Of Clouds and Stones

Posted on May 14, 2012 by bluedepth

The early 21st Century will be known for the era of cloud computing. Just a little bit of what the cloud can do I’m actually taking advantage of right now as I write this blog post.

Google provided a huge space for people to upload their music and created a handy tool to upload their iTunes music up to Google’s storage system on the network. I took advantage of this offer and copied my entire iTunes library up to Google. That’s of course just half of what I needed to cloudify my entire music collection. I also need a client to play the content on whatever devices I want to use them on. Unfortunately the Google webapp for their Google Music service doesn’t work well on my iOS device, however there is an app called Melodies which does work fantastically well!

This has saved me so much time, expense and bother. Instead of having to buy a device with a big storage unit for my music I can simply stream my music off the network, using Google and Verizon (and Wifi if I have it, and that is almost universally ubiquitous in North America anyways) so now I have nearly universal access to my music, in a way having my cake and eat it too.

This wasn’t always easy, the Melodies app did have an issue with not being able to shuffle properly but after I contacted the app support staff and telling them what was wrong they fixed the app and it updated on my iPhone in a few moments. From that point I have realized something I never thought I’d be able to do, but play my music right off the network. It’s just one more way that devices, storage, computers, all of it are becoming increasingly abstracted away from my computing experience. I expect that sometime soon the notion of a computer will start to erode and evaporate as more and more of my life becomes cloudified, or perhaps the right word is enclouded? Going to have to work on the terminology.

Of course, people who I’ve spoken to about the cloud come up with very familiar complaints as to why they don’t want to join me. Mostly it comes down to a question of privacy, and that they feel the cloud would endanger their sense of privacy. I’ve thought about that point for a while, trying to come up with a position on it. I’ve honestly never really given two shakes about my precious privacy. What value am I coveting? So what if Meijers knows what I buy and when I buy it? So what if Google knows what music I enjoy? So what if I’ve been categorized and indexed? Where is the hazard? People regard privacy as some sort of grail-object. They protect it beyond all rational sense and I don’t think that any of us can maintain any sense of privacy any longer, at least since social networking became a mainstream part of our lives.

But then again, there is the fear. Where does that come from? People hiding who they are, what they think, what they buy from others because we’re afraid of, what exactly? Isn’t it a more comfortable life to simply be who and what you are and let the chips land where they will? A life exposed is a non-issue for those that are proud of who and what they are. I admit to having a definite cavalier attitude when it comes to my privacy, but what the hell do I have to hide? Or any of us? To me it has always been my argument that if I reveal elements of my life to strangers that somehow they’ll take advantage of that information and somehow misuse it or attempt to hurt me. Well, first and foremost they’ll have to endure the social awkwardness of being the ones to expose my “secrets” to everyone else. The key here is to own everything about yourself. Own your passions, own your foibles, and own your mistakes. Nothing about the past means anything, regret is a dull nothing. For example, Anthony Wiener’s crotch-shot being publicized lead to the end of his political career. WHY? I respect people more when they stand up and own whatever it is that others find outrageous. Here’s the thing, none of us are pure. None of us really have any place to stand and throw stones. Even Jesus Christ spoke on this very point. “Let him who hath no sins cast the first stone!” Well? So you have a picture of your tenty underwear out there? OWN IT. BE PROUD OF IT. In fact, go on a Playgirl shoot and show the world your junk. This idle and meaningless outrage is stupid and lame. I would pay real money to anyone who could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that any random other human being isn’t a sexual pervert loaded with monumental loads of kink. All it takes is a shot of whiskey to get a man to drop his shorts and do highly entertaining things with his body.

So what it comes down to? Privacy bent to protect the image that we’d like to impress upon other people that we are all pure as driven snow? How silly is this, when we are as pure as driven-over snow! At least have the fortitude to stand up and say “Yes, that’s my junk shot! Do you like it!?!” Because in that, lies respect and honesty.

To people that feel differently than I do, I have a one word question to ask you:

“Really?”

Marco Polo plays Ping Pong

Posted on April 25, 2012 by bluedepth

There is always something. I recently had the irritated displeasure of attempting to raise a communications channel to a certain group of adults and found the process to be highly educational. Recently Apple had instituted a series of advanced security questions that get paired to an Apple ID when you make a purchase in the month of April. These questions ranged from “Where did your parents first meet?” to “What was the first concert you attended?”, those sorts of questions.

