It struck me that I wrote about the playlist on Spotify, and I’ve made it public since I created it, but I haven’t tried to embed it or share it. Time to change that. This should lead you to the playlist and you’ll see what music really moves me.
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.
During the last presidential election one of the topics that was bandied about was the concept of “corporate personhood”. Companies are people and therefore can enjoy the same abilities and protections afforded to people. Many on the left, where I stand, see corporate personhood as a particularly upsetting vestibule to fascism and is really not a good thing.
I’ve been thinking about the social extents of humanity as it currently exists in the 21st century and the magical number is 150. Any one person can only maintain meaningful social interactions with a general maximum of 150 other people. Beyond that and there just isn’t brainpower, time, attention, or will to treat all of them equally. I use this figure of 150 as an honest limit in many parts of my life and while writing some previous blog posts the idea about the moral and ethical capacity of companies came up. When it comes to social networking this number of contacts limit I think is important. People who follow more than 150 others are doing them a disservice and people who are followed by more than 150 others are likewise doing them a disservice. You simply cannot maintain an equal amount of attention beyond this limit and it’s unfair and in the end one could argue that it’s socially abusive to the 151st and further people connected to you.
So we get to corporate personhood. I think that once a company of people start accumulating there are ranges based on this number of 150. Very small companies with less than 150 members may still be able to maintain some moral and ethical understanding, but the relationship is asymptotic as the company approaches the horizon of 150 members. The more people join a company, the less each member feels responsible for the actions of the company. Many companies spread way beyond 150 into the thousands or even more than that and I think that the further along they go from 150, the less human they are when they are all added together. The individuals are all conscientious and compassionate human beings, but it’s when they are added up in a new context that they stop behaving as such and you see things like mob mentality and groupthink. The bigger the company the more these negative forces start to manipulate the membership. So what does this limit of 150 have to do with corporate personhood? I think it’s a bad idea to give any organization the rights and powers of a person when they lack the moral and ethical bearings of regular individuals. It’s like making a Frankensteins monster. Just because the monster is walking and maybe talking doesn’t mean you want it caring for the elderly or working in an infant ICU. Companies beyond 150 members, I would argue have the same moral and ethical understanding of a dead inanimate object, to say, none at all. So perhaps a law that perhaps graces organizations with personhood as long as their maximum membership does not exceed 150 is a wise thing. Companies (or organizations even) that exceed 150 cannot be considered “persons” because they are beyond the human capacity for moral and ethical behavior.
I honestly don’t think that there will ever be any laws where this limit of 150 is used, but I do think that understanding the human limits for socialization is important, especially when you are trying to understand the behavior of some of these large organizations and why they behave with such callousness and disregard for the moral and ethical compasses which regular people are compelled to follow.
In many ways, this 150 limit could also be the functional barrier for The Golden Rule. That people who have more than these social contacts, or organizations with more than this number of members cannot successfully comprehend the wisdom of The Golden Rule. In this light, I would argue that organizations over 150 members be subject to laws that add force to The Golden Rule, if such wisdom cannot come from within then it must be applied from without by laws and regulations.
“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.
I hate spam. I really hate it. I don’t want anything to do with Casinos, cheating lovers, or SEO bullshit. In fact, I’ve developed a very acute loathing for the phrase “SEO”. I’ve started to mentally connect “SEO Specalists” with “Used Car Salesmen”. If you are one, keep it to yourself. Don’t come and talk to me about SEO. It’s just gaming the system and it’s both corrupt and dishonest.
To that end, I went back to look at Askimet and realized that the API token that I thought was for-pay only turns out that it’s free for personal blogs. What a surprise! So I installed the Akismet plugin (I had earlier deleted it because I thought it was pay-only) and applied my API token and so far, although it’s only been a few moments, my blog is blessedly spam free.
