Category Archives: Issues

PAD 1/14/2013 – Headlines

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“Head to your favorite online news source. Pick an article with a headline that grabs you. Now, write a short story based on the article. “

This article grabbed my attention and would not let it go. The story is about a dolphin that ended up in the Gowanus Canal in New York City. There really isn’t any story to write about this, nothing that will leave anyone feeling good about humanity. Look at what we have wrought. Wildlife wandered into a canal so awful, so toxic, so disgusting that it died of exposure to us. I would argue that the canal represents New York City quite well, anyone who has read my blog, especially my LiveJournal when I was there knows my opinion on New York City is poor at best. That the waters of the Gowanus Canal can kill just cinches it. Everyone thinks that New York City is the biggest and best city in the world, but I have never liked it. Too many people, too filthy, too disgusting, too dangerous. Some think that this tale of the Gowanus Canal is just one small little part and that the city has more to offer, that you can just whitewash over this awfulness by looking elsewhere – perhaps the arts maybe. The city is dangerous to more than just wildlife!

So what to write about New York City. The waters are toxic, the streets are lethal, and this is all before we add in all the sick twisted terrible humans which just add to this murk of awfulness. So, here’s a little story.

Years ago the people of upstate New York laughed amongst themselves that if everyone northwest of the Hudson River would just agree and all flush their toilets with uncanny synchrony that we could finally blow New York City into the Atlantic. After reading news story after news story about all the corruption, not just in the people, but deeply embedded in the very land itself it became clear that this upstaters fantasy really might need to come true. So everyone from Watertown to Syracuse and all the way over to Buffalo all agreed that they would pick the perfect day, a sunny day filled with hope and wonder and they would all march into their bathrooms and at the very stroke of midnight everyone in New York State would flush their toilets all at the same time and blow the cancer of New York City into the sea. Much like Atlantis, except riddled with toxins and horrors beyond understanding, the mad city of New York sank beneath the waves, never to be seen or heard from again.

If you love New York City, I invite you to saunter along barefoot all the way to Gowanus Canal and have yourself a bath. Good luck with that.

PAD 1/31/13 – Burnt

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“Remember yesterday, when your home was on fire and you got to save five items? That means you left a lot of stuff behind. What are the things you wish you could have taken, but had to leave behind?”

What would fire consume? Everything. That’s what insurance is for. There are things I would miss. Things that weren’t saved because there is just too much of it, it’s too difficult to rescue or move in time. What kind of things would I miss? My wardrobe, Scott’s comic books, our extensive entertainment library with both DVD’s and books. So much would be lost, but that’s one of the reasons why there is safety equipment at home and fire extinguishers, but even then, disaster could strike.

There is something about living simply which bears here I think. The wisdom that if you have a lot of things in your life that in certain ways, you don’t own the stuff, but rather the stuff owns you. Reducing the amount of stuff you own is likely a wiser move, but it runs so much against American culture, that you own or rent a residence and then fill it full of treasure and then keep it. Adding to it and never reducing it. I’ve read so many articles online about radical simplification and there is something in it. I cannot deny the wisdom in living simply and rejecting the consumer culture that abounds here in America. Always having more stuff and adding more stuff to that just doesn’t make much rational sense.

