Category: Random Thoughts

The general category for posts on this blog.

Memorial Park

Random Thoughts

I had an idea. I’m pretty sure it is crazy. I’m also pretty sure that’s why I like it.

A Memorial Park.

Imagine a place, a decently sized green space. With flowers and trees, open grass spaces, maybe some picnic tables, a bit of playground equipment perhaps, and all surrounded by a wall.

Now imagine this place is a cemetery.

Not filled with tombstones with coffins buried beneath them. The only people interred here are ones who have been cremated, and their ashes mixed in with the soil. When you brought a loved one to be laid to rest here, you would bring the container of ashes, you’d be allowed to inter a small portion of it yourself at a ceremony at the location of your choosing. The rest would be interred later by the staff, spread out all over the park. Your loved one would get an engraving in a brick on the wall, or in a sidewalk or path.

And the park would be open to the public, for picnics and play.

Would you want to bury your loved ones there? Would you want to be buried there?

There are, I think, some beautiful cemeteries in the world, filled with gorgeous statues and crypts. But most cemeteries are lines of bland headstones, markers on a patch of earth beneath which a coffin, often expensive, rests holding the remains of a person. They are, by and large, generically depressing places, devoid of life, and I just don’t think that it how I would want to spend my eternity.

I want to build my Memorial Park, but I have no idea how to go about it or if it would be worth it. Is it even legal to have an area where cremation ash is interred into the soil and people are allowed to play there? Is it sanitary?

These are questions I suppose I should look into, though at least on some level is has to be okay because 6 years ago there were people interring ash beneath trees.

The Standing Desk – Month Eight

Random Thoughts

It has been a long time since I checked in on the desk…

Our office moved, and I used that as an excuse to build a new standing desk. Still out of IKEA pieces, but this time without that pesky other desk below it.

20130820_134302

It is much nicer, and I don’t feel quite so ghetto. Also, I have my own office, so I’m not surrounded by sitting people.

But how has it been?

On the 4th of July, I ran the Peachtree Road Race. It’s an annual 10K in Atlanta. I’ve done it a few years now, but one thing I noticed this year is that I didn’t get the usual aches and pains in my legs that night or the next few days. I’m going to give credit for that to the fact that I had been standing for 8 hours a day for nearly 6 months at that point.

I haven’t noticed any major weightloss, but I have noticed more energy during the day and in the evening, when I go home, I’m less restless. I actually want to sit down and relax to end my day, whereas before I would get home after sitting all day and feel antsy.

All in all, I feel the standing desk has been a win. I’ll be sticking with it.

Knowing and Seeking

Random Thoughts

I love knowing things. It is one of my favorite things. Knowing stuff is totally awesome, especially when people ask questions and you have the answers. Knowing is, as they say, half the battle. The other half is seeking, or curiosity.

Too many people stop after knowing.

A while ago, I spouted this on Facebook and Twitter:

I love telling other people how to do their job. I hate that I have to tell other people how to do their job.

And it is a truth I have long lived with. Because I love knowing things, quite often when I interact with someone on a professional level I know a lot of things about their job, and since I also love sharing my knowledge, when the knowledge I have can fill in a gap or point out a flaw, I feel awesome. I also don’t mind when people point out something I didn’t know or missed, because I know I would have done it to them given the chance.

When I don’t know a thing, I like to learn that thing – assuming there is some advantage to doing so. I mean, I don’t know how to ballet dance, but I’m also not in a hurry to learn to ballet dance as I don’t see an immediate benefit to it. This attitude tends to lead me to acting like a detective. If something is broken, I immediately start trying to devise a way to figure out how it is broken and how I might discover a solution.

When this is my job, when it is an item under my purview, this is what I do. And when I say that I hate that I have to tell other people how to do their job, what I really mean is I hate when I have to do the detective work for an item that isn’t in my purview.

