I watched the keynote on QuickTime yesterday and maybe it's just me, but it didn't seem as though Steve was at the top of his game. Nevertheless, it was an impressive event.
Spotlight, the new system-wide search feature seems to turn your entire Mac into a giant Tinderbox document. Smart folders are the equivalent of Tinderbox's Agents. Of course, Tinderbox includes an export facility and a map view that the Finder doesn't have, but Spotlight will make the Finder a much more capable tool for organizing information.
It seems as though there is separate Spotlight application that appears when you use the menu bar search feature. The ways in which you can sort the results displayed by Spotlight suggest some of the ideas behind Lifestreams. And the interface reminds me a lot of LaunchBar and Quicksilver. I really think it's going to make using my Mac a lot more productive because I save a lot of stuff that I find on the web on my HD, and half the time I can't find it again and I never seem to have the time to go through and organize it all.
Of course, the Konfabulator issue has some people in an uproar. It's the whole "people just love to jump up and down" thing. I suppose I see the developers' point, but by their reasoning, Apple should never include a text editor in the OS despite the fact that there seems to be any number of competitor text editors on the market. Or an e-mail application. Or a calculator. Or a disk utility. Or any of a number of applications that ship with the OS, yet for which there seems to remain viable competing applications in the marketplace. Yes, Dashboard looks just like Konfabulator, but lots of applications look similar in important ways. Does this make Apple "bad?" Maybe so. But it's not the kind of evil that makes me want to "jump up and down." Does that make me a hypocrite or something? Since so many people seem concerned about keeping score on character matters, I suppose it might. But I'm just as entitled to my ignorant, ill-informed, unfair, feet-of-clay fallibility as anyone else. I'm not going to get excited about it.
Apple's Tiger preview page doesn't offer a lot of information about system and bandwidth requirements for things like iChat AV over H.264. I'm inclined to believe that chatting with three other people at once will remain out of reach for mere mortals on cable modem with G4 systems. Which is perhaps just a way of not getting my hopes up. The multiple audio chats, combined with something like SubEthaEdit offers some intriguing collaboration possibilities. If you're the kind of person that collaborates much.
Anyway, just some more thoughts on the upcoming version of Mac OS X. I'm really looking forward to getting it as soon as it's available.
Janie. Who knew love could hurt so much? But it was worth it.
"My lungs were aching for air..."
We're not going to say anything...
Bad hair day.
Fiat X1/9: Babe magnet.
About the most that can be said is that I once owned a guitar.
Other guys had Farrah, I had Adrienne. Posters, I mean. That's my roommate, Ted.
Picture of a picture (made into a poster) of Ted and I as WUBA-Gang members. Probably looks gay, I know. Back then it was cool. We were the "bad guys" that disrupted pep rallies and football games, only to be foiled by team mascots, Super-Straight and Gorilla. Long story. Probably had to be there.
Did I mention the X1/9 was a babe magnet? Note the keg in the right side of the photo. That's Wendy by the way.
Ted, Craig, Tom, Steve and moi on our qual dive. Missing is Pedro, whose Blazer we drove up to some quarry in Pennsylvania to freeze our asses off on the dive. I'm pointing to Pete's license plate which is from Guam.
The replacement for the X1/9 after it self-immolated one afternoon. The Mazda GLC. It was no babe magnet, but it really was a Great Little Car.
Sandy Bell, my best friend of all time. We still keep in touch. You can see her work here.
A rainbow at Hanauma Bay, Oahu.
The Chalet at Castle Hill, where I lived while going to school in Newport, RI. Mass quantities of brewskis were consumed. Place had no insulation, and you froze in the winter. Absolutely, stunningly beautiful though. Woke up one morning to find Ted Turner walking through the backyard. Really.
The bull ring in Malaga, Spain. Nice place.
That's probably enough. This page will take forever to load now.
I ordered my Nokia 3660 today and my service is scheduled to start on 30 June. Still kind of mixed feelings, but there's a little excitement in there as well now. Probably buyer's remorse too, once I finally get my hands on it.
I also ordered a Bluetooth adapter from Amazon so the Mac can talk to the phone. I went with the Belkin from Amazon. There were other Belkins for a little less money at TigerDirect and Office Depot, but they shipped in 1 or 2 days and I'm kind of anxious. Office Depot actually shipped pretty darn fast on my IR remote for the iMac, but I trust Amazon so I went with theirs for $4.00 more. It was still $16.00 less than the D-Link.
I called CanonUSA about my malfunctioning PowerShot A70. As expected, they declined to offer a warranty repair. I called Visa and they're sending me the paperwork to initiate a claim. As long as I can substantiate the purchase with the Amazon invoice, it looks like it'll be good to go. I save most of my Amazon invoices on hardware, so I'm pretty sure it's in the files somewhere. If not, I'm told Amazon can send a duplicate invoice, though I haven't confirmed that. Anyway, this situation is looking more promising.
Chris made it home just fine. I called his cell around lunch time as he was headed to the airport and prompted him to call my office if his flight was delayed. Later he called to say they'd been delayed by 30 minutes. Then somebody told me about Flight Tracker, so I googled that up, punched in Chris's flight number and voila!
Looks like a lot of great improvements to Mac OS X are in store in 10.4, aka Tiger. Looks like we might need some new hardware though. Core Image will require a better video card than my Radeon 9000, and I'm not sure what's necessary to support H.264/AVC in iChat. Hopefully nothing more than a single 800MHz G4 so my parents will be able to enjoy it on their eMac. It'd be cool to chat with more than one family member at one time. Very cool.
Spotlight looks to be another great feature for turning masses of data into useful information. I could use it right now. I'm not sure what I think about Dashboard. I don't own Konfabulator, because I don't see the need for it. I really hope Apple bought Konfabulator, because even though I probably won't use it, I don't look forward to the wailing and gnashing of teeth that will ensue from the independent developers.
Safari looks like it'll be getting some neat features with built-in RSS support. We'll have to see how it works. Right now I'm inclined to believe a separate aggregator will be a viable application even if RSS is baked in to Safari.
Looks like we'll have to wait a while to get to experience Tiger. It's going to have to earn its stripes first, I guess. It's supposed to ship sometime in the first half of 2005. I hope they're under-promising and over-delivering on that.
I forgot to turn off the flash when I shot the anole sitting on the banana blossom, so he's a little washed-out.
And there were actually three spiders inhabiting an rather large and chaotic web next to the house, but the third one was too far away to get them all in single frame. Focusing on spiders is always a trick too it seems. This shot worked out. Some closer ones didn't.
Unfortunately, I seem to be having some mechanical problem with my Canon A70 PowerShot. When the camera is turned off, sometimes the lens won't fully retract and I get an E18 indication in the LCD. And when it's turned on, if I shake it, I can hear something rattling in it. So evidently some small part has come loose and is interfering with the lens extension and retraction. Naturally, I bought the thing just over a year ago, so technically the warranty is expired. But I think my Visa card offers an automatic doubling of the warranty. I'll have to investigate to see if I can have this thing fixed under warranty. Otherwise, I suspect the repair cost will likely be a significant fraction of the cost of a new one. We shall see.
