Example 1:
Current technology in the personal, portable storage that can communicate with an insane number of other devices, is not good enough. Why is car insurance only valid if current and printed on a specific piece of paper?! Not just any PAPER – oddly-sized and PINK paper… Ok well it doesn’t have to be pink because I can use a photocopy, right? Actually, no. At least here in Ontario you must have an original insurance slip unless it is a temporary one that the insurance company has emailed you until your little pink pieces of deforestation arrive sometime in the future by mail. And yes, even though you have only one car, they are going to send you 12 little pieces of paper because clearly you are stupid. But can you have an incredibly hi-res image showing proof of insurance on a device which is back-lit and easier to read (eg. zoom in as necessary) for the cop who is on the final hours of his shift and just wants to go home because it’s been a long night, all the caffeine has worn off, and if someone hands him another photocopy of a pink piece of paper he just might drag them from their car and pistol-whip them for stupidity… Can you have an image on your phone? Nope – better have that special piece of paper.

Example2:

Life Technologies has announced a $7 million dollar competition to improve its new Ion Personal Genome Machine (PGM) sequencer, which reads DNA using semiconductor technology. At $50,000, it costs about a tenth of other sequencing machines. – “Life Technologies $7 million competition for improved DNA sequencing“,  kurzweilai.net

Yet we are constantly hammered over the head to buy reusable coffee containers because it’s 2011 and we still can’t recycle a cardboard cup, some wax, and a plastic lid. The fact that a huge percentage of consumer packaging is STILL not recyclable is a bit disturbing. Yes there is the argument that is shouldn’t be produced in the first place and I get it, however there is a certain level of common sense in that not everything can travel or be stocked in a hemp bag…. We have been producing packaging products since before I was born, yet in 2011 not everything is recyclable, and not all regions will recycle it. Insane.

Example 3:
Your portable technology is still only as good as the life of your batteries. When you think about it, battery technology hasn’t really changed a whole lot over the years. Yes, packaging has improved, size has improved, and you can now actually recycle the little suckers, but really, it is still a chemical reaction happening to provide you with juice to power whatever you need and that juice only lasts a little while compared to the length of time you actually need. Sure, thinking back to the original cell phones where the battery would last 1-2 hours, and now your iphone lasts maybe 4h we’re talking at least a 100% improvement there, but that was more advancements in power-sucking technology than improvements to the actual power cell… Walking into a store tomorrow, you have roughly the same choices of batteries you did 10 years ago and if you’re buying Alkaline batteries – that technology has been around since 1950 when Canadian engineer Lewis Urry figured it out for the Eveready Battery company. It’s 2011 and I have to go plug in my iphone before I lose this post.

So we’re back with another fresh installment of Lyrical Lessons – but first – the lyrics:

don’t hold back…
cause you woke up in the mornin, with initiative to move, so why make it harder…
don’t hold back…
if you think about it, so many people do, be cool man, look smarter….
don’t hold back…
and you shouldn’t even care, bout those losers in the air, and their crooked stares…
don’t hold back…
cause there’s a party over here, so you might as well be here, where the people care…
don’t hold back…

…

world, my finger, is on the button…
my finger, is on the button…
my finger, is on the button…

push the button…

- “Galvanize”, Push The Button, The Chemical Brothers

Change. Change who you are, what you do, your views, your opinions, your beliefs, and anything else you want to without a) yourself getting in the way, b) analysis paralysis, c) fear of what others might think, or d) fear of being alone. Push the button – your own button – and make it happen.

Change. You have 5 seconds.

Change sucks because something is going to clobber you once you start and it’s up to you, and you alone to deal with it.

Well, if you haven’t before, you have now. Change, generally, is a good thing. Change for the sake of change? Bad thing. Small changes = good. Big changes = who the hell knows. The idea is good, doing it is hard, and if something screws up along the way, then it’s bad.

Change is a force, and if we remember anything from high school physics class it’s Newton’s 3rd law of motion (simplified):

“To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

This does explain why change is often de-railed once the process of change has begun. Take for example someone who wants to take control of their financial situation. They go out, buy some books, learn, and start reducing costs, saving, investing – yet what happens shortly there after? A sudden massive expense arrives out of the blue and all the hard work is suddenly dashed in a short period of time. Yes, they were further ahead, they have learned skills that can be duplicated again, and things can be gotten back on track – but it’s up to them. Life suddenly threw a curve-ball at them and future success or failure on their part will be up to them. Another example is when someone decides to take control of their un-healthy lifestyle and do something about it. So what do they do? They start to get up early and excercise, they begin to drink more water, and they start to track their food intake and make better choices. This works for a bit of time until either they suffer an injury or become ill (flu, cold, etc) which disrupts the schedule and takes them out of the game for a period of time. Take the smoker who finally decides to quit once and for all, yet during the same week something highly stressful happens and they’re right back to smoking again.

