I have outgrown my basic WordPress.com hosted page, and moved on to my own website:
http://endofline.lesterbell.com/
If you are just a regular visitor, you should get automatically redirected to my new page. If you are subscriber, you need to update your feed to this new feed:
http://endofline.lesterbell.com/feed/rss/
See you on the other side.
This week marked the fifteenth anniversary of Windows 95. This was major milestone, abandoning the impenetrable MS-DOS and the cumbersome Windows 3.1 for a new, slick experience. I still remember the day my dad brought up our first Windows 95 computer: a sexy gray Packard Bell.
This was our first computer with a CD drive. So in order to show off this new technology, the system came with several games. Most were edutainment games of varying levels of quality (the dinosaur one was the best). But there was one that was pure fun with a healthy does of violence. Yes, I speak of:
MegaRace is a vehicle combat game setup with the premise that you are participating in a television game show. The player must fight through a series of violent gangs in a variety of unreal environments. Tracks range from futuristic cities to underwater Atlantis.
Looking at it now, the game looks pretty poor. But 15 years ago? It was mind blowing. The pre-rendered 3D environments were unlike anything I had seen up to this point. The game play was simple, but that was feature for us. It allow you to look around and appreciate this creation. But the race was only half the fun.
The game show is hosted by Lance Boyle (played by Christian Erickson) in wonderfully cheezy full-motion video. Like 3D, FMV was relatively new and exciting stuff. Erickson plays Boyle with an over-the-top kind of silly that is wonderfully enduring. His dialog is enough to keep you playing, even if the rest of it falls apart for you.
With the power of the emulator DOSBox, I was able to actually play MegaRace again. In all honesty, it is not a great game. Age has turned its best feature, its graphics, into its greatest handicap. But Boyle is still entertaining, and the gameplay is fun enough when combined with some nostalgia. So happy birthday Windows 95, and thanks for bringing me MegaRace.
I miss football. It’s August, which means the start of both college and NFL seasons start soon. But it also means its as far from meaningful football as it gets.
This happens every year. Because I don’t really care for summer sports (baseball, racing, golf, etc.), I have this long drought between the end of hockey and the beginning of football. I guess I could simply start watching one of these sports. But then I’d be watching baseball, and that’d be bad.
This feeling of longing generally translates into real excitement for football. I’m reading all sorts of preview articles that really mean nothing. I mean, who cares how the Dolphin’s training camp is going? Apparently I do, because I can tell you that Jason Allen is upset with their special team performances.
The worst part of this all is NFL preseason games. They look like professional football. They should like professional football. But they are actually elaborate tryouts pretending to be professional football. Even when the first strings are in, no one is doing any intense or creative, saving that for the regular season.
Luckily, the start is only two weeks away. Are you ready for some football? Because I sure am.
Melliferax (along with her friend PaddyK) has started a new meme. It has a fantastic name: ”3 things which make my life easier that everybody else should also do but they just won’t no matter how much I bang on about it.” Quite a mouthful.
Moving on: my list is interesting because after much banging, I am actually making some headway. While many still resist my genius suggestions, it is not quite as hopeless some other people’s lists. So if you have already embraced my wisdom, feel free to swell in superiority to those who have not.
The idea that people manage their personal finances with paper bills and checkbooks boggles my mind. Those who do setup digital bills and payments still generally keep all of their information in separate silos; nothing ever interacting with the other accounts.
This method leaves a great deal of power and knowledge locked up in those accounts. A good universal money management system will unify all that info into one place. I currently use Mint.com (after it replaced Quicken Online). On a single webpage, I can see all my account balances; every transaction can be viewed and categorized, and budgets can be setup and tracked. This allows me to track every single penny that gets spent, allowing true budgeting and planning. It makes my finances so simple there is no reason not to sign up.
Your basic toaster sucks. They are generally poorly made and burn bread just as badly. Even worse, they are a single purpose appliance: they made toast and not much else.
The toaster oven is, as its name implies, both a toaster and an oven. As a toaster, it does everything your basic one does, but with more precision and quality. You can easily adjust timing to get your bread just right every time.
It is also a fully functioning oven. For small things, it will cook items just as easily as your full sized oven will. But it does this without wasting energy required to heat the oven’s larger area. This is double savings in the summer, when you have to then take all that heat out of a space through air conditioning.