At work, I have an Apple ID that I use to manage our iOS devices here and there and one of the people I tried to contact had to be the one that set the security questions, as I had gotten an email stating that someone set the security questions on the account on April 14th. So I figured someone was just absent-minded, we all have that from time to time, so I texted everyone to please get back to me if they had answered any Apple security questions.

I did get just a handful out of 23 people reply to me in one fashion or another. I then shifted the request over to email and also sent another request “If you have answered any security questions, please let me know what they are.” and for about a week of waiting, just the handful out of 23 deigned to reply to me.

Right after that I started a request with iTunes support at Apple to petition them to wipe away the erroneous security questions on the account and they were busy working on that. Last night they sent me an email telling me that the security questions were reset and that I could login and re-answer them, which I did late last night. So the technical angle of this issue is now a solved non-issue.

But what does bother me, and it’s more vexatious then a real concern is how people replied, or didn’t to my inquiry. I had made the erroneous assumption that when I send out a text twice, and an email asking for information that there is a built-in component to that message which people should reply either way. It was for work, it was important, I used the word “please”. The response I received back after bringing this up was “I didn’t know what it was about so I didn’t reply.” and it was my fault I suppose for assuming that people would, by themselves, assume that a reply was expected. Out of 23 people, only five were not question marks, the rest were crickets. Nobody here but us crickets.

So in the future I vow that I will include “reply requested” to my communications. I hate to dumb it down so far as to treat them like children, but after this, I can’t help but think that’s going to be the only way I can establish a communications channel with these people. I have great fear for when I have to establish a technical communications channel with people, these specifically, but even people in general when there is an emergency. There is this sense of “deer in the headlights” that is deeply upsetting to me. If you get a message that you don’t understand – which is the better path? To actually communicate about it in hopes of resolving it or just sit in the dark, ignoring it, hoping it goes away?

It’s a lot like Marco Polo playing Ping Pong with himself. It’s not a game, it’s just a sad old man standing in front of a ping-pong table with a stiff little white ping pong ball bouncing on the table.

Abandoning Google Plus

Posted on April 12, 2012 by bluedepth

Yesterday I opened my Google Plus page and discovered to my surprise and initial pleasure that Google had brought a new interface to their social network system. As I started to explore this new interface I started to immediately notice that things had changed not for the better, but rather for the worse. Google had unilaterally included their chat system on the right side of my browser window, it’s something I rarely ever use so that system is all wasted space. I noticed that the stories in my circles, the things I really care about are now shuffled off to the left in a column that lost 10% of space on the leftmost and 50% on the rightmost, being moved over for some controls at the very top of the page that now occupy this dreaded whitespace region on my Google Plus page.

It’s this whitespace, and the meaningless chat talker system that I can’t stand. Facebook attempted a similar move by presenting me with a chat-talker screen on the left side as well months ago, when I still used Facebook. When they made the changes to their interface, along with privacy concerns and workplace issues with social networking I left Facebook. Now it just languishes as an identity marker, if content gets on my Facebook page it’s wholly accidental. Twitter’s web page also underwent this columnar approach, as they reconfigured the entire interface out from underneath their users. For Twitter, I stopped using that because it was more noisy than useful, the people I wanted to engage with were just human billboards, and the interface changes were really the straw that broke the camel’s back.

So what is there to do? Complaints about the interface changes are really the only channel you have to express how much you dislike when a service does this to you – but you have no real power. Just complaining is one easily ignored tiny little voice in the darkness and doesn’t amount to anything at all. The only real power that any single user has is the power of choice. In the end, the only choice I have to make is, do I want to still use the system? It’s actually a matter of abandonment. I abandoned Facebook. I abandoned Twitter. Because they changed the interface and made it less useful to me, I am facing the idea of abandoning Google Plus. I don’t need these social network systems to give my life meaning. They need me, or rather, they need aggregate me’s, lots of people, to give what they do meaning. The less people use a socially networked system the less appealing that system is to everyone else. Facebook is only compelling because everyone uses it. There is no real value inherent in Facebook itself. This is a lesson that the classic business models these companies use can’t take into account – that their popularity defines their success. If they make a grossly unpopular change to the interface, then people will flee and their success will go tits up.