With all of my family except for my son-in-law, Pat, up in Philadelphia, I'm dividing my time between my apartment and the house my children live in. I've got my two cats here, who don't require too much attention, and a cat, a dog and a fish at the house that require somewhat more attention. So I'm bouncing back and forth during the day, and spending the nights at the house. Makes for only a semi-productive weekend.
I don't have comments here at Groundhog Day because as I've stated before, I believe they're more trouble than they're worth for a lot of reasons, some technical in nature, others human.
While I don't have them here, I have used comment facilities at others' weblogs to participate in discussions or to try to facilitate them, a role no one asked me to perform and which, it is now somewhat clear, isn't often welcome. Other times, my participation in others' comments resulted in my indulging in "my own bad self," and I'd like to do that as infrequently as I can.
So, to kind of avoid the unpleasantness that seems to attend so much of what passes for online discourse these days, I'm going to eschew (a word I love to hate) all comment facilities at others' weblogs. Whatever I might have to say about anything anyone else has said will be said here. And probably damn little of that.
I don't offer this with any ill-feeling toward anyone. I'm not offended, irritated, piqued, or pissed. Mostly, I'm just tired. Whatever time, energy and attention I have for this sort of thing is probably most profitably invested here. Or in private e-mails to others if that is more appropriate.
I'm not sure if this is exactly blog-worthy, but it seems to be occupying my attention at the moment, and hopefully this will scratch that particular itch.
Although I still have an opportunity to change my mind, I've started the process to become a mobile phone user. Since the phone I wanted wasn't in stock, I have time to think about this some more and decide if it's really a good idea or not.
I gather from everything I've read that all mobile phone providers leave something to be desired, so any choice one makes is going to be a compromise of some kind. I decided to go with T-Mobile for their GPRS data plans. I selected the Nokia 3660 for its large screen, compatibility with iSync, and Bluetooth capability. (Even though I don't have Bluetooth on my computers. Guess I'll have to fix that.) It's larger than all the clamshell models out there, but at the moment size isn't a big issue for me. (There's pun in there, I think.) The T-Mobile $39.99 Get More plan offers 600 anytime minutes, and unlimited nights and weekends, and I'll add the $9.99 t-zones Pro feature, although it isn't exactly clear that I'll be able to use anything more than what the regular t-zones feature offers. Apparently it's a matter of ports or something. I may try to make a change within the 14 day trial period if it doesn't appear as though the "Pro" service offers any advantage over the regular one.
Anyway, this time next week it's likely I'll join the ranks of the electronically tethered, pissing away upwards of $60.00 a month against the notion that somehow, some day, I'll need this thing. If nothing else, it'll make me more immediately available to my kids, and that's probably worth it.
So what's the big deal with justification? Justification is the most overt form of reasoning backward from our feelings. It is not a particularly good thing, because it attempts to legitimize mistakes, or elevate bad behavior as something "good."
None of us is perfect, we all make silly, foolish or stupid mistakes all the time. I have great experience with this. Most of us also have a "public" self-image that is a positive one. That is to say, we don't ever wish to appear "wrong." We may have other self-images that aren't as positive or as public, but we don't ever wish to embrace the possibility that we could have been wrong, regardless of how we feel about ourselves.
Just as a quick aside, I want to speculate a bit on why appearing wrong is such a big deal for us humans. I suspect it has a lot to do with our sensitivity to our place in the pecking order, our fear of losing rank, and the reliance on measures of authority to determine our social rank. To appear "wrong" in public is to diminish our authority, and threatens our rank within the pecking order. Authority and rank are keys to our security, our means to obtain food, shelter and clothing; and to attract and retain the most desirable mates. All of which is to say, it seems to matter a lot, so getting past it is hard.
So let's take our Vice President's recent exhibition of authenticity as a sort of "teachable moment." By most news accounts, the VP and Senator Leahy were gathered with the rest of the Senate for a group photograph. The Senate wasn't in session, and it's not what would ordinarily be considered a "formal" function. Which is to say, the normal rules of decorum probably didn't apply. This is important, because we rely on social contexts to help govern our behavior, because most of the time we're not behaving in a deliberate, cognitively volitional manner. So the context was a little more relaxed than usual.
At some point, Senator Leahy stepped over to exchange pleasantries with the VP. Why he would do so is not really important, what's important is that doing so was not inappropriate under any circumstances. Vice President Cheney seems to have had some lingering heartburn regarding how either Senator Leahy or other members of his party have been treating him and his former company, Haliburton. Specifically, the Vice President believes that they have been publicly questioning his integrity, and he seems to resent it.
Integrity is a component that supports authority, especially for people in high-attention positions of authority. It is natural for those who are subject to that authority, and even more natural for those who are competing for that authority, to try to identify weaknesses in areas like integrity. I'm not aware of any politician who universally enjoys unquestioned integrity. If you're going to be a politician in public office, then having your integrity questioned publicly and frequently is something you have to learn to live with, or find something else to do. And it's not as though the Vice President hasn't provided us with ample reason to question his integrity. After all, he headed the commission that identified himself as the best choice for the VP position on the ticket. He led the energy task force that was supposed to formulate energy policy for this country, despite the fact that he used to be the CEO of a large energy company. Sure, that may appear to make him more qualified to lead the task force, by virtue of his authority on the energy industry; but it raises legitimate questions about whether the task force would come up with the best energy policy for the country or for his industry. Then there's the whole matter of what he said about Iraq before the war. All of which is not to say that the Vice President lacks integrity, it is simply to say that questions about it are appropriate.
While questioning a politician's integrity may always be appropriate, politicians are always human beings as well, and they have feelings. So while having one's integrity questioned may be appropriate, it is also natural to have certain feelings about it. What those feelings may be will vary from individual to individual, but I think in general we may believe they are not good feelings; they must involve some amount of discomfort or distress. So politicians are always experiencing some amount of stress due to this situation. Coping with it is something most politicians learn to do, although their humanity makes them vulnerable to coping less well at certain times, and making mistakes as a result.
Vice President Cheney's comment to Senator Leahy was inappropriate. It was a mistake. Now the Vice President appears to be engaging in justification of that mistake, rather than some other, more appropriate action. By doing so, he is hoping to garner sympathy from those who are already inclined sympathetically toward the administration or the VP personally. Their sympathy, or validation, will ameliorate the bad feelings he has about his mistake. We never engage in justification when we're feeling good about ourselves and what we've done, we only seem to do it when we know we've made a mistake and we're trying to preserve our authority and make ourselves feel better. There are a number of downsides or drawbacks to this sort of thing.
First, many people recognize it for what it is. Not everyone will, especially those who are sympathetic toward him already. Everyone is familiar with justification because we all do it; but we seldom recognize it in ourselves, or in those for whom we feel some close affinity. If it's someone we "care" about, we want them to feel better about themselves, so we validate their feelings and subscribe to their justification. For those who are more neutral in their feelings, or who have negative feelings, the use of justification is plainly visible. The downside is that for those people, the justification simply underscores the nature of the error and compounds it with another error; which only further diminishes one's authority. In the short term, it might be useful in terms of reaching some interior emotional state where one is under less stress; but in the longer term it only increases the stress because one's authority has been diminished.
