May 7 Have you heard people talk about their spouse as “their better half”? It’s an interesting (and kind) thing to say. Often it’s the guy talking about his wife, but not always so. It’s slightly demeaning towards the “lesser half” (often self-deprecating since that person will say it about themselves) but that’s supposed to be hidden by the elevation of the spouse.
So my question is, how can both of them be the better half? I really don’t think that can be the case. I had a talk quite sometime back about this. We talked about different couples that we know, and sad as it was we realized that we could usually think of one person in the relationship who was a better catch. We weren’t trying to be mean (at least I don’t remember that being the intention, I think it was just a commentary on things that we saw). Still, it’s an interesting thought huh?
Think of a couple, and I’d hazard a guess that you could think that one of them is a bit of a better catch than the other. Now why this might be will obviously change from case to case.
Why did I write this? I don’t know, I just thought about it all of a sudden. And I thought it was an interesting thought. Don’t read into it too much or your head will hurt. And nobody likes headaches. Nobody. But do appreciate your other half for what who they are!
Apr 30 How many people do you know who are more interested and involved in the lives of celebrities than in the lives of those around them? Too many? Yeah, me too.
Who Are They?
In the realm of entertainment, there are actors, musicians, athletes, and people who are nothing else except somehow rich. They all come together at events, walk around the same streets that we do, and have lives that occasionally defy soap operas in their outrageousness. But why are there people who don’t personally know the celebrities interested in them at all? Is it because they seem to belong to a higher social caste than we? Is it because they are prettier, richer, and more talented than us? Is it because they do things that we wouldn’t even dream of doing?
My Thoughts
Really I just don’t know why us common folk are interested in them. All I know is that I see people all over the place who are far more interested in celebrities (who they do not know) than in their friends and family (who they do know). Something doesn’t seem right about that does it?
I really don’t think that celebrities are that interesting. I respect their talent, and I’m definitely not opposed to entertainment. But I don’t care what kind of a drink they ordered at Starbucks last Wednesday or who was seen schmoozing with who at the hot club in Las Vegas. Nor do I care to use any of my brain to remember any other unnecessarily small fact about them. What kind of a world do we live in where we know the favorite candy of a star and don’t even know what is really going on with the guy right next to us?
It’s time to stop immersing ourselves in others’ lives and time to start living our own! (Or at least immerse yourself in someone’s life who knows that you exist. Who knows, something worthwhile might even come out of it.)
Apr 23 Alright so I don’t actually know any ninjas. Pirates, though? Perhaps.
Not the pirates that say, “Arggh me matey” or have a peg leg or even have a parrot on their shoulder. That would be cool, but I actually only know pirates in the modern day sense. You know the ones that illegally consume things like music, videos, software, pictures, or any of a whole range of things. Haha I can hear the groans already.
The digital age has made it infinitely more easy to exactly duplicate other content (which is related to why digital things are superior in quality to analog). With this, people have degenerated to outright stealing while not even understanding what they’re doing. Well I hate to break it to you, but wrongs committed unintentionally are still wrong.
While I have written that I think that Music Piracy Makes People Stupid, this issue is far larger than just music. Music is the best known, probably because it’s the area that’s most often violated. It is so much more widespread, though. So let’s get down to the real issue.
Breaking Down Piracy
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Someone creates something for a purpose
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Somehow it’s made available to other people (whether stolen, hacked, copied, or what) outside of the realm of the original purpose
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You (or a “friend” of yours) gets a copy of said good and utilize it
Is that pretty much how it breaks down? Seems to me like the real issue is that the creator/writer/actor/musician/whatever did not intend for those in step 3 to make use of their creation. If I were a computer programmer and wrote a program to sell. And then if someone had illegally hacked my program that I worked to create to sell and gave it away for free, I’d be piping mad. If you were a photographer and had taken a picture for someone, but someone else had taken it and used it for a totally different purpose, you’d be up in arms. If you provided services (law, medicine, therapy, teaching, what have you) and someone took your service without providing payment, you’d see that something was immediately wrong.
