The Dangling Conversation

Here are a couple of recent items that speak to the nature of the vacuous assertion that "markets are conversations."

Markets: A zero-sum game, which consists of the net transfer of authority (wealth) from one party to another.

Definitely not a conversation.

Morning Moon Cloud

Although not associated with the storm currently bearing down on the gulf coast, there was some interesting cloudage this morning.

Putting your money where your mouth is...

This is a weblog Robert Scoble pointed to today. Since it's ostensibly about communication, something that is far harder than we understand, I'm interested in what this guy has to say. So I've been reading some of the posts today, and I think it's a mixed bag.

But here's a post I wish to highlight in the context of "markets are conversations."

He describes the process a certain salesman has with converting "closed lost" sales into "closed won." I have a fair amount of heartburn with a situation like this, because I think it's fundamentally dishonest on its face. This sales person makes a call on a customer who has made a decision not to deal with the sales person's company. The pretext is that the sales person wishes to understand how the customer arrived at his or her (negative) decision, with the intent that they will be able to use that information to improve their sales force. It seems to me that since about half of such calls are converted to sales, that's a false pretext and one that is used, mainly, to reopen the "conversation."

But, if it's genuine, then the customer should agree to assist the sales person with improving their "customer engagement process," with the condition that such assistance will come at a billable rate of $250.00 per hour, billable at .1 hour increments. We'll see how long the sales person stays interested in "the conversation."

Think about it, the sales person wants something from someone else, essentially "for free," and at the same time is making an effort to sell them something. Sounds like a pretty asymmetric "conversation," if you ask me. If you want my time and what I know, it seems to me you ought to be willing to pay me for it.

Otherwise, never bullshit a bullshitter.

Random Utterance

Markets are not conversations. They are about the exchange of authority, and more flows one way than the other. If you want to think about who's "winning" and who's "losing," in the aggregate, you might look at record and rising levels of consumer debt, and the further concentration of wealth into a smaller and smaller percentage of people who are, in the main, the authorities of corporations.

We should probably stop talking about "conversations," and start thinking about what our relationship is to the market. It's not a mutually beneficial one.

Sore Foot

I've managed give myself a case of plantar fasciitis, which is kind of an odd malady. It most often manifests itself as heel pain in the morning that tends to mostly go away after moving around for a while. That description "heel pain" might be a little misleading. Imagine stepping on a small acorn or pebble with your heel and putting all your weight on it, over and over again. Some mornings it's enough to bring your right to your knees.

I've had it before, about 20 years ago, when I spent most of the summer walking around Newport, Rhode Island wearing Docksider shoes, which have flat soles and little or no arch support. Back then, I bought a pair of Rockport Pro-Walkers and the problem resolved itself.

Well, foolish me, my most recent pair shoes were a pair of Timberlands that I really liked, that had a flat sole and little arch support. I wore them too long, as in the rubber sole was nearly worn through. I noticed the heel pain a few months ago, but it wasn't bad at first and I delayed buying a new pair of shoes. On top of that, I was doing taekwondo five times a week, and that's all in bare feet, with lots of jumping and standing on one foot, which all just add more stress and strain to the sole of my foot.

Well, when it started getting to the point where I had to hop around the first few minutes of my day, I went out and looked for a new pair of Rockports. I'm a lazy shopper, and so I just go to one store, the Navy Exchange. They weren't carrying Rockports anymore, so I ended up buying a pair of New Balance walking shoes, and I kept going to taekwondo. Things seemed to improve at first, but then it seemed to get worse again. So I've been cutting back on the amount of time I spend in the dojong and trying to rest my foot. Last weekend when I washed the car I was wearing flip-flops while on my feet for more than two hours and I paid a price for that, so I didn't go to class at all last week. I'm not sure I'll go this week either.

I think I've managed to delay addressing this problem long enough to make it a pretty significant problem. Rest and some stretching appear to be among the preferred courses of treatment, along with better shoes.

So right now I'm focused on rest (basically staying off my feet) and wearing my shoes whenever I have to be on my feet. (It's Florida, we go barefoot a lot.) I'm really missing taekwondo, it's a significant portion of the social interaction in my life, but if I go to class I know I'll want to get on the mat for "just a little" training. Hopefully, I can get this thing resolved enough to where I can train two or three times a week while it continues to heal. One of the sites I read on the web suggested 6 to 18 months might be necessary to completely resolve the problem. Ugh. I hope that's not the case.

If there's a lesson here, it's pay attention to your feet! Mostly I'm just inconvenienced at the moment; but it's easy to take one's feet for granted and if I'd paid more attention at the early signs of discomfort, I'd probably in much better shape right now. As it is, I'm sharing some of the frustration Pascale's been feeling of late.

Things You Don't See Every Day

So I'm looking through the feeds this morning and I see this little screen cap of an Internal Server Error message, and so I click on it.

Check out that second link in the bookmark bar, right below the URL.

That's pretty cool. Thanks, Jens!

Here Again

I've been writing what is turning out to be a rather long piece that is intended to be a rebuttal to a few ideas shared in many threads that I've been reading of late. It is getting quite tedious because I don't think we're really capable of changing anyone's mind. People change their own minds if they come to recognize that the consequences of their current thoughts and beliefs are disadvantageous to them. Until then, they protect and nurture those beliefs and no amount of argumentation or rational disputation is likely to change them.

