saturn return to sender

I don’t like Apple’s Mighty Mouse. Style has trumped function in a really bad way here.

The Mighty Mouse is a 4-button optical mouse with a two-way scroll ball. Apple has never, until now (where “now” is like, 6 months or a year ago — I’m naturally way behind in “reviewing it” here), itself released a mouse with more than one button, though OS X has always supported multiple button input devices in software. I’ve never really cared too much, personally, because you can always buy third-party mice that are adequate. But the fact that Apple has stubbornly refused to let go of its one-mouse, one-button policy in a world where even your grandmother probably uses a two-button mouse on her $300 Dell PC for email has been seen as … dumb. Also getting a mouse that you’re never going to want to use bundled with your $2000 computer is kind of obnoxious. (As an aside, for those who don’t know, you can get a right-click on any single-button mouse by holding down control and left-clicking.)

So the Mighty Mouse should be good news. I’ve had one for a few months now, and this morning I’m particularly annoyed with it, so I’m going to do what every blogger procrastinating on homework should: complain about it pointlessly on my blog.

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Well here’s a howdy-do. According to one study, based on life-cycle analysis, hybrid cars require more energy than Hummers:

For example, while the industry average of all vehicles sold in the U.S. in 2005 was $2.28 cents per mile, the Hummer H3 (among most SUVs) was only $1.949 cents per mile. That figure is also lower than all currently offered hybrids and Honda Civic at $2.42 per mile.

So how should we approach this study, executed by a marketing firm? LCAs figure prominently in sustainable building. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has some free software for working out the lifetime ecological costs of building materials and they offer a short explanation of their methodology (pdf) as well as rather extensive detail (pdf).

So where are the details for this study? The methodology? The firm that did the study says on their website that “a full report” will be available on their subscriber website. Ah. How classy of them.

Ah! Dear god! Make it stop!

I’m enjoying the essays and anecdotes at Before the Mortgage. (“Essays, lists, and ephemera for the years post-college and pre-picket fence.”) They’re pegging me pretty good. The relationship mis-fires and dating confusion, the quitting the job to do something absurd, the “work on being at peace with the fact that there may never be a mortgage.”

I remember knowing the editors of the new book at school as second-degree friends. I think we lived in the same co-op for a while. So maybe it’s not too surprising that the arcs of our lives and those of the contributors to their book have so far since then had similar features. 20-somethings, nomadic, educated, intelligent, and capable, but somehow feeling fundamentally clueless — and enjoying that. My peeps.

I’m taking a class called “Professional Practice” concerning the business of architectural practice. It’s wholly anti-thetical to everything I’ve ever thought of myself as being interested in: profits (for their own sake), entrepreneurship (as an end in itself), marketing (as an explicit tool for profit, not for merely getting the word out), company structure, cash flow, pro formas (I’m still not sure what those are), tax law, etc. The odd thing is — and maybe this is just my interest pack-rat-ism talking — I’m starting to like it. And I’m starting to see how, you know? This making money thing? Maybe not such a bad idea.

We have to come up with business plans in groups. They’re for how we would start up our own architectural firms, which I’m precisely 0.1% likely to do, but as the opaque thing that is the business world starts to reveal itself to me, I’m starting to understand how kind of cool it would be to build something yourself, to make money on your own. How you can be ethical and honest and eke out a living on your own terms, doing what you want to do. Theoretically.

But nahhh: primarly, that’s my exceptional level of indebtedness talking. I’d love to make money for long enough to pay off my debt. Then I figure myself for going nomadic again. I’d rather just stay nomadic, actually, but it’s becoming more and more obviously untenable. Of course, this is me talking, still in my 20s. By the time I dig in enough to break even, perhaps the quarter-life-crisis endemic to the Before the Mortgage crowd will have sorted itself out and I’ll be past that phase.

Anyway, all I know is that the brakes appear to be broken, I’ve already passed a couple of exits, and I have another year of grad school before I can shift lanes.