Splash Web Effects

See, there’s this problem with creating things. There are a hundred, a thousand, an uncountably large number of ways you can go with it. Some are beautiful, some are frightening. Some great, some uninspiring. Stuff, immeasurable, awaits in potentiality swirling about in the ether of imagination.

Now see, there is a geography to imagination. Great geysers of it spring fourth from the very earth in places, and in others there are droughts that plague the populace and force expensive imports from faraway lands just to sustain their very livelihoods. There are locales with one kind of creative energy, and vistas that inspire a completely different swirl of human output. Call it what you will: feng-shui, zen, environmental factors, the energy of a place, the aura, the feeling, the “rightness” factor. But you see, it’s not about what you think it is.

What you think it is revolves around the objects, the policies- but it’s the thought that goes into a place, or the very absence of it that really make or break the flow. When you put your heart into something, you see it multiply tenfold, a thousandfold, an uncountably large number-fold. Creativity is self-replicating.

This is why universities exist. This is why academies, monasteries, great archives of knowledge and light proliferate throughout civilization. The light is self-perpetuating. Its a contagion. It spreads. When it concentrates, it’s like there’s a valley for water to collect in, for thought to pool like a lagoon in the deep wilds of human experience.

Thought is like water, but it is like life too. This is just as well, as water and life go together hand in hand. These things, like structure, like expression, like summation and energy – they travel together, and are inseparable.

On to the problem.

The problem is the geography – too many of us are trying to create in deserts.

Work is a wonderful thing, not to be dreaded or lamented or escaped from. When work becomes this, we know it is because we are in a desert. Now, deserts have their own natural beauty, if you are there to visit and you’ve brought your own water. But linger too long, and you’ll feel your lifeforce, your water being drained slowly out of you, until you don’t have the strength to leave the desert. Until you’re trapped. You’ll die there, if no one pulls you out.

When the act of creation is monetized, we have to be careful not to spend the energy of it on efficiency. We have to look at the land, respect it’s level of output and regeneration, and adhere to that cycle. Like land, it can be over-farmed, over-worked, and take so much time to heal itself that you must move on from it in order to survive.

As it is a self-repairing, self-perpetuating process, adding energy to the system only strengthens it, makes it more robust and more flexible. In times of need and times of stress, a system with energy reserves is going to flourish, while a system that has been bled dry is brittle, and will crumble.

Empires and workplaces, organizations and teams, biospheres and ecologies all have a delicate balance to maintain. Becoming the right place to be, the exporter of energy rather than the importer, puts you in a position of power. The power you have in that situation is the ability to be truly self-sufficient. You are robust from the inside out. Unassailable, flexible, indomitable.

1. I never had to think about whether or not I would get to go to college, if I wanted to.
2. I never had to worry about my safety during my trip to or from school.
3. I never had to worry about whether or not my parents would accept my religious choices.
4. I never had to worry about whether or not my parents would accept my sexual orientation.
5. I never wondered where my next meal came from as a child.
6. I never had to go anywhere without shoes or socks on because I didn’t have any.
7. I never had to hide in a closet, an attic, a basement or a bathroom from anyone or anything, except weather, and even then it wasn’t a real threat.
8. I never had to forgo going to a doctor when I was sick because I couldn’t afford it.
9. I never had to make choices about what I wanted to do with my life because of my race or gender.
10. I never felt like my house wasn’t a safe place.
11. I never was not sure if I would live to see adulthood.
12. I never was sure that terrible things would happen to me in my life, regardless of if I lived to see adulthood or not.
13. I never got forced to go to a church by my parents I didn’t believe in, or denied the chance to go to one I wanted to find out more about.
14. I never wondered about something, and wasn’t able to find out something about it within a day.
15. I never thought there might not be an answer to something.
16. I never had my life planned out for me.
17. I never saw someone who was sick, and worried if I would catch what they had, and die.
18. I never even got tested for half the diseases that are responsible for the most deaths worldwide.
19. I never questioned where food came from as a child.
20. I never worried about a place to live.
21. I never was taught to hate anyone.
22. I never was taught that some people were worse than other people.
23. I never heard of anyone dying until I was old enough to understand what it was.
24. I never had to lie about who I was, or who my parents were.
25. I never had to worry about the government as an enemy of the people.
26. I never thought about people getting the wrong idea from my private phone conversations.
27. I never had anything thrown at me in public.
28. I never hid my face in public.
29. I never felt like I wasn’t allowed to go in public without an escort.
30. I never was lied to about basic facts in order to support a belief system.
31. I never was not allowed to listen to any types of music, or read any types of books.
32. I never couldn’t read, as far back as I can remember.
33. I never was kept from knowledge.
34. I never was taught to be ashamed of who I was.
35. I never thought I was different as a child, or less of a person because of it.
36. I never had to sleep outside, because there was no inside to sleep in.
37. I never was beaten to within an inch of my life by my parents.
38. I never was forced to renounce something I believed in.
39. I never thought my vote wasn’t counted.
40. I never wasn’t sure about who my parents were.
41. I never thought I might never see one of my parents again.
42. I never got taken away from my parents.
43. I never didn’t speak the first language of my peers.
44. I never worried about my country being invaded.
45. I never thought about my things being stolen.
46. I never had to work to support my brothers and sisters.
47. I never knew anyone who was going hungry, and couldn’t find food.
48. I never knew anyone who was afraid, and didn’t have a safe place to go.
49. I never met anyone as a child who had been noticably injured in an accident, or at war.
50. I never had to do many of the things people in third world countries had to, in theocracies had to, in fascist states had to, in poor neighborhoods had to, in authoritarian cultures had to, in places all around the world had to, yesterday and today, and will have to do tomorrow.

