Author Archives: bluedepth

Apple Hardware Pro/Con List

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This off-the-hip list I wrote out for a coworker to use when selecting which Apple product to buy. I thought maybe other people might find it useful.

Mac Mini

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Pros – Inexpensive, quite lightweight, easy to move from place to place.

Cons – No iSight Camera, no video screen with device, must bring your own.

 

iMac

*******

Pros – Very nice screen, luggable from place to place depending on the size, even the largest isn’t too heavy. Has iSight camera. The 27″ model could also pinch hit as a TV or movie screen. The 27″ model can easily have it’s RAM upgraded, while the 21″ cannot.

Cons – Expensive. Luggable is a double-edged sword, some people don’t mind, some do.

 

MacBook

*************

Pros – Very mobile. Has iSight Camera. A good mix that allows you to attach to bigger screens if you want with an adapter.

Cons – Expensive. Upgrading RAM is a real pain and really can’t be done. Small screen size, 13″ can be an issue.

 

iPad

******

Pros – Exceptionally mobile. Has iSight Cameras in front and back. You can send the video output to an Apple TV to play out on a bigger video device. The software is totally vetted by Apple and the device is extremely safe. Cannot suffer from viruses or even any malware.

Cons – It’s a tablet, so you don’t have a physical keyboard and no mouse at all. You could attach a keyboard over Bluetooth but it can become unwieldy quickly. The limits form the App Store could eventually be stifling for some uses as you can’t download apps from any place but Apple. There is also no upgrading of the device hardware. What you buy you’ll always have.

What A Mess We Have In Zimbra

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Webmail Plus and Apple, two tastes that make for awkward WTF’ery. At work I get meeting invitations so I open up Calendar and I open the invitation up. I change which calendar it’s on over to my iCloud calendar because I do not like using Webmail Plus and if I can avoid it, I will. But when I do that single action it apparently sends meeting cancellation notices to everyone else who is invited to the meeting! So the hilarity ensues. Then I get emails from everyone confused as to whether or not the meeting is on, or not.

So, it’s an incompatibility between Webmail Plus and Apple’s Calendar application. What a shocker. The workaround? Just ignore the invitations from Webmail Plus and bang in the details manually using my keyboard. It’s low-brow, but alas, it’s what must be done.

I find it hilarious that doing this sends out a cancellation to everyone else, even though the meeting wasn’t organized by me. Seems to be a bug, but since I just laugh at Webmail Plus and it’s issues, I just shrug and move on. Zimbra. Hah. Whatever.

The One (Really Easy) Persuasion Technique Everyone Should Know — PsyBlog

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The One (Really Easy) Persuasion Technique Everyone Should Know — PsyBlog.

I love methods of persuasion. It was a huge part of a lot of the courses I took when I was getting my bachelors. Most of what makes persuasion like this possible is just how absolutely loose and floppy human willpower really is. There are so many ways to bend people to your will it’s amazing any of us even have a will to call our own. There is a part of this that is similar, in that people in certain situations feel obligated to continue a social interaction even if it’s unpleasant because people don’t usually want to be seen as rude. This is ingrained in us for many years. This is the exact thing that telemarketers and fast-talking salespeople depend on to get what they want. They expect that people will continue an interaction if you deny them a closure and they’ll endure your sales pitch or your fast-talk until you are finished. Years ago I felt this very force keeping me from simply hanging up the phone on a telemarketer. I will say that when I pulled the phone off from my ear and looked at the handset I could hear the tinny little voice still trying to deliver the fast-talk. I just shrugged and hung up the phone. It felt oddly wonderful and liberating all at once. Ever since then I’ve had no problem in terminating unwanted communications. It was if a seal was broken, now I no longer feel beholden to continue even face-to-face communications if I do not want to, I just turn and walk away. Once you make that first liberating break, it’s far easier.

So, with this little article, you might be better armed to understand when someone is trying to bend you to their will. You can either go with it or you can do the unexpected and refuse, or you can just walk away. It’s been my experience that people need you more than you need them, so it’s not like you are going to endanger future exchanges. Plus if you terminate communications with someone and they know you are able to do so, they’ll likely tread more carefully next time.

Bow Ties Are Cool

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The Eleventh Doctor, Matt Smith, singlehandedly changed fashion by suggesting that many of the things the Doctor wears are cool. Fezes are cool, Tweed is cool, but most specifically, bow ties are cool.

