First Look at Mountain Lion OSX for Macintosh

Posted on July 25, 2012 by bluedepth

I purchased and downloaded the newest version of Macintosh OSX codenamed Mountain Lion. The download took a brief amount of time and once established I didn’t have a problem handling it. The first step was creating an independent system installer using a USB memory stick. I found some instructions that I remembered from when I did this with OSX Lion and the instructions worked well, up to a point. I was able to find the InstallESD.dmg file and I set up my 16GB memory stick with the proper format settings, specifically Mac HFS File System with Journaling and GUID partition map. The first issue I ran into was a strange memory error, that while restoring the dmg file to the USB memory stick, after the Mac was done really, in the verification step it failed with this odd arcane “cannot allocate memory” error. I went immediately to Google to look and found that if I mount the InstallESD.dmg file first, that *that* is the magic bullet. Turns out, it was.

Now that I have Mountain Lion on a USB memory stick I got a stock 24” iMac out of storage and set it up. Plugged the USB memory stick in, then the mouse and keyboard, main power, and while holding down the option key, turned it on. Everything worked as I expected it to! So far so good.

Once the system was up and running and in setup it prompted me to connect to a Wifi system, which was not a problem since I share Wifi from my primary work iMac (long story for another day) and it seemed satisfied. Then I ran into my first problem with Mountain Lion. During initial system setup I could not successfully log into any Apple ID. My personal one, or the one for work, either one didn’t work. The system allows you to continue without it and so that’s exactly what I did. Once I moved on to setting the time zone, this also failed, but I suspect it has everything to do with my shared Wifi coming from my Snow Leopard iMac and not something endemic to Mountain Lion. Instead of Mountain Lion successfully setting the time zone by it’s location I set it by hand. Not really a problem.

Once I got the system up and running, idle at the desktop everything was as it should be. My next step was to try to connect my test iMac up to my Apple ID. So logically I went first for System Preferences, then to Accounts, and there set my Apple ID. I was half hoping that setting it there would have had a chain reaction and set it everywhere else, but that didn’t happen. I noticed that iCloud wasn’t set up properly, so I found it in System Preferences, it wasn’t a problem, just a very weak annoyance. Then I tried the Mac App Store, had to do it again, same for iTunes. The only real irk that upset me was fiddling around with “Back To My Mac” feature which asked me to turn on sharing with a button that lead to the sharing panel. I was lost in there (no, not really, but I was in the headspace of an end-user) and it took me a while to notice that Apple did tell you where to go to set things up, so my one tweet about this being a problem is wrong, I was just hasty. I must say that much of this I will pin on me being in the “end user headspace” and not as an Admin, which I would have been much more careful and slow with in my approach to Mountain Lion. If you read and aren’t hasty, this isn’t a problem.

Every app that I’ve used worked well, some needed Java to be installed but the OS prompted to fetch it and install it for me without a problem so that was fine. Of the apps that work that I’ve tested, at least in that they open up are:

* Aqua Data Studio 11.0
* Dropbox
* iSquint
* KompoZer
* MarsEdit
* Miro Video Converter
* MPlayerX
* Music Manager (Google Cloud)
* OpenOffice.org
* Photo Wrangler 2.1
* Picasa (needed update)
* Postbox
* Seashore
* Spotify (needed update)
* The Unarchiver
* Transmission
* VLC
* What’s Keeping Me?
* XTabulator
* Zipeg

Of course, all the apps from the Mac App Store I assume work well. Dropbox was a non-issue, 1Password was smooth-as-glass, as I expected. But what really surprised me was Postbox. I recently fled Sparrow as an email client when they announced that Google was acquiring them. Postbox was my alternative. When I copied over Postbox and started it for the first time it offered to collect the settings form Mail.app which I didn’t think anything of and let it go ahead. Postbox seamlessly captured my iCloud email account and after I typed in my Apple ID password, I was up and running! For some strange reason, that really pleased me.

So, what is next? So far everything seems to test fine in Mountain Lion. There are some goobers from Lion that I still need to work out – such as secondary monitors in full screen mode being stupid, that sort of thing, and also to see if VirtualBox will work, but for the most part I’m satisfied that this new OS is exactly as Apple bills it, and they have done a very good job. There are some small irky bits and on my Twitter I’m sure it came across as being ranting-and-raving, but actually it’s quite good.