Well that’s my feel-good post for the month (or really, crushing western white guilt post for the month). Hope you enjoyed it! Stop taking shit for granted.
I wrote this copying John Scalzi’s post, however many of those things are things I did have to think about today, so I decided to write my own list of things my entitled white hippie upbringing gave me. I’m also not someone who’s had a perfect life, but I do know that many of the reasons I am the frankly amazing person I am today are ones listed above. Think about a lot of the things you have that others don’t – I’m not talking about furniture from Rooms To Go or a Volkswagen, but psychological issues you don’t have, cultural barriers you aren’t behind and physical limitations that won’t hold you back. Maybe make your own list. Post it to facebook, or whatever.

So, slowly, I’ve been swallowed up by the endless tide of new responsibility, new fascinations, new friends and new ideas. All this newness is making me sick, but that’s what your early 20s is about. Recently, I’ve sort of gotten into “twentysomething literature”, which is what I like to call blogs and articles and general stacks of wisdom that litter the internet about how to be twentysomething. The life and experiences and ideas and challenges and confusion that pretty much embodies being in your 20s is overwhelming and something people absolutely LOVE to write about. It’s characterized by thoughtstream text, where you jam words together like thought and stream and you don’t use punctuation like  you would in actual speech. It’s like listening to someone talk, and it’s very easy to imagine someone saying this to you as they sit across the table from you, smoking or caffinating or pontificating on their life- whatever indulgence they allow themselves.

Giving a secret shit about what people think about you, wanting to please them and wanting to be someone they respect as early as possible is like the second stage of puberty. We’ve grown into our bodies but not our brains, and the fact that we can think about all these things and haven’t settled down into the routine and minutia of life is the crippling thing. It was hormones, now it’s thoughts and restlessness and a serious lack of direction.

My current problem is that for most of my life I have been directed by things people told me to do, or told me I couldn’t do. (I did them in reverse, obviously.) Now, of course, I’m not being told to do anything or not to do anything, so I have no one to prove wrong. What I end up doing is listening to the internet. This is very dangerous, because it makes you intellectually bulimic. You want so badly to not actually be effected by the media you consume that you read and regurgitate everything, demonstrating that while you understand what people are saying, they totally don’t have you pegged. You’re too special for that.  So listening to people like Tim Ferris or Ramit Sethi, or the kids on Thought Catalog or all the young adults doing things far more amazing than you that are linked on This Isn’t Happiness – it’s exhausting. Listening to the wisdom of local mentors is no better- it’s the antithesis of the internet in that you have to put yourself out there in order to be taken in and taught the ropes, which makes you feel like you’re walking a tightrope a thousand feet in the air. Look at you! Up so high! You have so far to fall.

In the end, people in their late 30s calm the hell down and realize that they may never really know who they are, but what they do know is that they aren’t anyone else, so giving a shit about what anyone else thinks just isn’t an option anymore.

There is an increasing number of individuals with money and ideas that are getting cool things done, building nifty tools and advancing the modern web to new heights of usefulness.

Then there are these people. Yes, though many of these examples are farcical, there are many people who fail to grasp the basic tenets of social networking- equating the vast wealth of branding that Google and Facebook have to be easily reproducible, the hard part moreso being reproduction of functionality, rather than scale across the web.

Yes, there have been many an online ad, a classifieds post or a commission placed upon a design agency to simply duplicate the functionality of Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin or some other social media giant, assuming the throngs of crowds are simply waiting for the Next Big Thing, and that this has Never Before Been Attempted.

The question you should ask yourself in times like these, should you wonder “Why can’t I have invented Facebook?” and “How can I monetize Facebook’s popularity?” is not “How do I make the next Facebook” or “How do I make my OWN Facebook”- but instead wonder “What comes next?”

