World Loading... Please Wait

And there, in the quiet, just before waking, everything is fine.  Then the world loads and all that bothered you from when you went to sleep is right back to being in view.

You suddenly remember the stress you’ve been holding onto.  You remember the people that you hurt or how they hurt you.  You remember the sadness and anger of the world you left for a bit as you tried to just get some rest.

What is that phenomena?  Those brief few seconds where you wake up and you don’t remember the pain you had before.   Then, just as you get that smile on your face, it all just seeps back in.  That has to suck.  It’s like that one scene in Ladyhawke where Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfieffer have that brief interaction at dawn.  Both of them are human at the same time and almost get a glimpse of one another.    When you’re in a funk, every day is like that.  You wake up with the fleeting glimpse of something you love, just out of reach, and as it all comes into focus it disappears and you are left with the knowing that everything was crap like before.

World lag in real life.   I wonder if it’s a chemical in your brain.  Maybe that service hasn’t come online yet.  Maybe it’s a part of your brain that deals with reality and when you wake up, it takes a little longer to kick in.  It’s too bad you can’t disable it.  Maybe kill the process from your internal task manager.   Then, you could crawl out of bed, and function for awhile.   Later on, you could enable it and let it take over for awhile when nothing important is going on.  Kind of like how I deal with weekly virus scans or mandatory system updates.  Push that shit to late at night when you don’t care.   Except, that’s when it’s the worst. 

You’re in the quiet of your brain and that little voice says, “Hey… I know… remember that problem you can’t solve?  Let’s run that at max capacity and overheat your brain.  Come on, it’ll be fun!  Sure you’d rather watch some good shows or play video games or get sleep, but I’d rather run overload your system with over analysis of every little issue you have going on…. And all at the same time.”

When you finally do get to sleep, it all gets quiet and if you’re lucky, you can have a pleasant dream or at least a couple nice thoughts as you recharge.  But then, when you wake up…  BOOM, servers go online and it kicks in and you suddenly remember, “Nothing got resolved at 1:00 AM.”

Yeah, like a computer or a particular application, just walking away from it for awhile doesn’t fix it.   It’ll be there when you come back and will probably have done more damage to your system if you don’t fix it.   But in this analogy, more memory doesn’t always mean increased performance.  So, take care and get help when you have that extra CPU intensive process running in your head.     It’s not good to melt the circuitry. 

It sure as hell doesn’t help World Lag.  It just crashes harder and for longer each time.

Tablet vs. Placemat: Raising Kids With Technology

I didn’t want to be the kind of parent that just lets their kid watch TV or play video games, just to stop the madness.   I looked at other parents that just let their kids amok and I thought, “Wow, really?”   Sometimes, I’ve found myself falling into that trap, though.   I get home from my hour long commute and just want to escape for a bit so NickJr or Angry Birds can rescue me for awhile. 

Now, we usually play an entirely different game when we eat dinner.   No television, unless we are out a place that has sporting events televised.   No texting, usually, until after dinner.  The usually covers things like, I need to ask that person a question pertaining to the conversation we are having.   We all eat together as a family.  I tend to not waiver on these because it’s the one time of the day we can all sit and be with each other without the trappings of our social and technological lives interfering.   

We have one kid and she’s a handful, to say the least.  She’s too damn smart for being only five and comes up with arguments that would make her an excellent trial lawyer.  She gets bored and when she’s bored she usually takes it out on us.  I don’t mean that I am complaining that she’s needy.  I mean that she’s an evil genius that has figured out the code for our patience.   Don’t believe me, I have an example.

She wanted to go for a walk one day after school.  Now, I’ve been trying to lose weight, so it’s not a bad suggestion.  It was just dark and gloomy and I didn’t want us to be out when the skies finally went pffft.   So, as we’re walking she comments that she wants to go down the big hill in our neighborhood.  I did not.  The reason being, if we go down a big hill, there’s an equally large and steeply graded hill that we have to climb to get to our house.

“But, Daddy, I have all this energy that I need to get rid of.  If I don’t then I’ll be bored when we get home.”

“Kiddo, that’s not exactly my problem, now is it?”

“But, if I’m bored, it WILL be your problem.”

She’s five.  I’m scared.

Needless to say, we took the big hills.

But when we go out, she’s usually content, sitting there with a placemat and some crayons.   She has a vast collection of placemats with art all over one side and ads for home cleanings and excavating on the other.   So, when we went out this past week and brought along her Samsung Tablet, I was a bit disappointed that we caved to this type of distraction.  We usually sit and talk and she colors and really goes into her own little world.   Why are we placating her with this technological?  How dare we?

Then it dawned on me.  The placemats were my tablet.  The placemats were a distraction.  The placemats were used to keep me seated in one place instead of getting us kicked out of a restaurant for standing on the high chair and crowing like a rooster.   True story, though it was my brother that accomplished that task.

What the hell is the difference between a tablet and a placemat?

Well, the obvious is about $179.   Restaurants usually supply you with a placemat and a few crayons.  The tablet can be used to play games.  The placemat uses imagination or creativity.  Quite frankly, they both achieve the same goal.  The problem is, getting the most educational or creative benefits out of technology for your kids.   They also need to understand limits.  When the food arrives, the placemat and crayons get put away as should the tablet or other mobile device.    Maybe have a drawing or paint program for them to use instead of Temple Run 2 or Candy Crush Saga.

