PAD 4/1/2013 – The Social Network

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Do you feel like you “get” social media, or do you just use it because that’s where all your friends and family are?

We are social animals and so having a ready source of social satisfaction like Facebook and Twitter is actually kind of obvious and expected. If nobody created such systems we would have eventually grown one. The rewards for a social animal in a social networked world is like a kid in a candy store. We love to share, sometimes for our own mental health and sometimes because we’re intensely curious about other peoples lives and their dramas. We on the surface complain quite loudly when we’re embroiled in other peoples drama but I think deep down we’re on some level intense and very closeted drama whores. This comes out as worry fetishism on one side and vicarious voyeurism on another. The endless curiosity of “What is going on in your life” has been the obsession ever since we started throwing ourselves to the winds and moving far away from the people we claim to love in our families. Families end up being spread all across the country and because we only interact generally annually, which is to say that at most the older you get the number of times you see your loved ones are distinctly limited. We’re a culture hopelessly enraptured by the notion of having your cake and eating it too. We find opportunities in far-away places and we keep the local threads flowing through social networking. In many ways, we are either cheating each other or we are cheating those aforementioned opportunities. Not that any of this cheating is making life less valuable for either party, but it does help keep us connected while we’re very far apart from each other. I contend that as the social structure of family disintegrates, the use of social networking will rise up to meet it. As we spend less and less time with our family, we find more ways to spend more and more time with them virtually. That the social networking infrastructure has created a new sublayer of the noosphere, one where we can regularly socialize with each other with distance abstracted away from the equation by technology.

I only see social networking to become more and more important and I can see us starting to socialize with our technology as well as with each other. Eventually we’ll have relationships with the tools we use to maintain relationships with each other. Eventually there will come a time when we’ll have to socialize these services and make them basic services like running water, electricity, and heat. What comes after that? I can see the technology wrapping around our lives, so we can share our experiences with our loved ones in a way that is both encompassing and ubiquitous in nature. We can actually start seeing this coming true with Google Glass. The only thing that science fiction has dreamt up that we haven’t seen yet is Jarvis, the AI that Marvel’s Tony Stark depends on to help him control his armor. If there was a sociable personality in a pair of Google Glasses, that would be nearly the completion of my entire thesis here. It’s just a matter of time, I think, for that to come true.

PAD 4/12/2013 – Decisions, Decisions

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How are you more likely to make an important decision — by reasoning through it, or by going with your gut?

I create pro and con lists, look for advice from friends, family, and the internet and then once I have it all set, if the original decision hasn’t already been made by someone else or by the consequences of earlier decisions then I try to get a feel for what I should do based on everything and make a snap judgement from my emotions. That’s just my way. Facts are very useful, but generally the feeling of doing a thing is far more compelling. Answering the What and How is certainly important, the answer to Why is the topmost consideration. The decisions for Why usually come from instincts and gut-feelings.

Just like everything else, it’s good to do the leg-work and be deliberate but in doing all of that, in the end it’s all in the gut. I have to have faith that doing all the leg-work has set the stage for the drama to play out in my mind and whatever my decision is is the right one for me.

Role of Government (DPChallenge)

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There are few aspects of our lives that government doesn’t touch in some way, from macroeconomics to home economics. But should it? This week, we’re getting philosophical — we want to hear about what you think the role and scope of government should be. It’s time to mind the gap.

The role of government. Whoa. That’s a huge subject that deserves a short pithy glib reply to do it proper justice. 🙂

The constitution would have it that governments purpose is to provide for the general welfare and secure our common defense. I can’t deny that a common defense is important, but for the past two hundred years we’ve been less interested about defending ourselves as we have been about being just generally offensive to everyone else on the planet. We bring hot death to pretty much everyone, at least once, sometimes we bring it a bunch of times, just because it’s something we’re used to doing. Yes, we’re that disgusting and jaded. Yay America.

As a “Filthy Liberal Scum” I’m fond of the other end of the spectrum, the general welfare part. What should government do? It should manage the socialized aspects of life that we can’t really do well individually. Things like insurance, protection from natural disasters, and welfare for the people who through no fault of their own can’t make ends meet. There shouldn’t be any homeless people, to say anything about homeless children. If you are a child in America you should not want for food, healthcare, or housing. It’s governments role to redistribute wealth through the application of taxes to address these common social needs.