So for Christmas I got a bow tie, along with a few other Doctor Who related gifts and they were all perfect. Then I discovered that I really liked wearing the ties and was in desperate need for a guide to see how to tie a bow tie properly. It isn’t difficult and this video really helped:

So now, when I can put aside a little bit of money my next little shopping trip is to get some more bow ties. The one I have is great with either a white or black shirt, but I have other shirts which I think bow ties could really compliment and I’d like to wear more of them. I think I look good in them, the Eleventh Doctor supports me, and I love confusing people and being all obstinately anachronistic.

PAD 2/13/13 – Shoulda Woulda Coulda

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“Tell us about something you know you should do . . . but don’t.”

Generally I don’t think I’ve allowed such a conflict to build up in my life. Things that one should do, at least for me, usually find their way to being done eventually. This is the entryway to guilt and regret and those two feelings, along with fear in general and hate specifically are admittedly worthless and stupid. If you identify things you should do, then you admit to not living your authentic life and then you have to think about why you don’t do those things. Most of what people think they should do is based on the expectations they have from other people. That it’s another’s will that is imposed on you to make you feel like somehow you are missing out or you are bad for behaving a certain way, doing or not doing a certain thing. I’ve wandered through that dark valley in the past and it didn’t do anything for me but leave me very sad and very upset with myself for allowing myself to be led so easily. I find the notion of should to be really bound up with external measures of my behavior and as such, I really reject those. Anyone who knows me knows that I can and often do say unexpected things and I sometimes say things that are blunt and brutally honest because they have to be said. Life isn’t worth living if you don’t have passion for it and if you spend your time fretting over questions of should, then you are spending too much of your time considering those external measures of your behavior and you are not living an authentic life. You are living a mime life based on the whims and guesswork of people who only like to watch you dance to their strings. They don’t care for you, not really, so should is stupid.

Do what you will and be happy in it. Hell is other people.

Blog Ads

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I noticed this in the PAD stream that caught my attention. I regularly get a stream of spam comments and other social-network based debris from so-called SEO experts all angling to help me monetize my blog by adding advertisements.

Reading this got me to chuckling and thinking about what it means for me to try to do such a thing with my blog. Ads online are stupid, they don’t go anywhere or do anything. They are the visual noise that surrounds the content you are after and online there are so many great ways to avoid the entire thing. On blogs with ads, you can just pick up the RSS feed and then see the content headlines without the noise. You may be exposed to ads if you click further in, but at least you can control it. Beyond blogs, like when it comes to TV, the smart way is to DVR everything and then just use the fast forward button to skip past advertisements. Hour long TV programs turn out to be only a little longer than half an hour that way. You skip the noise and get right to the content.

If I use a DVR and skip ads on TV, then why would I put ads on my blog? Why would I add noise to what admittedly already is the mental noise of my blogging? So no, there won’t ever be ads here – and I don’t have to buy in to a ad-free add-on since I host my own blog. Something for which I should have done a very long time ago.

PAD 1/17/2013 Cucumbers in Crisis

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“Honestly evaluate the way you respond to crisis situations. Are you happy with the way you react?”

My reaction to crisis is inverted. Small, seemingly insignificant things cause me great upset where large sweeping catastrophes bring out my calm. It’s really quite the opposite as one would expect. There is a difference between a crisis and some sort of problem that I can’t solve because I can’t see the entire problem or I suspect that someone else may be to blame. In that situation my reactions are really the things I would like to change. When I’m exposed to things that irritate me everything starts to itch. The little itches on my skin become much more upsetting and I end up fidgeting and scratching a lot. Mostly though that’s got more to do with pressure than it does crisis situations. When there is something I can’t control and it’s bearing down on me, like a tornado or fire for example my reactions are not those of panic and running around without a plan but calm collected logic. I’m good in crisis situations as long as I can manage the pressure. If there is external pressure, perhaps things would turn out differently but I can only go on what I have experienced so far and I don’t leap to panic, at least not yet.

PAD 1/23/13 – Castaway Ham Sandwiches

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“Read the story of Richard Parker and Tom Dudley. Is what Dudley did defensible? What would you have done?”

