January 2006 Archives

Apparently Joe's (a fictitious name for a real person) parents recently saw a movie (I have no idea which one) in which two of the characters were a lesbian couple. Joe's parents said to him that "Hollywood is becoming more liberal." In an apparent effort to prove their point, they asked Joe when was the last time he and his wife had had a black person over to their home. (I am unclear if this also had taken place in the movie.) Apparently they were taken back when Joe told them that they had entertained a black man and his white wife and their racially mixed children for dinner just 2 weeks earlier. "Well, Atlanta really is changing." was their amazed response.

Now, I don't know Joe's parents. But I do know Joe and his wife, a bright, decent, delightful young couple. I am confident that Joe's parents are also good people--as they raised Joe. I know many people in my present, and a large number of people from my past that are indeed good people who think the world is getting worse and worse. What's going on here? What forces are at work? Is the world really nothing more than a mudslide?

I suspect that Hollywood has always "been liberal." My guess: one can market social issues that provoke emotional response by challenging norms much more lucratively than those that cut across few barriers. Shock radio, Fox News, etc. are examples from the opposite side of the social/political coin. They make money by being provocative, often by preying on large swaths of fear, distrust, apprehension, divestiture, and a sense of isolation.

I am becoming more and more convinced that we learn to deal effectively with those things we know, we regularly experience, those things we have thus come to at least think we understand. Those things become normal to us. (By effectively, I mean creating an internal sense of balance real of imagined.)

In my work I have at times dealt with people who thought their family life was normal, though it was exceedingly out of the social norm. Their family interactions were frequently characterized by rage, yelling, verbal and physical abuse. Yet they thought this was how everyone lived. This was all they knew. They were perpetuating that in which they had grown up. The notion that they didn't have to beat up on each other was "that crazy liberal talk."

When experiences fall outside of our normal day to day life experience, we frequently, maybe even habitually, react with a binary moral declaration: good versus bad, right versus wrong, moral versus immoral. The good, the right, the moral is that which we already understand, know, that from which we can draw meaningfulness and context. Somehow that which we don't know or understand becomes evil and wrong. Maybe a given circumstance or new experience is. Maybe though, it isn't. Maybe our habituated reaction is what is wrong.

I guess this is just human nature regardless of our race, sex, sexual orientation, political or social affiliations, eye color, height, blah, blah, blah. It's just human. The way to break this cycle of habituated, fear-based reaction to the unfamiliar: broadened life experiences that engender greater understanding, respect, and tolerance within an emotionally and physically safe context.

In other words: get to know people that are different from you. They may be really decent folks. They may not. But it's unfair to them and to you to lump all of the unknown into "bad."

On the way home tonight I saw this bumper sticker:

"If only closed minds
Also had closed mouths"

"Every sinner has a future, and every saint has a past."

This morning, as I was driving in to work, I heard a wonderfully thought-provoking quotation:

"Caring and criticizing are bought with the same coins."

"God is not spelled GOP"

I try to normally keep my posts short. This one is not. This post, which is really more of an initial, rough conversation with myself, could have this subtitle: Disconnected in a Hyper-Connected World.

Several events started my thinking about this: a friend recently purchased an MDX, my being nearly run over by a person driving while talking on her cell phone (she never knew I was there), a conversation with a reporter from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and my beginning to read

The World Café: Conversations that Matter.

Let me start by telling you about the MDX.

The MDX
Like many familymobiles, this vehicle is wirelessly "wired:" to a Global Positioning Satellite (GPS), to satellite radio (XM), to the cell phone provider, and to OnStar. In fact, mom and dad get a text message on their cell phones from the car when the little kiddies (now driving) exceed the posted speed limit! No, I'm not kidding. The text message tells the parents where, when, how fast, and what the posted speed limit is. With the correct login information, the location of the vehicle can be followed on the internet. The car can even be disabled from any computer in the world so it will not start. And these are just a few examples of how the vehicle is wirelessly "wired" to the outside world.