Which is why we have to live with inanities like "markets are conversations." Markets are largely zero-sum games. The consumers are actually those with something to sell, and what they consume are portions of our authority. Hey, if all it takes is a little chit-chat to get you to part with your money, they'll happily provide the appearance and a simulacrum of the experience, be it by a cherubic, effervescent, obtuse weblogger, or some other low-cost, high-value head fake to make you believe that you're engaged in some kind of ongoing conversation.

You'd think Doc's laments about paywalls and walled gardens, "money-making camouflage," and the like would begin to offer... I don't know, a clue? Of course, the consumers (that is, those with something to sell) don't like open conflict, it adds too much friction to what must be a very efficient process if they're to remain competitive. But it is a conflict between the consumers and the consumed, and the consumers (those with something to sell) usually win.

The whole "markets are conversations" thing always reminds me of the way families try to protect children by trying to take advantage of their innocence. "Mommy, daddy! Don't fight!"

"We're not fighting, Susie. We're having a conversation."

Yeah, right. And who's best served by that little fiction?

Kind of like Jeff Jarvis' one-sided conversation with Dell. All it took was just a little idle chit-chat to get Dell to refund him his money for his defective laptop. I bet they have those kinds of chats all the time.

Anyway, that post has been retired to the cooler, not because it was too radioactive, but because it was beginning to bore me. I may resurrect it one of these days, we'll see.

Sync Again

I installed Tiger on the iBook not too long ago, and the iBook is the only computer I sync my Clié and Nokia 3660 to. So last weekend I decided to try out iSync under Tiger.

To make a long story short, it worked. But in order to get it to work, first I had to delete both the Clié and the phone. I added the PDA back first, did a sync and that worked fine. Then I added the phone, did a sync without Palm devices, and that worked fine. Then I tried a sync with both devices at the same time, and that worked as well. I sync the phone over bluetooth and I used the cable for the Clié. I don't know if trying to do both over bluetooth would be a problem, but I wanted to keep the paths separate at first, just to see if there would be a problem of some kind related to sync'ing both handhelds.

My impression is the actual sync process is better under Tiger. I didn't notice any duplicated contacts or events in either iCal or Address book, and the conflict notification dialogs seemed to offer more information than before, which made it somewhat easier to decide what information to keep. Under Panther, I would still get a calendar item duplicated from time to time, though cleaning dozens of birthdays that were duplicated way, way back in the calendrical "past" cleared up the vast majority of those problems. Mostly they were holidays that were duplicated, but not so apparently this time.

Just Shoot Me

You know, I'd like to think I'm as optimistic, hopeful, positive, upbeat as the next guy.

Okay, maybe not.

But I just have to believe that some people are living on an entirely different planet than the one I inhabit. Or they just seem to be missing significant pieces of the "big picture." I also happen to believe someone should take a double-barrel 12 gauge shotgun and blow the word "conversation" right out of the English language. It's useless now. Used to be kind of a fun thing. Just a little shared attention, a little chit-chat to pleasantly pass the time. Now it's a hobby horse metaphor. With a broken leg. It needs to be put out of its misery. See para 1, above.

In a country where we largely share the same culture, mostly speak the same language, and otherwise have what one would think are a lot of things going for us with respect to communication, we still have half of all marriages ending in divorce. How do you suppose those conversations turn out? And that's just two people with presumably a lot of things in common. To say nothing of an almost countless number of incredibly important ways in far more difficult circumstances where we utterly fail to communicate each and every day. Yet we still have internet visionaries writing paeans to the global conversation.

Because, you know, the Internet "changes everything."

Group hug.

Just shoot me. (If some internet whacko shoots me because he thought we were having a "conversation," I'm going to be really pissed.)

See para 1, above.

Here's a tip: It's not the technology, stupid! "Gee, if we just have enough gigabits and gigahertz, then, you know, all our problems are solved!" We all follow the Yellow Brick Road to make our appeal to the Great and Powerful Oz, for a heart, a brain and some courage.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road! Follow the Yellow Brick Road! Follow the, follow the, follow the Yellow Brick Road! We're off to see the Wizard!

(Great, I'm going to have that stuck in my head for the rest of the night!)

All our problems lie between our ears and there's no technology that I know of that's going to "fix" that. But hey, don't let me rain on anyone's parade.

See para 1, above.

This has been a public service announcement.

We now return to your regular programming.

Sunday Morning

I washed Shiva this morning. Did the whole thing, minus a wax job. Took me a couple of hours, and it was already hot when I started at 0730. I had planned to do it last night, but I couldn't get the stall so I just figured I'd do it today.

But that meant I couldn't run down to Mayport and take pictures like I'd planned to. After washing the car, I was too tired to worry about it anyway. I took a shower, fired up the iPod and took a nap. Naps rock.

Anyway, after I woke up, I saw the blue trackball from the Kensington TurboBall lying in the sun where the cats had chased it. It looked pretty cool, so I decided to take a picture of it. One thing led to another, and I ended up taking a bunch of pictures. Too many pictures of books, though.

Anyway, if you're interested or otherwise inclined to look, you'll find them here.

