Category Archives: Learning

Brightness Knob

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The oddest memories come bubbling up to the surface when you least expect them. While I was brushing my teeth, quite out of the blue, mind you, I recalled a pair of personal experiences that I’ve never shared before. The first memory was when I was in middle school. The assignment was to write a paper on something historical and I chose Hitler, the Halocaust, and I used a complicated word because at the time it fit with the theme of what I was writing about. The word was “schizophrenic” but what really was a surprise to me was the teacher at the time, who I don’t really remember beyond being rather older and probably a sports coach more than a teacher picked my paper to read to the class. I think, as I remember it, he was trying to shame me or belittle me in front of my classmates by singling me out and demonstrating a poorly written paper. I sat back and took it and chuckled to myself, inside my head when he got to that big word and couldn’t pronounce it. My argument was cogent and valid and I was supposed to feel bad because I didn’t use real words in my writing. I think it was this first thing that struck me, that first real strong signal that adults were really full of shit. I was a kid, he was a teacher, so that was that, but it stayed with me. The whole part where I was supposed to feel chagrined but actually what I felt was pity for this older man, that he struggled and stumbled over this one word and since he didn’t understand it, that I obviously just made it up.

This memory carried a very particular emotion with it, which called out to another memory which came on the first one’s heels. I remember I was on a bus, I was in my mid-teens, and I was going on some sort of class field trip. I brought along a book I was reading, which just happened to be Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”. I was making quite a bit of progress reading the book and I was minding my own business when the teacher, a different one from the first in this story, chatted me up. He was curious about the book I was reading and he asked me how much of it I understood. I was taken aback by this as I figured that everyone who wanted to read this book could progress through its contents without too much trouble. That if you were curious about Stephen Hawking, you’d likely have some background ideas about what you were getting into and that anyone in that state could manage just fine. Then the teacher told me that the book I was reading was beyond him. I closed the book and put it away and left it like that until I got home. I felt strange that I was working through a book that a teacher confessed he couldn’t even think of tackling.

It may have been these things, and just life in general as I grew up that I realized that for some, people like me, a little bit at least, just had to go through the motions before I could do things I wanted to do, things I wanted to study, and the only person I had to impress with my wit and intelligence was myself. I kept to myself in grade school, middle school, and high school. I was never included and it was just part of what had to be. It was unpleasant but I knew that it was terminal. The unpleasant students that surrounded me, the unpleasant (except not all of them) teachers, and in general the entire situation was something that I just had to endure.

I used to think that school was a trial by fire and that all kids had to walk the same path. As I grow older I see things with a more mature perspective and I feel now that it was needlessly awful. So much of my potential was ignored or belittled, and I knew I was right and these adults were fools. There is no reason to weep over spilled milk, but now, when I see such brightness in kids I want to stop and clear a space for them to explore and think and blossom in a way that the rigid structure I was in never had room to allow. But these aren’t my kids and I don’t have a place or the power to effect the real change that my impetus calls for. One thing I will take from these memories is a respect for some young kids, that they can wrap their minds around really complicated ideas and to always be vigilant when evaluating the intellectual passion of others. Just because you don’t know a thing doesn’t mean someone who is *supposed* to be a learner and has a firmer grip on things than the teacher should be made to feel small, wrong, or awkward. Kids that carry around books that are, let’s say, atypical, really should get more focus and more to work on.

Just because someone is young and perhaps foolish doesn’t mean they aren’t bright. Sometimes people you never expect shine brightest of all.

Workflow with Pocket

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I have recently fallen into a peculiar workflow arrangement between various social networking applications and Read It Later’s Pocket application. When I am following the flow of status updates from my Twitter stream I prefer to stay in-the-moment with the stream and select interesting-looking tweets that have links attached to them, but instead of actually following them in a browser, I send them to Pocket. My preferred Twitter application, TweetBot makes this as easy as tap and select “Send to Pocket” with a happy little sound confirming that my action worked. This really works well for me and doing this has spread beyond the confines of Twitter out to Facebook – however there is no convenient interface between Facebook status posts and Pocket so the workflow is a little more convoluted. I command-click on perhaps-interesting Facebook posts and this opens them up in tabs. Then I switch to the tab, click the Pocket extension, send the link to Pocket and close the tab. I don’t really want to see the links right now, I’d rather send them all off to Pocket and then queue them up that way.

