Tag Archive for 'life'

Clock Punchers

Published on January 27, 2009 in blog entry. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I was discussing clock punchers last night with a friend. You know, the people who show up to work on a semi-regular basis and are shocked when someone drops some real action items in their lap.  The same people who spend 45 minutes of every hour complaining about the heroic effort it takes to simply sit down and answer all the emails from a boss.  I ran across this clever article (via The Black Table) Googling the topic, enjoy the last paragraph and my favorite part:

My job provides me with income, Web access, headphones, and constant access to pirated music. I just summed it up. Someday, I’ll have a job that provides me with more income. Maybe someday, I’ll get to a point where I won’t have to work at all. Until then, though, I’ll wake up, shower, take the train to work, go home at six, and shut up about it. It is amazing how earth-shattering a concept this is to many.

Further discussion this morning led to a money quote from @rcwpong:

It’s like they think most of these people are purposefully doing everything they do just to piss them off.  I’m like, “It’s just easier for them to be lazy, it’s not personal”.

Amen brother, amen.

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] More »

Turning 30

Published on January 15, 2009 in blog entry. 0 Comments Tags: .

Anything is possible. You are invincible with no limits. The music you listen to is incredibly meaningful. Every minute talking is a new discovery. Your life is vital.

The future is vast and unfathomable. Ideas are fresh. Relationships crush you with emotion.

There is energy in movement. Tomorrow will never arrive.

You are youth.

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] More »

It’s 2008 and we still don’t have flying cars

Published on January 1, 2008 in blog entry and life. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , .

A friend recently hit me with some good advice via IM: “Hang in there Manfred.” (Thats a reference to Accelerando for those not in the know)

The way William Gibson describes the future seems to fit better every year. “The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed.” Most of the technologies that appeared in 07 were measurably cool: the iPhone, the end of analog TV, GPS in cars & phone / blue tooth proliferation, Moore’s law and multi-core CPU’s, etc., etc. These are things that a number of years ago I looked forward to the way I now look forward to neural nanonics, private space flight, bioengineering, and other amazing stuff. Now they appear rather blah, about as exiting as a car or television set. The future is already here alright. I guess I just need to be more patient.

However it was a good year in the reading department. Accelerando by Charles Stross, Spook Country by William Gibson, The Night’s Dawn Trilogy (paperbacks 1 2 3 4 5 6) by Peter F. Hamilton to name some of most interesting ones. Of course Cory Doctorow and the usual crowd had some excellent blog posts. Penny Arcade had some truly great comics reminding yet again that “my people” are out there and going strong. 2007 certainly had an abundance of daily slack to consume.

I’m still holding out hope for my tribe. I expect we will continue to kick some ass and make sure things end up OK, preferably with lots of super bad ass scientific stuff.

Here’s to 2008 and the pursuit of slack and knowledge!

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] More »

Charlie’s Diary: Japan: some impressions

Published on November 5, 2007 in blog entry. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

They’ve got our future, damn it.

It’s not the shiny future of jet packs and food pills oh no, that’s not what Japan is about. Nevertheless, they’ve got it and they’re living in it, damn them. They’ve got express trains that run on time and accelerate so fast they push you back into your seat like an airliner on take-off. They’ve got skyscrapers with running lights, looming out of the sodium-lit evening haze a skyline just like the famous nighttime scene from Blade Runner except for the shortage of giant pyramids (and they’re building one of those out in Tokyo bay). And they shave their cats.

In the future we will all have shaved cats. And six story high pornography boutiques that sell Hello Kitty! novelty toys on the ground floor. And 200mph super-express trains blasting between arcologies through a landscape scorched by the waste heat of a hundred million air conditioning units. And beer vending machines on street corners. And skyscrapers cheek-by-jowl with temples that are modern reconstructions of buildings dating back to the eighth century (said reconstructions only slightly older than the Christopher Wren iteration of St Paul’s Cathedral).

via Charlie’s Diary

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] More »

Shades of Manfred Mancx

Published on September 15, 2007 in blog entry, internet and life. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .

Cory Doctrow, I much admire your ability to verbally express so many things that fly around my gray matter. Stealing a number of lines, some modified from a 2002 article:

I consume, digest, and excrete information for a living. Whether I’m writing code, architecting information systems, business plans, or interacting with early 20th century technology via hand tools, whether I’m speaking at table to hungry minds or yammering down the phone at some poor techno-wannabe, my success depends on my ability to cite and connect disparate factoids at just the right moment.

Thus I need to eat roughly six times my weight in information every day or my brain starts to starve and atrophy. I gather information from many sources: print, radio, television, conversation, the Web, RSS feeds, email, chance, and serendipity. I used to bookmark this stuff, but I just ended up with a million bookmarks that I never revisited and could never find anything in.
Theoretically, you can annotate your bookmarks, entering free-form reminders to yourself so that you can remember why you bookmarked this page or that one. I don’t know about you, but I never actually got around to doing this — it’s one of those get-to-it-later eat-your-vegetables best-practice housekeeping tasks like defragging your hard drive or squeegeeing your windshield that you know you should do but never get around to.

Until I started blogging. And using Twitter. Blogging gave my knowledge-grazing direction and reward. Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mental registers.

Without my electronic blog, tweet trail, gmail search, etc. I would be utterly useless. A portion of my intelligence has been externalized and can never be put back in. Bring on Intelligence Amplification!

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] More »

My Tribe

Published on June 1, 2007 in blog entry and life. 1 Comment Tags: , .

We are Tribal. Cory Doctrow’s Eastern Standard Tribe gets at this in a humorful way. I like this much better:

Only a few minutes ago, I had the delightful opportunity to read the comment of a fellow who said he wished that white, middle-class, racist, conservative cocksuckers like myself could have been herded into the Superdome Concentration Camp to see how much we like it. Absent, of course, was the fundamental truth of what he plainly does not have the eyes or the imagination to see, namely, that if the Superdome had been filled with white, middle-class, racist, conservative cocksuckers like myself, it would not have been a refinery of horror, but rather a citadel of hope and order and restraint and compassion.

That has nothing to do with me being white. If the blacks and Hispanics and Jews and gays that I work with and associate with were there with me, it would have been that much better. That’s because the people I associate with – my Tribe – consists not of blacks and whites and gays and Hispanics and Asians, but of individuals who do not rape, murder, or steal. My Tribe consists of people who know that sometimes bad things happen, and that these instances are opportunities to show ourselves what we are made of. My people go into burning buildings. My Tribe consists of organizers and self-starters, proud and self-reliant people who do not need to be told what to do in a crisis. My Tribe is not fearless; they are something better. They are courageous. My Tribe is honorable, and decent, and kind, and inventive. My Tribe knows how to give orders, and how to follow them. My Tribe knows enough about how the world works to figure out ways to boil water, ration food, repair structures, build and maintain makeshift latrines, and care for the wounded and the dead with respect and compassion.

Thats the kind of stuff I am made of. My friends are made of. The tribe my parents hail from. The tribe my co-workers hail from. It’s a tribe based on standing together and doing the right thing, because that’s always the best reason.

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] More »