Discovered a neat new site and I sent invites out to everyone who I thought initially might find it useful. The site is called Cloze and it combines email and social networking in one view. There are free apps for iPhone and iPad as well. So if you got some email from me and you weren’t expecting it, now you know who it was from. I had to use my work email because many of the addressees on the mail were work contacts and they wouldn’t know who I am if I used my gmail account.
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:
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.
“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.
“Describe your relationship with your phone. Is it your lifeline, a buzzing nuisance, or something in between?”
I’ve never understood why people exclaim that their mobile phone is some sort of yoke or control collar that was tied to them. You don’t have to attend to it, even if your company pays for the device. Then there are people who think of mobile phones as possible risks to their privacy. For those who are that paranoid I often get to laughing, “You really think that anything you are fretting about is a risk?” You can’t conduct business without leaving a huge paper trail behind you. Instead of fearing all of that, I say that people should revel in it, nay, wallow in it. What are you protecting?
For me my iPhone is an indispensable intellectual swiss army knife. I use it for many things, work, personal, pleasure, business, you name it. It’s my camera, the loom of my social network and the device where I play Letterpress. I am addicted to it, and I am perfectly fine with the notion of being addicted to a device. I’m addicted to alcohol so what the hell am I protecting? Some image of myself that never existed? What I can’t understand is why more people don’t see the value as I do.
My iPhone is still a phone, and that I suppose will always be true but the device has become much more than just a plain old telephone. Voice is full of noise, errors… problems. English demands so much and then the immediacy and interruptibility of vocal communications just add to the pile of unpleasantness. When you get a call it’s a moment transfixed and pinned to the ground. Someone is imposing their will upon yours, taking up your time, ignoring your flow and your tasks and imposing theirs on top as if the previous did not matter. This isn’t so much a problem with an iPhone as it is a gripe I’ve harbored for a very long time about the more general telephone technology that we all use. Telephones are a lot like walk-up service at work. Knocking on my door, ringing my phone, either of those demands that I entertain a very expensive intellectual interrupt so that I can put whatever it is that I’m working on into a wait-state so that I can switch mental contexts and engage in either a face to face conversation or a telephone conversation.
Just the presence of this technology alone is bothersome, but the language brings even more awkwardness. There is no chance to plan and consider what you are about to write, no opportunities, really, to proofread and revise before sending. The pressure of speech, body language, and freudian (jungian?) slips abound. English, and the culture that surrounds it like a cloud demands a proper greeting, a discussion with turns, and a proper closing. That’s how you are supposed to conduct yourself without seeming rude, insolent, or impertinent. All of this would be fine if it wasn’t for the fact that normal human beings are fleshy water-filled bags of error just waiting to pounce. Modern discourse doesn’t value listening so people tend to talk at each other instead of talking to each other. You can’t get a word in edgewise and because you value the other person you are talking to, you let them just trample on. This creates a self-reinforcing reward for future verbal tramplings. After a few conversations it’s not really pleasurable any longer, it’s a battle. Then there is the proper closings. You don’t want to seem cold or rude so you attempt to close the conversation with some sort of closure marker like “thank you” and sometimes these events don’t actually take and you end up sending multiple passes of closure invitations to the other side. You go from feeling bad about being curt and rude to feeling bad about appearing to be mentally defective.
I have said in the past, and I will say time and time again that text beats voice all the time. Especially for technologically-tied workers like myself. When I am at work, or engaged in any activity really, I often times find myself within a flow. It’s texting and iMessage and IM’ing and email where you can strike a new playing field. Text is planned and groomed, opening and closing control symbols are cliché and common as dirt, so they aren’t a problem, and the way these messages are propagated does not necessarily break flow. In many ways, these technologies are more polite forms of communication. “I need your attention, but it isn’t life-or-death and so, since I value your time, energy, and flow I will send a queue’able message that you may defer until you are ready to accept it.” and I have said time and time again that text communication is much more respectful and gentile than face to face communications or telephone communications.