Inside the car the vehicle is also hyper-connected to the occupants. Many of the car's functions are voice-activated: "Call: John's Office," "Radio: On," "Volume: Up," "Air-conditioner: 70º." And, naturally, the car talks to the driver as well. You can choose a male or female voice to provide explicit, accurate, detailed, step-by-step directions on how to get anywhere in the United States. The children can watch a DVD in the back, each wearing their own earphones adjusted to their preferred volumes; or, maybe one of them would prefer to listen to satellite radio instead. And if you want to connect your iPod to the stereo system, you can control it from the steering wheel and have all of the play information appear on the touch screen of the car's navigation system control panel.

In other words, a family can travel "together" in this vehicle virtually without even knowing the other family members are in the same vehicle: complete isolation through hyper connectivity. The family members can be connected to everyone but the people in the car. I find this very fascinating if not equally concerning. If you listened to my post dated January 14th, Commentator Andrei Codrescu (All Things Considered, NPR) said that the family unit is the last place where people can actually directly connect to one another through, now old-fashioned, face-to-face communication. What is actually happening to "the art of" conversation? In a world that talks as much as we do, we sure seem to be saying far less to the people closest to us.

Where Am I?
Curiously, we seem to have an insatiable desire to be where we are not, thus missing out on where we are. I must confess to growing completely weary of people not being where they actually are! We have all experienced nearly being run over by a driver who isn't successfully managing talking on the cell phone with driving down the road. (Read number 28 from this prior post at Tim's Reflection Connection.) They're physically on the road about to hit us while they are mentally someplace else talking with a person we can not see.

I admit to being disgusted when a person comes into the office, attends a meeting or conference, is in the movie theater, in church, at the restaurant, wherever, and everyone is distracted from the present moment when their cell phone rings (usually very loudly) and the person takes forever fumbling to find the phone and then begins the phone call while "quietly tiptoeing out" as if to somehow lessen the already needless disruption. And now with blue-tooth headsets, you can't even tell if a person is talking to you or if they are on the phone.

I consider all of this behavior rude, simply not-nice, and easily remedied: vibrate, don't ring. Did I say ring? Ringing is now also individualized self-expression? Since when did a horrid rendition of Beethoven's 5th Symphony or something even worse become a ring tone? But aside from being rude, we miss out on the nuance of being where we are. We interrupt the normal course of events where we are. We may even damage that mental, emotional, and physical space.

We all know not being present happens without the use of technology, too. We have all had a conversation with a person who, while physically in front of us, was mentally a million miles away. (I hate realizing that I haven't heard a word the person speaking to me was saying because I had my mind on something else.)

I think at least part of this issue is attentiveness. Technology abstracts ever allusive attentiveness even one step further. Or, interestingly, technology can make it easier or safer to appear to be attentive when we aren't. (Ever had a phone conversation with a person doing the dishes? How often does the call end when the dishes are finished? What's that about?)

Using pervasive connectivity we are actually disconnecting from those around us so we can be someplace else. Another way to say this: virtual connectivity that disconnects physically present reality. The children in the back seat aren't really in the car at all any more. They're in the artificial space of the DVD they're watching, the playlist they've created on their iPod, the game player they're using. Parents are delighted not to have to "deal with" the kids.

How can it be that with an unprecedented level of connectivity, we are becoming more isolated than ever before? We no longer have to pay attention to the subtle details of human interaction and self-expression that convey deep meaningfulness because we are distracted from actually being in the very space we can influence the most: where we are physically located. Our lives have become a television show with the complexity and the meaningfulness distilled right out of them. Do we really want to be impersonal, non-present sound bytes?

We no longer have to pay attention to the subtle details of human interaction and self-expression that convey deep meaningfulness because we are distracted from actually being in the very space we can influence the most: where we are physically located.

Impact Study
When I am extended into places where I am not physically present, I find myself typically performing less well, experiencing and impacting my realities to a lesser extent. Perhaps I can experience or impact more realities, more places, but seemingly the nature of the experiences or my impact is diluted, is dulled by my lack of attention to the subtle details of meaningfulness.

Do we even consider whether or not these subtleties are really important to the meaningfulness of our life experience? Does the meaningfulness of experiences balance well with the quantity of our experiences? Or, are we more focused on extended the quantity of our life experiences without regard to the quality of each experience?

I make no secret of the fact that I hate talking on the phone. I hate missing the seemingly insignificant tiny motions of facial muscles and eye movements that convey substantive, important meaning. I hate email for similar reasons. These abstractions of communication are not bad per se, they are just limited in the scope of what they can communicate well.