Another really neat web tool that I’ve fallen in love with is IFTTT.com. This site allows you to connect a huge collection of services to their site and then construct “If This Then That” rules. This has actually simplified the Twitter-to-Pocket interface, in so far that if I like a Tweet then that is plucked by IFTTT and sent off to my Pocket automatically. This particular bit does muddy the waters between TweetBot and Twitter itself, but it’s not really a problem, just a build-up of near-miss convenience. IFTTT in this arrangement shines when it comes to Google Reader. I have subscribed to quite a lot of RSS and ATOM feeds from various sites and manage them all in Google Reader. If I “star” something in Google Reader, then IFTTT notices and copies that entry to my Pocket for later reading. As I am quite fond of having my cake and eating it too I’m always on the lookout for multi-product synergy and convenience. I really do not like Google Reader’s web interface, in fact, I really don’t like many “Web Interfaces” for products and would prefer the gilded cage of specialized client software instead. So there is a nice synergy between Reeder on my Mac computers which presents my Google Reader contents in a visually appealing way as well as Flipboard, which is the preferred way to view Google Reader on my iPad. By using IFTTT as the middleman-behind-the-scenes I can funnel all the stories that catch my interest and collect them right into Pocket.

All of these things can also be done with Instapaper and I was an ardent fan of Instapaper for a very long while, but I’ve switched over to Pocket. I still regard Marco Arment and his product to be very good, but for me personally I found that Instapaper on my 1st Generation iPad would jettison too much for my liking. It wasn’t as much a problem with Instapaper as it was the iPad itself. Embarrassingly outclassed by the applications that I was trying to force on it. I’d be able to stand by this, but Instapaper on my 3rd Generation iPad also jettisoned. I didn’t really want to bother the author with the yackety-schmackety bug reports and Pocket edged out Instapaper when it came to displaying video and audio media. The core functions between the two are quite similar and the only other small feature that pushed me over to Pocket was the ability to search on my Pocket list and perform actions on multiple items. I have no doubt that Instapaper will catch up and may already have caught up. The money I spent on Instapaper was money well-spent and I would suggest that people look at both apps before deciding for themselves.

So back to the workflow, this is how I naturally started navigating my social network stream of information. In a way, I follow sources which curate the noise of Reddit and other news aggregators into categories that I find most interesting and then I self-curate the longer pieces into Pocket for later consumption. As I used this workflow it occurred to me that what was happening was an emergent stratification of curation. Living generates a noisy foam of information, which crashes on the coral reefs of StumbleUpon, Reddit, Engadget, HuffPo and the like. Information seagulls, like @geekami (for example) fly over these coral reefs of information and pluck out the shiniest bits, linking them to tweets and shipping them out. Then I come along and refine that for things I really find interesting and all of this ends up crashing into Pocket. Arguably, Pocket is the terminal for all this curation, but it doesn’t have to be. I could (but I don’t) cross-link Pocket and Buffer using IFTTT and regenerating a curated flow of information turning me into an information seagull. I suppose I don’t follow that path because I already have enough to do as it is, reading, comics, FOMO, work, gym… the list goes on and on.

For all the apps and people I mentioned in this blog entry, I really do recommend that you Google them and see if any of this fits in your life as it did mine. If It works for you, or you found a better way of managing this flow of information foam, please comment with your workflow description. Just more curation. Lexicographers and Encyclopedists eat your heart out. 😉

Acquiring Language

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I have been reading this article and an idea struck me while I was reading along. It’s really just a hypothesis honestly, but wouldn’t it explain so much that acquiring a mother-tongue involves the cortex and the amygdala as a cooperative pair. It helps explain features covered in the linked article and helps explain to me why secondary language acquisition later in life, after adulthood, is not as easy as acquiring whatever language it is that is your mother tongue.

This idea was spawned actually by an episode of Arrow and in the episode the lead character defeats a polygraph test. Perhaps if you consider a question in your secondary language then it’s a job just for the cortex and because it misses the amygdala completely, there is no emotional qualities to your thought process and maybe there won’t be any galvanic skin response, pupil dilation, or pulse changes. Thinking about a false answer in a secondary language may be the key to defeating something like a polygraph testing session. This is something that would be very compelling as a study. You’d need test subjects that acquired a secondary language in adulthood, say French where their native language was English and present them with a polygraph that they were encouraged to try to defeat, and then deliver questions with emotional weight in their home and foreign languages and see if this makes sense.