So basically, since the creator didn’t want it (and who hopefully created a bulletproof license or end user agreement), you’re undermining what they’re doing. It doesn’t matter that you could create a digital copy of their song without paying for it and they’ll be none the wiser. Because in actuality, it does affect them. You should have paid them for that song. And you are now a pirate. But you don’t have to be!
Dealing With This New Ninja World
Is all lost? Far from it. Once you understand what it’s like to be the one being defrauded, you’ll see that something needs to change. And there is a solution! There are all kinds of answers! Maybe watch things that are actually released by the studios (try out Hulu), actually buy music (if you’re listening to music you can probably afford to pay for it) or try Amie Street for the whole indie scene, and possibly even catch up on some of my Favorite Open Source Apps.
Or you could just become a real ninja and then you’d care about arrows, ninja stars, and ninjato rather than swiping versions of old TV shows, Adobe Photoshop, and/or the remix version of Justin Timberlake’s latest single. :D
Apr 15 You might have heard of a wiki. Then again, you also might not have heard one it. It’s a method of displaying user-modifiable content. That is, it can be changed by the people looking at it. This is different than things like this blog where I and I alone get to write. The wiki has been gaining notoriety since it allows the collaboration of knowledge, especially over the Internet.
The name wiki gets its name from Ward Cunningham, developer of the very first wiki. It’s actually Hawaiian in origin (wiki means fast), but you can read more about that at Wikipedia’s (appropriate since it’s one of the most well known wikis) page on the wiki.
The TiddlyWiki
So now that we’ve got the foundation knowledge in place, I wanted to share about the TiddlyWiki. (It still strikes me as an amusing name.) It is touted as a personal non-linear personal web notebook. I like to think of it as a central place where you can store whatever you want. It’s pretty easy to use after some initial adjustment. It is a single html file just like any old webpage.
To use it just open it up in any web browser, and you’re ready to go. Double-click on things to change them, and you can start creating new tiddlers (entries) and deleting ones that you don’t need. Saving your changes saves the information into that exact same html file. So all of the data and the framework are contained within a single file. As long as you have a web browser, you can modify your file. And what computer out there doesn’t have some sort of a web browser nowadays?
This file is the perfect size for a portable usb drive. It starts off empty at about 250KB, but it doesn’t grow all that quickly since only the new text that is added is stored.
The TiddlyWiki is a method that is open to different uses. And there are many.
Some uses for TiddlyWiki
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Web Journal - save links and articles that you find online
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Blog - extremely easy to write and publish (just put the html file on a web server and it’s published)
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Personal Journal - just have the file with you wherever you are, and it’ll be safe from prying eyes
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Collaborate on projects - one person can write and the changes will be instantly available for anyone else to see
There are many ways to store information. You could write it on paper, you could just remember everything, you could use a Microsoft Word document, whatever. So here are some reasons why you’d use a TiddlyWiki instead of one of those other methods.
Advantages of TiddlyWiki
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Basic tags (which allow you to quickly see all entries with a particular tag)
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Quick searching as you type into the search box
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Self-contained (it’s a single file)
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Portable (I guess that’s always relative, but it’s small in size)
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Interactive feel
Server-side Implementations
Personally I’ve been using a version of this that’s on my server. I tried a couple of different products, but MiniTiddlyServer (Update: MiniTiddlyServer is not deprecated so you will need to figure out another way) was the easiest and most straightforward for my PHP-enabled server. All I needed to do was download the zip file, put it onto my server, and off I went! Update: Check out my own TiddlyWiki
For those without their own server, TiddlySpot seems like a reasonable free solution. *[html]: Hyper Text Markup Language *[usb]: Universal Serial Bus
Apr 9 So over a year after starting, I’m at 200 posts. It didn’t take too long I guess. Oh well at least it’s not 50 days after starting!
Courtesy of Flickr user Verdesam
I’ve gone from posting things that I really wanted to put out there to posting everyday about stupid stuff that I found online to posting once a week some things that I see in life. And sometimes I even post things that will be useful to someone else.
But one thing is constant, this is my blog, and I get to do whatever I want with it! And I love that! :D
Still, the fact that I’ve written that many entries is pretty amazing to me. Let’s not think about how much time was spent writing those things. Rather, let’s enjoy the fact that I have an outlet by which to release my thoughts. Priceless, I’m sure.