To what extent is your blog a place for your own self-expression and creativity vs. a site designed to attract readers? How do you balance that? If sticking to certain topics and types of posts meant your readership would triple, would you do it?

My blog serves my own interests, as I use it as a soapbox to express myself to anyone who cares to read. I don’t actively seek out readers, as I blog principally to journal my travel through this lifetime. If I pick up readers, and they enjoy reading what I have to write, that’s a value added extra, a happy touch of serendipity but that is where it starts and ends. I refuse to pander to the hated phrase “SEO” which I find distasteful and repugnant. Who cares if the search engines find my drivel, I’m the last person who wants to game the system. I’m just here to talk into the darkness. I find that very comforting, as the darkness is a great listener.

I don’t and I won’t “monetize” my blog because that, along with the general notion of advertising makes me feel like my work is being turned into bait for a trap than worth anything on it’s own. There is a difference between a pat of cheese and something really worth pursuing. One of those is just there laying on a trigger in a trap. No ads, no money, just my drivel standing on it’s own with all the attendant misuses of grammar, spelling, and general gleeful disrespect for English. As I have said before, English is a whore, screw her, then push her down the MC Escher staircase.

If you enjoy reading this drivel, thanks, for what it’s worth. 🙂

Facebook has recently come under attack for failing to enforce its own guidelines on hate speech and violent imagery. Is it a website’s job to moderate the content its users post, or should users have complete freedom? Is there a happy medium? If so, how would you structure it?

Ever since I visited the Norman Rockwell Museum I have been absolutely absorbed by his wonderful multicultural work in regards to the Golden Rule. I’ve given it frequent and long consideration and I firmly believe that the wisdom of the Golden Rule is really the only one single rule that any conscious sentient being needs for proper conduct in life. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This wisdom occurs in other phrases from other cultures and they all share this core comparison dynamic. This is the central pillar on which a service like Facebook would be best organized with.

If a user posts a “Rape Picture” glorifying or lampooning violence against women for example, the central consideration should be how this particular bit of imagery lies on the balance scale of the Golden Rule. Violating the rule doesn’t have to end in a lot of histrionics, instead it can simply be marked to be not shared. Don’t tear it down, as that would upset people about their First Amendment Rights, but rather instead just fail to share it. Mark the failed share as “Golden Rule Violation” and be done with it. It’ll appear on the persons own wall as if it was shared, but nobody else sees it.

If someone wants to fight a violation based on the Golden Rule, then they can certainly try to assert why sharing such things are important. It’s been my experience that when you try to justify breaking the Rule, the raw level of absurdity that you run into (nee hypocrisy) makes any argument worthless to pursue.

What will the next must-have technological innovation be? Jetpacks? Hoverboards? Wind-powered calculators?

The next great technological innovation will be synthetic emotional personalities that will be embedded in our mobile devices. Right now for iOS and Android (the two real competing smartphone operating systems) there are “personal assistants”, like Siri for iOS. I only use iOS so I can only speak to my experience of using Siri. Siri is a great start, but it is pretty much a simple voice-based macro interpreter. She picks up only syntactical chunks and tries her best to interpret what the user wants, and appears to be “neat” because she’s arranged in a way where if we speak “plainly” she “gets what we want”. The problem with Siri is she has no emotional life on her own. She’s a personality that is brand new each time a human being engages with it. Even when describing Siri you feel it’s more appropriate to use it than her – and that’s where the next innovation is going to address.

How can you change an “It” to a “Her” or “Him”? It takes memory, appropriate emotional responses, and in many ways, almost all the way to a synthetic consciousness. Humans are creatures of wild exception, that is what we excel at. Humans are clever, imaginative, we have memories and motives and we have knacks and talents that let us handle wild exceptions that drive technology bonkers. We can do things that technology cannot, like contemplate the nature of existence, ask “What is the purpose of life?” and so on and so forth. These abilities we have allow us to handle exceptions that technology just fails to address directly and often times simply. Humans just “get it” and “get what we mean”. There isn’t any battle over context, no agreement/gender problems as we can consume signal and noise and handle them both gracefully. This is going to be the central pillar that these new synthetic systems have to master. You hit a button and your personalized assistant, whom you’ve named, remembers all the previous things you’ve discussed with them and have access to a gigantic index of human experience to draw from in order to understand something like “Open a new file for the saint louis file company. Also, remind me sometime later about my dry cleaning and around 7ish, call my husband and find out when we are heading to Missouri.” In many ways, we have an already existent mockup of what this is all about, and that is Marvel’s Jarvis. For these advanced synthetic personalities requests like these, the requests of lists, rambling, verbal noise like “oops, no not that…” do not end up with failure but are accepted in stride. With these synthetic personalities it may also serve as an entryway to automated education and even elder companionship. You have a relationship with Jarvis and he helps you do things, you live longer because you have a relationship with a machine that is nearly indistinguishable from another person and so there is a reason to live to see another day.

