Displaying Category: Pondering

I'm tired of all this fancy political talk about how the Democrats have accomplished nothing by paying people to get shit done (with stimulus), while the Republicans will fix everything by cutting funding to everything (and thereby firing people) and then do nothing, because they seriously expect business to fix it all for them... noting, of course, that for the last two years American businesses have been holding on to their money, afraid to do anything until government figures out what the hell they're going to do to fix the economy.

So in summary:

Democrats: pay people to work.

Republicans: Fire people and do nothing.

I'll let that sink in.

Sitting at the restaurant eating breakfast I realized I was listening to Rudolph of the red nose who guided Santa's sleigh at night. Then I went to the hardware store and heard the same song (different rendition). I started to wonder... What did Santa do before he discovered Rudolph? Quite suddenly the image of Santa repeatedly slamming into the sides of mountains or skyscrapers really brightened an otherwise dreary day. See, Christmas carols can be good!

My current dilemma involves something I've been questioning of myself lately. But to explain, I need to roll back time a bit. Historically, I've been rather lax about getting things taken care of to my complete satisfaction. For example, I purchase an item, be it a radio or a pair of jeans, a car... whatever, and there is something not quite right about these things. The buttons on the radio might not work predictably, the jeans might be the wrong size, and any number of things could be wrong with the car. I used to just accept these flaws. I felt it wasn't worth the effort or stress to exchange the jeans for the proper size and considered it a lesson to myself: "be sure to try the jeans on before buying them, dummy." Put in the effort up front to avoid the stress later if something doesn't work out. I never really put the time in up front, I just don't have the time, so it always comes down to what I do after the damage has been done. Do I return the item or exchange it or get it fixed?

Lately I've been putting significantly more effort into getting things right. I am sure to make exchanges, I am sure to get things fixed no matter how long it takes... and you know what? It sucks. I tell myself that once it's all made right to my satisfaction, then I will be completely happy with whatever it is and I will no longer doubt or wring my hands and all will be good, but I'm not sure that's how it works. Instead, I feel like things are never right. There's always something that can be made more fixed. I am stressing over things because they aren't perfect and I think it's my responsibility to ensure things are made perfect so I don't have to worry about them anymore.

Moving on from the generally material issues to the physical and psychological... now we're talking about me. I have experienced chronic pain for pretty much as long as I can remember. Generally neck and back pain, but there are plenty of off-shoots that affect every micron of my body. Pain in my arms, legs, face... that's right, my face hurts. Lots. I actually take pain-killers not because of my back pain, but because my face hurts. I've seen lots of doctors and had lots of diagnostic tests and pretty much everyone tells me I'm healthy. So I wonder, does everyone feel this much pain all the time? I've assumed it's normal, but at some point, this much pain can't be normal. Living can't always hurt this much, right? So my big dilemma is how much effort should I put into making this fixed? What is a satisfactory amount of pain and discomfort? How much should I bitch and moan about needing to be "healthy" by my standards and not the doctors'? Do I even know what that means?

I suppose it comes down to a quality of life thing. Life is important and you should put some effort into improving your life, not just for yourself, but because if you are happy, then others around you will be happier as well. But what level of attention on one's comfort is "enough?" How much time, energy and money should I invest in myself? Particularly when I already feel tapped out on all the other things in my life?

I feel completely unguided here. There's no metric for any of this, but I desperately want to find one. If you are this tall, you can ride the coaster. What does it take to do the fun stuff in life without being distracted and drained by all the crappy stuff? And since all of this seems self-induced, finding that balance is pretty much the most important thing ever. So really, how much is enough?

Tanya Davis wrote this wonderful poem called, oddly enough, "How To Be Alone," which she put to (some) music and filmed with the help of Andrea Dorfman. Please watch the resulting video: How To Be Alone.