Yet we use them thoughtlessly to communicate that which they may not be capable of communicating well. I suspect that we need to stop and reflect. All kinds of questions begin to flood my mind.

• Is there a difference between talking and conversation?
• What is required for each?
• When and how does connectivity disconnect?
• What is actually being disconnected from communication by lack of physical presence?
• What things that we truly value are limited or minimized by the technology we use to communicate?

And I haven't even dabbled with these ideas:

• Balancing Individualism with Community,
• Our Disproportionate Emphasis on Individualism to the Exclusion of Social Responsibility,
• Broader Community Isolation through Self-Selected Connectedness,
• Pervasive Subculture within Culture Made Possible by Connectivity,
• The Time and Attention Required to Attain Meaningfulness,
• Is some of our nation's current level of divisiveness the result of our enormous level of disconnected connectivity?

This is not really well structured thinking at this point, just ideas, some of which are bouncing around in my mind for the first time. Just some questions to ponder... I welcome you to join in this connectivity conversation by commenting or sending me email.

Here's the picture of the picture the framer loved so.

(Click to enlarge)

Today I traveled on MARTA to get to a conference in downtown Atlanta, at Georgia State University. (By the way, it was an excellent conference with Ruby Payne presenting on Understanding Poverty.) I am not accustomed to riding MARTA. It was a mess. The machines that sold the tokens didn't work. But I digress.

I got to the Five Points station and had to change to the East/West train. I couldn't figure out how to get to the East side from the Southbound train. (In Europe such things are clearly marked!) I had gotten off the wrong side of the train. I asked this guy standing there waiting. He not only told me, he said, "Let me walk you over there. It's a little confusing."

What?! This guy was just really being nice. He didn't just tell me, he went the extra step and showed me. I guess what was a little sad to me was that a simple act of kindness was unexpected and surprising. Too often we're just too busy to be kind, really kind.

"The only thing worse than a man you can't control is a man you can. "
Margo Kaufman

To watch this, you will need QuickTime 7. You can play the movie in this browser window by clicking on the picture below. You may have to double click it. The movie is also processed for your video iPod, so, go ahead, download it to your video iPod!

I think I was taxing my little laptop to the max. It was running Google Earth, streaming in the map content off of the internet live, and recording the playback of the Google Earth fly by all at the same time! So toward the end, the movie gets a little jerky.

Here is where we traveled in the movie: My house, Hartfield Jackson International Airport in Atlanta, London Bridge, London City Hall, Hyde Park, Buckingham Palace, The London Eye, Borton on the Water, then back to Hartfield Jackson International Airport in Atlanta and my home. Too cool. Much, much too cool! To conserve bandwidth and processing power, this movie is much smaller than the original Google Earth generates!

Click the picture above to play the movie

And now of course, Apple has made my life more complicated by introducing iLife '06, with its amazing live album feature for .Mac users. Naturally, I'm a .Mac user.

In a nutshell: you change any live album in iPhoto, and it updates automatically on anyone's machine who has subscribed to it through your .Mac account. The album subscription can even be used as a slide show, desktop rotation, and I think a screen saver as well.

So, how has this made my life more complicated? Well, the greatest majority of my blog does not link to my .Mac account. Now I'm tempted to start integrating the two. How exactly? I'll have to ponder this.

The new iWeb software added to iLife '06 is fantastic--easy, elegant, immensely usable, richly and seamlessly integrated with all of the digital media on the computer, and simply beautifully done. Even if you don't want to use it with .Mac, you can publish to your hard drive and FTP up to your site. Hmmm...

I've never seen a picture rotated on a web page before, but iWeb can do it! How?! I'll have to dig under the hood when that illusive miracle happens: I find the time! (Yes it really is 4 in the morning! Sad!! Very, very sad!)

At this point, all that remains with the photo albums on my site is my fixing all of the RSS links. As this will affect very few users at this point, I am declaring the Photo Album work finished. The RSS feed, CSS, and the actual file linking is low on the list of priorities.

If you don't know about Google Earth, you simply must! I had heard about it. I had even seen a widget version of it. What I saw and heard about was cool. I was missing the whole story!