Example. I have a customer. That customer uses my service in conjunction with the service provided by another company. The customer has a problem and it appears that both services are not working. I examine my side and determine that my service is working, and only appears to be failing because the other service is not working as expected. The person working at the other company says their service is working and my service is failing. I give the customer a list of simple tests to perform to illustrate the problem. These tests are not being done on my service but on the other service, and the results illustrate that the other service is broken, returning improper results that is leading to the failure of my service. These tests are very simple, take less than a minute to perform, and prove conclusively where the problem is and even point to the solution. So why didn’t the guy at the other company suggest it?

Because it’s easier to point the finger at someone else than it is to solve the problem.

Meanwhile, now that I’ve caused the problem to be fixed, the customer likes me, doesn’t like them, and is open to listening when I suggest that they should switch to another provider for that other service.

If you don’t take care of your customers, someone else will.

Three Week Rolling Average

Random Thoughts

graphOnce again I am back on the weight loss kick. This time we’ve joined a local co-op for a weekly fruit & vegetable basket so that we will have better foods to eat in the house. So far, this is working. We aren’t crazy, we aren’t trying to go vegan or anything, but we have eaten a few meals with little to no meat.

We are also giving juicing a shot. I’m not sure we are ready to go full on with a juice fast or anything, but it is interesting to make up a couple of glasses of vegetable/fruit juice and have it leave me feeling full for hours. If you know me, then you know I almost never feel full – I’m always hungry, except after juice. Weird.

Anyway, being that we are doing the eat better thing, and we also joined a gym, I’ve also started weighing myself. One of the things I hate most about weighing myself is the wild fluctuations you’ll see. According to the Hacker’s Diet, which I don’t recommend as an actual diet guideline but do recommend for learning some facts about how weight and weight-loss works, a lot of your weight change has to do with water, we are 80% water after all, and the odd thing is that people often increase their water intake when dieting. Take this example, you work out one day – running, lifting, etc – but drink a couple of gallons of water; then one day you sit on your ass playing video games and drink a glass of water. Chances are, the workout day may cause you to gain weight and the lazy day will cause you to lose weight. Crazy, right? That’s why you should never let a single day weight-in get you down.

To that end, I created a spreadsheet in Google Docs that will maintain a Three Week Rolling Average. Right out of the gate, let me say that this is only a “three week” thing if you put in a weight every day. If you skip days but don’t skip rows, it’s a 21 latest values average. But, if you don’t skip days on the sheet, and every day you don’t actually weigh yourself you just copy the weight from the previous day, you’ll get a nice running average. Bonus: the second sheet is a graph. Oh, and also, those numbers aren’t real, just an example.

The great thing about the rolling average is that it helps mentally negate a spike in weight. Once you get yourself in the mental space that the number on the scale doesn’t matter and what does matter is the current average once you’ve entered that number from the scale into the spreadsheet, it reduces the anxiety of stepping on the scale. Over time, the average helps smooth out the curve and you can get a picture of the real trend your weight is taking. As humans, we tend to remember bad things more acutely than we do good things, and so we’ll weigh ourselves every day but only remember the days we were disappointed in the number, leading us to feeling like the weight-loss isn’t working. With the average, however, you can see the spikes and valleys and where your real weight actually rests, and that one bad day isn’t the end of the world.

So, copy the document to your own Drive and start tracking. Let me know if you run into any problems with it.

Earth Day 2013

Random Thoughts

GlobeFace it, short of nuking the Moon so that a large chunk of it falls to Earth and breaks the planet in half, we aren’t going to destroy the Earth. It will continue its journey around the Sun and spinning on its axis long after the human race has wiped itself out. Earth Day efforts are about making sure we aren’t shortening our time as a viable species on this planet. And in previous years I’ve written about ways that you can do your part mostly by focusing on saving yourself money. That’s not going to change really…

First off, as always, I love not getting junk mail. 41pounds is still around and they do good work. If you do nothing else for Earth Day, do this. The mantra of being better is “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” and it should be done in that order. The single most important thing you can do is not to have trash to begin with, Reduce. Then, Reuse items you have. Lastly, seek ways to Recycle trash into new things to avoid harvesting of more resources. Before I stumbled upon a company that would eliminate my junk mail, I would get at least 5 or 6 pieces of mail, per day, minimum. And rarely was any of that worthwhile mail. It was credit card offers and other mailers, all of which went from my mailbox and into the trash. Now, I sometimes go two or three days without getting a single piece of mail. If you don’t get it, you don’t have to throw it out. If enough people don’t get it, they’ll stop printing it.

