Shabbir's Diary

Building your own ring for a sweetie

Aloha bitches!

In response to the questions from Joe and Chad in my last post, here are some answers:

The two places I frequent are Thaigem.com and Multicolour.com.  You can get many items there aren't that expensive, and you always have the option of returning it for a refund.  That can take a week or two, I have found, so don't buy something on spec with your rent money.  Although Thaigem's interface has been changed to an impulse shopping cart, Multicolour's is still pretty good.   You can also "build a ring" at Bluenile.com but I find their prices to be almost as much as retail.  You may not get much of a savings out of it, but you will get a lot of flexibility.

Take this ruby for example.  $154 isn't a lot for a stone, and if you get it and don't like it, you can send it back.  You are making a bit of a crapshoot on the quality and color because there's nothing like seeing it in person.  However if you get a stone you like, you'll be cutting out several middlemen (and layers of cost) in the process.  You may have to try a couple of times before you get the hang of it.

Once you've got your stone, take it to a jewelry store and ask them if you can go through the catalog and pick out a setting for a necklace or ring.  I use Tony at Boone and Sons on Connecticut and L street.  He can certainly find you nicer stones, but he probably can't find you cheaper.  A good jeweler won't feel threatened by the fact that you're getting your stones online.  He (or she) will know that they can make money on the setting and the labor, and be satisfied with that.   Also, as Tony has learned, a jeweler that's willing to work with you will get all your future business.

As far as Chad's comment about overcoming objections to the massive marketing machine that DeBeers has put into place, that's a hard hump to get over.  There are many kinds of stones more rare than diamonds, but indeed, marketing has made diamonds seem rare.  If you want to try and change someone mind about their engagement ring, I suggest you start them out early on lesser momentous pieces of non-diamond jewelry such as birthday gifts, etc.   Sarah's engagement ring was a diamond, and recently I replaced it with a large ruby ring that she likes infinitely more.

Over time, if your intended target realizes the amount of work you put into the jewelry, it should work out.  However if what other people think is so important even after the significant effort you expend, perhaps you ought to consider the long-term implications of that tendency on the relationship.  Will that opinion affect the car, house, and lifestyle you live?

If you want to you can easily spend as much on a ruby or sapphire-based engagement ring as a diamond one.  That might comfort your girlfriend, but you may not be happy that it does.

Good luck!

WSJ.com - Diamond Industry Rocked By Allegations of Bribery

To know me is to know my fascination with rare and semi-precious gems.  All Sarah's jewelry was handpicked by me, and in most cases, designed by me after I personally acquired the loose stones involved.  Thankfully, Sarah doesn't have a diamond jones, so this hobby isn't requiring me to break into my IRA to fund it.  Her ethical problems with conflict diamonds have led her to focus on other stones.

The gruesome conditions under which some diamonds are mined is only one reason that I find diamonds entirely....uninteresting.  There's no color to them, and you see much more of Nature's beauty and mastery in a ruby or a gardened emerald than you do in a diamond.  I generally find people who elevate diamonds to angelic levels to be a bit absurd, and now it appears they are getting bit in the ass.

Take this story from the Wall Street Journal about how that diamond grading certificate you got with your diamond may have been inflated to get you to pay more:

The Gemological Institute of America, which grades diamonds for independent dealers and big retailers such as Tiffany & Co. and Bailey Banks & Biddle, recently fired four employees and shuffled top management after a four-month internal probe of its policies.
..
The suit that sparked the institute's internal probe claimed the fraud was uncovered after two diamonds that were sold for a total of $15 million to members of the Saudi royal family were taken to an independent appraiser -- and found to have a lower grade that made them worth far less. [than the grade given to them by the GIA]
..
Mr. Pincione [a diamond dealer to the Saudis] claims an informant later gave him a ledger that supported allegations that a supervisor at the institute was being paid more than $3,000 a month to change grades on diamonds.