This works a lot like greed in a certain way as well. People are driven by greed to always increase the amount of money they have, to earn more, corner the market, whatever it takes to maximize your fiscal health. I don’t think I could be any more left-leaning if I tried. I’ve said before and I still believe this that the irrational accumulation of stuff is just as silly as the irrational accumulation of wealth. It runs directly against capitalism which pushes us all towards making as much money and keeping it as possible, even beyond rational understanding. I think that you should earn what can make your life comfortable and anything beyond that is actually wrong. I’ve thought long and hard about this and I put the limit on personal wealth at $75,000 a year. Beyond $75,000 and the money does less and less for you. Eventually that money means nothing and it starts to injure you. Look at the filthy rich, they lead lives of plenty with endless funds and they are miserable human beings. They are sad, they abuse drugs or alcohol, they act irresponsibly and generally are poor little rich people, devoid of true happiness. Sometimes, when I’m feeling very liberal I do spend time considering the forceful redistribution of individual wealth, where everyone’s wealth is capped at $75,000 and those who don’t earn enough to reach that limit are given money so that they can reach it, on the backs of the rich who, lets face it, wouldn’t even notice the money being gone. This of course would upset anyone who is a capitalist and would brand me as a socialist – why stop there, why not just go all the way to communism? Yes, I write this out of mean spite. I don’t really think the world will ever be like this idea in my head, but after years of watching the poor, the children, and the disadvantaged suffer while the rich build their obnoxious residences and waste their money on worthless endeavors, it’s actually a great reaction. Consider it not in terms of capitalism but rather in terms of suffering. How much suffering could be alleviated by forcefully redistributing the wealth of the richest people amongst us? I think it’s a worthy to consider a world like this, because to me, this seems to be something that Jesus himself would likely smile at and approve of. It has always struck me as odd, how people can maintain the wealth disparity in our society with their self-professed belief in Christianity.

I look forward to your spirited responses to this idea. 🙂

Corporate Personhood

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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.

Saving your bacon with Dropbox

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Several days ago at work I had someone approach me with a terrible tale of woe. They were helping a graduate student with a technical problem and wanted some guidance from me. The graduate student had a USB memory stick that had their entire academic production stored on it and they didn’t have backups anywhere else. This student went to Wal-Mart to print out pictures that were stored on this memory stick and when they had returned to Walwood they found that the memory stick no longer worked.

Then I got involved when the staff member helping this graduate student came to me with proxied panic about the data that this graduate student had lost. I plugged the device into my iMac thinking that at least the Mac would be able to display some sort of basic block device even if the filesystem was corrupted or damaged somehow. The USB memory stick was very old and my Mac noticed the device but refused to even display the block device details – so while the controller was apparently working, the channels further along towards the flash memory chips was not working as expected. There was nothing I could do to help the graduate student or the staff member and I felt just terrible. That there are no backups just made the panic more present and awful.

What could the graduate student do to mitigate this? The answer is in the clouds. I told the staff member that it wasn’t enough to simply tell graduate students that they should get some sort of cloud infrastructure to put their information on, but that they had to be stronger about it. That they had to insist that all students get some sort of cloud infrastructure to store their data. The cloud infrastructure that I prefer hands down is Dropbox. I use Dropbox and I love it, but when I tried to extend Dropbox services for the University I ran into some legal issues which pretty much precluded me using it – but none of that would preclude graduate students from using the system.

What is it about the cloud that drives me to it so strongly? It takes away a huge issue in one firm slash. The question of backing up your data. Using the cloud effectively abstracts away storage from the user, takes it elsewhere to be handled by people who spend their entire time only considering the proper storage and backup of data. Dropbox relies on Amazon S3 for primary storage and it’s Amazon that does the backups and the media shifting and everything that if you were to read an older “protect yourself” blog post would encourage you to do yourself. Instead of relying on you to do all the heavy lifting, which lets face it, we all want the benefits of that protection but sometimes getting to that point can be daunting, having it abstracted away makes a lot of sense. If there is a problem with Amazon S3, then the Internet has a bigger problem and if that’s the case, I would argue that Earth has a problem and that singular condition trumps the conditions of your backups because there are other more important things to consider. Now, please note that I am not directly advocating loading your data into Dropbox and then ignoring secondary backup completely, but for the majority of people out there, I do believe that Dropbox and Amazon S3 is enough to ensure your data security and persistence enough to stop here. Nothing stops anyone from duplicating their Dropbox contents on another storage medium but only those who are really invested in technology really need to move beyond what Dropbox provides.

I think every student should get a Dropbox account. The basic one is free and you can store up to 2GB and Dropbox has several ways you can win more space, such as referrals and such. For the panicked graduate student there is little that can be done beyond perhaps using a data recovery service such as the one I had previous experience with, Secure Data Recovery but the price tag on recovery with them is very expensive. You only use their services because you have to, and it’s a blessing that they are there, for when shit hits the fan.

