Category Archives: Blog

PAD April 25 2013 – Second Time Around

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Tell us about a book you can read again and again without getting bored — what is it that speaks to you?

I read both 1984 and “What Dreams May Come” regularly for different reasons. 1984 is worth reading because it speaks to the dangers of NewSpeak. When I was growing up I decided that expanding my vocabulary was the best single thing I could do for myself, to make me a better person. In 1984, that whole thing is a thread the book challenges and it terrifies me. The quality and the lessons it teaches I think are incredibly valuable. As for the latter book, I read that when I was at the lowest point in faith and it helped by inspiring me to seek out a new faith. I enjoy Richard Matheson for his other works as well, but that book really speaks to me.

PAD May 3 2013 – Its a text, text, text world

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How do you communicate differently online than in person, if at all? How do you communicate emotion and intent in a purely written medium?

Each medium has it’s own benefits and vulnerabilities. You can’t communicate the same way from one medium to another. When I’m online I find myself preferring email, iMessage/SMS, and Instant Message because you cannot beat the signal to noise ratio of text. When I’m using my cell phone, I prefer to only communicate over iMessage/SMS because the carrier I’m using, Sprint, has a terrible record of dropped calls and rather poor voice quality. Plus text eschews much of the wrappings of verbal communication, there is no need to preamble and no need for closure statements to indicate communications have concluded, usually. Generally, face to face conversations vary between formal and informal, and I have found that elaboration and clarity excel in formal face to face communications but are annoying in informal senses. When it comes to capturing backchannel cues and extended emotional content in media that doesn’t really have a good capacity to carry that information a wonderful shortcut is the cinema. I have found that it’s quite handy to refer to a common corpus of movies in which quoting scenes can convey everything from mood, through atmosphere, including sense and quite often, the message itself. The only issue is establishing that cinematic common corpus that those that communicate with me need to make sense of some of the shorthand phrases that I use to carry backchannel messages.

What movies? There are so many. Off the top of my head, pretty much anything Disney has produced because it’s ubiquitous. Comedies are rich with great scenes and raw material and I find myself referring to the classics such as Airplane!, Clue, Noises Off, Planes-Trains-and-Automobiles, Transylvania 6-5000, and the entire oeuvre of Mel Brooks, such as Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles. Also, worth mentioning is a classic comedy, The Kentucky Fried Movie. There are also other movies that lend detail and depth that aren’t really comedies, such as “Love, Actually.” and “Serendipity”. Then of course scifi movies like Serenity, the Alien series of movies, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Generally, since I keep much of this for the informal channel of communication the people who need to understand this corpus have likely seen these movies several times, likely with us.

PAD – April 22, 2013 – Earworm

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What song is stuck in your head (or on permanent rotation in your CD or MP3 player) these days? Why does it speak to you?

I have an entire playlist on Spotify devoted to these sorts of songs. I call it my Tingles list because each of these tracks speaks to me, and when the songs play, I feel actual tingles wash over me. Each of these songs mean something to me, and there are stretches of popular artists. Some artists that immediately spring to mind is Daft Punk, MIKA, Imagine Dragons, and Gustav Holst. That's actually the musical theme of my life – I'm nearly impossible to pin down and always have been. When I was growing up, back in high school I used to frustrate people I was acquaintances with because I defied musical categorization. Amongst these tracks, I would say the number one that jostles to the top more than not is MIKA's Toy Boy. That track has a profound emotional weight that hits me square between the eyes each time I hear it.

Medium

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This is how social networking works. I was just wandering along, scrubbing through my Feedly list of syndicated items on websites when I ran across an article about headline hunting. As I read along, I noticed the presentation layer, the UI/UX was pleasant enough to be remarkable and catch my attention. It became, quite quickly in fact a trip down the rabbit hole.

The source of this fascination was Medium.com. One well-written, well-presented article was all I needed to see that this is something special. I found myself enraptured, roped in, and signing up. Now I don’t know if I’ll ever write material for that system, but there I was spiraling into it and enjoying it quite a lot.

And this is what startups and social networking enthusiasts are really hoping will happen. That their creations will catch people, like I was caught, and reel them in. It’s the definition of good UI/UX, if the content and presentation are good enough, they become an entirely new thing, something like intellectual Velcro.

I was just floating along. Then suddenly I was reading a lot, enjoying myself, signing up, and then the magic hit: I started sharing. Links from the site to Facebook, Twitter and yes, even LinkedIn.

