Nextel Phones
Push to talk is the new rage among non-Nextel providers, they all want it.
I’m not sure why. This annoying lady came into Starbucks attempting to place an order for a friend who was also on a Nextel phone. These things are really like a walky talky and not a telephone, which means EVERYONE can hear the whole conversation. So instead of just making a phone call, she went back and forth, so we all knew what her friend ordered. At least on cell phones we only hear one side of the conversation, on push-to-talk we hear both.
If we think cell phones are bad these Push-to-talk things are going to be really fricking annoying! Especially once there are a lot of them.
Now we’re going to have to deal with people who are invading the conversation zones with walky talkies, bringing attention to themselves with the “Bleeeeep!” that their phones make on every message and that grab attention.
New technology brings new etiquette so when does the push-to-talk etiquette debate start? Maybe its going to get pushed to the side by the camera phone debate…
Sigh, technology moves too fast.
Budged Promise
Oh hell, I’ve been thinking all night I’m going to start it this way all night, and now I set down to write it, and I want to change the beginning. So here we go. Movies, TV Shows, and theatre that have made me cry:
- ER – The episode where Carrie left Chicago, and Mark was to scared to say that he loved her, and did just as she was leaving
- Titanic (only the first viewing)
- Wit – At the Human Race, I lost my grandmother later that year to cancer.
- Avenue Q – The song, “For Now”.
They’ve been scattered through time but the last one occurred last night, on my drive to work.
I don’t know why it hit me at that moment. I’ve heard the song before, whereas all the other times I cried on my first viewing.
There could be many interpretations of the song “For Now” but the message I get is, life moves on and sucks at times. Realize and deal with the now and look toward the future.
I don’t have a vision of where I want to be going. None whatsoever.
Somedays I wish I could’ve been like my dental hygienist, and just have known I always wanted to be a dental hygienist, life would’ve been so simple.
One of my friends from elementary school is now an investment banker on Wall Street, my mom got a letter from his mom.
I get all these people telling me “you can’t stay here at relay you have too much promise.”
I don’t want to stay at relay, I just don’t know where to go. I gotta do something, what I have no idea.
I’ve got all these ideas of things I could do. I could go after the writing thing either full time or just on a part time basis. I could go back to school and get a practical degree in counseling. I could go work in non profits or an educational setting. I could go to school get a degree in philosophy and pursue the writing thing. I could do none of them and dedicate myself to producing excellently relayed telephone calls.
Theres this sign at the ITT Tech school that I drive past all the time. A few weeks ago it said “Don’t expect a shove if you never budge.” I’ve been getting shoved, and I have no idea of where to budge towards. Or better yet, I’m dislodged, but I don’t know where to go now. I’m free floating again. I could go back and say I’m going to do something in theatre again.
I just don’t know.
Good Day (short version)
The previous entry ran longer that I thought it should’ve.. Here’s take two.
I had a good day. It consisted of
- A crappy start, where I just overslept and had issues.
- A spontaneous trip to Cincinnati that was really great and I applied for a job, had some good food with a friend and got my laptop fixed.
- A little bit of mundane errands.
- The realization that leaving community sucks.
- Tommy asks me too much computer wise, and owes me a few blow jobs.
There much shorter and to the point.
Good Day
I intended to write this at the end of yesterday before I went to bed, but I only have so much energy and I overdrew on it at about 9 pm, so when I got home at midnight I was beat.
My good day began shittily. I’d completely disjuncted my sleeping schedule from anything anyone could consider normal. This is not good for me; from November through about April my body likes to default to sleeping if you give it the chance. Unless something very important is happening I’ll sleep. I make up for the drop in productivity during November through April by being a busy beaver during May through September. So while the origins begin in a haze, all I remember is I forced my way to sleep the day before my good day, because, well I was trying to keep a sleeping schedule.
My body listens to me too well. I slept right through the beginning of work. Given I’m currently competing with several post office workers for most disgruntled employee, I decided not to come in. I know it hurts me, but its the only way I can give them the finger. (I tried actually giving them the finger, but standing in front of the company sign throwing birds, well lets say I think the sign won, it didn’t flinch while I eventually got tired after four hours.)
So following my policy I called in about 11 minutes before the end of my shift, since the company thinks calling in 89 minutes before the beginning of your shift and 1 minute before the end of your shift is the same, I decided to take advantage of their confusion.