I also think as a sidelight to this, that people invest in a diversified storage layout, especially when using public systems like those at Wal-Mart. Flash drives are very cheap now and it’s easier to kill a cheap throwaway “sacrificial lamb” than it is to watch your entire life disappear in a puff of logic from an overused terminal and it’s possibly damaged or shorted-out USB port. It is also my strong professional recommendation that people put lifespans on the devices they depend on. USB Hard Drives should be replaced after five years, no matter how long they have been running or not. USB sticks should be replaced every six months. Flash technology is not bulletproof, these devices degrade over time and it’s best to be safe and not sorry and if it costs a little extra or seems wasteful, then my argument is, so be it. Better to waste money on devices you don’t need then have to spend a thousand times more to recover data from a device that you errantly depended upon for far too long.

If I were in the academic sector at my University I would take this threat very seriously and as a value-added service to the student population I would find some way to set up a “University Cloud” storage system, and open-source variant that provides the same functions that Dropbox provides, alas, I am on the wrong side of the aisle on this, so all I can do is load my good ideas into my professional trebuchet and lob it over the walls of the ivory tower. Maybe someone will read this and it’ll spark something. Just some cursory searching on the network has led me to some possibilities:

Thanks to Quora for this list

Above and beyond everything else, when your life is becoming more and more digitally based it becomes a new vital thing to protect yourself from loss. The maxim “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is more relevant and important than you may have originally considered. Don’t end up being pushed up against a wall, protect yourself, backup your digital life!

PAD 2/7/13 – Right to Health

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“Is access to medical care something that governments should provide, or is it better left to the private sector? Are their drawbacks to your choice?”

 This is the central question of socialism. What things, if any, are appropriate for society to bear versus private citizens or companies? I think that this question has several parts actually, how big is the topic being considered, does it have any ethical or moral implications, and is there any need for democratic oversight? When it comes to health care I argue that it’s a human topic, it’s vast and universal and it’s incredibly expensive. I think that  when it comes to healthcare, that society can best provide coverage more than private companies and that as a member of society I would be willing to underwrite the costs of covering every American so that none of us have to endure catastrophic loss because of a health issue. I also argue that companies are inherently amoral and unethical. Companies that are publicly traded have shareholders and the promise of good behavior is not for those receiving the healthcare but rather the welfare of the shareholders themselves. Even if a company is not publicly traded, greed still overwhelms the greater good and renders companies amoral and blind to ethics. Companies are not people, companies have no conscience, they have no compassion. They are a mindless thing, sometimes the best thing you can say is that a company that doesn’t rape, pillage, and plunder is about as moral and ethical as they can get. I think “rape pillage and plunder” is a natural expression for a company because when you add people together in masses beyond 150 members, their ability to understand the consequences of their behaviors drop precipitously to zero. It is also vital that there be some public (democratic) oversight of the entire structure and so in this last condition I think it’s best that government do the work as ultimately government can be taken to account for their activities through the judicial branch of government.

There is a sidelight to all of this, that America has a problem and that is we have celebrity career politicians. This, I believe, has to end. We have term limits for many parts of government and I think it’s vital to extend this to the legislative and judicial branches of government. I think that a congressperson should serve for a maximum of four years and then be barred from future service in that branch. They can pursue other branches if they wish, but that’s where it ends.

So that is my answer to this question. Best that healthcare be done by society and done universally. Single payer, nationalized, social.

Keystone Kops

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I’ve had a hell of a time with Verizon. We have a Verizon Government contract at work because we are a governmental entity along with being a non-profit.

To set the stage, my system support specialist wanted to drop his old phone and take his number that he likes and that everyone knows belongs to him and have that number assigned to his work iPhone 5. We asked Verizon a few times and it took a fair bit for them to come around and we eventually got it off and running, or at least so we thought. Then this email exchange happened. I have redacted the numbers and names to protect the guilty.