Next steps at work are tallying up all the people interested in Mountain Lion and figuring out how we’re to pay Apple for the licenses, then helping everyone set up Apple ID’s on their own. There is going to be a headache with all these new very independent and unmanaged Apple ID’s floating around in space, but if you want the Bright and Shiny you have to swallow a seed or two.

Off To The Races

Posted on July 6, 2012 by bluedepth

Today we went back to exploring graveyards in the local area. We stopped as Weedsport Rural Cemetery with an educated guess that we’d discover some family there. My mother informed me that I should be able to find my great grandfather Charles Race there as well as my great great grandfather, Fernando Race there as well. After some wandering around we spotted the first grave. It held Fernando, Josephine, and Helen. Helen was only five years old when she died and so she was buried next to her parents. I never knew any of these people, but seeing that they buried their lost little girl right next to them started to color in the vagueness. I imagine Fernando and Josephine to be salt-to-the-earth people with huge hearts and kind dispositions. They had MANY children and when they lost one too early, they made sure she would always be with them, even in the hereafter. I had to pause and take it all in. Helen was born in 1907 and died five years later in 1912. As I paid my respects to my long dead super-great grandparents I started to look around their headstones. I immediately ran across Clinton C. Race. Clinton served in the Navy during the Korean conflict and his headstone (rightly so) proudly had his military plaque on the obverse side of his headstone marker. On his headstone he made reference to a lost brother, Leroy. Leroy was 1 month old when he died. Looking at the records of the family, Chester Race had twin boys, Charles and Leroy. Leroy didn’t survive. Chester went on to have many more children including Clinton. The kicker was, I didn’t know any of this and worse, I couldn’t prove any of it. The only real thing I had to go on was that I had a gaggle of Races all buried together, like arm-spans together. Clinton was feet from Fernando, and there was another grave for Mark Race right next to Clinton.

So I had Clinton and Mark and no way to link them, nor any way to link them to Fernando. I know that Fernando is related to me, and I suspected that Mark was Clinton’s son, but linking Clinton to anyone else? Nope. Fernando had a lot of kids, but never a Clinton. So I did some research. Ancestry.com wasn’t very useful as Clinton didn’t apparently show up on many public records, like censuses or anything like that. For hours Clinton was a lost lamb. I knew in my heart that Clinton was related to me, why would anyone with the same surname elect to be buried next to another person with the same surname? To punish future lookey-loos like me? Nah! It was a mystery. That’s a central carrot to this genealogical obsession. You know you’ve got kin but you can’t connect them up, until…

Thanks to the Fulton Historical Society, they placed a newspaper scan article on the Internet from 1964 which was an obit for Chester Race. Chester was the missing key. Fernando was Chester’s father, and brother to Charles – my maternal grandfathers father. So I was related to Chester. In Ancestry.com all I knew of Chester was that he had one girl child and that was it. Turns out I was wrong. Chester had Clinton as well! And Chester had his own Charles and with him came Leroy. That halcyon moment was so sweet and reverberated for hours. I linked Clinton Race with Chester, with Fernando, and with Charles and then Allen, to my mother and then to me. The cousin relationship is thick, but it exists! Right after that the rest of it fell into place. Clinton had two boys, Mark and Timothy. Mark was buried right next to his father. The obvious next step was to look at Mark. He was alive up until 2010, he died in an accident. Mark had two children, Rebecca and Brian.

Hungry for more discovery I started to concentrate on Mark, Timothy, Brian, and Rebecca. I know that Rebecca moved to Florida and maybe got married, so we hope a happily ever after for her, and Brian (thanks to the apple-not-falling-far-from-the-tree when it comes to looks) has some fame with him. Brian Race works for Sea Shepherd. It was a weird feeling, looking at a picture of a man who is definitely related to me, doing work I find incredibly impressive and courageous. Now, how related is he? Not really at all. We really share Fernando and that’s many generations and cousin-bridges. Is there any point to knowing about Brian Race? Probably not. But in the same way that I can claim some ancestral link to A.G. Spalding (of the baseball-and-catchers-mitts Spalding company) I can also claim a connection to Solomon Spalding, which if you are a Mormon should be a name you recognize and hiss at, like throwing holy water on a vampire. If you don’t get it, do a Google search for Solomon Spalding and Joseph Smith. It’ll be a good read, I promise. So, back to the Races – Fernando, Chester, Clinton, Mark, and then Brian. Five generations of people that connect to me.