I think it would be very interesting at least… It opens questions like is adulthood the seal on the amygdala from acquiring any more language/emotion content. Hmmm…

Barnes & Noble's Nook HD+ Is Clever

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Barnes & Noble just sent an email out announcing their two new tablets: The Nook HD and Nook HD+.

Previously to this release I was discussing with my partner, who works for Barnes & Noble ways that B&N could compete with Amazon and Apple in the tablet space. There was a concern that B&N had lost traction and that the company was going to spiral out of control and crash, eventually. These tablets have just eliminated a good portion of that worry.

For full disclosure, I came across a rather pleasant and unexpected windfall in regards to money and I’ve been kvetching about the poor performance of my 1st edition iPad and in a way, Apple has sent a clear message that they regard the device as dead because they are no longer writing software updates for it. I went ahead and purchased an iPad 3 and I’ve been enjoying it quite a lot.

This news from B&N is very interesting to me as this new device has several key areas that put up more bang-for-less-money. The first surprise is the processing speed of the Nook HD+ in comparison with the iPad 3. 1.5GHz dual-core versus 1GHz dual-core. Ever since 2003 when the world pretty much stopped worrying and loved the bomb that is processor speed ratings this distinction isn’t as compelling as it appears on paper. The two units have different core technologies, the iPad has an A5X processor and the Nook HD+ has an OMAP 4470 processor. We have seen from manufacturers like HTC and Samsung that even when you pour huge muscular processors into devices to compete, that if the experience of the user isn’t done correctly then all the computing horsepower in the world means very little. It’s not about the muscles, it’s about the refinement of the motor cortex. It isn’t how strong you are, it’s your dexterity – at least in the phone and tablet space. I do hand it to B&N when it comes to pumping numbers and keeping costs suppressed – that’s a win in their column.

The second surprise, and I’ve been half expecting someone to notice this glaring deficit in tablet OS design comes down to what I believe to be Barnes & Noble’s knife-held-confidently-behind-its-back killer feature. Barnes & Noble is going to bring profile control to the tablet space. This casts a huge pall over both Amazon and Apple devices and redefines a tablet to be a multiuser device. It is exceptionally clever for Barnes & Noble to do this because it draws a clear bead of connection from everyone’s computer experience (where you have an account and profile) off to your device. When it comes to Apple, they rejected this model and regard a device to be a one-person-only deal, which has been a weakness in the iOS OS design. Apple may be too far along to make such a fundamental change to iOS so we may see the creation of a new track of tablet technology. Is a tablet multiuser or single-user? By being multi-user, and if B&N does it elegantly, it can cast B&N in a family friendly light, more than an Amazon or Apple product because one relatively inexpensive device can serve an entire family. Instead of the onerous cost of a Kindle or iPad for each person, because each device is single-user, one Nook HD+ can be used by different members of a family without having to worry about security, privacy, preference or profile leakages between people. It’s a failure of the Apple iOS OS and here is why: When I come across another persons iOS device, I am utterly lost – I don’t know their preferences, their security settings, where they have placed icons, and I find myself having to relegate to the search screen to even find where they put the ubiquitous “Settings” icon. If B&N does profiles elegantly, this will be a non-issue. Rendered moot because each person has their own settings that they are used to, making the confusion evaporate.

I think that B&N will pursue a marketing strategy that elevates the personal touch and the family friendliness of their Nook HD and Nook HD+ devices. That will be key, with profiles, the ability to use LendMe to share books, and their admittedly well-done “Parent recording storybooks for their children” technology they will position themselves to be “The Booksellers who care about you and your family” and they will occupy a third niche in this space. The first niche is the deep-discount one, that’s occupied by Amazon. The second niche is the elegance-at-all-costs one, which is occupied by Apple – and then last but certainly not least, the third niche which is the Friends-Family-Kids one, which is going to be Barnes & Noble Booksellers.

This niche may be the best hope for Barnes & Noble to retain their 21st century relevance.  They should maintain their “Brick and Mortar” presence and cater their stores to being a place where you feel welcome, with friendly staff and a coffeehouse/library atmosphere. The elevator sales-pitch is that B&N is more personable and immediate than Amazon could ever hope of being – you don’t know Jack at Amazon, but you know Jack at B&N. B&N’s approach to kids and family with their very deep roots set throughout America means they have already beat Apple to the market in terms of the personal touch. Yes, Apple has the Genius Bar and yes they are friendly geeks, but you don’t go to a Genius Bar to find out about Apps and Woodworking! You can only do that at a Barnes & Noble!

