Author Archives: bluedepth

Tagging

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I’ve been blogging actively on and off for years. Much of it started in LiveJournal and when SixApart, the company that wrote LiveJournal were sold to a russian company it was time for me to leave. I left for a few reasons, one was because I didn’t trust my writings to a company that was owned by a foreign country – the laws get murky once your thoughts and opinions leave the USA; the other reason was a general eroding of english users as more cyrillic users started to appear on LiveJournal. The language barrier between english and russian was the little push that I needed to leave that and get on with WordPress.

My use of WordPress continued a-pace until one of my work blogs was tagged as suspect by a WordPress.com robot and the company deactivated my blog. After explaining what I was using the blog for, they re-enabled it however that identified a problem for me, mostly that my blog was being measured – if not by a person then by an automatic process and as such, it had a definite stink of censorship about it. At work, and in my private life I already had a separate hosting company and that’s when I discovered WordPress.org, the DIY blog platform based on the technology that powers WordPress.com. I installed a constellation of new blogs both for work and for personal use and that had a bunch of added extras – specifically unlimited storage of rich media which I would have otherwise had to pay for with WordPress.com as well as direct control of the content. There were no robots or censors wandering around turning off accounts willy-nilly in this other arrangement. Also, and more to the point of this blog entry, the shift over to WordPress.org also enabled the use of plugins which really extend the WordPress platform even further than the nice presentation that the WordPress.com system provides. I’ve been having a devil of a time remembering to tag my WordPress blog posts. I went fishing for a new plugin to maybe help with tags and I found the WP Calais Auto Tagger and so far I’m quite impressed with it’s quality. Now when I make a post, the post is sent to OpenCalais where it is processed for relevant tags and I get a list of possibilities that I can elect to use or not. I take the category part of my blog posts very seriously and now I can rely on this bit of technology to help me with the tags as well. If you run WordPress blogs, I suggest you look into this.

Generally speaking, if you are a friend of mine and would like a WordPress.org blog for your own, I’m more than happy to help you out. I can set it up quickly and support it even – if you are interested, just drop me a line. Those that know me know how to reach me. I suppose everyone else could leave a comment. This offer isn’t valid for anyone at Western, sorry.

The Debris of Mind

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I have reinforced certain habits using the gadgets that I am so fond of using. Specifically the Reminders app that is linked to my Apple ID and my iCloud account. Enter items one place and they are present on all the other devices I use – ta dah! So I have a structure of repeating reminders that I use to structure my workdays – actually my entire life – but lets just go with workdays to make it seem less sad and dependent. I schedule snacks, lunches, even the end of work because when I’m concentrating deeply on something time just flows right on past me. Without alarms and reminders I would be late for everything and I might even forget to attend something important. So my reminder went off today, for my mid-morning snack, which is a cup of fruit-on-the-bottom greek yogurt and so I went into the mailroom here at work where the community fridge is located and as I was walking to get my snack I noticed the mail. Oh! The mail! So I got sidetracked. I got my mail and brought it back to my office. Mostly it was junk, just more meaningless wastes of paper as most mail is these days and I sat back down and got back to work. Then I had this nagging feeling like I had forgotten something and I looked at my reminder list and my snack wasn’t checked off.

I would love to attribute this to anything but what it is. Technology has softened my wits. I’m easily distracted and waylaid and that in itself is just another problem. It’s not age, although I would love to blame it on something like that, but what it comes down to is that technology is a double-edged sword. Sure it enhances life and makes it easier on us, but by doing so, it eliminates the rigor we once had to not forget when we move from room to room. The only real saving grace is that doorways represent really fundamentally important context changes in the human brain that can demonstrably damage items in short-term memory. You can get up, walk out of the office with a fully fleshed out plan and each time you pass a doorway that plan gets hit by a mental tempest. Coworkers stopping you to talk, mail in your mailbox, something going on with the machines in that room that need attention, anything at all can swiftly kill even strongly made plans.

This got me thinking about an imaginary environment, a building made up of doorways, in a long linear arrangement, say 15 rooms. Each room loaded with things designed to distract and confuse. Bright lights, blaring sounds, overstuffed mailboxes, a copier machine spraying paper, a ball-pit filled with brightly colored balls being gently agitated with mystery sounds coming from underneath it, perhaps even animals and clowns, like a circus. People walk in the entrance and as they slowly make their way through the doorways and the distractions erode even the most intensely established mental frameworks. When people reach the exit, they walk away refreshed and emptied. The worries, the concerns, the issues they carried in with them at the entrance are utterly blown away by the simple act of slowly walking through this environment. At the end you could have a nice big lounge filled with soothing music and overstuffed chairs with a really long wall of excellent books that you can pick out and read for as long as you like. Perhaps another room where you can nap. You could bill such a building as a “Mind Wash” and I bet people would pay to be able to enjoy it. All your worries, all your troubles, at least temporarily blown away by all the doorways and all the distractions and then the mood music and lighting and books and napping pads on the floor. 🙂