Now, I am not a doctor and can’t speak to the possible detrimental side effects of a child of five interacting with a tablet and what games could do to her learning abilities or possibly contribute to attention deficit disorder.   What I do know is that she’s not crowing like a chicken and as long as she doesn’t get in trouble for repeatedly talking in kindergarten she gets to use the tablet after school.

“But, Daddy, I just have so much to say!”

Yep.  She does.

Lazy Vs. Efficient

I hate wasting time and resources.

I hate when I am not getting the most out of something. I usually do not run the A/C or the heater while driving. If it’s nice out, I keep the window down and the air off. In the colder months, I will heat up the car, just to take the chill out. Then, I will just drive with the heat off, but the temperature to heat. I also don’t use the gas pedal on hills. I build up a decent speed, and then coast through a hill to the bottom. Some will disagree with my approach to gas efficiency. I know it sounds silly, but I still manage to get at least 300 miles to a tank of gas in a V6 engine driving back and forth through Pittsburgh, everyday.

I also hate wasting time in the mornings. When I get to work, the kitchen is the first room I enter on my way to my cube. I put my lunch in the fridge, make my coffee, and get breakfast ready. Some days, it’s Pop Tarts. Some days, it’s cereal. Lately, it’s been oatmeal. In any case, I get it all prepared before heading to my cube. That way I don’t have to walk all the way there, drop off my stuff, then walk back to the kitchen. I can have my coffee and breakfast going while I get my computer up and running, checking emails, etc. That may seem lazy, like I don’t want to walk all that way. I consider it being efficient in using my time wisely.

I remember in one of my old jobs, working at a hotel, that due to being pressed for time in turning over a room from a lunch to a wedding we would try to be as efficient as possible. If the room had all rectangle tables for a meeting, and we needed mostly round tables, we’d save the ones we needed and remove the rest. We would take back two rectangle tables, one in each hand, and bring out two round tables, rolling them out, side by side.

One day, I snapped at a younger, less experienced coworker. They were carrying in round tables and not taking out rectangles. I flat out said, “If I see you walk out of here empty handed, one more time, I’m putting my foot in your ass.” Of course, I was mostly joking, but we needed to hurry.

Anytime I can reduce the number of trips I need to make, I feel like I am being efficient. Granted, I try to carry every bag of groceries from the car, instead of making trips because it’s tiring. However, is it really being lazy if you load up your arms to capacity instead of carrying two bags and making ten trips in and out of the house?

When I’m at home on my laptop, working or just vegging, I tend to do what I can from a fixed position. If the kid wants a channel change, I ask her to bring me the remote. Yeah, that’s not lazy, huh? LOL. Granted, I’m a big guy who hates to get up and down a lot. Still working….well not much… on that. It’s hard when 80% of what you do to make money involves a computer and a chair.

That reminds me… I have a giveaway to prepare. Wink wink

George Carlin and The Last Crusade

Last week my work laptop went BSOD. That’s Blue Screen of Death for all those not in the know. Anyway, I got a loaner and via the network I can at least work in some semblance. I have access to my email and the network but none of my stuff is there.

Working through this issue reminds me of the classic, and very spot on, bits from George Carlin. Being on a loaner laptop is like spending a night or two at a friend’s house. Sure, you can bring along the essentials but you never feel quite as relaxed putting your stuff into an overnight bag and spending the night away from the rest of your stuff.

It’s amazing how dependent we’ve become on our computers. It’s even more apparent when we don’t have them at the ready. So, here I am with webmail open and it fails out. Great, no email. Well, at least I can do work through the other website I am usually using. What the hell was the server name, again? Crap. I had it bookmarked in my favorites. Oooh, that’s right. I don’t have my computer and I didn’t back up my favorites to my network folder. Well, I guess I can always check Facebook for a moment. I don’t remember my password. SHIT!

Yep, it sucks. But this got me to thinking. You have your laptop which has all your applications, favorites, files, and notes. Then you have to go somewhere and all you have is your phone. Well, in essence, your phone becomes that next logical progression in Carlin’s chain of relocating to a new place with your stuff. If you lose your phone or are in a bad service location, you need to rely on that more powerful, yet less effective machine to recall your information. That’s your brain.

What did we do before Cell Phones, Smart Phones, computers, and PDAs? How did we remember all the important stuff like phone numbers, names, birthdays, important meetings, recipes, movie trivia, the 76 Phillies roster, and meaning of life?

As Henry Jones Sr. once said, “I wrote them down in my diary so I wouldn’t have to remember them.”

Well, said Dr. Jones.

They say we only use a small percentage of our brain power. Has technology reduced that number even further? How much longer before we are entirely dependent on machines to remember everything. We’ve already lost the ability to write. Our grammar is failing. We are discarding books for ebooks. We abbreviate and create acronyms.

And even though I am getting a newer laptop, reimaged from my old one, I will still have to go back and add all kinds of stuff, notes, files, etc. that will be undoubtedly lost from my old one.   I will have to remember what that is, though.

We are becoming dumber, as I once said a long time ago.  I just don't remember when I said it.   It's on this blog somewhere.

Go. Find.  Read.  Remember.

Speed Updating

I have no time. No time I tells ya! Things must be automated so I can get back to staring at the wall of my cube/living room/bathroom stall.

First there was speed dial. We had the ability to skip dialing all ten numbers on our home phones and instead dial one number that was assigned to someone we commonly called.