Second, it elevates bad behavior. The Vice President has just helped to lower the standard for civility in political discourse; a standard which, in my opinion, is already set too low. When people in positions of authority, people of high rank in the pecking order, justify their mistakes, they make it easier for others to make the same errors. Ironically, this was one of the arguments this administration used in its first campaign, effectively trying to run against the conduct of Bill Clinton, with the promise to "restore honor and dignity to the White House."
Finally, it's a distraction. There's an issue here, and it's not whether or not it was okay for the Vice President of the United States to tell a sitting Senator to "fuck off." Vice President Cheney has something going on inside him that he needs to confront and resolve. To the extent that he's devoting his cognitive resources to reason backward from his emotions, he's ignoring the source of the problem and practically ensuring it will manifest itself again in other destructive ways.
So what should we do we do when we've made a mistake in a very public way? Perhaps the best thing to do, depending on our emotional state, is to admit we made a mistake and, if necessary, apologize to whoever was offended. This has the effect of mitigating any damage to our authority by showing we have enough authority to recognize when we've made a mistake, which is something most people respect.
If, for some reason, our emotional state doesn't allow us to admit we've made a mistake, then don't. But also don't engage in justification because that just calls attention to ourselves and our errors. Just be still. Let it go. We all make mistakes, and we don't have to publicly admit all of them. If it's a public mistake, most likely the public already knows it was a mistake. Just be still. Keep a low profile for a while. If it's something we should apologize for, we should still do so at a time when our emotional state permits it. The point is, sometimes we find ourselves in states of great distress when we're feeling very vulnerable and we're not thinking clearly or behaving well. That's a time to just be still. Settle your own dust. Once the dust settles, we'll be better able to see what we should do. In other words, "When you find yourself in a hole, quit digging!" The trick is recognizing we're in a hole, as the VP is demonstrating he has not.
Most importantly, we need to examine what might be going on inside ourselves that contributed to making that particular mistake. What does that error tell us about ourselves that we might be able to work on and improve? We all learn from our mistakes, but the public ones, the ones that come with some pain and embarrassment, are hard to look at because we feel all those feelings all over again. But they're perhaps the most important ones to examine because they may have the most to tell us about ourselves. Remember Thales, "Know thyself." It's harder than it sounds, and it's an effort and an education that never ends. But the more we know, the fewer mistakes we'll make.
Finally, is justification ever appropriate? Who are we accountable to? I would say it's probably never appropriate. Whether or not a particular action we've taken was justified is probably a question we can't answer for ourselves.
I dropped Chris off at the airport this morning. To preclude the kind of difficulty that ensued yesterday, I told him I'd remain by the curb at the departure area until he had checked in and returned to tell me everything was a go. I didn't think I'd have to wait long at 0545 in the morning.
But an ever-vigilant member of the Transportation Safety Administration, or Airport Security, or someone in uniform, told me I would have to park in the parking garage if I wanted to wait for my son. So I parked the car and walked back to look for Chris. I walked over to his airline ticket counter, and noticed he wasn't in line. I walked back to where the car had been, and he wasn't out there. I did a couple of orbits and I couldn't see him. I checked the departure times on the TV monitor to see if we had his flight wrong and he'd had to bolt for the gate. Yes, we had it wrong, but the other way. It didn't leave till 0710, instead of 0700, so he actually had a little more time to kill.
So then I got the bright idea to call him on his mobile phone from a pay phone. So I inserted the requisite two quarters and dialed his number.
Chris: "Hello?"
Me: "Hey Chris, where are you?"
Chris: "Hello?"
Me: "Can you hear me?"
Chris: "Hello?"
Naturally, the friggin' pay phone didn't work. It was on one of those trees where there would normally be four phones, but it was the only one and it didn't work.
Is this like a sign from God that I'm supposed to get a mobile phone?
I could tell by the background sounds in Chris's phone that he was outside. So I went back out to look for him and found him by the curb looking for me. He said I pulled away just as he was walking out to tell me he was all checked in. Naturally.
So all's well that ends well, but I guess I need to think about this whole mobile phone thing some more.
I just returned from dropping my son off at the airport. He was scheduled to fly to Philadelphia this evening to spend the weekend with his mom and her family in celebration of her mother's birthday. Chris is 17, and so I treated him like I would any other adult I would be dropping at the airport, or as he would have been treated if he had a friend or a cab drop him off. I dropped him at the curb next to his airline ticket counter, told him I loved him and gave him a twenty for some snacks during his layover. (Well, I don't do that for friends when I drop them off. Unless, like, you know, they're really good friends.) Then I headed on back to my apartment.
Well, as it turned out, shortly after arriving, he learned his flight was delayed by more than two hours, which would have him missing his connection in North Carolina, with no other flights out of there tonight. The best thing they can do for him is put him on a 0700 flight tomorrow morning. So now Chris is stuck at the airport with no transportation home, and his father on the road with no means of communication.
We're a resourceful family, even if I'm not prescient enough to check for flight delays before leaving home. He called Melissa, his big sister, on her mobile phone. She was already in Philadelphia. She then calls her husband, Pat, and learns that he's on the road just outside of Jacksonville, maybe 15 minutes from the airport, on his way home. So she asks him to swing by the airport and pick up Chris and drop him off at home.
I get to my apartment and I have a message on my answering machine. I didn't know who it could be, since I wasn't expecting a call, and it never occurred to me it might be Chris with a travel problem. It's Melissa calling from her mobile phone, giving me the whole situation. So I call her back, confirm everything seems to be okay; then I call Chris on his mobile phone and confirm that he's expecting Pat to pick him up. He tried reaching his mom on her mobile phone, but he only got her voice mail. Melissa will probably see her a little later before it would have been time to go to the airport to pick Chris up in Philly, so that should go okay.
The only downside is I don't get to enjoy a night of reckless debauchery, as I have to be at the house around 0500 to take him back to the airport.
Sigh.
What I'm not really clear about is whether this is an example of why it would be good for me to have a mobile phone; or why it's not necessary, because everyone else has one!
Cher is going to be performing in Jacksonville on September 18th as part of her most recent "farewell tour." If you look at the list of venues, they seem like smaller metropolitan areas (Binghamton?), so maybe they figured there was still some untapped interest in her that could be exploited. Works for me. I didn't see her when she was in Jax last time, so I went ahead and bought a ticket.
I hadn't been by Killing the Buddha in a long time, but back in May they published an article on Aikido! Well, martial arts and meditation in general. Well worth a read.
The guy who develops the software I use to do whatever it is I do here, Mark Bernstein, has some very worthwhile thoughts in the wake of the weblogs.com brouhaha.
This cheap religion these days. The whole damn world's going to hell.
Yesterday, I was talking with a friend of mine about the whole digital music thing. It's so hollow today. I mean, where's the experience?
Back in my day, when we appreciated the value of music, it was different.
In each home, or dorm room, a kind of sacred space was set aside. An alter, if you will. And if we wanted to listen to music, we had to perform the sacred rituals. First the source had to be retrieved from its special storage area. Often there was a reading from the container of the source. Then, the source was carefully, reverentially, removed from its storage container. We never directly touched the source. Show some respect! We performed the rites, zapping it with ions and wiping it down with distilled water and a lint-free cloth, before carefully placing it on the alter. Then we placed the tone arm from the alter, containing the cartridge and the stylus, each carefully selected and maintained, onto the source, softly, slowly, through the magic of damped cuing. And if we had applied power to the receiver or amplifiers of the alter, then we had the music! At no more than .005% Total Harmonic Distortion. Free from wow and flutter by virtue of the direct drive turntable with quartz phase-locked-loop circuitry.
