Train Of Thought
You Can Only Conquer Yourself
Our goal should not be the mountaintop. It should not be the finish-line. It should not be the presentation. It should not be that raise or promotion or that awards ceremony. If our goal is the mountaintop what do we do once we reach it? Stop?
We should all be aiming to surpass our goals and, in doing so, to surpass ourselves.
Setting a static goal limits our progression. When we aim to attain static goals our mastery becomes finite. When we aim for at a moving target we allow our mastery to become limitless.
“Your life is something to build every day. You must convince yourself that you have surpassed yesterday. And tomorrow you must feel you have surpassed today.”
- Tsunetomo Yamamoto
Thoughts On An Oil Disaster
BP is been running a paid search public relations campaign for various oil spill related phrases. So every time someone runs a Google image search for the phrase “oil spill animal pictures” the destination of the link closest to the search window (also known as the link that impatient people will click) is a BP.com public relations landing page bursting at the seams with press releases, positive imagery and carefully chosen headlines.
There were over 20 million searches for the phrase “oil spill” in May 2010 and every time one of these sponsored ads is clicked BP is going to pay around $2 per click.
That’s a lot of money being spent in order to prove to the people of Earth that BP’s doing a good job. Way too much money. Leroy Stick, the pseudonym used by the guy behind the BP PR parody twitter account, had a few choice words for BP’s actual PR efforts. The biggest take-away from Leroy’s open letter to the media is that burning through money and man-hours trying to manufacture public opinion is a waste- the public will determine the quality of the goods or services you’re providing. In this case the millions of dollars BP is spending on image clean-up would have been better spent researching and preparing for this exact situation.
BP’s failure to respond to this disaster aside its clear that the root cause of the oil spill is our national addiction to fossil fuels. Its convenient (and fun) to blame BP for the oil spill but until we can collectively take a stand against the over-consumption of fossil fuels there will always be a bunch of suits with drills and a checkbook willing to do whatever’s necessary to supply our demand.
What will it take to make renewable energy technologies like wind power or wave power a priority? What will it take to get us to give up our cars and trucks and redesign our civilization’s transportation infrastructure?
They say the oil spill clean up could last years. At the very least I hope it stands as a constant reminder that we, as a people, need to do better.
Image Source
The Day After Earth Day
Yesterday, I tweeted that I’m not a big fan of Earth Day.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of Spaceship Earth but I can’t see how focusing on taking care of Earth for one day a year can have a sufficient impact on our continued residence on this pale blue dot. Spending one a month a year to promote (read: exploit) African American contributions to American society is offensive. It creates a societal surge of interest (read: money) and then fades into the fringe of public consciousness.
Earth Day is, at best, a solid attempt at promoting a widespread change of consciousness with regard to altering our impact on this planet but I can’t help but feel that it falls short. Yes, we all should change our habits but it can’t stop there.
Feeling that as a tool for change, Earth Day isn’t working isn’t that difficult when 76% of American shoppers made purchases specifically because they were good for the environment.
Consuming in order to help heal a planet damaged by overconsumption is like George Carlin once said, “…fucking for virginity.”
Changing our habits is only part of the solution; in order to give our planet the attention that it deserves we’ll need to see Change on a legislative level and that means we’ll all have to speak up.
We must destroy in order to rebuild.
“It is better to create than to be learned, creating is the true essence of life.”
~ Barthold Georg Niebuhr
As a child, one of my favorite hobbies was breaking things. I’d get home from school and for the 3 hours I had until my mother would arrive home I’d be sneaking around the house with a screwdriver, voiding warranties on electronics. I was the nerdy, pint-size manifestation of Ferris Bueller rushing to repair the family VCR before the folks got home.
This quasi-destructive curiosity got me in trouble more times than not but what I gained by breaking everything that seemed the least bit interesting was far more valuable than what I lost out on as a result of getting punished. There are very few things that give me more satisfaction than learning how to (re)build something out of a pile of seemingly random parts.
It is as a result of those nights spent sneaking through my father’s tool-shed in search of tools for an old computer autopsy that I find myself, 24 years old still breaking things just to rebuild them. As an experiment in design/web-development I decided to build my own wordpress theme. It felt good getting under the hood, digging through all the code and getting my hands dirty.
That said, if anything seems broken or if the blog causes your computer to blow up, please email me and let me know.
Didn’t really have that many but I got a Google Buzz.
UPDATE: I’m no longer buzzing. Having a social network inside of my Inbox was like having a surprise birthday party inside the batcave.
Google got e-mail right but they also got Wave wrong* so when I first heard about Google’s newest product, Google Buzz, I took it with a grain of salt (and a lime).
Buzz aggregates the online activity of your mostly recently contacted e-mail contacts (and additional recommended sources) and beams it all directly into your gMail Inbox. Buzz has the potential to be a calm serene social-media-zen-garden; an easily accessible feed of fresh content from a smaller, closer-knit network of content-creators and content-sharers.
- Twitter is at its core a vanity-driven instant message service chock-full of millions of people, all broadcasting in the hope that everyone else will tune in and listen to their message.
- Facebook is even more noisy. I know I’m not the only person who’s gotten sick & tired of having to constantly hide Farmville, Quiz or Contest giveaway application updates from their news-feed, just so its easier to get to the good shit.
Buzz attempts to bring the best features of each service together — all the vanity and vetted links & content of friends, family and colleagues — while simultaneously recommending posts and content you might like based on the content & status updates you’ve decided to share publicly.
Right now Buzz only supports content aggregation from a few social networks — Google chat status, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube.com, Google Reader & Picasa for now — but what about importing content from Tumblr? Or WordPress? Or Blogger? Or the big dog Facebook?