Verizon Government said:

Thank you for contacting the Verizon Wireless Government Customer Operations Team. We have received your request to transfer [NEW PHONE NUMBER] to account [VZ ACCOUNT NUMBER]. In order to complete your request, please have the end user ensure the device and price plan are associated with Verizon Wireless and not Alltell. We are unable to transfer an Alltell device and price plan.
—
VZ Rep said:
Andy the user on this account needs to have his rate plans changed to non share Verizon plans. Once that is done they should be able to process the transfer.
—
Verizon Government said:
We have completed your request to perform an Assumption of Liability (AOL) for mobile number [NEW PHONE NUMBER] . On January 31, 2013 we account number removed the aforementioned mobile number from [EMPLOYEE]’s private account and reassigned to [INSTITUTIONS] account number [ACCOUNT NUMBER].
—
VZ Rep said:
Please put the line [NEW PHONE NUMBER] on the AC1000 min plan code 74053 with the 10.00 hot spot. See below.
—
Verizon Government to VZ Rep:
Dear [VZ REP],
Additional information or clarification is needed so that we may process your request. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Information Needed:

• With the line of [NEW PHONE NUMBER], the requested price plan of 74053: AMERICAS CHOICE II 1000 SHARE EMAIL & DATA+N&W+IN UNL $96.14 is not valid for the simple phone of Samsung Reality SCH-u820.
—
VZ Rep to Me:
Andy are you going to cancel the line that has the iPhone? [EMPLOYEE] does not have a smart device so the line was transferred with his consumer plan.
—
Me to VZ Rep:
[VZ Rep],
[EMPLOYEE] doesn’t really care for his current device and so I’d like to have the number associated with the iPhone 5 that [EMPLOYEE] is currently is using to have that phone number. The plan will be applied to that iPhone 5 that he is already using.
—
VZ Rep to Me:
You need to cancel the number currently on the iPhone 5. Once it is canceled you can then request the device be activate on his line.
—
Me to VZ Rep:
[VZ Rep], I can do this on our website right? I’ll give it a shot later today. Thanks!
—
VZ Rep to Me:
The site will only allow you to suspend. Please send me the line that needs canceling.
—
Me to VZ Rep:
Okay, I’ll repeat myself once again. We’d like to cancel [OLD PHONE NUMBER]
and put [NEW PHONE NUMBER] in its place. Put the number on the iPhone. No new
device, use the device we have. The device that [EMPLOYEE] already has, his
iPhone 5. The device that we have already on our account, the one that
currently has [OLD PHONE NUMBER], should instead have the phone number
[NEW PHONE NUMBER]. This device already has a plan, the plan that has always
been on the device since we started our contract.
I don’t understand why I have to keep on requesting the same thing with
the same details over and over again.
—
VZ Rep to Verizon Government:
Please cancel [OLD PHONE NUMBER]. Once that is processed please take that
device and put it on mobile [NEW PHONE NUMBER]. The [NEW PHONE NUMBER] needs to be put on
the same plan that [OLD PHONE NUMBER] had – 74053 – AMERICAS CHOICE II 1000 SHARE
EMAIL & DATA+N&W+IN UNL $96.14 0408 with the 10.00 hot spot.
—
Verizon Government to VZ Rep and I:
Dear [CUSTOMER],
We have completed part of your request.
Reference Number: [REFERENCE NUMBER]
We have deactivated:
Mobile Number: [OLD PHONE NUMBER]
Effective Date: 02/09/2013 06:35:20
Contract End Date: 02/09/2013 06:35:20
Early Termination Fee:0.0

Second request to do an ESN device change to [NEW PHONE NUMBER] for the Iphone 5 [MEID], the SIM [SIM CODE] was already paired on mobile number [OLD PHONE NUMBER] and can not be used on more than one number. Please either advise a new SIM card that has not been used or we can ship you one for free, just provide a shipping address. ( NO PO BOX)
—
My response to Verizon, both Government and Rep:
Thanks, but since you tossed [OLD PHONE NUMBER] the device Iphone 5 [MEID], the SIM [SIM CODE] no longer has a number. Please set [NEW PHONE NUMBER] to this device.

Please do this, otherwise I’ll have to ask [VZ Rep] to do this again in a few days and you’ll do it anyways. Lets just cut to the chase and do it now. I’d rather not have to make this request a 15th time, literally, just to get one step closer. We’re so close. So unbearably, deliciously close!