What about family calls? Yes, this is a point at which all of my arguments fly right out the window. Nothing, not even flow is more important than your family, so for that there will always be a need for telephone technology in the world. I would argue that actually FaceTime technology, which is video-augmented telephone calls are superior to plain-old-telephone-calls because there is so much more there. You see the other person, something that usually takes airfare or a long car ride to accomplish. The level of information in a FaceTime conversation I would argue is far higher than in a basic telephone conversation – you can see body language, facial expressions, so much more than can be carried by voice alone.
At least for me, my family can FaceTime call me, or call me on the phone. Everyone else really should use some text infrastructure. The only part where any of this is flexible is who you consider family? Friends and family? I draw the line at coworkers and professional contacts. If you aren’t my friend outside of work, keep your phone calls – send me an email or a text.
There is an iOS game that I’ve heard before and didn’t think anything of until I downloaded it and started to play. The game is called Letterpress and it’s incredibly addicting. Each game is composed of 25 english letters in a 5×5 grid and the person who starts the game with another player is the first to go. You can select words from these 25 characters, one letter at a time and as you play the letters they are marked with your color. Your color is blue and your opponents color is red. When you use a letter the colors start out faint, but as you use letters and surround other claimed letters, the letters that are surrounded get a bolder color of whomever claimed them. All letters can be used over and over again and you get points for claiming a letter and stealing letters with weak colors from your opponent. Letters that are in strong colors can still be used but they don’t give you any points. The game ends when all letters have been claimed with a color and the person with the higher score wins.
The games themselves are tiny and quick and really fun. It’s like speed-yahtzee and it exercises your vocabulary as you try to construct words with or without really helpful bits like e’s and “ing”‘s. The app is freemium and so it’s free to play a few games but you can upgrade and play an unlimited number of games for $1.99. It’s the best iOS game I’ve ever played. It’s fair, it’s nicely balanced, and the quick game play is great fun. My win/loss is 50/50 and I don’t really care to win that much, but boy, do I love playing. The game is designed with touch, so it has pleasing sounds when you select and move letter tiles to make words and to remove old dead games you can swipe across the display and tap the Remove button and the game makes a really satisfying exploding noise and it actually explodes off the display. Another added extra is that Letterpress is a universal app, it works on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad equally well and your upgrade works for your Apple ID and then applies to all the different devices you have associated with that Apple ID. All in all I love it and I’m trying to get to word out to friends and family so they can start playing along.
At work I got to talking about the climate and climate change. About how all the weird weather is just going to get worse and how stupid all of it is. From Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth that nobody much cared for because they just don’t like Al Gore is where a lot of the foolishness starts. I started to riff on a theme after that, noticing on the way that a lot of rich people seem to cluster around the water’s edge. I got to laughing as I considered what a pretty good rise in sea level would do. Say goodbye to New Yack, buh-bye Florida, and then there was this: “Oh yes, we have a house in the Hamptons… we’re so filthy rich and ohh-la-la.” … “We had a house in the Hamptons, but that’s all under the sea now.” I shifted gears and thought about a anthropomorphized mother nature beating the tar out of Florida. I don’t really care much for Florida, they have citrus, rain, oppressive heat, and really adorable under-the-sea-level-but-still-dry land contours. What happens when the sea rises? Florida will be covered with sea water. It’s going to be very hard to grow any citrus after an anthropomorphized mother nature is finished SALTING THE EARTH, after all, seawater is saltwater! Anyhow, I eventually returned to climate change and got to talking about how methane is a much worse gas than carbon dioxide when it comes to the greenhouse effect and that got me talking about how American stockyard animals all fart and release Methane.
Then I remembered the little bit of trivia that marsupials don’t host the bacteria that convert sugars into methane so animals like Kangaroo just don’t fart. 
