Positively Glorious!

Recently, Jessica and I took the plunge into Cell Phone land. After years of working without them, it was becoming evident that my business work was suffering a bit. Also, since we don’t have long distance on our house phone, Jessica wasn’t talking with her family as much as she wanted. So, after a grudging decision, we jumped in.

Jess didn’t want a smart phone. Just a regular phone without a bunch of bells and whistles. Me? Because I’m such a geek, I jumped straight into the Android Open Source operating system world with a Motorola Cliq.

Mostly, it’s because I do a lot of things that warrant a certain amount of information accessibility. But it’s also because I just like to play with computers, and the smart phones of today are more powerful computers than I was programming on 15 years ago. Amazing.

Still, the most fun I’ve had with it so far is not really techy at all. It’s something that phones have had for a long time: Custom ringtones.

Continue Reading »

So I’m walking down the street last night. It’s dark, and I’m walking fast because I’m meeting my fair Jessica at a restaurant and want to be there before her, because I don’t mind waiting for her, but I know she doesn’t like waiting for me.

So, I’m walking faster than usual.

It was a beautiful night, actually. Pretty warm. I had my favorite brown leather “not used for a motorcycle anymore because I sold that to Jessie’s father” jacket and a new pair of  “original, hard as freakin cardboard because I’m not buying any of that ‘about to break down pre-washed’ crap” Levi jeans.

So there I am, hair down and flowing, all 6+ foot of me, striding down the hill thinking “I can’t wait to get to the restaurant and read my book until Jessie shows up.”

But that’s not what other people were thinking, I guess. Continue Reading »

Here’s a story. It’s apropos of nothing, but I’ve been too busy to write enough here, so I thought this would make people smile.

I could go on and on about how it’s a story of Social Networking, and how sometimes the world is a better place because we’re closer, or at least more able to contact people for random bits of meaningless and make friends.

It could be a story about how we’re not so distant, or maybe how we’re differently distant.

But it’s not, because then I’d feel the need to actually do a bit of research to support my theory, and post it on mettadore.com, which I know plenty of people are sick of. So, rather than anything meaningful, it’s merely an amusing anecdote.

I was at work, drinking maté, typing away, la la la, work work work, data data data, la la l–

AHH!

I spilled maté on my mac!

Well, the story’s a happy one, because, as you can see from the image of my tweet, physics saved me. That’s not always the case. At certain times, physics is a right bastard, particularly when I’m on my skateboard, or ice skates, or standing on my roof trying one more time to get my Superman Underroos to do their damn job!

Anyway, physics is sometimes a bastard, but this time it was cool.

So today, I got an email message from someone that made me chuckle:

Hi John-

Google led me to your tweet from 1/28: “The surface tension of water is strong enough that water won’t flow into certain sized holes… like those of a MacBook Pro’s speaker.”

I just spilled a (small) bit of iced coffee onto my 15″ 2008 MBP left speaker grill, so the topic is near to me… The coffee seemed to just sit on the grill for the couple of seconds it took me to wipe it off. My empirical evidence supports you theory.

First, I looked on the web for teardown photos to see where the microphone was. No luck. Since I’m wondering if I might have any trouble, I was wondering if you had any more background for your MBP speaker/surface tension info.

Thanks!

I thought it was pretty funny that someone would actually look up “surface tension” or something like that- what a total geek. What was funnier was that I actually looked it up, and started to do a calculation the day it happened, just to see. Now “that’s” a total geek!

Anyway, I sent a message back, mostly to be funny, because I always feel both funnier and more helpful when I connect to someone through social networking.

Hi! Wow, pretty funny connection. Social Networking FTW!

So, no, nothing. No problems and no later developments. I did calculations of surface tension in grad school and the size of those holes are, in fact, too small. However, I will give the caveat that certain things increase or decrease the surface tension of water. “Uh oh? Where’s he going with this?” You ask.

For instance, cat spit. I have some knowledge of cat spit, and it decreases water’s surface tension. Don’t ask me how I know this, it’s an embarrassing situation that I’m still in counseling for. Suffice it to say that if you have a cat, you may want to be careful letting him drink beverages around your laptop (The whole “lack of a thumb” thing is hard for them, but I’ve learned that now, and we’re moving on)

Anyway, I’m not sure where coffee is on this. Whether it increases or decreases it. However, even if it decreased it, it would have to be an insane amount to get into that grill. My suspicion is that the Apple engineers are somewhat sloppy drinkers, and have thought about everything– based on they’re own klutsy habits!

I think your safe. Yay Mac!

Hope everything else is equally peachy.
-J

The whole exchange got me thinking about my New Year’s Resolution for 2009, which I’ve re-resolved for 2010. That was “to be more Irish.” It’s a tough goal. Being Irish is nothing to sniff at. It’s no easy feat, but I’m convinced I can do it if I work hard enough. This exchange bodes well, because the Irish have a saying that a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet.

This person shot me an email out of the blue, and email to a stranger, and email to a friend she hasn’t met yet. That’s the cool thing about social networking. We’re all friends.

Yay for Social Networking! (and yay for the Irish, too!)

I have this habit of playing a silly game that I call “The Deep Joke.” The name is a bit of a “thought train,” but basically comes out of a childhood search for meaning and an album called “Deep Breakfast,” itself named after a book.

Anyway, when I was a child, I learned something about comedy. I learned that there were things called “jokes.” I know, it’s not revolutionary, but to me it was pretty amazing, because as soon as I learned about jokes, I started– as is my wont– pushing the boundaries of them.

Very quickly I found that the concept went deeper than I thought. Because most jokes were about something. That’s like the fundamenal joke. The simple joke. A comment about something. They’re fun, sure, but I wanted more.

