Category: musings

Today we officially started work on the first full length Submodern album. Today was primarily planning, scheduling and preparation. We’ll record the first song tomorrow. I’m very exicted and I hope we don’t screw it up, haha.

I’ll admit I haven’t been a big fan of Microsoft for a long time now, but the recent rash of viruses and worms that have afflicted the various Microsoft operating systems, right through to the latest and greatest technology they have to offer in Windows XP, have started to really make me think about the role they as a company have to play in the future of the technological world. As a company that has managed to become as dominant in one market as they have, I believe they now have a legitimate legal, ethical, and moral responsibility to the world that they are not meeting.

The sheer insecurity of Windows systems used to be something I could laugh about. It didn’t have much of an effect on my own life so I didn’t really care that much. Unfortunately, the scale of the most recent worms has now started to significantly affect even my company’s Linux based network. None of our computers have been infected, but they are having to bear the extra email load generated by the thousands (millions, even?) of computers out there that have been affected. That combined with the extra email everyone is getting has increased our company’s human workload as a whole as well. We’re a relatively small company too, so I know we’re not feeling the worst of the pain, either.

Now, I’m starting to wonder what level of blame Microsoft themselves should take for this situation. Some people may say blaming Microsoft for this virus is like blaming the builders of a road for a car accident, and that may actually be a very good analogy. Of course most car accidents have nothing to do with the safety of the road itself, but it also seems likely that some accidents that have occurred could have been avoided if the road had been designed more thoughtfully. To take that a step further, some accidents have certainly been caused by poorly designed roadways, and in those cases surely the designers and builders of the roads should shoulder at least some of the blame, no?

Microsoft has clearly attempted to become the dominant player in the desktop operating system market, and they have largely achieved that goal. To that end they have designed much of their operating system in such a way as to reduce the value of software written by competing companies. A great deal of thought and work has gone into creating the Windows dominated world we live in today, but it’s starting to look like very little, if any, thought was put into how to protect consumers in the event of a massive security breakdown within that world. In my eyes, Microsoft has created a monster it is incapable or unwilling to control and I believe they should bear some legal and financial responsibility for that.

My question is where do we go from here? What next step can we take? Is Microsoft going to willingly take responsibility for their actions or does something more serious have to be done?

Tonight I’m stuck thinking about what I’m doing here on Earth. I feel the need to have a purpose but I haven’t yet found one thing that I feel like I can throw myself into for the rest of my life. Do you think perhaps I hope for too much? Is the world just not the way I want it to be?

I saw a talk by Cassidy Curtis, the guy who started Graffiti Archaelogy, tonight and it was inspiring to see someone so into what he was doing. He has a real love for Graffiti art and has found a way to chronicle and hopefully preserve some of it for the future. It felt to me like he has found a life pursuit and I was envious.

It makes me happy to look back on the things I have accomplished and it’s exciting to think about the potential of this technology and capital engine I have helped to create, yet still I want more… I feel that not all of my needs are being met. More and more I’m starting to feel like I may be looking in the wrong direction and that may be why I’m not seeing the magic staring me right in the face.

There’s been a big hullabaloo about Apple’s recently announced iPod Mini, a smaller and cuter version of the iPod that comes in 5 different colors. Everyone seems to think it’s a nifty device, but everyone is simultaneously whining about the high price. At $249 it’s only $50 less than the cheapest iPod, which holds over 3 times as much music. Ok, maybe $249 isn’t exactly cheap, but it’s still a nice step for Apple. Also, it seems like everyone is overlooking the fact that somehow Apple (along with Sony and a couple other companies) has turned consumer electronics into fashion accessories. People will buy iPod minis at $249 because they are small and cute and while white may match everything, having 5 colors to choose from is even better for the fashion conscious. $249 is fairly expensive for a single purchase, but lots of women buy handbags that cost $400 or more and even a geek like me owns a pair of $150 jeans. While I don’t plan to buy an iPod Mini myself, I think Apple knows exactly what they’re doing in this case (I still think they screwed up with the cube).

A thought-provoking conversation this weekend put my mind into overdrive. There was a time when my mind was probably almost continually in overdrive, but now I’ve either learned how to relax or I’ve gotten lazy, or both. Anyway, the current thoughtline is of the classic ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What impact do I want to have on this world?’ sort. Back in college, those questions were mostly theoretical as at that point I really had very little control over much of anything. Now, I have some daily decisions that can impact other people in a fairly significant way.

I’m the kind of person that has trouble processing negative energy, especially directed towards me personally. I’ve developed some defense mechanisms that help me shut down and reject the bad vibes before they get too deeply into my psyche. To do that, I sometimes have to make tough judgement calls about a person, group or situation. If, for instance, I decide somebody is full of crap I can then basically ignore what they say. I try to pay attention to what’s going on around me, but I’m only one person and I don’t have time to treat every new bit of information equally… I have to make some high-level processing decisions to keep the overall workload manageable. In less geeky terms, I only pay attention to what’s important to me. That means my information is inherently biased, but that’s ok by me. I like to hear a relatively balanced telling of a story but I don’t mind putting some trust into certain information souces.