We can all look around and see this pattern happen for people over and over and over again. But why? Why is there always an equal and opposite reaction – especially when the change is significant? Does it always happen? No idea – but it does happen enough to notice it… Some would say that these are tests to see if you are truly committed to the change that you desire (god, universe, whatever), but why? What possible purpose does it serve? Why not a big challenge at the end of change so that which has changed can directly apply to, and effectively mange the challenge?

It has been said that you’re only supposed to change one thing at a time, for example, stop smoking, but don’t stop smoking, stop drinking, start running marathons, and start eating carrots all at once. Stop one thing for 21 days and develop the habit so that you can move onto the next thing requiring change and that which you have changed is now a habit. Kinda makes sense, however, the clobbering potential still applies regardless of whether or not it’s one change or 10. Changing 10 things at once is to say the least, challenging, however, it is entirely possible. Changing just one thing is also possible, yet depending on what it is can easily equal 10 things.

The point here is regardless of what, why, or how many things you decide to change, beware of the clobbering that is in your future. Yes, if you’re committed to the change(s) then it merely becomes an annoyance or a delay, yet if you happen to have insight as to why it happens (and it will) – do share.

And yes, I’m currently battling a cold after a whole week of working out in the mornings and dramatically improving my intake… Clobbered.

Asking questions is easy – we do it all day long: Do you have the time? Have you seen so-and-so today? Where did we park the car? What are we having for dinner? Should we have one glass of wine each, or four? But even simple questions have the ability to mess with your belief system in a big way. Lets for example, all agree that taking the life of someone is bad. Ok – that’s a belief correct? We both believe that taking another person’s life is bad. Now what happens when you start to ask questions? Questions like:

• Are there people that believe it is good?
• Why would they believe this?
• What other beliefs must you possess in order to believe that you are correct?
• Where did those beliefs come from?
• Is is there ever justification?
• What about in situation X?
• Why not? Is that belief valid?
• and so on..

In context these simple questions provide us with the ability to explore things even if they are completely contrary to what we believe. No one ever said you have to agree with the answers, yet are you willing to ask the questions to actually get the answers? I’m not saying asking questions of a thesis/PhD-type where you’re dedicating your life to finding the answers, but what about just asking enough to learn something new? And what happens when you learn something true and correct that is contrary to what we believe?

Now if we take the list of questions from above out of context, take out the ‘personal/beliefs’ references, and then apply them to….. the economy? religion? technology? anthropology? linguistics? Every day we are continually marveling at the advances and decline of humanity, yet advancements come from the hands of people who ask questions – decline comes from the hands of those who stopped asking.

… to be continued

It is said that the average 5 year old asks between 300-400 questions per day which to me is both insanely disturbing yet absolutely incredible. If we think about our day to day lives (now much older than 5), how many questions do we ask vs. how many statements to we make? My guess is that at first we likely don’t ask as many questions as we once did, yet we likely ask more than that because there are many questions we didn’t even realize we were asking.

Yes, of course it’s not about the quantity but the quality, right? Well generally, however, who are you to decide what a quality question is or not? Ok sure we can likely agree that rhetorical questions are not quality, but other than that, will you not ask because of you’re allowing your bias to screw up your judgment? Lets skip the debate over what makes a question good or not and purely focus on the actual power of asking a question.

While wandering through the book store I was skim-browsing some of the titles in the business section when I started to notice books by economists. Now having learned a bit more about economists and how they perceive and explore the world around them, titles I recognized started popping out. Always the junkie for purchasing books (reading optional – the intent is always there to read the book, yet it could take some time before I get to starting it.. Finishing it is a whole other topic.), I started to explore a couple books. What is this book about? Where do I know that author name from? Is this book really what I’m looking for? Is there something better right in front of my eyes that I’m not seeing? How much is this book in my hands? That much? Why? and so on…

After picking up a particular book to explore further and then looking for a more suitable perch for my coffee than the last precarious location, I noticed a massively thick book sitting on the top shelf. Ooooh, what’s that? Now the title of the big book is rather intriguing: “The Real Price Of EVERYTHING” edited with an introduction by Michael Lewis. At first I wondered if it was literally a book filled with items and their price at the time of compiled all printed insanely small and on bible paper to ensure maximum pages – thankfully it was not (but if the print was really small, and you were able to gather the data in a relatively short period of time – how many items could be listed in ~1400 pages?).