Facebook is not a new idea, nor is it the best executed. It is simply the idea with the most successful branding. More people use Facebook, so in turn, more people use Facebook. The point of this however, is that more people use Facebook. What would be the point of logging in to Facebook if no one was ever online and no one ever posted a status update?

The idea behind social media is traction. Social traction comes from context and popularity. The reason every clothing designer in the world can’t be famous is the same reason every social network in the world doesn’t quite make it. Branding, market research, usability studies and product viability are all valuable pieces of information that despite what you think you know, you can’t possibly just guess at until you do some research. Facebook, Microsoft, Apple- all these companies were founded by the twin goddesses of Genius and Luck. Maybe 10 individuals at any given time are blessed with both, and anyone hoping to bank on having them is someone taxed by their misunderstanding of statistics.

In the wake of all of the hubbub about facebook’s security practices, the various how-tos and informational paranoia, I am asked quite frequently by friends and family of all levels of acquaintance about my continued use of frequent facebook and twitter updates, and their varying degrees of professionalism.

I am an avid social media user. I use twitter, facebook, linkedin and a host of other services. I check-in, I tweet and I update statuses. I post pictures of myself and my friends in fun, and silly engagements, such as playing rockband in my living room. I also tweet about what I’m working on (although I no longer post any actual details due to an NDA that covers my public speech). In short, I like to talk about what I am doing, a lot.

I enjoy disclosing details about my life. The reasons I have found for doing so- as they are generally rationalizations rather than instigating reasons- are many. I feel my professional and personal lives are enriched by a living, breathing, up-to-the-minute portfolio of not just my work, but my entire personhood. I also enjoy that it is easy for people I know to keep up with my day-to-day life, as I am young and mobile, and tend to lose contact with people for months at a time before revisiting them.

Now, most of the concerns shared by those that know and follow me are this: Are you not afraid people will judge you incorrectly, see you out of context or assume false things about you?

Of course not. My twitter feed, facebook profile, buzz list and linkedin updates are me in context. No more perfectly am I captured anywhere. I have a unique personality, varied interests and am overall, complex emotionally.

The company I work for while writing this post has a leader within it’s ranks that exemplifies everything right with corporate culture, and is someone I am deeply and profoundly proud to call my boss. The main thing done correctly is the hiring of new staff, as our company is growing rapidly. Many companies, especially in times of growth, tear themselves apart by giving each applicant only a cursory glance, comparing numerical qualifications and cherry-picking only the brightest gems, polished to the glossiest shine. These gems then mix in a pool of others, all gawdy and imperfectly aligned.

The art of arranging human beings so that they will best work together, and choosing those that have not become so set in their ways, and allowing them to support those that are set correctly- this is a skill that many so-called executives will never master in a lifetime. Selecting only the optimum arrangement, the most efficient, frictionless set of gears that don’t wear each other down due to ill-fitting size and shape, this is the skill practiced here.

But this skill is not something that can be summarized in a brief interview, or a scan of a few carefully selected words by a potential interviewee- it is best summarized by a portfolio of life that grows with a person- ideas and information growing and changing with the person it represents- something a simple resume could never do.

So yes, on my portfolio, you’ll find that I am a programmer- I have experience with Classic ASP and other server-side scripting languages. You’ll see how many years I have worked and who for. You will also see the whimsy and talent, the lack of sophistication and the supreme dedication I have to perfecting the profession I have chosen- all of this information is unmeasurable on purpose- it has to be cataloged accidentally, along the course of life, and through the lens of context.

Google, in all it’s well-meaning splendor and ethos of not being evil, has decided to make a change in policy regarding unaccredited pharmacies. Hooray.

Another change Google’s dropped on the table however, is that it’s stance on drugs from accredited pharmacies from our friends to the north has shifted dramatically. New rules state that Canadian pharmacies will no longer be able to target consumers in the US, and that search results will be filtered.

For those of us embroiled in the healthcare debate, either side acknowledges that prescriptions for drugs in the US are often far too costly, and not covered, or not covered very well by current insurance. Even life-saving or medically necessary drugs come at a high cost, and without subsidization by our government, many people do without their medicine, opting to feed their families at the cost of their own health.

Enter Canadian Pharmacies, such as canadianpharmacymeds.com – which is an accredited pharmacy in Canada. Many customers of the pharmacy receive medicine at much lower prices than at non-subsidized us pharmacies, or where generics are unavailable. Due to these new rules however, it could become much harder to comparison-shop, or even find these legitimate pharmacies in order to receive cheaper medication from reputable sources.

The problem that is not currently being solved however, is cutting down on pharmacies that have bad reputations for sending out sugar pills, or are fake/scam sites. These places have little moral or legal obligation to skirt past any rules Google imposes, and so the only people hurt by this are law-abiding, policy-following and generally reputable sources of medication in Canada.