So this process of information management means that I may not always treat everyone I encounter with the same level of respect and that means I occasionally wind up being labeled as a jerk or a meanie or something. It doesn’t happen often, but it has happened before. Regardless of respect, I still typically treat people the way I want to be treated. I guess maybe I err on the ‘honest’ side. I feel like it’s hard to hear certain things, but I still want to hear them if someone feels the need to say them. That’s what strong relationships are for, right?

The holiday season is in full swing yet again and it’s passing along quicker than ever. I think it’s during the last few holidays that I’ve started to really notice the effects of aging and turning into a full-fledged adult. I’ve been legally an adult for quite awhile now, but you really are still a child in many ways until you hit your late 20’s (and I’m sure some would say late 30’s or late 40’s) … and that’s not at all a bad thing. I like being an adult or whatever, but I also miss being a kid. Life was so full of possibilities then… and life is so full of complications now. Or so it seems. Life is probably actually full of more possibilities now than it was 7 years ago, but I guess it’s full of lots of obligations and hesitations now as well.

Anyway, during the holiday season is when you are required to consider what kinds of things you might appreciate receiving as gifts. It’s also when you are required to hang out with family members, adults and children alike, and make chit chat. During family chit chat moments, the differences between the children and the adults is clearer than at any other time. Other differences are clearer as well, but that’s the one that’s come to mind just now. The adults mostly talk about serious, boring stuff. Stuff that used to seem so serious and boring is now oddly interesting, yet still not as interesting as the things I thought about it when I was a child.

Well, anyway. Ramble away.

I heard about this at some point a long time ago, but I never tried it out until now. If you have cable tv service, call up your cable company and ask if they have any promotions you can take advantage of. They probably will and you’ll probably get some premium channels for free for 3 months or something. Easy!

I got an interesting spam today that seems to perhaps be an attempt to reduce the effectiveness of these Bayesian statistics-based spam filters that have become the rage recently. The message contains white text on a white background so it appears to be blank, but the words appear if you run a selection over them all. Once visible, they seem to be all random words. Most of the words are harmless, but some of them are words that are probably common to spam. You lose either way because marking it as spam will add in non-spam type words into the filter database potentially increasing the rate of false positives, but leaving it as non-spam reduces the score of the spam words contained in the message potentially increasing the rate of false negatives.

The ever-popular Spamassassin has a Bayesian component in its arsenal, but uses more traditional content-based filters as well. Apple’s Mail client has a built-in Bayesian Junk Filter, and Bogofilter is a unix-based Bayesian filter that I use myself.

After 17 or so days on the road, I’m finally back in my own cozy house with my own cozy bed. I love traveling and seeing new things and people, but it’s always so nice to return home. No matter how many old friends you catch up with or new friends you get to know, the friends waiting at home are still the best friends of all.

For some reason, one embarassing moment of my life keeps popping up in my head from time to time. It happened when I was in 5th grade, but I can’t seem to get past it. I guess I might as well share it with everyone.

Here’s the story: I was in school and the teacher asked a question something like, “What are the people who ride race horses called?” It probably wasn’t just like that, but that’s the idea. I raised my hand and when called on I said the answer was ‘disc jockey’. Everyone in the class proceeded to laugh and I was awfully embarassed. I was one of the smart kids in school so the laughter was probably intensified as a result.

More details: Earlier that week, I had been reading an Archie or Richie Rich comic and one of the mini one-page comics involved a play on the term ‘disc jockey’. In the final frame, it showed a jockey all geared up riding on a giant record album. There were reins and everything. It was pretty funny for a little comic, but it went completely over my otherwise fairly quick 5th grade head. I didn’t know what a disc jockey was, I guess, and I assumed that the joke was showing how funny it was that people who ride horses were called ‘disc jockeys’. It seemed odd at the time, but Archie and Richie Rich had never let me down before and I took it at face value. I did realize my mistake later, after I had already embarrassed myself thoroughly.

I never really wanted to raise my hand and answer any questions for pretty much the rest of my school life. That situation continued clear through college, though I didn’t actually know the answers most of the time in college so it might not really count. I guess I was an unusually sensitive child and I think that moment really affected me. I was already shy and it sealed that into me even further. Up until now, I hadn’t made this connection, but I had noticed that this disc jockey situation had stayed in my mind for whatever reason.

Maybe my mind will be able to let this go now that I’ve revealed the fact that once in 5th grade I didn’t know the difference between a jockey and a disc jockey. Wish me luck!