If you are a conservative then pretty much everything in this post should make you burst into flames, and in the spirit of being a conscientious host, please go outside to immolate in private, we can’t have your second-hand smoke making anyone inside sick.

There are many other things the government can do, and probably should, but the general take away I think is that we’re war’s bitch and we should be paying attention to the more important things like our children and education than breaking our teeth in some very far-away sand-pit.

PAD 3/29/2013 – Trading Places

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Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a member of the opposite sex for a day? What do you think life would be like?

Think of another gender? To be a woman. The world is a mess for a woman. Coming from a tradition of being property, losing your name in the “tradition of marriage” and having to put up with male shit? I wouldn’t. To be the clear majority gender and yet treated somehow less worthy than their male counterparts? The world is stacked against women. Biology doesn’t really have anything pleasant in store for women either, years of readying oneself for reproduction only to have the entire structure torn down and purged monthly? It’s almost like some sort of rude practical joke to me. Male bullshit, rude biological jokes, and a society that at worst wants to hide you under a tarp and at best suffers your presence and underpays you just because of your gender.

It’s bullshit. It’s men’s fault, and as a man, I’m sorry ladies. What a mess. If it’s any consolation the trashy Y chromosome is dying out and with it, all the males – so it’s not like you won’t come out on top, at least at the end.

Money makes the world go ’round

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While reading “The Great Gatsby” one of the characters makes reference to money spent. The book is set in the jazz age of flappers and the well-heeled, say 1927 or so. Before the crash that sent many of these rich men and women tumbling from buildings. So the reference was how much a character ate after being hungry and expressed in dollars. 1927 dollars. Different than 2013 dollars. So I found a site: http://www.dollartimes.com/calculators/inflation.htm which you can calculate the power of the dollar from one time region to another. This points out the unique trap an author can get themselves in when they pin facts down in their fictional narrative.

Mr. Technical Support Guy

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While sitting enjoying some nice tea, in this case Chocolate Chai Pu-erh tea at our local tea shop I had my iPad and my Bluetooth keyboard set up and I’ve been wandering through my Drafts-stored blog-prompts looking at things to write about. While writing about my Nook HD a pair of ladies approached me and asked me about the setup they saw me using. What it all was and how much was it and how did it work. So I gave them an impromptu sales pitch for Apple technology, the iPad, the Smartcover, and the Bluetooth Keyboard. They asked why I was using a physical keyboard and I confessed that I type a little too fast for the processor in the iPad to keep up. When I try to write The, the t and h are usually missed because my taps are too fast and I end up with E. Almost always. So I use a physical keyboard because that can keep up with my typing speed. They were impressed and wandered off to their table to enjoy their chocolate treats.

I was marveling at being an Apple Store employee without of course being one, yay for Apple evangelism (!) and I got back to work writing. Then another lady came up to me with her Kindle Fire in her hands and she asked me for help. Something about sitting here with a tablet and keyboard marks me as “Mr. Technical Support” and her problem was as she described to me “My Kindle says I have too many windows open. I went to Best Buy and the Geek Squad guy was no help, I was wondering if you knew how to fix this problem?” and I smiled at her and looked at her Kindle Fire. It’s worth noting that I’ve never really ever touched a Kindle Fire before, I don’t know what it’s system is like (I assume it’s a variant of the Android OS, maybe) and I invited her to sit down next to me while I looked at her Kindle Fire device. I suggested the best path would be to open up a browser on my iPad and bring up Google and search Google for “kindle fire too many windows open” and see if there was anyone else who had this problem and how they fixed it. As it turns out, there is no clear way (from what I could see) to actually close apps in a Kindle Fire. Now, it’s important to note that I’ve never actually touched a Kindle Fire and I’m not actually a part of Amazon’s Technical Support team, and all I really have is cleverness and Google. I found the solution for her and showed her how to hard reset her Kindle Fire. It’s like it is for any tablet device, hold down the power button and keep holding it until the device is forced off and then press the power button again to turn it on. Once her Kindle Fire came back on I asked her to try to bring the error on again and she opened an eBook on her Kindle Fire and said “It should show the error now… wait, it’s working! You’re my hero!”