Trivial Pursuit

I filled up Shiva, the Destroyer of Worlds (aka, my Montero Sport) yesterday, and at $2.559 a gallon, I felt inspired to calculate my fuel efficiency.

A long, long time ago, about five cars ago anyway, I used to carry a little log book and dutifully recorded every fill-up, along with all the maintenance checks. That habit went the way those kinds of habits go when you have kids, pets, a spouse, a really demanding job and too many things vying for your finite attention. Well, now I have a little less frenetic life, not much, but a little; and my mobile phone has a voice recorder feature. I always have the phone with me, and it only takes a couple of seconds to speak the current odometer reading and the number of gallons in the fill-up, I also note the price though I don't know why I think that's useful.

Anyway, I had nine consecutive fill-ups recorded (I got out of the habit back in March and only started again in June), and so yesterday I extracted that data and ran the numbers. I'm averaging 19.7 miles per gallon, which was a pleasant surprise. The best tank was 21.19 mpg, which included the trip down to the Santa Fe River, the worst was 18.86 mpg, with most of the rest within a few tenths of the average. This is in a 2002 Montero Sport, 2WD, automatic, 3.0 liter V-6, 4,000 pound gross vehicle weight, in the height of summer (which means it's HOT!), and the air conditioning on all the time, including the morning commute. Apart from the Santa Fe River trip, it's all city driving, which means stoplight-to-stoplight, with lots of idling time at lights. It's not as bad as being stuck on an interstate creeping along, but it's not as good as long stretches of cruising at a constant speed either. The Santa Fe River trip was at a higher average speed than I probably would have driven by myself, but I was with a group of people who drive faster than I do. Some of the return leg was slowed significantly by heavy rain. It is on relatively new tires though, and I need to check the inflation pressure, I might be able to squeak another tenth of a mile per gallon out of the thing.

All in all, not bad for two tons of metal and plastic. Yes, I know all my environmentally enlightened friends would condemn me for driving an SUV, but it's not as simple as all that. Assuming I could afford it, which I can't, if I sold or traded Shiva in, someone else would buy it. Probably someone much younger than I am, and who probably drives a lot more than I do. I have a relatively short commute, in miles if not always in minutes, and I'm not the sort of person with whose social activities often have him driving hither, thither and yon. So it seems likely to me that Shiva would be burning more gas in someone else's hands. The only way that would be a net win is if Shiva replaced a less efficient vehicle for the new buyer, which might be likely or might not. Plus, if I were to buy a new, more environmentally friendly vehicle, you'd have to factor in the energy costs of building that vehicle. Again, there's no such thing as free lunch.

I bought Shiva out of what I perceived as economic necessity. I needed a new vehicle to replace a decade-old SUV that had become increasingly unreliable and expensive to maintain. I was unemployed at the time, and I needed something with the cargo capacity of a small SUV, a station wagon or a mini-van. At the time, Mitsubishi offered new cars with no payments and no interest for one year, and I had no job; so that made Mitsubishi my only viable option, and the Montero Sport was the smallest vehicle they offered at the time that met my needs.

Apart from the gross error of not immediately refinancing the vehicle when I landed a job (I waited the full year, which was monumentally stupid - (Seriously, they erected a monument to my stupidity down at the credit union. The worst part is the pigeon poop.)), the Montero has been a pretty good choice. I was guessing my fuel economy would come in around the high 17's, so I was very pleased to see nearly 20 and I'm motivated now to play around a bit and see if I can't get it to 20.

I know, it's kind of a cheese sandwich post, but so what?

Speaking of Signy Mallory

Hadn't read this before, but it's from several years back. An interesting discussion of the difference between heroes and soldiers, and apropos of Adama's and Roslin's roles in Galactica..

Galactica (again)

There's... a lot... that's not good. But it is, by far, the best damn science fiction... screw that... the best damn show on television.

What a cast. Ron Moore is hitting nearly all the right notes. Edward James Olmos is, I don't know the words, but he is a force. I love Mary McDonnell, a force herself. Katee Sackhoff is just awesome.

I don't know where this show is going, but so far it hasn't let me down. This is sf I never thought television could do. Adama's meeting with Dee tonight... the end of that meeting... whoa... Love, betrayal, love... Holy shit.

If there's one thing I would add, I'd have Ron Moore take a meeting with C.J. Cherryh, and I think I'd be in some kind of sf heaven.

I so much want to see Downbelow Station made into a move. Now I know it can be done.

"We hold Pell."

Walken for President

I know I'm late to the party on this one, but I just wanted to add a couple more quotes that a Walken candidacy might use from a movie I like, Last Man Standing:

(Walken is Hickey. John Smith is "the man with no name" character, Bruce Willis.)

Hickey: I heard you got Finn. That was Doyle's best shooter.

John Smith: I thought you were the best.

Hickey: Nah, just the best lookin'.

Hickey: [Final scene, speaking to Smith] I don't want to die in Texas. Chicago, maybe... but not Texas. You can meet me there if you like.

You'd probably have to have seen the movie.

In case I haven't mentioned this already someplace else...

Once again, I'm offering something that I wouldn't describe as a complete, coherent post. It's just some stuff I need to get "out there" so it isn't rattling around in my head so much.

