Ever notice how some people say "thanks" in weird situations? I go over to someone to ask them a favor, fully serving only my needs at the time. Our parting salutations include me saying, "thank you," with a reply of "thanks!"

Are they saying thanks kinda like, "thanks for ending this conversation, please move along?" I find this happens a lot in the company I work for, where people can be a bit stuffier than normal (we all have to wear ties 4 days a week...more on that som other day), and people tend to handle others and subjects with annoying delicate care when in person.

It's just one of those weird things I notice, and I feel a little bad each time it happens, like we're, as a culture, degenerating into rote greetings and partings with little real emotion behind them or even so much apathy and habit that they come out at all the wrong times without thought.

I'm terrible at chit chat. I really do hate it. I dislike when people I don't really care about try to talk to me when I wasn't looking to talk to someone. Some people reach out for human contact whenever they can. People like me like to internalize and keep to ourselves most of the time. But chit chat is the worst. Asking polite questions like, "how about this weather?" or "so, anyone around here get sick from all that spinach?" or "catch the game last night?"

I love weather, but I love all weather, for the most part. I don't complain about much, because there's not much you can do to change it. Besides, I love nature, and weather is the easiest manifestation of it to enjoy. If it is raining, it pains me when someone complains about such lousy weather and how terrible it is...after I walk the length of the parking lot because I want to, without an umbrella, and without hustling along. "Actually, I really love this weather, it makes me feel good and allows me to enjoy being alive in this wonderful world, to be able to sense it, feel the rain, smell the smells, and just bask in it." Yeah, this is usually met with someone walking away, insulted that I challenged their impersonal, habitual chit chat mutterings. How dare I violate their feel-good habit of just spitting out an unthinking comment just to comment.

But yes, while I don't mind talking about how the weather is, I don't usually like to do so with strangers or even most family members. Weather chat is the most polite and dis-associated chat ever, and is a bane to my opening up to someone who starts out with it. Ugh!

A close second is the common starter-phrase, "How are you?" "Uhh, miserable, and even more so because you talked to me when I wasn't opening the lines of communication anyway." "Ass." Oops! Maybe this should be, "How are you?" "Fine, how are you?" "Fine." And then we can walk away or launch into the real reason we're thrust into close enough proximity that we must talk.

Exactly what is accomplished there? Was there any real curiousity on how I feel or on the reply? Nope. I hate that little give and take, and it is usually met with, "Fine," and no follow-up question. Most of the time, I truly don't give a crap how the other person is feeling right then, and as such, I don't ask.

Likewise, salutations and other polite chit chat by habit are not welcomed by me. It is odd, but I rarely say, "please," "you're welcome," or "thank you," by mere habit. Every time I am sincere in my request and conscious of saying it as well.

And that's the real thing I had on my mind this morning. Meaning things you say, not just saying them out of habit or politeness. Instead of asking how someone is, ask them a non-yes/no question. What do you think of all this rain/sunshine? Or ask them something more personal, such as how their weekend trip went a few days ago. Make a statement rather than a question, "days like this sure make it fun to be alive," and let them respond if they want to.

But I really hate polite chit-chat, or someone making polite-yet-meaningless comments or sounds just for the sake of doing so, or habit of doing so. Save the energy and effort for someone else or for more meaningful exchanges.

I am in rehabilitation

1. to restore to a condition of good health, ability to work, or the like.
2. to restore to good condition, operation, or management, as a bankrupt business.
3. to reestablish the good reputation of (a person, one's character or name, etc.).
4. to restore formally to former capacity, standing, rank, rights, or privileges.

I have this problem. It is a problem that I am in rehab for, and doing an ok job of it, but I have a long ways to go. It is a problem that is slightly borne out of my childhood, partly from my own personality, and largely from a recent job that I had.

My problem can be misdiagnosed as a lack of confidence in my own abilities. While that may be partly true, my real problem has been in overestimating everyone else.

See, I have this kind of attitude where I think people are great at what they do, especially authority figures and people in business. This means when I work with colleagues in IT, I tend to sit back and assume they know a lot. And later on, I start to realize they don't know much more. The same goes for people in business, the grown-ups. I tend to assume that they know what they're doing, because they're professionals in professional jobs getting paid decent money, right? But really, they're just people and far too many are really not all that great at what they do. In fact, some of the most profound changes that I've undergone in my life were realized upon realizing that not everyone knows what they're doing.