By the time I called off from work and hid from the world, it was almost midnight. Starting your day at midnight is akin to starting a race the week after it has finished, everyone else is done and you gotta plot your own race to run.
I settled in to piss away another day. I did though do my laundry and make Christmas gifts, so in that regard I was anti-piss.
Come 4 or 5 am, somewhere thereabouts the crowd who went to go see Lord of The Rings at midnight, in a misguided attempt to atone for not seeing Star Wars one during the the first three hours it was released, came home. While I had been looking at jobs in Cincy, one of the atonement seekers made mention of a job for Citicards in the Cincy area. So like a good internet connected computer, I searched and applied for the job before I was planning on going to bed.
Then I hopped in the shower to keep my newly washed sheets clean, and I realized, “Wait, I’m not tired, theres a testing session for the job today. Eh, what the hell. its only a job who cares if I’m cracked out and slightly tired?” So in a half naked rage getting out of the shower, I got everything together (from the Internet of course) and hopped on the road to Kentucky.
Traffic Sucks.
Despite a net loss my planned speed of arrival into Cincinnati of 65 miles per hour, I managed to arrive to the testing session only 5 minutes late. Not bad. First thing I noticed, this call center well, was clean, and it actually was kinda beautiful, they’d actually gotten an architect to attempt to do something beautiful, instead of my utilitarian call center. I had left Russia and come to America!
While there was lots of company drivel, by the end of our three and a half hour odyssey, I had passed the initial screening, and realized that, hell they’re a big old for profit evil bank, and they actually seem to care about their employees. Where the fuck was my little quaint non-profit employer who assumes employees are in the toilet coming from?
On my way out, I called a friend who lives in to have our prearranged lunch, and since I got his cell phone company’s computer, I spent an hour trying to coax from my memory where the Apple store was located to get a foot pad for my laptop. (oh, and of course I stopped at Starbucks for a battery charger.)
While I was there I had a great little conversation with the Genius Bar guy, got online exchanged email with a support rep in NYC, set up my lunch online, and consulted on Amazon’s shipping habits. All courtesy of free wireless in Apple’s store.
So after yet another odyssey of getting lost in Cincinnati, I arrived late at TGI Friday’s well before my friend, who was running really late.
I waited.
And Waited.
And Waited.
And Waited.
So finally my friend arrived and our flare starved waitress (the current “corporate” look of Friday’s sucks.) got to the fun part of serving us. We had a great lunch and after some, err well frank conversation, I ended my odyssey to Cincinnati.
My good day got a bit mundane. I got gas, visited the library, chilled at home for a bit, opened my mail, and went to my post office-esque crappy call center job.
Changing jobs started to settle in. I began to think of how much I’d miss this bunch of people. I mean the job sucks, the work is bleh, but theres a group of the people there who are golden. I’ve begun to miss school/community/regional theatre’s structure, where you build a community around a show, with the knowledge that it is going to end, that the show won’t go on forever, and come closing night, everyone is going to say, well it was great! Then, pack up their bags and go home, and get started in the next direction. Its not one person packing their bags leaving the group, its the group ending. Its a tacit acknowledgment of the ethereal nature of life, our communities aren’t permeant, but instead of continually reformulating them, theatre just gets rid of them.
After struggling to stay awake in the call center oven, I finally got off work and got home at midnight. Not to ever be undone by having too much of a good thing, I got online for a little wind down, and got dragged into helping Tommy debug some javascript. I love that boy, but he definitely asks a lot.. He owes me a few blow jobs when I see him next.
I made my bed, hopped in its cozy entrapments, and slept quite soundly, drifting to the next day, where promise and opportunity awaits.
Noncompletionitis
I’ve been having an issue.. basically we’ve been busier at work because I’ve been working different days that are busier, so I have eJournal entries that get started and never finished in any remote sense of the word.
I’m just out of any habits. I sat down and I had like five entries to type.. Sigh, sometimes these things are more of a pain in the ass than they’re worth.
In good news I finished a beta version of my MTMail program – a program for mailing Movable Type entries. Yes I know MT includes this by default, but isn’t very consistent in its functionality. I tried Dan Khon’s method but I ended up periodically flooding by mine and other’s mailboxes. I even got blocked as Spam by someone’s husband.. I plan on releasing it, but at the moment I’m looking for testers, both in receiving emailed entries and running a copy on their server. Drop me an email if you want to help.
Okay I’m going to drop my half written entries here, just to be done with them.