You know, we have this whole consumer thing backwards. The companies and corporations are the consumers; we, on the other hand, are the consumed.

Not in whole, of course, just little bits at a time. Nibble off a bit, wait for more to grow back. Kind of like a hay field perhaps.

Some folks are over-grazed and they wind up in financial troubles.

Most of the transactions in the marketplace are not synergistic, win-win transactions. They are much more commonly zero-sum transactions. Don't believe me? Think about it. How much soda do you consume when water is, for the most part, abundantly available and nearly free? Though I hasten to add, there is a lot of money to be made in selling water too.

What is consumed is our authority. Most of our authority resides in our money. Want somebody to build you a house? Try to order someone to do it and see what happens. You might try to persuade someone, and perhaps if you're indigent or something, you might prevail with some form of moral authority. If you happen to own a construction company, you could certainly order your employees to build a house, but if you don't give them money in the form of wages, chances are they won't build many more for you. But if you don't own your own company, and can't rely on some form of moral authority, you're going to have to come up with some cash - liquid authority.

We surrender our authority over our time to our employer in return for wages, thus converting our authority into its most liquid form.

Of course, what authority we have that doesn't reside in our money resides in our attention, and there is no dearth of competition for that. I feel as though I need to repeat that all "Top x" lists are more about commanding attention for the list makers than anything else. Anyone getting that message? Bueller? Anyone? (For the record: Bueller knew it all along. Bueller was not easy prey.)

Discipline is the exercise of authority. Self-discipline is the exercise of one's authority over oneself. The exercise of authority requires attention. Pay attention to what you pay attention to.

Markets are not conversations. Markets are jungles, or forests, savannas, or oceans, where you and I are the prey species. Lately, "markets are conversations," makes me think of this guy.

What kind of conversation do you suppose we might have with a sociopath?

Just asking.

The whole Cluetrain Manifesto was really a windfall for corporations. Rather than empowering individuals to learn how to survive in a predatory environment, it flatters them and lulls them into a false sense of power and security. It also gave corporations and the marketers responsible for prey management a new scheme for protective coloration.

In the military, we tend to modify the appearance of our personnel and equipment according to the environment we're operating in. In the "detect-to-engage sequence" (not to be confused with the "observe-orient-decide-act" process, which is also important, though at a different level or scale), "detection" is the critical event. The earlier the detection, the more time you have to bring defenses to bear. So we try to make ourselves as difficult to detect as possible. Stealth technology is a good example, but so are the changing camouflage schemes of uniforms from jungle to desert to urban. The "theses" of the Cluetrain Manifesto are just new colors marketers can use to obscure their intent, in order to better close on their prey and evade their defenses and close the sale. I would also note that "attention" is the critical component of "detection."

You figure it out.

Not all corporations have adopted the camouflage of "conversation," but that's okay, the prey species has been conditioned to encourage its adoption. That's genius, if you ask me. Not good news, but genius nevertheless.

I don't think the guys who wrote the Cluetrain Manifesto were thinking of making life easier for corporations to harvest authority from "customers." I really think they had good intentions. But the road to hell is, you know, paved with theses. Or something that rhymes with that.

Anyway, I'm sure I haven't "made or changed" anyone's "mind." But maybe I've irritated a few people, which may be the next best thing. The truth doesn't always come in nice, romantic, easily digestible slogans like "markets are conversations." Sometimes it hits you upside the head like a 2x4. Other times, as the saying goes, the bear eats you.

And mobs are "smart"...

You know, spending the extra $949.00 would probably be worth it, just for the warranty, current technology, and personal safety.

But that's just me.

Markets are conversations...

In addition to Dell Hell, and Dan Gillmor's Powerbook's USB 2.0 ports that work pretty much as advertised but don't do what he wants them to do, and Seth Godin's observations regarding manifestations of "cluelessness," we can add to the growing mountain of evidence in support of the (vacuous) assertion that "markets are conversations," this sterling example of our enlightened fellow human beings engaging in the discourse of the marketplace.

Roll on, mighty Cluetrain™! Roll on!

Walmart update: "I think I can. I think I can. I think I can..."

Looking out back...

There was this great shot of the sun behind a cloud but it was happening as I was leaving the grocery store. By the time I got home, I was only able to get these. Plus, my camera lens fogged up. Hazards of living in Florida I guess.

Still, I think they're pretty cool.

Usual disclaimer: I'm not a photographer. I take pictures.

Update: It's apparent I'm not an html-slinger either. I omitted a closing quotation mark in the img refs which had me chasing my tail about possible sync problems with .Mac.

Sigh.

Learning how to actually use a camera is on my "to-do" list. One of these days.

The Feedster 500

Feedster lifts a page from Technorati's play-book. Now they only need to come up with some beloved solons of the internet to act as their apologists, partner up with another attention-starved startup and offer some type of "award" to "honor" members of the audience they wish to flatter, and they'll have it down pat.

That said, I do like Feedster ever so much more than Technorati, if for no other reason than they don't claim authority while simultaneously disclaiming responsibility.

I hate it when that happens...

C2 makes a wheels-up landing at Norfolk Naval Air Station.

