Louis CK makes me thinky
Louis CK on how we are surrounded by awesome and don’t even notice (warning: NSFW language, unless you work someplace very relaxed and hep):
So, so true. And I wish I could say that I am one of those people that, of course, ya know, it ain’t about me.
BUT IT IS.
Damn it.
Right here is the problem with my country. We have everything, frickin’ everyhing, and it’s not good enough. We live in an age in which we live longer, and healthier, lives than ever, and we freak out and worry and complain about how unhealthy and horrible the modern world is. We have marvelous toys, inventions of passionate and talented humans, and we complain that they don’t shave off a few more nanoseconds of work. We have marvelous toys and games, and complain bitterly because sometimes they break down. It’s like we’re petulant children, unable to enjoy what we have, always wanting the next thing, and unable to accept when things don’t go exactly our way.
And I’m just as guilty as everyone. So a late New Years resolution: I’m going to try to enjoy the wonders of the world, and complain about the mostly trivial annoyances less often (Read: I’m going to try as hard as I can to do this, and probably fail more than a little). I’m going to try to appreciate the marvels we are surrounded with, and the people who make them possible. Gratitude is good. Not the mushy, pointless kind of religion, where all the gratitude is placed on the nonexistent, and the actual benefactors ignored (how many graces before meals ever say, “hey, thanks, farmers!”?). I mean the concrete, wow, a whole bunch of talented people made my computer possible, and all the cool things it does, and maybe I can remember to acknowledge how cool that is before I start bitching about how, say, Chrome and Flash have started behaving funky on a few websites. Because really, the benefits I get from these things far outweighs the few annoyances that arrive from the natural tendency of the world to fail to be perfect.
Or, to put it another way, I know damn well that I am not perfect, nor do I particularly want to be, and in fact would argue that “perfect” is an incoherent concept born of simplistic ideologies. So I’m not really entitled to other people’s perfection, right? Maybe I can just be thankful for all the good things that come into this world because there are so many crazy talented, hardworking folk out there.
Today in Technology Nostalgia
Back when I first went to college, way back in the day when CDs were still pretty trippy, cutting edge stuff, I had me a Word Processor. I don’t mean a program — I mean what was essentially a typewriter with pretensions.
It was a Brother, not a Magnavox, but did look quite a bit like this one:
It weighed something like 5000lbs, took floppies that could hold maybe 400k of data, and had a screen that let you see a breathtaking 5 or 6 lines at a time. The processor speed left a lot to be desired, and something as simple as hitting backspace was a “get a cup of coffee and wait” affair. Other than that, it was basically an electronic typewriter, and you had to feed one page at a time to print out, just like a regular typewriter.
Not only was it handy for writing papers, but in the event that you were assaulted, you and three or four of your buddies could swing it at the attacker’s head and do some serious damage. Try doin’ that with your fancy schmancy Pages or Word or Google Docs.
Which leaves me wondering, mostly, if there has been a decrease in the number of back problems and hernias in the last two decades, at least among office workers and students.
This not serious post is brought to you by the plague, which has left Gregory somewhat like this:
The early web
Ain’t got much blogging in me today, but here’s a fun read for you:
Before Netscape: the forgotten Web browsers
I can’t say I go quite back that far, but it did get me reminiscing about the early days. I first did email with elm and pine on a UNIX system, explored the internet with Gopher, and was amazed, 93-94ish, when I first saw a web browser (on a computer of a friend’s, connecting up over slow dial-up with a computer long distance). When I first got internet service — from a mom and pop ISP! — the web browser was Netscape 0.8. I also used Mosaic 2 a bit. Hell, I remember when the first version of RealAudio came out, and it was like, wow, SOUND ON THE INTERNET! I used to listen to a Blues program that some station put up in RealAudio, at a level of sound quality akin to a telephone conversation.
Netscape, later the poster child of “Gosh we was done beat up by Ebil, ebil Microsoft” and the Symbol of All That Is Good and True, was the Big Bad That Would Destroy All Good Things. There was a web page dedicated to campaigning against the symbol of its evilness — the proprietary “blink” tag that became the stuff of infamy (the page in question had all text in a blink tag, so it would be a hideous nightmare in Netscape only). Netscape was accused of the Worst of All Evils, Intent To Crassly Commericalize the Web, a complaint leveled at Amazon, too, when it first popped up.