Google Earth is nothing short of astounding technology. The free download is indispensable for any Social Studies teacher! You can create fly-arounds, tilt the satellite images to give an amazing 3D effect to flat bird's eye imagery, add country boundaries, street names, etc. The images in major cities are rather detailed. Best of all, you can save the virtual trip for a later fly-by. You can even save your trips and share them (with other teachers!)

I first really paid attention to this when one of our teachers showed me the presentation he will be giving tonight to the parents of students participating on a field trip to Jekyll Island. He starts from out in space and flies in to the actual place the students will be staying. Then he flies to the various locations on the island the students will be studying. I was shocked! The parents will be too! It's astoundingly impressive.

Very cool stuff. When I get a chance, I will post a movie fly around of my last trip to England--well, my only trip to the UK so far. :o) For $20 you can get a version that interfaces with GPS. There's also a $400 annual subscription service available, but until I feel like I know more of the ins and outs of the program, I'll not download the 7 day free trial. I want to get my money's worth out of the free trial. :o)

After I migrated from my other server to DreamHost, who I highly recommend, but that's another post another time, I stopped paying much attention to my site stats. Too many irons in the fire and all of that...

At any rate, in the month of December, I had 3,688 different hosts served (distinct visitors to the site). I'm only about 100 hits shy of 1,000 hits a day. I had nearly 9,000 visits during Christmas week with a huge spike on the 27th. What's up with that?! Tuesdays seem to be the most popular time to visit, and 1:00PM is peek viewing time. Odd.

The number one search string used on my site continues to be "cool optical illusions," coming in with 193 searches! And i think it's interesting that 4 searches for "Now Thank We All Our God" have been done--great piece of music, one of my all time favorites, which I actually posted to this site. I just noticed however, that the music folder disappeared when I transitioned to the new server. Never fear. This will be fixed in a few days so you can then have a listen!

I am happy to report that the photo albums at the link at the top of my blog are 90% completed. All of the links work as far as I know at this point. A couple of issues persist that will be soon resolved. Enjoy the new look. New photos are on the way as well.

...The President and I agree on one thing. The threat from terrorism is all too real. There is simply no question that we continue to face new challenges in the wake of the attack on September 11th and that we must be ever-vigilant in protecting our citizens from harm.

Where we disagree is that we have to break the law or sacrifice our system of government to protect Americans from terrorism. In fact, doing so makes us weaker and more vulnerable.

Once violated, the rule of law is in danger. Unless stopped, lawlessness grows. The greater the power of the executive grows, the more difficult it becomes for the other branches to perform their constitutional roles. As the executive acts outside its constitutionally prescribed role and is able to control access to information that would expose its actions, it becomes increasingly difficult for the other branches to police it. Once that ability is lost, democracy itself is threatened and we become a government of men and not laws...

I went up to the top of the mountain today at Wayah Bald, North Carolina. Thank goodness for 4 wheel drive!

I got my work laptop back from Apple. It was only gone for 2 days. They had to replace the hard drive, and they fixed the ethernet port. O dear god!! I've been working on it for several days now and still have not gotten it back to its previous state. I have too much stuff on my work machine!

There's this pesky little issue of machine authorization for the iTunes store as well as software that can only authorize to run on a limited number of machines. For example, Adobe thinks I've installed Photoshop on 3 machines now: my home machine, my work laptop BC (before crash) and my work laptop again (AC). The license will only authorize 2. So I will have to call them when I get down off of the mountain as I have no phone service up here on my cell!

And, finally, I need to dig around and find some serial numbers for other software applications now demanding them along with a reinstall. What a royal pain!

...with a bit of snow!

AMERICANS ANNOYED BY "ALL THIS INTERNATIONAL [expletive deleted]" ON INTERNET

Web's Increasingly Worldly Flavor Threatens Americans' Worldview

PULLMAN, WASH. (SatireWire.com) — The profusion of international news available on the Internet has made it increasingly difficult for the average American to ignore the rest of the world, a trend researchers say threatens Americans' long, proud history of disregarding anything not about them.