And now she knows how to fix her own problem with her Kindle Fire.

Apparently I am “Mr. Technical Support Guy” after all. I should wear a shirt and have a Square reader and take credit cards for my services. $10 for Answers. LOL.

Barnes & Noble’s Nook Update

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They updated the OS for the Nook HD and Nook HD+ a few weeks ago and boy, what a difference does it make! These devices are no longer jailed to the Barnes & Noble's experience with their nascent App Store, but instead they are open to the entire Google Play infrastructure.

I've had an on-again/off-again love affair with the Nook series of eBook readers. I started with the Simple Touch and that lasted until the devices page turning buttons started going “hard of hearing” and I stopped using the device to read books when paging through became a maybe-yes/maybe-no proposition. I upgraded to the Nook HD, which is the smaller model that they offer and the HD+ is the iPad size model. The Nook has a bunch of really great features going for it, like having a place to insert a MicroSD card so getting a device with a big amount of internal memory is really quite meaningless, the bargain-basement model is good enough as the material that eats up the most space can be easily stored on the MicroSD card.

The challenge to really loving the Nook wasn't about the device itself, the device itself is built very well, almost Apple well, it's reliable and is smartly designed. The challenge I have always had with my Nook was the eBook reader software that B&N ships with their stock Nook devices. Please do not misunderstand, the app itself is exceptionally good if you are a general user, someone unlike me who is perfectly fine with the certainly competent eBook reader app. I however was not fine with the app. It came down to being ever so slightly irritated at certain little niggling issues that while I was using the device would wear me down. It's like having a very small pebble stuck in your shoe – you can walk without a problem, you don't limp at all, but you know there is a rock in there and over a long period of time it just irritates you and makes everything just a little less “right”. This stock app lacked some features which I really wanted. The primary feature was having the ability to configure the reader to use the font I prefer to have my eBooks rendered as. I have fonts I really find easy to read, those are OpenSans from Google and Helvetica Neue from Adobe. This was the little pebble in my shoe.

Then B&N let go of their Nook devices and upgraded them all to full Android devices that could use the Google Play Store as well as the B&N App Store. That night, after downloading the update and starting my Nook HD with this brave new world running on it I discovered just how incredible my Nook HD could be, freed. I found, bought, and installed a new eBook reader called Moon+ Reader Pro. The cost of the app wasn't too bad, at $4.99, it had a free version which gave you a taste of much of it's great features and once I saw just how perfect a match this eBook reader was for me I decided that I could spend the money on the full-blown app. This one app makes my Nook HD awesome as an eBook reader, and here is why:

  • Custom Fonts (!) – This was exactly what I wanted all along! It turns out that Helvetica Neue has a labyrinthine licensing model so I gave up on that font but instead switched over to my other favorite, Google's OpenSans. This font is freely available and it wasn't hard at all to find it as a “TrueType Font”, aka a TTF Font version. I copied the TTF Font file to my Dropbox and used another great Nook HD/Google Play app called File Manager HD to copy the file out of my Dropbox and create a folder for it in my Nook HD's file system called “Fonts” and copy the TTF Font file there. In Moon+ it was a cakewalk to navigate to my new Fonts folder, find OpenSans and that was it. Every eBook now is rendered in OpenSans, the way I really really like it to be.

  • Adjustable screen brightness with a swipe and font size adjustment by swipe – This actually wasn't something I thought I would really need until I found myself using it a lot. It's quite handy to skip out on having to adjust settings when trying to find the right font size and brightness to suit your reading preferences.

  • BookPlay – It's a feature of Moon+ where you can play a book, it slowly (with an adjustable speed) advances the lines of an eBook smoothly while your eyes fixate at the center of the screen and you don't have to paginate at all. The book automatically, slowly, smoothly advances along like a scroll attached to an adjustable winding player. I don't really know what the feature is called, but I call it BookPlay, and it's nice when I don't want to tappa-tappa to advance eBook pages on my Nook HD. The speed of advancement can also be set to a swipe adjustment, which I find to be really quite handy and super-clever.

