How To Let Go Of Anger

Posted on March 18, 2013 by bluedepth

I discovered this bit of wisdom in the dimly lit corners of my pocket list. Enjoy.

“Anger is like a storm rising up from the bottom of your consciousness. When you feel it coming, turn your focus to your breath. Breathe in deeply to bring your mind home to your body. Then look at, or think of, the person triggering this emotion: With mindfulness, you can see that she is unhappy, that she is suffering. You can see her wrong perceptions. You can see that she is not beautiful when she says things that are unkind. You can also see that you don’t want to be like her. You’ll feel motivated by a desire to say or do something nice — to help the other person suffer less. This means compassionate energy has been born in your heart. And when compassion appears, anger is deleted.”

— Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist monk and author of Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames

Google Reader RIP

Posted on March 14, 2013 by bluedepth

Google just announced that their RSS Service, Google Reader is slated to be shutdown on July 1st, 2013. This upsets me greatly but I’m not really surprised. There was never any real traction for the service and they let the web component of it languish in the past. There was some noise that they were going to integrate the social features into Google Plus. Good luck with that.

What does this mean for the majority of users out there? Nothing really. I would say that if Google is going to pull the plug, essentially pull the rug out from under their customers by surprise like this, is that you get exactly what you pay for. Google Reader was great, and it was free and now it’s a dead service walking.

I can’t really see Google Plus succeeding against Facebook. That’s the battle to come. So they are reorganizing their infrastructure and pointing it to failtown. Okay. I would say that if you use any other Google product, like Picasa or Blogger, that you should migrate to something else like Flickr or WordPress as soon as you can, because if they kill Reader, who’s to say what’s next? The only thing I am planning to use now is Google Mail, which may be the last refuge for these scoundrels. It’s best to leave of your own volition than to be unceremoniously tossed out on your ass by surprise.

Very Far Around Robin Hoods Barn

Posted on March 10, 2013 by bluedepth

Oh the lengths you’ll go to include services such as Google+ that by design do not readily make themselves available for such things! First I had to find a way to link my Google+ profile to my Google Voice number, all to get a magic email address which I can only send using Google Mail so that the email will automatically end up on my Google+ profile. That part is done, then I went over to IFTTT.com and investigated how that might work. So I uncorked the WordPress channel and set it to watch this blog for new entries, when it sees one, it should collect all the details and then send those using my Gmail account to my Google+ magic email address. Now lets see if the damn thing works. 🙂

TL;DR: Now I have a way to publicize on Google+ from WordPress automatically.

Friday Flashback – March 8th

Posted on March 8, 2013 by bluedepth

2004 – I got my IRS return back from the Feds, $1700, a part of that went to GenCon. Boy, were those the days. Since GenCon went to Indianapolis, and I don’t travel through Indiana unless driven by a myrddraal, that won’t be happening again. Some funny Andy-abuses-popsong-lyrics humor and the almost daily work issues, which at this point are at the focus where irritation and cliché meet. Moving along…

2006 – The big thing on this day was Project Runway was concluded. The most important bit from this show happened this year, “Where’s Andre?” Yes. Where.

2007 – Owning an American Made Car made the headlines on this day. Getting screwed over by General Motors makes 2013 a laugh-fest. We saved GM, Quist-ler, and Ford. Oh hooray. $1200 for replacement bearings and fourth set of brakes. It’s one of the reasons why I’ll never own another American made piece of shit car again. American auto companies can fail – hah – or not. wry smile The start of my debt was this awful car, one small little golden brick of it at least.

2009 – The beginning of the end for my odd benign cyst that was on my leg for years and years and years. This was when that whole thing started on the path to the end. Now I’m delightfully symmetrical and ever so daintily scarred. In the movies? Watchmen. Those were the days.

2010 – Wireless carriers still mattered. Sprint was good for highways, Verizon was slow but everywhere and AT&T was shit. This also was when AT&T bought Centennial wireless. So, whatever. Little did these carriers know but they were on the path to becoming commodity carriers. Nobody cares about their products or their employees, just their towers. In other news, I was hopeful that La Palma would break off, hit the ocean and several hours later erase New York City with a megatsunami. Alas, my hopes were for naught. New York City still exists. Blah. I started to blog and lauded how I could link dump automatically on Twitter and Facebook. Yeah, social networks as whores, take it bitches. It was at this point I realized that Apple Sales are whores. If you approach them and jingle money at them, they’ll do anything for you, but after the sale? You’re full of Santorum and the beer goggles have worn off. I also wished for Fax Machines to disappear. I didn’t get my wish.