Mark’s children, as well as Timothy (if he still draws breath) and any of the other Races, if you somehow happen to read this blog post and I am right (or even if I’m not!) about Clinton, I encourage you with all my heart to please make contact with us. I would really love to share our family tree with you and maybe help you get to know your greats and get to know them and appreciate their lives through the scraggly bits and pieces that we have collected. I don’t want to personally interfere with anyones lives, so I am going to put this message in a bottle and hurl it into the great abyss. Leave a comment or write me an email at bluedepth(at)gmail(dot)com. I’m all over, Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress. If not, no biggie.

Jindal Says He Won’t Implement Obamacare – ABC News

Posted on June 29, 2012 by bluedepth

Jindal Says He Won’t Implement Obamacare – ABC News.

The Governor of Louisiana has effectively declared that he is going to defy the Union!

That’s fine. Louisiana has really just declared their full intent to be considered in rebellion against the Union and this amounts to secession. The last time we saw this particular bluster it was 1861 and South Carolina.

So all that is old is new again. If Jindal is serious, he is going to take his state into open rebellion and this will initiate the Second Great American Civil War. This is such an outrage! To throw away the Union because you don’t want your poorest citizens to have health insurance coverage! It boggles the mind!

So, what is to be done? If Louisiana is in open rebellion it is time to establish a new border for the remaining states, establish trade tariffs, discontinue all federal services to the rebellious state of Louisiana, place barricades on their Interstates, militarize the border and eventually occupy the state, depose it’s state government and force it to submit to the will of the Union.

The last time states were in open rebellion the North burned Richmond Virginia to the ground to simply prove a point.

So, Governor Jindal, are you sure you want to do this? Are you sure you want to take your entire state down this path? Your political bluster HAS CONSEQUENCES Governor!

My advice to you and the people of Louisiana, tread very carefully. Very carefully. You are being watched and evaluated.

Losing Social Context

Posted on June 21, 2012 by bluedepth

I’m an avid user of social networking, picking up stories from Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. These services all have certain ways to mark some sort of favorite status, liking, favorite’ing a tweet, +1’ing a G+ entry, that sort of thing. On its own it’s effective for those services however I’ve found that it just really isn’t enough for me.

To bridge the gap, between seeing something that piques my interest and remembering it for later used to be served by browser bookmarks, but these are inconvenient because they languish on only one machine and can’t be accessible on every device that I own. I was for a time a user of Delicious, but since it was bought out by Yahoo and then imperiled by Yahoo in a mystery state somewhere between being alive and dead I’ve given up on that as well. Another bookmarking service that I use is Marco Arment’s Instapaper which satisfies a lot of the needs that I have – it works on every device I use and it’s ubiquitous enough to become the tool of choice for me when it comes to a bookmarking service.

There is a problem with Instapaper however. It comes down to context. When I’m on Twitter I see a link from @gadgetfreaks, for example, and I send the link to Instapaper so I can read it later. I prefer the information flow from Twitter to be regular and smooth, dancing from item to item I never really stop to actually browse any of the links presented to me on Twitter unless they are in my “core” group of people who I follow on Twitter. On Twitter it’s really a quick browse with small dwells to retweet, send links to Instapaper, or very rarely browse right from Twitter off a link shared by someone I follow. So, after a while of browsing the stream from Twitter my Instapaper queue becomes weighty and I then use the Instapaper site, the Instapaper app, or “ReadNow” app on my MacBook to go back to the links that I’ve sent to Instapaper to read later, or, read now.