It’s a collision between human ingenuity, laziness, creativity, and our drive to be social creatures. We’ll create these synthetics because the rewards will be worth the costs of development. Imagine having a durable piece of technology with you (or inside you) that you can talk to, that can assist you in times of trouble. Nobody would kidnap a child with one of these synthetics attached to them. The synthetic would find a way to connect to the Internet and know exactly where the child is and what state they are in. It would eliminate a lot of these sorts of crimes and could possibly also banish loneliness as a complaint in our world. You won’t ever have to be alone again with Jarvis in your life.

Tell us about a time where everything you’d hoped would happen actually did.

The most recent moment where this came true was when I had a problem at work with my primary file server. It had been giving everyone fits for a while and I suspected there might be something wrong with the storage system. My system support specialist ran a check and found that indeed there was a deep logic problem in the storage system. It wasn’t earth-shattering but it did require a fair bit of white-knuckle “file system check” routines that had me on edge for about two hours. I was of course hoping that the deep repairs that I had started would end up all for the best with the corrected file system in a functional and error-free state. Thankfully the “file system check” did exactly that. It took a while, a bit of white-knuckle, but I landed squarely on my feet and I was very thankful to the Gods of Technology for blessing me with an easy fix. It wasn’t that the check was going to blow up in my face, but if it didn’t go well, it would have eaten a week of my life. Thankfully that didn’t happen. It all worked out for the best.

Write about your first name: Are you named after someone or something? Are there any stories or associations attached to it? If you had the choice, would you rename yourself?

I don’t believe I am named after anyone in particular. My first name, the given one, is Andrew. Generally speaking I have certain rules about the preferred use of my given name. Anyone can use my shortened given name freely, but only my parents are allowed to use my full given name. I don’t know exactly where this rule comes from as it’s rather irrational but it is there. I sort of ran over it as I was growing up and it’s a part of me so I just accepted it, put it in the voile of a rule and there we go.

It’s biblical and sainted and I certainly like having this name. I’ve toyed around with the only other variation which is “Drew” but that really doesn’t work. It offends the ear for some reason.

Would I rename myself? No. Absolutely not. In this I am mildly fatalistic, that I was meant to have this name, as my parents were meant to select it for me and give it to me. Any other name would merely be a pseudonym, and while that sometimes is useful in awkward social situations (or when you want to protect your true name, which has a certain undeniable power) what I am called is what I will always be called. It’s been years since I’ve run across another person with my given name, as odd as that seems, Andy just isn’t that popular around here. Of course, with any pronouncement like that, the world loves to screw you up. For a time I had a system support specialist at work who not only shared my given name but also had identical middle and last initials. Since then, I’ve gone back to not really knowing any other Andrews. I’m quite okay with that, I’m unique and being the only Andrew around helps reinforce that specialness.

That first names are given out is another little bit that I’ve thought about for a time. I’ve read in some science fiction stories about alien cultures where the young have to earn their name. I find that compelling, likely unworkable in human cultures, but it does make your name more important if you have to earn it versus simply being given it after birth. Huh.

When you gaze out your window — real or figurative — do you see the forest first, or the trees?

When I look at actual trees, it’s always the forest first and then individual trees. However the idiomatic expression that this is related to is quite different for me. When it comes to solving problems I tend to be more tree-than-forest based and it often times bites me when I miss the obvious answer if I could just step back and see things more simply and holistically. So far I haven’t been unduly defeated by this problem, but it’s something that occurs to me now when I see a problem that I have to solve crop up. It’s important I think, especially in IT, to stop in the very beginning of diagnosing a problem with technology to honor this idiom and pause in the beginning and ask “Are there any really simple explanations for why this is happening?” that one question sometimes is just what I need to find the real culprit and save myself the hours of pursuing shadows and gremlins through a system, completely ignoring the surface-only solution that I walked right past.

In a way this is an error of assumption. You assume that it couldn’t be anything really obvious so you don’t look, and when you don’t look, you don’t see and missing it right then and there is such an embarrassing mistake. Almost always I get the solution and the chagrin from missing the obvious makes me feel the fool each time.