I have faith in you all. That a task asked 15 times over two months can be done. We all know it can, so pretending that there are problems is just playing coy. Think of it this way, once we’re done I’ll stop being the worlds most screechiest wheel. I do not like being that loopy wheel on the shopping cart of life that just refuses to track with all the others.

If I can’t get to the end just with our consumer/carrier relationship then at least help me finish this. Think of it not in terms of ESN’s, plans, or SIM cards but rather in the merciful euthanization of this sprawling task from hell that shot out grubby tentacles and turned into one ugly time vampire. Don’t do it for me, do it to kill this wretched task. It must be killed and the only way to do that is to spritz it with the holy water of assigning Iphone 5 [MEID], the SIM [SIM CODE] to [NEW PHONE NUMBER].

Once we are done the angels in heaven will trumpet our glorious success.

LET US FINISH THIS. PLEASE!

Administrator’s Eyes

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Working in IT in Higher Education for the past 14 years has taught me many key survival tactics. Life in Higher Education is special because of the unique specialness of the needs that many of my coworkers have. I don’t want to call anything specific out, I’m not here to hurt anyones feelings.

One of the first things you learn is that no matter what the patina is that people do their level best to project, right underneath it is some of the most kinky, clever, sneaky freaks you will ever meet. I hate to be picky but there is quite literally a 10 out of 10 chance that the truly kinky will be the boys. Perhaps this is higher education, perhaps not, but gentlemen, you are filthy. Damn.

When I started working in my profession I made some basic decisions which have saved my bacon more times than I care to even contemplate. First and foremost of those is cultivating “Administrator’s Eyes” which is the very state that I enter into when I help anyone with their technology. I started it as a habit and now it’s become a perception-altering meditative practice, nearly. When I am helping a client (I don’t call them customers, that’s inappropriate, they are clients) and I am sitting down where they normally sit I will focus my entire attention on the parts of the screen that contain only those pieces that enable me to render assistance. I do not let my eyes wander. It’s not out of some lofty sense of propriety that I picked up over time but more specifically battle-earned knowledge. I cannot, I will not handle the kinky freakish things that my fellow human beings get themselves into. Often times people will say “Oh, certainly nobody does that in a professional setting!” and I point them to teenage boys that spend way too much time in the bathroom with flimsy Scientific American magazines that appear to be on their last legs to keep their covers from falling off… these boys grew up into men and being a boy who grew up to be a man, I can say with authority that the only thing that honestly changed was that our hair started to thin or fall out.

It’s a habit that I recommend every IT professional adopt. It saves you from social embarrassment, even by proxy, and at the core of it stands this central question which each one of us in the IT field must eventually answer: “Can you handle the answers?” This is the first thing I consider before I even allow the questions to occur to me. Almost always the answer is no. A huge orchestra-blaring no. I can’t handle knowing anything. I can’t handle knowing usernames, passwords, websites, or anything at all beyond the thin border of a web browser. It’s not that knowing would endanger my professional life, but it would change my relationship with my clients and I simply cannot risk that. I have relationships that I must preserve, beyond everything else. I cannot perceive porn webpages, anything blah-Tube, even if it’s just online banking, trips to Amazon.com, or the stray Solitaire game being played. I have a deeply rooted and vested interest in knowing as little about my clients as I can manage beyond their presentation to me in the professional setting at work. It really is self-preservation. I do not perceive anything that would naturally be upsetting to anyone else so that the material in question does not change the fundamental relationship between IT professional and client. I suppose in a way, medical doctors take a “Do No Harm” oath, and I suppose I am advocating for IT professionals to take a similar oath “Do Not See”. Help with getting whatever it is up and working properly with sample data or bogus Lorem Ipsum if you can manage it, and even if you can’t and you have to look directly at the entire screen, once you engage the habit of “Do Not See” hard enough you might be able to pull off maintaining this state of blissful ignorance the entire way through your day.

