality thing; that there were some accustomed to dynamism who welcomed change with open arms, and that there were others forever wed to the status quo. And while I still believe that appreciation for change is a characteristic unevenly distributed across the population, I no longer think it’s something we typically hold onto as we age. Its natural course is to be diminished in the aged, regardless of philosophy or politics.

Let me be blunt: With every passing day beyond some point in adolescence, humans tend to become less open to change. We are still, on the whole, comfortable with whatever changes that took place while we were coming of age. But the next round, the ones welcomed by those even just five years our junior, we greet with indifference, skepticism or outright hostility.

Why? I don’t know. I have some hypotheses, united by their common lack of evidence, the most obvious of which I will here assert for lack of a realistic alternative. It may prove to have an evolutionary advantage to wish to keep the world as it was when we originally ascended into adulthood, for our skills will be best developed for the technologies of that time; our vocabulary most tuned to that day’s vernacular; our worldly conceptions formed by that period’s prevailing events and beliefs.

But none of the above justifies stemming the tide of progress. An affinity for traditional sex-based divisions of labor does not make denying women’s entry into the workforce acceptable. Comfort with segregated schools doesn’t legitimize their continued existence. And being accustomed to traditional conceptions of marriage is a vestige of the past, not a basis for denying gay people equal rights.

But, you are almost certainly thinking to yourself, surely there is a large difference between desegregation and the crass nature of today’s television, right? And of course you are correct: Obviously not all change can be legitimately called social progress, and not all progressions are of equal importance. There are in fact immense differences. But the groundwork for the most significant social progress is laid gradually over time, much of it by supposedly “crass” cultural artifacts. When The Simpsons first hit the airwaves in the early nineties, many predicted the downfall of Western civilization. Twenty years later, the show has proven to be a groundbreaking and important piece of American culture. The fringe has a tendency to become the mainstream which with time can become venerated. Think jazz or rock music.

So why am I writing this letter? To encourage you — no, to implore you — to fight the all too natural tendency to become obstinate and stuck in your ways and to dismiss the culture and values of the day in favor of those nurtured in your youth. What terrifies me is that no amount of rational persuasion will be enough to convince you, my future self, to buck the trend and remain a friend of modernity. But I have never subscribed to the idea that we are not ultimately in control of our own fates, and thus still hold out hope that somehow, in at least some small way, this letter will have an effect, and that it will help you live a long life, waking each day with eyes open to wonder and a mind open to change.

Move money efficiently

The most wildly successful experiment — which, after over three years of daily use has safely moved from experiment to necessity — has been using a simple Google Docs spreadsheet to track household and inter-roommate expenses. The idea is to get rid of the hassle of moving money back and forth by having a spreadsheet that keeps tabs on how much each roommate has spent, what percentage of each transaction each is liable for, and how much each owes or is owed by the others. It’s simple, easy to use, and works wonderfully.

Use local knowledge

This one dawned on me only recently, but in retrospect it should have been obvious. After hearing a friend complain about high interest rates on his credit card debt, I saw a golden opportunity. Right now, you’re lucky to get 2% on your savings (e.g., with SmartyPig) and maybe 3% on a CD — assuming you’re willing to lock your money up for five years.

So, suppose a friend, whom you trust and whose earnings potential, intelligence, character, and more you can firmly vouch for, is paying three or four times the best savings interest rate you can get in credit card debt. By simply taking the average of the rate you’re getting and the rate he’s paying, you and your friend can both profit substantially. It is, quite simply, the very definition of win-win.

Price fairly and avoid free riders

A couple years ago I decided I wanted to buy a TV. My roommates had varying levels of enthusiasm for this idea. Further, two of them couldn’t care less about the difference between 720p and 1080p. I, on the other hand, have some sort of disease, and not only couldn’t stomach the thought of getting anything less than 1080p, but thought it would be practically wasteful to not get a PS3 with the new HD set for watching Blu-rays (I acknowledge this is a shortcoming of mine as a human being).

