October 2nd, 2011
It’s taken me time to put my thoughts together, but I felt I needed to reply to the recent changes in Facebook and the reactions of people about it.
In short, Facebook changed their interface again, everyone complained and said how much they hated it, then within two days, everyone shut up and just kept going, as if nothing had happened. I’m handling this by changing my habits. I’m switching, as much as possible, to Google+. I’m doing all my new posting on Google+ (other than my Hal’s Haiku page on Facebook) and I’m only responding to other posts on Facebook. I plan, over time, to reduce my interaction on Facebook more and more until I don’t use it anymore.
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May 16th, 2011
This is something I’ve been thinking about writing about for a few years, but just never took the time to put together the numbers and write it down. Unfortunately, while I’ve reconstructed some of the numbers, I’ve lost some of the math. But if you’re really interested in checking out what I say, the numbers could be reconstructed using Google and spending some time searching.
I was on eHarmony from close to the beginning until about 2010, when I started a relationship with someone I met offline, through ballroom dancing. But from about 2009 on, I stayed on eHarmony only out of the slim chance it might work. By then I had learned something important: eHamrony is hiding important figures that show them as more of a failure than a success. A lot of online dating services are doing this.
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May 12th, 2011
I know I’m a bit slow on posting this, since it’s about my trip to Arts in the Park at the start of May, but I took time to think about whether it was worth posting or not. (Plus life sometimes gets in the way of a blog post!)
Every year I look forward t o Arts in the Park, at Dogwood Dell and the Carillon (which is a local city park with a monument to World War I). The grounds are covered with tent after tent, each with a different artist displaying his or her work, in hopes that those of us wandering by will decide to buy something. Some artists are back year after year and, of course, every year there are new artists as well.
But even though I always enjoy the show, I find that it always challenges my ideas about individuality and creativity — and not in the way you’d think or in a good way.
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March 4th, 2011
(Note: This was originally written in August, 2008.)
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. They always have. They always will. Two examples spring to my mind, one real, one not. The first is the fictional one: Remember Dead Poets Society? He challenged the students to make their lives extraordinary. Some did. One kid pushed the limits and his Father pushed back and he killed himself. One rebelled and was kicked out (or so I remember) and the meekest of the bunch was the one that finally, at the end, stood on his desk and said, “Oh, Captain, my Captain!” But what else happened? How many of the kids just went along with the teacher but didn’t meet the challenge to make their lives extraordinary instead of ordinary? And how many of them just stood on their desks at the end because others were doing it?
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Posted in Ballroom Dancing, Free and Open Source Software, Life, Literature and Arts, Politics | No Comments »
March 29th, 2009
I FINALLY got to see the series finale for Battlestar Galactica. Now before I tell you how hard it’s been to see it, a little lead up, some of which you know. I read about the first Battlestar Galactica series way before it was ever on the air. I found a great article about John Dykstra and how he was taking the effects skills he learned in Star Wars and was making a TV series with those abilities. I was looking forward to the show well before it aired. Okay, it was the late 1970s, it was cheesy, it was over done, many of the effects shots were re-used over and over, but for me, at that time — well, it was just fantastic. There was a weekly show on the TV with space ships, people that lived on them, effects that made it look real, and stories that took me beyond the here and now. Every week we heard the same tag line at the end, “And so, the last Battlestar, Galactica, leads a rag tag fugitive fleet on a lonely quest for a shining planet called Earth.” After an attack by the Cylons (robots made by man that rebelled), most of the 12 colonies are destroyed, so they find the fabled planet they all came from and find keys to help them find Earth. It ran for one season only and they never found Earth. Well, okay, they did in the really, really, really bad sequel, Galactica 1980, but that was basically an attempt to keep things going and most of us consider it “non-canon” as far as what happened.
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August 11th, 2008
I don’t know whether I was just stepping out or stepping up. I participated in my first dance competition a day or so ago. I went down to Raleigh for a small comp to do seven dances. Apparently that’s a bit unusual — doing that many dances in one’s first comp. At least that’s what some people have told me since then. I guess maybe if someone had told me that earlier, I might stuck with only two or three dances, but we had been practicing eight in comp class and if I had not gone senile with one issue with the basic steps in East Coast swing, I probably would have entered in that as well.
I still don’t know if doing seven dances for your first comp is hard or not. All I know is I did it. I figured I knew the dances so I might as well do them. It wasn’t costing me anything to try them.
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June 26th, 2008
I haven’t been writing much in my blog for several reasons. First is that I’m still adapting to how everything has changed since my Father died and this blog is not a personal diary. It’s not here so I can show the world my most private thoughts.
However, I’ve realized there is something that’s become a passion of mine in the past year that I have yet to write about here and it’s something I do love doing and talking about. Anyone that knows me knows I love cycling and enjoy walking and lifting weights, but that’s about the limit of any training I’ve had in movement.
And yet in August I’ll be competing in tango and a number of other ballroom dances. How did that happen?
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December 17th, 2007
What do you mean when you say the word, “Free?” In software, we have two meanings, one is expressed as “free as in beer” and the other is “free as in speech.” This applies to music as well. There is music you can download for free, there’s also music you have to pay to download. Often you can pay for music and get far less than you expect, even if the song is exactly what you want.
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Posted in Computers/Internet, Digital Music, Free and Open Source Software | No Comments »
October 12th, 2007
I make my living from the results of software I’ve written. I have two LCD monitors in front of me and, when I’m working, am often logged into 3-4 computers that could be in different locations in the city or state. When I lose my Internet connection, often I have to stop working. Even if I’m on only my workstation computer, I still need the Internet for reference and other uses. Make no mistake about it: I am a true computer and network geek. On the other hand, I held out for years, avoiding Amazon and eBay. Why? I’d rather support the merchants locally. At one point I had a part time job I loved in a small retail store. I didn’t need the money, but I liked the book store, liked their attitude, and liked helping both the store and the customers. They opened a new branch store in a mall not far from me. Once I was helping two women with a lot of questions and recommending the appropriate books for each question they had. Then I said something about one being discounted. One woman said, “Oh, we wouldn’t get it here. We’d get it on Amazon.” To this day I regret that I didn’t say, “Then see if Amazon is here to help you and patiently answer all your questions in six months. If we’re gone then and you have questions, you’ll know it’s because people bought from them and not us.” I didn’t say it because I didn’t want to prejudice their view of a store I believed in and I didn’t want to hurt the reputation of the owners. Interestingly enough, within six months, that branch store was closed due to lack of sales.
So why would I, a strong supporter of local stores, come within an inch of saying to someone in a store, “That’s okay. I’ll get it on Amazon?”
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October 7th, 2007
I’ve been dealing with email before most people ever heard of email, computer networks, or even the Internet. I remember getting emails about the government considering modem taxes before most people knew what a modem was and while some tech people were still making fun of me for using a modem and connecting to networks. Many of the people I know through the Internet are techies. They tend to respond to emails the way I do, with interspersed comments, no HTML formatting or anything else at all fancy. I also have friends I’ve met through the Internet that barely know more than to log on to their computer don’t understand where their computer ends and the Internet starts.
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