This is something I encourage in all my assistants and people who work with me on IT tasks. I try to impress upon them that their coworkers may not be as pure as the driven snow and that through the adoption of Administrator’s Eyes they can learn a way to avoid the awkwardness that comes when you accidentally stumble onto a terabyte of stored data that people ought to keep at home, under a blanket, probably with a hot shower at the ready. It saves you from ever having to ask yourself that most torturous question “Can you handle the answers?” because I know I cannot. Therefore not only do I not ask the questions, but I don’t even consciously perceive anything that would lead me down that dark alley.

If there are any IT admins that read my blog, what are your thoughts on Administrator’s Eyes? Do you agree or do you think differently? Please comment here or on Facebook, I would love to know, as long as you’ve washed your hands in hot soapy water for a count of twenty. 🙂

PAD 2/5/13 – Call Me, Maybe, Maybe Not.

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“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.

Friends: Man shot dead after pulling into wrong driveway | www.wsbtv.com

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Friends: Man shot dead after pulling into wrong driveway | www.wsbtv.com.

Do we need gun control in America? After reading that article how could you say anything else? How exactly is this sort of response even defensible? What really upsets me is that I’ve been known on occasion to also pull into random driveways, mostly so I can wait for traffic to clear and turn around with a K-turn. Even more than how this could happen to me, or happen really to anyone at all the segment of this story really gets me:

Thomas has also learned Sailors is a war veteran and a former church missionary. Sailors’ attorney told Thomas that the man believed he and his wife were being attacked.

So apparently they were churchgoing folk as well. It doesn’t do anything to calm my nerves as it appears that not even having the church dominate your life the notion of “Thou Shalt Not Kill” seems to not apply in these people. In this case, at least how it seems, it’s kill trespassers without provocation. Malice of forethought indeed.

Why do we need gun control? Why should there be limits on guns? I think the now-not-happening future of Rodrigo Diaz should be enough, but then again, all the now-not-happening futures of the kids in Newtown, the people in Aurora, or anyone else who was killed with a gun. So much potential squandered, so much lost.

That’s what I want to know. At what point does the loss-of-potential run up against our love affair with the gun? When is it enough that we should as a society temper the second amendment with the very regulations that the text of the amendment itself actually demands?

How much death, how much blood, how many lost lives? To quench this paranoid delusion that if we don’t have guns that somehow the government is going to swoop in and ruin our lives. That’s what gets me so much – this unfocused paranoid fear that citizens having guns is the only thing, the only single pillar that keeps our society functioning. If citizenry didn’t have weapons then obviously… what? No really. WHAT? What would happen? Would Township Supervisors rape your pets? Would Congresspeople attempt to cannibalize your children? What is this fear, where does it come from?

I don’t think it comes from anywhere really. I think people have fallen in love with guns and they love to kill. They love murder and bloodshed and the Church with all it’s high and mighty pronouncements are worth absolute bollocks. It’s got very little to do with securing liberty and everything to do with ensuring that you can kill effectively at a great distance with the minimum of effort. It’s the worst thing imaginable. It’s murder and laziness, the pinnacle of both. The second amendment has more to do with greed and lust for death than it does with any lofty “protect the womenfolk from marauding interlopers”. I seriously need to know at what point the body count, all the blood, and all this death will ever be enough to satiate the lust these people have for their beloved guns. It disgusts me and I am ashamed of what America has become because of this failure to well-regulate the militia.

Decameron

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Influenza is a wildfire that is blazing through this state and my office. Many of my coworkers are out sick and at first what I thought was just the standard Influenza might be a few other things. WMU, through the health center and ultimately through the CDC pushed the 2012 Influenza vaccine shot which we later popularly discovered didn’t apparently take into account the strain that is blazing through Michigan and our office. I have talked to a few people who characterized this new flu as “Flu Type A”and I don’t know where they got that moniker from. I also heard that another virus, the Norovirus was blazing across the US, sourced from Sydney Australia. Are these tag-team illnesses or are we mistaking the Norovirus for the Influenza? For me it’s just idle speculation as the practical upshot is, I’m slowly being surrounded by sick people and eventually my resistance will falter, something will happen – either a surface I thoughtlessly touch or some aerosolized agent that I somehow come into contact with.