Rest of the long story short, I found myself asking: What if I actually read this entire book?, and the power of a simple question now sees a gaping hole where this book was located in the store, a surprised look on the cashier’s face as it slams into the counter, a little old lady thinking it was a bible then realizing it is not, and this book on the end of my desk in one of the cat’s many favourite sitting places. Sure there was the expected justification before, during, and well after the purchase, yet the power of a single question changed everything.

To be continued… (Part 2 in a couple days)

So shift gears for a second here. Sure, there is the Google we all know and love for searching, SEO, email, chat, shared documents, YouTube, etc. etc.. Literally, the list goes on for quite a while.. But how much user data are they actually harvesting from a) the people that use their sites, and b) the sites that gladly log their data with Google in trade for some poor analytics? It’s one thing to gather some data from your own group of sites, but now hook up millions and millions of websites with billions of users logging data into your systems. The best part is that all you have to provide in return is some approximate/estimated metrics that are older than 24h. You don’t need to provide database access, and they’re completely limited to exactly what you give them. Do you honestly believe that because a specific item of user data isn’t available in your GA account that they’re not storing it?

So why then are we using it? Well, for small sites it’s cheap and it’s good. Even for medium sized sites it’s a good solid platform that can provide the necessary data to make good decisions. The challenge here is that  I have a big issue with large corporate sites giving away their data. Ok, but what are the alternatives, right? Well, sadly there isn’t much. There are a bunch of companies that claim to have superior analytics, and one I’ve found that answered a lot of questions about the specific database that started all of this.. Not sure how good their product is, however, it is very interesting to say the least.

Anything available that is Open Source? Well, actually, now that you mention it – sorta. While doing some of this digging I came across PiWik:

Piwik is a downloadable, open source (GPL licensed) web analytics software program. It provides you with detailed real time reports on your website visitors: the search engines and keywords they used, the language they speak, your popular pages… and so much more.

Piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics.

Oh really? After installing it on my trusty webserver, and noticing how truly dismal my traffic is (meh, most of the content is ready by RSS anyways which sometimes makes me wonder why bother having anything other than an RSS feed), I began to notice that this crew is onto something. Sure, it’s still got a ways to go before it becomes a serious contender to GA – but wow!

Ok, so now look at it this way: GA is top dog, but barely gives a dog a bone – right? PiWik is out proving that you can own your own data, they have made great strides in gathering data just like GA, and really, if they had some funding/more coders they could be in serious contention in a very short time. The question now begs, if you’re a massive corporation who has the bankroll + developers who could actually make this happen – then why are you giving your data away?

Data is everything, because without it you cannot convert it to information, you cannot gather sufficient information to convert it to knowledge, and without knowledge, you cannot take action.

data, google analytics, PiWik, knowledge

So here is the challenge. Along the way you gain experience points which in turn helps move you up the levels. At the time of writing this I am at level 20 out of a possible 40 levels – I’m half way there. Now, because there is no level 41 (currently – they may add more levels later), there are potentially hundreds or thousands of people at this level. Also, much of your strength in the game is determined by the number of Twitter followers that you have. So we now have a ceiling on how high you can go in the game, if you don’t build your Twitter followers you will always be the whipping boy of larger players, and really, once you make it to the top – it’s really really crowded with no clear winner. Basically, all the people who have reached level 40 are now just collecting money, buying stuff, and attacking each other. There is no victory – just wasted time. Sure, you could make the argument that the entire thing is a waste of time, and no doubt, some will. That’s fine.

Looking at life however, how many games do we play where there is no possibility of winning? I believe that Sun Tzu put it best when he wrote:

Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.

The true hardliners take the stance that if you haven’t already won, don’t even play. In life, it’s always a bit challenging to be that definitive, but the basic principle of  that if you don’t even stand a chance of winning – don’t play. But what about all the glorious learning through failure that could be had? Well, how much fun has it been so far? Sure, there are times where we fail, and we learn, but to actively go out and look for things to fail at? I agree, it doesn’t make much sense.