  • Many canned custom themes and theme colors – You can configure the Moon+ app to switch display themes with all the settings saved per theme or turn off everything but color changing so the theme selection system does double-duty as a screen color picker. Sometimes I like reading black text on white backgrounds. Sometimes yellow text on a textured blue background and sometimes dark blue text on a black background. Each color theme is useful for different reading conditions. It's nice to be able to set my Nook HD to it's brightest highest contrast black-on-white for reading outside or on the bus on my way to work, then to the yellow/blue one for leisurely reading at home and then the dark blue on black to read in bed without staring at what amounts to a flashlight in the shape of a tablet.

  • Formats? Every format! – I have a few books in the B&N Store that I “bought” because they were “Free Friday eBook deals” that I took B&N up on when the opportunity struck. For those books I will gladly go back to the B&N canned eBook reading software and that's fine for those books. In general however I prefer to obtain my eBooks in the ePub file format. To that end, I have all my ePub books loaded on my MicroSD card, so they don't take up space on my Nook HD. Moon+ has a great bookshelf organizing metaphor and installing books that are stored on my MicroSD is a cakewalk. I love having all of my eBooks available and here's something that I've always been a little grumped about when it comes to the canned B&N eBook reader app, and that is, you have to get your books from B&N to have them in the B&N “Locker” so that you can make use of the “magic bookmarks” so you can pick up your eBooks on any device and read and when you stop that new place where you stopped is synchronized across all your B&N connected Nook apps and devices. This is really quite nice, especially when you have multiple devices or one of your devices has an exhausted battery but you don't want to stop reading your eBooks. There is no way to import your own ePub files into this B&N “Locker” system so you're shit out of luck. Moon+ returns this feature and makes it more generalized, open, and way more convenient. You can set up your “magic bookmark” sync with your Dropbox account! That's the way to do it! Have individual ePub files on Dropbox or on a device and use Dropbox to store the tokens needed to make the “magic bookmark” feature work without having to rely on the closed garden that B&N provides! This is so cake and eat it too, and I love crowing about that sort of thing when I discover it.

  • Reading Statistics – Moon+ also watches you read as you use the app and records your reading speed, how quickly you read books, and it also includes per-chapter ETA so you know generally speaking how long you have left in the chapter you are currently reading and a per-book ETA to let you know how much longer the book will last if your reading rate is constant. If you slow down or speed up, these values change and you can display them on a very thin status bar that is always visible at the bottom of your eBook screen. This little status bar can also display your battery level in your Nook, so you know how much juice you have left before you have to plug your Nook back in and charge it up. It's wonderful, for example, while reading “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” to know that the chapter you are currently reading has only 15 minutes left in it. That is quite a nice feature.

  • Access to Project Gutenberg – Moon+ makes it easy to connect itself to the largest collection of publicly accessible eBooks in the world. Project Gutenberg scans public domain books, lots of classics really, into ePub format and makes them freely available online. Moon+ has a interface to Project Gutenberg so the entire archive is just a few taps away and you can download your eBook right to your Nook and start enjoying reading, without having to pay one red cent.

All in all, for $4.99 Moon+ is a steal and makes the Nook HD a wonderful eBook reader. Moon+ has single-appedly eliminated any desire I had for the iPad Mini. That Moon+ only exists in the Android marketplace (Google Play) makes this one app the central pillar that tilts the playing field in favor of B&N and Android when it comes to tablets and reading eBooks. The iBook app for the Apple infrastructure is still quite good, as much as the B&N canned eBook app is for the Nooks themselves, but Moon+ blows it's competitors out of the water.

PAD 5/5/2013 – The Glass

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Is the glass half-full, or half-empty?

The glass is half-full, and there should always be more where that came from in the refrigerator.

This of course runs against what I believe when I’m beset by people. Sartre said that “Hell is Other People” and along those lines I understand what he meant by that. When I’m working with other people, by and large the glass is half-empty, it’s got a little hole drilled in it so it’s actually a dribble glass and it was cast improperly so there are parts of the cup that are too thick and other parts that are too thin and if you touch it wrong the entire glass can fall apart like a super-fragile Christmas ornament.