The comments are the source of the spam. There was a post in the WordPress Community Pool regarding Twitter that got me thinking about how my readership engages with my blog. People don’t really engage in Twitter much anymore and they don’t engage in WordPress comments either. All the engagement seems to be focused on Facebook. I’m not against any of this, but I find it very fascinating. This leads me to the topic of this post, which is that blog spam in the comments on my WordPress.org system is even more damnable. Nobody uses the comment system but I’m loathe to disable it. So, Akismet, at least so far, is riding to the rescue.
With that, I have a great Monty Python skit to share with you all on YouTube. Enjoy!
One thing I wasn’t really expecting but that I’m getting in a rather steady stream are spam comments. There seems to be several species of spam floating about. Amongst these are the link droppers, the foreign language gobbledygook, the ‘cheaters’ messages and the random attaboy messages that are possibly authentic but utterly meaningless.
But then there is another class of commentary. There is a whole argument chain about the Wheel of Time that has been marching along. It seems like real comments from real people, as the commentary has a real argumentative structure but I haven’t written any critical posts about WOT.
I’ve been deleting the spammy comments, all of them, and eventually I think I’ll have to create an email filter to organize them into batches or turn off email notification altogether. At least the WordPress app allows me to deal with comments like the mail app allows me to deal with multiple emails. Highlight batches and delete.
It’s not that I don’t want comments. I do! But I want real comments from real people. One thing I will state, if a comment is obnoxious I will kill it without remorse. If you have an unquenchable opinion, start your own blog.
After I moved my blog over to my own host I discovered that my original WordPress blog on WordPress.com was still getting traffic. All that information is now on my new host so for those looking for bluedepth.wordpress.com, you can find all those posts instead at www.windchilde.com/bluedepth instead.
I set my WordPress.com blog as private, so that should send a message to people that the site has moved. If you had a email subscription or an RSS link, it should have been dead for a long while now. You should be able to get new links from this host instead.
Thanks!
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.
When I’m on vacation I have lots of free time and so I start coming up with ideas for blogging. The biggest challenge I have is balancing these moments where I have lots of free time and can blog prodigiously versus those times when I am so busy I can’t possibly blog. It’s either feast or famine. There are times when I wish services like Plinky had some sort of tracking ability. I hate the idea of having to keep a list of what Plinky prompts I’ve taken up as blog assignments and which ones I haven’t and the site doesn’t seem to have that as a capacity. Is there anyone out there who would like me to write about specific items maybe? I just blog about what occurs to me or things that are remarkable in my Pocket queue.
I’ve been kicking around several ideas including more work-related blog posts, especially when it comes to getting things accomplished, using our ticket system, and running a help desk in general. I think that will take more planning because I have to tread carefully. Work tends to get rather picky about what I write and share, and there has been heavy drama time in the past and I’d rather not have to deal with that malarkey again if I can help it.
I also have to remind myself now that my blog is all paid and all bottomless. I can share pictures and even video all by myself without having to deal with YouTube or any of that “passing under the eyes of a censor” kind of thing. Then again, I don’t think that recording video would be the best thing – but maybe so – I’ll really have to come up with things worth talking about if I’m going to do that. Unless I open up to Q&A and swing the doors wide open for anonymous Q&A.
So many ideas… thankfully I have a lot of time to plan and put these things in operation, or not. 🙂
I ran into an inconvenience with the current way I share socially
online. I have established a new workflow. Short messages still end up
going to Twitter, and if I feel like they are worth sending to Facebook
I use “Selective Tweets” to push that single tweet forward into
Facebook. For longer entires I write them up in Day One no matter if
they are public or private and then save them there and then share them
via email if they are public with my WordPress blog. If they are private
matters, they simply get shared with Facebook with a default stringent
security setting so only the right people can see those posts.