Ah, the good ol’ days. I can still hear the modem connection sound, off in the distance…
I’m a bit of a Macboy, so…
…yeah, kind of sad about Steve Jobs. Love him or hate him — and really, if you’re a thinking person, it’s probably both — he had a huge influence on how technology played out over the last generation, and thus has impacted many lives. What I am most grateful for is this, pointed out by Zach Weiner:
Just want to say about Steve Jobs – the great thing he did that a lot of people don't get was to introduce aesthetics back into engineering.—
Zach Weiner (@ZachWeiner) October 06, 2011
[I don't get ugly engineering. The underlying science, the Chemistry and Math and Physics of the things, it's all so beautiful. How could you not want to make the final product sing that beauty?]
Aesthetics, I’ve come to think, is an important part of the Good Life. I don’t just mean in the “have a nice happy life” sense of “The Good Life.” I mean “The Good Life” in the philosophical sense. Beauty is important, and should be part of everything in our lives. No tool is too mundane for it. Beauty is not only for the big things — in fact, the path lies in instilling and seeing beauty in all things. It may seem silly and a waste of time to make a utilitarian object like a computer beautiful — but then, it’s those silly and waste of time things that make us most human.
So thanks, Steve, for that contribution to the world. Not a bad one, really. Not a bad influence for one life to have on many others.
Sometimes being an idiot works out rather nicely
You don’t need details. Details on how Gregory hosed his Macbook so badly that even the Lion recovery partition was gone. Suffice to say that last night, I spent many hours reinstalling OS X from the Snow Leopard disc that came with my Mac, then getting that updated, then going to the app store and redownloading Lion, and then slowly getting everything back on my computer.
And gaining, yay for clean installs, something like 60 gigs in the process.
The best part, though, is that this whole thing had me thinking a lot about how I use my computer. What’s needed and what’s not. I find myself wondering things like: should i just backup my music somewhere and ditch it on the computer? I can access it all on Google Music, and frankly I mostly do MOG these days, so why do I have all this crap sitting on gigs of space on my computer?
Applications got a cruel going over. Right now the installs are so minimal it’s funny. Right down to the fact that I’m keeping the Microsoft Office installer, but I am in no rush to reinstall that crap.
So being an idiot has its advantages. Forced spring-cleaning! We’ll overlook the fact that I went to work today on about 3 hours of sleep, and right now am so exhausted that I’m approaching the kind of delirium where you think Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was a good movie.
There might just be a connection
People Who Get Malware Also Get Mugged More Than Usual
The fact that I am a total jerk can be summed up with this fact: I chortled when I read that headline. Confession time: when it comes to computer security, I am an elitist of the first order. Not in a “some people are naturally better” sense, but in the “for damn sure some folks are way smarter about security than other people are.” I am not the person to turn to for sympathy when you get a computer virus, because deep down, I pretty much think you had it coming.
Because really, it ain’t a perfect truth, but is pretty damn true: you can avoid almost all computer security trouble simply by not being an idiot. We’re not talking really advanced stuff here. We’re not talking arcane knowledge, or difficult and time consuming tasks. We’re mostly talking about things like not using your cat’s name for your password, and reading your email with at least 2 brain cells engaged. For the most part, the fancy computer knowledge goes little further than realizing that “.exe” is not the file extension you should see when you’re about to download a nude picture of Emma Watson from that email your buddy sent you.
I’m also sick of the victimization story that gets passed around in our culture. Evil people suck, and should be brought to justice, sure thing, but at the end of the day it isn’t a bad idea to ask yourself “what simple things can I do to really fuck up the day of those evil bastards?” The next time you get a computer virus that hoses your computer and exposes your info, you might, instead of complaining about the evil jerks (they’re always there, don’t worry, you can complain later) ponder how you failed. It’ll be far more productive, I assure you, though perhaps less emotionally satisfying.