Hell, do you remember when you could dial just seven numbers and need to put in the area code? I do. That was back when a mobile phone meant your parents had a 50 foot spiraled phone cord attached the wall phone in the kitchen and you could talk to people from the bathroom. Of course, after a while, the cord became all twisted and knotted up and you could barely get away from the fridge before you yanked the phone off the wall and it made that “ding” sound when it hit the floor. Yeah, this was back when phones actually had real ringers, with bells inside of them.

But after speed dialing, there was voice dialing. You didn’t have to even get your fingers dirty dialing your house on the cell phone while your blazing a trail up the highway at 90mph. You just say, “Call Home” and it called the house. Of course, this never worked for my mother-in-law. I’d heard complaints that every time she said “Call Home” it tried to call her mother’s nursing home. Then she’d say, “No! CALL HOME!” By the time she’d have it all straightened out she could have, not only dialed all ten numbers of her home phone but, been standing in her living room to do it.

Texting slowed things down a bit because you had to hunt and peck your way around the phone pad and even worse, auto correct lead to some interesting combinations of phrases that could get you into serious trouble if you didn’t pay attention.

So, I’m proposing a new speed update method whereas I simply type in a two digit number and all my friends on Facebook know exactly what I’m saying.

This is actually something some friends I concocted about 10 years ago, before Facebook was even a thought in the back of Zuckerman’s mind... or the Winklevi, depending on who you believe.

We were all sitting around a sports bar and thought, “You know what? Instead of actually telling a joke or retelling a funny story, whenever it comes up as an applicable moment, just yell out a number.” We had a system down where various punch lines became numbers and all we’d do is yell out, “4” and that meant some joke about a guy who needs surgery to reattach his arm and he can’t afford the reputable doctor’s prices. So, he goes to a cheaper, less educated doctor who reattaches it and while talking with the original doctor he chides him over the original price, complete with giving the expensive doctor the old forearm jerk. At that point, the arm he slaps with his other hand goes flying off.

To that end, I want to simply say a number and have it correspond to a particular statement.  Here's 50 I've come up with, so far.

1. I love my wife.
2. My wife puts up with my stupid bullshit.
3. I put up with something my wife does but it’s not the end of the world because I love my wife and she’s on Facebook.
4. I just pooped.
5. Traffic was a bitch getting into work.
6. Traffic was a bitch getting home from work.
7. I just had a tasty breakfast.
8. I just had a tasty lunch.
9. I just had a tasty dinner.
10. My bowels have decided to reject tasty breakfast/lunch/dinner.
11. My kid did something funny.
12. My kid did something scary.
13. My kid is off doing something leaving me to update my status.
14. My cat did something funny.
15. My cat did something scary.
16. My cat is off doing something leaving me to update my status.
17. Obscure 70s movie quote that only three friends will get and ‘Like’ no matter what.
18. Obscure 80s movie quote that only three friends will get and ‘Like’ no matter what.
19. Obscure 90s movie quote that only three friends will get and ‘Like’ no matter what.
20. Obscure 00s movie quote that only three friends will get and ‘Like’ no matter what.
21. Facebook is doing something buggy, again.
22. Steelers/Penguins did something great.
23. Steelers/Penguins did something awful.
24. Refs screwed over the Steelers/Penguins.
25. Team playing the Steelers/Penguins are evil.
26. Buffy Quote.
27. Firefly Quote.
28. LOST Quote.
29. Song Lyrics about Love.
30. Song Lyrics about Hate.
31. Song Lyrics about Sadness.
32. Never Forget.
33. Patriotic American Update.
34. Election Candidate I hate statement that starts flame war.
35. Election Candidate I love statement that starts flame war.
36. Statement about War on Terror.
37. Clarification about stupid statement about War on Terror.
38. Apology about misunderstanding due to stupid statement about War on Terror.
39. Something, something, people, something, something disease, something, repost.
40. Going to bed.
41. Not wanting to be up.
42. I love my car.
43. I hate my car.
44. I love my phone.
45. I hate my phone.
46. I love my job.
47. I hate my job.
48. Weekend!
49. Monday, uggh!
50. Thank you for the birthday wishes.

Honestly, It's Not My Bag, Baby!

Last Fall, I had an unfortunate infestation of ants in my home. They poured out of the wall, underneath the baseboards and marched across the hardwood floors of my living and made a condo out of my laptop bag. I immediately took said bag and tossed it on our enclosed back porch. Then, I attended to the source of the problem, setting traps and spraying the gap between the baseboard and floor. Unfortunately, since I am a lazy f**k, I never got around to fumigating my bag, which had now become a retirement community for stinkbugs as well.

In the meantime I had begun taking my wife’s laptop bag to work. She never used it for anything, but it wasn’t exactly the most manly thing in the world. It was a Vera Bradley, solid color, quilted laptop bag. I didn’t have a lot of options. I knew my work was not going to replace my bag and I didn’t feel like buying a new one for a work laptop. I simply just kept using my wife’s and stowed it out of sight for the duration of my stay with my former employer.

Flash forward to this week. I get up and proceed to get for work at my current job, which is an hour drive away. I go out into our living room and see that one of my cats has knocked over my new, company issued laptop bag, possibly to lay on it, as they always do. Then, I realized the horror. One of my other cats has decided to piss all over it, leaving a puddle of urine laying there.