Friday Flashback – February 22nd

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Friday Flashback 2/22

2006 – Coultergeist Visits WMU
2008 – The USS Lake Erie knocked a “downed satellite” out of orbit using the AEGIS weapon system to do it, perhaps. Nobody knows exactly what happened, but sometimes I like to think about how it might have played out. Also in 2008 I was playing around with a swiss ball trying to get in shape. It didn’t take, at least not at that point.
2009 – One-word LiveJournal quizzes kept me occupied and I was busy contending with a cold, feeling awful and sick. I was also in the middle of reading Green Lantern comic books from the 80’s with all their adorable schlock.
2010 – Toyota was dealing with their runaway vehicles, while I was struggling with an injured back. Christmas trees that resist removal are such a pain. TweetDeck was a charmer but ultimately a piece of shiny junk.
2011 – I wrote about the importance of a Carbon Monoxide detector as the region was dealing with a nasty winter storm and a lot of power outages. Western had opened up some of it’s resources to the community to help mitigate what the outage meant for a lot of people in the community. We also learned that sections of permafrost were melting. Saying that this was one of the first indications of climate change would be laughably wrong. We’ve all known for a really long time that we’ve damaged the climate, this was just some lighthearted wistful comedy that helped round it all off.
2013 – I finished moving my Twitter activity over to Day One. I also decided to buy into the Sentricom system to protect my house from Termites. Perhaps it was a waste of money, but generally isn’t it better to be safer than sorrier?

A little trip down memory lane. I’m going to try to do these on Fridays from now on. Since I have so much of my past recorded in Day One, this should be easy. The only difficulty will be trying to summarize some of those days when I was tweeting a lot.

True Colors

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I’ve got a series of shirts that I wear frequently and these shirts are the ones that I’m trying to pair with various bow ties. I prefer more bluish colors and always vertical stripes if they have them. What I need help with here is matching three bow ties that will work best with the most number of shirts. There are many ties in my list, but I want to start small.

I would really appreciate a list of shirts and ties that you all think go well together. I’m looking for ties that can be used with multiple shirts if possible. Any input at all is welcome. Thanks in advance!

Shirts:

Ties:

Empty Nests

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I’ve given up on Twitter. I won’t be removing my account as Twitter still has some use to for browsing the stream but there really isn’t any compelling interactions on that service for me any longer. The only things that will end up on Twitter really are links to blog posts and maybe the one-off comment.

Ever since Twitter enabled the data download feature on my account, I took advantage of it. I downloaded the entire archive and discovered to my pleasure that Twitter stored all my tweets as plain text in a CSV file. I spent the last months migrating my old Tweets into my Day One application. I will hand one thing to Twitter, it did keep me “logging” along for a long time. I’m switching that impulse over to Day One. It’s impressive just how much of my past I have recorded. It turns out to be about 2600 days, or about 7 years of my past – recorded and in some ways with a lot of resolution. For that I will always be thankful for Twitter. However…

The reason why I am leaving Twitter is because it is too exposed. I didn’t feel it was useful to have a private Twitter account, so I left it public and this decision was made with a devil-may-care attitude, that anything I tweeted wouldn’t matter. As it turns out, it does. Mostly this is because of my workplace, in that I do not trust them or anyone who works there. It’s not really anything meant to be hurtful or anything, but I can’t risk my job and I certainly feel that sharing on Twitter threatens my employment. For as far as I trust Western Michigan University, it starts and ends with the partitioned, compartmentalized version of me that works there professionally. Not the true honest authentic me. Being honest and sharing freely would just upset everyone and lead to needless drama at work, so I unfollowed a bunch of coworkers and people whose tweets would have gone to waste on an ignored account.

Another problem with Twitter is the loss of engagement and dimensionality. Everyone on Twitter is a three-dimensional person with all the complexities that come with being alive. Twitter’s relationships seem stuck in a one-sided mode of conversation. This very thing struck me most powerfully as I was migrating Tweets into my Day One app. I caught out of the corner of my eye tweets that I had made to people who were popular or famous. They were wasted messages. At first this concerned me, but then I realized that what was really going on was that the people who had thousands and thousands of followers were so far beyond their social horizon (that 150 limit I’ve written about before) that they simply cannot socially relate to anyone beyond their subset coterie of social contacts. It’s not that they are mean or being ignorant, but they just cannot process that level of interaction – it’s more about how our biology is colliding with our technology. So for the really famous, the really popular, that’s where the dimensionality comes in. A regular person is three-dimensional. The others are one-dimensional. They are human billboards. They stand there and output information and you stop thinking of them as individuals and start relating to them as “sources” instead. Robbing them of their inherent humanity. They don’t have feelings, as billboards don’t have feelings.

So, we’re all done with that. Twitter will still be a link-dump for my blog. Most of my actual sharing will start in Byword, then be copied to Day One, then from there shared to Facebook under my “Sharing” security model. If you don’t see lots of things on my Facebook wall, that’s because you aren’t in “Sharing”, and mostly that’s because I can’t allow my honest self to interfere with my work. — Gosh, writing that out felt wrong, but at least I’m honest.

If you follow me on Twitter and want to keep your lists tidy and unfollow me, I won’t even notice you leaving. So go in peace.