And when the music played, we treated it with respect. We trod softly, gently, in the vicinity of the alter! No carelessly careening around as if the music didn't matter!
And after twenty to twenty-five minutes, the rituals had to be repeated. None of this hours of music with no commitment from the listener!
Today, what? You carry around two or three days' worth of music in a box smaller than a pack of cigarettes. You go jogging with the damn things! Where's the respect? Where's the reverence? Where's the experience?!
It's too cheap. Too damn easy. You don't know what you're missing. Back then, the music mattered. Today it's just a fashion accessory.
One thing I'll say about ignorance: it's authentic!
Look, this is a long post. It's not very passionate. It's probably not terribly "authentic." It's not going to titillate you. Chances are, it'll bore you. I recommend you move on to something more interesting, more passionate, more authentic right now. Passion is another word for suffering, and we're all about suffering as little as possible here. If you value suffering in your life, if you want more of it, then move on. I have nothing for you.
If you're looking for a little less suffering, then maybe you'll have to suffer through this interminable essay and my bad writing. There just might be something here you can use. I make no guarantees, and I remind everyone that I'm an authority on nothing, I make all this shit up. You got a better idea? Go for it.
So.
Something happens, or maybe something doesn't happen. Do we know why? "Why" is important, because it establishes the context for the emotional response. We don't require a cognitive review of the pertinent data, we've got a part of our mind that stores a mental model for most explanations of why, and I call that a belief system. Other people call it other things, but it's kind of an unconscious filter that places events in what is usually an appropriate context. The vast majority of the time, it works just fine. But when it doesn't work, it can cause a lot of suffering, for everyone.
Suffering is the difference between the way things are and the way we'd like them to be. (Yes, I know I'm repetitious, but the name of the weblog is Groundhog Day, same as it was yesterday and the same as it will be tomorrow. Assuming there is a tomorrow.)
The way things are is a product of our belief system as much as it is of the physical events that create it. And our belief systems aren't always perfect. In some areas, they work just fine. But in other areas, they've accreted a lot of bad data and we don't have a good built-in garbage collection routine. I think that's the point of setting the suffering bit, but it seems as though the API has been deprecated in recent releases of the human OS.
Okay, I'll stop trying to be funny.
Okay, so something happens, or doesn't happen, and we don't stop to think about why, we have a mental model that tells us why. And because there's a difference between the way something happened and the way we wanted it to happen, we experience suffering. Sometimes that suffering comes in the form of anger, and anger comes from fear. A lot of people don't believe that, and that's fine. Believe what you want. I find this works better as a description of what happens than anything else I've found. But it's the belief that supports the unexamined why that's frightening. Which, in turn, is the source of the anger. That belief can be something very fundamental about ourselves, that developed a long time ago, and which we've reinforced by relying on it over the years. It may be something like, "I'm not loved," or "I'm not wanted," or "I'm not safe," or "I'm not appreciated." Those are all examples of believing that some need is not being met, which we are especially sensitive to, probably because of things that happened during our "growing up years." We've built them into our belief systems and that's how we interpret the events of the world as they relate to us. They may have been true at one time, in one specific context, but now we've generalized them into an explanation about why things happen the way that they do.
The problem is, while those beliefs may have been true in a specific circumstance at one time, they're probably not generally true today. At least not enough to be a reliable basis for developing an emotional response that correlates to the event in a way that an external observer would understand. As a result, their emotional response to your emotional response will likely not be the one you expect, which, in turn, feeds back into the process as more suffering, and the problem becomes worse!
So, what can we do to kind of make this process work a little better?
Pay attention.
This is the essence of mindfulness. What's going on inside you? You're ignorant about what's really going on inside anyone else. But you're the authority on what's going on inside you, if you make the effort to pay attention and figure that out. That means you have to throw a cognitive interrupt when the anger bit gets set. When you notice yourself getting angry, you need to take some action to stop the process before you initiate an emotional response that you haven't fully considered.
Now, let's not get silly here. If you stub your toe and yell, "God damn it!" well, you may have committed a sin, but you haven't really hurt anybody or seriously increased the net amount of suffering in the universe. But if someone has made you angry and you're about to lash out at them, that may be a good time to pause and consider a little bit what your other options may be.
You're the authority on your feelings, you know what you're feeling. Now you need to ask yourself why do you feel that way? Chances are, you have some explanation that's reasonably accessible, but does it stand up to scrutiny? And it takes some effort and some willingness to be vulnerable to yourself to do this. Part of our process of ensuring we have a consistent view of ourselves is the act of justifying ourselves, not only to others, but to ourselves. None of us ever cares to admit we're wrong, and justifying is a defense mechanism against being wrong. It's a cognitive response to the fear of being wrong, and so it's a short hop from justification to anger, and it's also part of the explanation of why so many people see some virtue in anger. But that's for another time.
The way out of this destructive cycle is to reduce ignorance by asking questions and being open to the possibility of being wrong. It may not have always been safe to be wrong in the past, but at some point you have to embrace the risk of discovering that you're wrong about something if you're ever to make progress. There's nothing wrong with being wrong, although we've been conditioned by many things to believe that there is. We're all wrong, probably at least as often as we're right. The point is to always test, to acknowledge uncertainty. It can take a long time to get there. I know.
One thing we're usually not wrong about is how we feel. We're the authorities on what we're feeling. So we can talk about how we feel without fear of being wrong. One thing we're not authorities on is what other people are believing, even though we have a mental model of what other people believe about us that helps to create our emotional response to events. So when an event happens that makes us angry, instead of attacking ("fight" part of fight or flight response), or retreating into a defensive shell ("flight" part), you might try to get more information about the event from the others who were a part of it.
You might say, "I'm angry right now, because I feel as though my contributions aren't valued." The other person might not have any idea what you're talking about. This gets tricky, because their own emotional response may be just as "buggy" and they might respond in a defensive way by attacking or retreating instead of engaging. If that happens, there are some other strategies to employ, but for the moment we'll assume kind of an ideal case.
In the ideal case the other person will probably ask for more information in turn. "What makes you feel as though I don't value your contributions." (The really "ideal other person" will validate your feelings by reflecting them back to you - acknowledging that your message has been received and understood. In which case, they might say something like, "You feel as though I don't value your contributions. I'm sorry, what makes you feel that way?") This is where the process can get a little more difficult, because we're often very poor communicators. But the goal is to try to reach some mutual agreement on whether or not the assertion that your "contributions aren't valued" is true. If it's true, then your feelings are appropriate and the other person learns something useful that helps them make a change that meets your needs. If it's not true, then you've learned something from the other person that you didn't know before; which allows you to discard that false notion, and the feelings that arise from it.
This doesn't always work. In fact, with some people it can be a rare thing if it ever works at all. If, and this is an important "if," you feel as though you're genuinely embracing this process, and that the other person can't for some reason, then you need to consider the possibility of not interacting with that person. Depending on the nature of the relationship, that may require a great deal of work, and probably some additional suffering; or it may be very simple and you are simply able to either ignore them, or otherwise never have them in your life again.