Personally, I love it. Probably because it speaks so much to how I live my life. Maybe not entirely with the same joy that Tanya expresses, but I do do these things, both because I like to and because, as someone who is alone, I have to. What's important in all this, though, is my primary credo: I shalt not sacrifice mine life for lack of someone to experience it with. In other words, don't not do things because you don't have anyone to do them with. Don't miss out on great movies because you're friends are too lame to join you. Don't eat ramen when you could be out enjoying a meal at a nice restaurant. Don't avoid the park because you're afraid of looking odd by yourself. Don't miss a chance to see a great band because you're friends complain they don't know the music. Don't be afraid to sit at home and get drunk in the silence or go out and get dizzy watching the crowds go about their shopping at the mall. Live your life, whether with others or by yourself.

I do all of those things, often happily. Am I happy all the time? Nay, I am not. Though I am happily alone, I am unhappily lonely. Those are different states and I still get them confused depending on the perspective. I will say that there are lots of things I would really like to do with someone or someones and I often miss spending time with my friends and loved ones. But I firmly and steadfastly believe that even without these people around, there is life to be lived and I don't want to miss out. What about you? What do you do or would like to do alone?

Yes. Because now there's a real study that suggests the heaviest users of Facebook are narcissists and people with low self-esteem. Though, I really feel like a 100 person sample (of college students) really isn't enough to make this conclusion statistically significant. I thought the most value came from this:

Narcissism and Self-Esteem on Facebook was written by York University undergraduate student Soraya Mehdizadeh. Speaking to CTV.ca, she summarized how everyone participates in social media, saying "you very carefully construct the image of yourself that you want people to see."

Mehdizadeh went on to say "that's why so many people get paranoid if their boss sees them on Facebook. They're worried that they don't project the same image there that they project in their workplace."

Which I can definitely see and agree with. We post what we want others (who don't know us) to see and suppress the rest. Why? Because we can. But how different is that from the real world where we might suppress some of our more jerk-like tendencies? If we don't express those jerk-like tendencies, does that mean we aren't a jerk or just that we aren't a jerk "most of the time?"

Alright, thinking about this got me to places I wasn't expecting... I guess that's a good thing?

Unless you've been living in an empty desktop computer case (one of those old beige steel types) you've probably noticed the decline of the desktop computer over the last eight years or so. More and more people have ditched their bulky desktops in favor of more portable laptops. Farhad Manjoo at Slate wrote an article on just this subject and he raises some interesting, though mostly obvious points. Netbooks, tablets, and laptops are taking over the market, and surpassed desktops purchased for the first time last year. This makes sense when you consider that laptops can now have roughly equivalent performance to desktops for only a slightly greater cost and that differential should continue to shrink in coming years.

Personally, I still prefer desktops. Laptops make concessions in available ports and obviously what internal components are available and accessible, as well as CPUs and video cards. At home, my primary PC is a laptop that I keep hooked up to about six external devices (thank you USB hub) and two monitors. It doesn't move from its shelf unless I seriously need to take it somewhere. In the past year, I think this has happened maybe two or three times when I went to a friend's for some group gaming. My gaming machine is a desktop and I don't expect that to change anytime soon. I think my brother recently spent something like $4000 on a hardcore gaming laptop. I could probably build the same thing for under $2000 in a desktop and I would still be able to upgrade it later when the need arises. Of course there's that point where you have to replace the CPU, which means replacing the motherboard and RAM and a few of the other components, but I can still reuse hard drives and optical drives and mice and so on. I just can't justify a laptop for a primarily gaming-centric machine. And I think I am in the minority on this point with the exception of the enthusiast gamers who think the lights should dim when the machine is powered up.

I do have the opinion, though, that at some point, all machines will be "fast enough," whether they are desktops or laptops or tablets or cell phones, that they can run whatever is needed of them and all it will come down to is what format you want to work in. That may mean email and IM on the cell phone, spreadsheets on the tablet, and gaming on the big screen, but the machines themselves will be roughly indistinguishable from each other. I think I can live with that.