One: Fricking Problem
I have a fricking problem. Its A. I so want to ask him on a date. But I don’t want to give up anything. Not the friendship, not the conversation, not the fantasy I get to keep that he could be gay or bi.
(I still haven’t said anything to him…)
Two:
I was reading Wired’s article on Philip K. Dick First of all I would have loved to meet him. His philosophical interests (as identified by Wired’s Erik Davis.)
- False Realities – looking at the realities that are created. (Think The Truman Show or any of the Matrix Movies.) this is closely related to the field of epistemological philosophy.
- Human vs. Machine – How do we know what is human? (i.e. touring test) This gets trickier every year as processors get faster, and programmers develop new algorithms to make computers appear smarter. (An aside, this is a murkier area than it may seem, some people in touring tests have been described by humans as machines, because of their depth of knowledge.)
- Entropy – how things decay.
- The Nature of God – a large area where people claim tautologies but we know little
- Social Control – how societies are manipulated and controlled. (Related to False Realties, The Nature of God, and indirectly to entropy)
Okay but the point. Why haven’t I ever thought of writing Sci-Fi?
I wrote (and illustrated) Sci-Fi when I was younger, and I’ve always like the genre because the “good” examples of it are philosophic of moral arguments.
(And thus i stop into oblivion… there is nothing more frustrating than starting to write a thread and getting distracted so that you don’t know where you’re going.)
That it.. I’ve been carrying too many shot glasses around and trying to keep them all going.. sigh..
AAAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHH
What is it that they say? To Err is human, to really fuck things up requires a computer?
So if you really, really, really wanna fuck things up do you need a very powerful operating system like Unix?
I’ve been having all sorts of trouble with my email lately, including sending all of my mail to one of my coworkers for about 24 hours… (sigh)
okay take this is notice for everyone that any email for me in the past day or two has not been received. Instead of resending it (because I’m not sure if I’ve got it all ironed out yet) please leave a comment here…
Technology is so fricking grand
Dead quick decision making
I’ve been reading Stuff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. Its actually a really intriguing book; Its written with enough humor to prevent a depressive mood from enveloping its reader.
In attempting to calibrate human bone stimulant Rick Lowden, a DOE researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, needed to shoot actual bone to calibrate the stimulant. He stated that “I was offered sixteen cadaver legs to shoot at. DOE told me they would terminate my project if I did that. We had to shoot pig femurs instead.” (p. 143)
This is bureaucratic politically correct bullshit at its worst. What the DOE is stating that they rather restrict a legitimate researcher from designing their experiment in a way that would most accurately represent what they are trying to determine than face political pressure for performing legitimate research.
Here is the political system at its worst. Bureaucrats are rightfully fearful of political reprisals for doing their job, even if it has unseemly aspects. This is akin to instructing the military to win a war but not to kill any people on the enemy’s side. Such a request is ludicrous and would be quickly dismissed as such. (Notably we do try to reduce casualties of non-combatants as much as possible.)
But here is the crux. If politicians do not want specific types of research to be performed they should state that in the laws authorizing the research. Don’t tell bureaucrats to do research and then chide them for the scientifically justifiable way to perform that research.
this is just a symptom of excessive scrutiny and criticism of people who have to make many decisions based on vast amounts of information in short periods of time. This happens to many professionals including medical professionals, police officers, military personnel, and communications assistants.
Medical professionals are asked to have volumes of Journal articles to compare, police officers are expected to follow multiple and arcane legal presidents, military personnel must consider political dispositions, their orders, and international law, communications assistants must apply a 2,000 page procedure manual. It is unreasonable to cause significant harm to those who make decisions on large amounts of information that in hindsight were incorrect, if they made the decision honestly in good faith.
Of course if it weren’t for excessive litigation this wouldn’t be an issue.
<hr>, GZip, and writing
I’ve been debating if this:
constitutes a poor writing style.
Is it one of those things that I’ve picked up in my web centric writing? I’m not sure I do have writing that uses
that predates the web, I just used a black bar formated as a graphic.
Its an interesting conundrum. I know writers of books use extended spaces to signify jumps in the narrative flow.
is a way of saying “no I haven’t gone psychotic and rambling, I meant to jump topics, bear with me; it will be come clear shortly.
is similar to a major philosophical tool.
Philosophers will often make a claim and if it hasn’t been substantiated yet they will drop “(more on that later)” or “(as we will see in chapter 9)” in right after the unsubstantiated claim. It is a part of an author’s passive conversation to the reader, as if to say “don’t get into a tizzy now, I know this needs to be defended but it doesn’t fit here, so hold your arguments and constipation for later.”