While I’m browsing my Instapaper queue I then run into a crisis, sometimes, and this crisis is one of context. I have an entry in my Instapaper but I have no idea what it is in reference to and there isn’t any convenient way that I can think of to chew backwards through the Twitter stream to rescue the flavor text that was near the link to rescue some semblance of a context. So these links in my Instapaper, without context, are on at least some small way at least browsable, but without the surrounding context the links are more chaff than wheat. So I browse the links, I don’t get why I saved it, and then just dump the link out of Instapaper.

Is it a problem? No, not in any appreciable way. But it would be an interesting expansion on the Instapaper design to have the functionality that sends the link to Instapaper also grab the nearby text from Twitter and have a foldaway area where you can unpack the context and regain it, so the article you saved in Instapaper makes sense.

10-year-long video game creates hellish nightmare world – CNN.com

Posted on June 18, 2012 by bluedepth

10-year-long video game creates hellish nightmare world – CNN.com.

As I was reading I couldn’t help but notice that this world is without hope. So this is what happens when nobody is allowed to think beyond the simulation!?! This is AWESOME. Three super-city states trapped in eternal war. It’s like 1984 in a computer.

At some point when nuclear weapons aren’t enough to toss in humanities collective towel, I suppose you’d have to switch to an effective agent for genocide. Perhaps an aerosolized super-durable Marburg virus. One sneeze that ended it all. Hemorragic Fever so pronounced that it makes peoples heads explode from the mismatched blood pressure.

Seems a blessing after reading what the state of the world would be in that simulation. I wonder if this keeps Sid Meier up at night wondering…

Erik Rhodes: "A Romance with Misery"

Posted on June 14, 2012 by bluedepth

Erik Rhodes: “A Romance with Misery”.

When I got home from work today Scott called up from where he was enjoying the cool of the basement that Erik Rhodes had died in his sleep, of a heart attack. He was 30 years old.

Erik Rhodes, or James as his true name would turn out to be, was a adult performer and after reading his tumblr, which I linked to this post above, I noticed what anyone could. This person was very sad and in a way going to pieces. Post after post saturated with tone that was screaming out to anyone who would listen that he needed help. But nobody apparently noticed. I have to admit that I didn’t even notice myself until the blog was pointed out to me. I feel sorry for him and his family, what a loss.

Throughout all the sadness I can’t help but spy the Adonis Complex lurking in the background. All men have this darkness lurking somewhere in their psyche. Just like girls have their own self-image and self-worth issues, being razor thin and looking-near-death-is-so-hot, but the Adonis Complex is really a very male thing. It starts out when we compare ourselves against each other. This man has a full head of hair, 3% body fat, muscles galore. We feel envy, then we approach the envy in a very male way. We try to fix what is wrong with us. Some workout endlessly, struggling for a body that may always elude them while others seek shortcuts, usually one drug or another. Anything that’s a stimulant can lead to abuse of a shortcut. Sometimes it’s a naive shortcut like nicotine abuse, sometimes it’s cocaine or heroin. Sometimes it’s anabolic steroids.

The Complex is like a fog on the brain. It colors everything. Comparisons pile up on comparisons and as we start reaching our goal our self-worth and self-image can (not will) go right into the toilet. What you end up with is a beautiful specimen of masculinity that is wretchedly depressed. Once Adonis arrives, his only real destination is to drown in the pool of water that he sees his reflection in. Yes, I’m mixing my mythical metaphors, the tragedy is of Narcissus, not of Adonis, but it’s for Adonis the Complex is named after and it’s Narcissus that holds the tragedy.

Women suffer similar body-image pressures, but the genders are very different. A fish can’t teach a bird to swim and so trying to explain it to a woman is really something I’m not capable of doing. The feelings, the pressure, the drive, and above all else, the mechanical aptitude that males bring to “fix” what is wrong ends up spiraling out of control.

So we get back to this poor soul. Narcissus died of a heart attack in his sleep. They’ll find an overdose of steroids, he wrote about how that was his plan after all, and the rest of us will be left behind, some will have lost an idol, some will have lost a family member. We all will lose someone that could have been rescued if more people knew and reached out.