Take my advice, buy your girl a ruby, an emerald, something with a little color and then spend an hour with a jeweler picking out a setting from the catalog to have it mounted.  She'll be flattered by the fact that you spent that kind of time on creating her gift and she'll get a much more interesting piece.

See the Times Online story
also WSJ.com - Diamond Industry Rocked By Allegations of Bribery. (subscription required)

YouTube - SNL - The Chronic of Narnia Rap

Oh my god, I'm crying I'm laughing to hard...

Link: YouTube - SNL - The Chronic of Narnia Rap.

Fairfax Poker Game Is Raided; 2 Charged

How stupid do you have to be to run a raked* poker game in Northern Virginia after Fairfax County has clearly announced its intention to bust all such games?  They raided the Centreville and Reston games, held a press conference talking about how illegal it was, and then made sure the operators each pulled a felony.

Link: Fairfax Poker Game Is Raided; 2 Charged.

* A raked poker game is one in which the operator takes a cut of the winnings.  So for example every hand the operator takes a $1 out of the pot and keeps it for themselves.

Five Years

"Five Years", one of my favorite Bowie songs, describes how the Earth is dying and with only five years left, how much of life Bowie wants to experience. 

My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare
I had to cram so many things to store everything in there

He's overwhelmed at the thought of having to cram a lifetime's experience of joy, art, culture, love, and sadness in just five years.  And this is how I feel today on my fifth wedding anniversary.  When I met Sarah I was involved with someone else, and never thought I was getting married.  Then I noticed that my mom met someone and fell in love at fifty, and I realized it wasn't so crazy.  I played the playboy for a little while and straightened my life out, ending my other relationship and proposing to Sarah.

Being married to Sarah is like being close to the sun.  I can't describe what it's like very eloquently, except to say that to be loved by Sarah is to be bathed in heat and light.  You know it physically as well as intellectually and emotionally. 

I'm conscious of the fact that I could have gone my whole life without ever knowing this feeling, and I'm even more conscious of the fact that I'm one lucky bastard to have five years of it.  Who knows how much time we all have on the Big Blue Globe?  You could be driving through Chicago and have an airplane skip off the runway and kill you in your car.  Or you could eat the one steak in 50 million that has mad cow disease and croak before your 40th birthday.  So many things could take you out unexpectedly.  You've got to appreciate what you've got right now and every day and I am lucky for Sarah's understanding, love, and humor. 

I hope that on this day I can make her feel that lucky too.

flagrantly violationg the law

While I frequently don't agree with either the goals of the Bush Administration, I just assumed they bought into the whole concept of the rule of law.  Now it appears that the President (or more likely his advisors) flagrantly disregarded the law, signing executive orders to spy on Americans on the flimsiest of pretenses.

I don't have any doubt that the White House knew it was ordering illegal wiretaps.  Wiretaps are carefully governed for very good reasons because of their potential for silent abuse.  American surviellance history is clear on why.   I'm disappointed to think that the White House has no appreciation for that history.  I suspect they just thought they wouldn't actually have to be accountable for it.  And given the Syriana world we live in, I think that's probably right.

The Bush presidency is making me even more jaded than I was about government, and I thought I was pretty cynical to begin with.

Link: CNN.com - Bush says he signed NSA wiretap order - Dec 17, 2005.

Poor implementations of the zombie genre

Ironically, I'm going to tell you how bad this movie and then create an Amazon.com affiliates link so I get a slight profit for all the none of you that buy it.  I'll make you a deal: if I tell you about a bad movie, I'll recommend a good one as well.

I'm a zombie flick afficiando, and so I'm always filling my Netflix queue with the millions of zombie flick remakes.  A few days ago Netflix brought me Zombie Night.  I can't even tell you how bad it is.  I'm pretty sure I saw one of the 'stars' listed as an executive producer as well.

Worst scene: the survivors are holed up in an old warehouse, and being seriously stern with people who get infected so they don't infect any more survivors.  For some odd reason they let one of the 'stars' hang out and say goodbye to his family for hours even though he could become a flesh-eating menace at any moment, and they've been throwing other infected people off the roof.  (Because it saves on the ammunition)  His wife and daughter even hug him repeatedly while he tells his daughter about how all those stories about monsters under the bed were actually real, and now there are monsters.  Sorry Sweetie.