2011 – A bit of Sage love as an email brought me great joy. I still thought Daniel Tosh was pretty neat, before the rape jokes and general wretchedness set in. WMU rolled out the Bronco Transit Mobile GPS and I thought it was neat, then I stopped using the system. I started thinking about how awkward it must be for Christians when Easter isn’t a fixed date but based off a calculation on the moon after the vernal equinox, lulz. Extra special work-fun and I started talking about AES–256 and how smart people look it up and take advantage of it.

2013 – Reality TV and Contest TV kind of suck. I decided to make a change to what I do at home, after dinner and cleanup are done. A very old friend and I shared a special moment, but they have no idea because it was just a dream. My daily tarot card readings pretty much jive with my horoscopes and so, I do my best to not go all “Hulk Angry/Hulk Smash”. I dealt with work issues, did things I’m not proud of, found FBackup which was okay, and generally felt that the day was best forgotten. I laughed heartily at the foibles of folken, they don’t, so I do, and it doesn’t matter. Well, it matters to me, which is why I do it. What is it? Ah, yes. Work stuff… you’ll never be knowing. Trust Issues. Dangly Bits. LOL.

Goodbye Carl

Posted on March 7, 2013 by bluedepth

Carl Levin is not going to run for office in 2014. For the guy that pushed NDAA (AKA American Citizens as Enemy Combatants) and said nothing in 2000 when all it took to prevent George W. Bush from being president was one single senator… Goodbye Carl. Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out!

Now we can think about getting a real honest democrat in that seat. NDAA. *cough*

Empty Nests

Posted on February 22, 2013 by bluedepth

I’ve given up on Twitter. I won’t be removing my account as Twitter still has some use to for browsing the stream but there really isn’t any compelling interactions on that service for me any longer. The only things that will end up on Twitter really are links to blog posts and maybe the one-off comment.

Ever since Twitter enabled the data download feature on my account, I took advantage of it. I downloaded the entire archive and discovered to my pleasure that Twitter stored all my tweets as plain text in a CSV file. I spent the last months migrating my old Tweets into my Day One application. I will hand one thing to Twitter, it did keep me “logging” along for a long time. I’m switching that impulse over to Day One. It’s impressive just how much of my past I have recorded. It turns out to be about 2600 days, or about 7 years of my past – recorded and in some ways with a lot of resolution. For that I will always be thankful for Twitter. However…

The reason why I am leaving Twitter is because it is too exposed. I didn’t feel it was useful to have a private Twitter account, so I left it public and this decision was made with a devil-may-care attitude, that anything I tweeted wouldn’t matter. As it turns out, it does. Mostly this is because of my workplace, in that I do not trust them or anyone who works there. It’s not really anything meant to be hurtful or anything, but I can’t risk my job and I certainly feel that sharing on Twitter threatens my employment. For as far as I trust Western Michigan University, it starts and ends with the partitioned, compartmentalized version of me that works there professionally. Not the true honest authentic me. Being honest and sharing freely would just upset everyone and lead to needless drama at work, so I unfollowed a bunch of coworkers and people whose tweets would have gone to waste on an ignored account.

Another problem with Twitter is the loss of engagement and dimensionality. Everyone on Twitter is a three-dimensional person with all the complexities that come with being alive. Twitter’s relationships seem stuck in a one-sided mode of conversation. This very thing struck me most powerfully as I was migrating Tweets into my Day One app. I caught out of the corner of my eye tweets that I had made to people who were popular or famous. They were wasted messages. At first this concerned me, but then I realized that what was really going on was that the people who had thousands and thousands of followers were so far beyond their social horizon (that 150 limit I’ve written about before) that they simply cannot socially relate to anyone beyond their subset coterie of social contacts. It’s not that they are mean or being ignorant, but they just cannot process that level of interaction – it’s more about how our biology is colliding with our technology. So for the really famous, the really popular, that’s where the dimensionality comes in. A regular person is three-dimensional. The others are one-dimensional. They are human billboards. They stand there and output information and you stop thinking of them as individuals and start relating to them as “sources” instead. Robbing them of their inherent humanity. They don’t have feelings, as billboards don’t have feelings.