And then that leads to the almost obvious analysis waiting at the end of all of this. Are the people who do such things, adult entertainment, pornography, all on a path similar to the one James walked? Are these people “terminally pretty”? And then people will start to point their fingers at the porn industry itself for perpetuating mental illness, body dysmorphic disease and self-image crises that lead to self-inflicted abuse that is just a stones throw from suicide.

There is always hope, there is always someone to reach out to. Just get in a car and drive away from your pain. Walk up to a house, anywhere there are decent people and knock on their doors and tell them you need help. Good people are agents of hope. They will help, no matter who they are. That is what good people do.

SupportPress In Action

Posted on June 8, 2012 by bluedepth

My first week with SupportPress has been magnificent. It was just in time as well, as we are looking down the barrel of a bunch of employee location movements which always requires lots of tickets and tracking because there are just so many discrete pieces to work with whenever someone moves from their established location to a new one, even if it’s temporary.

It’s also been a series of lessons when it comes to introducing new technology to regular folk. The adoption rate was much higher than I hoped for, as people were actually jockeying for “first ticket” so that felt really good. I’d estimate about fifteen percent of the staff have moved their communications channel to the help desk completely over to the new SupportPress system, while the rest have yet to break their old ways.

The old ways we still will respect. Having this new help desk system has given me moments of decision to make and learn from. Do I force people to only use the SupportPress system? Do I turn the office into a BOFH zone by forcing my clients to fold their entire communications structure into a ticket? Turns out I rejected that choice and elected to endure the steeper path of being, in what really turns out to be a human bridge, for my clients. So when someone drops by, someone calls, someone emails, or someone iChats us up, each time it calls for a ticket. SupportPress in this regard is really great, as we can create tickets on behalf of our clients and fill in all the details as if they penned the tickets themselves.

Another choice was one of statistics and performance. Now that the SupportPress system is providing us with ticket numbers and categories as well as ticket ages, the data is ripe for analysis, categorization, and the temptation to turn all of these raw numbers into performance metrics is very strong. This, as it turns out, is just another BOFH move that I simply cannot take. I refuse to use the raw data to measure any kind of performance metric – there is more to my life, to my assistants life than how many tickets we land or how old the tickets get before we tend to them. Here is a central tenet of mine, this system is meant to help only. It will never be used as a dashboard, it will never be turned into a yoke, or a bridle. The same way I rejected the before-mentioned BOFH move of forcing tickets out of clients, this is somewhat like the other side of the argument. The reasoning behind it is that I want people to use this resource. I want my employees (singular notwithstanding) to not fear that they will be lined up against some artificial measuring stick and slotted. I refuse to have First Trumpet, Second Trumpet, and Screwup Trumpet chairs in my orchestra.

There are other things that have occurred to me but I have rejected out of hand, brought about by SupportPress. I have considered and rejected a “Zero Ticket Friday” policy as fundamentally broken. What is so special about Friday that all tickets should be closed? If I institute that policy and some tickets are stuck in the waiting queue, do I penalize people for it? If you start making accommodations for things like “tickets can languish in the waiting queue forever” then what the hell is the point of the first move on this policy? Eventually it’s the self-defeating policies like these that create the bullshit of “It’s Friday, lets push all the tickets into the waiting queue.” It’s just dumb. So we aren’t doing it.

One thing that has come of SupportPress that we’ve noticed is that some of our clients have reacted less-than-happily about the sheer flow of SupportPress notification emails. The system sends an email when any ticket moves or changes, so clients could have at least two tickets (a start and an end) or up to double-digits especially if there are a lot of phase changes and clarification messages flowing back and forth. I personally don’t have a problem with notification floods as I am rather OCD about managing my email. I’ve written before on how I manage my Inbox – that any email has four potential destinations after they have been read. An incoming message can be stored in Evernote, sent to Toodledo, adapted and stored in SupportPress or outright deleted. Yes, I still use Toodledo, but I use it in conjunction with SupportPress. Some tasks, such as weekly reminders and such really fit better with Toodledo than SupportPress. Nobody really cares that much about getting constant notifications or trackability about daily, weekly, or even monthly tasks that I work on. Much of the regular things I do at work are “Andy does it, so we don’t have to worry about it anymore.” and so everything gets done and people can move on. That’s really helps illustrate the core features of SupportPress. SupportPress is designed to capture the discrete, non-repeating, highly interruptive traffic that any competent Help Desk must endure. There have been a lot of whitepapers written on the economy of interruptions surrounding Help Desk environments so going into it here would just be needlessly duplicative. The only really important thing to state about interruptions is that they are a necessary evil. People have to stop us to get help, it’s the nature of the beast.