"With all the foreign newspapers and multi-cultural sites, the Internet is making it almost impossible for the average American to remain uninformed and apathetic," said Samantha Lessborn of Washington State University, which conducted the survey. "Americans can still do it. But it now takes effort, whereas before it was as easy as turning off Tom Brokaw whenever he said 'In South Korea today...'"

According to survey participant Danny Grisham, a 22-year-old from Cheyenne, Wyoming, it's not just the plethora of international news on the Web that is irritating. "Look, I can get around the news. I just turn off Reuters headlines in MyYahoo," he said. "But even some of the search sites like Yahoo and Alta Vista are available in different languages. Like everybody in the world doesn't speak English. Yeah, right."

"I can see where it's important if we're, like, beating some country in the Olympics or bombing them or, ideally, both," Grisham added. "But if some Colombian drug lord sinks a ferry full of Israeli soldiers in North Latvoania or Serbo-Malaysia, or wherever, and Americans aren't involved, what has that got to do with me?"

Other respondents said they were appalled, not just by the availability of non-U.S. news, but by the way important U.S. news is reported by some of these foreign sites. "Yesterday, for instance, the St. Louis Rams beat the Atlanta Falcons, OK, and I go to the London Times site and it's not even there," said Chip Pernadge of Kansas City, Mo. "[expletive deleted], no wonder those guys lost the war and had to give Hong Kong back to Canada."

Sensing a market opportunity, Net Nanny, makers of Net Nanny filtering software, announced this week it will introduce NetNarrow, an English-only product that automatically filters out content that appears to be international. Specifically, the software looks for world datelines and keywords indicative of irrelevant foreign stories, including "Shiite," "post-Apartheid," and "Bob Geldof."

Survey-taker Craig Barker of Brooklyn, New York, said he will be among the first to get NetNarrow. "On the Web, there are so many ways to get news from so many different places, I could really get some fresh insights into what's going on in other countries if I wanted to," he said.. "But I don't want to."

"You'd think these Internet people would know that," Barker added. "I mean, that's why the Internet is called America Online, right? It's supposed to be about America."

Editor's Note: It seems that after reading this entirely fictional story, some investors/customers of Net Nanny believed the company actually was going to produce NetNarrow software. As a result, Net Nanny asked SatireWire to please assure people that this is not the case. No, really.

Source: SatireWire

I listen to NPR regularly. I even support NPR financially as I believe them to be one of our nation's few excellent sources of factual news reporting. I heard this program this week. It's humorous and makes a great point.

NPR : Remembering that Tone Is Everything:

All Things Considered, January 10, 2006 · Commentator Andrei Codrescu feels we've lost the ability to modulate our voices to suit frustrating circumstances. The reason: We deal with mechanical voices on the phone all day. He says the only real people we talk to anymore are family members.

If you have Window's Media player, you can click the link below to listen to the brief 3 minute program. (I know, WMP is garbage, but, sad to say, NPR doesn't make files available through QT. I have requested they change this policy.)

npr3023.wax

When I saw this photo from New Orleans after Katrina I couldn't help but wondering:  Why were these school buses not used to evacuate the poor, elderly, and others without transportation?

I gave several of my photographs as Christmas gifts. I had them blown up very large: 20 x 30. Two of them were recently framed by a rather expensive (!!) framer in Buckhead. Somehow I ended up with the assignment of going to pick them up. I was shocked! They were breathtaking.

The framer had one of them in his window display for everyone to see. When I arrived, he told the customer with whom he was working that I was the "professional photographer" of the picture in the window and the one behind us. (I am not a professional photographer!)

The window picture was one of my favorites from the pictures I took in the Rockies. The one behind us in the store was taken during my latest Paris trip. His customer asked where it had been taken--the River Sein. They truly are spectacular!

What I found most unexpected and very pleasing was that the framer wanted to purchase the picture from the Rockies. With his accent he said, "It is perfect. No. No it is not perfect. If you sign it in the bottom right corner with a shiny gold pen before it is framed, then it is perfect. I make good frame, but you take best picture. Artist sign his work."

I gave him my web address as he expressed interest in buying my photographs. What fun!

This isn't just an indication of profitability, this measures innovation as well! Bill hasn't had a new idea in decades. He just bought a lot of them.

