Category Archives: Blog

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.

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.