My attitude would be illustrated in high school by assuming all students were valedictorians. In college, I would assume that all fellow students were straight-A students who knew everything they needed to know. People who work in government are smurt people who do an awesome job, despite my criticisms of them from afar. And religious figures are right because, well, they just are.

So my rehabilitation the past 6 months since leaving a rather abusive job, has been to constantly tell myself: People don't know what they're talking about. I know my shit. I know my job, I know security, and I know IT.

This has been an easy rehabilitation to begin, but it certainly does take a level of effort on my part right now, to right the wrongs of a former job and the toll it took on my personality. In a way, yes, it is just needing to build my confidence, but it is also about correcting my overestimated view of other people.

It is not often that I come across something poignant about life when reading a technical essay or report. But in an article on loan spammers by Orlando Padilla in Uninformed, he gives this quote from his parents:

Once you start making money, you'll forget what is important in life and will simply want to follow this path.

Ain't that the truth? This is why I am so viciously pursuant of a job that I like, that I can be happy with giving 8 hours of my life to every day. It's only about the money until the necessities are paid off.

Now this is a really fun-sounding idea for a metro game: players attempt to control as many payphones in an area as possible by calling from the phone to a central scorekeeper. The link gives plenty of information. This isn't necessarily something to be done in say, my state of Iowa, but would be amazingly fun in a very payphone-heavy metro area. What would be most interesting, though, is seeing how it is set up and run. Checking out the Asterisk setup behind the scenes, as well as how the payphone signatures are determined. I wonder if a game like this can be devised for DefCon? I wonder if payphone signatures can be spoofed such that a player can just adjust the variable and keep calling back from one phone?

Now what about expanding this to, say, the entire city of New York in a never-ending game where you can call up at any time? What about doing this for wireless hotspots or networks? Granted, you can spoof your IP and stuff, but what about needing to maintain a solid session with a central server from a wireless network, and submit data about that network? And note that I'm not saying open, public wireless networks... This whole idea is similar to a capture the flag competition, only mixing physical movement along with travesing the digital landscape. All the more reason to move to a more urban location. ;-)

I really shouldn't be, but I am. I am amazed at how often I see emails from people who just do not communicate clearly or completely over email, even in professional inter-office communications and beyond. Grammar and spelling errors aside, even something that should be simple like getting a point across or describing a situation are often rife with errors or incoherency. I estimate that in our email ticket system, 1 in 3 email requests for support have a level of incoherency in them.

Browsing some sites I came across Nitesh Dhanjani's blog (reminder to self to read this piece on killing creativity in the workplace) and his latest post on his favorite TED talks, some of which are now available online. These are awesome talks and presentations about some amazing things. I also picked out a few I liked.

ZeFrank is a notable personality in the form of an Internet comedian, and has a funny, informative, and enlightening method to his madness online.

I really do not like motivational speakers or people who try to basically preach self-help or motivation to you. Tony Robbins is pretty close to that, but he certainly has an energy and compelling way about him that is just really fun to watch and look at. I may not accept all his points (and he goes through them very, very quickly in this short talk), but I do think he has some good ideas and poignant points enough that I wouldn't avoid the chance to learn more.

Ken Robinson speaks about education and how we should be educating our children to embrace creativity as opposed to how we kill it currently. Some notable quotes he makes: "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you will not come up with anything original...We run our companies this way, we stigmatize mistakes." Picasso: "All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up."

Multi-touch screens have been debuted a number of times in the past few years, and I truly think is going to be a future of computing. This is extremely exciting stuff! The user interface of the future and the way we will interact with computers.

I challenge any Christian firm in their beliefs to look an Islamic or Hindi religious follower in the eye, and tell them that they will not be saved, that they will be cast into hell for eternity, and that they are not equal after the great equalizer of death. To tell them this while remaining loving, as religion teaches, and to also remain respectful of them as a human being.

How exactly does that work?

Inspired by the TED talk from Dan Dennett.

This is just too cool to post, but people are now trying out new prosthetic arms that can be moved with thoughts. The concept is quite simple (in a way) because nerves from an amputation are not killed or removed, really. More modernly, they are transplanted into the chest, but these nerves can still pass stimuli. Thoughts can activate the nerves and as doctors figure out which ones mean what, they can use those pulses to do the moves they were meant to govern in the mechanical hand. This is awesome!

I imagine eventually the sensations will go both ways, at least in part, where a touch on the prosthetic limb can pass a pressure or sensation back to the nerves, especially since the girl in one of the CNN videos says she can still feel her hand when her chest is touched.