That's a pretty exciting ride, even when the landing gear are in their more traditional position. Passengers are seated facing aft in the aircraft. Landing on the carrier is quite a ride. Getting catapulted off is probably more exciting, but it's over quickly. Like the song says, "The waiting is the hardest part..." Landing is a bit more like a roller-coaster. Always interesting when your seat-mate vomits.

Not my favorite way to fly, but it was an interesting experience the few times I had to do it.

Coolness

Quick Change is being released in DVD. Excellent.

Respect

I have a hard time respecting anyone who believes that science or technology is neutral. Unfortunately, even when people consciously know that they are not, they give credence to the biased outputs without questioning the underlying assumptions. This is why i'm an academic - nothing gives me greater joy than to think about what biases go into the creation of a particular system. danah boyd, 7 August 2005

And therein lies the rub: a year ago, Technorati could do no evil. Now, Technorati can do no good. Neither is the absolute truth, because we’re applying terms such as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ to what is nothing more than technology, and technology just is. Shelley Powers, 7 August 2005

In a comment to danah boyd's post above, Shelley Powers asks if it was prompted by Shelley's post, also above. danah replies, in part: That said, i am bothered by your post. Technology reflects the biases of all relevant participants (creators, users, etc). I don't believe in framing technology good/evil moral structures because there's no way to discuss those concepts without dealing in doctrine. That said, the implication you're making by your title implies that technology is neutral (although the latter half of your post goes against that). Thus, i'm not sure how i feel about your post because it seems self-contradictory.

Well, I'm not an academic, and I'm not sure what "doctrine" refers to, but I think danah boyd is a little confused.

Shelley hasn't made a claim that technology is unbiased. Shelley is claiming that technology is neither good nor evil. Further, danah boyd seems to be implying that there is some connection between bias and good or evil.

danah boyd is correct if she's stating that science and technology often yield outcomes that reflect the biases of the people behind the science or technology; but science and technology themselves are merely artifacts and therefore incapable of some form of intrinsic bias. A person, or a rational actor is required to exhibit bias. Said bias may be exhibited in the choices the person makes in developing or using a technology or an algorithm. But technology or algorithms are inanimate, insensate, inert artifacts, incapable of making choices, biased or otherwise.

Likewise, good or evil, at least when they are used as adjectives to describe something, are only meaningful when they are used to describe a person or some entity capable of exhibiting moral agency. They may also be meaningful when applied to outcomes, though this may be subject to some dispute. In no case can an artifact be said to be, intrinsically, good or evil, which is Shelley's point, at least in so far as she makes the distinction between Technorati, the corporation and the rational actors capable of moral agency that make up that corporation, and the technology upon which they have based the service it offers.

(Parenthetically, I'm unsympathetic to the notion that bias is somehow connected to evil, which is something that I infer from danah's post and comment to Shelley. I suspect it's almost impossible for anyone to be unbiased. Indeed, I think we mostly prefer that people manifest an unequivocal bias for good over evil. That is, to the extent we are able to discern the difference.)

I see no contradiction in Shelley's post. Shelley's point is that one can't make claims about a company or a service being either "good" or "evil," if one is considering the technology that forms the basis for the product being offered. To the extent that the outcome of particular product or service might be undesirable or unwelcome or deficient in some manner, perhaps that might be said to be "evil," but I don't see Shelley making that claim either. Rather, I see Shelley making the more modest claim that danah would seem to support, that the biased outcomes of morally neutral technology are the products of human biases.

To reiterate my own idea along these lines: Technology changes how we do things, it doesn't change what we do. People become enamored with the novelty of a new how and mistake it for a new what, which begets myths of "changing the world."

Spotlight Documentation

Not sure if this was up before, but I just received it in my ADC RSS feed: Spotlight Reference documentation. Nice section on the operators for constructing searches.

Tags and Hierarchies

"We should consider why our tech culture rewards -- and perhaps insists on -- exactly this rhetorical approach. If you're careful not to argue beyond the evidence and if you're thorough with your research, it seems, you're likely to be stuck as a respected but obscure academic researcher. Add a little more bombast and subtract a lot of restraint, and you can be a star." Mark Bernstein.

If I may be permitted a bit of semi-Reynoldsian Insta-commentary : No shit.

Roadside Assistance

Last night the phone rings, which is kind of unusual; and it's not a wrong number, which is even more unusual. It's my son and he is very angry with his truck because every time he turns on the headlights, it stalls and now he can't get it started and he's in the middle of the road.

It's go time.

I've had this call before. Last time, he was out of gas on the other side of town. He did have the good luck to run out of gas next to a gas station though. Of course, what he was really out of was money. Well, maybe sense was a little in short supply as well.

Fortunately, he's not far from here, having just left his job at a local restaurant. So I grab my trusty box of tools (Well, I don't know if it's really "trusty," but it sounded good. At least they're not "rusty!") and head out to Shiva, The Destroyer of Worlds, aka: My SUV.

Before I got to him, someone had come along and pushed him off the road into a parking lot. That's always nice. He'd managed to get it to start again, and it would start reliably, but every time he turned on the headlights, it would die. I try switching on the lights while rev'ing the engine. As soon as you take your foot off the gas, it dies.

We have this discussion about cars where I do my best to not say, "I told you so." But I do manage to slip in, "This is why I wanted you to buy a small, cheap, reliable Japanese car." We talk about other things. It's hard for me to hear with the cars going by, but he's in a better mood.

