Author Archives: bluedepth

PAD 2/4/13 – Changes

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“You need to make a major change in your life. Do you make it all at once, cold turkey style, or incrementally? “

This is exactly how I stopped biting my fingernails. It was a bad habit and I knew it would take forever and be nearly impossible to overcome. Or so at least that was the narrative that I told myself. Then one day a few years ago I decided that I had had enough of hiding my fingers because I was embarrassed by them. I did a little reading and there were lots of suggestions on how to break myself of the habit. Mostly they were related to things I had to buy, like little fingertip condoms, special fingernail polish which would harden the nails beyond damage from teeth, all the way out to click-training yourself out of the habit. I got to laughing and really thinking about how if I could just make a break with it I could do it. And that was all it was. I brought some willpower to bear and resolved to not do it any longer. A line in the sand as it were. Since then I haven’t gone back to biting my fingernails. I’m quite proud of my accomplishment. So I would say that at least for me, it was the coldest turkey of them all.

No Forgiveness for BP

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I just saw a BP commercial play on CBS, as part of the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. I DVR the show and watch it when I like, time shifting it to a more pleasant hour than when it’s on, so it’s always an old program, which I’m fine with. But the BP commercial does irritate me. In it, a talking head for BP explains, almost plaintively, that they have spent 23 billion dollars in cleanup efforts in the Gulf of Mexico. He then talks up all the wonderful opportunities and great tourism of the area and then segues into how many Americans BP employs.

How dare you! How dare your company! Your greed and ignorance are only met with your petulant arrogance. You think there is any forgiveness for you? There is no forgiveness possible for an amoral company such as BP. Companies are not people. You cannot possibly expect people to treat you like you are asking them to. You poisoned the Gulf of Mexico with your greedy incompetence!

I still maintain that the right and proper punishment for what BP did in the Gulf of Mexico was to have all their American property seized, liquidated and be banned from doing any commerce in the United States. That’s a fitting punishment, not 23 billion dollars. It’s chump change to what you did in the Gulf of Mexico. The fact that BP wasn’t eliminated from the United States is clear proof that there is still quite a lot wrong with our world and how we manage it.

Shame on you BP. Shame on you forever.

PAD 2/12/2013 – All About Me

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Explain why you chose your blog’s title and what it means to you.

My blog’s title is really straightforward. Thoughts and Opinions. It might as well have a byline underneath it celebrating the First Amendment as that single amended law has protected me time and time again, which is actually the reason why the title is the way it is. I am not stating facts, there are no facts here. There is just opinion and thoughts, private bits, First Amendment Protected Bits. While I have little use for the Second Amendment, the First Amendment is right up there with the Fourth. When I get to thinking about these, the first, the fourth, for example, I think it comes down to “Leave me alone” writ large. It’s a silly thing to title a blog, “Leave me alone” so instead, I just put down Thoughts and Opinions. After reading any of my posts, especially the ones where I talk about situations where I must deal with other human beings, the other phrase is used a lot, and frankly, it’s a close second to “Thoughts and Opinions” and that is “Hell Is Other People.” Oh god, how true that is. Nothing is as awkward or uncomfortable or as unpleasant as someone else. I make choice exceptions to that singular rule, but on the whole, I endure people, I don’t celebrate them. Actually I guess I do celebrate a part of them, they’re leaving – that I really like.

It’s something that I’ve learned after being exposed, or as some would say, over-exposed in Facebook, Twitter, and this Blog, that I don’t seek readers. It took a long while to get over being self-aggrandizing, for being loud and noisy, for thinking what I wanted was to be noticed. I don’t. Being noticed, like acquiring readers is a foolish part of being young. Over time you come to realize that very little good can come from attention, once in a blue moon the attention is positive and it’s something pleasant. Far too commonly however, attention is the opposite. It’s problems, complaints, upsetness, irritation – something unpleasant. So on Twitter, especially when I see that I might be at risk of following or being-followed-by more than 150 people I go on block binges. I throw people off, drive them off because if I don’t, I feel cheap and exposed and less three-dimensional and more two-dimensional. I sometimes wonder at what point is someone who is followed too much on a social networking system relegated to being one-dimensional. This concerns me, I think that big networks devalue everyone who is a part of them and that’s why, that magical 150, that’s why 150 is so important. You can’t help it. Anything more than 150 and you are hurting other people, surely unintentionally, but it’s still social savagery to attempt to engage with more than 150 others. So I save myself and the nameless faceless strangers by not being too attractive or too attention-grabbing. The blog I do for myself, as any honest journalist should. The only thing about the blog that I will admit to is that it’s all solitary work with the blinds open and in front of the window.

