Category Archives: Blog

PAD 5/5/2013 – The Glass

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Is the glass half-full, or half-empty?

The glass is half-full, and there should always be more where that came from in the refrigerator.

This of course runs against what I believe when I’m beset by people. Sartre said that “Hell is Other People” and along those lines I understand what he meant by that. When I’m working with other people, by and large the glass is half-empty, it’s got a little hole drilled in it so it’s actually a dribble glass and it was cast improperly so there are parts of the cup that are too thick and other parts that are too thin and if you touch it wrong the entire glass can fall apart like a super-fragile Christmas ornament.

Mostly I feel the “half-empty” because, in a very generalized way, people are glorious disappointments. They are frail, they fail, they sometimes embrace ignorance and apathy and sometimes they do things that boggle common sense. Feeling this pessimism doesn’t really get me down, as people don’t really get me down because I have accepted long ago that how I see the world and how I act in it is uniquely mine and I’ve made peace that expecting anyone else to live the way I do is the height of folly. So I can be a half-glass full guy in a world full of glass-half-empties. I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is to not let the turkeys get you down. In that regard, it’s good to have your own set of glasses that you keep to yourself.

PAD 3/18/2013 – Impossibility

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“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – the White Queen, Alice in Wonderland.

What are the six impossible things you believe in? (If you can only manage one or two, that’s also okay.)

I have lived too long and witnessed too much inexplicability to not believe in astrology, Tarot cartomancy, and the subtle presence of magic in our world. It’s always a soft arrival too, if you try to force it or put it under a spotlight it evaporates as if it was never there. I don’t think that any of it will ever be in any way “explainable” by science. These things really can only be apprehended by faith. When I write of faith, I don’t really mean religion. I’ve always found religion to be stultifying and so I try to live without it as much as I can. The faith for these impossible things has been borne out by event after event where upon reflection the accuracy of all of it, any of it, is utterly remarkable.

I even run into it in my workplace. I have lost count of the number of times I have received notices from my coworkers that the systems that I support have failed them. When I walk in, even just walking by, the problems appear to evaporate. It’s just my presence that seems to do it and after a while you start to notice this remarkable phenomena and after a while I got to thinking that one possible explanation is that my office is beset by gremlins, brownies, manitou, or domovoi, or they are all there and acting in collusion with each other. I fancy that my presence scares them off and so the technical systems that I support, when I use them, work perfectly fine for me pretty much all the time, but when my coworkers try to use them, it’s a crapshoot for them. Until I appear, and then it’s back to being perfectly fine. I suppose there might be a more rational explanation about why this is, perhaps something to do with my bioelectric field or something subtle and clever and measurable like that – but I prefer to live in a world where everything is slightly tinted by the mayhap of the hidden world of magic. I select to live with a world that is enriched by tiny mysteries, because living in a world where everything is a field, particle, or wave is just too banal and bankrupt for my ability to endure such a stark emptiness. I think, for me, it comes down to the hidden pleasure that comes from the doubt that we may all live in a world more complicated and wonderful than we can ever possibly know and more complicated and wonderful than we will *ever* be able to know. I find value in that little layer of maybe that hides right underneath the surface of our mundane world. Skeptics and debunkers would claim that all of this is so much fantasy and magical thinking and that it doesn’t serve any purpose other than to encourage ignorance and the folly of a false make-believe world. In response to them, I embrace the bunkum. If you can’t prove it really isn’t there, then what is the harm of belief? Wouldn’t it be a right hilarity that the world is exactly the way I think it is, a mechanical universe with a touch of mystery overlaid on top of it. You could swap out magic with God and then Voltaires comment that there is no proof for God doesn’t mean you shouldn’t believe in him, on the off chance that he does really exist. Perhaps magic really does exist.

Impossible things are important.

PAD 3/19/2013 – Menagerie

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Do you have animals in your life? If yes, what do they mean to you? If no, why have you opted not to?