Worst line: (said by a guy turning to zombie state) "I beat cancer, I can beat this!"

My suggestion, go rent 28 Days Later, a much better movie that I will pontificate on in the future.

Some tips for job hunters

When applying for jobs where written communication is a core skill, you can enhance your chances of getting hired by doing the following things in your resume:

• Make up entirely new plural versions of nouns that aren't in the dictionary.  Indeed, we will all be very excited to ask you in the interview about the very special dictionary you are working from.
• Understanding that the position will handle lots of written communications with clients, be sure to do things like fail to line up your columns in your resume.  Don't bother to correctly indent columns so they line up.  Don't worry if three or four words of your resume bleed onto a second page that would otherwise be unnecessary.  After all, nothing says, "I'm an MS Office expert" like seeing a two page resume that could have been one page if you knew how to find "Page Setup" in Word.
• Best of all, ensure that if a job posting says certain experience is a requirement to apply, go ahead and apply even if you're unqualified.  Know that we just put that in the ad to get a hearty guffaw around the office.

A good resume and cover letter is not hard to do, and when someone does it well amid a pile of screwups, they just look that much better.  So much so, in fact, that we're going to try and fill a different position from a well-written resume that we received in that same pile that didn't quite make the cut.

Moneyball and Football

One more thing you shouldn't miss in the Sunday NYT: Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep by Michael Lewis, also author of the seminal work on the application of advanced statatistical analysis to baseball,  Moneyball.  I'm not what you'd consider a baseball fan, but reading Moneyball was a riveting experience.  It was amazing to watch a guy dissect the game of baseball with statistics, challenging everything that everyone else believed about how you should run a ball club, and then prove them oh so wrong.

This NYT article describes the success of an innovative college football coach whose techniques have made Texas Tech's football team much more effective than colleges with better-funded programs.  He's not the same sort of quant-head Beane was, but I see why Lewis loved him.

A quick quote:

What a defense sees, when it lines up against [Coach Leach's] Texas Tech, is endless variety, caused, first, by the sheer number of people racing around trying to catch a pass and then compounded by the many different routes they run. A typical football offense has three serious pass-catching threats; Texas Tech's offense has five, and it would employ more if that wasn't against the rules. ... He regards receivers as raffle tickets: the more of them you have, the more likely one will hit big. Some go wide, some go deep, some come across the middle. All are fast. (When Leach recruits high-school players, he is forced to compromise on most talents, but he insists on speed.)

All have been conditioned to run much more than a football player normally does. A typical N.F.L. receiver in training might run 1,500 yards of sprints a day; Texas Tech receivers run 2,500 yards. To prepare his receivers' ankles and knees for the unusual punishment of his nonstop-running offense, Leach has installed a 40-yard-long sand pit on his practice field; slogging through the sand, he says, strengthens the receivers' joints. And when they finish sprinting, they move to Leach's tennis-ball bazookas. A year of catching tiny fuzzy balls fired at their chests at 60 m.p.h. has turned many young men who got to Texas Tech with hands of stone into glue-fingered receivers.

And if you get a chance, go read a recent article on Billy Beane, the star of Moneyball, on why his techniques are becoming less and less effective.

The woes of being a Connecticut indian withou a casino

Check out this Washington Post story about the Indian tribes in Connecticut that don't have casinos, and the ongoing tensions with the ones that do.  The door appears to have closed on indians getting federal recognition of their tribes, which is one of the predicates for opening a casino.  (and by the way, how cruelly ironic is it that as a Native American you have to have the US government issue you a license to state who you are?)

"We love the two casinos that are there," said Ken Dautrich, a public policy professor at the University of Connecticut. "But we would hate to have more."

Read Some Conn. Tribes Have All the Luck, by David Farenthold, WP Staff Writer