He's got this fancy radio that he installed in the dash with some big amplifier. I can't figure out how to turn the damn thing off. Isn't that funny? There's not an off switch to be found on the thing. So I pull the fuze to it. Still no go.

Gauge says we've got the right voltage and watching the gauge while turning on the lights doesn't cause a major voltage drop. V=IR, and we're not blowing fuzes; so maybe we ought to look into the R part of the equation. I check the battery connections. One seems loose. I tighten it. No go. I pull one lead and note significant corrosion on the connector. I'm feeling lucky.

I scrape the crud from the inside of the connector and the battery post and crank the sucker down pretty hard when I put it back on. Make mental note to buy small wire brush to put in trusty box o' tools.

Start truck, turn on lights. Good to go.

Follow son home.

Return to base. Put tools away.

Hang up cape in closet.

Stupid User Tricks

I admit I'm not the most clever Mac user. Sometimes I do things the hard way, just because I don't think too much about how I'm doing them. But I made a change today that is kind of useful to me.

I was reading some tips on customizing Finder windows at the .Mac site (the one for members) from Tonya Engst. She described how she customized the sidebar in Finder to make it easier managing various projects she was working on. I thought that was a pretty neat idea, but I didn't think I really have many "projects" I'm working on to use that little tip.

When I decided to include the screen shot of the Exposé and Dashboard system preference, it occurred to me how I might use the sidebar to make it easier including images in whatever it is I do here.

Tinderbox is pretty cool, you can just copy and paste an image right into a note; and for a long time, that's how I did it. This has two downsides, at least from the standpoint maintaining a weblog. First, and I haven't checked to see if this has changed in version 2.5 or not, but images pasted into a note wouldn't export properly in my RSS feed. Chances are, it's the way I set up the RSS export templates, but I'm not motivated enough to try and figure it out. Second, pasting images into the Tinderbox document itself made the documents much larger and longer to export and synchronize.

So when iDisk began keeping a local archive, I just created a Pictures folder (bad choice in naming, I know), inside the Sites folder, and then just dropped images into it. I created a little Spell Catcher shortcut that generates the img src html code up to the file name, and I just type in the file name. This way, Tinderbox remains very snappy, uploads (synchronizing the local and remote disk images) seem to happen quicker and more reliably, and the images will appear in my RSS feed because I do bad things like include markup in my feed.

The downside to this was that including pictures became somewhat more laborious. I use Snapz Pro to take my screenshots because it offers some features that OS X's built-in screen grabbing doesn't offer. Chiefly, I can scale images and add some kind of border effect. But since I'm not copying the images and pasting them into the Tinderbox note anymore, I have to save them somewhere first. Snapz Pro only offers the Desktop and the Pictures folder in the the user's Home folder. So I would save them to the desktop, then drag them up into the iDisk/Sites/Pictures folder. If that wasn't showing, first I'd have to navigate to it. Placing that folder in the sidebar eliminated that step. Yea me! Yea Tonya Engst!

Now I'm going to describe how I just learned something obvious in the course of writing this post. I do feel rather stupid, just figuring this out. Snapz Pro offers a Send to: drop-down list that includes the Desktop, the Pictures folder from the Home folder, the clipboard, the printer or Mail. But there is also a long list of folders in that drop-down list. I'd been using copy and paste for so long, I didn't know where that list had come from. I didn't think very much about it, other than to look for some facility to add a folder to that list, which I couldn't find. I didn't know where they came from, I just knew I didn't need any of them.

It just occurred to me as I was reviewing these features for this post, that each of those folders was a folder that appeared inside my Pictures folder! So, the point of this post was how I made my life a little easier by adding my iDisk/Sites/Pictures folder to my sidebar; but that's all quite beside the point now. I just went and created an alias to my iDisk/Sites/Pictures folder and placed it inside my Pictures folder (See what I mean about a poor choice in folder names? Fortunately, I left it named as Pictures Alias.) Now I can save from Snapz Pro directly into the folder that serves the pictures.

Doh!

Stupid Mouse Tricks

I have a Logitech MX510 mouse attached to my Mac because my Kensington trackball is still waiting for me to get a new LED to illuminate it. The MX 510 has eight buttons, which is three more than the trackball had, so if you're into buttons, the Logitech wins hands down, so to speak.

One day, I was just clicking buttons to see if they did anything and, if so, what. One of the arrow buttons on the left side seemed to activate one of the Exposé options. Investigating further, I noticed that the Exposé and Dashboard System Preference recognizes all eight buttons on the mouse. And also interestingly, if you hold down a modifier key while assigning an action to a mouse button, it will append the modifier key to it as well.

One feature I can't find a System Preference to explain is that button 8 will invoke the Command-Tab application switching feature. Once that's activated, you can use the scroll wheel to highlight a particular app. That's not especially useful, as you can't then just click button 1 and switch to that app. You can hold down button 8, and it will rapidly cycle through all the apps and when you release it you'll switch to that app, but it's so fast that it's not really usable, at least for me and my cat-like reflexes.

I never installed Logitech's driver, and I don't have any third-party generic USB drivers installed, so this is supported in Tiger, 10.4.2.

