Ramblings of an Anonymous Coward

Pictures

flickr announced another printing option which includes being able to pick up your pictures at the local target store. cool. and speaking of pictures, i have a few more links for those with visual interests.

i came across a gallery of prints made from unprocessed film found in vintage cameras. since the film was never developed, the photographer of these shots never saw them. by vintage, i mean pictures from the late 30's through the 60's. i think it is pretty neat to see pictures ordinary people took back then. some are quite excellent and if you are paying attention you can even figure out the city/country in a few. i want to sit down sometime and look through them all.

thinking of art, math really can be quite beautiful. consider entanglement by justin mullins. i found it quite amusing that euler's relation was here too as we were just talking about this at dinner last night, but expressed as an algebraic equation for one of my know it all kids. not as pretty as some of the other, but cool none the less. they should have expressed it as e^(i(pi))=-1, rather than adding 1 to make it equal zero, but that's me. i'd like someting like this to hang in my office one day.

speaking of old pictures -- benny's postcards has some pretty interesting images. yes, yiddish postcards. not quite as cool as the undeveloped film above, but interesting none the less.

The Vapor Trail

i can rarely resist a silly test and this was no exception. often i have something to say about the results and aside from the fact that many questions really just don't apply to a married with children sort of guy, i'm left a bit speechless.

The Vapor Trail Random Brutal Love Master (RBLMm) Here today, gone today. You are The Vapor Trail. Are you in a relationship now? Your exact opposite: The Backrubber Deliberate Gentle Sex Dreamer What about now? Vapor Trails can be highly charismatic people--unpredictable, confident, and magnetic. You're experienced. You know how to handle yourself in a relationship, and many people appreciate that. Many people, all in a row. You've had your share of blissful beginnings, to be sure. But things almost never turn out how you'd like, do they? The problem is you're never happy with someone for an extended period of time. Relate to the following: Vapor Trails especially need a girl who will laugh at their jokes. They're also the most likely male type to be haunted by serious regret. FACT: A few of your exes, the ones you were best to, will always love you. Nice going. ALWAYS AVOID: The Intern, The Maid of Honor CONSIDER: The Sudden Departure Link: The 32-Type Dating Test by OkCupid - Free Online Dating.

ok, i lied. i do have more to say. i'm gonna have to pick at a few things....

• charismatic -- uhhhhh, no.
• unpredictable -- sometimes this is true, so i'll give 'em that one
• confident -- in some areas of my life, but certainly not when it comes to dealing with people or emotions. so NO.
• magnetic -- ummm, if i had a magnet in my pocket, maybe. no.
• You're experienced. -- now that was funny. next.
• You know how to handle yourself in a relationship -- yeah, right .... that must have been sarcasm

i'll stop there... i'm tired of picking. the rest is simply a little creepy in the same sense of a fortune teller saying something that when twisted and bent can be right or totally wrong. it all hinges on what you want to believe.

i'll definitely have to make another post to get the bad taste out of my fingers from this one. bleh!

Umm... No Clever Title Ideas Today

it has been nearly two weeks since i have posted and in that time, shit happens. i had a day where i swear everything i touched broke -- servers crashed and even a disk raid group failed. completely. a very important notebook of mine was lost for a few hours. i though for sure it was gone. thankfully it was tucked away where i had never tucked it before... in a nutshell i wasn't myself nor doing the things i would normally do. t'was caos. sure, when a calmer mind prevailed there were reasons all most of the shit happened. but i tell ya... it sucked.

so enough of the live journal like posting... forgetfoo posted an... um.... interesting picture of a taunting urinal. his comment was right on... on a scale between 1 and fucked up, this is just plain wrong... but funny. later i read an article over at wired which talked about something i've noticed too... the dynamics of video game addiction. we'll see how this plays out in WoW. i'm level 57 now and hope to be 58 by the weekend and either 59 or 60 after. :-)

heh, that still sounded like something on live journal. *sigh*

20 Amps Wasn't Enough

if i wrote what i was thinking and feeling right now, it wouldn't be a pretty sight. downright ugly in fact. i'm tired, i'm hungry, i'm cranky, i want to shed all responsibilities even if just for a little while... and that would need to include stopping all of the thoughts that would be in the back of my mind as i sat and played a game or watched a movie. in other words... not gonna happen.

while taking a little break just now, i see edward teller had a quote of the day...