Still not getting phone books. The opt out is so very nice. You should do that too.

Last year, we had some people come to the house and clean out the ventilation. They found construction garbage in there. The house was built in the mid 1990s. That stuff had been sitting in there for fifteen years. It wasn’t exactly cheap. Hundreds of dollars were spent. However, since then, our heating and air conditioning has worked better, more efficiently, and more cheaply. So, I recommend looking into that if you think your house might need such a thing.

In a sort of anti-Earth Day move, we are looking to have a bunch of trees cut down… but they will be replaced with better trees (because seriously, pine trees are pretty useless to the average person) and a garden. I’ll be posting more about that once it starts happening.

And, of course, coming up on the weekend of May 4th and 5th, the neighborhood is having it’s spring garage sale event. Hopefully people will come and buy my junk instead of buying the exact same things for much more from Amazon.

On another note, eating healthier is also usually better for the rest of us. The better you eat, the less packaging the food tends to come in, and therefore, less trash. Reduce, both your impact and your girth. Over eating and poor eating are also linked to lots and lots of health issues, and with the way the cost of healthcare is going, you want to limit your health issues as much as possible.

Anyway, enough Earth Day rambling out of me.

New feature on the main site…

Random Thoughts, Site News

MovieMash-SampleOf all the places I posted it, here wasn’t one of them… So, now, without further ado, I introduce to you: Movie Mash.

If you are a long time reader, you might recall for nearly two years I used to do these movie round-ups where I would give a run down of the movies releasing in theaters that week. And you might recall that for a good portion of those posts I would mock up a “super poster”, photoshopping all the movies together into one glorious mess.

Well, I’m bringing that back, sort of. The Movie Mash is where I will take, when inspired, two or more of the movies releasing on a given Friday, make a mock poster for the movie they would be if they were just one movie, and write up a synopsis of the new plot that goes with it.

I’ve already begun, with Scary Movie 42 last week and The Lords of Oblivion this week, and I’m already working on future ones. So check it out, and be sure to add the main site to your RSS reader or favorites to keep up with the latest going on over there.

Below, I’ve included my previous movie poster efforts.

Enjoy!

Inviting Discourse vs Shutting It Down

Random Thoughts

Of late, I have become disgruntled with one of the forums that I frequent. I go there because I like to discuss things with people. Things I enjoy, things that I don’t, random subjects from all walks of life. Sometimes I’m there to participate, and sometimes to read and learn, and still other times to write and educate. That might make my view of forums sound lofty and snobby, but it really isn’t.

However, I do expect a certain level of “average” behavior. I put that in quotes because I couldn’t think of a better word. What I mean is that the majority of a given users posts must be used to gauge the personality of the user. Everyone goes off the rails once in a while, but if 90% of your posts are “going off the rails” then you aren’t really. Those are your rails, and the posts where you are calm and reasoned are actually your deviation.

Think of it this way… you can like something ironically – i.e. a genre of films that is bad and you are enjoying it because it is bad, not because you think it is good – but if you like everything ironically, you aren’t, you are just liking things. This is what people mean when they use “hipster” as a derogatory term – people who are living their entire lives as some sort of “anti” statement, liking things that people don’t like, not liking things that people like, wearing clothes that aren’t in fashion because they aren’t in fashion, etc. At some point, you have to admit that you aren’t doing those things “ironically” but in fact doing them because you truly enjoy them.