Right now, I can invoke all the various flavors of Exposé, and Dashboard from the mouse, which has proven to be pretty useful. At least to me, I'm not one of those guys who frets lest his fingers ever leave the keyboard. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just not something I obsess over.

I'm not sure I've seen this documented anywhere else, but then I probably haven't been paying attention. In case you haven't either, I figured I'd mention it here.

Conservation of Misery

Jason Kottke pointed to a Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs and Steel) opinion piece from the May, 1987 issue of Discover Magazine. The title of the essay is The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. The mistake the article refers to is the adoption and development of agriculture. It's a fascinating article, and an idea I hadn't heard about before; but I must say, having read it, it makes enormous sense to me.

Rather than recapitulate the entire essay, I'll just assume you've read it. Suffice to say, there is evidence to support the notion that human beings, as individuals, are not better off as a result of the adoption of agriculture.

What makes this interesting is that from Diamond's reasonable, I think, assessment of what paleopathology seems to tell us, agriculture was a mistake, in terms of the effects it has had on the lives of individual human beings. But I don't think that from the perspective of the human race, it can be considered a mistake.

I believe we mistakenly regard our species from the point of view of individual creatures who happen to share a common DNA. I think there is very good reason to believe that our species is not a race of individuals, but a race of competing groups. All of our behaviors are tailored to supporting existence as members of groups. From the standpoint of the survival and growth of groups, agriculture has been a tremendous success.

I believe groups behave as discrete, living organisms. I think there's a disconnect between what we seem to believe about ourselves, as autonomous, rational individuals, and the way we behave as members of a particular group. I think a given individual can be a member of any number of groups at a given time, but most of our behaviors are governed, to a large extent, and unconsciously, by the context of our roles within our groups.

What's interesting now is that we're developing the scientific tools and amassing the data to begin to discern this in a fairly compelling way. How this knowledge will feed back into the complex, "emergent" to use a trendy buzzword of the "blogosphere," behavior of groups will be most intriguing.

One of the ideas I've been trying, with little success, to convey in Groundhog Day is that our behaviors as members of our respective groups are often incompatible with, or at the expense of, our own best interests as individuals. In the most obvious cases, we've managed to incorporate that into our values and morality systems in things like There is no "I" in "team." The very worst examples of this being suicide bombers.

What is much more subtle are things like the development of agriculture, which has been incorporated as an almost unquestioned example of tremendous "progress" into our collective belief system. And it has been, from the standpoint of the survival and success of groups; but perhaps not nearly so for individuals. Also subtle are things like the American decision to go to war in Iraq. Or the way corporations adopt and manipulate ideas about individuality to keep individuals behaving in ways that are to the advantage of groups like corporations and industries; and how people who compete for rank within the hierarchies of these groups and organizations promote ideas like "markets are conversations," which more empower the groups of businesses to influence the behavior of individuals than they do to empower individuals to influence the behavior of businesses.

To empower individuals, individuals will have to begin to understand the nature of their own behaviors, especially in the unfamiliar, and likely very uncomfortable context as members of groups, each of which are themselves a kind of living organism. The "group" is only peripherally aware of the individual. Just as we are only peripherally aware of the cells of our bodies. The group does not hold the interests of the individual as its own greatest interest. Its own success is its central and overriding interest.

Anyway, I don't expect very many of you will find this terribly compelling or even mildly interesting. But a couple of guys made a pretty good movie about it not too long ago.

Stimulus...response

I'm pretty much sick of writing about the "A-List" or any of the variations thereon. In the latest round of criticism and discussion of the concept, one significant point I see overlooked is the utility of lists to the list creators.

I have little regard for Technorati, the authority that disclaims all responsibility. I think its success, to whatever extent it may be said to be "successful," is due far more to clever "social engineering," the manipulation and exploitation of human nature, than it is to any significant technical merit greater than its competitors.

Creating a list is a way of drawing attention to oneself, and the act of creating establishes a presumption of authority on the part of the creator. It's a way of bootstrapping oneself into the competition for rank in the hierarchy.

I'm not opposed to hierarchies. That would be like opposing gravity. But there are various ways of ordering hierarchy, and one of our collective illusions is that we order ours, (whoever "we" happen to be) based on merit. Technorati chose a very easily measured trait (number of inbound links) to order its ranking, but its genius was in casting that trait in a way to flatter the members of its list by calling it "authority." It has subsequently, after profiting from it, changed that characterization to the slightly less flattering characterization, "popular."

It should be easy to see how clever this was. We'd all like to believe we're quite sophisticated and cannot moved by shallow considerations of mere "popularity." But "authority," why, that's something we all respect! Even if it denies all responsibility.

As I've written before, Technorati profited from the attention-directing capacity of the most "popular" webloggers, pointing to Technorati. The most pathetic example being Jeff Jarvis' unseemly appeals to his place on the list. Technorati has gone on to leverage that attention-advantage by introducing its concepts of "tags," which employs the efforts of webloggers to make its own product more competitive; and everyone seems quite happy to do it, with some exceptions.

But Technorati hasn't stopped exploiting human nature, as they demonstrated with the AO 100 list. Again, a presumption of authority goes unquestioned as they choose to "honor" some high attention-earners in order to profit from their attention-directing authority.