PAD 2/18/2013 – Far From Normal

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“Many of us think of our lives as boringly normal, while others live the high life. Take a step back, and take a look at your life as an outsider might. Now, tell us at least six unique, exciting, or just plain odd things about yourself.”

Odd things? Odd things that won’t lead to me being fired, hunted, or driven from the village by an angry mob wielding torches and pitchforks?

Nope. I keep my oddities to myself. The last thing I want to do is give my enemies any more ammunition than they need to make my life difficult. Perhaps it’s one point that I have enemies. They may not think of themselves in that capacity but I certainly do. So I won’t be itemizing my strange.

The people who know me, and know me well, which is to say, none of my coworkers at least to start with, already have a good understanding of all my strange specialness. I’ve given up on my work peers, it’s been too long, there has been too much unpleasantness, and frankly the level of honesty required for me to share with them anything that would normally be in this particular PAD post just isn’t proper for a professional relationship. I value my coworkers not knowing about me about as much as me pretending that once work is done they cease existing.

So, you can imagine just how mindbendingly awkward it is for me when I spy one of my coworkers out there, in the real world, like at the supermarket or the movies, or any place that isn’t Walwood Hall, Westerns campus, or the Roadhouse. The last time I ran into a coworker was at Chocolatea and I stuffed my head behind my MacBook and concentrated on that as hard as I could, and the possibility of the awkwardness passed me by. Not quite unlike the Angel of Death moving through biblical Egypt. 🙂

I’m glad that *my* supermarket is on *my* side of town. Everyone I work with lives elsewhere. And yes, I would rather drive out of my way to avoid an adjacent supermarket if it means I can totally avoid running into coworkers. It’s a very special form of awkwardness. It’s goofy and unpleasant and squicky. The last time, for example, I was in the West Main Meijers  was last week and I was more concerned with getting out quickly and not running into coworkers than I was finding what I was looking for or even checking out. Another reason why I never go there… beyond the fact that it’s laid out backwards. 🙂

So, there we are. 🙂 No.

PAD – DP Challenge : Mind The Gap

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“This week’s Mind the Gap: How do you prefer to read, with an eReader like a Kindle or Nook, or with an old school paperback in hand?”

Ever since I laid my hands on my first tablet, which was my first generation iPad from Apple I’ve been a fan of digital reading. I’ve moved on as my preferences shifted. The iPad is still a great platform for comic books but not really so much for long-form reading of eBooks. I used to use a Nook Simple Touch but the side buttons started to fail and it lacked the backlight that I like to have at night when I read so I don’t have to upset Scott with stray lights so I can read. I’ve since switched to a Nook HD, using the money I got as a gift last Christmas. I have to admit that the Nook HD is a wonderful device for reading. I don’t really use the Nook service from B&N because I have all the books I want to read as not-online ePub files, and B&N doesn’t let you put your own files in their system so I load everything into the MicroSD card and then open the books from that memory device instead, all on the Nook HD. The key for me is the weight. The iPad is just too heavy to keep a hold of for an extended period of time. I thought I would be up for the iPad Mini, but my original idea that I could be fine using my iPad 3 with its Retina display and be okay with an iPad Mini which doesn’t have Retina turned out to be the stumbling block for me. The Nook HD has a Retina-like display and is only a few percent heavier than the iPad Mini.