SupportPress shines brightest when it comes to creating an abstraction layer between clients and the Help Desk. I like to think of the system providing a certain amount of slip between ticket arrival and first contact. In this way, SupportPress slays the interruption dragon that besets us. Instead of people electing to visit us or call us, which are the most interruptive, they can issue a ticket. We are notified that a ticket has arrived and that fact can be temporarily slipped in time so that we can conclude whatever function we are executing without having to endure the most dreaded thing of all, a context switch. Much like computers, interrupts and context switching is the number one gross consumer of time. These interrupts and context switches also threaten our quality of work. We can switch quickly but regaining traction once we’ve switched back to what we were thinking about before can be sometimes a maddeningly slippery proposition. I can’t count the number of times that interrupts and context switches have caused me lost time when dealing with a columnar data procedure such as checking items off of a long list. Where was I? Am I doing everything right? Why do I have this nagging doubt that I’m missing something? It’s this that I wish people would understand, and why when we ask people to issue their problems via ticket, why it’s so helpful to us.

So then we revisit an earlier point I had made, that I have elected to not force people to create tickets only. While this is true in spirit, I dearly wish people would on-their-own elect to use the less interruptive technologies available to them. The best thing for anyone to do would be to issue a SupportPress ticket outright, but if not that outright, then email or instant message also works well, because those technologies also include a modicum of temporal slipping that we really crave when we are knee-deep in some elaborate procedure. So while I refuse to force people to do a certain thing, I respectfully request that they do what they’ll do a certain way. Then it comes to how best to encourage people do change their course? First you have to let them know what it is that you’d like them to do, in a way, this blog entry may help with that as I suspect some of my coworkers read my blog and maybe they’ll notice the hint. One thing that can be done is rewarding people for using the ticket system by prioritizing those people who issued tickets with more force than we would otherwise pursue an incoming interrupt and context switch. It isn’t outright sabotage, but it does show that there is a preference and it’s in everyones best interest to respect us with the grace of a non-interrupt, and hence, non-context switching request. We’re driven to help and that is our passion and our purpose, but there is a best way to do it and for me at least, SupportPress is it.

So how much did it take for implementing this solution? We already have an iPage hosting account, wmichalumni.com, and frankly any host worth their salt would be just as good. I just like iPage because they are professional, no-nonsense, and cost-efficient. Any host can (and should) allow you to set up a free copy of WordPress.org. WordPress.org is an open source and free bit of software that creates a WordPress.com blog on a host that either you own or rent. The infrastructure of WordPress is actually perfect for what we are trying to do. The fact that it’s free is just a cherry on top. Installation of WordPress.org, at least on iPage is remarkably simple. It takes about 5 clicks and some little typing or usernames and passwords and preferences and the host creates a perfectly functioning WordPress.org instance for you. The theme, which is what SupportPress really is comes as a ZIP file for $100. Once you buy it, and then upload the zip file to your new WordPress.org site, everything else is pretty much a freefall into implementation. Falling down a flight of stairs is more complicated than installing SupportPress. Once the system is going, creating users is a snap, then introducing them is equally as easy, and before you know it, you’re up and running and your total outlay for the project was $100 for the theme and whatever you are paying your host.

So, then that begs the question of why we don’t self-host. I chose to not self-host because there is a field of tar which would ruin usability. iPage has unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, and since we are already paying for it to do other things, it’s arguably ‘free’ to do our SupportPress infrastructure. I don’t have to endure needless bureaucracy and it’s available anywhere and anytime without me having to muck about with VPN technology or anything else. It’s not that what I am avoiding is that onerous, but this way is far far simpler and is much more satisfying to me in that the path that I took got it done. From zero to implementation with nobody to argue with, nobody to ask, nobody to cajole, and nobody peeking over my shoulder.