To some extent, I contribute to this problem by drawing negative attention to Technorati. For my criticism to have some effect, I would have to be perceived as at least authoritative as Technorati. I would have to be near their rank in the hierarchy (not explicitly the Top 100). So the critical or negative nature of my attention-directing is largely discounted, and the effect is really just to call more attention to Technorati, which it desires and which I think is undesirable.

Mostly, I think it's unfortunate that we all fall prey to these schemes that flatter and exploit the weaknesses of the human ego. But, I guess that's life in the food chain.

Fixated

My current musical fixation is Mary Fahl's Going Home.

This and That

Much of my first hour in the morning consists of letting the cats out and letting the cats back in. They don't even have anyplace to go, I only let them onto the deck, which is screened-in. They've learned to scratch at the door when then want out, and to pick at the weather stripping (now pretty much destroyed), when they want in. It's hard to ignore. Once the sun is up, Karma has pretty much decided to stay outside, while Squeaky will have settled on the recliner. Then I can usually sit for 20 minutes without any interruptions, though Squeaky will often come over and put her front paws over my crossed legs and sit with me for a while.

I watched Joe Somebody last night, and it was a pretty decent little flick. I liked Jim Belushi as the ex-film star, martial arts instructor. Kind of how I imagine myself maybe one day (Hey, it's my imagination, okay?), minus the movie posters. Favorite line: "Is there a beer in there?" Nice ending.

My oldest daughter's new iMac should be arriving this week. That'll be fun to help them set up. In other family-Mac news, I bought a DVD-burner for my youngest daughter's computer. It was a pull from another machine, $45.00, so that wasn't bad. Caitie's bought a few songs on iTunes and she wants to burn them to a CD, but the G4 at her mom's house doesn't have a burner, so I'll put this one in for her when I get a few minutes this week.

Much later: I didn't post this morning, so I'm wrapping it up now. I installed the DVD-burner in Caitie's G4, along with an 80GB HD I had laying around, and the Radeon 9000 that came out of my machine when I got the 9800. The MDD towers are much easier to work on than the Gigabit Ethernet models. I always manage to cut my hand on the older G4. Make no mistake, the old G4 is still vastly easier to work on than any Wintel box I've had to muck about in, but the MDD is is about the easiest machine I've ever worked on.

Caitie's mom had bought a 19" LCD monitor for the computer, and I noticed it hadn't been connected yet. Happily, it had a DVI interface and the Radeon 9000 supports DVI and ADC. The Rage 128 I replaced with the Radeon had a VGA port and the proprietary ADC port, so it was a cool thing to have installed the Radeon. Anyway, I hooked that up as well. I didn't recognize the brand, and I don't recall it at the moment, but it presented an excellent picture. One hot blue pixel though. Still, not bad.

After getting everything back together, I ran Carbon Copy Cloner to make the 80 gig drive the boot drive. That took a lot longer than I expected. It's a 7200 rpm drive, versus the 5400 rpm drive that came with the box. Should be a little snappier now. It's a 400MHz G4, so every little bit helps. I'd put a processor upgrade in it, but it's not my machine and I don't have that kind of money burning a hole in my pocket.

I burned a CD while CCC was running, just make sure that worked. Worked like a champ. I left Cait a stack of CD-R's I had laying around.

Anyway, that's probably more than enough of all that.

Without a Paddle

Actually, we did have a paddle, two of them in fact.

Yesterday Caitie and I joined some friends from taekwondo for a canoe trip down the Santa Fe river. It was about seven miles, with the current; or about two and a half hours on the river. (In that satellite photo, we started right near that US 41/441 arrow, ending at Rum Island.) There were seventeen of us, eight adults and nine kids in eight canoes.

I brought along my camera, though I realized that a canoe was probably not the best place to have a digital camera. It survived. Though I've said it many times before, I'm not a photographer, I take pictures, that is even more so from a canoe. The sun was so bright, and I was wearing my sunglasses (which don't have bifocal lenses), so I almost never could see what I was shooting in the camera's LCD. Plus, I had to shoot with one hand while the canoe rocked. They aren't among my best photos. I'll post one or two later today.

We had a lot of fun though. We took a very brief side trip up Lily Spring where Naked Ed lives and saw Naked Ed himself. He was behind a modesty fence of some kind, though some of our party mentioned that they had observed that Ed was indeed naked. Some folks splashed around in the spring for a few minutes before we paddled on.

We had only one mishap, with one of our party getting hung up in the crotch of a fallen tree, capsizing the canoe in their effort to get it free. Caitie and I got hung up on some rocks as we were trying to maneuver to assist with recovering their paddles and I was wondering if my insurance rider would cover loss of my camera in a canoe mishap. I was able to push down against the rocks with my paddle, putting some portion of my weight onto the paddle and thereby effectively reducing the weight borne by the canoe, which allowed the buoyant force and current to carry us over the obstruction far enough to get us clear. But we spent a few minutes wondering how we were going to get free without getting wet.

The trip ended at Rum Island and we had some time there for the kids to play on a rope swing, jumping into the river. Vans from the canoe outfitter picked us up and took us back to our vehicles, and we headed back to Jacksonville and enjoyed a cookout at the home of one of our party.

It was a pretty excellent little trip, even if I am a little sore in the shoulders this morning.