What happens when you are adrift at sea and start to go hungry? Everything you see becomes a ham sandwich – even your friends. These two men could have been brothers and not just friends and it wouldn’t have changed anything. When human beings are starving there are parts of yourself you never thought that existed that over time and with enough raw hunger come out to play. You’ll think things and do things that you would swear up and down you would never even dream about in real life, when you aren’t that hungry.

So is it a punishable offense? It’s the same question that the Donner party had to answer, or the Chilean Soccer team. So many situations where people were stranded, starving, and ended up turning on each other for food. Sure, there is wrong there, but it’s a clichéd maxim that humanity is really just a ham sandwich away from anarchy and a few more from outright cannibalism. Can you punish men for behaving in this fashion? One could argue that if you are hungry enough, your instinct to survive will overcome everything else and you will survive no matter what you have to do.

Stories like this inspire me to only accept risky situations like these men did if and only if I am wearing a bulky jacket full of jerky and hidden bottles of water. Yes, it probably wouldn’t have saved poor Richard Parker, even if he did have a jacket full of jerky, but it would be something. The real idea is to never get yourself worked into those particular situations, safe living, good living. Not eating your friends sort of living.

So I would say that Dudley is not guilty of a crime and the defense would be temporary insanity brought on by extreme hunger.

PAD 1/14/2013 – Headlines

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“Head to your favorite online news source. Pick an article with a headline that grabs you. Now, write a short story based on the article. “

This article grabbed my attention and would not let it go. The story is about a dolphin that ended up in the Gowanus Canal in New York City. There really isn’t any story to write about this, nothing that will leave anyone feeling good about humanity. Look at what we have wrought. Wildlife wandered into a canal so awful, so toxic, so disgusting that it died of exposure to us. I would argue that the canal represents New York City quite well, anyone who has read my blog, especially my LiveJournal when I was there knows my opinion on New York City is poor at best. That the waters of the Gowanus Canal can kill just cinches it. Everyone thinks that New York City is the biggest and best city in the world, but I have never liked it. Too many people, too filthy, too disgusting, too dangerous. Some think that this tale of the Gowanus Canal is just one small little part and that the city has more to offer, that you can just whitewash over this awfulness by looking elsewhere – perhaps the arts maybe. The city is dangerous to more than just wildlife!

So what to write about New York City. The waters are toxic, the streets are lethal, and this is all before we add in all the sick twisted terrible humans which just add to this murk of awfulness. So, here’s a little story.

Years ago the people of upstate New York laughed amongst themselves that if everyone northwest of the Hudson River would just agree and all flush their toilets with uncanny synchrony that we could finally blow New York City into the Atlantic. After reading news story after news story about all the corruption, not just in the people, but deeply embedded in the very land itself it became clear that this upstaters fantasy really might need to come true. So everyone from Watertown to Syracuse and all the way over to Buffalo all agreed that they would pick the perfect day, a sunny day filled with hope and wonder and they would all march into their bathrooms and at the very stroke of midnight everyone in New York State would flush their toilets all at the same time and blow the cancer of New York City into the sea. Much like Atlantis, except riddled with toxins and horrors beyond understanding, the mad city of New York sank beneath the waves, never to be seen or heard from again.

If you love New York City, I invite you to saunter along barefoot all the way to Gowanus Canal and have yourself a bath. Good luck with that.

SQL Tattletale

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While at work I had an irritation with my SQL Server database. My coworkers give me data to load and without fail I have to create new tables to accept the data that they give me. The data is all headed somewhere and that somewhere always has many tables and in each of those tables many columns. The need I have is for the names of those columns, their data types, how long they are, and what their collations are. I don’t really have any of that information written down and for the longest time I’ve been schlepping to sp_help ‘table name’ to find the answers and it’s been a right mess. The data is there, but it’s annoying as sp_help gives me way too much information and there is no way to trim it back. So, I created a new stored procedure and I named it “tattle”, here it is in T-SQL:

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[tattle]
@MYARG char(255)
AS
SELECT COLUMN_NAME,DATA_TYPE,CHARACTER_MAXIMUM_LENGTH,COLLATION_NAME FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS WHERE TABLE_NAME=@MYARG
GO

I’m quite proud of what I accomplished and the output is EXACTLY what I need when I need it. To run it I just type in tattle ‘table’ and it spits out just what I am after.

It’s the little victories you have to savor. 🙂