 

 

PAD 1/26/13 – Music

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“What role does music play in your life?”

There is two kinds of music for me. The first kind is filler music. The clever hooks and poppy nothingness that I play all the time on my Spotify account while I’m at work. I keep it low and quiet and it helps to pass the time. The music is good, just because it’s meaningless doesn’t mean it’s not pleasant. It would do a disservice to declare who and what is “poppy nothingness” so I just won’t. If you think your art is deep and moving and transcendental then so do I. Whatever floats your boat. But…

There is another kind of music. The fundamental delight that it brings is beyond description. You just have to sit back and let it wash over you, changing you, as the tingles rage along your body when you hear the music that changes your life. I don’t know what thematic musical styles do it for me, but I know it when I feel it. If I’m listening to music and I feel that tingle – it doesn’t happen a lot, but when it does it’s unmistakable, then I know. I place all of this sort of music into a special playlist on Spotify and when I want to be agape with musical wonder I double-click on the playlist and shuffle. It doesn’t matter what track comes up first, they all do it for me, each and every time they play.

I used to think of music as the frilly doilies of life. Easily ignored and really compelling for doily collectors, for which I am not one. But over time, and since I discovered that some music brings the tingle, some music is more than others. I would say, much like books, going fishing for good music can lead you some truly excellent catches.

PAD 2/8/13 – Reincarnation

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“Reincarnation: do you believe in it?”

 I know it’s true. I’ve done this before. Living and all. I’ve written about this before as well, back in my old LiveJournal. I’ve had many lives and I have impressions of at least the most recent past one. It’s comedy gold that in the most recent past life I was a catholic priest somewhere in the United Kingdom. Lots of wet, lots of cold, lots of cliffs. I also know that the people in my life now were in that prior life as well. The dramas that I played out in this life were strikingly similar to things that happened before. One of the best kept little jokes about existence is that human beings reincarnate and that gender is at best, incidental and at worst, accidental. Your soul isn’t male or female, your body is. You change those out like socks, except for the timescale, the analogy is quite apt, I think. So, in many ways there is no reason for me to fear death, there may still be an undiscovered country, but if so, this is it. Or it’s not and there is something new coming. The best part of living is that you never know whether you get to go again on the merry-go-round of life or if you get to hop off of it on the path towards enlightenment. Perhaps the path doesn’t exist and it’s all just hopping on and off the merry-go-round. I don’t know. But what I do know is that we all have done these things before, we’ve danced before, lived, loved, laughed, and fought. We’ll most likely continue this until we either stop or there isn’t any more life left in the Universe – or not. The best part of thinking about reincarnation is the “or not” part. It’s vital, I think, to allow the “or not” into your life. It lets you remain flexible when and where you need it.

So, round we go, all of us, once again. Dizzy yet? 🙂

PAD 2/9/2013 – Childhood Revisited

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Sure, you turned out pretty good, but is there anything you wish had been different about your childhood? If you have kids, is there anything you wish were different for them?

Every time I think about this kind of question it brings up the tangled web of the consequences of living. Would you do anything over again? How could anyone answer this question honestly? Could you be anything other than what you are? I think, at least for me, the answer is no. Looking back on everything that I experienced, the good things, and the bad things, that all the things were needful. I love who I am and I don’t need someone outside of myself to remind me of that fact. I get a lot of flak for being who and what I am but I’m very fond of, and repeat to myself regularly one of the best quotes from Dr. Seuss. “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” and I try to live with this great piece of wisdom every day of my life. It’s a figurative life preserver that keeps me afloat when I’m beset by banal trolls who would rather I just be flat, plain, and featureless.

So, back to childhood. Everything that happened in your past all gets added up and results in what you are now. What kind of life would it be if I doubted myself now? It would be fake, and it would do a disservice to all the things that have come before. It would shame all the good things and it would render meaningless all the suffering that I endured. I refuse to accept either of those conditions so in a way, through my own convoluted logic I am who I am and I can’t be anything else. As if anyone could go back in time and change things, which you can’t, so it’s academic. This sort of thing, musing about changing your past is the height of uselessness. Pondering the impossible – and I would say changing your past is impossible, is a waste of effort, time, and thinking. For all the good that happened, I am happy for it. For all the bad that happened, I am happy for that as well. It’s only in enduring suffering and outlasting it that you defeat it and that singular win, defeating suffering, makes the rewards that much sweeter. So live in the now, bless and release the past, and try to do your best – because:

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.

 

 

PAD 2/15/2013 – Proud

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When was the last time someone told you they were proud of you?

It was in the aftermath of the last time Griffin blocked. I noticed very early that he was having difficulty urinating and so I whisked him off to the emergency vet hospital. I let everyone know what had happened on Twitter and Facebook and then after discovering that my boy would need surgery I had to be strong for him and help him recover. It was in the recovery that my friends and family told me how proud I made them in how good a kitty-daddy I am. It made me feel wonderful, and thankful that my boy survived and is now dozing in post-play-post-treats-under-the-heating-duct kitty happiness.