The fact is that if there is the possibility of winning, then you have the possibility of winning. That’s a good thing. You also have the possibility of losing, however, in this case you have the opportunity of learning so that you can win in the future. Also a good thing.

It came to the point in Spymaster where I suddenly realized that unless I wanted to game Twitter and dramatically increase my following in a very short time, for no other gain than the game, then there was no possibility of ever winning. Why was I even playing? We don’t need more things in our lives that we can’t win at. We need more things that we can win at and we need to take the time to recognize these.

If you can’t win, ever – don’t even play.

Someone is speaking well of you.

Yeah, I finally fired up the old WordPress back-end and figured I should post something this quarter… Seriously, I didn’t realize until the other day that the last post was way back in early January! Not entirely sure what the heck happened between now and then, however, we’re here now, so on with the show.

At first I really didn’t have much to say about this one other than ‘it’s about time!’, but quickly realized that all though potentially true, it really wasn’t the ideal tone to set when making a comeback… again… My more refined response to someone speaking well of me, was in two parts that kinda landed on top of one another:

• who am I speaking well of?
• who am I not speaking well of, and why?

What?! I’m not speaking well of someone? Reality check here people – we all don’t get along, we all don’t have to get along, and we all have different opions of each other that might escape our face from time to time. But who are we speaking well of right now? I guess ultimately, the ‘why’ part of the second question should be placed up with the first question to draw on the… more positive aspects of things… and it’s true, and it also fits with the second question too. Essentially, the fact that you are speaking well of someone is simply (in it’s simplicity – not it’s importance) an indicator of what we need more of in our lives. Sure it sounds kinda like a cliche, but, um, what’s the alternative?

Where it gets a bit tricky is when we look at who we’re not speaking well of – yeah, put the list away for a second – but more importantly, WHY we’re not speaking well of them. It generally has to do with a certain trait (or lack of one) that sets us down the path. Get us around some like-minded individuals who can all recognize this catastrophic ‘trait issue’, and we all natter along until someone feels too guilty about the situation and we all shut up. Yet the kicker to all of this is that if you are able to recognize a good trait in someone, it is because you also posses that trait – if you didn’t already posses it, you wouldn’t be able to recognize it… and you can see where this is going… But wait, how can I recognize the fact that they are lacking a certain trait? If they’re truly lacking it, that would mean that I’m lacking it, yet if I’m lacking it, I don’t posses it, and therefore I can’t recognize it – and your brain explodes.

Picking up the pieces, we now discover that we are in fact looking at the only mirror in the world that will never show you to your face, but will show you yourself, better than you could ever see in a regular mirror.

Someone speaking well of you? Fantastic – you deserve it. Have a list of people you’re not speaking well of? Do you know why? Great, change – you’ve got 5 minutes.

Be well, and speak well.

I work in a big office building. Not one of those massive downtown behemoth’s that have separate elevators for upper and lower floors, but given the area of the city it’s located in, my office building is a big blue glass monolith that you can (sadly) see for miles around. Seriously, I can walk to the end of my street, look left, and literally yell “Thar she ‘blows!” while pointing off in the distance at the big blue whale rising above the sea of trees. The special days are when you’re looking east towards the office, the sun is setting in the west, and you get this nice blinding reminder (literally) of what awaits you the next day… The point here is that it’s big. With big offices come hordes of people you don’t know, and cleaning staffs that scour that sucker for hours long after you leave for the day…

One of the big concerns in large offices where not everyone knows your name is simply, theft. For a while there, just after I had first started, laptops were being removed from people’s desks – during business hours! Constantly there were emails circulating throughout about how to secure your equipment, not to leave laptops laying around, and if you didn’t recognize anyone in the office to challenge their reason for existance. Did I get challenged? Yes, a couple times, however, after about a month of everyone interrogating everyone else in the office who was meant to be there, we all just gave up on vigilante security and went back to just locking our stuff to our desks (yay Kensington!).

So the daytime theft had decreased, yet at night the odd backpack left at a desk was rifled through, or prizes meant to be given away for contests suddenly evolved, grew legs, realized this was no place to hang around, and walked away. The next day most conversations would consist of how terrible that such a thing happened, yet each time ended with something like ‘well, it should have been locked up anyways’… Wait. No. It shouldn’t. Sure everyone comments about how sad it is that we have to lock our doors when we leave in the morning, how we need security systems for our cars (that don’t necessarily work), how our stuff on our desks needs to be locked away, etc. etc., yet WHY does it have to be like that?