Evil jerks abound: when you keep being victimized by them (I once had a friend get a series of serious computer viruses over a couple of month period!) you might just wonder what you’re doing that makes their job so much easier.
Up to my Math in Ass, so…
It has been a day of being Highly Studious, and indeed Studly in a Studently Way, as I did Mathy things and figured out many things and generally found, much to my still surprise, that my brain can function in Mathy ways, which are a bit like witchy ways only with less herbs.
(Allow me a HUZZAH, by the way, because I got almost the entire homework assignment for next week done today. HUZZAH!)
So I really don’t have anything to share, other than suggestions for Christmas. Yes, it is approaching, my friends, and you’ll be wondering what to get your loved ones. Well, let me tell you, this is cutting edge stuff right here. Computing, my friends! It’s the wave of the future! So listen to William Shatner and get a cutting edge com-pu-ter for your family!
(Ah, ’80s technology. Three words to sum up ’80s home computers: Big. Ass. Keyboards.)
Why I hate Facebook
I realized what it is that makes me hate Facebook.
The realization came as another round of statuses filled my News Feed. The copter getting downed in Afghanistan started it, as various people had to put out their messages about our soldiers defending our freedoms and yada yada and prayer this and prayer that. It’s always the same words, with just minor variations. The Troops are our Best, defending our freedoms, the beauty and honor of their sacrifice.
And every time I cringe. I cringe because it is so wrong in so many ways, completely at odds with the facts on the ground. The fact that most war is about protecting the interests of the rich and the powerful, and that is what most soldiers die for, in the end, whatever they may think. But mostly it makes me cringe because it is so…unreflective. So the antithesis of the examined life. Rote ejaculations of this sentiment or that sentiment, well, a robot can be programmed for that. I guess I’m a bit of a democratic elitist — I think we all should aim for something higher than that. Public declarations on places like Facebook do little more than maintain the status quo. They, and the comments below them, inevitably turn into the digital age reinforcement of Group Identity and opinion. Be seen saying the right things, or be ostracized. I’ve bitched before about the often explicit use of guilt and shame — I saw another example of it in my feed yesterday, one that basically amounted to “say this, or it says something bad about you.” They often take the form of “copy this into your status for an hour,” the ultimate in “don’t think, just do what everyone else tells you to do.”
More and more, I realize that social networks that exist to just, well, socialize? Not my thing. They all seem to end up pretty much like that, bullying pulpits (see what I did there?) to enforce social norms. Twitter and Google+ can no doubt fall prey to that, too, but mostly I see a lot more of the “share cool stuff” tendency.
Overloaded on information about information
I’ve been in this place where there’s just too much information. A common complaint in the internet age, I guess. In my case, the culprit is — well me, frankly. But let me cast the blame in another direction, so I don’t get too lost in soul-searching and self-discovery. I blame Google Reader.
See, I got this thing about numbers. To wit: say, in Google Reader, you see 300+ unread posts. I have to do something about that. The number compels me. Add to this the tendency to say, ooo, that’s cool, and on the web “cool” beccomes “click the rss button and add it to Google Reader” and then that 300+ thing becomes 1000+ and I spend a good deal of time then clicking another button, namely the “mark all as read” one.
Hey, don't look at me. Zemanta suggested I use this image. Image via Wikipedia
This clearly represents a major mental breakdown on my part the evil of Google Reader.
The end result is that I spend a lot of time ”dealing” with things I could be reading, and far less actually, ya know, reading. In depth, with care. Actually absorbing something.
So, a change. I’m walking away from Google Reader, and using the Pulp newsreader for Mac, which works a bit different and is a bit more geared towards “less is more” in the feeds department. Only the mostest important things to me will be there. Other stuff, the “glance at and sometimes dive in” stuff, I’ll lean on Facebook and Twitter.
A lot of this, of course, is partly just practical: with the plans for school and all, and the in depth diving into Math, my brain time is precious (and limited, oh so limited — there, I made the joke for you).
It’s my brain, dang it, and I ain’t gonna be technology’s piece of ass. Excelsior!