I think everyone I know would enjoy this site and get caught up in it like I did. In many ways Medium.com wins because in less than fifteen minutes I’ve become an evangelist of it. Check it out at Medium.com. I think you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.

PAD 10-25-2013: Best Foot Forward

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PAD 10-25-2013
Daily Prompt: Simply the Best

NASA is building a new Voyager spacecraft that will carry the best of modern human culture. What belongs onboard?

In earlier treatments the best of the best was selected by Carl Sagan and others in the community that built the Voyager vehicles. They elected to place everything on a gold record and affix that to the vehicle, encoded like a vinyl record would be, only made of gold so it would be durable. I don’t see any reason why that can’t be maintained as the best way of encoding information about us, except I don’t know if even golds durability in space is long enough for the vehicle to be received. If you send a message with no hope of it ever being received, then sending the message is pointless. Then again, when you don’t know, that’s when faith comes in, we have to have faith that whatever vehicle we use can endure and that there is someone out there interested.

So then, what to include? I would think that the best treatment would be an exploration of human rationality, our wits, first and foremost. These could be encoded as three core sequences of numbers. The first step is to establish a primer, so that we can be understood. The best primer? The Periodic Table of Elements. Everything in the observable universe is made up of these elements, so starting the primer here makes universal sense. We can make use of this table as a multidimensional primer. It can be used to cover mathematics, counting, chemistry, and physics. It would necessarily have to be elaborate, showing numbers associated with actual elements, what their electron configurations resemble and also include how some of the heavier ones break up into lighter ones so we can demonstrate our knowledge of the weak force of nuclear fission. With that we could cover all the basics and demonstrate that we understand how to annihilate ourselves but instead elected to communicate – which goes farther than at first glance. We would also need to involve the concept of time in the primer, so the best way to do that would be a scale model of our solar system illustrated with how long it takes light to reach our planet from our star. Since we’ve covered numbers and counting already, this would be an easy expansion, plus any receiver would necessarily already be expecting this sort of communication. The next step is to demonstrate ever increasing levels of understanding. The best first step would be the sequence of all positive integer primes from 1 to 100. Then the next sequence would be Fibbonacci’s, showing how the sequence asymptotically approaches the value of Phi and then as a callout from this, demonstrate our architecture which features this value, The Golden Mean, appears also in other lifeforms on Earth such as the disc of a sunflower and a Nautilus shell. Finally we’d demonstrate Pi, say to 100 decimal places and show that we understand shapes and relationships.

Once we have covered the primer and a demonstration of comprehension through mathematics, it would be in our best interest to follow what Carl Sagan pioneered, having recorded human voices offering greetings. It would also be best to feature replicas of our best artistic works, so a replica of the Mona Lisa, something from Van Gogh, a Renoir, and a Picasso would be great to show we understand reality and metaphor. The next section would be music, and that should be reproductions of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky.

I’m split on wether or not it makes any sense to include religious works on this disc. The goal of any communication is to build rapport and it may be difficult to make a good first impression if we even touch on the numerous ways we have fractionalized each other and splintered into violent groups. You don’t ever want to put your psychotic lunatic foot forward when trying to represent humanity. Yes we are a deeply troubled and damaged species but for all the nightmares we are capable of, we are also capable of great beauty. It would be best to leave much of the negative things as brief footnotes to the codex we send into space. It would be unfair to the recipient to pose as a cultured and enlightened species when we are most certainly not either of those things. We should emphasize our skills and the best parts of us and send that out, with a warning that we are en-masse rather herd-like, prone to erratic behavior and trampling.

Funny that it isn’t until you think through all the conditions that you arrive at the inescapable conclusion that Earth ought to be quarantined until we stop being an infantile species. Perhaps we shouldn’t send any more of these vehicles into space, perhaps that’s the best way to put our foot forward, by not doing so at all. Hrm. Then again, if we do share the very best of us to the rest of the Universe they’ll eventually investigate us and listen to all the signals pouring out of our planet and be able to see exactly what would be in store for them during First Contact.

And that may have already come to pass. We may have already been noticed and placed in quarantine and we just don’t know it.

PAD April 30 2013 – Art Appreciation

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Do you need to agree with an artist’s lifestyle or politics to appreciate their art? To spend money on it?

I don’t need to agree to at least witness the art. If money is going to change hands then the rules are different. If I’m going to pay someone for their artwork then either we should be compatible or they should remain as much a mystery to me as possible. I don’t like gun-toting crazy-eyed conservatives who wear three-point hats and kvetch about government tyranny. Looking is free or covered by a door charge for the event, but buying requires more.