So, we were at a bit of an impasse: Both groups preferred not buying a TV over spending as much (or as little) as the other thought appropriate. Socializing the costs evenly across all the roommates would have been unfair, as would my paying for the entire TV, since it was to be placed in our communal loft, and all acknowledged that they would use and benefit from it.

Purchasing a TV as a group has other challenges, too. For instance, who takes it when one or more of the roommates moves out? Does one buy out the other roommates’ shares? If so, how do you price a depreciated share of a television?

We side-stepped all these issues by devising a simple pricing structure. First, I found the entertainment system that I wanted to buy (i.e., the least expensive one that met my minimum requirements). Then my roommates determined how much they would spend on a TV, assuming we were all going in equally for a set that they actually wanted. Finally, we agreed that they would contribute a little less than this amount of money to the purchase and that I would own what we bought, since I was bearing a disproportionate share of the cost, and yet we would all have equal access to a better set as a result. Thus, I bought the TV and they essentially bought time-limited partial ownership rights to it.

In the end, we all got what we wanted, at prices below what we thought it was worth.

Exploit diversity

One of the reasons markets are wonderful is that there are a great diversity of human preferences and skills distributed throughout the population, and markets let people trade goods and services based on these differences for mutual benefit. So, some people find cooking after a long day of work relaxing. Others, like me, find it draining and would prefer to spend our precious free time doing other things, like blogging about how much they don’t like preparing food.

My typical solution to this problem has been to go out to dinner. Every night. This is wonderful — I get tremendous variety, excellent food, and there’s virtually no preparation or cleanup time. It has one major drawback, though: It’s expensive.

A couple of my roommates, on the other hand, actually enjoy cooking dinner. They spend time planning meals for each week, buying ingredients at the Food Coop, and doing a series of foreign tasks which result in tasty food in what I’m told is called our “kitchen” (I’m exaggerating a bit here, as I in fact made Indian food just the other night).

By now you should see where this is going. We’re presently discussing how best to design a system in which I’ll buy weekly meal shares. The marginal cost of cooking for an additional person will be small, and thus even after adding a (well-deserved) premium on top of this to account for the labor involved in preparing the food, I’ll still be able to get high-quality meals at prices below what I’m paying in restaurants (and my roommates will have more money in their pockets).

I could go on with other examples — for example, how we priced each of our shares of rent for our apartment (which is a blog post unto itself) — but I think you get the point: There are a surprising number of opportunities to trade more efficiently with friends and which leave everyone better off.

But that’s only half of my point. The other half is that trade brings people together and actually strengthens relationships.

But Nick, I hear you saying, the causal relationship runs in the opposite direction. It’s not that you trade with your friends and therefore have good relationships with them, it’s that you have good relationships that make such trade possible. I actually think this point is right, at least partly, because I fully acknowledge that what I’ve described above does require existing positive relationships. But I think the causal relationship and dependency go both ways. Trade requires trust, but it also builds it.

But there’s another advantage of explicitly negotiating transactions like this: It puts everything out in the open and ensures everyone is aware of and comfortable with the terms. Much of the tension and conflict I see or hear about from others’ experiences living with roommates comes from a lack of this transparency and clarity. Miscommunications and misunderstanding can slowly breed resentment, frequently about petty and trivial things.

The other retort I expect to hear is that reducing relationships to financial transactions is cold and cheapens the idea of friendship. This is nonsense. First, I’m not proposing reducing all aspects of friendships to defined financial transactions, just a few. Second, in all the cases outlined above, everyone involved was left better off as a result.

There’s one more advantage to dreaming up and experimenting with these ideas: It’s fun. And that’s undoubtedly good for friendships.

My history with the Mac goes back to 1988, when I was four years old. My father purchased a Mac Plus and, shortly thereafter, a LaserWriter Plus. I don’t think I can actually remember the day he bought the Mac, but I have a distinct memory of the UPS truck stopping at the top of our driveway, and the deliveryman emerging with the rather unwieldy brown box that housed the LaserWriter.