I recently had a bit of irritation about books. I wanted to read “A Memory Of Light” by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson and TOR only released the book as a hardcover. I understand why they did that, but I didn’t like it. I want to read books on my Nook HD and I don’t appreciate being meaninglessly inconvenienced just to satisfy the publishers designs. So I just dealt with it and hauled around the giant block of wood until I was done reading it. I do not like big books like that, they are heavy, bulky, and their bindings always take a beating when I’m reading and I just don’t know why. I’m not mean to books, but almost invariably they will become frayed or damaged. None of that happens on my Nook HD. I can carry it easily anywhere I like, it keeps my place, I can use highlighting and set bookmarks and I don’t have to haul around a heavy chunk of wood to do it. I think what upsets me most about the last Wheel Of Time book is that it was such a meaningless bit of inconvenience. That book started out being on a word processor. It started life as a digital file, then it was printed and bound and sold. So, the wood came out first, but in reality they could have if they really wanted to just dress the file that went to the printer up as an ePub and sold that instead. But no, they insisted that the wood beat the eBook. I don’t think the eBook will even go on sale until April, while the wood has been out since January. It pays honor and respect to wood, but irritates the consumer. I vowed that after Wheel of Time I wouldn’t read another book that wasn’t available as an eBook edition. I don’t need pictures or any of the surrounding miscellany, just give me the text. I’ll set my own font and font size and margins and page backgrounds.

So, onwards and upwards with eBooks. It shouldn’t really concern B&N, as I do enjoy reading my Nook HD there and it’s at my local B&N where I would go to talk to people who know books about books. The only thing I wouldn’t do is buy wood from them any longer. I would still buy books though. eBooks. Sometimes people mention that libraries can do eBooks, but that’s a joke. Sure, a library might have eBook editions available for lending, but they only have two “files” to lend out and a waiting list that is months if not years long. So, for the libraries I can wait until they get around to making sense. eBook editions for lending might as well be infinite, it’s not like the files themselves take any actual resources at all – just organized electrons is all. So, much like books themselves, at first they are valuable and rare, but over time the eBook editions will be just as common as their woody counterparts and lending them out through libraries will end up being just as plentiful and easy. Or at least so we can hope. In the meantime I can buy what I want and have the benefit of not having to haul around a big heavy chunk of wood.

PAD 2/19/2013 – Nightmares

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Describe the last nightmare you remember having. What do you think it meant?

I journal my life, and my dreams in my Day One app. This morning I recorded this, while it’s not a nightmare per se, it is rather upsetting:

I dreamt of an else world that didn’t have milk. Or rather they had cows but due to a mean trick of nature the cows didn’t produce any milkfat. There was a visitor with me from that place and we were talking about food and they had never had milk or cream or anything made with that ingredient. I have watched too much Fringe. 🙂

It would be the way, that an upsetting dream would involve butter, cheese, ice cream. The general take-away from this is that if ever I became lactose intolerant I would rather live with the agony than give up any milk product at all. Such a totally Cancerian thing too, I don’t think you could walk any distance with a Cancerian before food came up as a topic of conversation.

No milkfat, so…. Boo? Yes. Boo! Nightmare? Eh. Not so much. But this is as dark as my dreams get. 🙂

PAD 2/17/2013 – Mentor Me

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Have you ever had a mentor? What was the greatest lesson you learned from him or her?

I’ve never really had the benefit of having a mentor. Nothing directly that way anyhow. The closest I’ve ever gotten was during college when I felt a glimmer of it in some after-class discussions with professors that I was taking classes with. It never really amounted to much because that sort of thing felt awkward, dwelling too long and feeling that you’re a pest is just too much to bear so you cut it off quick and don’t repeat it.

At work there is some talk from time to time about mentorship but it strikes me quite along the same lines as leadership. You can’t help but walk five feet before you collide with a leadership this or a leadership that. So much attention paid to leadership and I laugh that there is no attention paid to followership. Why train leaders and ignore the followers? Seems unfair to me.

But still, I don’t see mentorship to be all that relevant. Perhaps it’s a definition issue. I see mentorship to be a little sidelong curious, two people who are relating a little too closely, a relationship that is suspiciously intimate and exclusive. Perhaps I suspect people of being more filthy than they might be, but I can’t help but think that there might be something more to the mentoring experience than just intensely training someone intimately. I guess I can’t separate the lecher from the roman senator enough to see mentorship for anything more than it being at best, suspicious and at worse, scandalous.