PAD April 28 2013 – Cringe Worthy

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Do you feel uncomfortable when you see someone else being embarrassed? What’s most likely to make you squirm?

There is two distinct levels of cringe. The first is rather quite pleasant and that is Schadenfreude. When someone gets what they have coming to them, usually in spades, it’s actually a delight. Few things are finer than being witness to a hearty comeuppance.

The second form, which I’ve witnessed in romantic comedies and certain other dark-humor comedies tends to trot out the agony and the awkwardness and projects it in full fidelity right into you. It’s unpleasant and usually breaks the comedic force that it was trying to carry. Movies like Bridesmaids and anything starring Will Ferrell pretty much fall into this category. At first it comes across as foolish and sophomoric and then quickly dissolves into cringe squick. If I can avoid witnessing this second form, I’ll take the opportunity.

Postaday – June 4th

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If you could get all the nutrition you needed in a day with a pill — no worrying about what to eat, no food preparation — would you do it?

I can’t really see how this could end well. The pill would have to be one hell of a complicated mess in order to stuff everything you need into it. This doesn’t even go on with the notion that you’d be losing an incredible amount of pleasure – why stay alive if you can’t enjoy all the varied textures and flavors that food has to offer? I can’t see people salivating over a pill, yearning for the taste which probably is nil and the aftertaste or burp-up which has got to be rather nasty.

On a quite other level, it does put shame to your teeth. Why have them if all you need to do is swallow a pill? I suppose this would be good for people who have ALS and are trapped in their bodies, it would make nutrition at least possible if they’ve lost the ability to chew. For anyone else though, it seems a terrible waste of life’s fleeting pleasures.

Slogger

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Memories.Slogger

Every once in a while I run across something I’ve seen before but ignored accidentally until I see it in great big headlines and neon and stop to pay attention to it and discover that it does something I really really want. This particular afternoon it was the product Slogger from Brett Terpstra. The software is a Ruby script, and Ruby is a delightful programming language that I’ve had the pleasure of dabbling in. Nowhere near the level of Brett and the people who help him, but here and there, little things.

The need came from a simple Google query, IFTTT and Day One. Looking for some way to bridge that divide between the automatic web service that I’ve fallen in love with, IFTTT and Day One, the journaling software that works quite well and renders DropBox a “Killer App”. Dropbox is the glue that keeps my Day One system together, on my laptop, my desktop, and all my mobile devices. When I found Slogger it was a definite Eureka moment, the answer all in one place. I downloaded the code as the author describes and tried to set it up.

Monumental fail. Pieces everywhere, error codes puking on the screen faster than I could read, pages and pages of interpreter and compiler errors, all surrounding one “Ruby Gem” module called hpricot. I knew why this was fail-town for me, it was because I had installed XCode CLI tools in order to get the mac_google_authenticator PAM module built. That CLI package rendered my system retarded when it came to processing gem requests. In the Ruby world there is a system established for distributing software written in Ruby, it’s called ‘gem’ and you run it much like apt-get in Ubuntu, it’s really quite straightforward and never has given me fits – until. Everything was complicated by the fact that I couldn’t really find where XCode was on my machine, all the likely targets to search didn’t have anything relevant and my find command returned pages of errors and I didn’t have the patience to pick through a thousand lines of “Permission Denied” to find the one spot where the file was hidden.

Didn’t need to complain, as I knew the solution. Download XCode for real. So off to Apple, download the monster and install it. That satisfied hpricot, and everything else installed quite nicely. I set Slogger up, pointed it at my Dropbox and configured the plugins that I wanted. The initial run crashed and burned but I figured out why, it was an errant space in the line that points to the Day One folder, a symbolic link fixed that and I was again off to the races. Of all the plugins that I configured these were successful:

  1. BlogLogger
  2. facebookifttt
  3. goodreadslogger
  4. lastfmlogger
  5. pocketlogger
  6. rsslogger

Then there were the plugins I tried to configure but couldn’t:

  1. fitbit
  2. flickrlogger
  3. getgluelogger

The primary problem with the fitbit plugin was that fitgem, the Ruby assistant program that you have to install is a phantom. You install it, it’s successful, and then it’s gone. No trace of it exists. You try again, poof, nowhere. Plus for the plugin setup there are API codes, User codes, and oAuth codes. I get the reasoning behind all of them and getting most of them was not an issue. I felt a little awkward creating an “Application” for just myself, it seems kind of a waste of effort to ferret all these bits and peices into a semiformal request procedure, but doing it wasn’t hard or cost anything, so what the hell. The part where it all falls apart for fitbit is where you have to get the oAuth token, since fitgem never worked and it’s invocation from slogger should have opened a web browser and asked for my approval, all of that never happened. I tried to be sporting and do the heavy lifting myself but all I did was irritate the API for fitbit and I figured, what the hell, I got most of what I was after and moved the fitbit plugin into the “unused” folder and forgot all about it. Abandon ship, y’arrrr!

