The Search

Hunt well, young Bear.
Scavenge and steal
from pores of forest flesh.
Spend life
fulfilling
hunger
maybe to play
Ignorant wandering moment
to moment
to nothing.

Momentary Panic

Thunderclap.

Don’t worry.

I’ll support you, my children,

    while I can,

on the hollow, painted horses

    that I built for you,

on this slippery, rapid carousel,

on this wet shelter’s failing promises.

-Demastrie, 2006

Blogged with Flock

The Old Patriot

As I sat in the restaurant, waiting for my glass of water and reading the menu, I heard a voice from the table behind and to the right of me. "I am an American and I’m proud of it." There were two accentuated words: "American" and "proud." The words came strong from an old, deep place in the speaker’s soul. I glanced back. I saw a man, about eighty, and his slightly younger wife. He was speaking across the aisle to a booth of four twenty-somethings, two men and two woman. I sensed them smiling at him and, from what I could tell from the momentary, silent vacuum, they were caught off guard by these strange words. I was too.

"I drive an American car."

"Good for you," one of the young men said back.

"I wouldn’t drive anything else."

"Hmm."

"Women like the foreign cars, but not me."

"They are better on gas."

That was the bait he wanted.

"Who cares?! They filled up my backside with shrapnel. I wouldn’t give them a penny of my money. I didn’t forget that. You know that? Why should I forget that?"

An uncomfortable silence.

"Sure they make the cars here. But, you know what? The money goes back there and then they come back here and buy up our hotels and send back for their spies. You didn’t know that, did you?"

"No, sir."

There was a pause, just long enough for us to think the conversation might be over.

"You watch. They’re here. And one day, they’re going to attack us. Communists."

Gulp. I sipped my water and tried not to look.

"You know who’s sending the guns and bullets over there to Iraq?"

"No, sir."

"The communists. The Russians. And the Germans."

His wife didn’t flinch as we did. Maybe she remembered the communists.

"I’m an American and I’m proud of it."

Pretty Flocking Good

A few months ago, a colleague of mine sent an email talking about a new browser called Flock. I installed it and after playing a bit, I just didn’t get it. Time went by. Then I started this blog. A couple of days ago, because Flock had a blog editor, I tried again. Suddenly, this browser became so much more important to me in a few ways.

A Social Application

Unlike other browsers, the Flock browser gives the user a two-way interface to the internet. You can push the quill pen icon and start writing (like I did a few minutes ago). You can drag photos from your desktop to the toolbar and they are instantly shared on Flickr. You can drag your Flick images from the film strip toolbar display to your blog page. You can grab snippets of text from web pages that you’re reading and drop them on the temporary storage area Flock calls the “shelf.” From here, you can drop them to your blog page. When you bookmark a page, something Flockers call “starring,” they are saved automatically to Shadows or del.icio.us browser favorites storage sites where others can see them via various search and aggregations. (Yes, you can choose not to share or to make favorites private.) You can quickly subscribe to news feeds.

What this does is bring together all of the pieces of the knowledge internet, where topics can be discussed and shared easily. It lets the once-lurking user say something to the world easily. It moves the internet toward becoming the modern-day version of the tavern of old, where people gather, exchange ideas, and make things happen. That’s the biggest benefit of this application: it helps the user make things happen.

A Web Service Application

This is a beautiful example of an application exploiting Web Services. Many online applications (like Flickr, WordPress, Shadows, etc.) expose themselves with open protocols. This allows other applications to use their exposed features. This is very powerful, because multiple applications can be interwoven in new an exciting ways never dreamed up by their original designers. Flock does a good job at taking a first stab at using this great lever. It makes me imagine dozens of services, all tied together with the Web Service enabled browser.

Another Demonstration of the Open Source Community Pushing Things Forward

What can I say? This application is built on Mozilla/Firefox and uses those great browsers’ technologies in new and exciting ways. Software building on other software building on other software. It’s a sign that we’re growing and computers are providing extensions to our human capabilities that help us improve, that help us solve problems, and that help reach others with common interests.

technorati tags: Flock, Browsers, Web, Technology

New Blog Name Today

From a scribble I made in some old college lit class journal of mine, circa 1983:

Faster to the single pine,

beyond quick helicopter glide,

to the heart of the city,

with its high rise wreckage,

man-the-animal, man-the-animal, man-the-animal died.

Risk and Rewards

I’m laughing to myself this morning. It’s this blog thing. I just started it yesterday and it had some hits. I’m not even sure how one would’ve found it. I guess I could hit the Apache server logs and get an idea of whom it might be, but I’m not THAT interested. Anyway, I guess I have to proofread what I write from now on…and I guess this won’t be therapeutic in the way I once thought it would be. Little matter.

Gambling

I’ve been hearing the GoldenPalace.com commercials on Stern, so last night I browsed there and downloaded their software. It lets you play with pretend money, if you’d like, but there’s constant nags appropriately timed to coincide with moments that you hit a jackpot telling you that you could be playing with real money. I wasn’t, although I have no hesitation about doing so on occasion. Dangerous stuff, like juggling old dynamite. Dangerous as it is, I think there is value in playing in this domain.

The gambling environment is a model environment for the World of Risks and Rewards. Granted, it’s a warped model, with everything skewed to steer you from rational action and every effort made to stir up some really negative human attributes, like greed, envy, and gluttony. That said, it lets one play with risk and reward in an accelerated way. In this model, if you are one that can remain in control, you will begin see to how chance works. You begin to understand randomness and what it means to have the cards against you (literally). It is here that you will take deep into your soul the truth that there are no rewards without risk. Those who risk nothing receive no rewards.

I think that herein lies the answer to my Day One question on the education of the hopeless. Not to bring them to the casino or lead them to the lottery counter, for you’ll already find them there and that works for very few. (Because the reward is not commensurate with the risk, so in the long term the risker always loses his reward.) The risk they take must be calculated. The routine must be broken. To use the Mike Foley metaphor, the autopilot must be disengaged and the course of their lives driven by yoke and compass. (I must stop saying “must” so much when I write. ;))

Day One

I begin. Again.

The old blog server was wiped out and the new one is a Wordpress installation. It looks like pretty good software. Dreamhost.com made it easy to install. They set up my MySql database and everything.

Driving into work today, I was thinking about the education of a young man. I guess the thinking was spurred by my concern over the rearing of my 16 year old son, but the thoughts were more general than that.

It has become clear to me that not everyone is suited for the traditional classroom education: Sitting in a chair, hearing teachers spout on and on, testing, following silly rules. I can barely believe that I ever succeeded in such an environment. Those who can’t fit this model–those who can’t learn here–are left behind. “No child left behind” is absolute garbage. Those who can’t be efficiently brought into line will be removed from the system, so they don’t skew the statistics and negatively impact school funding. Target and remove is the unwritten policy.

So we remove them from the system. We force them to search for other systems. We tell them nothing about where they may look for such systems. We set them up for failure.

A human must be educated or they will be a burden. Or they will live as a servant to society. You’ve seen them at service counters, with their signature downcast gazes. Hopelessness. Frustation. Devaluation. How does such a human gain his education? How does such a human make his place in the world? How does such a human realize his worth?