PAD 1/18/2013 – Home, Soil, Rain – Gardening!

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“Write down the first words that comes to mind when we say . . .

. . . home.

. . . soil.

. . . rain.

Use those words in the title of your post.”

This is easy. The word is gardening. We cleared out a plot of land between the end of the walkway next to our garage and the beginning of the established garden to create a vegetable garden. We’re in our third year of working on this little plot of land and we’ve made some improvements. One of the most notable is the chickenwire fence we put up to keep the wildlife from raiding our garden. Last year all our plants were safe, but we had too many and so none of them worked well. This coming year we’ll likely do half of what we did last time and maybe we’ll be more successful. Of course, all this is predicated on the notion that the climate will work with us. It used to be that you could be sure that there wouldn’t be any frosts by Memorial Day but these days with the wild variability in the weather I don’t know if that old standby will be as reliable as it once was. Last year a surprise freak frost/freeze devastated Michigan farmers. I can only hope this year we don’t have a reprise of that again.

Explaining Things Simply — The Lone Sysadmin

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Explaining Things Simply — The Lone Sysadmin.

I read this article and started to really think about why it is that I find myself saying over and over again that Hell is Other People. I’ve faced this pressure in my professional life, the clamor to “write simpler” ends up being a 22 caliber bullet that ends up ricocheting around inside my head. The requirements for communication are straightforward, you need a common language with a common syntax, grammar and vocabulary. In my experience with IT the biggest tripping point is that vocabulary trap at the end.

When you are in IT, sometimes you have no choice but to write in a complicated fashion because the core issue is a complicated one. Usually there is fiscal risk, sometimes legal risk, sometimes even personal risk. The messages are often times important and the combined issue of complicated subject matter and limited shared vocabulary really makes communication impossible. This is where I think a lot of my particular cassandras tears originate from. I can’t hope to communicate with others about technology as the spiraling reduction of complexity required to reach a successful instance of real communication ends up making the entire statement devolve into “That is bad. We should not do it. It is not safe.” which ends up being thrown in the bin because your reasons aren’t good enough – those reasons you left on the chopping room floor because they were too complicated and there was no shared vocabulary.

After reading this article, which I can appreciate, I can’t help but get the image of Morlocks and Eloi out of my head. I’ve frequently made reference to these characters in HG Wells’ ‘The Time Machine’ story, but I think the comparison is apt and getting more so as time goes on. There are people who understand, there are people who do not, and it could lead to a fundamental separation between people – maybe even enough to be something that could cause speciation. There is another aspect of this that rankles me deeply, and that is that there is a deficit in vocabulary to start with! What ever happened to self-improvement, learning, or being curious with your average person? Years ago we all could have said that understanding technology wasn’t a necessity, but in the 21st century? Can we really say that still? Everyone needs to understand technology. Even a dog-catcher needs to understand some technology to do his work! So, if there is nothing to do that doesn’t involve some sort of technology then why do people avoid it so? Why do they remain so ignorant and incurious and so unwilling to learn?

I’ve said it many times and it’s likely going to be either a part of my memoirs or my epitaph even, that when someone ceases to learn, they begin to die. If you don’t want to know, perhaps living isn’t for you. Let a machine do it, what’s the difference?

House Judiciary Chair Introduces Unconstitutional Bill To Permanently Abolish The Income Tax | ThinkProgress

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House Judiciary Chair Introduces Unconstitutional Bill To Permanently Abolish The Income Tax | ThinkProgress.

This headline was hilarious. How do these people think they will be paid? If there are no taxes then there is no money to pay these politicians for their ‘service’ to the country. Will they work for free? The bill was co-signed by 69 others, so that means that 70 congresspeople are technically willing to work for free. So, since each one of them earns roughly $174,000 a year (not bad for being worthless schmucks) then that means if they all worked for free, like their bill would eventually end up making them, that’s roughly $12 million dollars a year right there! We could just take that money and fund PBS or maybe find some nice things to do with that money at the EPA or perhaps NASA, where it’ll make more sense to spend it.

I think we all should write a letter of thanks to every one of those cosigners to this particular bill and thank them for their brave sacrifice to work for free in Congress.