The toaster oven is rivals the cooktop as the most used appliance in our house. Go get one now. It’ll change your life.
The internet is vast. And its vastness changes not just every day, but every moment. Attempting to digest it in any sort of timely fashion requires tools behind simply visiting sites daily.
Enter the RSS reader. For those that are unaware, RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS reader then takes a collection of these feeds from all of your favorite websites and organizes them into a single place. My favorite reader is Google Reader, which allows me to access my feeds from anywhere.
A good reader will keep track of what’s been updated and what you have and haven’t read. You can star items for later, share them with friends, even leave notes and comments. I average about 600 items a day in my reader. While not all get read completely, I at least scan the headlines of every single one of them. This keeps me up-to-date with a large variety of topics, which I could never do visiting them one site at a time.
So there are my three. I am sure each one of you has your own crusade you’re fighting. I would love to know what tips you all think everyone should adopt. Feel free to share in the comments.
I am a creature of habit. I’ve been getting up at the same time for so long, I wake up quick enough to turn off my alarm just as it starts. Noon rolls around, and my stomach suddenly wakes up and demands lunch. Ready for dinner at six and bed at midnight. Rinse and repeat tomorrow.
Some of this is part of my inherent personality. Some is tied to my parents and their own tendency toward habitual behavior. But some of this I think is tied to being raised in a ritualistic religion.
For the first 18 years of my life, I was a practicing Catholic. Mass was a weekly affair in our house; we always went early Sunday morning. This was clockwork, regardless of the time of year or location. If we were home, we went to St. Mary’s in Hemlock. On vacation it didn’t matter where we went, we’d find a church to attend mass at.
Within mass itself, you find another layer of habits. Every single mass follows the same sequence of rituals. Processional, introduction, liturgy of the word, liturgy of the Eucharist, communion rite, conclusion, recessional. All year round, this order of events is largely unchanged. Even when the events change, additions and subtractions happen as part of a yearly schedule. There are few surprises being a Catholic.
Even now, nearly a decade removed from regular mass attendance, these rituals still speak to me. The religious meaning is gone, but the familiar sequence of events feed my need for regular habits. I find myself easily falling into a pattern of standing and sitting, chanting and singing, completely subconscious.
My love of habits was not born of religion. But being part of a ritualistic religion seems to have enhanced my natural tendency toward forming habits. It was such a large part of my life that its effects last long after I left the faith.
-That is all.
The first widely popular computer mouse was packed in with the Apple Macintosh in 1984. This Macintosh had a black-and-white, 9 in CRT with a resolution of 512×342 pixels. The only drive was a single-sided 3.5-inch floppy disk drive. The current iMac has a 21.5-inch LED-backlit glossy widescreen with a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels. It has an internal 500GB hard drive and a dual CD/DVD drive. Like the original, it too comes with a mouse.
In fact, if you look at the two mice together, you’ll notice something interesting. Outside of aesthetics, they haven’t changed much. And the keyboards have changed even less. The monitor and drive space, on the other hand, has a quite an increase in features and size. If you were to compare operating systems, the level of improvement is even more dramatic. The two wouldn’t even be comparable. This uneven evolution of the parts is known as shearing layers.
Shearing layers is a concept coined by architect Frank Duffy. He used it to refer to buildings as composed of several layers of change. For architecture, he identified the following six layers:
Look at the various time tables for each elements. At the longest scale, you have the eternal site. At the shortest, you have the everchanging “stuff.” This kind of diverse evolution takes place equally in various other products, as illustrated in technology above.
In fact, it also happens in biology as well. Many times, natural selection forces certain systems in a species to adjust extremely quickly while other remain stagnant/slowly evolving for long periods of time. In humans, brain size increased dramatically while the rest of the systems remain relatively unchanged. Similarly, the coloration of the peppered moth darkened dramatically during the Industrial Revolution in order to better stay hidden against soot covered trees.
Shearing layers helps break up large concepts into their individual components. Thinking systematically allows one to follow focus on a single element, rather than being distracted by the different pace of the elements surrounding it. It can be a great help in analyzing complex systems.