I don’t remember much about my first moments with the machine; my parents always tried to keep me away from screens at a young age. But I do know that I did manage to use it from time to time in my early years. I was probably six when I sat down with MacPaint and wanted to make a game. I wasn’t sure how, until I discovered I could draw shapes — what to my young eyes looked to be a helicopter — which I could then select with the lasso tool. With monochrome pixels progressing clockwise around my drawing like digital ants, I could click and drag my creation and make it fly. I was hooked.

The next seminal moment came shortly thereafter, in the early 90s, when I raced upstairs with my oldest sister on her birthday to find a small and unremarkable cardboard box with a 3.5″ floppy inside. She explained it was an online service called Prodigy, and that it allowed our Mac to connect to other computers around the world.

Flashforward to late ‘93 (or was it early ‘94?) and my father tells me that we’ll likely be getting a new family computer (the Plus had grown rather long in the tooth, though he did continue to use it as his personal machine until late in the 90s when its 9″ screen had a 3″ viewable range). I was ecstatic, and felt like the day would never come. Finally, after a lengthy afternoon at Micro Center, we came home with a shiny new Macintosh Performa, a 6115CD, to be precise. This was the beginning of Apple’s transition away from the 68k Macs to the PowerPC; it was also, despite ostensibly being a “family computer,” the first machine I felt I owned.

I have countless memories from this point on — of seeing Noah Wyle onstage as Jobs at MacWorld ‘99; of discovering HyperCard (oh, how I loved thee!) and sharing code with strangers on AOL message boards; of driving to Delaware with my mother to get the last blueberry iBook — it may have looked like a toilet seat but it had a handle and no latch! — from a CompUSA; of seeing New York for the first time with my dad, having an overpriced breakfast at 5am in midtown before getting in line for Jobs’s keynote; of befriending the employees of my local Mac shop, who made me custom-length cables and copies of System 7.

Of flying to Cupertino with my mom for the Apple shareholders meeting, attended by a man from Dublin and another who had come from Nevada by way of his Harley and another that complained that the free Apples provided at breakfast were not Macintosh apples; of meeting Fred Anderson and Avi Tevanian (who personally assured me that OS X would ship with a terminal application, despite the many rumors to the contrary) and Sal Soghoian; of seeing Woz speak my first semester of engineering school and getting to tell him that it was largely because of the Apple IIe that I was studying computer engineering; of starting my own private consulting firm to help people setup and troubleshoot their Macs and home networks.

Of analyzing every box on every page of every copy of MacMall, MacZone and MacConnection; of reading the monthly programming challenges in MacTech and wondering when I would be good enough to compete — or even understand what the problems were really about; of upgrading to System 7.6, to 8.0, 8.5, 9.0, and then to Mac OS X Public Beta, and then 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5, and every single incremental version in between; of going to launch parties for 8.0 (with “I Break for 8″ bumper stickers), 8.5 (Sherlock!), 9.0 (better Sherlock!), and at least a couple releases of OS X.

Of coding late into the night until my mother would force me off the computer; of The Macintosh Toolbox and REALBasic and FutureBasic II and AppleScript and HyperTalk and GameMaker and demo versions of CodeWarrior and the first C code I ever saw; of watching every single keynote and webcast of Apple events for the past decade; of reading Crazy Apple Rumors and As the Apple Turns and all the other rumor sites; of the famous (?) “Back in Black” cover of MacAddict; of watching the community drama at the AppleInsider forums, and witnessing the bitter fork that gave way to AppleNova; of thinking that the iPod looked neat but expensive and that I’d likely never buy one; of reading rumors for years — years — of an Apple PDA, and finally — finally — watching the release of the iPhone; of standing in line for hours at the Fifth Avenue store to actually get mine.