I don’t care to encourage other people to abandon these systems if they like them. Each of us has to make these kinds of decisions on a wholly personal level. I find it obnoxious that Google, and Facebook, and Twitter for that matter all force interface changes on users without giving the user any control whatsoever. It would be more elegant if there were a batch of controls we could select from and build our own interface. Put the bits and pieces where we want, opt out of things we don’t care for and make the interface work best for us, as the users. None of these sites have done that, they all behave as if they have global fiat to make changes willy-nilly. The end user who has to contend with these changes can’t do anything really except make that singular choice surrounding the issue of abandonment.

So where do I go now? It’s comic, but in many ways I am looking forward to going backwards. There is one system that I’ve used, mostly as a category but the people behind what I currently use I regard as being the platonic form of that category, and that is WordPress. Going back to blogging. What does the WordPress infrastructure have that attracts me? It’s got stable themes, the site looks very much like it always has. There are changes, but they aren’t as gross in scope as these other systems have perpetrated. I can share links on WordPress, I can write long posts, short status updates, and WordPress has a competent comment system already in place.

So I will give Google Plus until May 1st to do something better with their interface, to recognize the value in the stream and give us users the choice of what systems we want to see on our Google Plus page. Google should give us the ability to turn off the whitespace region, we should be able to turn off the chat talker region, so that we can maximize the stream region. If they fail to correct these glaring human interface deficits I will do to Google Plus what I did to Facebook. I will abandon Google Plus. I will keep the account running but I will no longer actively use it. Things that end up on Google Plus will end up being the same sort of things that end up washing up on Twitter, specifically links to content on my WordPress blog. Google’s loss will be WordPress’ gain. WordPress has always done right by me, and I respect them. I do not respect Twitter, nor do I respect Facebook. My respect for Google is quixotic at best. I used to believe in their “Do No Evil” company mantra, but that has been shed as Google has done some very evil acts, they aren’t what they once were and this sullying of their image makes the pending abandonment easy.

Will my abandonment hurt Google? No, of course not. I’m not so full of myself as to think that me leaving will change anything about the service, that Google will even notice my absence. However if I can inspire other people to give another look at WordPress, maybe see that progress forward can be achieved by regressing to earlier systems may be a worthy pursuit if what you get in the trade is interface stability. That this single raindrop encourages others to fall. The raindrop doesn’t believe it is responsible for the flood. I can only hope that I help the flood along. These massive changes that these social network sites perpetrate on their usership should be punished! We want it all, we want to use the service and we want to control it as well. We want the interface to be regular, logical, useful and static. When we want to make a change, we want to be the ones making it. We do not want to be victims of someones good intentions, Google! I would say this for Facebook as well, but that’s a lost cause.

So time is ticking away. If Google does not act, then the stream on that service is terminal. If that comes to pass, I will be migrating to my WordPress blog.

I hope to see some of you there.

Easter Tidings

Posted on April 6, 2012 by bluedepth

It’s Easter time, which is one of the very-important-so-lets-go-to-Church Christian Holidays. Many Christians, well, the good ones, have been involved with some sort of lenten fast for the past forty days and it doesn’t end until Easter Sunday, which is in two days from today.

