Daniel Spisak on Technology

So I have Omar to thank for the following bit of information below, check this out. A map showing what areas/cities have more single men or women in them. This is pretty crazy, apparently I need to go to Newark/New York to find a woman and import her:

After seeing that map it started the gears turning in my head, and being the naturally curious type I decided to do a little digging myself to come up with some numbers on this. Interestingly enough the California Department of Finance has a Demographics Research division that does a lot of work with Census data and other demographic sources. One of these sources was the “An Overview of Californians” PDF using the Year 2000 Census Bureau data. In that lovely document we find this table:

A more recent document called the “California Population Survey: Extended Report March 2005″ has updated figures shown below:

So overall, there are 1 million more single males in the state of California then single females. Not exactly stellar odds if you ask me. Just how bad are the odds for a single guy in say Los Angeles or Orange counties? Well, looking at the more detailed Year 2000 Census data we have the following data on household composition:

Los Angeles

Orange

But this doesn’t really give us the full picture unfortunately since a woman living alone, or not isn’t necessarily single per se. So while the number of women vs men living alone show that there are more single women households in Orange County and Los Angeles County than men, it doesn’t accurately reflect what percentage of those households are not in some form of current relationship.

And this whole entry is a stunning example of the kind of spare time I now have to blow on looking up census data to explain why its so damn hard for me to find a nice woman.

This is an honest question. Why in the sam hell blazes is it so goddamned hard to date? Especially so in the LA/OC areas it seems? For the last three months I had not really given it much thought or effort because I had to really buckle down on my classes at UC Irvine. Fair enough after all, right?

So I decided to renew my old Yahoo Personals account and see if things had changed on there for the better or not. Well, after messing around on there for a few days I had someone write me back wanting to know how to get in touch with me to talk more. Seemed like a simple enough request and the persons profile seemed absolutely normal to me. So I write them back with one of my email addresses and go back to other things at the time.

Mind you here its worth mentioning why I stopped using Yahoo Personals the last time I tried it out. In a nutshell, at the time I was looking to find someone it was before I was doing my full-time classes for my degree so I had a bit more time on my hands and I still had a fair amount of disposable income, etc. Just wasn’t making much progress finding someone interesting to connect with was all. Anyways, in the entire time I had used Yahoo Personals the first time, the only person who had ever responded back to me turned out to be a female escort who was using the service to look for new clients, not a relationship. Needless to say when I found this out I was both disappointed and upset at the same time since it seemed like a perversion of the intent for the service. Oh well, live and learn or something.

So here we are, a few years later. Has Yahoo Personals gotten any better? Well, their layout and interface is better and some of the features of the site have improved. You can now tell who is looking at your profile which is a nice feature I guess. Back to the person whom I sent my email address to, so she writes me back.

Except, the name she is using isnt the one on her Yahoo Personals profile? WTF? I keep reading the email and attached is a photo of the “person” in question. It is nothing like the photo on the profile (brunette vs blonde, etc). It’s like split personality or something. So I write “them” back with the question “What happened to the person in the profile?”.

Today I got the answer to that question. They sent another email back, it completely ignored the question and directed me to check out “their website” where there were “more photos of me available”.

A spammer.

A fucking spammer.

WHAT

THE

FUCK!?!

Seriously, I am going to become a goddamned motherfucking monk at this rate. I’m never going to find someone to date. EVAR.

Sheesh. I don’t even know why I fucking bother these days.

I’m 31 right now, not a bad age to be supposedly. I guess its ok.

I live with my parents. I have for the past 3 years , maybe a bit longer then that while I worked on going back to school to finish up my computer science bachelors degree I stopped back in 1998 when UC Santa Cruz kicked me out because I allowed myself to get depressed over a woman (my first girlfriend) and let things slide academically. After that I went to work at various technology companies before and after the dot com bomb. I always wanted to go back to school to finish what I started  but never had the time or the money. Then when I was at Cox Business Services down in Rancho Santa Margarita they had a major restructuring in which they made the position I was in redundant and let me go.

When this happened the tech market for jobs looked like Dresden after the bombing. Orange County and LA were horrible places to find work in due to all the failed dot com’ers looking for work in addition to other pressures that were on the market back then.

At that time my parents offered to help me go back to school to finish my degree, provided I moved in with them and made sure I stuck with the program. As part of this I also had then began to start working occasionally as a consultant for a firm up in Pasadena. This brought in a decent amount of money, but not enough to pay all of my bills and cover school expenses. So my parents and I agreed that they would cover the tuition and I would cover the rest.

I have tried very hard over the past 3 years to stick to that division because for two reasons. One is I really hate being this old and having to get financial help from my parents. Second is that I wanted to be responsible for my share of the bills. I guess you can call it a sort of pride. I feel bad if I have to ask others for help with money, it just is the worst feeling ever. I’m not stupid, I may sometimes be scatterbrained because of something I am dealing with however.

Right now, I am in the final stretch of classes towards graduation. This quarter alone I had two senior project level classes both of which are not trivial to do.  Then throw in a class on artifical intelligence and a fairly involved world history course and you have a pretty full schedule. I still have two quarters left to go, one this summer and then my final one in the fall. In there I have one more senior project level class to do and about a 50/50 split of computer science related classes verses humanities classes to finish one or two breadth requirements I have left over.

Now add into that working a job as a consultant where the hours are not on any known schedule. I dont work part time or full time, I work whenever I can and there is a client that has work needing to be done. This means my income is not predictable, not reliable. But for the past 3 years I’d managed a decent balancing act of my bills verses my income. And lets not even go into the fact that all my income is 1099-MISC reported so come tax time I have to make sure I have cash in the bank to pay taxes not withheld.

This quarter in particular has probably been the hardest one I have ever had. And it’s almost over too! But I had classes and labs so densely packed that I hardly had time to sleep, let alone be available enough to work enough to cover costs of things that happened.

Now throw in scatterbrained things like forgetting you’re cars registration hadn’t ever been taken cared of for the year. Like worrying about whether or not your father is going to still have a job (single income household). Like trying to ignore the fact that you havent been with a woman in years. Add it all up.

Then try to tell me with a straight face you NEVER forget to do something, even if its simple.

Sometimes, you forget to do something. Sometimes, you really dont want to have to ask to borrow money from your parents when you are 31.

Next time before you try and tell me something, try to walk a few miles in my damn shoes, it might help you from sticking your foot in your mouth. If you’re having a bad day its no excuse to take it out on me. Lord knows I try to make sure I don’t do that to my friends.

Apparently the fuckers smashed in the window of my car so they could steal something…..
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wait for it
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wait for it
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this is going to be good….

My freaking iPod. The one that was left in the car because the battery on it was totally dead and in need of a recharge but I had left my charging cable at home. So these asshats busted a window of my car to steal an iPod that wasn’t even going to work for them until it gets charged. Just fucking fabulous. Oh well, I guess I learned my lesson. Don’t leave iPods visible in the car.

Ever.

Because stupid asshats will smash your window and steal your iPod, instead of the $1500 in camera gear that was in a courier bag on the floor, or the tripod that was in the trunk.