I have two felines as part of my family that I consider to be on-par with having a child, which I will never have. There are two of them, two boys. The oldest is a nearly purebred Abyssinian and the other is a purebreed Ocicat. They are both furry bundles of love and there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for them. Thankfully mostly I serve as a handy lap and a petting machine, but I enjoy it as much as they do so it works out for the best.

I couldn’t imagine life without some sort of animal companion. Animals provide complete unconditional love and there is no cleverness, no crafting, no hidden agendas with animals. They love you completely and unreservedly. In a lot of ways I actually prefer the companionship of animals to that of people, not in every case of course, but in general animals are better people than people are people.

PAD 5/7/2013 – Key Takeaway

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Give your newer sisters and brothers-in-WordPress one piece of advice based on your experiences blogging.

If you’re a new blogger, what’s one question you’d like to ask other bloggers?

The best advice I can give is to be honest but have control over what you say. Honesty is the best policy, as the old adage is fond of saying and it keeps blogging simple as you don’t need to remember any lies you’ve written in order to keep your blog internally consistent. However, honesty has it’s limits, and that has more to do with sharing and privacy. Depending on why you blog, sometimes you may find yourself wanting to write about something private. I think that assigning posts passwords is a great feature to WordPress and makes sharing securable.

Some things are worth talking about, writing about. Some things you share aren’t really meant for your coworkers of your employer and then the best policy here is to slap a password on the posts and keep them private from wandering eyes.

There are a lot of great reasons too, to blog independently from WordPress.com. Having control over your content, not having to worry about quotas or paying for extra services all make self-hosting with WordPress.org really worth it in the long run, especially with the right hosting provider. I’ve found a lot of the plugins that enrich the self-hosted option of WordPress.org makes the product really shine. Here are some things to look into if you think blogging may be for you:

1. Fixing your .htaccess file on your blog. This can be configured to restrict your blog from foreign browsers. I’ve decided to ban entire countries from reading my blog mostly because I don’t agree with their politics, and in the case of China, I’ve gotten quite tired of comment spam. By limiting incoming traffic from browsers using this file, you can preclude them from ever being a problem. Just because the Internet is global doesn’t mean that you should feel forced to respect that globality.

2. Blacklist & IP Filter – These two plugins help identify unwanted IP addresses that are unwanted on your blog and the plugin IP Filter helps you block those with more configurability than you can get with .htaccess.

3. Akismet and Jetpack really help protect and extend your blog. Every blog I host has these two plugins and once you get them configured properly they add so many wonderful features to your blog that it’s difficult to imagine using the blogs without them.

4. PhotoDropper – This plugin makes searching for and inserting pictures in your blog posts a cakewalk. It takes care of searching for the terms you want, only shows you Creative Commons licensed imagery so you don’t accidentally run afoul of image copyright holders and automatically includes credit lines to your posts to help respect the people who are sharing the imagery you are using on your blog. It’s about as turnkey as I’ve been able to find when it comes to finding and crediting blog pictures that I use to enrich my blog posts.

Beyond plugins it’s also worth it to mention AgileTortiose’s iOS app Drafts. This app makes writing anything, journal entires, emails, and blog posts a snap. You can update on any connected device until you are ready and the destination selector feature makes pushing your updates out to various service a snap. I journal with DayOne and I post to WordPress using Poster. Drafts has options for these other apps and a dizzying array of more just for the tapping.

Use Drafts, Dumbass!

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Turns out blogging with the iPhone has a hidden trap. Turn the phone to landscape orientation and you run the risk of accidentally sending your blog post and then you have to mop up in the WordPress app. Duuuur.

Then you remember you have Drafts app and smack your forehead with how dumb you were in not using it in the first place!

Fixed that… 😉

PAD 4/13/2013 – Charitable

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PAD 4/13/2013

Daily Prompt: Charitable
by michelle w.
You’ve inherited $5 million, with instructions that you must give it all away — but you can choose any organizations you like to be the beneficiaries. Where does the money go?