Property theft is one of those things that I never really understood. At what point to you have the right to remove something from my possession, without my approval, and do with it what you will? Why is your selfishness and sense of entitlement greater than mine or anyone elses in the world? What makes you so special?

Now keeping all of this in mind, what do you think went through my head first when I discovered that I had left my watch sitting on my desk when I got home? Yeah, not pretty. See, depending on the shirt I’m wearing that day, if my watch band is exposed, it scratches on my keyboard rest, or just generally makes a lot of noise as I use my computer. So to combat this I simply take it off and place it on the supporting leg of my monitor until I’m finished for the day, or until I get up to go somewhere. There have been the odd time where I’ve gotten up to go get a cup of mocha (coffee + hot chocolate; can you possibly go wrong?!), forgotten the watch, and it’s still been there. Generally during the day (and given the location of my desk) I’m not overly concerned about my watch evolving and walking away. On this particular evening however, I was ill, tired and just wanted to go home. I packed up my stuff, made sure I had everything and headed downstairs to kidnap my wife from her cube (yeah, same company, same building – but different floors, and different brands). As per usual, something in the back of my brain was trying to tell me that I was forgetting something… Side note: Brain, it would be REALLY useful if you would just tell me what I’m forgetting, rather than just annoyingly hint at it for hours on end.

After being home for a while, I suddenly realized exactly what  i had forgotten at work. I quickly located another source of time, realized that even if I left now the cleaning staff would have already been through, and now had two simple choices: either go to the office now and possibly have the rest of my night ruined, or simply resign to the fact that there is a 50-50 chance that I’ll be disappointed in the morning. I chose the latter…

When chosing to be either surprised that there is still honest people in the world or that everyone sucks, it begins to mess with your brain a bit. There is the part of you that figures the minimum wage, non-english speaking cleaning staff just had a pretty good score tonight and that you’re a complete idiot for leaving something like that on your desk – but there is the other part of you that figures (especially when you realize that you’re being a jerk and that the previous line of thought is the entire reason why we keep our stuff locked down), no, generally people are honest and respect other people and their property. Our brain might even go as far as to justifying the disappearance of such an item in that perhaps this new immigrant who doesn’t speak the language, fled a war-torn country, is working this menial job just to put food on the table, and that perhaps if they’re able to get a few more dollars for my materialism, they could probably buy some warm winter clothing for their children…. or something along those lines.

If you truly let the brain run wild down certain lines, you can quickly find yourself out to hate everyone, or out to pity everyone including yourself… and this really doesn’t do anyone any good. On the other hand, it is important to remember that other people don’t always suck. Not everyone is out to rip you off by stealing your stuff. Not everyone has an over-inflated sense of entitlement, and not everyone deserves to be suspected of stealing something before anything has even happened, or before you even know whether or not you’re even at a loss. Sure, there are jerks on the public transit every morning and every night with the previously mentioned over-inflated sense of entitlement, but there are also the self-aware people who aren’t about to bang into you with their backpacks, or yell into their phones on a bad connection.

For the most part I beleive that honest and good people far outnumber the ignorant in our society – if you don’t think so, then you could be right, and if you are, then it’s your fault.

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.

In this context, “almost surely” is a mathematical term with a precise meaning, and the “monkey” is not an actual monkey; rather, it is a metaphor for an abstract device that produces a random sequence of letters ad infinitum. The theorem illustrates the perils of reasoning about infinity by imagining a vast but finite number, and vice versa. The probability of a monkey typing a given string of text as long as, say, Hamlet, is so tiny that, were the experiment conducted, the chance of it actually occurring during a span of time of the order of the age of the universe is minuscule but not zero.

Ok, there is no Shakespeare (as far as I know), no monkeys, Bob is in Texas, probability of Bob reaching 100 submitters is high (not minuscule or zero), and no monkeys were harmed in the making of this blog post that promotes the 2nd ever BLOGAPOLOOZA over at Middle Zone Musings happening all month long. Want to participate? Read this and/or ping Bob by email or by Twitter. Oh, and yes, thanks to Wiki, we now know that the above image does not contain a monkey but a Chimpanzee, and Chimps should be regarded as apes and not monkeys.

P.S. My glorious post gets published today at 6pm!