Tag Archives: blogging

The Fine Art of Button Pushing

But first, the quote of the day:

Il piacere di alzar la testa tutto l’anni e ben pagato da certi quarti d’ora che bisogna passar

From Stendhal’s “The Red and the Black” (“the pleasure of going around with one’s head held high all year is well paid for by certain quarters of an hour one must endure”)

Meme of the day: List 5 of your buttons that can be pushed to effect every time

1) Non Sequiters. Such as, when people demand that we atheists justify our non-belief in God. As if! Like I have to prove it to you that goldfish never speak Chinese!!

2) Cover-ups. When people sweep things under the rug and pretend that everything is fine. Never fails to rile.

3) Race-baiting. Republicans like Hannity and Limbaugh are just dying to come out and accuse Obama supporters of being “nigger lovers” but just can’t bring themselves to say the words, so they try and use other words instead, but come on! I double dog dare you to!

4) Honest brokers. People who claim impartiality when it’s obviously not true, like the United States in the Middle East. Obama today was saying that Iran has caused problems there – oh, really? Did they invade and occupy anybody? Did they sell everybody tons of weapons? Did they go around overthrowing anybody’s government, like we overthrew theirs? Really. Troublemakers!

5) Lackeys. There are people who do not do their job, but wait for you to do it for them, then copy it and claim some credit. When they approach, my stress level rises. Invariably.

If I were a meme-spreader, I would “tag” certain people, but when people do that to me, that’s button push number six – like the woman who once asked me what my dating showstoppers were, and I immediately realized that one of them is people who use the term “showstoppers”.

Nothing Nice To Say

Sometimes it’s hard to stick to my ‘blog comment’ rule, which is, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything. Like anyone, I often come across blog posts full of ignorance or foolishness (according to me) and it’s sooo tempting, but what’s the point of getting into ‘arguments’ with phantoms? or with real people in reali life, for that matter? And there are certain blogs that keep me on the edge of posting comments I will regret – maybe I read them just to test myself and remind myself of the rule.

I know that whenever I do ‘fall off the wagon’, I hate it.

nice quote i saw today – McCain may be Seabiscuit, but Obama is Secretariat …

also was informed that blogging is sooo 2004 and the 2008 thing to do is twitter and facebook, which of course, by next year, will be soooo 2008. as it happens, due to my work (cellphone software testing) i have to plug into all of these things, and i find them all interesting and useful in their own way. i suppose it depends on what your goal is. if you want to be the Most Important Person With Ideas Everyone Will Listen To, well, good luck in general.

Facebook kind of blands-out the concept of friendship (there’s proably a better way to put it)

Twitter is like public instant-messaging, which you can do with IM groups anyway, or email aliases, for that matter.

Blogging for me has always been like the spiral bound notebook I used to keep, which I called ‘So Much Things To Say’, and as such, it suits me just fine for that purpose.

AS for what is soooo this year or that, who cares?

Re-reading now The Count of Monte Cristo (A. Dumas) but the unabridged version, the one with opium, hashish and lesbianism. Who knew?

“When one associates with madmen, one must train as a maniac”

degrees

Not only is Facebook moving in to new offices around the corner from mine, but they’re closing in on me by degrees of separation as well. I had referenced Missy Tonight’ on my Facebook page, a friend commented on it, and the one and only Penn Jillette commented on her comment on her page! Gosh, it sure is a small world after all!

(another commenter asked if I was a “fully credentialed” atheist! hey, that might be another way to cash in – start an atheist accreditation program. I can see the syllabus now:
How to Start Living and Stop Pestering Jesus
How to Be Born, Exist, and Die
A Practical Guide to Imaginary Friendship

feel free to add your own …

Small Potatoes

This blog is seriously small-time, and that’s just fine with me. I do find it interesting, however, how the few strangers who wander here happen to find it. Mostly it’s through searches, occasionally through links from other bloggers who happen to be the people whoses blogs i enjoy the most. I’ve been trying out ‘google analytics’ to track the trickle of traffic, and discovered the most popular paths to here are for a few of my favorite blog posts – the one where i invented an entirely fictitious back story to explain a Curve album, the one where i wrote an essay on a great history book called Captains of Consciousness, the one where I make fun of google for jumping on the advertising possibilites of Barack Obama being the AntiChrist, and the one where talk about what to do with your soul mate once you find them.

i recently thought of promoting my Atheist Fiction through some random atheist blogs, of which there are more and more. We’re still a relatively tiny subset, it seems. Well, there are more atheists than ever, but hardly anyone at all in the entire world, it seems, has any interest or awareness in atheist fiction, not even atheist pulp fiction, or atheist science fiction, or atheist comedy cult classics.

Ah well. Ahead of my time I suppose.

Meanwhile, I’m having a fun time with my latest – Missy Tonight. I’m grateful at least that my trivial entertainments are amusing to myself if nobody else in atheistdom.

Dogosphere

Walking with my dog and noticing how she stops to smell different spots, deciding which ones to mark herself, or not; it’s her own little blogosphere.

Lately I’ve been blaming JRR Tolkein for all of the software bugs I encounter every day (in my capacity as a software test engineer) – most programmers are the kind of people who grew up reading fantasy, and think it’s perfectly acceptable to have “lore” and “magic” and to make up your own languages, to create logic-defying systems, to make it up as you go along. This whole industry is based on fantasy (whose earliest adopters were porn and gambling entrepeneurs, two other fantasy-based economies). You have to dig deep into the “lore” (a.k.a. code) to discover the hidden secret meanings. For example:

“The [negative prices in the billing system] are leftover from a workaround we had to do for [Company X]. The word for “free” [in a certain foreign language] was causing the pricing string to truncate on the UI. [So-and-so] came up with the trick that we put in a negative price,
which on the UI resulted in “0″, rather than “free”, and got around the truncation.”

The end result of that particular “workaround” is that it’s okay to charge a customer a negative amount for a free product.

This is so typical of the inner workings of software. These people – who were the weirdos in high school – are the ones who end up defining what “normal” is. I suppose we’re fortunate it’s not all based on Edgar Allen Poe. Tolkein will have to do.

Dispatches

Someone awards a Thinking Man’s Blog award – I would like to present a Reading Man’s Blog Award to Dispatches From Zembla. This blog is my version of continuing education.

Today’s post is a link to a New Yorker story about the Pirana people from the Amazon, whose culture is so completely focused on the present that they have no past, no history, no creation myths, no abstractions.

Much of the magazine article dwells on academic arguments about whose linguistic theory is right and whose is wrong (academia is sooo boring to me), but the parts about these people and how they live is really interesting.

Trentino-alto Adige

Someone from that area in Northern Italy googled my Gian Carlo Spallanzani ‘Alchemy for Dummies’ video. I wonder if that’s their name, or they know someone with that name. Actually, I stole the name from Stanislaw Lem’s book “A Perfect Vacuum” ( a collection of reviews of non-existent books), and promptly mis-spelled it on my videos as Spallanzini. Oh well. Spallanzani in that book was the author of a complete modern rewrite of Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’. Nowadays, that’s more inevitable than laughable – witness the recent BBC Robin Hood series, where Robin and his Merry Men resemble nothing more than a contemporary Emo band. (The show makes me cringe but I’m a sucker for all things Robin Hood and his “enhanced wealth-reallocation techniques”)