I cleaned it off best I could, using Lysol wipes and hot water. I simply did not have time to tear apart the entire house, waking my wife and daughter at 6:00 AM in order to find a replacement. Besides, after I used the wipes on the bag, it seemed to be OK. That was, until I was driving home and the smell really hit me. I couldn’t take it back to work in that condition.

That night, my wife suggested taking her bag to work, like I had before. I was a little leery. When you’ve worked at the same company for nearly ten years and you do something like bringing a purse to work. They kind of give you the benefit of the doubt if you’ve never done it before. When you’ve been at a company for only six months and do something like that, your coworkers don’t understand your life the same way. Everyone at my old job knew the tale of my cat causing us to have to replace the floor in our basement so this was simply par for the course. At the new job, they don’t know this and will generate their own opinions.

Needless to say, I took my wife’s bag. I knew it was probably a bad move and I should have really considered, putting it in my desk drawer, out of sight. Unfortunately, I had an all day meeting and simply did not have the opportunity to do this.

About ten minutes into the meeting, of which I am sharing my laptop screen on the projector, I receive an IM.

“Where did you get the pretty laptop bag?”

Fortunately, I had moved all of my email and IM screens to my laptop and only extended my windows desktop to the projector. This message was only visible to me. Well, me and the three other people with which my coworker decided to share. Suddenly, the incident took on a life of its own as more people, including my boss and my boss’ boss, were chiming in about my lovely bag.

During a break, I was able to come out and try some damage control, to no avail. People were laughing. I wasn’t sure why. Then I found out. We have nine large flat screen monitors hanging throughout the cube farm which displays stats and various other bits of information for the department. The slide show rotates through different screens and eventually, I noticed what everyone was laughing about. Tucked in between two of the slides was a picture of two or my coworkers modeling the bag in rather funny poses with the title of “The Companion Bag” above the words “MyLastName & CO.”, essentially making this an advertisement.

I couldn’t help but laugh because while it was making fun of me for bringing my wife’s bag, it also put their manhood on the line to have been photographed modeling it. Needless to say, it was all in good fun and if I can’t laugh at myself, I shouldn’t laugh at others. I gave them a “Well Played” and then went back into my meeting. Of course, I had to share and explain the incident, reiterating that my cat caused the situation.

I made sure that I found a suitable replacement for the next day, while I wait until my regular bad dries after being washed. It just goes to show that if I had ever expressed doubts about coming here, they made me feel welcome, even at my own expense.

Bravo, crew.
Now, I must disown my cat.

Help! I'm Addicted To Minecraft!

My penchant for getting addicted to games is legendary. I spent an entire series, early on in the blog history, detailing my love of video games throughout my life. I went from the age of the Atari 2600 through PC gaming and ended up at the PS2. And I always vowed to go back and more entries on PS3, Wii, and even online gaming. Unfortunately, I got lazy or busy, depending on your understanding of my free time.

To bridge the gap, I did a couple of ‘one off’ posts about Uncharted and Fallout 3 for PS3 and the Call of Duty series for the Wii. Since then, I’ve taken a break from those and had focused on Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, which is a game that can get your adrenaline really pumping. I do not suggest playing it for any length of time and then driving anywhere. You’re liable to find yourself speeding.  But this is nothing compared to my new timesuck.

My wife has a piano student who is a bit of a gamer.  He has an Xbox 360 and was a big Halo nut.  We’ve talked a lot about gaming and we’ve spent lesson time racing, much to wife’s dismay, I’m sure. However, he started asking me one day about Minecraft. I had never heard of it. I thought he was talking about Minesweeper.  To hear him speak of it made little sense because he’s in high school and has a tendency to talk really fast and not make a lot of sense unless you really pay attention to him. You can see why I like this kid instead of my usual, “Get off my lawn” mentality. So, I did a little research and was utterly amazed at this game. I also resisted it with as much will power as I could muster.

Unless they are a gamer, trying to explain Minecraft to someone can be frustrating. They don’t understand game physics or sandbox modes or anything like that. So, I found it very hard to try and relate to others about what Minecraft is without saying, “Just go to YouTube and watch a video.” But, I’m going to try to do it for you, the reader.

Imagine the island from LOST as if it were built by the creators of Wolfenstein and then ask people to just go out and build stuff like in a SimCity style of game. Not clear enough? OK long version it is.

To get you into the right frame of mind you have to understand the brevity of the design. Everything in the world of Minecraft is built using blocks. It’s a very cubistic world with really no angled surfaces except for liquids. For being 2011, the level of graphics are laughable but believe me, once you start playing you’ll forgive the crudely drawn landscapes.

You start out on an unknown continent. You have no items in inventory. You have no real direction. You just start building. There’s no score, no end, and no limits to your imagination. Sounds like a typical Saturday with my kid and her basket of blocks. That’s what this is, essentially, a game of building with blocks. Except you have to get the blocks from your environment.

