So, I'm zooming through the internets over the last few days and I come across some interesting pages. first i saw a page of a gravestone with writing on it. it said something about
"first they took your lives
now they took your memory"
or something. what caught my eye was the circle A symbol and a heart with an A inside.
i didn't know exactly what that meant, so i googled it. this is what i found.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_symbolism
that led me to read a bit about anarchism, a topic i hadn't looked at in some years. i found the usual socialistic anarchism, but i also found
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism
which in turn led me to
http://www.capitalist.me/
among other sites. i haven't even realized that Anarcho-capitalism existed, but now that i've found it i love it. i haven't read enough yet to brand myself an Anarcho-capitalist...but i'm close.
it' so easy to say, "just look around, obviously the government is a filled with either morons or demons" but it's also too extreme. i routinely ignore all extremist statements like that on the basis that if the proponent can't bother to explain himself logical and simply spouts vitriol, it isn't worth my time because most of those nuts are just that, nutty. they come in all flavors, ufo nuts, vegan nuts, paranoid nuts, animal rights nuts, go fish.
still the more i read and watch about governmental action the more it reinforces my belief that power corupts. it's not a scathing indictment of any person in government, it's a simple truth that humans are selfish beings who cannot resist the temptation to abuse power.
but this whole thing got me thinking about symbols. the Libertatis AEquilibritas symbol is not a common symbol. few would recognize it, let alone know what it stood for. even the circle A doesn't bring to mind the tenants of anarchism. instead it usually brings to mind riots and fires and murder. when in fact that isn't anarchy, it's chaos. go read the wiki page about anarchy...it's an eye opener.
even before this i had considered myself borderline libertarian...but now i feel like i have to re-investigate these things to find out what to call myself. odds are that there are others like me out there.
the one thing i do know is that i'm against socialism. here's the hard truth. when 1/2 the population learns that the government will feed them even if they don't work, and when the other half learns that the government will take their earned wages away...the workers will stop working. then the government will have to force people to work. read that again, "foce people to work"...folks, that's slavery.
ah well.
i'll leave you with a few interesting links.
flash presentation on liberty
http://www.capitalist.me/media/philosophyliberty.swf
DefCon 15 - T112 - No-Tech Hacking
http://www.stumbleupon.com/click_redir.php?t=49a9b0f91378c&src=blog&u=http%3A%2F%2Fvideo.google.com%2Fvideoplay%3Fdocid%3D-2160824376898701015
america: freedom to fascism
http://www.stumbleupon.com/click_redir.php?t=49a9b0f91378c&src=blog&u=http%3A%2F%2Fvideo.google.com%2Fvideoplay%3Fdocid%3D-1656880303867390173
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Work stories
So you come home from work and your just brimming with stories about the lady or that guy. Or how your boss yelled at you, or your coworker. Here's the thing, I DON'T CARE. in fact no one cares.
that's not to say that i hate you, i don't, but your stories mean nothing to me. I don't know your boss, and don't know edna, the fat receptionist, and i really just don't care that someone ate all the donuts before you could get your cream filled.
do you understand? I mean, do i bother you about all the things that happen in my classes? no, why? because I realize the you fundamentally won't care. i'll let you know roughly where i am in my classes, how i'm doing. but I know that you don't have the time or inclination to discuss the intricacies of my human resource papers, or the formulas to calculate holding period ROI.
so do me a favor will you, remeber that the things that happen to you interest me about the same amount as what happens to britney spears...that is, not hardly at all.
thanks, i mean that.
8D
that's not to say that i hate you, i don't, but your stories mean nothing to me. I don't know your boss, and don't know edna, the fat receptionist, and i really just don't care that someone ate all the donuts before you could get your cream filled.
do you understand? I mean, do i bother you about all the things that happen in my classes? no, why? because I realize the you fundamentally won't care. i'll let you know roughly where i am in my classes, how i'm doing. but I know that you don't have the time or inclination to discuss the intricacies of my human resource papers, or the formulas to calculate holding period ROI.
so do me a favor will you, remeber that the things that happen to you interest me about the same amount as what happens to britney spears...that is, not hardly at all.
thanks, i mean that.