As a used-to-be-Christian who now regards himself as somewhere between a secular humanist, a buddhist, and a neo-pagan this holiday is much like all the other Christian holidays, which is to say, a giant batch of goof in order to facilitate cultural assimilation. The big holidays for Christians are Christmas and Easter. The birth and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Now, Christmas has it’s own special sort of silliness. We chop down trees and dress them with baubles and we have figures that occupy popular consciousness and the “Baby Jesus” only appears as a sideline player in that yearly conflagration of economic stimulus and material goodwill. The other holiday, the one we are adjacent to now, is Easter. Once again we have a cultural hodgepodge of really goofy things all colliding at the same time. At the core of it should be, but isn’t, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I’ll get to the silliness of that later on, but bear with me. The holiday is supposed to be solemn with a celebration of this one mans ability to somehow pop back to life after being dead and through resurrection cleansing our sins in the eyes of God. Except none of that matters. Children don’t give a flying rip about Jesus Christ, he’s just a suave white guy (usually) who appears in quickly flashed artistic impressions of historical events and kids just get a general sense about all the hocus-pocus behind it all and just shrug because for a child the notion of death and resurrection are meaningless concepts. To Children, summer lasts forever and nobody dies. What kids associate with the holiday is the exact core of what the Christians tried to subvert by laying their tripartite-dead-notdead-heavy_mystery_time-God on top of pagan rituals. Like Eostre. A pagan germanic tradition that occurs in April and involves candy, rabbits, brightly colored eggs, and a host of deities from faiths that Christians find distasteful, like Eostre herself, a goddess, or Freyja, a teutonic goddess. So, in order to culturally assimilate the unwashed barbaric hordes you don’t try to kill them off en-masse, instead you co-opt their rituals and you pretend that it’s always been this way. You get to their children and before you know it, after a few generations come and go, the entire backstory has been whitewashed and a new narrative has been put in it’s place. The problem with whitewashing an old narrative is that it quite often hangs around. People still do the same things even if they don’t really know why any longer. So Christians assemble (like the pagans), they celebrate Easter (the pagans celebrate Eostre! Wait, it’s so close!), people assemble Easter Baskets full of candy, dyed eggs, fake plastic grass and a host of rabbit icons… holy crap. We’ve fallen completely off the Christian wagon kids! This is all dirty no-good filthy pagan crap! Where did Jesus go, we misplaced him, oops. But at the end, after all the egg-hunts and eating of chocolate rabbits, which, I must say is about as pagan as you can get, turning an icon into something edible and sweet, BOGGLE… and then to eat an Easter Ham, which I think is a really mean thing that Christians do as Jesus was a Jew and !@#$ KOSHER and last I checked PIG WAS NOT KOSHER oh whatever. After Easter dinner then everyone gets in their finery and toddles off to Church. Then and only then do we get heaping helpings of the steaming pile of Jesus Christ narrative. It’s a lot like Jesus Christ the cannon, being packed with Jesus Christ grapeshot and aimed at the belching rabbit-icon-eating/pig-eating/non-kosher horde of barbarians and fired with magical Jesus Christ gunpowder of guilt.

Even the timing of the holiday is annoyingly pagan. The Christians really don’t get how to whitewash and properly murder and cannibalize mythic narratives. They establish that Easter is the Sunday closest to the first full moon after the vernal equinox! What the HELL does the vernal equinox or the !@#$ MOON have to do with Jesus Christ? Huh!?! Oh wake up! It’s got nothing to do at all, it’s just a bunch of confused old men trying to retain control on what amounts to being an uncontrollable herd of sweaty messy barbarians. When you go to Church next, look around. Now imagine what it looked like 1600 to 1800 years ago. Never mind, it’s the same thing, only now you all think it’s true and believe and that’s really all that matters. You’ve bought the Christians cart of goods that they have for sale, but you still do quintessentially pagan things! If belief gives godlings life, then Krampus, Santa Claus, and Eostre are very much alive and well. Keep being good, keep eating rabbit icons, and keep on futzing about with dyed eggs! Eostre needs all your belief energy to even stand up to Big Daddy, JC, and the Spook.

Speaking of dead things coming back to life, the resurrection itself. What a monumental pile of hocus-pocus if I’ve ever seen it. We have never seen anyone go from well and truly dead to alive all on their own, except for once, 2000 years ago. Sure. What’s more plausible? That Jesus Christ died, went through hell, and then was resurrected, OR that he was nailed to a cross as a form of capital punishment, where he lapsed into a coma from exposure, malnutrition, and poor hydration then when “dead” hauled off the cross and then laid in state. Then after recovering from being in a coma, got up and wandered off?!? What if that was really what happened?

So Christians elect to believe that a dead man suddenly popped back to life and then they see the miracle of that and then tacitly agree to suspend all rational thought thereafter. Accept it, it’s the word of God. Accept it, it’s in the scriptures. Accept it, you have to if you believe. Accept it, or you’ll be a sinner.

Get off the collective cross, we need the wood.

So, enjoy the Easter fantasy. The pagan rituals you still perform without knowing why. Still buy into the narrative sold to you by the Christians and never feel any hint of awkwardness that you’ve suspended your own rational thoughts and given control of your actions over to old men who don’t even notice your existence. It sounds so silly, but, there it is.

And people wonder why we haven’t been visited by aliens or have mastered space travel. If you were an advanced alien culture, and you saw the kind of hocus-pocus that we humans readily believe in, would you elect to just do nothing or would you watch us very carefully to make sure we never leave the third planet from this unremarkable star on the edge of a very unremarkable galaxy?

So embarrassing. We aren’t ready, at this rate we won’t ever be ready. Not really.