The point is, many of our emotions are based on beliefs that are little more than untested assertions. When we form an emotional response based on these untested assertions, and attack or retreat, we're really projecting our fears onto someone else and shaping our relationships around ignorance. The combination of ignorance, fear, and anger leads to poisonous interactions that increase the net level of suffering in people's lives. Perhaps this is the way it must be, because we all have to suffer enough to be willing to look for a change. Suffering is the difference between the way things are, and the way we'd like them to be. We can examine the way things are and see if they really are that way, or if we're not projecting our fears into our areas of ignorance. Maybe the difference between the way things are and the way we'd like them to be isn't as great as it appears.
Who sang that damn song? There are a lot of versions of it at the iTunes Music Store, but I didn't recognize any of them as the one that made the charts some time back in the dim reaches of my adolescence. Anyway, not that important.
Feelings are important though, they're kind of the internal gyroscopic compass we all rely on. And just like a physical gyroscopic compass, it has capabilities and limitations we ought to understand if we're to navigate safely, especially at the poles.
I used to be an angry driver. I still can be, from time to time. There's no immunity to it, but one learns and one improves, does better, drives angry less often. There's a general routine that's always running, kind of like the internal event loop of human consciousness. An event happens. Our sensory apparatus detects it. Our minds create a perception of it. And they generate an emotional response to it. Then, our cognitive faculties, select a response, some action to take, from a range of action choices presented by the emotional response, which does the bulk of the decision-tree pruning for us.
There are some bugs in this process. I'm going to focus on two sub-routines, because they're the source of the most problems. It's probably impossible to draw a clear demarcation between the perception - emotional response routines. And there are internal feedback loops between those routines, which, I think are intended to be error-correcting, but sometimes become error-amplifying.
So I'm driving down the road, traveling at the speed limit or a little more, maintaining what I believe a "safe" distance is between myself and the driver in front of me. Another driver overtakes me in the left lane, and then inserts himself in the space in front of me, and promptly slows down. I have to brake, and I get angry. There are a number of physiological responses that go along with getting angry, none of which is especially healthy. I then take some action based on my anger, which may consist of one or more of the following: blowing my horn; giving the other driver the finger; riding up on his bumper; pulling into the left lane and trying to get in front of him again. None of which is especially appropriate to my main goal, which is to arrive at my destination safely. This sort of thing happens to a lot of people. Sometimes we're the angry driver, sometimes we're the object of an angry driver's wrath. What goes wrong?
It's in the perceptual routine, I think. We interpret the event as happening to me, in the sense that I am the intended object of the event. Our perception of the event is that the other driver cut me off. While a more objective perception might be that the other driver changed lanes. The difference is that we're making ourselves the center of the universe, and in that perceptual context, the victim of another person's thoughtlessness, stupidity or ill intentions, or some other defect of the other driver. We are ignorant of the state of mind of the other driver. We can't know what he or she was thinking when they took the action. It may well be that traffic is very heavy, they had some reason to be in the right lane, and the safest opening was the one in front of me. But instead we project onto the other driver, of whom we are completely ignorant, our expectations of what he or she should have done.
Now, what does our angry response achieve? Nothing worthwhile. We have a fight or flight response going on internally with a spike in blood pressure, heart rate and respiration, a surge in stress hormones; maybe we take some unsafe actions, or behave rudely to "punish" the other driver (or "hold them accountable?"). Whose interests are served here? Well, ours are, in the narrowest sense, in that we're attending to and acting out from our interior emotional state. But even that isn't really in our interests as a driver, and none of what we do as an angry driver is an anyone else's interest on the road.
So, what do we do? What can we do? Do we have any power over the other driver? No. Do we have any authority over the other driver? Not unless we're a police officer. So, how much attention should we give to the other driver? We do have some power over what's going on inside our own minds. Not a lot, but just enough, if we use it wisely.
The other driver changes lanes, we perceive we've been cut off, and we feel the anger response rising. The thing to do is pay attention to that angry feeling and not to the range of responses being offered the emotional response routine. I try to consider my ignorance of the other driver's situation and intentions. I wonder if he hasn't had a bad day and just isn't at his best right now. Or I wonder if he might be struggling to get home to attend to a personal emergency of some kind. Because I'm ignorant, it's just as appropriate to consider more charitable interpretations of the other driver's actions and to try to remove myself from being the center of the universe. By doing so, that cognitive intervention feeds back into the perception-emotional response routines, and I can "let go" of my anger. There are other strategies as well: take a deep breath, hold it for a count of five and exhale slowly. That takes the edge off the fight or flight response and the surge in stress hormones. Also takes your cognitive center off of fashioning some uncharitable response ("That son-of-a-bitch!"), and focuses it on (surprise!) your breathing. (Always a good place to begin looking for your center. Because it sure as hell isn't in the center of the universe.)
Now, do I always get this right? No, of course not. But I get it right far more often than I did before. And on my best days, I'm able to embrace my commute to work or home as an opportunity to work on my practice. And even on my worst days, I'm more mindful of the negative outcomes attendant to being an angry driver, and I'm able to recover more quickly on those occasions when I backslide.
It comes down to what happened? What am I feeling? Why do I feel that way? What can I do about it? The last three questions all deal with things that I have some power over. Yelling and screaming and flipping another driver the bird isn't going to do anything constructive about the other driver. They're essentially powerless actions. There's little opportunity to communicate with other drivers in a meaningful way, so you have to focus on what you can do with your feelings by yourself.
A little later, we'll review what you can do with your feelings when you can communicate with another person.
Till then woodchuck-chuckers: Don't drive angry. Don't drive angry.
Is there any virtue in emotional violence because it's authentic? Because it's passionate? Is name-calling, humiliation, denigration and vilification interesting because it's raw and spontaneous?
Is self-control overrated? Dry? Sterile? Boring?
What is the intent of emotional violence? Whose needs are being served?
What do we know more about, ourselves or someone else? Of which are we the least ignorant? Should we write from the position of the greatest ignorance, or the least?
My dad is still alive and kicking, and I cherish every moment we have with him. He's a remarkable guy. A one-time weblogger, he's still opinionated and active in his community. My sisters had my parents for the weekend, so I'm sure they suffered for no lack of attention.
As for me, I took Chris and Caitie to breakfast this morning and then we came back to my place to watch a little of Comedy Central's Last Comic Standing before heading out to see Dodgeball. It was a funny movie, a little uneven in places, but lots of great cameo appearances. Took Chris back home to get ready for a concert he was going to tonight, and spent the rest of the day with Caitie. I burned her a CD from some songs in my library and a few she picked out from the iTunes Music Store. Not sure how I'm going to react when Jessica Simpson and Hilary Duff turn up in the rotation, but what the heck? Melissa called to wish me a happy father's day as well, so I had my share of attention too.
It's a movie weekend here at Groundhog Day. I saw The Terminal and Spartan yesterday. I'll probably see either Dodgeball or Garfield today.
The Terminal, was very light, entertaining, funny. It's not Cast Away, or Joe Versus the Volcano, it doesn't carry any broader themes, which is just fine.