Flickr is a pain in the ass. It’s Yahoo and as such, it’s kind of an Internet leper. You need your Flickr number, there’s a site that makes that easy, except it doesn’t work. Flickr username? Feh, either the one in Flickr or your linked Yahoo ID is meaningless. I half figured it was in the URL anyways, but then I thought about it and I don’t really use Flickr all that much beyond a solitary IFTTT rule and that’s precarious as it is. The only attractive part of Flickr is they gave out 1TB of storage. Still lepers tho. So, abandon ship! Y’arrrrr!

GetGlue was the last great effort. Much like Klout, it’s a site that makes sense sort of, but the name is utterly silly. GetGlue. What the hell? Why? Glue has nothing to do with TV or Movies. The only connection I could think of was celluloid and horses-processed-into-glue sort of connection. They give away stickers, what a wonderful bit of pollution that is, and as a gimmick seems dumb. The plugin needs an RSS feed for the GetGlue Activity Stream. It appears as though the GetGlue folks have moved away from RSS and towards “widgets” which seems stupid as in this application RSS is the answer and widgets are worthless. Alas, Google searching for the RSS feed method was fruitless. I was half hoping for something like http://getglue.com/user/bluedepth/feed.rss, where I could just craft it up and be on my merry way. No. You have to “View Source” to find it, which is stupid because that is so full of CSS flotsam and jetsam as to be utterly incomprehensible. Again, my ardor for that particular service was fog on a hot day. I don’t need it. I don’t use it. Whatever! Abandon ship! y’arrrrr!

So I tried the slogger script, it failed, tore out fitbit goop and then it worked. Then I went into my Day One app and mopped up all the mess that testing had made. The only oddity I noticed was the BlogLogger completely missed out on the text on my WordPress site that was between pre tags. Meh. Not really a reason to kick the entire thing to the curb, just something to honestly stop using. HTML is a right bastard, almost all of the time. CSS is a filthy abomination, but we won’t go there.

I would say that tonight everything will work as it should for Slogger, but I have to race to work tonight to turn everything off because work is going to exit-stage-left when it comes to the Internet. They are turning the entire thing off, at least for a few hours. I can’t wait for tomorrow, there will be lulz.

So, to Mr. Terpstra, thank you for slogger. I’m sorry the plugins didn’t work, that fitgem was a phantom, but at least most of what I wanted worked. So we sound a victory cheer, sort of. Yaaay!

Byword 2.0

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Byword, one of my favorite apps for the Mac and for my iOS devices just upgraded to version 2.0. They have included publishing to blog platforms as a Premium feature and used the Mac App Store or iOS to distribute the added functionality for $4.99. So far I love this app and this was one of those features that I’ve been dying for, so I’m quite pleased. I can do all my writing using Byword and not have to worry about distractions or anything on the screen getting in the way of my writing. It’s all clear, clean, and simple.

The last post to my WordPress blog about Invention was written using Byword 2.0 and I’m quite impressed with it. I could suggest some other enhancements like enumerating the Category list and suggesting possible tags in WordPress posting, but I will take what I can get from the get-go. One thing that was a little dismaying, but not a show stopper was that the purchase of the Premium add-on only works for the App Store that matches the platform you are buying it for. The Premium add-on for Mac App Store is separate from the one for the iOS App Store. Their support was very clear and I pretty much assumed so even before I wrote to support, I just wanted to be sure. Frankly I could give or take the extra features on my iPad or my iPhone as Drafts works brilliantly there along with Poster app on those devices. Drafts hands off to Poster well enough without having to worry about buying Byword 2.0 Premium again for the iOS App Store. I bought the add-on for the Mac App Store because that’s where, when I blog on my Laptop or on my iMac, this will be the app that I’ll use to blog.

The only irking thing, and it’s not really anything really overwrought is the lack of pick lists and tag suggestions for WordPress, but I have faith that eventually they might take their software in that direction. Only time will tell, and developers. 🙂