Why does it look like the Winter Olympic medals have been left in the oven too long and have gotten all melty?

I wrote this for posting on another site, so while the context is a bit vague, I think the message is still worthy.

And just to alleviate any potential confusion that post title may generate in readers, I am not referring to myself. Though, while I am a people, I am not awesome. Now, I have read a lot of profiles on here and elsewhere (dating sites or otherwise) and there are so many interesting people out there who talk about their travels around the world and how many people they've helped and all of their awesome adventures in being awesome people and hell, some of these people just sound like modern day heroes/heroines. They're awesome. Actually, too awesome. You spend half your life in other countries using your supernatural healing abilities to cure sick children and turning dirt into Twinkies for starving babes while drinking wine with your best friends over sushi and Ethernopian foods (though, I don't see as many people going "Yum! Kitfu!") how is your life not completely and utterly satisfying? And I know it isn't satisfying because you're on a dating slash social networking site looking for partners (in the not gross one-night-stand-sense, not that I'm judging...), so that can't mean everything is completely awesome. See how I used my powers of deduction there? You can call me Holmes.

Let's face it, life isn't about what you do, it's who you're doing it with. Dirt to Twinkies is a great trick, but unless someone is there to help you hand them out (or at least take pictures) then how satisfying is the experience? I'm not trying to minimize the joy of helping people out, that's great and satisfying in its own way, but it isn't shared with that one person you really want to be sharing it with. Am I right? So here we are, alone in our otherwise perfect lives waiting for our voices screamed out into the darkest night to finally reflect off something and maybe find purchase somewhere in someone else's head. I'd like to think it's working out for some percentage of the populace, anyway. Me, not so much.

The thing is, I'm really not a very attractive human, and humans in general prefer to avoid the unattractive people. I know, I do it myself. Which may have some of you scratching your heads because at the beginning up there I talked about my extensive conversations with myself that I like to have when it's quiet. Well, obviously I don't have those conversations in front of mirrors. Moving on... What do unattractive people do to be heard? Or, if we really want to get pop-culture deep, I could take an example from the movie Avatar which raised this concept of being "seen" not in the literal sense, but how another person sees you for who you are. Not on the outside, not on the inside, but the whole person. I want someone to see me. I'm pretty sure that's all anyone really wants, right? (That's Sherlock Holmes.)

Even these perfect people with perfectly amazingly awesome lives? Yes, even them. And I don't know, maybe they have trouble too. Maybe people just see their awesomeness but still fail to see the whole person. Fail to see the flaws, fail to see the inner monologues. Fail to see the personal tragedies in their lives. Fail to see their appreciation for obscure pop-culture references. Fail to understand obscure pop-culture references (kids these days...).

So here's the point I've managed to avoid for the last four paragraphs. Awesome people who seem to have their life together, turning dirt into Twinkies and such, they play this game like "oh, I am so independent and awesome *holds up some dirt* I don't need anything else in my life!" Except they do, because whether you are awesome or just a 4, you're still human (maybe?) and it's a fairly consistent component of humanity that we crave social connections. Not just "oh, I'm helping the childrens!" social connections, but real, true, honest, "let's hold hands" social connections. Someone to share crappy mornings with and Cheerios with and bad weather and promotions and day trips into the city to visit the zoo and yes, even dirt Twinkies.

And right about now I'm realizing there's no way to bring this back to being about me without it getting stupidly awkward. Oooo! Shiny! ...

I was pointed toward an article that explains Comcast's interest in buying a majority stake in video streaming site Hulu and probably changing that over to a pay-for service. Because Comcast and the other cable providers and broadcast networks seem to be clueless, I'll do them a solid and clue them in on how television programming is going to work in the future.