Spartan was strange. I guess the big thing is Mamet's dialog. Glengarry Glen Ross is, I guess, a good example. I was surprised, but Mamet also did the screenplay for Ronin, which was a much more enjoyable action flick than Spartan. All the characters in Spartan are 2-dimensional, and we don't really care about any of them. The ones that look the most interesting we don't get to see very often, and when we do, they're usually killed off after performing some vital plot-advancing service. The scenes in the command post where the Secret Service is making the initial effort to locate the president's missing daughter are not credible. They're too... something. Arch? They're drawn for effect, but the result is just confusing. It's almost as if the elements of the movie were supposed to be "spartan."
It's worth watching, but the result isn't very satisfying. There are too many caricatures and not enough real people. Val Kilmer is good, given what he has to work with, but some of his lines just suck. I'd give it a C+ as an action flick.
Turns out I missed some sort of science fiction convention in Jacksonville last weekend. Of course, most of my Saturday was clobbered with TKD, but I suppose I would have found the time afterward to drop by and visit, especially since I was already downtown. That's what I get for not keeping up with local news and events.
It seems as though if you changed some of the nouns and a few of the adjectives, the whole weblogs.com thing reads like the warbloggers' posts leading up to March 2003.
It's not so much that we're writing ourselves into existence, we're painting ourselves into corners.
Stopped by Books-a-Million last night, because I have an attachment (that I ought to break) to books when I'm feeling stressed. Found a new, very thin, volume of my old friend Epictetus. If you don't recall, he's the former slave who became a philosopher, a Stoic; who, I think, remain somewhat out of favor with the hip and the trendy. (Well, I take that back. Actually, stoicism seems to be enjoying a bit of a revival, though I'm not sure that it's hip or trendy just yet. But it's a popular culture revival. The truly educated, the conventional "authorities" if you will, still sniff at stoicism.) It's a nice little book, mostly relying on Epictetus for some pithy thoughts to frame some beautiful calligraphy. A few nice bits:
"No matter what they say about you, do not be upset about it; it no longer depends on you."
Sound familiar? The rest is not up to you...
"When you assume a role that is beyond your powers, not only will you cut a sorry figure at it, but in addition you will have left aside the role you could have fulfilled."
Something I would do well to keep in mind in the future.
"Most often, remain silent. Or else only say what is necessary, and in few words."
I haven't been keeping up on my cosmology, but the last time I looked the data suggested that the expansion of the universe was accelerating, and that there was no way it was going to collapse back into itself in a kind of "Big Crunch." The acceleration is due to some mysterious fifth fundamental force of the universe, which, to my knowledge hasn't been named yet.
If that is indeed the case, then I wish to propose the obvious (well, obvious to me anyway) name: Irony.
I received an e-mail from a friend yesterday, making a jocular reference to my "defending the indefensible" with regard to my comments on the personal attacks on Dave Winer. I suppose this topic has been done unto death, but I think it's probably worth a few more whacks at the expired equine.
I think it's reasonable for people to believe that what Dave Winer did was "indefensible." I'm not sure if my correspondent was specifically referring to what Dave did, or to Dave himself. I choose to believe he meant the former. Regarding the former, I think calling it "indefensible" is strong, even harsh criticism. But it is not a personal attack. As to the latter, to believe that Dave Winer, the person, is indefensible is wrong.
Each of us is a fallible, imperfect human being. In our social interactions in the "real" world, we've evolved a set of norms that acknowledge that fact and that allow us to criticize and debate each others' actions and beliefs without getting into personal attacks, the main intent of which is to inflict emotional pain and suffering. We don't seem to have those norms in the "blogosphere," which, more and more, begins to resemble more the Jerry Springer show than a forum for intelligent discussion and debate.
It is natural, in the real world, when attacked with physical violence that is intended to inflict pain and suffering, or even to take a life, to physically defend oneself, inflicting the same in return. We even allow for it in our legal system, it is a sanctioned response. In what many would consider our most highly evolved religious and ethical belief systems, the case is made that it is better, to suffer physical violence alone, than to inflict it in defense. This is sometimes referred to as pacifism, or "turning the other cheek."
It is also natural, in the real world, to do likewise when confronted with emotional violence. But we recognize the damage that is done to all the participants, and to the social fabric that binds us in what we ever so loosely term "civilization," and so we've evolved norms and ethical beliefs that are intended to stop the damage as soon as it occurs and to minimize its effects. This is what we teach children when we teach them to "do unto others, as you would have them do unto you." Yet, it seems we forget about that when we're safely behind our computer screens, and we're screened from the effects of our attacks, experiencing only the emotional response that prompted them. There are no emotional "circuit breakers" for people in this context. It's all just "stimulus-response." And it seems it is even worse when there is previous history in this regard, as there is with Mr. Winer and his attackers. When he takes a controversial action, it seems as though people are spring-loaded to project the least charitable interpretation on it, experience some negative emotional response as a result, and then immediately launch an attack, often mistakenly calling it "accountability." And there is a rich and intense effort at justification of those attacks, which seems to suggest that those who are attacking are at least obliquely aware that what they are doing is somehow outside of some norm.
Let me just take a moment, as an aside, to speak to the specific justification I've seen most frequently cited, and that is a legal or tortious argument from common law. If there is some validity to the theory that Dave Winer had a legal obligation of some kind, then the most appropriate thing to do would be to seek a court in which to make that argument and avail oneself of the relief afforded by the legal system. It is not appropriate to cite some hypothetical legal theory as justification for personal attacks against another human being. One might even speculate about the tortious implications of legal opinions rendered by professional lawyers on the internet in specific circumstances as to whether they constitute legal advice, and if so, are they sufficient in themselves, do they end at an appropriate stopping point? Or are they contributing to further injury? But I am not a lawyer, and I'm not impressed by people who wrap themselves in legal arguments to justify hurting another person.
In the real world, mature adults who are not immediately engaged in the emotional violence step in to quell it. Sometimes all it takes is a reminder about personal decorum. Sometimes it takes separating the parties involved. Sometimes it goes further and the courts are involved to resolve a dispute that might formerly have been resolved through emotional violence. In the online world, that doesn't seem to work. The networked connections we all seem to believe are so wonderful, permit rapid assembly of online "mobs" to shower victims with invective and opprobrium, often directed at both the initial target of the personal attacks, and later at the attackers. This is a kind of "virtual" mob mentality, where it becomes all too easy to cast aside all pretense at decorum and revert to our most childish and base tendencies.
The quality of our relationships is diminished. Our view of ourselves is diminished. The value of our civilization is diminished. We are all demeaned.
In the real world, we believe that all human beings are worthy of being treated with respect and dignity. That doesn't always happen, and when it fails in the worst ways, then there are authorities in place to deal with it. In the real world, I think we believe that it is better to treat people with respect, even if we don't feel as though they are treating us that way. In the real world, I believe we act in ways that most often try to reduce suffering, rather than inflict more of it. In the real world, we attack or criticize actions or ideas, not the people behind them; though, the quality of our political discourse in this country seems to have largely abandoned that notion as well. Perhaps it's as "quaint" to some as the provisions of the Geneva Conventions.