Hopefully, Google will see these issues with the policy change and reverse course, as this is one of the few avenues consumers have of leveling the playing field with regards to healthcare and the rising cost of prescriptions.

So I have been searching in vain for days for an oAuth library for Classic ASP.

I believe that due to the nature of Classic ASP, the limited support and the random quirks (fewer than ASP.NET and yet somehow… people complain more…) there exists NO library for such a thing.

I’ve been looking through the PHP libraries and the coldfusion libraries and so on, and many of the objects and methods present just aren’t supported in Classic.

Problem is, Twitter is depreciating the Basic Auth methods soon, and you won’t be able to cURL in.

@Anywhere, which is a javascript library that will allow Twitter to interact with your DOM, is going to essentially become the Facebook Connect of Twitter. We’re looking at DOM level integration, so it’s server-side language independent. This comes out April 15th, and I can’t wait.

Until then, I can tweet using this library :

http://asp.web.id/first-version-of-asp-twitter-library.html

and store usernames and passwords (horrible, but necessary for 15 days…) for the time being. I’m sending out an authentication tweet that signals successful connection, and pulling the user_profile_pic out of the Twitter REST API Method: users lookup that makes it look a lot like Facebook Connect; it achieves the user interface experience I’m looking for.

So today, while trying to figure out why a cookie was mysteriously destroying itself, we stumbled upon an interesting turn of events that I can’t find anywhere on the net.

Apparently, Cookies won’t hold if they start with the word “Include”.

We had this cookie- INCLUDE_CORPORATE_BLOG , that wouldn’t transfer from page to page.

A session with the same name would, and so we were going to have to create an entire strange workaround trying to figure out why this piece of data wouldn’t hold. My colleague suggested that we try changing the name, partly joking, to which we said “couldn’t hurt”.

Turns out, in Classic ASP, you can’t have Cookies that start with the word “INCLUDE”.

I waited a bit after writing this- 3 months to be exact. I wanted to be sure I wasn’t fueled by a slight against my ego, and that the feminist rage I was feeling wouldn’t falter after time. This is the blogger equivalent of writing an angry letter and waiting till morning to send it.

Here I present, the most feminist rant ever.

A question I am invariably, and I do mean invariably, asked when people find out that I have a child, “How do you manage a family and working?”, or alternately, “Who watches your son while you are at work?”

The audacity of this question is understated, as it has clear implications: people always want to know- not as a polite aside like “What is his name”‘ “How old is he”, etc, is how I can be so irresponsible as to have a career when I have a child to raise. There are then unfortunate implications to that statement that do not merely happen to be rather rude and presumptive, but effect my career as well. Assumptions range that I do not actually like what I do, I am merely doing this to “feed my kids”, that I would not do this if I didn’t have to, that I am disorganized, rushed or hurried in my work, or that I simply do not care.
But this is not predijudice against parents- it is prejudice against mothers, spisifically. My male collegues, many of whom have children- some of whom are single parents- are never asked this question. They might be applauded, if they are single, but it is a badge of honor, not a mark of shame.
This stereotype is absurd- the idea that I would rather be a housewife or homemaker of any sort- that I don’t do what I love or love what I do- that my ambitions for myself are extensions of the ambition to provide well for my offspring, these assertions are ridiculous.
I am much more ambitious than many of my personal acquaintances, and many of my coworkers- but the assumption is that I would give it all up were I to marry someone well off, or attain some sort of lump sum in a stroke of luck. This stereotype is not only one of the single most damaging ideas to feminism in society today, but many professional women- women who would raise intelligent, well-fed and well-adjusted offspring put it off until the end of their careers, or off entirely, due to this assumption. This leaves these incredible people out of the gene pool, and can only hurt posterity. To talk about sustainability, sustaining a population segment with a high enough IQ to maintain and use the technological wonders we use today is one of the highest priorities we can have as a species- this trend has to stop.

Sometimes we get working, or we get excited about a change in our lives. Sometimes it’s for something we love, sometimes it’s for something we hate. Sometimes we go off on an adventure, and even, times come where the adventure becomes our everyday lives. These are the times when we forget.

We forget to paint, or to read, or to ski or to blog. We forget to go on dates. We forget to follow the plans we lay out because of life and love and children and layoffs.

The problem is when we fall asleep, and never remember again. We go to work and we come home and we think about what we are forgetting to do as something we are forgetting to do- not something we love.

It becomes something we regard as secondary to our lives. It moves into a tertiary thing, and then something for “only” when we have time. And then we have no time.

The biggest change we can make for ourselves is to audit and reclaim our time. Look at the biggest detractors in your life- Commute, Chores, Spending time with individuals that you don’t enjoy, and don’t benefit from you. Imagine the difference these hours add up to.

With commutes upwards of an hour long, imagine getting back two to four hours a day? What could you do in two to four hours? Change your life?