The money would not go to any charitable organization. I find the notion of charitable organizations to be inherently wasteful with overhead. Everyone gets a cut of the money and when the funds get to the people with the need, after everyone has their piece of the action there isn’t much left. I’ve thought of this before, and the best thing I can think of is to better lives and keep them that way with an eye to permanence. To that end, the best destination for money like this is to create trusts for people, lock the principal money off and only allow those whom I bestow with the benefits access to the interest earned from the principal fund. This as a permanent thing wouldn’t be wise either, so I would put a 30 year timing lock on the principal, after 30 years the entire principal becomes available to the beneficiary, hopefully by then they have enough wisdom to not squander it.

Plus a construct like this helps fend off the law of found money. If all you get is a constant trickle then the law may not notice you and you likely won’t suffer for the gift. That’s the double-edged sword of giving. The law of found money punishes everyone.

PAD 4/10/2013 – Imperfection

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PAD 4/10/2013

Daily Prompt: Imperfection
by michelle w.
Imperfections — in things, in people, in places — add character to life. Tell us about an imperfection that you cherish.

Imperfections abound. I can’t help but wax philosophical as it was the first thing to come to mind when I saw this particular prompt. Which imperfection do I find the most valuable? Our imperfect understanding of the Universe. Yes, as I said, it’s huge and bold and monumental. If we knew exactly how the Wizard did what he did behind the curtain would life be as rich as is it for us now? Not knowing everything keeps room for the mysteries alive. There are so many little mysteries that would wither and die if we had the keys to the Grand Unified Theory. If we could explain everything then there would be no room for fancy and imagination. Sometimes I think that there really isn’t a Grand Unified Theory, because the Universe loathes certainty. If there is no room for gnomes, dwarves, manitou, brownies, or fairies then there is no room for beauty and who would want to live in a world like that? I suppose it’s the romantic part of me that rejects the notion of the Universe as a marvelously complicated clockwork. If we could pin down a Grand Unified Theory then we could exorcise randomness from everything. How agonizingly banal would it be when we had a rule that fit every single observation perfectly? Sometimes I think that if there is a God, he’s spending his time keeping us guessing because that’s how he expresses his love for us. Keeping us on our toes, always guessing, always learning, always marveling at the mysteries that lay before us, in a way, our imperfect understanding is the fertile soil of the true beauty we are seeking. A wild and wonderful world where the rules are just beyond our grasp constantly challenges and enjoins us to engage with it. That striving for the Grand Unified Theory is actually our goal, not actually attaining it, but pursuing it. Endlessly.

It’s important for it to be this way, where else could the fairies go if it wasn’t?

PAD 3/13/2013 – “I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue!”

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PAD 3/13/2013 – Silver Screen

Take a quote from your favorite movie — there’s the title of your post. Now, write!

“I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue!”

Without a doubt my favorite movie of all time is Airplane. Anyone who knows me really should watch and learn because that movie is one of the best and funniest movies that has ever been made. There are so many kinds of comedy expressed in that movie that it makes me giggle uncontrollably even just recalling some of them. The quote from Lloyd Bridges, playing McCroskey is just one of many, but it’s one of the most useful especially for me at work. There are times when work tries me so much that the escalating substance abuse lines that McCroskey says during the movie accurately reflect much of my emotional state of disbelief that I endure while at work. Whenever I’m feeling down, or when happiness just seems a little out of reach I’ll play this movie for myself and I always feel so much better afterwards.

I wrote before about how blogging is kind of like therapy. So are the movies, especially this movie. The ability to laugh is essential and laughter is much like a hug from a loved one. To quote one of the best lines from one of my favorite TV series, which is Pushing Daisies, a hug is like an emotional heimlich maneuver. It grabs you and helps you eject awful feelings and makes life better. Laughing while hugging? Why, yes! Better than any drug!

PAD 4/4/2013 – The Transporter

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Tell us about a sensation — a taste, a smell, a piece of music — that transports you back to childhood.