I think that any Help Desk, especially one in academia, but really this extends to any other industry as well could really benefit from SupportPress. I like to reward products that please me and do their jobs well. When I find a product, like SupportPress, I flog it for all it’s worth. My only regret with SupportPress is that I didn’t have this technology 10 years ago. I am blessed to have it now and I plan on continuing to use it and I plan on taking it with me wherever I roam in the future. If anyone has any questions about anything I’ve written here, you know where to get ahold of me. I welcome questions on this, SupportPress is that good.

Publicize!

Posted on June 8, 2012 by bluedepth

WordPress just released the ability for me to publicize my blog posts on Tumblr, so this post should end up being linked to Twitter, Facebook, and now Tumblr.

As I do almost all of my blogging on WordPress, this is a good thing. I notice that the different services shine all a little differently. I don’t get any replies on Twitter about my posts, Facebook may earn a comment or a Like, and since I manually haul out to G+, that is its own ball of wax.

Speaking of G+, one thing I have noticed is that people get very bent out of shape when I post a password protected WordPress post to that service, way more than any other service by far. I think it’s because people have taken the art of engagement very seriously over in G+, since it’s not really going to unseat Facebook when it comes to uniq’s. People just don’t seem to understand why, at least on G+, what hides behind those protected posts. I protect them because I have to prevent a certain audience from gaining access to what I write in those posts. There are some people I just can’t trust with ‘the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ so I have to make the posts protected after a fashion. It’s something I never expected that I would have to blog about, but if I do, then the people who throw fits hopefully will read it and understand that their concern is misplaced. The protected posts really aren’t that interesting for regular folken, they are written for a different audience. Close friends and family pretty much, so not being able to see the protected posts really shouldn’t upset you – you aren’t missing anything.

So, it’ll be interesting to see what comes of this whole sharing to Tumblr thing. Frankly my tumblr doesn’t get much traffic or followers. We’ll see.

And for those who continue to read the tripe that I write, I thank you. I promise poor quality and rambling on in the future. Gotta keep up my standards. 🙂

Throw It Back

Posted on June 2, 2012 by bluedepth

I used to fret and worry about my relationship with alcohol. What did it mean? Is the drinking itself bad or is it the reason behind the drinking the really bad part? Maybe it was a combination of both. Next month I’ll turn 37 years old and quickly plowing myself into my 40’s. So what preciousness is to save that I’m holding onto?

Americans have a really funny way of dealing with alcohol. We used to love it, then we hated it, then we prohibited it completely and all the while our relationship and use of the substance has not changed. I notice this a lot when I go to purchase alcohol from shops, especially here in Michigan. People are so, I suppose the emotion they must feel is embarrassment, because the shops all reflexively wrap bottles of alcohol in brown paper wrappers. Like it’s shameful or embarrassing to be seen in polite society with a bottle of Jack Daniels, Jamesons, or Captain Morgan. Wine never really got the sharp end of the stick, and neither really did beer. Both of those spirits are too weak to be of mention. You’ll go to the bathroom a lot before you’ll feel much in the way of an effect from those particular drinks. It’s the harder liquors that surprise me. First off, Michigan rigidly controls the price of spirits right down to what retailers are allowed to sell the spirits for. It doesn’t matter who sells what, they all get their prices out of this dog-eared pale-blue booklet that the state hands them. I sometimes wonder why the state of Michigan thinks it’s the sole arbiter of the price and availability of spirits in their state borders? As if they could control their citizenry with laws. Hah. But there it is, artificial price fixing for no good reason. A 750ml bottle of Jameson’s Whiskey is $25 in Michigan and $17 in Illinois. The only reason I’d buy liquor in Michigan is out of laziness.

And as it turns out, my favorite liquors are Jamesons, what a shocker, and as funny as it seems, the low-brow rums, Bacardi’s Oakheart and Newfoundland’s Screech. I don’t really care for the specialty long-aged rums and apparently I prefer just the english-speaking rums of the world, as the rest aren’t very much to my liking. But really where it’s at is my relationship to a bottle of Jamesons.