This has got me thinking about all the popular culture illnesses. Nothing as awe-inspiring as Captain Trips from Stephen King’s stories, but even movies like Hot Zone all lend themselves certain weight to the idea of control, quarantine, and the eventual lapse in vigilance. I haven’t gotten sick (knock on wood) and for that I’m very thankful, but something is knocking on the door and I don’t know if I’m doing enough to protect myself. Much of what I do is probably just a placebo, taking extra doses of Vitamin C, a dose of Vitamin D-3 (which I need anyways, and it probably doesn’t do anything else) drinking lots of hot tea (hot water can’t hurt) and regular drinks at night. Nothing comically appropriate like getting piss drunk every night, but a wee something regularly, wine, liquor, cider, beer. Does it help? It’s not hurting, so why not?

Beyond the things I eat and drink, vigilance visits me in what I do at work and at home. I often times worry that I’m starting to develop a germ-phobia laced with a touch of obsessive compulsive disorder. I know at least somewhat clinically that this activity of washing my hands before I eat (and sometimes afterwards) is only really a mental illness if I am paralyzed because I cannot proceed without cleaning my hands or it somehow impacts my quality of life. There is a small part of me that is concerned that all this handwashing, in hot water, for twenty seconds using rather aggressive soaps is just hastening my seasonal skin issues on my hands. The colder the weather, the drier the climate the more dry and cracked and bloody my hands get. My hands and my legs bear the worst of it, but my legs get a respite as I have them covered up almost all the time, where my hands don’t and pay the price. All this handwashing is just pushing them even harder. At what point will I have that breakpoint of diminishing returns? When will washing my hands mean nothing if I’m bleeding from the cracks from the angry skin on the back of my hands? What to do to cope? I’ve decided that Dove Soap’s line that caters to men, with their moisturizer as part of the soap may be my best effort. I’ve also got a pump bottle of moisturizing sanitizer however as I discovered tonight, sanitizer doesn’t touch Norovirus. Not that I’m really convinced that Norovirus is chewing through the office, but if it isn’t, then it’s on the heels of Influenza Type A.

This very story has played out before. It plays out whenever there are communicable outbreaks and the natural question pops up – at what point does it make more sense to just not go to work and expose yourself? At what point do you stop leaving the house? I laughingly call it the Decameron moment as the people in that book, in order to pass the time recount stories to each other and remain away from the city to avoid the plague. I can’t deny the pleasure of reading the Decameron back when I was in college and if it weren’t for the two other books that I’m currently hip-deep in reading, I would take it right up as it’s applicability in this particular situation is undeniable.

So tomorrow I’m going to have to come up with ways to protect myself at work. Bringing my own soap maybe to start would be okay, paper towels are still the best way to dry my hands as we don’t have any hot-air blowers at work. As for surfaces, it’s going to have to be Lysol and Isopropyl Alcohol as I can’t risk using Clorox on the surfaces at work. I know that Lysol and Alcohol will not likely damage the things at work, but I’m pretty sure that Clorox, even diluted would likely have unintended consequences. I will have to have faith that what I have, plus my nearly OCD handwashing and keeping my distance from people is enough. I have been dallying with the notion of pushing SupportPress down my clients figurative throats and only rendering help over Apple Remote Desktop in order to zero out the touching-of-surfaces vector of possible sickness. I haven’t gotten there yet, but it is something I am considering. I sometimes wonder if anyone has done a pathology survey in regards to electronic forms of communication and that impact on disease spread? What happens if we all switch to video links, phones, and email and shun contact with each other even more than we already have? In a lot of ways, each office could be it’s own Decameron, with people holed up, trying to avoid getting sick and passing the time.

I feel excellent. There is nothing wrong now, but it’s coming. The worst part is not knowing, or rather suspecting that something you can’t see is lying in wait for you and at the very best could make you miserable and at the very worst, kill you outright. Another bit of consideration is what the break-off point is for workplaces all around when a majority of staff is actually sick. At what point is going to work and accomplishing nothing cost more than just staying at home, claiming that you are sick when really, you’re just holed up waiting for the illness to burn past you?