The real competition isn’t between B&N and Apple anyhow, since Apple touches B&N only in this one market-space. The real competition here is between Amazon and B&N. It’ll be an interesting evolution to say the least – which do people prefer more? The cold, impersonal, sterile deep-discount algorithms of Amazon or the instant-gratification, warm, personal, and direct approach of Barnes & Noble Booksellers? It may simply come down to how people refer to these two competitors. You USE Amazon and you VISIT Barnes & Noble Booksellers. That right there is something that Jeff Bezos can never buy himself into, but B&N already exists to cater to. Which do you value, the impersonal or the personal?

Barnes & Noble Booksellers may have just secured their direct relevancy in the market for the next decade with these two new devices. The proof is in the pudding of course, these devices, once in the stores, will be the final arbiter on the survivability of B&N in the tablet market space.

 

Neo Pangea To Launch Intern Abuser Website

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Neo Pangea To Launch Intern Abuser Website.

I saw this and instantly thought of the Milgram experiments and thought about an expansion to his basic study which might reveal more about humanity. The basic Milgram experiment was to deliver a painful electric shock to an actor who was pretending to react to the shock. The person in the experiment was the subject with the control board – to see how far they’d go.

Milgram touched on so many parts of the human condition in his experiment but there are drifting outliers that bear study. Putting a sadist on the panel, or putting a masochist there for example.

Of course, tongue-in-cheek a part of me idly wondered if you were in a Milgram type experiment and you were told that there was a politician on the receiving end of the control box would that change the resistance level of the subject to escalate? I think that the experiment would display a certain measure of class warfare or even have a kind of respectability-quotient attached to it. What if you had a salesman, a politician, or a lawyer on the receiving end of the control box? How would you progress through the various levels of simulated sadism of the Milgram experiment?

I get to laughing about this entire idea. Not because torturing people is funny, but there is a part of me that would skip all the controls and go for the lethal one at the very end and just hold it down and savor the howling screams of agony – for salesmen, politicians, and lawyers.

🙂

SupportPress

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I just rolled SupportPress out to the rank and file at work. Or at least I thought I did. My day was going so well, so smoothly. I got my introduction email with graphics sent out (or so I thought) and I got all the invites shipped out as well. Everything was going just peachy – until I looked at the sent mail and noticed that when I sent the message by copying all the discrete addresses that only the first address took. So I didn’t send out any message at all!

To really get a grasp on how irritating this was, I couldn’t send a message to the LDAP alias that expands out to all the people I work with, the address is dar-staff@wmich.edu. The SMTP server at WMU was rejecting it out of hand. Turns out I figured out why – it was the screenshot graphics. That system they have rejects mail with pictures. So I had no choice but to copy down all the addresses from our Wiki and do it manually. Turns out when you copy that kind of information into Sparrow, it only looks at the first address and ignores everything else. It was my thinking that it would see the commas and figure out I was copying in 48 addresses. No, just one really long address.

When I noticed this, all I had was my iPhone and I was having lunch with Scott. I was cursing Webmail Plus and the LDAP directory for placing artificial limits on email and so I figured I could get the list of addresses and paste them into my iPhone and use the Mail app in my iPhone to do the heavy lifting. Turns out it suffered the same mental block, treating the addresses I pasted in as one giant address. So after lunch was over I was in my car trying to tap and copy one address at a time in. This is another bad idea because if you tap and don’t hold the iPhone thinks you want to email to just that one person and so dumps the draft you were working on and starts a new draft with an empty email. The forwarded bit with all the text and graphics? Lost. Three times lost. I was successful in the end, shipping my intro email out to all my coworkers despite all the technology surrounding me meant to make things easier.

Alls well that ends well, so we’re up online with SupportPress and I have to say that I am very happily surprised with what I see. Clients see a very simple version of the site and it’s compatible with every browser, every computer, including iPhone and iPad to boot! Now that I’ve let the genie out of the bottle it will be very interesting to see how it is received. There has been lots to say on that topic before, and in another post, a more private one, I’ll go further into the nitty gritty details.

So despite technological hurdles, I was able to get my automated help desk system off the ground and show it off to people. Monday is going to be a rip-roaring day, indeed!