I also imagine the power on the limb can be cranked up such that she can crush glass and otherwise utilize the power of mechanics to overcome limitations of the body. Yikes! Theoretically all of this is not really new, as the body is just one large physical and chemical and biological entity that can, in increasing parts, be minicked artificially.

Cyborgs here we come!

Unless I have some long-lost best friends wanting to look me up, who honestly would ever read my blog archive other than me? Kinda puts things into perspective on what I should post. Then again, maybe it won't. :)

But it is interesting, how blogging can be very "in the moment" but unless there are some awesome posts or some special tie to that person, blog archives seem about as dusty and musty as the least-used corners of a large library.

update: Going to update this to explain that sometimes I read archives to see what a blog or person is all about. But it is more of a scattered skimming or glancing through some old posts. Unless there is very nice and intricate categorization, this is pretty much a needle in a haystack search, however. I hope someday with my site upgrade to have categories. I would like to be able to click a category to see things like, "my musings" or "who am I and what do I do?" kinds of things for anyone new.

update #2: Of note, I hate the terms blog and blogging...I've never liked them. This is my personal site, and my journal. :)

I'm a gamer. I'm even ok in MMO games like World of Warcraft which has consumed more of my life than it should have. But Second Life is just a little bit...scary. This article is about Second Life accounts being exposed to data thieves, but read the article for the description of the game world. This is scary and amazing all at the same time:

Users buy and sell virtual land and build businesses with currency called "Linden Dollars," which can be exchanged for real currency.

Blurring the line between a multiplayer game and an online business, the popularity of the site has spurred Fortune 500 corporations such as Coca-Cola and Wells Fargo, along with architects, authors and musicians to erect virtual outposts of their organizations or personas.

Retailer American Apparel has created a business to sell clothing for the "Second Life" avatars users create to represent themselves inside the online world. Musicians such as Duran Duran and Suzanne Vega have held concerts inside "Second Life."

Catch that? This is like The Sims, MMORPGs, and real life all mashed together. What will happen if this continues? We will soon have real world illustrations to push those fundamental philosophical questions of existence.

What if someone spends more time in this virtual world than in the real world? When businesses start moving over and people start making a living in a virtual world selling virtual services and goods in exchange, ultimately, for real dollars...things start getting weird. Weirder than the current MMORPG goods and services hawked on eBay, auction sites, or other darker ad-infested corners of the world like gold farmers or power-leveling services.

On Friday and into Saturday as it was raining both days and rather cool, I realized that the breeze I felt and the sense of it was that autumn had returned a bit early. Today is still grey and cool and rainy, and indeed, it looks like summer may have yielded early, and the leaves in places have already started responding in kind.

This, of course, makes me happy, as I love this time of year. Taking a walk on a grey evening with an invisible mist in the air and cool enough not to be muggy is amazing.

One thing I found that I love about my apartment is the location when it rains. I am not entirely near the parking lot, and I have huge shade trees outside the window. My apartment is even on the 1/2 level, meaning the windows are very near ground level. This lets me get the sound of wind and rain in the trees and the spattering on the ground as well.

Driving home last night was a reminder why I don't socially drink all that much unless it is within walking distance from home or with friends, and why I am protective of friends who decide otherwise. Driving home on a fairly empty freeway at 1:30am this morning, I noticed I was being beared down on by some car. Since it was rainy, I was going the speed limit, so I kinda wondered why a cop might be coming up for me. I merged over two lanes into the entrance/exit lane that marked my own exit from the freeway. "Zoom!" a maroonish Impala zooms by at least 20mph faster than me, merges too far into the exit ramp going almost fully onto the shoulder. I catch up to him behind traffic a couple blocks away in commercial/residential land and he passes an SUV (note that this is a no-passing area in a one-lane road), slows down at a corner as it looks like he maybe thought he missed his turn, turns into an apartment complex very near mine, nearly swerves into the far curb, overcorrects and nearly swipes the cars on the near side. It was one of those moments where I stopped and watched and comtemplated following him in to report if he did any real damage anywhere...I know I would be pissed to wake up to see my car swiped over night. I didn't, but those images remind me of how stupid drinking and driving can be, and how much damage you can do to property and lives with just some small choices.