The hills are made of dirt and rock and the beaches are made of sand. There are trees around and even snow in some areas. Basically, you walk up to a tree and punch it. It pops and there is a floating block of wood left in its place. You grab the block and continue to karate chop the tree until you have several pieces in your inventory. Now, you need to start making a shelter. Why? Because nightfall will be soon upon you and the monsters will be out. That’s right, monsters. There is a day and night cycle in Minecraft and during the day, animals roam free. At night, skeletons and spiders and zombies search for unprepared miners. And perhaps the worst of the lot, the creeper will sneak up on you, hiss and then explode. So, your first order of business in Minecraft is to build a shelter. You can do that by opening up your inventory and putting a piece of wood into your ‘crafting’ area. It can then be rendered into wood planks. Those can be used to construct a crude, but effective shelter to keep you safe from the nasties. During the night, you can focus on building tools. Once you are safe, open your inventory and build a crafting bench. One plank in each of the four crafting squares will render a workbench with an expanded area of nine spaces in which to craft items. Place wood planks into the center of your crafting area to split them into sticks to make tools.

Building tools is a fairly simple process. You need only to consider what the essential parts are to a tool. Since you have a nine square crafting area available, putting wood planks in the blocks to form a ‘T’ will construct a wooden pickaxe. This is essential to your inventory in order to do anything else. Well, there are other ways, like luring a creeper into an area and then letting him explode in order to collect various remnant blocks of cobblestone, but that’s dangerous. So, once you have your wooden pickaxe and it is day time, once more, venture out into the world and find rock. Use the pickaxe to bust up some stones in and collect the cobblestone. Using the same method as the pickaxe construction, replace the top of your ‘T’ with cobblestone and you will have constructed a stone axe. Put two a vertical line, consisting of one stone and two sticks and you now have a shovel. You can also build hatchets and hoes as well.

Now that you have a decent amount of inventory built up you want to hold onto it. So using wood planks, construct a chest by placing a plank in all of the nine blocks except the center. Place the chest in your shelter and fill it up with your stuff. Place two chests next to each other and you double the capacity. You can build a furnace the same way using stones and now you can smelt ores and other materials to build more items. Use wood as fuel and sand as an ingredient and you can make glass for windows in your shelter.

The important thing to remember is protecting your items. If you die, you respawn at your original starting point and you lose all your items. If you are pretty close to where you died, you may be able reclaim all your belongings which will all just be floating in the air. However they can disappear over time. That’s why chests are so valuable. It’s the basic rule of adventure gaming. Take only what you need to explore and return to deposit your acquisitions. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Once you are ready to really explore, grab some tools and head for the nearest hillside and just start digging. Eventually, you’ll open up a cave or a tunnel into a mine. In order to light the way and see where the monsters might be, you’ll need torches. A simple recipe of two sticks with a piece of coal on top and you’ll have a way to mark your path as well as keep the monsters from spawning behind you while you are exploring. Two rules of thumb when exploring a mine are never dig straight up and never dig straight down. Because, sand and gravel react with the same realistic physics as the real world, you can potentially suffocate yourself in a sand or gravel avalanche because they will fall if there is space below them. Also, lava will fall and monsters will fall through holes in the ceilings of caves. When you dig straight down, you run the risk of breaking into a cavern and falling to your doom.

This is why Minecraft is so addictive. When I was just outside, digging in the dirt and not really making sense of what I needed to do to survive, Minecraft was rather boring. Punch a pig here. Karate chop a tree there. Oooh, big fun. Then, I had to take shelter. I broke into a hillside and found a small cave and set up a simple dwelling. I waited out the night while I read up on how to make tools. There was a lot of rock around me so I started digging into the walls. I busted out a block and there was this expanse behind it. It just went on and on forever. It was dark and there were noises. I quickly walled up the opening with dirt but I kept thinking. I want to see what’s in there. So, I basically spent time building up tools and supplies to do some exploring and that’s when I realized that I had been playing for a few hours. I simply just gave in to the possibility of what that little hole in the wall could become.

Eventually, I moved on from the cave dwelling because cows and pigs and chicken and sheep kept spawning inside. Not to mention, on occasion, skeletons and creepers spawned inside, regardless of all my torches. I died quite a few times and couldn’t get back inside to where I kept all my weapons were at because a big effing archer skeleton “Waz in my house, killing me lotz.” So, now I am building a new house a few feet away on top of a mound. Unfortunately, building a proper house takes time and I have to run inside the cave with the chickens and pigs while spiders sit outside my window during the night. To fix this, I’m building a tunnel from the cave to the construction site in order to move back and forth. This is what Minecraft has done to me. I’m building tunnels that take twice as long as the actual house construction will take. However, once I’m done, I will have access to a tunnel that will lead right to my cave and all the caverns within. Eventually, I will move on to other caves or even begin to dig in the basement, starting new caves.

So, if you’re even the least bit interested in all this madness, go pick up Minecraft and watch your life slowly be taken away from you. In the meantime, go watch these hilarious Brits enjoy the wonders of Minecraft. Even if you don’t feel like taking on Minecraft on your own, because you have a life, waste a good lunch hour watching their YouTube videos. They’re a riot and make sure you wear earphones because they swear quite a lot. British humor, w/ swearing, ranks up there near Muppet violence on my list of things I absolutely love.

And once you've made that jump into playing, I highly suggest going to Minepedia to research how to do things.   Have fun!

I've also done some shirts for my stores.

United Minecrafters
from Mongo Angry! Mongo Smash!at Zazzle

Can't Talk. Must Mine.
from Mongo Angry! Mongo Smash! at Skreened

Uncrate.com Makes My Afternoon Disappear

I have been spending an ungodly amount of time surfing through this site. One of the folks I follow on Twitter made reference to their effervescent bacon tablets and that just got me spiraling into a wasted day of wishful thinking.