Of being ridiculed for being a Mac user; of reading of Apple’s imminent demise and “beleaguered” status; of wanting to strangle Apple’s board of directors on a regular basis; of zapping the PRAM and rebuilding the Desktop File; of extensions conflicts and SCSI ID problems; of SimCity and Fate of Atlantis and Full Throttle and Sam & Max and Marathon and Dust; of LAN games of Bolo and WarCraft II and StarCraft; of writing $5 checks to shareware developers; of becoming part of a rich culture with its own history and mythology and celebrities and traditions.

Of hearing that glorious startup chime, looking at the glowing screen, and seeing a small blue face staring back at me, smiling.

Happy Birthday, Macintosh. Thanks for all the memories.

A few months ago I decided to make a conscious effort to spend five minutes every day cleaning my room. I’ve found that this actually works remarkably well, to the point that my room is almost always in a clean or nearly clean state. This is partly because my room is small, but it’s also because five minutes of “straightening up” — e.g., making your bed, recycling old papers, putting books back on shelves, putting dirty laundry in a hamper — is actually quite a lot. I still haven’t finished my theoretical framework of orderliness, but my room sure is a lot cleaner.

Visible checklists are the only ones that matter. If you want to get yourself to do something, make it hard to ignore and even harder to forget. This is one of the many things I use my whiteboard for: My notes/goals/lists live as large letters on my wall, visible from my bed. A note on my computer or phone will quickly be forgotten or lost; a note on my wall will greet me when I wake. (Note that this doesn’t mean every habit you put on a readily visible checklist will automatically be picked up. This worked great for making sure to floss every day without fail, but my results were less impressive for making sure to exercise — perhaps my new taekwondo class will change things?!)

One (or two) habits at a time. When I come up with six or seven new habits to acquire, I’m likely to fail at most or even all of them. If you’re serious about making changes, concentrate on one or two things; if after a week or two those are going well, add a third or fourth.

Don’t be afraid to experiment. For those of us who spend way too much time in our heads, it’s easy to forget just how powerful real-world experimentation is, or even that things can, like, be empirically verified. If you find yourself daydreaming about what the “ideal” method for doing xyz is, try to come up with something that you can try that might be part of that ideal system or which is simply good enough. If it succeeds, great. If it fails, you’ve an idea for your next hypothesis to test — or at least more data to daydream about.

Almost exactly a year ago, Maj. Andy Olmsted died in Iraq.

I thought of Andy again when I heard that trauma surgeon John Pryor had been killed in Iraq on Christmas Day. Beyond the devastating loss to his loved ones, our world is poorer for having lost his passionate honesty. Indeed, the first I ever heard of him was through his 2007 op-ed about parallels between his work overseas and at home:

In Iraq, ironically, I found myself drawing on my experience as a civilian trauma surgeon each time [mass casualties] would overrun the combat hospital. As nine or 10 patients from a firefight rolled in, I sometimes caught myself saying “just like another Friday night in West Philadelphia.”

The wounds and nationalities of the patients are different, but the feelings of helplessness, despair and loss are the same. In Iraq, soldiers die for freedom, for honor, for their country and for their buddies. Here in Philadelphia, they die without honor, without purpose, for no country, for no one.

More young men are killed each day on the streets of America than on the worst days of carnage and loss in Iraq. There is a war at home raging every day, filling our trauma centers with so many wounded children that it sometimes makes Baghdad seem like a quiet city in Iowa. Unlike the Iraq conflict, this war is not on the front pages of The Post or on CNN.

Pryor was in a better position than most of us both to see this bloody misery firsthand and to bear witness to it. It would have been enough that he used his hands to heal; that he also used his voice to advocate was an act of profound generosity.