A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective.
-- edward teller

Random Thoughts on a Day Of Atonement

i was sitting at a stoplight today and thought -- damn, am i becoming my mother?. i'm getting old, tired and weary. complaints percolate to the top faster and faster. i'm becoming forgetful and am as selfish as ever. over recent years my emotional balance has been questionable. or perhaps like my dad? completely unmotivated beyond getting done what needs to be done.

while at lunch with a co-worker the other day he mentioned the movie "some kind of monster" which was about metallica, their new [at the time] album, and their group therapy. his reaction was ... i don't know if i like them any more, they are a bunch of pussies. the disappointment was obvious. we all know the band as being tough, head-banging, heavy metal rockers. they're supposed to be the rape and pillage kinda guys. despite that, i told him again that i liked the movie and appreciated that they were "real people" behind their act. he was unconvinced. frankly, i appreciate the band now more than ever.

i read this today and unfortunately didn't keep the url, but had saved it off as something i wanted to remember/share.

That guy used to have soul. That was why he liked me in college. I represented something he could not allow himself to be. I could feel and feel deeply. He could only feel the top layers of life.

i've been told that i don't get deep and that description of only feeling the top layers of life, i think, fits me to the proverbial "T". i like that analogy.

Apple, TV, Esquire Mish-Mash

so apple made their big announcment the other day. honestly, after jobs diss'ed video some time back i really expected them to introduce and 80GB iPod. no dice, it is an ipod that plays videos. but that is not where the brilliance of the announcement comes from. see, the itunes store worked out a deal to get episodes of the show lost available for download -- $1.99 each. now the quality has something to be desired, but it looks like some people are getting it. they are understanding that people want content "how they want it" not just how the content holder wants to spoon it out to them.

as is typical, mark cuban hits it on the head. i had no idea who bob iger was, but cuban's post explains the importance of this deal much better than i ever could. i would add; however, that it isn't the device that is important but the shift in thinking that seems to be afoot. finally!

a.j. jacobs wrote a piece for esquire called My Outsourced Life where he "off-shores" many of his day to day tasks. while there are some practical advantages in some of these things i appreciate the concerns he raises and especially the sly comedic relief. i could just imagine the wife's reaction if i had an indian woman named honey phone her up to deal with an argument. it certainly has its appeal, but i suspect payback would be hell. now the idea of having her call and talk to my mom -- now that's value! seriously though, read this article... it starts a little slow but was damn amusing.

Damn Comment Spam

i just had to delete hundreds of comment spam. geez! seeing as i don't get much in the way of comments anyway, i'm not going to leave anything anything open for comment until i implement a solution to keep this crap out (leaving only my crap of course).

as an aside, one nice thing about MT is having everything in a database, i can whip up a couple queries and knock most of the comment spam quickly. the rebuild is a little slow, but anyway...

Happiness Is...

i was going to put this into the previous post, but it felt too much like an add-on when i was done... though it too does deal with psychology, but more directly. i wanted to point to an article in the UK's sunday times entitled So what do you have to do to find happiness? which in between a lot of stuff that nearly bored me to tears were a few things i thought were interesting.

below are some clips from the article that caught my eye and are likely out of context, so please... read the article linked above.

As a psychology graduate working in animal- behaviour labs, Seligman discovered "learned helplessness" and became a big name. Dogs who experience electric shocks that they cannot avoid by their actions simply give up trying. They will passively endure later shocks that they could easily escape. Seligman went on to apply this to humans, with "learned helplessness" as a model for depression. People who feel battered by unsolvable problems learn to be helpless; they become passive, slower to learn, anxious and sad. This idea revolutionised behavioural psychology and therapy by suggesting the need to challenge depressed people's beliefs and thought patterns, not just their behaviour.

i can identify with that. there have been plenty of times i've just thought it just doesn't matter what i do and simply float along.

Professor Alice Isen of Cornell University and colleagues have demonstrated how positive emotions make people think faster and more creatively.

interesting. i've found myself being more "creative", at least in an artistic sense, when i'm on a down rather than an up. when happy (excited) i do believe i think faster and get more things done.