8D
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Love
So, I got to thinking about love today.
You hear so many damn love songs all the time, on the radio, youtube, etc. and they all seem to blur together after awhile. all the angst, the broken hearts, the longing... they are real feelings, but they're so overplayed. This one is different though.
This song, and the video with it, make me ache. It's like a physical hurt, one I'm not at all used to.
see, I'm single, (like you couldn't have guessed that by now) and I'm a guy (who else post a blog about bookmarks?) and moreover, i'm cool with that.
I was always a shy person. From the time I was little I would hang around on the edges of the kids playroom at whatever conference etc that my family went to. I don't recall any traumatizing incidents, and I don't really feel like I hang back because I'm scared. But I've just never felt comfortable in new environments, or with new people.
so as i grew up i stayed that way. I didn't have a whole lot of contact with other kids my age. I did get along famously with the adults that were around. and I've always been seen as an anomaly because i act so mature. i enjoyed that btw. it made me feel special.
still, i missed a lot of the "normal" social interaction that most kids get as they grow up. I've never kissed a girl, never played doctor, gone on a date...etc. and again, i was cool with all of that. but lately i've started to feel...alone.
and in a different way. in the past i've often felt alone, in fact i love being alone! and i've devloped the ability to enjoy being lonley. notice the difference.
i love BEING alone...with no one around. (that's not all that unique)
i developed the ability to enjoy LONELEYNESS. (i can take that pain and enoy it).
they say girls develop before boys, and that may be true. i remember tackiling a girl back when i was....13? and not undertanding the feelings that i had.
but while my body has been good-to-go for years, only now are my emotions catching up. i'm starting to long for a companion. and not in the physical way (for the most part). what i want most is someone to support my ideas, not arguing about them, just being there for me. a smile, a hug. someone i can truly take all my masks off around, and let them inside my shell.
this video shows a girl that feels what feel. i want to be that romeo.
i'm not ready yet, but i'm finally awake, i'm looking, for that one girl... the one that makes me complete.
i know this was a rambly post, and not all tha clear, but that why this blog exists. to help me work these issues out.
8D
You hear so many damn love songs all the time, on the radio, youtube, etc. and they all seem to blur together after awhile. all the angst, the broken hearts, the longing... they are real feelings, but they're so overplayed. This one is different though.
This song, and the video with it, make me ache. It's like a physical hurt, one I'm not at all used to.
see, I'm single, (like you couldn't have guessed that by now) and I'm a guy (who else post a blog about bookmarks?) and moreover, i'm cool with that.
I was always a shy person. From the time I was little I would hang around on the edges of the kids playroom at whatever conference etc that my family went to. I don't recall any traumatizing incidents, and I don't really feel like I hang back because I'm scared. But I've just never felt comfortable in new environments, or with new people.
so as i grew up i stayed that way. I didn't have a whole lot of contact with other kids my age. I did get along famously with the adults that were around. and I've always been seen as an anomaly because i act so mature. i enjoyed that btw. it made me feel special.
still, i missed a lot of the "normal" social interaction that most kids get as they grow up. I've never kissed a girl, never played doctor, gone on a date...etc. and again, i was cool with all of that. but lately i've started to feel...alone.
and in a different way. in the past i've often felt alone, in fact i love being alone! and i've devloped the ability to enjoy being lonley. notice the difference.
i love BEING alone...with no one around. (that's not all that unique)
i developed the ability to enjoy LONELEYNESS. (i can take that pain and enoy it).
they say girls develop before boys, and that may be true. i remember tackiling a girl back when i was....13? and not undertanding the feelings that i had.
but while my body has been good-to-go for years, only now are my emotions catching up. i'm starting to long for a companion. and not in the physical way (for the most part). what i want most is someone to support my ideas, not arguing about them, just being there for me. a smile, a hug. someone i can truly take all my masks off around, and let them inside my shell.
this video shows a girl that feels what feel. i want to be that romeo.
i'm not ready yet, but i'm finally awake, i'm looking, for that one girl... the one that makes me complete.
i know this was a rambly post, and not all tha clear, but that why this blog exists. to help me work these issues out.