Back to forums… No one likes to be called a troll in the forum world. Even the people who are trolling and enjoying the trolling, they don’t want to be called it. And if 90% of your posts are reasoned, well written posts, and every now and then you “go off the rails”, you won’t get labeled as a troll. However, if 90% of your posts are loud, vulgar, contrarian diatribes, you might get called one, you might even be one.

Mostly though, the problem I’ve been having has to do with tone, which doesn’t translate well in the written word. You often have to suss out an author’s intended tone based on their body of work. It is much easier to empathize with someone who is going off the rails because a subject has pushed their buttons than it is to empathize with someone whose default position appears to be yelling and screaming. Someone could be joking, but if all of their posts are written in the same filth-ridden snarky tones, then either they are always joking or no one is ever going to know the difference between real rant and joke rant. (Honestly, I believe they don’t even know the difference until they offend someone and backpedal with the “I was only joking” excuse.)

The other half of the problem is that when someone goes deep vulgar negative on a subject, there is simply no corollary on the positive side. No level of explanation, no amount of “I love this show and think it is good” can quite make up for the other side saying “this show is shitty, the writers are hacks, the directors are witless and anyone who enjoys this unfettered garbage is a brainless moron who plays with feces!”

When someone says, “This show is insulting my intelligence.” there are two ways you could read that.

  1. I am dumb and this show is smart, therefore if you are enjoying it you must be smart.
  2. I am smart and this show is dumb, therefore if you are enjoying it you must be dumb.

No one ever posts with the first one in mind. It is always the second.

The overuse of vulgarity and insults often serves only to shut down discussion. A person on the positive side of an argument will tire of being called stupid and of the thing they like being called “a barely watchable pile of shit” and so on, eventually choosing to leave the conversation – resulting in a negative droning echo chamber.

More than once I’ve been told, “The general consensus around here was that it was garbage” and when I go look up the original thread of discussion I’ll find that in the beginning there were dissenting opinions, people on both sides, but as the negative side went vulgar and insulting the positive side backed away and the thread ends with pages and pages of people agreeing how awful it is. I suppose if you consider running off people who like something until you are left with only people who dislike that something reaching a consensus… well, I don’t know what to say to that.

In general, when I dislike something I try to be specific in what exactly I did not like and why I think I did not like it. Was a scene in a movie unbelievable because of my own personal knowledge of the subject that exceeds the average person or was it blatantly ignoring obviously things that are actual general knowledge? And I always try to frame things with myself as owner of the problem. “I didn’t like the writing…” versus “The writing is terrible…”

And ultimately, that really seems to be the central problem with the things that get under my skin. It is okay to not like things. It is not okay to continuously frame everything you don’t like as being inherently unlikable.

To bring this meandering diatribe of my own to a close, I’ll end with one final thing I don’t enjoy on the Internet. When someone likes a thing, it is apparently okay to tell that person they are wrong, that they didn’t understand it. Doing this is simply expressing your opinion, and should be considered protected speech. However, when someone doesn’t like a thing, telling them they are wrong or that they didn’t understand it is oppression and attempted censorship of the highest order and you should be burned at the stake or banned for life, or both. Doing this is offensive and you should never ever do it.

The Socialest Network

Random Thoughts
Admit it, most of you live here.
Admit it, most of you live here.

Socialest (not to be confused with Socialist) meaning “the most social”. It is how I feel lately with every website on the Internet. Facebook used the be the primary culprit. Their feed, which I always want to read by “Most Recent”, keeps trying to display what it thinks I want to read. And the default setting for new friends is to show “Most Updates”. Zuckerberg and company are trying to curate my experience, to give me the best most awesome items they can mathematically determine – which largely results in me missing everything I actually care about. If I didn’t keep fighting Facebook’s settings, my feed would be entirely populated by items people reshared that have gotten thousands of likes, but when my brother says something cool but gets only 1 or 2 likes it gets hidden.

Due to Facebook’s deluge of ads and app spam (at last count I had over 200 apps blocked from my feed), I would prefer something cleaner like Google+. But then, they are curating my experience as well. Items posted in the last few minutes appear below items from yesterday that are more popular. It’s not as bad as Facebook yet, but it is clearly moving in that direction.