It's silly, and you should stop doing it.

Posted on April 6, 2012 by bluedepth

Email confidentiality footers annoy me. I see them frequently on many emails that I get and I think of them as meaningless text that really should be ignored. That an email is somehow a private exchange of information is laughable. Email is sent in plaintext using an open protocol and on the wire it’s all unencrypted.

What really brings this to the forefront is when I see these meaningless bits of mental flotsam and jetsam clogging up my email box because someone set a vacation autoresponse and their membership on a email list is causing them to constantly reply with a “I’ll be out from…” email with this stupid block of text at the bottom asserting that the email is the property of blah blah blah.

Writing email has the same security protections as writing a postcard and tying it to a bird and letting it fly off. Your assertion that your communications are somehow proprietary or classified is utterly hilarious.

If people really wanted to make this not so utterly irrelevant, they should use public-key encryption or at least something like ROT–13 encryption so that the text isn’t readily apparent and takes some work to decode. Sending plaintext with this silly block at the bottom just musses up the display and doesn’t mean anything to anybody. So stop it.

Fifteen Hundred Dollars

Posted on April 4, 2012 by bluedepth

While actively pursuing the design I’ve had to make meditation a part of my daily routine I’ve been looking online to see what is out on the Internet when it comes to meditation. What I half-heartedly wished I’d see is clear resources on how to get started and free information, perhaps even courses that people could sign up for if they wanted. There are lots of resources online, including Wikipedia, which I quite enjoy. Much of the basic information is useful but many of the links on the first page of Google seem to orbit this semantic space that I like to characterize as ‘freaky eastern shazam’. It’s very reminiscent of the sites you run into when investigating anything that isn’t mainstream in the west. Reading about Tea leads you to bombastic hyperbole about all the health benefits of tea. Reading about Reiki leads you to similar bombast, Feng Shui, Buddhism, and really what this particular blog post is about, Meditation. All these topics have collected the flotsam and jetsam of bombastic hyperbole around them. A lot of ooohing and aaahing and almost always there is some old crusty personality featured that is an ‘expert’ or ‘guru’ that is supposed to lend the topic seriousness. It’s as if western thought is a nightclub and the only way to get beyond the bouncer is to have some sort of elderly expert you can name-drop which will unhook the red velvet ropes and let you in.

Specifically what I ran across that kind of upset me is the site for Transcendental Meditation. Now I have nothing against them at all, no real complaints or critiques to speak of, as they seem to be pleasant and upstanding people. What I do find rather irksome is once you click beyond all the chrome shiny you get to the brass beneath it all. I’ve noticed this quite a lot, this sense of having to pay to be taught, that ‘tuition’ costs some rather pricey sum that somehow justifies a buying-sight-unseen product which may or may not be for you. I’ve hashed this very thing out with the people who follow Reiki, and here we see it again, except for meditation. The cost is $1500! But because Oprah and her cult-of-personality is “underwriting” a portion of the wares that tm.org sell, they’re willing to lower the price to $975!

Selling what should be a basic part of human living strikes me as wrong. It’s upsetting. Everyone should be encouraged to explore their consciousness. They should be willing to explore the many porticos and hallways to their awareness and realize that it’s more than just being on and off, being awake and asleep, being active and maybe-I-dream-but-I-don’t-remember. I’ve gone exploring and there is more here that people should be curious about and explore along with me. So I see these sites and I note the cost and it strikes me with an almost angry emotional sense that something that is an inborn and fundamental part of living should be for sale. Everyone experiences meditative states at least briefly every single day of their lives. I maintain (alas have no empirical proof) that everyone passes through the state that I feel when I meditate right after they leave REM sleep and right before their first conscious thought which is almost always some sort of planned movement, to get up off the bed. If you bring on this particular state with your full awareness intact during the day and stay in that place for a time, it changes you for the better. There is something here that is good for people and I can feel it. I can’t prove it, but I feel it to be right.