Sometimes I wonder what rock I live under that I miss out on some new stuff on the web. Then again, there is so much new stuff in the world wide web of self-publishing I'd never be able to keep up. But Wintermute's blog has this clip of ZeFrank at TedTalks. I then looked up ZeFrank and found his daily video cast of news and thoughts. I love his dry, sarcastic humor, but even more than that, I love his thinking and how he meshes all of that together. Really fun stuff, and in digestible 5 minute bites.

Of note, I've finally listened to some of my downloaded Marco V songs that have been sitting in my "to listen to" box for months. Really digging it. I downloaded a bunch in my search for a particular mix that was overlaid a lengthy World of Warcraft movie. Excellent techno/heavy electric club stuff.

Today has been one of those minorly "off" days, despite being yet another beautiful summer day. Off to lunch late because of ever-changing deployment schedules from our application development team. Handed someone else's paycheck this morning; thankfully I didn't open it. Uncharacteristically mistyped my PIN at the ATM when checking my account balance. Mistyped what I wanted from the ATM, having to restart the whole process again because "cancel" aborts the whole thing. Saw I had much more money than I thought (bills must not be processed yet). Started over again to actually withdraw some of it. Forgot my wallet out in my car at Barnes & Noble over lunch.

Ahhh...at least I was able to settle in for a relaxing and rewarding lunch with a new flavor of latte I've not had before. Even the girl at the counter said her day was also a little off today as well. Must be in the wind. :)

Life continues to mystify. Rather, life in an affluent nation continues to mystify and provide lessons every year. Just when you think you have things headed in the right direction, something springs up in the way. I guess I have learned a couple lessons in the last week:

- Try like hell to be financially secure. In other words, erase the credit card debts asap, keep as little in the way of tied-in monthly costs as possible. Once that is taken care of, extra money can build up into a nice cushion in case life suddenly changes, or gives you a chance to pursue something highly desired or dreamt about. To be stuck watching an amazing opportunity pass by due to money reasons is not a fun thing.

- Don't enter into bad agreements or deals just because of necessity. For instance, don't enter into a "no cancel" lease agreement just because a place to live is needed, it looked good, sounded good, and was a good price. When I have a house I can do this, but for now, I can't be entering into those kinds of things that tie oneself down. My lease keeps me tied, but the rest of me and my life is wanting to still roam. The lease has turned into a leash.

Life would be so much happier with simplicity. Less money spent, less luxuries and affluency. Less frustration and ties. This might be something I'll explore with my inner self over the next 6 months: simplicity, especially financial simplicity.

Steve "Crocodile Hunter" Irwin passed away this weekend, the victim of a stingray defensive attack. There has only been one time in the past where a celebrity has passed away that even remotely affected me (Chris Farley), but this weekend now makes two. Steve Irwin is what I personally dubbed the first cultural icon of this millenia as "crocodile hunter mania" reached its peak in right around the turn of the century. To me, he has been one of those celebs that if I had to make a short list of people I'd love to meet, he'd be at the top.

Steve is a remarkable person and someone I totally adore and respect. I have a special place in my heart for nature and wildlife and conservationism. In fact, it was my first pursuit careerwise until I realized I should keep that as my love and hobby and not as my job. His exuberance and passion for his work might have seemed a little quirky, but I completely adored and respected him for that. This was a man who knew what he loved, and did what he loved for his job. And you know there wasn't a day that went by where he wasn't enjoying it and thankful for it.

The world needs more Steve Irwins. Not only do we need more champions for nature and wildlife, but we need more people with as much passion and excitement for their jobs as he had for his. This was a man I could totally have worked besides or would have loved to spend a safari-type vacation with any time. Crikey!

Iowa summers are typically muggy, hot (upper 90's), and humid. This year has been an exception, as the weather so far during our worst two months (August and September) has been amazingly mild. Temps have only barely climbed up to 90, and there has been a nice breeze almost every day so far. The sky has been beautiful, and I'm really, for once, appreciating living in Iowa this summer. The rains have been a bit more numerous than recent years, and have felt amazingly nice.

For as odd as this year has been up until today, I definitely could not have asked for more pleasant weather this summer. Today is gorgeous, at maybe 75 degress, sunny, wisps of white clouds in the sky, and a breeze that pretty much says, "hello," and not much else. For lunches, I've been driving out to Jordan Creek mall and sitting at Barnes & Noble reading magazines (today I picked up Calvin & Hobbes books), and I love the drive out there where you can just see the sky going on and on, with lots of wide open space and beautiful weather to enjoy it with. I love nature, and Iowa is pretty damned cool. :)