Mostly I feel the “half-empty” because, in a very generalized way, people are glorious disappointments. They are frail, they fail, they sometimes embrace ignorance and apathy and sometimes they do things that boggle common sense. Feeling this pessimism doesn’t really get me down, as people don’t really get me down because I have accepted long ago that how I see the world and how I act in it is uniquely mine and I’ve made peace that expecting anyone else to live the way I do is the height of folly. So I can be a half-glass full guy in a world full of glass-half-empties. I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is to not let the turkeys get you down. In that regard, it’s good to have your own set of glasses that you keep to yourself.

PAD 3/18/2013 – Impossibility

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“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – the White Queen, Alice in Wonderland.

What are the six impossible things you believe in? (If you can only manage one or two, that’s also okay.)

I have lived too long and witnessed too much inexplicability to not believe in astrology, Tarot cartomancy, and the subtle presence of magic in our world. It’s always a soft arrival too, if you try to force it or put it under a spotlight it evaporates as if it was never there. I don’t think that any of it will ever be in any way “explainable” by science. These things really can only be apprehended by faith. When I write of faith, I don’t really mean religion. I’ve always found religion to be stultifying and so I try to live without it as much as I can. The faith for these impossible things has been borne out by event after event where upon reflection the accuracy of all of it, any of it, is utterly remarkable.

I even run into it in my workplace. I have lost count of the number of times I have received notices from my coworkers that the systems that I support have failed them. When I walk in, even just walking by, the problems appear to evaporate. It’s just my presence that seems to do it and after a while you start to notice this remarkable phenomena and after a while I got to thinking that one possible explanation is that my office is beset by gremlins, brownies, manitou, or domovoi, or they are all there and acting in collusion with each other. I fancy that my presence scares them off and so the technical systems that I support, when I use them, work perfectly fine for me pretty much all the time, but when my coworkers try to use them, it’s a crapshoot for them. Until I appear, and then it’s back to being perfectly fine. I suppose there might be a more rational explanation about why this is, perhaps something to do with my bioelectric field or something subtle and clever and measurable like that – but I prefer to live in a world where everything is slightly tinted by the mayhap of the hidden world of magic. I select to live with a world that is enriched by tiny mysteries, because living in a world where everything is a field, particle, or wave is just too banal and bankrupt for my ability to endure such a stark emptiness. I think, for me, it comes down to the hidden pleasure that comes from the doubt that we may all live in a world more complicated and wonderful than we can ever possibly know and more complicated and wonderful than we will *ever* be able to know. I find value in that little layer of maybe that hides right underneath the surface of our mundane world. Skeptics and debunkers would claim that all of this is so much fantasy and magical thinking and that it doesn’t serve any purpose other than to encourage ignorance and the folly of a false make-believe world. In response to them, I embrace the bunkum. If you can’t prove it really isn’t there, then what is the harm of belief? Wouldn’t it be a right hilarity that the world is exactly the way I think it is, a mechanical universe with a touch of mystery overlaid on top of it. You could swap out magic with God and then Voltaires comment that there is no proof for God doesn’t mean you shouldn’t believe in him, on the off chance that he does really exist. Perhaps magic really does exist.

Impossible things are important.

PAD 3/19/2013 – Menagerie

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Do you have animals in your life? If yes, what do they mean to you? If no, why have you opted not to?

I have two felines as part of my family that I consider to be on-par with having a child, which I will never have. There are two of them, two boys. The oldest is a nearly purebred Abyssinian and the other is a purebreed Ocicat. They are both furry bundles of love and there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for them. Thankfully mostly I serve as a handy lap and a petting machine, but I enjoy it as much as they do so it works out for the best.

I couldn’t imagine life without some sort of animal companion. Animals provide complete unconditional love and there is no cleverness, no crafting, no hidden agendas with animals. They love you completely and unreservedly. In a lot of ways I actually prefer the companionship of animals to that of people, not in every case of course, but in general animals are better people than people are people.