Buddha's Fingerprints

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I was midway through “Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book” by Daniel Ingram and decided that I really couldn’t finish reading that book. It wasn’t because the author or what he wrote was difficult to understand or really any concrete reason honestly, however as I was reading there was a mounting feeling that continuing to read the text would somehow damage my recent spiritual explorations. This isn’t the first book that I’ve cracked open on the subject of Buddhism, and it isn’t the last book that I have either slogged through out of some sense that if I start something I really ought to finish it or in the rarest cases, stop reading half-way through.

I’ve also run my toes through other books, most notably some core Zen books that I found free online. I didn’t really get along with Zen either as I didn’t have the chops for it. As I read along with the Zen teachings I discovered that a large part of the foundation of Zen is wound up with cults of personality and pretty hardcore physical abuse. Teachers are pseudo-deities and they are fond of beating their students to a pulp. Uh, no thanks.

So it brought me back to this book by Mr. Ingram. The writing style of the book was very conversational, very colloquial, and around page 140 or so it became exceptionally particular and rather obnoxiously dismissive. What struck me in the earlier chapters was this feeling of threat from this particular book. Not the general threat in the sense that the words were in themselves threatening, but threatening to my own spiritual development. I started to feel a kind of chafing as I was reading about how there were all these steps, and these stages and how everything was so meticulously laid out. It started to upset me, in a very deeply spiritual sense. That any random persons spiritual journey can be laid out with such rigor, such structure really repels me. That people are just machines playing back music and that the music never ever changes from person to person. I suppose I was chafing against dogma, and that dogma was of the core teachings of Buddhism which I don’t necessarily ascribe to. I’m all for the cessation of suffering and a lot of what the Buddha had to teach makes sense, but it’s one thing to see the morality as waymarkers versus seeing the morality as a pair of manacles tied to a chain and led through a machine.

It comes down to reading a buddhism book and not believing in buddhism. I suppose any book and faith could switch places. I have no interest in the Koran because I have no interest in Islam. I have no interest in the Torah because I have no interest in Judaism. And really, why exclude the 800 pound gorilla in the corner? I have no interest in the Bible because I have no interest in Christianity. The big three are stultifying. So rigid, so structured, so planned out. There is no soul in these faiths. Nothing to explore, nothing to discover. Everything is safe, paved, prepared and many of them have little rest areas in which you can get off the road and have a snack. Even as it appears Buddhism is very much like this as it turns out. Everyone reads the texts and then goes about mindlessly following because, really, what else is there? So you learn all these new words and vocabulary and you notice names that ring dim bells in the other texts you have read and over time you come to the stark realization that the author is beating around the bush and in a way, brought on a crisis of faith in a religion that I don’t believe in. For Buddhists it’s all about being and not-being, ultimately the realization of Nirvana by becoming enlightened. It’s all very important sounding but my problem is I know too much about the structure of the Universe. I have more than a passing idea about QM, Brane Theory, M-theory, String Theory, GUT, TOE, the list goes on and on. Ontology and Cosmology and, well, lets face it, I’m too smart for my own good. I’ve dabbled too much. I’ve in a way, seen too much and imagined too much. When I read about the cessation of dualities I can’t help but think of Bohm’s Implicate Order, and when I think of that I think about the potential of living in a holographic universe, which then brings up threads connected to the Everett Interpretation for QM, that each observation causes a split so that every potential possibility is realized. The raging undercurrent of all of it is, that as I read about the experiences this man, Mr. Ingram has with meditation I think about his brain. About how it processes information, so up along with this goes what I know of behaviorism, Jungian analysis, and the real thorn-patch of quantum neurodynamics. So I see all these learned sages going on and on about attaining this and that and getting teachers to teach you this and that and I find myself wondering "Don’t these people know that what they are seeking is actually extending their consciousness into the quantum foam that exists between their synaptic clefts?" And then I imagine David Bohm looking all sternly at me and giving me a ‘tsk tsk tsk’ gesture. If it wasn’t for anything else, I have Tielhard de Chardin on my shoulder like a little angel whispering in my ears about the noosphere. Perhaps Eckhard Tolle is a little devil on the other side, I haven’t made up my mind. But this is what gets me. How can anyone know what another persons spiritual path is going to be? Just because 2500 years of people all referring to each other and repeating each other lends some small credence that there is something worth exploring, there is a part of me that blanches when told that this is how it really is and that in a way I could obtain a map of what is to come and follow it.