So, we’re all done with that. Twitter will still be a link-dump for my blog. Most of my actual sharing will start in Byword, then be copied to Day One, then from there shared to Facebook under my “Sharing” security model. If you don’t see lots of things on my Facebook wall, that’s because you aren’t in “Sharing”, and mostly that’s because I can’t allow my honest self to interfere with my work. — Gosh, writing that out felt wrong, but at least I’m honest.

If you follow me on Twitter and want to keep your lists tidy and unfollow me, I won’t even notice you leaving. So go in peace.

No Forgiveness for BP

Posted on February 20, 2013 by bluedepth

I just saw a BP commercial play on CBS, as part of the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. I DVR the show and watch it when I like, time shifting it to a more pleasant hour than when it’s on, so it’s always an old program, which I’m fine with. But the BP commercial does irritate me. In it, a talking head for BP explains, almost plaintively, that they have spent 23 billion dollars in cleanup efforts in the Gulf of Mexico. He then talks up all the wonderful opportunities and great tourism of the area and then segues into how many Americans BP employs.

How dare you! How dare your company! Your greed and ignorance are only met with your petulant arrogance. You think there is any forgiveness for you? There is no forgiveness possible for an amoral company such as BP. Companies are not people. You cannot possibly expect people to treat you like you are asking them to. You poisoned the Gulf of Mexico with your greedy incompetence!

I still maintain that the right and proper punishment for what BP did in the Gulf of Mexico was to have all their American property seized, liquidated and be banned from doing any commerce in the United States. That’s a fitting punishment, not 23 billion dollars. It’s chump change to what you did in the Gulf of Mexico. The fact that BP wasn’t eliminated from the United States is clear proof that there is still quite a lot wrong with our world and how we manage it.

Shame on you BP. Shame on you forever.

PAD 2/12/2013 – All About Me

Posted on February 20, 2013 by bluedepth

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.

Explaining Things Simply — The Lone Sysadmin

Posted on February 15, 2013 by bluedepth

Explaining Things Simply — The Lone Sysadmin.

I read this article and started to really think about why it is that I find myself saying over and over again that Hell is Other People. I’ve faced this pressure in my professional life, the clamor to “write simpler” ends up being a 22 caliber bullet that ends up ricocheting around inside my head. The requirements for communication are straightforward, you need a common language with a common syntax, grammar and vocabulary. In my experience with IT the biggest tripping point is that vocabulary trap at the end.

When you are in IT, sometimes you have no choice but to write in a complicated fashion because the core issue is a complicated one. Usually there is fiscal risk, sometimes legal risk, sometimes even personal risk. The messages are often times important and the combined issue of complicated subject matter and limited shared vocabulary really makes communication impossible. This is where I think a lot of my particular cassandras tears originate from. I can’t hope to communicate with others about technology as the spiraling reduction of complexity required to reach a successful instance of real communication ends up making the entire statement devolve into “That is bad. We should not do it. It is not safe.” which ends up being thrown in the bin because your reasons aren’t good enough – those reasons you left on the chopping room floor because they were too complicated and there was no shared vocabulary.

After reading this article, which I can appreciate, I can’t help but get the image of Morlocks and Eloi out of my head. I’ve frequently made reference to these characters in HG Wells’ ‘The Time Machine’ story, but I think the comparison is apt and getting more so as time goes on. There are people who understand, there are people who do not, and it could lead to a fundamental separation between people – maybe even enough to be something that could cause speciation. There is another aspect of this that rankles me deeply, and that is that there is a deficit in vocabulary to start with! What ever happened to self-improvement, learning, or being curious with your average person? Years ago we all could have said that understanding technology wasn’t a necessity, but in the 21st century? Can we really say that still? Everyone needs to understand technology. Even a dog-catcher needs to understand some technology to do his work! So, if there is nothing to do that doesn’t involve some sort of technology then why do people avoid it so? Why do they remain so ignorant and incurious and so unwilling to learn?

I’ve said it many times and it’s likely going to be either a part of my memoirs or my epitaph even, that when someone ceases to learn, they begin to die. If you don’t want to know, perhaps living isn’t for you. Let a machine do it, what’s the difference?

Bluedepth's Journal

Thoughts & Opinions

Category Archives: Issues

Very Far Around Robin Hoods Barn

Goodbye Carl

No Forgiveness for BP

Explaining Things Simply — The Lone Sysadmin