The email routine actually has been hit and miss to start but now it’s
working out quite nicely. First I migrated my blog from WordPress.com to
Wordpress.org. This is just me moving stuff from a companies site (.com)
to the domain that I own with Scott (windchilde.com) and I figure since
I’m paying for it anyways I might as well use it. Plus the switch over
to the windchilde.com domain also allows me unlimited storage and
unlimited bandwidth so I can share photos and videos without having to
worry about running into any storage caps or having to pay for extra
storage when I’m already paying for a pretty good deal with the host
that runs windchilde.com. I originally started with WordPress.org and
figured that Jetpack, which is a feature crosstalk package between
Wordpress.com and WordPress.org, extending some of the things that I
liked about WordPress.com around my installation of WordPress.org for
free. One of those options was “Post by Email” which gave me a
gobbledegook address at post.wordpress.com. That feature never worked
for me. It was supposed to be turn-key but it fell on it’s face. So I
turned to plugins, which are how you can extend WordPress.org sites, but
not WordPress.com sites. The company keeps a tight lid on things like
that where the “DIY” system is far more flexible and accommodating. I
downloaded the plugin called “Postie” and configured it to use a POP
account that I created on the windchilde.com domain and got that all set
up. There were a wee bit of growing pains regarding how to set
Categories and Tags in the email posts that I was making out of Day One.
What I had was a rather clunky Evernote note with the copied text from
my WordPress Category page so I could refer to that to pick and choose
which category I wanted the email post to go into. This was a mess. I
thought about it for a while and when I was done working out at Anytime
Fitness it struck me in a eureka moment; Why not just use TextExpander
to do the heavy lifting? So I started TextExpander on my MBP at home and
it came up, loaded the settings from my Dropbox (neat) and I created a
new snippet, called it “Categories” and set it’s trigger to be “;cat”.
Then I loaded all my categories from WordPress into a bracketed
pull-down list that TextExpander enables you to make on-the-fly so once
I’m done with Day One editing, I can save the entry (also is stored in
my Dropbox, yay!) and then click Share, Email, and then with the open
email I can just type in the trigger for each category I want to add and
I don’t need to remember to go to Evernote to get the list, or risk a
typo screwing everything up. Using Categories this way is really
convenient and tags are a snap to add as well.
Every once in a while I like to plug software that really works for me.
I plug the tarnations out of Mac, of course, as it’s the platform that I
can actually get my work done on. The apps that run on the Mac make the
rest of it work oh-so-well. Day One is a magnificent personal journaling
app. It’s private and password protected on all my devices and stored on
my Dropbox so I don’t have to screw around with backups or restores or
worrying that my entire Journal may just flit off into nothingness if my
MBP or a flash drive decides to play dumb on me. Plus Day One has
in-built sharing features, so I can share via Email, Twitter, or
Facebook if I want to. WordPress.org is not really software that runs on
my Mac, but instead runs on a host. The host I use is iPage.com and they
do a competent job. Setting up a WordPress.org site is embarrassingly
easy, mostly just a handful of clicks and you get a starter email with
the address you should use and your username and a temporary password. I
started to use WordPress because I left LiveJournal when the Russians
bought SixApart, the company that runs LiveJournal. Not that I have
anything against russians, but I’m not a huge fan of my words in that
place, it’s a personal thing. WordPress.org also enables commenting and
stats collection and automatically publicizes on it’s own to Twitter and
Facebook and Tumblr so I don’t have to futz around and create links to
my blog posts after the fact – WordPress does it for me.
Day One stores everything, WordPress stores my public lengthy stories,
Facebook stores my private lengthy stories and Twitter and Facebook
handle the rest – the tiny stuff. It’s all held together by Dropbox,
TextExpander, Day One app, my host, WordPress.org, Twitter, Facebook,
and Tumblr. It seems complicated and it is rather too-involved, but this
way I can write freely without having to concern myself with
self-censorship or exposing the wrong people to the wrong kind of
information. This way it’s all compact and interrelated and convenient.
So far, this is great for me and it’s how I am able to “have my cake and
eat it too”, which I’m a huge fan of in general.
All these products that I mentioned are either cheap or free. Nothing
cost me an arm or a leg, even the host, when you spread the cost over a
whole year is a pittance. I could even help friends and family set up
their own WordPress.org blogs on my host if they, and Scott, agreed. So,
if you think some of this would suit you and Scott’s good with it, just
let me know.