I suppose in this sense, following a map is what dogma is all about. If you reject the map, or you don’t follow it, then you should feel bad or foolish because you aren’t doing it right. You aren’t doing it the way 2500 years of much wiser people have done it in the past. And how dare anyone buck a 2500 year tradition? Uh, well, hate to break it to you, but I’m kind of a pain in the ass if you haven’t noticed yet. I’ll ignore 2500 years of learned thinking if it means I get to explore on my own.

And so we get back to faith in a central pillar of spirituality. I knew when I lost my faith in Christianity, when I was 8 in the library of my grandmothers Presbyterian church, that my faith, that my entire spirituality would have to be formed not from things I could find to follow but made up of the experiences of my life. That the only really honest faith, the only true spiritual path I could ever know and feel any amount of strength in would have to spring up from deep within myself. I can’t hear God from without, I have to hear him (or more entertainingly, her) from within. And when I mean God, I don’t mean some objective father(mother) figure in the sky, somehow judging me as I lead my life, but really God as a handle for really what can only be regarded as my own soul. In that way I am a proud secular humanist. Secular in that I reject all faiths, humanist in that the only faith left is whatever I find when I turn my sentience inward. So in a way, coming back to this book, I had to stop reading it because it was pushing me too hard, offering a map, dogma, too strongly.

So I have questions, and the answers I seek seem at least on first glance to shimmer on the horizon like a mirage in front of the Buddhism banner, but then as I approach the mirage falls apart and I find myself wandering around again. Funny how much real human spirituality includes the notion of wandering around in a desert for a very long time. For that we can blame Moses, who apparently needed a map! Getting back to it, the best way for anyone to find, well, actually, I haven’t the foggiest idea what they should do. I know what I should do, and for me, more specifically and clearly, it’s exploration that has to continue forward without structure, without a map, without dogma. So I can’t read that book any longer.

Does that mean I will stop meditation? Absolutely not. There are answers in meditation, I just know it. I can feel it. But like everything in life, nothing comes free and easy. This pursuit will take me probably the rest of my life, but in the end I can sit back and laugh and notice that it was right all along because it was mine. True, it’s a frankensteins monster made up of things I’ve picked up from wiser men than I, but at least it’s my monster. This monster not only sings “Putting on the Ritz” very well, but also dances. I couldn’t very well leave out that reference, now could I?

This also pretty much concludes any other readings or pursuit in the direction of the banner of Buddhism for me. It’s not for me. While I respect Buddhists more than the other faiths, they all are hamstrung in the very same way. Too much structure, too much plan, too much dogma. In a way, when I ask myself “Am I doing it right?” the only honest answer is “Absolutely, because it can’t be any other way.” Now when I say I won’t follow the Buddha it doesn’t mean I won’t raid his tent for neat ideas and shiny bits. I rifled through Jesus Christ’s footlocker, I have no compunction with dashing the Buddhas tent and sorting out his goodies. It’s just, I’m drawing my own map, and I’m drawing it as I walk along, french curves, spirals and mad meandering squiggles all.

Faith is like a fingerprint. No two are alike. Dogma is meaningless because of this one central idea. How can you share what can’t be standardized? What you need is 30 kiloqualms over there. What is a kiloqualm? That’s a silly question! It’s obvious! (to me) 😉

Behind the Barn

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It is something I’ve never really understood clearly enough. Why do people roll over so readily when it comes to technology? Instead of being curious, poking, prodding, and exploring, they just roll over and give up.

I get this a lot with people who can’t use websites at all, a lot like WordPress.com or WordPress.org. What gets me is that a lot of these systems are written in a way where the programmer really has a vested interest in helping you understand. They are going way more than halfway with the design of a lot of these systems, but some people simply refuse to explore. Why are we so incurious, so resistant to exploration? Is it that daunting and I just don’t see it? So what if you broke something? That’s what IT people like me want to see. We want to see a field littered with broken technology because that shows us where we need to concentrate on making things better.

I get this a lot at work. People tell me frequently “How do you know this?” and it’s rather embarrassing to tell them that I just looked at the thing and saw what the purpose of the thing was and saw how it was supposed to be used and blindly wandered around bumping into things until I figured things out!

It’s how I learned how to drive a car. It’s how I learned Windows. It’s how I learned Mac. It’s how I learn everything. I open it up, dive in head first and start making a right proper mess out of everything. Each oops and damn and well-crap reveals more about what the system does than any manual could. Plus you get a feel for all the natural ways that people may approach new things like these bits of software. It seems so natural and simple to me that I get to wondering why more people don’t try it and see if it works for them as well.