But
isn’t that way.
can sometimes say “I was too lazy to write a transition, therefore I’m not going to.”
Then again pathetic and obvious transitions are reader unfriendly. I know I get frustrated with writing where the information conveyed per word ratio is too low. Of course if the ratio is too high you risk losing your reader. This is one of the things that frustrates me immensely about introductory text books, they waste my time. Most writers are so concerned that they’ll lose their reader their info conveyed per word ratio is far to low for me.
You see if I rewrote/edited a textbook it would be ¼ to ½ shorter.
But back to
I believe I might have a small tendency to use it too much, but maybe I’m just attempting to scream to other writers “write more compactly!”
Oh also transitions for transitions sake suck. While I’ll agree that art for art’s sake is good, transitions for transitions sake is formulaic writing as if I wanted a formula I’d be reading RSS or GZip files for fun, but I don’t.
Okay enough about
I’m done with it. But if I could learn to read text files compressed into GZip as fast as I read English that would be cool, because I could push an author’s information conveyed per character rate up, now that would be cool!
But
conveys quickly too.
Holiday Suction
I’m feeling strangely lonely again…
Holidays Suck, they just do. Thanksgiving was alright. Dad and I went to a movie, then we went to dinner at a restaurant, like two old single men whose wives died and left them together. I’m 23, not 83.
All my siblings have their lives started. My older brother, the perpetually single one, finally has shacked up. So that leaves everyone in my immediate family with the exception of me and my dad either married, or living with their significant other. Everyone’s started their microcommunity.
I’ve decided I’m taking a vacation to San Francisco. I figure I can do it for inside of $500.00 + 25,000 airline miles, assuming I stay at a hostel, which actually sounds intriguing.
I have this dream that I’ll meet some amazing guy and end up moving out there. Fantasy is so easy and attractive, wouldn’t it be great if life were that way?
I really want to move out of Dayton. I just cannot justify it, for two reasons.
One, I’m living rent free at my dad’s house. so moving somewhere and paying rent is a untenable idea, given that I owe a crapload of money.
Number Two is so much trickier. I have one really close friend and she is tied here by here mom, husband, and child. We both have the same feelings, we ant me to be happy, but we don’t want to live in different cities away from each other. Neither option will make me completely happy, so I’m stuck choosing the lesser of two evils.
Holidays just bring all this out, and the worst thing is the elevator holiday music. Bleh. Thats the torturous worst!
Nonthanksgiving
I had a chat with my former roommate from two years ago. He’s an Army “reservist” currently in Iraq.
Nicholas Barnard: Happy Thanksgiving!
Former Roommate: you too
Former Roommate: how are you
Nicholas Barnard: I’m doing well. Just about to go to bed actually, but I’m just working and doing my thing.. Nothing really different
Former Roommate: well good night
Nicholas Barnard: Thank you. You take care of yourself and keep your head up! We’re all appreciative of the sacrifices you guys (and gals) have been makin..
Former Roommate: thank you
Former Roommate: and we are thankful of yall supportin us
Nicholas Barnard: well night..
Former Roommate: night
(I made a few spelling and punctuation corrections)
I struggled when I was typing, “We’re all appreciative of the sacrifices you guys (and gals) have been makin..” I was going to say I am thankful for their sacrifices, but I am not. I am thankful for those men and women from my and previous generations that honor and serve our great diverse nation, but I am not thankful that they are in and dying in Iraq.
While I do have the luxury of hindsight, I feel as if we were sold a false bill of goods. There are no WMDs, Saddam and Osama Bin Laden are still on the run, we have spent a massive amount of money, and we have alienated our allies. We have all paid an uncalculated price, some of us will pay a small price, some of us paying a larger long term price, and finally others have paid the largest ultimate price. I respect and appreciate those in the latter two categories, but not thankful they are where they are.
Enough politics.
I am thankful for my daily protection from others and the elements.
I am thankful to have a job I enjoy, and provide for those who need my assistance.
I am thankful that I can be me, regardless of social structures.
I am thankful for those that challenge me and push me.
I am thankful for my ability and power to articulate and my wonderful family, friends and coworkers who support me, and make life as enjoyable and interesting as it is.
I am thankful to be here, life is an amazing privilege that we have been granted, and sometimes take for granted.
I am thankful to be.