8D
Friday, February 6, 2009
Bookmarks
Has anyone else noticed how bad bookmarking is these days? I think it's because the paradigm has shifted but the bookmarking tools still operate (for the most part) according to the outdated use cases.
I've identified several things a bookmarking service should be able to do.
1. In the old days bookmarks were files stored on your local computer that let you find useful sites quickly. that is still the fundamental function of a bookmarking tool. pretty much all the tools out there do this limited thing.
2. local archive. you should be able to backup your bookmarks to an html file. this allows you to use those bookmarks without having them installed in your current browser. say, if your at a friends house, all you'd need to bring with you is that file and you can access all your links, and search through them via description or tag. it also provides the vital "i-need-a-bombproof-way-of-storing-my-bookmarks-'cause-i'd-kill-myself-if-they-got-trashed" archive function. this archive must fully support any taging methods used. the end file should always be html, so it can be opened anywhere. (firefox screwed this one up latley using a .js file to hold the backups by default. although .html is an option, it doesn't support tags.)
3. online backup. it can be a pain to drag that html file with you everywhere, and like anything else, you will forget it. so now, with web 2.0, we'd like to store our links on an easily accessible webpage. that way the only thing we need to remember is that url and we can access our bookmarks on the go. ala, "johnnyboy.tool.com" .
4. sharing. since the web deals in news, videos, pictures, etc... we often find things that we think a friend would like. so a good bookmarking tool should allow for this. i think the best way would be to designate a folder or tag named "share with john" or "share with marcy".
5. the sharing feature should allow john and marcy to subscribe to that folder/tag via rss. that way you don't need to expressly "send" each page to them.
6. some folks aren't going to figure out the rss thing, so it needs to support sharing via email. the interface should not require anything from the user (not even an email account, god knows we all have too many already). you should just click "share via email", a window pops up, you select you friends email address from the list (or type it, if this is the first time you are sending to that address), type a quick message (ala, "hi john, this is the coolest plane i've ever seen. let me know what you think".), and hit send. voila!
it should be that simple, but so far no service i've seen supports that. stumble upon does an adequate job, but the email it sends is cluttered and annoying.
(also, the email that is recived should come from "tool.com" period, no identifing link ti john's account.)
7. bookmarks are fundamentally private. users don't want to broadcast their interesting in light bondage to the whole world, especialy not when it's attached to a username that their family may know. still, they want to be able to share the cute kittem pics with their moms. the trick here is to use user ids instead of names.
8. discovery. people like to find cool things. a great way to do this is to index what john likes, find others that like those things, and then alert him to new things found by those like minded folks (or rather, let him flip through the newest pages when he has the time, just like stumbleupon). stumbleupon is great at this, but they lack privacy features. meaning anything, anything you "like" is shown under your username. see point 7. (a sub point here is that people like to make friends online, so i would be a nice feature to allow john to "message" "andy" and talk about new sites or other opinions. it is important that these "friends" not know who john is except as "John", his alias. (notice it is different than "johnnyboy"...because any fool could figure that user "johnnyboy"'s private url is "johnnyboy.tool.com". thi wouldn't be huge since you met via "like" matching... but there is no reason to allow that contamination...a mirror of "johnnyboy.tool.com" could be created if john wanted at "1280237027.tool.com" so he could show "andy" his true interests, but this whole process should empower the user to set privacy as he wishes. the default settings should be strictly private.)
9. all of this must be fast. in browser tools are generally pretty good on speed. web tools generally take about 2 beats longer to sych up than you want. or they skip that and just sych on browser shutdown. that's ok...until you have a browser crash in the middle of a marathon bookmarking session. a better solution is needed.