Uncrate.com appears to be a site that advertises products for men… who have exorbitant amounts of disposable cash. But I love it. It ranks up there with ThinkGeek.com.

Here are some highlights of products I would definitely want. Note, I can probably afford the cereal marshmallows and that’s it. LOL.

Mint Robo Cleaner

1959 Land Rover Series II Model 109

HP Slate 500

Cereal Marshmallows

Mac Book Air 2

Where was I?  What's work?  What's my pin number? 



Apple Launches the iPad or a Big Ass Button Remote Control

Apple finally launched the iPad.  What I find extremely ironic or perhaps morbid is that Steve Jobs looked as thin as it did during the unveiling.   To his credit, he is surviving pancreatic cancer and had a liver transplant but still it was a bit off putting to see him turn sideways and disappear.   The iPad is supposed to combine a bunch of different concepts into one device.  iPhone, web browser, book reader, email, etc., etc., etc.

Frankly, it doesn't look all that impressive except for the lower than expected price.  For $499, the entry level model is a 16GB version.  For the 64GB version you'll pay $699.  For a pay as you go data package you'll pay $14.99 or $29.99 for unlimited usage.  And don't expect to be able to use your provider for internet, unless you have AT & T.   I expect your billing statement will probably be thicker than the device.  Lastly, for those of you expecting some space age revolutionary looking tablet, guess again.  You've already seen this one in a smaller version, the iPhone.  Hell, I've seen the droid do the same stuff and it fits in your pocket.

If you really wanted to be innovative, Steve, you should have also packaged it as an LCD monitor.   Think about it.   You come home to a television stand that displays what looks like a flat screen television.  You spend a few minutes watching the news and decide you want to cap off the night by reading a book.  So, you walk to the television and lift it off its cradle.  You turn it on its end and use your finger to flip through the pages of an exciting novel or search out clues to the final season of LOST.   When you're done, you simply return the device back to its cradle to charge and act like a television again. 

Now that would have been something to see.  Instead we get the following.

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The Digital Self

The idea is reminiscent of something out of a Phillip K. Dick or Isaac Asimov story but it is almost a reality. Think of your entire life on a computer. Every memory, every moment uploaded onto a server that is your life, digitized forever. Sound too far fetched?

Consider that we have our lives spread among several different systems. You have photo albums on Google or Photobucket. You have them on your home computer and CDs that you’ve burned. You have public, private, career, and educational information stored in your computer and online in your social networking sites. Your emails, conservations, tweets, texts, everything that makes up you is somewhere in the digital world. What if we were to take existing technologies and somehow aggregate all of that scattered information into one server configured strictly for you? Consider it one large “you” database. Then on another server an application sits and runs a program that creates an avatar of you using all of that stored information in the database as a profile. The application server could then run a series of engines that uses the database as a primer for who you are. In essence you exist as a fully rendered artificial representation of your natural self down to the idiosyncrasies like cracking your knuckles or grinding your teeth.

Think of being able to preserve yourself, digitally? You become sick or start to feel the effects of old age and you can pass on your memories and wisdom onto your virtual self, becoming immortal. Think Jor-El’s presence in the Fortress of Solitude within the world of Superman. Your family could still talk to you through your virtual self. You could continue to learn and experience life beyond the grave. You could become immortal.

Then, take the concept of MMORPGS and you can create a world for those avatars to live in and interact. Facebook 3D. You could play scrabble with your grandchildren or chat with other dead friends. You could get a job and earn money performing certain tasks that a computer program would automatically do. A new species of human existence could eventually come about.

Despite being a fully sentient experience we have the technology in its dismantled parts. How long before we are able to put the pieces together in the right sequence? Considering the amount of computing resources needed to accomplish such a task, it’s almost mind boggling. Ultimately, there would be a host of problems to contend with in order to have an operational virtual self. Look how bad it gets when Gmail or Twitter goes down.

Cost is one thing. Upgrades and maintenance is another. Disaster recovery would be a huge issue. It would be the virtual equivalent to a heart attack or stroke. How could you perform the necessary tasks to reboot or reformat your virtual self if you are dead? You would also have to have the necessary environment for such a system. Cold rooms, ventilation, and power would be essential to maintain yourself, electronically. The technology may be there, but the conceptualization and execution may still be decades away. But let’s imagine a world where it is a reality.

You wear a device similar to one from this article. You wear this thing around your neck. It’s a multi sensory device that records audio, video, still picture, and other sensory stimuli that you experience every day. Additionally, you have an application for your phone, computer, and what not that records transactions such as receipts, texts, calls, and emails and converts them into code. Each night you remove the device that you wear and plug it into a docking station where it downloads and updates the database as well as the application from your transactions updating the database in real time. Your online self learns those experiences like, “Ooh, I just tried a fish taco today and I don’t like them.” or “I just watched the new Harry Potter movie and I can now discuss it with my other virtual friends.”

Or, let’s take the concept into a whole new direction. I don’t have a blackberry or another smart phone so I don’t know if this is already a possibility, but how about the next generation PDA. This time, though, the Personal Digital Assistant is really just that. You take your entire set of habits and input them as rules for the online self. Money Management, Scheduling, etc. I know we do this now, so the concept doesn’t sound new. I already have direct deposit of my paycheck and automatic withdrawal on all but a couple utilities. However, that is still something you need to set up manually. What if your digital self had the logic to make those payments on particular days other than the ones you already have designated? It was a good month for work, let’s up the credit card payment 10%. The holidays are coming, let’s not pay that electric bill until the next pay day before it’s due.