There is a counter-argument that is usually made, especially by Reiki professionals who state that the cost is high so that people take it seriously. That in a way, the only way to impress upon a western mind that something is worthy of pursuit you must first make them pay for it, which in a way compels them to make it feel serious because otherwise it’s just a waste of money and wasting money is taboo. The mental garden path runs, “Well, I paid $1500 for this, so I should get my monies worth…” and I find this entire notion to be embarrassing. Shouldn’t you want to do something that may be good for you from your own values, for your own good? Why should money enter into it? Then again, I did pay over $15,000 for a “college education” so upon reflection, I’m as much of a guppy as these yokels paying $1500 for someone to teach them meditation. In many ways I think about the time I spent in college and what I got out of that experience. Was it about the “higher education” that stayed with me, or is it something else? It would be crass to basically state that I paid $15,000 for a beautiful piece of paper which I’ve never shown another living soul, but entitles me to letters that I get to tack on to my name, which nobody ever does because the letters B.A. are so common as to be meaningless. Perhaps what I got out of college wasn’t what I went there for, but for all the other things that happened to me while I was there. All the other things I did, the growing up, the learning, and none of it was done in a classroom. I try to remember anything I learned in a classroom for my college education and I can’t recall anything beyond a vague impression of stadium-style seating.

But what I can do now is explore without having to pay someone to teach me. At least in this I can do this on my own. I don’t need someone to hand me any paperwork I won’t ever really use. Because meditation is an inherent skill, and a ‘college education’ isn’t, then that may be the justification I use to both criticize tm.org for selling out and why I sold out to the SUNY college system in New York. The basis is flimsy, but it is something at least.

So what does it take to meditate? It seems straightforward to me, and I strip away the religious claptrap that surrounds the act, if you want to take meditation and clothe it in a religious context that’s fine and up to you. The basics as far as I consider them is to exercise your will and carry your full awareness into a state of consciousness without thoughts. The parts of the brain can be resistant to this because while we are conscious we pretty much are just an endless stream of thoughts and this is the problem. You are more than a stream of thoughts and meditation helps you explore what existence is without this constant stream of thinking. I find that concentrating on breathing is perfect. It’s something you absolutely must do at all times or you will die, so you might as well use it as a tool to manipulate your consciousness. I’ve found that concentrating and centering all my will and awareness on my breathing, the feeling of breathing is all that I need. I notice that my mind wanders off of breathing and the further I go the more unusual ‘junk’ gets thrown up and occurs to me. It’s just as if the thinking parts of me know I’m trying to quiet them and they don’t want to ever shut up, so they try to sabotage me. While I sit calmly trying to meditate my thinking mind, in a panic to keep me from leaving, digs up the scent of WD–40 and the embrace of my maternal grandfather. I’m sure if I were to anthropomorphize my thinking parts it would run something like this: “WHAT!?! You cannot leave me! I’ll fix you! Here, here’s a memory of your grandfather! See! You can’t live without me!” Throughout the entire experience I have discovered that trying to suppress these intrusive thoughts only encourages them to pop up, just like raising the heat on a pan of popcorn kernels. The more heat, the faster they pop. Instead of actively suppressing them, the key I’ve found is to apply my will to let go of whatever it is and calmly return to breathing. Sometimes I’m successful, sometimes I’m not. In the end however, if I have enough time and willpower I can cross a barrier and as I’ve written about before, it feels like a different region of consciousness. The popcorn thoughts no longer appear and everything is serene, calm, and quiet in the most important place of all, inside my own mind.

So, why spend $1500, or even $975 if something like this can be explored and developed by sitting someplace comfortable, closing your eyes, and breathing? I think more people would enjoy it if they tried it. As I’ve characterized it before, it’s ineffable. There really aren’t words to convey what the feeling is, wonderful and magnificent and delightful don’t really touch the nature of what this space in your consciousness is. The only thing that really upsets me is that I’ve been carrying this around with me for 36 years and only now have taken it seriously. Instead of bemoaning the lost time I am going to make it a part of the life that remains to me because this is really really good.

Cloven Hoofywoofies

Posted on April 2, 2012 by bluedepth

Just finished the “2012 Great Colleges To Work For” survey sent from ModernThink, LLC. We received a message a while ago indicating that this was an important survey, and that it was important to certain people that we all fill it out.

When I got that email the first thing that came to mind was “Are you sure?”. So this morning I got the invitation to fill out the survey. I clicked my merry way through the questions and near the end there were two open-ended text-box questions. I wrote what I thought down, trying not to be terribly unfair or particularly abusive and came up with a rather compelling bit of text to include as a response for the survey. Then right before I clicked Next I thought I better re-read the invitation email, see if there was any fine print. The devil is in the details, are there any cloven-hoofywoofies behind ModernThink’s draperies?