Obviously I wasn’t done, and I needed to end it on a humorous note and I pulled down some points in the column of ‘obnoxious and obscene’ and posited that we should switch out cows, pigs, and chickens for their marsupial counterparts, like kangaroos and such and that would be better for the environment. It didn’t actually stop there, I got to thinking about how one dispatches chickens – you decapitate them and then them run about until they exsanguinate and stop moving, then you pick up the dead and dress it and you’re all set. Naturally I thought about what one could do in my fictional America where we’ve switched out to Kangaroos. What if you decapitated a Kangaroo and let it bound about? Kangaroos are big, lots of blood and energy and without a brain they’d probably take off bouncing along. Here’s the good part, imagine a new reality TV series where people bet online to see which Kangaroo, once properly beheaded gets as far as it can bounding off without a brain. Make it a national lottery, pack it with ads, boy, that would be a huge moneymaker.
There will be a full moon in two days. So, you know, that’s my excuse for all of this. People who know me shouldn’t even bat an eye at any of this. 🙂
Post-a-Day 1/1/13: Where were you last night when 2012 turned into 2013? Is that where you’d wanted to be?
On New Years Eve I was with my partners family enjoying the ball-drop festivities in NYC. It’s always very entertaining seeing how Eastern Time is the most ‘official’ time zone the is, or at least it seems to be. There is an inside joke about how important New Years is for Central Time Zone people.
So with a new year comes the new year resoutionistas. Which means that the Anytime Fitness in Kalamaoo, when I get back will be mobbed to the rafters by these people. It’s not too bad that they come in, but what is bad is they don’t keep it going any longer than they do.
Your Type is
ESFJ
Extroverted Sensing Feeling Judging
Strength of the preferences %
1 11 44 44
Description of the ESFJ:
Guardians of birthdays, holidays and celebrations, ESFJs are generous entertainers. They enjoy and joyfully observe traditions and are liberal in giving, especially where custom prescribes.
All else being equal, ESFJs enjoy being in charge. They see problems clearly and delegate easily, work hard and play with zest. ESFJs, as do most SJs, bear strong allegiance to rights of seniority. They willingly provide service (which embodies life’s meaning) and expect the same from others.
ESFJs are easily wounded. And when wounded, their emotions will not be contained. They by nature “wear their hearts on their sleeves,” often exuding warmth and bonhomie, but not infrequently boiling over with the vexation of their souls. Some ESFJs channel these vibrant emotions into moving dramatic performances on stage and screen.
Strong, contradictory forces consume the ESFJ. Their sense of right and wrong wrestles with an overwhelming rescuing, ‘mothering’ drive. This sometimes results in swift, immediate action taken upon a transgressor, followed by stern reprimand; ultimately, however, the prodigal is wrested from the gallows of their folly, just as the noose tightens and all hope is lost, by the very executioner!
An ESFJ at odds with self is a remarkable sight. When a decision must be made, especially one involving the risk of conflict (abhorrent to ESFJs), there ensues an in-house wrestling match between the aforementioned black-and-white Values and the Nemesis of Discord. The contender pits self against self, once firmly deciding with the Right, then switching to Prudence to forestall hostilities, countered by unswerving Values, ad exhaustium, winner take all.
As caretakers, ESFJs sense danger all around–germs within, the elements without, unscrupulous malefactors, insidious character flaws. The world is a dangerous place, not to be trusted. Not that the ESFJ is paranoid; ‘hyper-vigilant’ would be more precise. And thus they serve excellently as protectors, outstanding in fields such as medical care and elementary education.
Okay Okay Okay, this does seem to fit me. It’s uncanny how plain I seem now that I’m just 4 letters. 🙂
Take the test yourself, maybe we can be fast friends or bitter enemies… Jung – Myers-Briggs typological test
My Day One Migration is moving along well. I’m grabbing low-hanging-fruit and copying in those posts from my old LiveJournal that didn’t have comments attached to them. I’ve decided to include comments as one of the most frequent commenters on my LiveJournal was my dearly departed friend Ryan. Seeing his words on my LiveJournal help bring him back to life, if only in a very small way, but they are important to me as are all the other people that I love. So far, with some original Day One entries, the copied in Notes from Facebook (Where my blogging went between LiveJournal and Day One) and LiveJournal so far I have 547 entries, spanning 327 days with items spanning back to 1999.
Once I have everything moved over in Day One then I can search more easily and look at different posts and maybe repost some things from my old LiveJournal that I think are either still relevant today or at least entertaining enough to share once again.