You can let your online self check your scheduling and make appointments for you. Say you just had a dental appointment and you would like to schedule the next one. The digital self knows you just had an appointment because it was schedule in your calendar. It knows you prefer Saturday appointments and it has to be scheduled sixth months or more out. It checks your schedule, contacts the dentist’s office and asks for an appointment to be made at a certain date and then leaves you a message that it has been scheduled and added to your calendar.

Using the digital self database, the digital you can see receipts for the last year and plan ahead based on what you tell it to be looking for in terms of scheduling. The digital self sees that you have gone out for your anniversary to the same restaurant for the last three years. It can then ask you if you would like to make a reservation for the same time this year. Perhaps you’ve gone to two or three different ones over the year. It can give you a choice. Once you give it the go ahead, it makes the reservation, electronically, with the restaurant. It also reminds you at a preset time to get a present for different holidays or birthdays.

Now, a lot of things are contingent on this actually working. First of all, the places your digital self interact with need to be able to communicate with each other, although, a lot of restaurant and stores already have the ability to make online reservations. It’s just a matter of the digital self being able to use the web to do so. Also, I’m not sure how many doctors have the capability but it could be as easy as them having an email address for the receptionist.

Having a tool, regardless of the application, would be a huge time saver to a lot of people. Not to mention, it could do several of these transactions or tasks simultaneously. In the short run, just having apps on your smart phone that talked to each other would be a huge advancement, but of course, there are concerns . If you give a program that much control of your life it could lead to piracy and theft. Rogue applications could be made to go out and strip your identity. Not to mention, it could tweak it or clone it giving the hacker the ability to make your life hell. Also, like before, if the system crashes or goes on the fritz, the information you have stored would be lost. It would be nice if there was a backup hard drive for the table each day or week to be able to hold all your appointments, allowing you to go to a desktop or other type of computer to access that information and maybe print it out.

As much as I would love to see this become a reality, I would rather see the tech sector focus on ways to solver bigger problems in near future. The personal interaction with people we get on a daily basis is what makes us human. Not to mention, giving our lives over to an electronic device is one step closer to the evils described in The Terminator series or The Matrix. Computers making decisions for us instead of at our request is one of the basic premises of all “Evil Computers/Robots” films. Perhaps we are not ready for this type of advancement, but the ability to preserve ourselves after we die may be one step closer to immortality. I’m sure there is a philosophical debate on whether this is a wise thing and it probably questions the existence of a soul. If we exist solely online outside of ourselves it will never be the same as existing in the real world. But think of the possibilities.

The Stuff Blog Posts Are Made Of

The mind is always at work. Every single day, I am usually on automatic pilot with the repetitive tasks while my mind plots new ways to find solutions for my everyday woes. Unfortunately, my thoughts are as organized as my house. Everything is shoved into a place that was designed to be that objects container. A spare bedroom is a junk room, storage room, Santa’s Workshop, or closet for work clothes. Another closet serves as a document management repository. Two filing cabinets, tucked into the wings, serve to hold all of our bills, paychecks, savings info, and pretty much all of the user guides or instruction manuals to everything that I put together of an electronic or wooden nature. Of course, it also holds overflow from other areas. My garage was meant to hold a car, yet it is a labyrinthine of objects that have no connection to one another yet construct a path from the door to the a freezer and refrigerator that is also used for storage.

While trying to plan for my impending beach trip, I am forced to confront this state of disarray. I have to organize some stuff, buy some stuff, and pack all my stuff. I am going take a portion of my stuff to some other house for a week. I will then buy more stuff there and bring it all home to be added to this mess.

As I looked around at this mishmash of objects in different locations of my house. I immediately thought of three things, a dumpster, a match, and George Carlin. He had this whole piece on stuff that is truly a work of genius. Then man was a master of his medium. Now, while I will undoubtedly infringe on his work, I am expounding on some concepts that he introduced.

Carlin said it best. All I need a place for my stuff. A house is literally just a pile of stuff with a cover on it. My house is a huge pile of stuff with a tiny cover on it. Sometimes I’d love to throw some of my stuff out. My wife would really love to throw all of my stuff out. But she calls it shit. Just like Carlin indicated. I would love to get rid of all the unnecessary stuff like decorations that we haven’t used in years. But that is neither here nor there. Those are things that are not going to change. I am always going to have stuff and I need to find a place to put it. Sometimes, I think that I do not live in my house, my stuff does. But that’s what life is. Going from place to place with your stuff, you move around while your stuff stays at home and sits.

We are born with no stuff. We start to acquire an overwhelming amount but we are not responsible for it . Our parents, friends of parents, and other family members contribute to that pile of stuff early on leading to a diminishing organization and storage of all that stuff. The bigger we get, the smaller our toys are. We go from huge monstrosities of molded plastic held together by cheap screws that strip easily, running off of a handful of batteries to smaller, more complex devices that in essence can hold our electronic stuff. We trade the toy box for the blackberry. We go from physical representations of stuff to electronic applications and games that comprise our stuff. Where do you keep your addresses? Where do you play most of your games? It’s a pile of stuff with a cover on it.