Maybe it’s because of my father, and his semi-Indian-incredibly-subtle-always-multiple-meanings form of communication, or maybe it’s just because I really liked jokes. Whatever the reason, slowly, I came to realize that it was much more fun to be had if you didn’t limit yourself to simply making jokes about something. It was possible to make jokes about about something.

It became my habit to make what I started to call “deep jokes.”

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I have this common statement that I make that’s actually an inside joke that I think only I get. Whenever I’m ending something, I say “Well, you know what the music means.” I’ve been given cause recently to wonder that some people might not.

I had a wonderful dinner the other evening with a friend that Jessica and I’ve met through our local community theater. We’ve been wanting to get together to chat for a while, and finally had the chance to visit them for dinner. It was a really exciting night for me because her husband is a bagpiper, and I really, really love the bagpipes. Not the Great Highland Bagpipes (The “GHB,” as they say), I love small pipes.¹ That small, very ancient instrument that you can safely listen to in the intimacy of a small room and which rarely fail to touch pluck my heartstrings.

This man was a small piper, and I was really excited to finally be in the same room with this great instrument. I was even honored by being allowed to play them! For the first time in my life, I held this wonderful instrument in my hand and managed to get out the few first bars of “Mary Had A Little Lamb” before collapsing into laughter.

What bliss! It was as night filled with music and conversation, but there was one interesting conversation that the night brought on which I thought about long after the night was over. In fact, I thought about it all that night, and all the next day.

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1. And there are a lot of small pipes. In fact there’s a list of bagpipes that shows that they are ridiculously culturally ubiquitous in Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa. [↩]

Yesterday, I saw an interesting snippet on Manton Reece’s blog. It’s actually a snippet of a snippet, because it was originally written by Seth Godin:

When I was at MOMA last week, I saw a list of director and artist Tim Burton’s projects. Here’s the guy who’s responsible for some of the most breathtaking movies of his generation, and the real surprise is this: almost every year over the last thirty, he worked on one or more exciting projects that were never green lighted and produced. Every year, he spent an enormous amount of time on failed projects.

This is not at all a surprise to me, because I do the same thing. Continue Reading »

Because it’s Christmas, and because this time of gift-giving is so difficult in so many ways, I wanted to take a moment to detail more about what gift-giving is to me. The focus of it being that gifts have meaning.

And, more importantly, the act of giving itself has meaning. Deep meaning.

When I give a gift, the responsibility of that gift lies with me, the giver. It is my responsibility to know this person, to take the time to seek and to listen. It is my responsibility to find that one thing that they secretly want, but would not share with themselves. That thing they feel they don’t deserve or can’t afford.

Then, having given them this gift, I thus remove their guilt of having this thing.

That is the real gift.

The gift of receiving the thing free of the burden of needing justification. If I gave an expensive but unwanted jewel, I’d be saying “here’s meaninglessness in our meaningless relationship.” If I give a treasured but inexpensive trifle, I’m saying “Here is meaning, in the depth of our relationship.” Continue Reading »

You all know them. The people who give gifts of toilet brushes, or gifts of a steak dinner to a vegetarian. As I sit in the house of my wife’s parents during this Christmas holiday, it comes that I have a few spare moments to contemplate bad gifts, culture, and the phenomenon of gift-giving.¹

There is kind of cultural nuance that intrigues me about gift-giving. It is a nuance that I feel every Christmas when traveling home to the culture of my in-laws. It strikes me that every family is a blending of two cultures– whether ethnic cultures as ours, or merely familial cultures. These variations become very pronounced during gift-giving, and Christmas is nothing if not a time of gift-giving.

Coming from a multi-ethnic family, a mixed-race person like me sees these variations from a strange, internal perspective. I’ve seen the nuances of gift-giving from early childhood and never realized them until my training in anthropology placed a lens on the incongruities I’d felt for so long. Though I’d felt the fact as assuredly as I’d felt my own bones and tendons, it was only then that I had words and expression for the fact: gifts have meaning.

Even more importantly: The very act of giving has meaning.

In fact, I realize more and more that it is the act itself that is meaningful, much moreso than the gift.

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1. This phenomenon has seen it’s share of study in the anthropological field– a great many anthropologists have studied reciprocity in every culture, most famously Bronislaw Malinowski, who’s pioneering work in the Trobriand Islands led to new understandings of gift-giving, and of the highly complex and subtle cultural nuances of so-called “savages.” [↩]

As Christmas descends upon us, a couple of people have asked me if there is anything specific that I want. This year, I have a very unusual answer.

Software.

But only if that software is Scrivener.

It’s the best writing software, full stop.

I’ve been a writer for basically my entire life, and in that time, I’ve used basically every possible method you can think of to get my thoughts into words on a page. Long-hand writing on legal pads, index cards, typed pages, word processors, early HTML pages, wiki’s, LaTeX, and of course, blogs.

Writing is, to me, basically a matter of taking the emotions in my head and using a painfully suboptimal system to get them onto the page. Whatever that system is, and I’ve tried everything out there, it’s painfully suboptimal– and most of them are just horribly horribly wrong. Never have I found anything that excites me.

Until I found Scrivener. Continue Reading »

I used to work in Portland at the Watershed Management Division of Oregon DEQ. It was probably the best job I’ve ever had– mostly because the people who choose to work at DEQ are, for the most part, amazing. They are the type of people who you can easily work next to for 20 years and at the end of it thing “Wow, where’d all that time go?”

Despite that, I was having a hard time.

A lot of the difficulty was that Jessie and I were living in Hood River– we’d moved there for her job when I was still working on my thesis. That meant that, including the commute to work, I had a 13 hour day. I’d wake up at 5am to leave, and be home about 6pm. That was hard enough, but what added a lot of difficulty to that was the lack of– for a better word– beer. Continue Reading »