With Google announcing that they are going to retire the Reader application, a place where I spend a huge amount of time reading from my hundreds of aggregated RSS feeds, I have had to go in search of a possible replacement. All of those replacements suck. Each one of them wants to try and curate my reading experience. They want to show me the stuff with the most subscribers, the most likes, the most comments, and they want to bury anything else in the back.

It’s all turning into a popularity contest.

Everyone seems to think not only that they can predict what I want to see but that I want them to. I don’t. I would like to see the things I have asked to see, and when I want to see more things I will go looking for them (which I often do – I mean, you don’t get to have hundreds of feeds in your Reader without seeking this stuff out) or one of the sources I already read and trust will recommend it to me. I read lots of personal blogs, most of which I discovered because they were mentioned or linked to by another blog. What I really don’t need is my reading platform taking my reading habits and trying to select from a database similar items. It could be nice, but as far as I am aware every one of these systems eventually gets greedy and starts allowing people to pay for a better rank or more publicity. My Facebook feed is constant suggesting posts to me of things I could not care any less about that someone clearly paid to have put in front of my eyes.

It has been said, if you aren’t paying for it, you are the product being sold. And that is the center of all of these social networks. They don’t charge you anything because they are selling you. Google+ doesn’t have ads yet, but since Google announced the closing of Reader because they could never figure out a way to make money off it, you have to assume the ads are coming because if they can’t make money off Google+ they will eventually shutter it.

I’m rambling… anyway, I guess my point is that I wish people who stop trying to sell my eyes and control what I see.

The Dream is Always the Same

Random Thoughts

Mitch: You know, um, something strange happened to me this morning…
Chris Knight: Was it a dream where you see yourself standing in sort of sun-god robes on a pyramid with a thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you?
Mitch: No…
Chris Knight: Why am I the only one who has that dream?

TheDreamI have a recurring dream. Well, I have two recurring dreams. The other one is more of a theme than a single dream, and it is about zombies. But the one I want to ramble about today is the non-zombie recurring dream.

Lots of people dream about flying. I imagine, however, that most people fly like Superman or some other super hero when they fly in their dreams. When I dream of flying, it’s more like Andrew Clements from My Secret Identity.

Really it stems from high school literature class. We were allowed to pick our own books for our book reports, any book. I chose The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And within that tome was the following line:

The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

This is how is goes in my dream. I am needing to go somewhere, the store or work or something, and I step outside the house, throw myself at the ground and miss. I slowly float through the sky, swimming instead of soaring. I tilt in the wind and drift. But the key element of the dream isn’t actually the flying. This method of movement through the air requires me to will myself to move, and that force of will exhausts me, both in the dream and out.

Some dreams, like the aforementioned zombie dreams, leave me feeling refreshed. I wake up ready to attack the day. But after a flying dream I am sluggish, physically and mentally. I feel slow, exhausted. I am to the point now that when I begin having the dream, the moment I throw myself at the ground and miss, I start trying to employ the tricks I have honed over the years to control my dreams.

I watched Dreamscape too many times as a kid, but it has come in handy, since it works. Never to escape the flying dream though. Any other dream, I can will it to turn into a zombie apocalypse or move to a beach, or both, but the flying dream remains and I wake up tired.

This probably means something, but I’ve had too many flying dreams lately and my brain thinkering isn’t what it should be. Perhaps if I can just get a few nights of zombies…

Anyway…

The Standing Desk – Month One and then some

Random Thoughts

I missed the actual one month mark by three weeks, so this is almost a two month update. Check out the original post and the one week update.

Not much has changed. I’m still standing.

The most noticeable effect of this is that when I get home in the evenings, I am much less restless than I used to be. After standing all day, I don’t mind sitting, whereas before after sitting all day I would get home and feel like I needed to be up and moving.

For the time being, I will continue to stand.

And now, we dance!