The key point to always remember is that information and media is always free. Not because the world is full of cheapskates or because those young punks just want to buck the system, but because humans transfer information freely between each other. Constantly. Every instance of communication between people is a transfer of information and that can never be universally controlled without leakage. Other forms of media, be they written, recorded audio, recorded video, or live streams, whatever it is, exists in a world only a hairs-breadth from our native forms of communication. The dividing line between them is the medium in which they reside. In the ancient days this media was on bulky cartridges, cassettes, or reels of tape or film that required expensive equipment to view or record and wasn't generally available to the average consumer. As technology matures, access to these media forms naturally grows more and more accessible to just about everyone with access to electricity. And even those without hard line access to electricity can pop out a small solar cell array to recharge their iPod or laptop. Media is everywhere and anyone can access it.

I am not advocating world-wide piracy here, I am simply explaining the world we live in. A world in which, the moment a television program is broadcast over the air or transmitted by cable to a residence, someone is on the other end recording it. Once that program is recorded it can and will be encoded into some format that can be transmitted digitally to anywhere in the world. There is no protection possible that can prevent this. So the question is, Mr. Cable Company, do you bury your head in the sand and pretend none of this is real, or do you accept the world we now live in and get creative with your business plan?

Here's how the future of media distribution is going to go down: First, everything will be available on the Web. For free. The living room television will no longer care about over the air signals or digital cable or any of that nonsense. Instead, the TV will be a media portal to web sources. Users will subscribe to these sources (think something like Hulu, but set up for access in the living room similar to Windows Media Center or MythTV or Miro) to get show updates and reminders or set up personalized schedules and playlists. For most users these services will be free and ad-supported. Users will be able to sign up for paid subscriptions to view programs ad-free and get access to whatever interesting premium services the portals can come up with.

If you're thinking ahead, then you've probably realized this means the death of any other service that provides these videos. The broadcast networks will cease to broadcast in traditional terms. They will certainly continue to produce programming, which they will then sell to the portals. So in effect, the portals are the direct customers, the subscribers to the service. The networks are no longer making money on advertising, they make money instead on selling their program to services that then do the distribution for them.

This will also mean the death of traditional cable television. Cable providers will become simple broadband providers and by this time, broadband will be CHEAP and also regulated by governments the world over to guarantee minimum service quality following in the footsteps first laid down by countries like Finland. I expect the cable providers will either have large stakes in these media portals, or just own them outright. I can see it now, the "Comcast Network" is now just a site on the web where people go to get the content they used to access through their set-top boxes and DVRs.

The most significant benefits to the end user should be obvious. Generally free ad-supported access to any program in the world including live news feeds. Access through your television to your personal audio repository that exists out in the cloud somewhere. These would be tracks you have purchased through services like iTunes or Amazon music that get tagged for you to use and access anywhere, be it your TV, your phone, your portable audio device, whatever. They'll all be able to access your personal media stores. This also means asynchronous viewing of programs. No longer do you have to consider a broadcast schedule and be forced to watch at that time... Of course, many of us abandoned this long ago with the introduction of DVRs, but in the future you won't even have to worry about programming those things. You just subscribe to a program and it becomes available to you as soon as it gets posted. The only schedule you have to consider is the release schedule of each program you subscribe to. Of course, you still have to consider live feeds, but those probably run 24/7, think CNN, C-SPAN, BBC News, and so on.

Clearly this isn't all going to happen tomorrow, but I would say it would be a pretty safe bet to develop over the next 10 to 15 years. In the meantime, I have no doubt broadcast and cable networks are going to continue to try and charge everyone for oxygen ignoring the fact that we can pretty much get oxygen anywhere just by inhaling.

Update (2009-10-21): Just found an article about something called Keychest being developed by Disney: "The technology would allow consumers to pay a single price for permanent access to a movie or TV show across multiple digital platforms and devices—from the Web, to mobile gadgets like iPhones and cable services that allow on-demand viewing. It could also facilitate other services such as online movie subscriptions."

Alright folks, this is your chance to poke fun and ridicule, because I am right now watching Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, recorded off Lifetime, and I am really enjoying it.