This adage is true. I can totally vouch for it. The weirdest thing's I've thought of are a direct result of just not keeping busy with normal things.
A while ago, I wrote about using sign language as long-range communication. I'd like to expand on that idea by asking, why not teach all kids sign language from the get go?
I think, for the most part, sign language is a seperate, exclusive mode of communication which can suppliment normal verbal communication. The idea came to me as I met this girl, who was the girlfriend of this dude (beer and then liquor will make you sicker, liquor then beer and you're in the clear) at my brother's friend's house... Uhh... Anyway, she was a teacher of some sort who used sign language, and when she would talk to me, she would just start signing. Sometimes, she would apologize and just say it was force of habit, but I thought it was totally cool. I wish I knew how to sign as I talked... So, casually looking into it, I signed up for the sign language Meetup... And that's that.
Preventive Maintenance or Preventive Measures would also have been acceptable... Also, this is, I think, the first in what I hope to be a set of articles finally outlining how I see the world...
Preventive Maintenance is The Things You Do that prevent something from just... Dying. Or quitting. Like if I had a car, preventive maintenance would be changing the oil, rotating the tires, or even something as dumb as filling up the gas. Like... If I had a computer, preventive maintenance could be a whole number of things, like scanning for spyware regularly or cleaning out files I don't need anymore.
Basically, the whole premise behind this idea is that... So many things in life actually require preventive maintenance, and not many people seem to realize this. Things require baby sitting. This could also bleed into a more generic concept that existence and acknowledgement demand committment. This could also be abstracted away. For however cumbersome people few some preventive maintenance, like car maintenance, I feel that that kind of stuff could be made easier. An auto-checkup light or something silly like that. Not everyone in the world has time or the desire to learn how a car works. Or a computer for that matter.
Preventive maintenance. Don't die.
When I was Outlook-crazy (in the pre-crash era), I was always annoyed at how flat Tasks were in Outlook. In reality, a lot of what I did would be dependent on a person or a place, or just a certain type of availability. A lot of these tasks didn't really have a due date, but were just things more easily accomplished at the right place or the right time.
With that, I propose some sort of system... Such that, as I go around the world and go about my business, I'm pinged about more appropriate things like what data sources can help me or what tasks would be good to finish while I'm in the area.
I vaguely imagined a tag-like system (gee, aren't all the hyper-categorical things we do nowadays tag-like?) that was also a grid, where people were graphed against places, and this program would allow me to examine intersections of where I might be, who I might talk to, and what I might be able to accomplish while I was there.
I don't have so many interpersonal tasks now, being away from campus and all. I don't really have that many appointments (unlike class and such). If you look at my calendar now, it would probably say something boring like Work.
Bleh to that.
I've been complaining to everyone that my ability to long-range think has been obscured by desire to go to Japan a la the JET Programme. Well, I just received an e-mail from the Embassy dropping the bomb...
I did not get in.
So, I can already feel my mental pathways changing and accommodating the lack of my going abroad. That's a Good Brain...
Sucks, man. Maybe I should look to this as a lesson and look into learning more Japanese and how to teach English. Anything that will make me more qualified.
Every time I join a social network, I'm annoyed at how much activation energy is required to get things going. In line with intelligent systems being more predictive or at least recommending, I think social networks should suggest people you should be friends with. There are two reasons for this.
One, if you belong to a circle of five friends, and you're only connected to three on the network, there's an extremely high probability that you are friends with the fourth in real life (we're excluding you, the fifth friend). So, task numero uno in any social network is to find people you actually are friends with. What a chore. Tedium should be eliminated!
Two, maybe you just want to up the strength of your network. The people in question, who may or may not be your real friends, but maybe acquaintances, are otherwise known as connectors. These mofos are the ones that link together different social circles. If you've ever looked at a graph of people's social networks, you'll see that for the most part, they're clouds. People tend to hang out with people who have similar interests. But of these people, there's usually an outlier or someone who just also has a vastly different set of friends or interests. What you see happening is that this person is the junction point or the intersection on a Venn diagram where two social clouds would otherwise never meet.
These connectors would be found by ranking everyone in the second-degree (from you) based on their social strength. That is, who of all the second-degree friends know most of my friends?
Actually, it should be noted that as I write this, the idea is deviating or changing from what I originally thought. So, what I wrote about who knows most of my friends is nice, but not what I ended up thinking. What it should be is, who of all the second-degree friends would add the most connections? That's more in line with mathematically strengthening your network.
How I came upon this concept is more of a mix of the first idea and the first metric, who of all the second-dgree friends know most of my friends? It's essentially completing the existing social circles. While working on my Friendster account, I would click on people I didn't know very well (third-degree friends) and then look at how I was connected to them. Usually, the same names in the second-degree (the first-degree is useless since those are my friends) would always come up and these would be the connectors. So, just as a matter of observation, these people (I called them power friends) were either people I should have been friends with on the network or literally people I should just be friends with. They were extremely connected and virtually all of my first-degree friends connected to him could vouch for him.
So yeah, I can feel this entry going a little roundabout... It might be unclear, but the idea is the same, having a social network recommend to you people that are statistically well-connected, either for the purposes of actually knowing you, or just increasing the power of your social network.
If you'd like to take a trip down memory lane and see a slice of the blogging world as it was in oh, say the year 2000, try Googling the terms riothero or boylog. Both are the (extremely unique, and very Googlable) names of two blogs, one by a dude named Mark and the other, Chris. Their websites seemed to have fallen off the face of search (I'm sure the Internet Archive is storing something, somewhere), but their influence is still noticable in all the hits their searches produce.
No, not really... I mean, it's not really the title of a Made episode. At least I think it's not. If it was, that'd be pretty cool.
Just another lazy Monday, cleaning out notes... And these notes made me remember...
One time, on the Food Network (probably), I was watching a special about chuckwagons. It was mighty interesting, will all the food and the low-tech solutions they had. At that point, I was like, hot damn, I wanna learn how to do low-tech style cooking too. I love that, low-tech cooking. Task under constraint. I lob it!
But whatever. Salted meats, buttered biscuits, mmm...
Boy juice and girl juice.
It's funny, laugh.