Recently in Thoughts Category
The internet is a big cloud in every network diagram I have ever seen, but the concept of little clouds never really occurred to me until recently. In the big cloud that is the internet there are a whole lot of rain drops, lightning bolts, and some golf ball sized hail stones that leave holes in my monitor (my cyber windshield).
But in my own little cloud there is peace and harmony. My bookmarks play well with each other and are sorted. My mail is all in its own folders. My calendar is sorted by what kind of event I'm looking at. All of my information is being jammed into its own neat little category.
But this is not how my brain works. My brain is a form of organized chaos. One idea bounces off another which triggers another. Like rain drops in a cloud. Hah! I stuck with the metaphor! Take that, doubters and naysayers!
Okay, I'll get serious.
The point is that my world is not black and white and neither should the way I handle the information that makes it revolve be. To that end, I think that tags are a great tool. Putting tags on everything makes them searchable. They may live in folders like "work" and "home," but they also have little words attached like "humor" or "television" or "perl" or "email" or who knows what else. Any word that comes to mind when I create or save a piece of information becomes a tag, and I can then go back and search through my own little cloud. And a proper search, too. Programatic, not reading through each folder wondering, "did I file this article under architecture or business?" It just is.
I think that bookmarks are a good place to start with this, and I think a good way to handle that is to keep it all both online and locally. This means that wherever I am I can reach into my cloud and fetch what I'm looking for. To that end, it's time to start looking at my options: Del.icio.us, Magnolia, and Google bookmarks. I have not looked closely enough to make a decision, but I can say this much - important factors are integration with my browser(s), privacy control, and ability to share what I've found with the world.
Let's see where this goes.
Sometimes I come across something that is just flat out genius and I marvel at how simple that thing is. Rewind, for example, to a trip to the Summer Shack a few months back. One of the people I was with ordered lobster and naturally was given a lobster bib. This bib, unlike any other I had seen before, had a little pouch on the bottom. Such a simple little thing, but so brilliant. Other lobster bibs protect the shirt and sully the pants. Not this one.
Today I was reading a magazine and I came across this.
"... once you recognize who you are and what you do best, you're free to surround yourself with people who are not you and who have different skills. This eases the pressure on you to do it all and simplifies life."
To quote Popeye the sailor man, well blow me down! Those two sentences can be life changing if they are realized. It's such a simple concept, but it's not the culture bred in the world. It's about true team work through different strengths and mutual support, not competition. It's a utopian environment where people thrive off their environment, a positive influence, rather than competition with their team mates and trying to outdo each other, a negative influence in my book. It breeds trust and faith in your team mates, and rather than forcing things to get done it allows them to.
Just. Plain. Brilliant.
Good lord, I really missed this boat didn't I? I'm not going to explain tags too much, but they're basically a Web 2.0 concept that's all over. Take del.icio.us for example, with its ability to use tags to help sort, identify, and search through links. MovableType has it built in now, and there's even a plugin for Mail.app called MailTags that adds it to your email if you're a mac user. I really dig this concept and over the next little while I'm going to be moving in that direction with a lot of my stuff.
Many years ago, mobile phone companies began to include nationwide long distance in their calling plans. This was an exceptional feature for a lot of people, and it was loved.
In addition, the phone companies charged a flat rate for a certain pre-set number of minutes and that worked out well, too. Not so in the world of the land line where, even today, calls are mostly charged by the minute rather than prepaid.
The issue I take with this comes in with international calling. My best friend lives in Canada, and we speak very regularly. In order to afford it, I pay an astronomical rate for a years-old phone plan that still includes calls to canada in the prepaid minutes.
Modern mobile-phone plans don't include these calls without you paying the same rates as this ancient plan - or higher. Instead they offer you the option to pay a small sum which will reduce the per-minute charge on these international calls. In other words, if I pay N dollars a month for 1000 any-time minutes and unlimited nights and weekends, then X dollars on top of that to reduce my long distance fees to call Canada, I still pay long distance in addition to my existing plan. To be entirely truthful, I didn't stick around long enough to see if any of the prepaid air time is expended in addition to this charge, but I find it frustrating and downright inconsistent.
The fact is that mobile phone plans today generally count your air time usage against the minutes you prepaid. To charge in addition to that is wrong. However, if we were to say that each minute on the phone with canada was worth one and a fraction of a minute of air time, that would be much more fair and consistent. It would give folks a chance to stay within their plan, would leave phone companies the ability to choose the value of their international calling, and even potentially be an add-on service that we'd have to pay for. But it would still be more fair than what we've got today.
Allow me to summarize everything I have heard, read, and seen in the media about hurricane Katrina. Ready? Here we go!
Hurricane Katrina is bad. [Editor's note: Mmm'kay.]
Really I have one question. Why haven't any hotels started taking in refugees? Think of it. They'd help people, and they'd make millions. Imagine the end of every Holiday Inn commercial saying, "proud shelter of hurricane Katrina victims." That'd be one hell of an ad campaign.
This entry talks about a San Francisco hotel censoring the WiFi connection is provides to guests. I know this opinion is going to be unpopular, but as a sysadmin I have to say that I agree with the censorship to a degree. While I agree with blocking known problematic sites, such as spammer sites, cracker sites, warez sites, and so on, I disagree with disallowing certain chat forums for other content.
So, in essence, I agree with the hotel's ability to censor their guests somewhat. Remember, this is a service they provide and are, therefore, ultimately liable for. They have to protect themselves. If they don't, they're going to have a serious problem one day.
Using hotels to perform hacks has been a standard practice for hackers since hacking became hacking. Remember that before you question the hotels for protecting themselves from Lawyers with a penchant toward yelling about due diligence.
I swore I wouldn't write anything controversial. I shouted from the roof tops that certain things I would just keep my mouth shut about. But I can't not talk about this.
Before me is an article which I have read twice in disbelief. Twice have I read it and now I simply have to write. This article is about the columbine shooting, and some of the motivations behind it. The real motivations.
The article displays a suicide note from one of the shooters. It's more profane than I'm interested in displaying here, so you'll just have to see it in the article. Don't worry, it's toward the top and hard to miss.
The article and the suicide note together illustrate better than I ever could some points I've in the past made. Childhood teasing is a problem, folks. Kids are more cruel than even Adolph Hitler. That's what they do. Their brains have a bit of difficulty grasping higher levels of humor so they ridicule for amusement. I've seen it before. I grew up living it. Every class has their kid who it is cool to pick on. I was that kid.
Before I go on, I must state that in no way am I making excuses for or justifying the actions of these shooters. This was not right. Period, end of story. There is no excuse, there is no justification. Be clear on that.