I’ve written about nostalgia before. The scent of WD-40 enables me to recall my very early life, when I was about five years old. The scent of this product is indelibly linked with my maternal grandfather and every time I catch it’s scent a part of my consciousness returns back to when I was five, sitting in my grandfathers lap playing with his miniature train set that was set up in his root cellar. It’s quite difficult for me to access those memories without WD-40, so it’s become a part of a ritual when I use WD-40. I always find time when I have to use WD-40 to dwell on the unlocked memories and in a way, bring my long passed on grandfather back to me now. In many ways, the people that we loved and lost are always with us, in this limited way. I suppose in one way of considering it, it’s through WD-40 that my grandfather has a rough semblance of immortality, at least in my consciousness.

There are also other strong memories, but they are linked to places and mundane situations by exceptional events. I remember, for example, exactly where I was and what I was feeling and seeing when the Challenger accident occurred as well as when the 9/11/2001 event occurred. They are unremarkable memories only made important because of their bound events keeping them “alive” in my memory. Not really worth writing about, at least not in the context of WD-40 and my grandfather.

PAD 4/16/2013 – Million Dollar Question

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Why do you blog?

I enjoy blogging because it provides me a way to share more, which has become after a manner of speaking, somewhat of a therapy for me. I can express thoughts and feelings and that’s the primary thing, that they are shared actually is quite incidental. If I have readers, then I have readers and if not, that’s just as acceptable to me. I feel like these posts are letters that I write, and the writing itself helps me explore my feelings and in some cases helps me vent my frustrations, and then I leave the open letters just lying around for others to gander at if they so desire. Before the advent of social networking I used to blog on LiveJournal and there was a vibrant community and I had friends there that would comment on my blog posts. Alas, time and conditions change and LiveJournal is no longer appropriate for me nor is it a place that I feel safe to share my thoughts or feelings. WordPress, a much better platform for writing actually wasn’t such a great move because the community on WordPress is absent. I got to wondering why I wasn’t getting anything but spam comments on my WordPress blog and it struck me that people have organically decided to move their commenting to the social networks of Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. That’s where all the comments are to my WordPress blog posts. Twitter is dead to me, I pretty much just link dump there. Facebook is only slightly more useful and I haven’t posted on Google Plus without the aid of a “oh yeah, hit the Google Plus option…” in about a year.

It’s actually quite fine because comments actually aren’t why I blog. Over time I came to understand that on some social networking systems the only people who I would find willing to engage with me were people who were trolls – making obtuse obnoxious comments just to get a rise out of me. That’s when I learned that in some situations the best retort to a trollish comment is to not make one at all. So the absence of comments actually became a blessed silence. Trolls ruined it for everyone, and once you go without that sort of engagement, the experience does actually improve.

There are things that I write that aren’t meant for open-letter-on-the-table distribution. Those I put passwords on and only hand that password out to people whom I value enough to trust with everything, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Not to say that if I don’t share the password with someone means I don’t value them as much as the others, it’s just that I write some things that I feel I should protect the people who do not have the password from having to be exposed to. Usually the password protected posts are written in times of distress, and it’s better this way for everyone – those who know and those who do not.

In general the platform on which I blog, which used to be WordPress.com and now is WordPress.org is a tale all to itself. I used to make heavy use of WordPress.com until I ran afoul of one of their well-meaning automatic protection systems that ended up accidentally censoring one of my blogs. It was a misunderstanding and a poorly designed automatic system that led to the falling out, but I no longer trust WordPress.com with my blog. In many ways, the shift to WordPress.org, self-hosted, became more important to me in terms of control and liberty to write what I truly think and feel. I am no longer beholden to a company like Automattic with risking my thoughts and feelings, instead, it’s all on my own recognizance. I thank Automattic for contributing to WordPress.org, and for me it’s the perfect combination of power and liberty.

So in a way, all these posts amount to cheap therapy. One of the added values is that I won’t fall in love with my therapist. In some ways, therapy this way is ideal. I can be brutally honest with an absence of someone than I ever could if there really was someone there playing that role. If nothing more, therapy with an absent therapist is wholly more hygienic and extremely more convenient. As a value added extra, these blog posts also get added to my Day One Journal, so at the end of my life, I won’t have to worry about encroaching Alzheimers or senility robbing me of my memories, all the very best will be written down. For someone who will die childless, this is my bid for some form of immortality.