We move from toy box to pencil box. Now our stuff is mobile. We can take it with us. Sure, it’s not exactly fun stuff, but it can create fun stuff. Soon we graduate from pencil box to locker. Now, we must be acquiring some good stuff, because now we have a lock on it. This stuff must be important. Then we break down that locked up stuff into a smaller container to go with us. It’s our homework or schedule or whatever else we carry throughout our day. I can’t believe that I managed to survive this long leaving a turkey sandwich, with mayonnaise and cheese no less, in my locker, unrefrigerated for four hours before eating it. How did I not end up with salmonella?

Once we reach a certain age, we move on from a small metal box of stuff to a large metal box of stuff…on wheels. Yes, once we are old enough to drive we obtain a rolling cover for some of our stuff. It holds tapes, CDs, books, clothes, maps, papers, and money. It goes with us and then we stop, take some stuff out and go somewhere else.

College? A larger place for your stuff. I stayed in the dorms for my entire collegiate career. Why? Because all I needed was a place for my stuff. Seriously. I had a TV, VCR, PC, Radio, books, magazines, refrigerator, hot pot, CDs, tapes, Food, clothes, bed, chair, bookcase, cabinet, and dresser all contained in a little pie shaped stuff holder. My stuff sat in one place and the rest of the campus was where I lived. There was no need for an apartment that was overpriced and probably in violation of several building codes. I want my stuff to be safe from the elements and intruders.

We graduate and sometimes move back into our original stuff holder, Mom and Dad’s! I get a call every now and then from my Mom telling me she’s going to get rid of the stuff from my childhood. There is a ton of stuff in our garage that is labeled, “Yard Sale.” That’s a name we give to stuff that we no longer want, but never get around to unloading. We always make plans to have a Yard Sale but that’s a euphemism for being a pack rat. It deflects the problem because it may go away some day.

Then we migrate some of our stuff into our car, again, to try and find a good job so we can buy more stuff or at least more expensive stuff. We get a computer that holds a lot of our stuff like resumes and contacts. We go online to social networks and we create email accounts. That all becomes containers for our stuff. Hell, this blog is just a place for all the inane and weird stuff that is in my head. I’m trying to get it out of there to make room for more important stuff. Maybe, one day, I can put it all together and have someone get a red pen out and fix it so I can write a book. Perhaps, you will have a copy of my stuff sitting on or next to your stuff in your home. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Then we buy that house or rent that apartment and try and fit all of our physical stuff from our various containers into one place. Eventually there is no room for us. So, we look into buying a bigger place, not get rid of stuff. We move and acquire more stuff that we need to complete the rooms in our new place for our stuff. We add those children I talked about and their stuff. We get pets and of course, they have to have stuff. Often, my cats tend to take my stuff and treat it as their own. My daughter hides my stuff when I’m not paying attention. Usually, it’s the phone of remote that goes missing.

One day, I may be able to get a bigger cover for my stuff. If I had my choice, I would build instead of buy. Why? Because I want to make sure there is room for my stuff. I want to allow for the acquisition of more stuff, and as I take a tractor trailer sized wide turn back around to my original point, I want better organization of all my stuff. After all, that is what I do for a living. I organize and hold other people’s stuff. That stuff is knowledge. It’s all electronic and it lives in one place. We managed to get rid of a lot of the paper stuff. It gets old and outdated and not everyone has access to it. We find the need to lock down those important items and we also make sure that our stuff is approved. With that in mind, I need to make sure that where I go next, I have a place for my stuff and it’s appropriately organized.

I would love to get rid of all of that paper that resides in those filing cabinets. I think that a Kindle type device would work well in a document management type setting. If I were smart enough to configure a system in my home to house all of my important documents, then I could probably use something like a Kindle to retrieve those documents when needed. Say I am working out in the garage and I have to find the instructions for some tool or project I’m working on. Instead of rifling through my cabinet or travelling back and forth from my desktop computer to the location I’m working at, I can just grab the Kindle and call up that document. Better yet, what if my wife is cooking and she needs a recipe? Instead of sifting through all of them, she can locate them by using this hand held device that can be propped up like a cookbook. On the phone with a utility or other service like insurance. Call up your last bill or medical records. Now, of course, you would need a backup of all this stuff. If there’s a power outage or something crashes, you would need to get to this stuff. But a backup copy still takes up less space. You could even box up all the other stuff and store it in a smaller container instead of a huge filing cabinet. You would always be able to get to your stuff. These are of course all pipe dreams because the initiative to do those things take time and money, which is stuff I don’t have.

If you stop and think about it, you literally have stuff everywhere. Your stuff is all over the planet. That online account I spoke of. It’s probably housing your stuff in a server overseas somewhere. You have little containers of stuff scattered about the Earth like a trail of Matryoshka Dolls. One set of stuff breaks down into smaller containers of the original. Our house becomes our car, which becomes our purses or back packs, which then becomes our wallets, and then our pockets.

When we die, most of our stuff finally leaves our possession. I inherited stuff, that is in my house, from relatives, who died. My poor kid(s) will eventually have to go through my stuff and decide to keep, sell, throw out, or God forbid, mark “Yard Sale.” Some people take some of their stuff with them. People put little trinkets and remembrances of our lives in a casket with us. If we decide to get cremated, someone will either scatter our ashes or keep us in an urn. Thus, we become stuff that gets put together with other people’s stuff.

I don’t know about you but that’s some scary stuff there.