What is my relationship to alcohol? I drink liberally and I become intoxicated and I enjoy myself. I do not make a mess of myself by drinking beyond my personal limit, nor do I operate any machinery while under the influence. That last bit is a lie, of course, as machinery includes my iPhone and my computer, so a few bouts of drunk twittering won’t send me to jail. I’ve never operated a motor vehicle, and almost always I’m the designated driver because, well, lets face it, I have control and money issues. So back to drinking. It’s a joy. It brings warmth and happiness into my life. Not that my life was bereft of warmth and happiness before, but while intoxicated it makes many things feel better. Many things are easier to cope with. I wear my emotions on my sleeve and I share my feelings, some would say, too readily. There was a humorous picture of a boy stating what I often times find myself thinking, especially sober, and that is “We’re all thinking it, I just said it.” So we get down to the reasons why I drink.

I like to drink because it feels good. I like to drink because it tastes good. Wine is principally what I’m getting at, as there is a universe of delicious flavors in wine and more people should go exploring to see what they like. Beer? When I was a kid and very sensitive to bitters, beer was awful. As I age however, beer has become like water. It’s a drink with food, it makes you belch, and makes you have to see a man about a horse quite often. In many ways, beer and wine are somewhat okay ways to replace water, especially if you question the quality of water. I personally have never felt that the water where I live is good for me. Now, before people get really worked up, the gentle reader should be aware that I was raised on the worlds best water. The city supply of Syracuse, New York. That water is drawn from Skaneateles Lake and is some of the best tasting water on the planet. I am sorry that more people don’t understand just how wonderful it is to walk up to the tap in your house, turn it on and be able to drink what comes out without even a single iota of worry, and enjoying the taste, which is the way water should taste. It should not taste like a chlorinated fish bowl. So the water is a big reason for the more simpler spirits. But that doesn’t touch on the stronger ones. Here again I like the taste, or perhaps, in the case of Jamesons, I’m genetically predisposed to enjoy the taste, I do sometimes wonder about that. I also enjoy the feeling it gives me, and then, and what everyone really wants to know, is the social aspects to my alcoholism.

I drink because Hell is other people. This is very general and expansive and it’s not really meant to hurt others feelings, but lets face it, unless I’m in love with you or we are exceptionally close, Sartre’s statement about Hell being other people eventually finds it’s mark. I can endure a lot of things from people, especially when I have no other choice. I can be whatever I need to be to endure the situation. That’s the blessing that comes with a monumentally strong sense of self-monitoring. In work meetings I can be calm and reserved and measured, that sort of thing. Generally however I can’t stand humanity. In all the ways we are unique and special and loving, that’s got nothing to do with it. It’s the baser things that bother me, the odd behaviors, the many varied ways we abuse each other and in many ways, so effortlessly and lets face it, callously. It can range from being a real prat to being incidentally and nebulously a horrible human being. So what comes of all these unpleasant feelings? Being exposed to people who chew too loudly, snort, wheeze, moan, whine, or in one way or another do whatever they can to be as awful to others as they can, where is there to go? Where can anyone go if they are trapped in that situation? I am forever thankful for alcohol. “Please pass the wine” is a far more pleasant thing to say than dragging out (or dragging up) the varied unpleasantnesses that surround some social situations. I find that it’s almost always more preferable to prepend potentially unpleasant social interactions with a precautionary buffer of alcohol in my system. If I am nursing a beer or a glass of wine, of throwing back shots of Jamesons, I can eventually reach a place where the things that upset me no longer really bother me, and in a way, alcohol makes everything better. So yes, I drink, at least as a partial reason, to cope with the people in my life. I am not going to point fingers at who makes me drink, that would just be courting disaster, but in a general sense, Hell is other people.

So to get back to the beginning, is it a problem? Should I be concerned? The answer is, I don’t give a damn. I’m not going to fret over what drinking means to me, I’m just going to enjoy my life and all the things in it and if I spend my time in a beer bottle or a bottle of Jamesons, then that’s where I want to be. For pleasure, for joy, for happiness, and to escape Hell, at least for a short while. Anything can be endured as long as there is a break to it, a stop, a discontinuity to horribleness. In many ways, alcohol is a blessing to endurance.