10. nested tags. us old schoolers worked up elaborate folder hierarchies that put a taco website in food/mexican/spicy. (and some far longer). we don't want to trash the old system just to start using (poorly supported) tags. you need to be able to import your old bookmarks and copy that order with tags. so the old taco site can be found by looking for any of the foldername/tags AND you can still get to it via browsing your bookmarks. if you can't nest tags you can't navigate through the bookmarks to see what you've got, it's all just one huge mess in the "root" of the bookmarks folder. so if you didn't put good tags on a page you cant search for it (at least not now, see point 11).
11. searchable. not just by url, title, description,keywords, and tags or folders...but full text on the page. (you can probably get away with just pulling the text off of the page, you don't need to SAVE it, next point, so the storage needs wouldn't really be that huge).
12. store local copies of the pages. maybe not all of them, but make taking a webpage offline easy. just hit the "readable offline" button. the famous "readitlater" extention for firefox can do this, but it should be hardwired into any decent bookmarking tool.
that's all i can think of for the moment. if you have any suggestions, let me know.
if you know a good bookmarking tool that does all of this, i REALLY REALLY want to know!!!!!
ok?
thanks.
:D
I've identified several things a bookmarking service should be able to do.
1. In the old days bookmarks were files stored on your local computer that let you find useful sites quickly. that is still the fundamental function of a bookmarking tool. pretty much all the tools out there do this limited thing.
2. local archive. you should be able to backup your bookmarks to an html file. this allows you to use those bookmarks without having them installed in your current browser. say, if your at a friends house, all you'd need to bring with you is that file and you can access all your links, and search through them via description or tag. it also provides the vital "i-need-a-bombproof-way-of-storing-my-bookmarks-'cause-i'd-kill-myself-if-they-got-trashed" archive function. this archive must fully support any taging methods used. the end file should always be html, so it can be opened anywhere. (firefox screwed this one up latley using a .js file to hold the backups by default. although .html is an option, it doesn't support tags.)
3. online backup. it can be a pain to drag that html file with you everywhere, and like anything else, you will forget it. so now, with web 2.0, we'd like to store our links on an easily accessible webpage. that way the only thing we need to remember is that url and we can access our bookmarks on the go. ala, "johnnyboy.tool.com" .
4. sharing. since the web deals in news, videos, pictures, etc... we often find things that we think a friend would like. so a good bookmarking tool should allow for this. i think the best way would be to designate a folder or tag named "share with john" or "share with marcy".
5. the sharing feature should allow john and marcy to subscribe to that folder/tag via rss. that way you don't need to expressly "send" each page to them.
6. some folks aren't going to figure out the rss thing, so it needs to support sharing via email. the interface should not require anything from the user (not even an email account, god knows we all have too many already). you should just click "share via email", a window pops up, you select you friends email address from the list (or type it, if this is the first time you are sending to that address), type a quick message (ala, "hi john, this is the coolest plane i've ever seen. let me know what you think".), and hit send. voila!
it should be that simple, but so far no service i've seen supports that. stumble upon does an adequate job, but the email it sends is cluttered and annoying.
(also, the email that is recived should come from "tool.com" period, no identifing link ti john's account.)
7. bookmarks are fundamentally private. users don't want to broadcast their interesting in light bondage to the whole world, especialy not when it's attached to a username that their family may know. still, they want to be able to share the cute kittem pics with their moms. the trick here is to use user ids instead of names.
- so john doe would sign up as "johnnyboy",
- his online bookmark page would be "johnnyboy.tool.com" (easy for him to remember),
- he'd share folders or tags with his mom as "rss.13729839.tool.com" (or just "13729839.tool.com") (notice that it's not "13729839.tool.com/kittens", we don't want mom to navigate upwards to 13729839.tool.com and see a list of all folders, get it?)