Don’t study, don’t just sit there contemplating doing something. There is no try, there is only DO. Do it. Whatever it is. Anyone can be an instant genius if you have just a sliver of faith in yourself and absolutely zero qualms with making messes out of things. I wish more people would do this sort of thing. Go exploring. Make a mess. Take something broken apart and see how it was put together.

I’ve tried to explain the whys and the hows to people in my job and I’ve seen the same response over and over. Exasperation. People don’t want to know the why or the how, they just want simple instructions, much like “Slot A” and “Tab B”. It’s almost a kind of Pavlovian thing, someone comes to them asking them for something and all they want is just the minimum to produce minimally acceptable output and then hand it back. There isn’t any pride in that and that’s something else that bothers me. So few anymore take actual pride in their work. Even if you can’t take pride, you can at least say that it works, even if your solution is a hot mess and someone else has a much more elegant solution. At least you came up with a solution on your own! I suppose a part of what I dearly wish for would be for people to sit back and say “If I got what I’m about to give this other person, would it be correct?” And if it’s not, and you hand it off anyways, and you know it, then you are the worst kind of lazy person – willfully lazy. I just can’t stand that.

I hear the same statement from folks quite a lot, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”. This statement bothers me so much and so deeply that my usual response (and usually I leave it unsaid) is “If the old dog can’t learn new tricks perhaps it’s time to take Old Yeller out behind the barn and do what must be done.” It is one of my deepest held beliefs that when you stop questioning, when you stop being curious, when you stop wanting to know – that’s when you die. Yes, the mechanical parts of you live on and you may have another thirty or forty years of meaningless shuffling yet to do, but really, you’re dead inside. When you stop wanting to know, when you stop being curious, you might as well go behind the barn and do what must be done. Living any other way is living like a sleepwalker, just shuffling through your life and the only thing you can really take pride in, the one last thing that you can contribute is carbon dioxide. That’s no way to live.

So I urge everyone to take things apart and put them together again. Find something that interests you and explore it. Do something. Take pride in doing it badly at first, but you will get better. There is so much to our world left undone, unimagined. I don’t think one lifetime is anywhere near enough to ever “have had enough” of learning. If you feel the icy grip of age sneaking up on you, fight it off with something new. Try something creative. Write, draw, sculpt, paint, sing. Any verb. Do it, do it awfully, but take joy in knowing that you are really DOING something instead of just waiting to be led out behind the barn.

TL;DR

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Information on the network is perpetually increasing in volume and so I find it progressively important to seek out tools that help me parse, limit, and control the flow of the information that is out there raging by like an enormous wordy river. I started my personal evolution in many places other geeks do – old skool with newsgroups. Since then, Usenet has been abandoned and shuttered and handed it’s info-river crown off to RSS and ATOM, which are ways of syndicating content from websites and aggregating that content in one framework. In a lot of ways, these systems are effectively joining the little rivers into a giant monster river that goes gushing by.

This is the first step. Anyone who attempts to put their head in this river only sees a blur as it rushes on by you, maybe you’ll get a hundred stories but the majority of it will pour on by without one iota of attention from you. This didn’t last too long and then the next step came, which was social curation. People follow other people and the ones who are the most popular are the ones curating the epic flow of information and bringing only the things you are really interested in to your attention. These social networks are like fishermen on the raging river of information, they catch bits and pitch them over their shoulders and they slide down the duct towards their followers. You don’t have to worry about the raging torrent anymore because you have faith that anything worth your attention is ending up in that duct running towards you.

Something really foolish happens next, you start to aggregate the ducts together and now you’ve got a smaller version of the giant raging torrential river except now it’s sorted, somewhat, but still rather too swift to catch much.

Then comes instapaper and all the other “read it later” services. When I see something that I sense may be interesting, usually by headline or keyword I will tap on it’s link and send it to instapaper for keeping. It’s as if the matchsticks in the raging torrent are getting picked out, then aggregated and the smaller torrent is being picked over by me and then serialized. The information waits, and I move through it item by item at the pace I am comfortable with. Now, the rate of information loss is immense. It’s meaningless to return to the giant torrent, the curators are just as noisy as the torrent is itself, the ducts might as well be the new torrent, and the tools you use are making uncomfortable squealing sounds under the pressure of how much we are effectively serializing.