This text immediately popped out at me:

"Please note, however, that your institution may have the opportunity to purchase a report that summarizes all employee responses to the two optional, open-ended questions at the end of the survey. The report will list all responses to those two questions in alphabetical order by the first letter of the response to ensure objectivity in reporting. In order to preserve your anonymity, please do not include your name or other identifying remarks in your responses."

Anyone who even has a passing knowledge of me can spot my writing style and my passionate bluntness right off the bat, so anything that I write really has my mental fingerprints all over it. In a way, anything that I had written in those optional boxes would have been an “identifying remark” so I highlighted the passages I spent about five minutes each writing and blanked them out. I did consider, just briefly putting in a Lorem Ipsum block, but I didn’t. I’ve learned the lesson from Facebook. It’s a lot like Fight Club, in so far that the chief rule about Fight Club is that you do not talk about Fight Club. I just extended that to the survey. It’s far better for me professionally to deflect questions, change the subject, and… oh! isn’t this a pretty flower! 🙂

In a rather tongue-in-cheek way, a white anglo-saxon protestant knows how to ford those kinds of rapids. 🙂

I’m glad I read the fine print. I’m glad I spotted the hoofywoofies. I finished the survey and I can move on with my life.

P.S. I have to give props to Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman for the term “hoofywoofies”, it’s from their collaborative fiction book titled “Good Omens”. If you get a chance to read it, I highly recommend it.

Childhood's End

Posted on March 29, 2012 by bluedepth

I saw this opinion article on the New York Times: Children’s Books… and I have the exact opposite opinion as the author that the New York Times published. He states that adults should not read kids books. That they are beneath adults and that there are better things that adults should read.

I don’t want to know anyone who has this opinion. Wadding up your childhood and locking it in the basement of your soul is the quickest way to become an autumn person. Courting the death of joy should be anathema to any vibrant living human being. There is more than enough room, and respect, for anyone wanting to read “The Lorax” at the tender age of 36! The ability to embrace childish things means you have not let your soul ossify with the banality of our cold and horrible world.

People who judge and then sniff imperiously when they see an adult reading “The Hunger Games” or “Harry Potter”, or even “Horton Hears A Who” are in my opinion spiritually bankrupt and repellent. They exude the ardent seriousness of stupid adults. Life is best led reading whatever it is that you want to read. Judging puts you in hell, with the pedants, grammar, and spelling nazis. This cold and desolate region is filled with angry bitter shades who refuse to axe anyone a question. They refuse to deal with anyone who ain’t like them. And they burn with rage when you express alot of affection for anyone who doesn’t toe the strict line that English doesn’t have.

Your childhood is a diamond. It has to be loved. It’s as much a part of every passionate living adult as rationality. It’s your inner child that powers your curiosity. He or she is the gatekeeper to your imagination and your creativity. Denying him or her damns you to a life lived in shadows of gray. In that state you might as well be dead for all the good you are to anyone else.

Everyone needs to keep doing things that are good for your inner child. Don’t turn into an autumn person. They are animated corpses who don’t know they are dead.

Chicago Police Say: "Your First Amendment Rights can be terminated."

Posted on March 20, 2012 by bluedepth

The Chicago Police Department has a problem. One of their officers was videotaped stating “Your First Amendment Rights can be terminated.”

Here’s the article and you can watch the video for yourself. I wrote a little bit about it on Google Plus:

First Amendment rights can be terminated? That’s the first I’ve heard of that! Here’s the text of the thing: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

There are exceptions that the Supreme Court has installed which bear on this text, but nowhere does any of it bear on what I saw in this video.

This video is just Chicago Police acting shamefully. Perpetuating the stereotype that the police are paid thugs with no regard to citizens basic constitutionally-guaranteed rights. How can we petition the government for a redress of grievances if the central right that backs it up can be “terminated”.

Chicago has a problem on it’s hands. The police need to be put back under control before they think of themselves as somehow better or more than the rest of us.

Trampling on our rights, and worse yet, being recorded to trample over citizens rights is only going to lead to future unrest and a mounting pressure from citizens to reject these officers of the law as absurd simulacrums of what they are intended to be: To enforce laws, to serve the citizens and protect them.

The first step? Protect us from yourselves, Chicago Police Department. You are hazardous to our life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

Bluedepth's Journal

Thoughts & Opinions

Category Archives: Issues