Since I am guessing Steve Jobs will be announcing 10.5, which will run on all of the new Mactell machines he will also announce tomorrow, I decided it was high time I upgrade my home machine to 10.4!  :o)

I've been working on 10.4 on my work laptop for a long time.  And since most of my computer work is for work, I do most of my computer work on my work machine.  Do you get the idea that I'm working myself to death with work.  But I'm not bitter!  :o)

Any way, since I have to go to work tomorrow, I'm going to bed now.

The nation has realized we need to stop the lunacy of this incompetent Republican president.  Needless to say, I will leap for joy when this happens:

Updated: 7:14 p.m. ET Jan. 6, 2006
WASHINGTON - In an ominous election-year sign for Republicans, Americans are leaning sharply toward giving Democrats control of Congress, an AP-Ipsos poll finds. Democrats are favored 49 percent to 36 percent.

The poll was taken this week as Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to tax evasion, fraud and corruption charges and agreed to aid a federal investigation of members of Congress and other government officials.

President Bush’s job approval remains low — 40 percent in the AP-Ipsos poll. About as many approve of his handling of Iraq, where violence against Iraqis and U.S. troops has surged. ...

Source:  AP picked up by MSNBC and USAToday

You know by now, I hope, that you can pick one of four themes in which to view my blog--well, one of three actually--until now.  For some time I have been intending to create the Summer CSS theme for my blog.  I just lacked inspiration and time.  I knew I wanted a static picture on top of which my blog scrolled, yet that would have some small sense of "wow," much like the brilliant design by Mike Davidson at the CSS Zengarden, Bonsai Sky.

Some time back I came upon Mike Matas' blog, the guy who wrote Delicious Monster but now works for Apple.  His blog is very nicely styled.  In fact, I love what he did with it--somewhat similar to Patrick Griffith's Elastic Lawn, but with a very nice twist.

I noticed that Mike was offering the photo, from which the outdoor theme he created is based, as a desktop picture for anyone to download, along with several others.  I downloaded it and recreated much of his outdoor design here as my summer theme!  I wish I could take credit for the idea, but it is his work.  When summertime arrives, I'll shoot my own picture and rework the theme some at that time.

In the mean time, click on the tiny flowers in the sidebar under the heading "Pick a Theme," and enjoy Mike's design.

Well, I'm finally starting to get over this cold. The congestion is almost all gone. I worked all day, as I have most of the days of my vacation. I've decided I have another far more serious illness: workaholism!

At any rate, I got a lot accomplished today. Some days I work but feel little was accomplished. Not so today!

I freely admit to all that I am not "typical"–whatever that is.  For example:  I have on occasion wondered what visual information would sound like if we heard it instead of saw it.  Seems this fellow, Tim Omerick, also wondered.  So he wrote a program to "play" pictures.  He named the program "Sound of an Image."  I just finished listening to a picture of my face, you know the one showing as my favicon.  Interesting indeed.  OK, ok...odd as well.

You too can download his free program and play your own face picture, or any picture for that matter.  The name of his blog is skyfell.org.  The link to the program is here.

Admittedly, I am an Apple fanatic.  I sit counting off the seconds until Steve Jobs makes the latest Apple product announcements this coming Monday.  Until today, if you had asked me if my fan"aticism" had any limits, I would have said "No way!"  I would have been wrong!  Hopefully this is not permanent!

It seems that one area of the country actually did something productive about their lack of green space.  Apparently three-quarters of San Francisco's downtown public space is set aside for parking!  People decided to make a statement.  Groups took over parking spaces and turned them into parks.  Clever, and a success!

During the "protest" folks fed the parking meter, put down sod, park benches, and shade.  At the end of the protest everything was taken up.  The authorities didn't seem to interfere with the park(ing), and people continued to feed the meters so the park(ing) could stay longer.  For pictures and detailed info on how to turn a parking space into a park, check out the pdf at this link.

Ever feel like this?

Aside from a variety of watches, I don't really like jewelry, as evidenced in my list of 100 Things 1.1.  In fact, I only have a small number of pieces, almost all of which my father gave me.  He wasn't into jewelry either now that I think about it.

Last night, in the middle of the night, I heard an uproariously loud explosion (which had nothing to do with the horrendous thunder storm going on at the time!).  I think the sky fell.  Therefore, today I purchased a ring.