It takes titantic self-confidence to cut into human flesh, even to heal. I don’t know what it was like to live with Dr. Pryor or even have him as a colleague. I do know that the obituary was shocking to me, though as the song says we should know how fast the world can change:

Lying here in the darkness
I hear the sirens wail
Somebody going to emergency
Somebody’s going to jail
If you find somebody to love in this world
You better hang on tooth and nail
The wolf is always at the door
In a New York minute
Everything can change
In a New York minute

Back to Andy Olmsted, and his farewell message:

[F]or those who knew me and feel this pain, I think it’s a good thing to realize that this pain has been felt by thousands and thousands (probably millions, actually) of other people all over the world. That is part of the cost of war, any war, no matter how justified. If everyone who feels this pain keeps that in mind the next time we have to decide whether or not war is a good idea, perhaps it will help us to make a more informed decision.

“If our core liberalism—if our roots in the struggle of common law against the absolutist king, or in Locke, or in Montesquieu, or in the American Revolution mean anything at all to us—then it means a four percentage-point difference in income tax rates is less important than removing the party of torture and detention without trial from power. That’s morally so overwhelmingly important as to make my traditional arguments about libertarians leaving the fusionist alliance with the right seem kind of silly.”

There’s a laundry list of issues on which libertarians and liberals ought to share at least some common ground: torture, war, criminal justice issues, the drug war, gay marriage, immigration, the death penalty, government transparency, privacy, reproductive rights, and free speech.

The Democrats have proven to be a miserable opposition party these last two years, and their excuse seems to have been that they couldn’t do X because the Republicans were running the show. On issue after issue, ranging from the Iraq war to FISA, they’ve proved to be not just incapable of stopping a Republican executive but all too frequently compliant. That excuse is now off the table — they’ve got commanding leads in both houses of Congress and a President with strong popular support. The questions that remain to be answered are how much the Democrats really believe in these values, and how exactly they will prioritize them.

Early results (and by that I mean yesterday’s election) are mixed. High Democratic turnouts helped pass bigoted, civil-liberties bashing state constitutional amendments in Florida, California and Arizona, while Democrats in Massachusetts decriminalized pot and Michigan voters legalized medicinal marijuana. This last issue is one on which President Obama has the potential to do some immediate good: If Obama stays good to his word and stops federal raids on legal, state-sanctioned medicinal marijuana dispensaries, perhaps we can stop ruining the lives of innocent citizens and throwing away tax dollars.

The results of half a dozen ballot initiatives clearly can’t be used as a true gauge of how the new Democratic government will run things; only time can answer that question definitively. But if President Obama decides to prioritize traditional liberal and libertarian values — equal protection under the law, social tolerance, privacy, constitutionally limited powers, and peace — the next four years will be a breath of fresh air.

I stepped onto a Brooklyn-bound Q train not long after 1am. There was a short, five-second awkward silence. Then a young woman screamed “Obama!” and the entire train car erupted into raucous applause.

I’m happy to say that I was wrong. Last week when I read about Paulson’s initial proposal for the bailout, I thought that the backing of the White House and the leaders of both parties, coupled with an atmosphere of fear and the need to “do something quickly,” would be more than enough to push it through. Instead, a coalition of far-left Democrats and the few remaining free-market Republicans, joined by many members of both parties worried about losing their seats in the upcoming elections, defeated the bill and came out victorious.

My gut still says the bill will resurface and will probably be passed, in some form or another. But today we won, and tomorrow, I’ll be quite happy to be wrong again.

Since I last posted, dear reader (readers, even?),  much has happened: I graduated from engineering school, started my first full-time job, and moved into a new apartment. There was more, of course, but this site has never been about the nitty-gritty details of my life, and just because I updated the banner graphic does not mean that is about to change.

For the curious, the resurrection of Unschooled was delayed in no small part by the fact that I spent more time geeking out than getting the site back online. I switched hosting providers twice — from bluehost to VPSLink to Slicehost, where the site currently resides. I switched web servers twice — from Apache to nginx back to Apache. And I switched blogging software three times — from WordPress to Byteflow to Movable Type and back to WordPress, albeit a newer version. Needless to say, none of this was actually necessary in order to get the site back up and running.

So, despite my best efforts, the site is back, to which I can only say,

Welcome back.