I feel sad that my own, undeniably imperfect, efforts at trying to stop or mitigate these attacks was met largely with derision or resentment. I never said anyone should be ashamed, though I believe there is reason for people to feel ashamed. Perhaps I've just said it now. I believe I've acted as a responsible adult, and it's depressing to find that others, who I believe are mature, responsible adults, respond as though that was inappropriate.
I don't know what's going on here. I suspect a lot of it has to do with context and social cues, self-selection in the kinds of personalities that engage in online discussion and debate, and a lot of other things, I have no idea what. I do know that what I witnessed directed at Dave Winer was, in very many cases, inappropriate, or outright wrong. I believe I would never witness that sort of conduct in a "real," physical forum, from the same parties. Something gets lost when we make the transition from the "real" world to the "virtual" one, and we need to find it again.
I wasn't defending the indefensible, and what I was defending was bigger than Dave Winer, who is no less worthy of being defended for all of that. What I was defending was the notion that we are better people than our basest tendencies. I was defending the notion that values and ideals are more important than immediate and temporary concerns about who was injured, who should be punished or who should be blamed. I was defending the notion that those values and ideals only live when we live up to them.
My step-daughter, and I include the "step" part out of some feeble desire for technical accuracy - the only way she could be any more my daughter would be to share half my chromosomes - rescued me in my car difficulty yesterday. After getting a jump start from a neighbor, the planet-crushing, little-old-lady intimidating, atmosphere-fouling, climate-changing, resource-depleting, testosterone-oozing, subcompact-squashing, nuke-gay-baby-whales-for-Jesus supporting SUV died at a small, but very busy intersection. Always fun holding up traffic while you're pushing four thousand pounds of inert vehicle on a warm, sticky Florida morning.
A nice Filipino woman let me use her phone and I called Melissa. She quickly arrived in her trusty Volkswagen Jetta and we repaired to a nearby K-Mart where I could buy a battery to repair my SUV. After remarking about how heavy the battery was, she asked me if I wanted her to carry it for me. I'll leave it to the reader to decide if she was being charitable or a smart-ass, only pointing out the previous assertion that she is my daughter. Naturally, I let her carry it for me. I am a smart-ass.
So we get back to Shiva, the Destroyer of Worlds, and I plunk the new battery in, and it's not the same height, so the hold-down bracket doesn't clamp securely to the top of the battery, but otherwise it's no big deal. Jump in, and she starts right up.
So Melissa mentions she happens to have my birthday present with her, would I like it now? Since my birthday was a couple of weeks ago, I figure, why not? (She gave me a card on my birthday with a picture of what she was getting for me in it.) It weighed almost as much as the battery, so I made her carry it over to the SUV. She gave me The Complete Far Side, for my birthday. And a right-angle drive for my Dremel tool. (That was actually a Christmas present that finally arrived.)
I get out to the car this morning and turn the key and nothing happens. A bit of fiddling around, and it appears as though the battery has died.
So, I've got a few minutes to kill while I wait for help to arrive.
With a car, we have an expectation that it's going to start, as long as we've been properly maintaining it. But many of us know that, from time to time, things happen, like batteries going dead, and it won't start. It's an inconvenience. It doesn't give us any advance notice. It involves time and expense to resolve. But it's not something we feel as though we need to man the barricades over.
In some ways, a human being is like a car. In some other ways, it's not. If Dave Winer woke up dead last weekend and weblogs.com fell silent, while I'm not sure any of the people castigating him now would have any kind words to say about him, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be assailing him the way they are either. The body, I guess, is like a car, and sometimes things break and we know that. But a mind, that's a different story. We expect all minds to think alike. Or, at least, like ours. And when a mind doesn't think like ours, well, that's offensive. That's something to hold someone accountable for.
I guess.
Because we think a mind isn't like a car. A mind is something always under our control, something for which we are always responsible. And here's where it gets a little fuzzy, in some ways we are, and in some way's perhaps we're not so much. Responsible that is. I'd like to say we're responsible for our lives, we're not so responsible for our minds. How much of our minds are we responsible for? What's your IQ? Why isn't it higher? How did you get yours to be so high? How does your mind work? How do you know? Do you know? Why don't you know?
Minds are like cars, in a lot of ways. They have problems. They're not all built to factory specifications. They don't all receive the same maintenance. Some get more attention than others. Some get a lot less.
I'm very near-sighted. Not my fault. My problem, but not my fault. My responsibility to address my problem, but not my fault. And I only know it's my responsibility because I've learned it. Sometimes I do not wear my glasses, and it's okay. It may actually work to my advantage. I don't wear my glasses when doing tae kwon do (or taekwondo, I've seen both spellings), because I can see well enough to do what I have to do most of the time, and my poor vision isn't going to cause me to hurt someone. And wearing my glasses is actually a disadvantage to me, because they require protection, they slide down my nose when I'm perspiring - they're a distraction. But when I drive a car, I always wear my glasses, because my poor vision might get someone hurt. My problem, which is not my fault, could get someone else hurt; and so it's my responsibility to wear my glasses when driving. The authority that will hold me accountable is the state, which has levied upon me a legal requirement to wear my glasses when driving. Possibly, if some day I don't wear my glasses and cause an accident that hurts someone else, the person whose injury I've caused may take me to civil court, and a civil court may hold me accountable.
Now, lots of people who may be "offended" or angry or frightened by the fact that I drove without my glasses might choose to berate me, or call me names, but that's not holding me accountable. That's just people acting out of their emotions, and calling it "accountability" is reasoning backward from their feelings. Do they know that? Why not? Are they not responsible for the way their minds work? Who should hold them "accountable?" Me? You? What is their responsibility? Who told them? How do they know?
Do all minds think alike? Of course not. Even if they did, in order to do so, they would all have to know the same things. Can all people know all the same things? Again, of course not. Dave Winer's mind caused him to make a particular choice. Do we all know what Dave knows about his choice? No. He's tried to tell us some of it, but it's by no means everything. Does Dave's mind work like yours? Like mine? Yet again, of course not.
Some of us have, in our minds, a set of expectations regarding what a "better" choice would be. Implicit in those expectations, is the expectation that Dave Winer has that same knowledge. Does he? If he doesn't, would he be required to agree? If so, why? When you receive a free service from someone, are you therefore entitled to burden that individual with your expectations? Did you afford that person prior notice that you were choosing to burden them with your expectations, and that furthermore, you would hold them "accountable" to your expectations? Could you have made a better choice? Who should hold you accountable for making a better choice? Me? Do you know how your mind works? Really? Why not?
Much of what we're witnessing here is behavior that is based on maintaining group norms. Most of the time, whether we're aware of it or not, we're not individuals, we're members of groups and our actions serve the needs of the group. Sometimes that's the right thing to do. Sometimes being a good person means being a good group member. But other times, being a good person means knowing when not to be a good group member.
There's really so much to learn, and such a short lifetime to learn it in.
The public bashing Dave Winer is taking for his handling of the weblogs.com hosting issue is vastly, yes, vastly, out of proportion to the surprise and inconvenience his action has imposed on others.
This is one of the worst features of weblogs, especially the comment facilities - a kind of emergent, "smart" mob mentality that enables people, even people who were in no way affected or inconvenienced by the move, to publicly dump on someone. It echoes of "the shaming of Marc Canter."