Although most people rate themselves as happy, there is a wealth of evidence to show that negative thinking is deeply ingrained in the human psyche. Experiments show that we remember failures more vividly than successes. We dwell on what went badly, not what went well. When life runs smoothly, we're on autopilot — we're only in a state of true consciousness when we notice the stone in our shoe.

most definitely. it is rare for me to be able to point to more positives than negatives things. my son can proudly say he swept the floor, and while i notice and appreciate it, my attention is most quickly drawn to the spot he missed or the fact that the job was so-so rather than the fact he put forth the effort. show me a picture and i'll tend to point to the things i don't like about it rather than the things i do.

Of the six universal emotions, four — anger, fear, disgust and sadness — are negative and only one, joy, is positive. (The sixth, surprise, is neutral.)

six universal emotions? was i sleeping in pysch class that day or is my memory simply failing me? ahhhh, who cares. :-)

Modern humans, stuck with an ancient brain, are like rats on a wheel. We can't stop running, because we're always looking over our shoulders and comparing our achievements with our neighbours'. At 20, we think we'd be happy with a house and a car. But if we get them, we start dreaming of a second home in Italy and a turbo-charged four-wheel-drive.

This is called the "hedonic treadmill" by happiness scholars. It causes us to rapidly and inevitably adapt to good things by taking them for granted. The more possessions and accomplishments we have, the more we need to boost our level of happiness.

sad, but true. worse is recognizing it and feeling helpless to change it. maybe there is a good drug to take... :-)

Happiness is neither desire nor pleasure alone. It involves a third chemical pathway. Serotonin constantly shifts the balance between negative and positive emotions. It can reduce worry, fear, panic and sleeplessness and increase sociability, co-operation, and happy feelings. Drugs based on serotonin, such as ecstasy, produce a relaxed sense of wellbeing rather than the dopamine pattern of euphoria and craving.

In essence, what the biology lesson tells us is that negative emotions are fundamental to the human condition, and it's no wonder they are difficult to eradicate. At the same time, by a trick of nature, our brains are designed to crave but never really achieve lasting happiness.

ecstasy? sounds like they picked an apropo name. whodathunkit? maybe there is a legal version of such a thing?

The tragic legacy of Freud is that many are "unduly embittered about their past, and unduly passive about their future", says Seligman. His colleague Aaron Beck developed cognitive therapy after becoming disillusioned with his Freudian training in the 1950s. Beck found that as depressed patients talked "cathartically" about past wounds and losses, some people began to unravel. Occasionally this led to suicide attempts, some of which were fatal. There was very little evidence that psychoanalysis worked.

this is quoted here... just because. the bolding was done by me and is not in the article. hehe. oh, and since i've quoted so much, i really should link to the website they mentioned too... http://www.reflectivehappiness.com/ that has programs to supposedly make you happier.

In one internet study, two interventions increased happiness and decreased depressive symptoms for at least six months. One exercise involves writing down three things that went well and why, every day for a week.

read the full article for the other exercises, but i cherry picked this one out to say... hmmm, if done properly is blogging theraputically good (for real)?

t's difficult to resist the logic of the happiness doctors. Stay in your Eeyore-ish bubble of existentialist angst and have a life that's short, sickly, friendless and self-obsessed. Or find a way to get happy, and long life, good health, job satisfaction and social success will be yours.

well.... i dunno pooh.

Your Match Is...

allow me to start off quite tangentially and say that the other day my spousal unit muttered something like "hot men available now" or some such as she was going through her email encountering the spam we all know and hate. thankfully, most of my spam gets filtered out, but one slipped by today that purported that it had my perfect match and while i had plenty of better things i could do -- and against my better judgement -- i clicked through.

well, i guess their software is only so good as i was presented with not one perfect match, but six people to choose from with pictures and links to profiles. my first thought was ... on what basis were these profiles picked for me? if i were a match.com user and they had a profile of me available i would understand, but this was spam and given the email address it was sent to, they would have little to have gone on.

as is often the case with me, curiousity set in, with part of it being driven by figuring out where this spammer got the email address. being the dopey guy that i am, i looked at the pictures and clicked through on the profiles of the women whose pictures i found appealing which was 2 of the 6. for the other 4... sorry ladies, not only am i not available, but i also didn't find you attractive.

now the only reason i even bothered posting this is because i looked at the two profiles and while the profiles had many things in common, it had one that jumped out at me screaming irony, irony, irony. both of these women had degrees in psychology (assuming the profiles are accurate of course).

maybe this spam is just a bait and switch to do client acquisition? heh!