It is human nature to built collective mythology. We create them as a species, as countries, as racial and religious groups. These are more than just gods; almost every part of a culture is infused with some level of mythology. In the United States, there is a strong belief among citizens that democracy and capitalism is the “best” way to run a country.
Mythology is built at smaller tiers as well, including at the family level. Movies, music, catch phrases, activities, etc can all become tied into the cultural identity of belonging to a family. This creates added meaning to this content, above and beyond the general meanings in the content.
Hands, touching hands, reaching outTouching me, touching you
In my family, “Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond holds a special place in our hearts. Born out of my father’s love of the song, it has slowly spread to everyone else. Over time, my entire family as adopted it as a kind of theme song. Go to any wedding that we are all at, and someone will request it with a dedication to Dad.
One must stand, one must fall
Similarly, we have a great attachment for the original Transformers: The Movie. At one point, my brothers and I could recreate the dialog of the entire movie, line by line. While not that obsessed, my sisters had an equal investment. Katie even owns a copy of the movie. It integrated deeply into our childhood, a piece of home and family we could appreciate wherever we are in life.
These are just a few examples. Due to the nature of my family (and our crazy quirks), listing everything possible would be outside the scope of this post. This family helps us differentiate ourselves from others around us. It also furthers the close nit nature of our family.
-That is all.
The beauty of the internet is that it gives us access to content that was allow available at a local level in the past. Today’s example are lectures from TED (Technology Entertainment and Design). TED is a global set of conferences curated by the American private non-profit Sapling Foundation. The goal of the conferences are to promote “ideas worth spreading”.
Since June 2006, these talks have been offered for free viewing online, under a Creative Commons license. There are now over 700 talks are available free. The lectures address an increasingly wide range of topics within the research and practice of science and culture. As an example, I want to share a pair of video I found particularly enjoyable.
Here is a fantastic lecture from Sir Ken Robinson about creativity in education. Robinson is an international advisor on education in the arts. The lecture focuses on the idea that a focus on being correct, of never making mistakes, limits children’s desire to experiment and try new things. Education is more about quantitatively correct problems (2+2=4) than creative endeavors (paint the landscape).
In this lecture, Sheena Iyengar talks about how we evaluate choice. Iyengar is a professor of business, reach director, and author. She looks deeply at choosing and has discovered many surprising things about it. For instance, when we’re presented with too many choices, like 24 varieties of jam, we tend not to choose anything at all.
This one is from Matt Ridley, author of some of my favorites like Nature via Nuture and The Red Queen. In this lecture, Ridley argues that throughout history the engine of human progress and prosperity has been “ideas having sex with each other.” Innovation and prosperity come not just from completely original ideas, but combinations of existing ideas.
This is just a small sampling of what is available on TED.com. Other past presenters include Bill Clinton, Jane Goodall, Malcolm Gladwell, Al Gore, Gordon Brown, Richard Dawkins, and Bill Gates. Definitely check it out, and if you find any others that you like, feel free to share in the comments.
-That is all.
The internet has bred an interesting culture of free content. Paid walls are less and less acceptable as a means of making money online. There are simply too many other ways for people to find similar content to charge subscription fees. So unless you’ve got something unique (a streaming video library or a special dating community), most people will simply turn away and find a free alternative.
The model the internet has adopted is in context ads. This is a method similar to television, ads happen before, after, and during the content. These range from extremely annoying sound-playing, bright flashing ads down to passive, text-only Google-ads.
Geeks being geeks, there are now a multitude of browser based ad blockers. Regardless of your browser of choice, you can go throughout the entire internet without see ads. You can access all the content you want for “free” by not seeing the ads.
For the longest time, I used the ad blocker everywhere I went. There was no distinction between a website a visited once and one I went to every day. There were no ads I ever wanted to see, so I didn’t.
Unfortunately, there is a major problem with this point of view. If a website’s means of making money is ads, and I do not see any of those ads, that website won’t make money. While one might idealize about a world where all content is free, money does drive our current internet. Without it, websites will wither and die.
Thus part of supporting website I enjoy means turning off my ad blocker. The blocker is still on in general, to prevent a bad ad taking over my browser. But there is an ever growing collection of core websites, ones that I visit every day, where I see all of the ads. It might not make much of a difference in the long run, but I’m doing my part.
-That is all.