8. discovery. people like to find cool things. a great way to do this is to index what john likes, find others that like those things, and then alert him to new things found by those like minded folks (or rather, let him flip through the newest pages when he has the time, just like stumbleupon). stumbleupon is great at this, but they lack privacy features. meaning anything, anything you "like" is shown under your username. see point 7. (a sub point here is that people like to make friends online, so i would be a nice feature to allow john to "message" "andy" and talk about new sites or other opinions. it is important that these "friends" not know who john is except as "John", his alias. (notice it is different than "johnnyboy"...because any fool could figure that user "johnnyboy"'s private url is "johnnyboy.tool.com". thi wouldn't be huge since you met via "like" matching... but there is no reason to allow that contamination...a mirror of "johnnyboy.tool.com" could be created if john wanted at "1280237027.tool.com" so he could show "andy" his true interests, but this whole process should empower the user to set privacy as he wishes. the default settings should be strictly private.)
- the discovery feature should not show any user name. thus john has the internal profile (the one the matching engine sees) of "johnnyboy.tool.com". this shows ALL "liked" bookmarks, but it is in no way tracible (to the public anyway) to john's account. this way john is sent pages on both kittens and light bondage. but since no one knows the full access "johnnyboy.tool.com" url, they can't see what he doesn't want them to see. he only gives out the spesific shared folder/tags.
9. all of this must be fast. in browser tools are generally pretty good on speed. web tools generally take about 2 beats longer to sych up than you want. or they skip that and just sych on browser shutdown. that's ok...until you have a browser crash in the middle of a marathon bookmarking session. a better solution is needed.
10. nested tags. us old schoolers worked up elaborate folder hierarchies that put a taco website in food/mexican/spicy. (and some far longer). we don't want to trash the old system just to start using (poorly supported) tags. you need to be able to import your old bookmarks and copy that order with tags. so the old taco site can be found by looking for any of the foldername/tags AND you can still get to it via browsing your bookmarks. if you can't nest tags you can't navigate through the bookmarks to see what you've got, it's all just one huge mess in the "root" of the bookmarks folder. so if you didn't put good tags on a page you cant search for it (at least not now, see point 11).
11. searchable. not just by url, title, description,keywords, and tags or folders...but full text on the page. (you can probably get away with just pulling the text off of the page, you don't need to SAVE it, next point, so the storage needs wouldn't really be that huge).
12. store local copies of the pages. maybe not all of them, but make taking a webpage offline easy. just hit the "readable offline" button. the famous "readitlater" extention for firefox can do this, but it should be hardwired into any decent bookmarking tool.
that's all i can think of for the moment. if you have any suggestions, let me know.
if you know a good bookmarking tool that does all of this, i REALLY REALLY want to know!!!!!
ok?
thanks.
:D
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Progress report
Greetings my naughty monkeys,
I've had several ideas for posts, but I've not had the chance to work on them with a clear head. And really, there is just no point to writing down the ravings of a man half dead with sleep.
What has absorbed a bit of my time has been the creation of my playlist. Imeem.com has a great database of songs. I'm hoping it continues to work as well as it has thus far. My playlist now has over 150 songs from techno to oldies. It is still a work in progress, and i haven't even touched the list of 500+ that I at one point created in ms access. I've tried to get away from propriatairy software as much as i can. I'm not a nut about it, but I'm a fan of the open source movment.
If anyone happens across this, I'd love to learn about how the free software movment earns enough to support the developers.
That's about all I have to report so far. I'm not apologizing about that, it is what it is.
but if you like my music, let me know :)
8D
I've had several ideas for posts, but I've not had the chance to work on them with a clear head. And really, there is just no point to writing down the ravings of a man half dead with sleep.
What has absorbed a bit of my time has been the creation of my playlist. Imeem.com has a great database of songs. I'm hoping it continues to work as well as it has thus far. My playlist now has over 150 songs from techno to oldies. It is still a work in progress, and i haven't even touched the list of 500+ that I at one point created in ms access. I've tried to get away from propriatairy software as much as i can. I'm not a nut about it, but I'm a fan of the open source movment.
If anyone happens across this, I'd love to learn about how the free software movment earns enough to support the developers.
That's about all I have to report so far. I'm not apologizing about that, it is what it is.
but if you like my music, let me know :)
8D
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