Then as I read through my instapaper queue I finally reach the last point on the journey of raw information reaching me in the 21st century. Either I like it and archive it or save it in my evernote “for ever” or, and this is actually turning out to be a new theme, I brand the information TL;DR. It stands for “Too Long; Didn’t Read” and I find myself reading just a few sentences of what at first looked compelling and then realizing that either I don’t care or I don’t agree and then out comes the TL;DR stamp and the information is pitched into the big bit bucket in the sky.

There is something new coming, and I’ve seen an inkling of it with an iPad app named Thirst. It acts as a kind of content aggregator/curator for twitter traffic, another raging torrent of information and categorizes tweets and brings other content along for the ride. I think it’s really quite something however I can’t really make good use of it because my iPad is just too old for such an app, it jettisons after a few moments of use. Alas, there will come a day when we set up networks of aggregators and curators in spiral arrangements so that the final product is an intensely hyperlinked virtual meta-document delivered on some sort of display technology.

Something like this I find will really only work and make most people happy if we borrow a theme from email and arrange it serially like with instapaper. New material is always flowing into the queue but we can scan the queue, comfortable with knowing that nothing will go unseen, and able to give our attention to the stream of incoming relevant, curated, categorized, and hyperlinked information. Like a DVR helps people by timeshifting television information, whatever this new second or third generation information application will also perform the same duty.

Speaking of television, a great majority of it is TL;DW, or TB;DW. Too long or too boring. Perhaps we’ll extend it to TI;DW. Too inane; didn’t watch.

This blog post is already TL;DR, but at least I know it and celebrate it.

Guest Post: Yoga for Cancer Patients

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This post was submitted by Mr. David Haas with the Mesothelioma Cancer Alliance, he requested that I share it on my blog and I think it’s worth a read.

Yoga- A Good Fitness Choice for Cancer Patients

Most people regard yoga as a form of healthy physical activity. However, yoga is more than mere exercise; it is both a practice and a philosophy. Originating in ancient India, yoga requires physical, mental and spiritual discipline. It is usually associated with the meditative rituals of Hinduism, Buddhism and other eastern religions.

Commonly practiced around the world for centuries, yoga is growing in popularity across the United States. It has numerous health benefits, not only for healthy individuals but for those battling cancer. Some doctors and fitness trainers consider yoga ideal for people going through aggressive cancer treatments or entering cancer recovery programs.

A Good Cancer Fitness Choice

Yoga is an excellent low-impact activity for patients in all stages of cancer. It is gentle on the body and beneficial for the mind. In fact, yoga is at the cutting-edge of mental health. It relieves emotional and physical stress, provides mental clarity and promotes general well-being. All of these things work together to help patients win their battle with cancer.

Patients going through conventional treatments can use yoga to increase energy and combat fatigue and other treatment side effects. For those battling difficult cancers like mesothelioma or pancreatic cancer, yoga is a wonderful palliative treatment.

Many patients find it hard to endure treatments for mesothelioma and other advanced illnesses, and vigorous exercise is usually out of the question. Gentle stretches in bed may be all they can handle at first. When they are ready to move beyond stretching or short walks down the hall, yoga is a good fitness choice.

What is Yoga?

Many cancer treatment programs integrate yoga regimens with traditional therapies like surgery, radiation, chemotherapy and hormone therapy. Yoga is a form of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapy, a holistic practice.

According to Cancer Treatment Centers of America, numerous findings suggest that yoga improves life quality issues for survivors of breast cancer and other diseases. While it cannot cure cancer, yoga is beneficial for those enduring pain or discomfort. Less pain means a better life, with more time for loved ones, things and experiences.

Yoga emphasizes certain physical postures and positions. As a result, people often regard the practice as exercise. However, the term “yoga” literally means “union.” Both the practice and philosophy of yoga seek to create oneness by uniting the body, mind and spirit.

Yoga’s Value for Cancer Patients

Due to yoga emphasizes fitness as well as self-reflection, it can be quite valuable for patients who face treatments for mesothelioma, breast cancer, skin malignancies and other tumors. Physical and mental health is essential for fighting cancer, and yoga helps patients maintain a healthy body and mind.

Like other alternative therapies, the type and intensity of yoga vary from person to person. Patients who choose to incorporate yoga into their cancer fitness programs should talk to their doctor first. Yoga requires fairly good physical health to begin with, so patients should verify their health status with their doctor. Upon approval, patients should search for a qualified yoga instructor in their area. Instructors can show patients the proper techniques for the most benefits.