I really want one omniscient social media client/app to take tame the stream of my online content but Buzz needs to be able to pull in more of my the content from my Facebook & Tumblr contacts/friends or else their recommended content feature will really need to be amazing and pick up a lot of slack.
Regardless, for the time-being at least, I’m buzzing.
Married To The Game
(Photo via Flickr)
Growing up I remember begging my parents to get me a video game system. Those crocodile tears and pre-teen pleas went unanswered until one Christmas I ripped off the colorful wrapping off of a shiny new Super Nintendo Entertainment System. In hindsight it wasn’t that big of a deal but at the time my parents might as well have given me a BMW with a full tank of gas. Within hours I was dodging fireballs and bottomless pits with Mario and Yoshi and loving it.
Flash-forward to modern day Sean. I’m still obsessed with video games but now I’m old enough to see how spending a decade staring at television sets has prepared me for the onset of augmented reality.
“Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmented by) virtual computer-generated imagery – creating a mixed reality.” (via Wikipedia)
Simply put, augmented reality is infusing our view of the world with additional, relevant data/information. What I realized while I was in the midst of a 6 hour Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 binge is that I’ve been experiencing the precursor to augment reality for a decade, the video game heads-up-display. This concept is not exclusive to the world of video gaming but I guarantee its where the majority of my generation became exposed to the term.
Currently the best way to serve data through augmented reality is through the use of computers and mobile devices but in time as display technology gets lighter and thinner augmented reality won’t require having to walk around your city scanning the air like a Star Trek extra.
With a heads up display information is displayed in such a way that the user can refer to it at a glance without being too distracted from the task at hand. In the case of the above screen-shot the information being conveyed (radar, score, ammunition, etc.) is relevant to fighting in a simulated death-match but there are tons of other possible implementations.
- What about a pair of shades that displayed Google Maps data so you can navigate a busy city on a bicycle?
- Or a special pair of protected laboratory goggles that displayed the temperature of the materials in your lab?
- Or a protective mask that allows fire-fighters the ability to see a trapped child on the other side of a burning wall?
The possibilities are seemingly endless but one thing is for sure, there is an entire generation of young people walking around today (with their pants on the ground probably) who were raised on video games.
These kids have been reviewing information relayed to them in a heads up display for as long as they’ve been old enough to hold a controller and soon… they’ll be old enough to drive.
Remember to break all the broken rules.
- MLK, Jr.
Its important to remember that our idols are/were made of flesh. This man was a man like any other. While our idols may do amazing things it is important to remember that they are human, just like we are.
I say it is important to remember that our heroes are human because one day what was asked of them may be asked of us. The world is in a precarious state. With the earthquake in Haiti, the struggle for universal health-care, fight for freedom of speech on the Internet, the ozone layer and the collapse of the environment and big banks that are give out executive bonuses before the pay back bailout money, who’s to say what will be asked of us all in the future?
- What are you willing to be arrested for?
- What are you willing to die for?
- What are you willing to fight for?
- What are you willing to live for?
These are not easy questions but I plan on using today as an opportunity to reflect on the role the rebel and all that comes along with it. After all, standing up for what is right, especially when it is wrong to do so, is the stuff that heroes are made of.
∞
If knowledge is power then I want to be the electric company.
I was reading this article about a software developer, Sergey Aleynikov, who was arrested by the FBI for allegedly stealing a portion of code from Goldman Sachs. He was eventually released on a $750,000 bond.
The code was a program that, in “ultrafast” (NY Times used the word. Wasn’t really my idea.) world of computerized stock trading, compromising the expensive software might have cost Goldman Sachs upwards of $8,000,000,000 in damages.
Then there was this doctor that I read about, James Heilman, who’s peers were fighting to have investigated by his local doctors’ organization because he published the 10 inkblots of the Rorschach test on Wikipedia.
His peers have argued that releasing the inkblots will diminish the effectiveness of the test.
Fearing that such widespread exposure would increase the likelihood that patients may have potentially seen and/or studied the test beforehand and will arrive with answers already prepared.
The first “decision” to “liberate” information resulted in a group of corporate-thugs sending the goons after a employee who allegedly tried taking a little more than a few notepads, pens and a stapler on his last day.
The second decision to liberate information resulted in a mob of angry shrinks descending on a guy who was allegedly trying to demystify the world of psychoanalysis.
Both men affected the flow of information and information, by extension, is power. But which is more powerful?
A bit of code that might be worth around $8 billion hidden away on some German file-server? Or the inkblots that, theoretically give everyone incredible insight into the psychoanalytical decisions of psychiatrists and psychologists and, are being referred to in an article by the New York Times, hosted by Wikipedia and linked to by 11,000+ blogs?
∞
A Greater Depth of Field
I’m a big True Blood fan. Vampires and humans being forced to coexist in the deep south? I’m sold. Say no more.
The basic story is simple. Vampires are real and are out in the open. Society as a whole is forced to adjust to their presence. What happens after that is nothing short of gothic, melodramatic awesomeness.
Check out a dope promotional video for the show that I found over on BloodCopy.com.
What I love about this style of promotional video is that they delve into the True Blood universe/diegesis and give the story greater depth. Fans of the show know that humans are highly addicted to the healing/euphoric effects of drinking Vampire’s blood and a fictional public service announcement cements this concept in the mind.
The ability to tell a story outside of the confines of the television programming block is one of the most promising aspects of the Internet for both consumers/fans as well as storytellers/producers.
As a fan, I never want the episode to end but as a producer, I recognize the obvious benefit of having a break between episodes. This gap between episodes serves as a dependable way of ensuring fan’s have a strong desire for new content.
Since I can’t only be a fan nor can I only be a producer, I’m conflicted. (Not vampire with a soul conflicted but close.)
Is it is possible to over-saturate fans with content? What about a story that is so large and epic that a traditional film or television programming block can’t contain it?
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