And some people believe they're holding Dave Winer "accountable." This is one of the most disturbing things to me, this distorted notion of accountability that people use to justify their own inhumane behavior. Who has the "authority" to hold Mr. Winer accountable? When should Mr. Winer and all the rest of us know that he has been "held" accountable? Who granted those individuals acting in this capacity their "authority?" Who else is subject to their "authority?" Am I? Are you? What are my duties and responsibilities for which I am to be held accountable? Are they simply the whim of every public-spirited citizen with a computer and an internet connection?
And Doc Searls continues to embrace his own confused notions about what the internet is: "Nobody owns it." In the "world of ends," Dave Winer most assuredly owned his "end." He was under no real obligation to offer even as much as he did. There are a lot of people who are asserting all sorts of obligations, but again, what is their authority? Could he have handled things differently, perhaps better? Maybe so, but I think there's more than a grain of truth to the idea that whatever he did would meet with criticism. Expressing disappointment or some form of unhappiness is appropriate. Making assertions regarding Mr. Winer's health, his technical abilities, or his character is not.
What is happening here is not very pretty, and reflects very poorly on this "community" (another term people toss about with abandon while having little real notion of what it means).
I've just spent the last 11 minutes staring at the screen trying to think of what to write about. That seems to suggest that today might be a good day to not write about anything.
Woke up with a really sore throat. It seems to be abating as I sit here. I suspect some combination of allergies, sinuses, dry air and bad karma. We shall see.
Had my mid-term in tae kwon do on Saturday. Seemed to go pretty well. Broke both boards on the first attempt, and didn't seem to get too winded during the "endurance" portion of the test. Caitie came along and watched, so she would know what to expect for her test and to cheer her dad on. I gave her my camera to take some pictures, because it can become a fairly dull event for those in the audience. Naturally, she took a lot of pictures of me, and now I know why I feel winded a lot of the time. It's amazing how the image one has in one's head, and the image one sees in the mirror each day bears so little resemblance to the image formed by the camera. A little depressing, that.
Finally managed to find the beach from here yesterday. It's a little trickier from this apartment if only because I have to follow a route that exposes me to more high-speed, low-attention drivers. But I took some directions from Melissa and stayed in a series of parking lots to avoid the worst of it. I'm still probably a mile or less from the ocean; but for some reason, until yesterday I hadn't felt the urge to visit. Naturally, it was near high tide when I got there. I made a modest effort to ride on the beach but then abandoned that because it was just too hard in the softer sand. So I road down the street to a breakfast café and had a much too expensive omelet and then road back home.
Apart from housekeeping, a couple of trips to the store, and an interesting video chat with three of my nephews, that was pretty much my weekend. There, now that I've written something, I can put this aside and do something else productive.
The title's basically the punch line to an old Far Side cartoon called, "What dogs hear."
Turns out, they may hear a lot more. The news making the rounds is that dogs understand up to 200 words. Now, I think they're using the word "understand" loosely, as most of the reports I've read shows the dogs seem to understand the names of things more so than, say, verbs or adjectives. But still, it's kind of interesting. I'm not sure it's terribly surprising though.
Dogs are social creatures, they live in a pack structure, and I'm sure they've evolved a highly sophisticated means of telling one dog from another in order to maintain the pack hierarchy. I'm guessing scent plays the major role in that, but it seems reasonable to believe that dogs would have evolved a means of correlating other sensory data with object/individual identification. So a dog would know what Ginger smelled like, looked like and maybe even sounded like.
Dogs have also evolved in a close association with humans, who are verbal communicators. Objects that are of importance or interest to humans are probably of some importance or interest to dogs. So it seems reasonable to conclude that the same memory structures that help a dog keep track of who's who in the pack can help a dog keep track of where Thag Simmons left his club. (Before his tragic death at the tail of a stegosaurus. Again, an obscure Larson reference.) So I'm sure dogs correlate the sight, smell and sound of objects important to humans just as they do the sight, smell and sound of other dogs.
What would be more interesting is to learn how many verbs dogs "understand," and do they have some sense of past, present and future tense. My guess is very little, apart from being able to associate a given verbal cue with a particular behavior, like commands, which dogs follow very well.
I've recently begun to think about actually getting a mobile phone. I'm still not enamored with the idea of being on an electronic tether, and if you look at my caller ID on my hardline you'll note the last incoming call I received was two days ago, and that virtually all of my incoming calls are from my kids. But it's my role as a parent that's prompting reconsideration of these mobile monstrosities.
In any event, mobile phones are finally reaching the point where they're beginning to look interesting to me. It's likely that within the next few months I could have a phone with enough functionality to replace my PDA, although I'm not sure what I'd do about LifeBalance. I'm not terribly enamored with the Treo, but there may be other Palm-based phones out there. Screen sizes are finally beginning to approach usable dimensions, and that's important. I'd prefer one without a camera, as that seems to pose a problem in a lot of the places I have to visit, and I really don't need a camera with me all the time.
I haven't made up my mind yet, I'm just more open to the idea of owning a mobile phone at the moment. I really wouldn't welcome yet another bill either. But we'll see.
On a quick read, I think this is worth pointing to in the current context of divisiveness, fear and anger.
My first reaction is to endorse this, but I want to think about it some more. I do know that I would welcome more politeness online today, whether or not being nice turns out not to be a nice thing to do.
In any case, I think it's an excellent observation in a very brief post that prompts more thinking on my own. And that's always nice.
It's an editorial in the Christian Science Monitor about the divisions in America. It's an encouraging sign to me. Although I'm very skeptical about how human beings behave in groups, I think I would prefer more unity within Americans as a group than the fear and hostility growing out of the current divisiveness.
When you find yourself in a hole, the best thing to do is to quit digging.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about some things my taekwondo instructor was teaching me about aikido, and how I took away an idea that has a broader application in life. What he was trying to teach me was that in a struggle, it is often better to focus your attention on where your center is, rather than on the points of resistance. If you focus on the points of resistance, your opponent can get you off balance and you cannot defend yourself if you are off balance.
As I said, I think this is an important life lesson as well.
I think that, too often, we focus our attention on external matters, points of resistance, issues where there is a difference between the way things are, and the way we'd like them to be. Attention is a finite resource, when our attention is focused on these points of resistance, we cannot pay attention to our center.
There were two parts to this drill. In the first part, I was to try to get my instructor off balance, to make him lift or move one of his feet in response to what I was doing as he held my wrists. While doing so, I was not to lose my balance either, I was not to lift or move one of my feet. In all of these drills, he was able to get me to lift one of my feet, and I wasn't able to get him to move one of his. In the second part of the drill, I was to simply try to keep my balance and not allow him to get me off balance. I lost my balance nearly every time in each drill. I lost my balance more quickly when I was defending, resisting his efforts to get me off balance.
As we worked through the drills, I began to realize that I had more control when I focused my attention on where my center was and I could use my knees, hips, and spine to keep my center more closely in balance than if I had my attention focused on the resistance at my wrists.
So, what I learned was that if I focused my attention on my opponent in this particular struggle, it worked to his advantage. He was able to get me off balance more quickly; in effect, I was assisting him.
I think in life the situation is such that often neither opponent is an aikidoist,
