Are Seven

There was an interesting post today on Google Blogoscoped about an internet sensation that goes by (apparently) Fred, and is wildly popular with…people.  Kids, presumably.  The video itself is worth watching, at the very least so you know about Fred, and you can kind of see how it’d be pretty hilarious to junior high and high school and high college students. Like, say, an Adam Sandler movie, it may not be that funny at first, but you can see how repeated viewings and–more importantly–repeatedly quoting it with your friends could turn it into a sensation.

It’s the main point of the GB post that’s a thought starter: that these videos have tens of millions of views, and yet the vast majority of us have never even heard of it. GB quotes a LA Times column:

That an act with millions of fans could escape the popular attention is more evidence of the digital fissuring of our culture. As we ensconce ourselves ever further in our respective demographics, personal and professional, we continue to drift apart from the people right next to us, until even an iceberg holding 4 million tweens can float by unnoticed.

It’s over-dramatic, maybe, but it’s pretty dead-on.  There’s always been pockets of people that have their own interests and cultures and phrases and dances that are never even glanced at by the mainstream, and there’s always been the standard rifts between kids and adults, but this is different.  There’s now the ability to have enormous pop culture phenomenons that are never registered or reacted to by the rest of culture.  The internet world.

Yet…while there’s the possibility to have these sorts of movements, it’s also much, much easier for anyone to find out about it. You don’t need to be immersed in these pockets of culture to understand them.  A quick look up on Wikipedia or a check-in with Google tells you in about five seconds just about everything you want to know. There’s no more spending weeks wondering, “What the hell is this rick-rolling that everyone’s talking about?”  Even this afternoon, a co-worker sent me an email that said nothing but “SSIA”.  A quick search, and I knew it meant “subject says it all”.  Mystery solved.

It may be easier than ever to get out of tune with trends, but it’s easier than ever to quickly find the key and sing along.  If you want.

One of the signs of aging is when you’ve been over the legal drinking age for so long that it starts to become kind of flattering when you get carded, the thought being that, even though you’re well, WELL above the age of 21, you’re still getting mistaken as someone who could easily be on the cusp, still in your early 20’s.

I don’t buy it. Getting gray hair and then losing it is enough of a pain. There should be some glory in looking well over the age, and that glory should be that I should walk into any old bar, order a drink and have someone bring it to me. I know that I don’t look like I’m 24 or 19; I look like I’m 36, or 30 at least. Let’s put my gray hairs to work instead of letting them hang out there on the temples, all lazy-like. Listen to those hairs. They’re talking, saying, “I’ve done this before. Many times.” Yes, I’d be flattered if I thought that someone sincerely suspected that I was in my early 20’s, but no one does. So let me get some advantage out of that.

I know that spots that sling the devils drink “have to ask”, but just fair warning to all that when asked to get out my wallet and pull my ID out of it and have bouncers pore over it with a flashlight or waiters act like they’re paying me a big, fake compliment: I won’t give a big smile along with my ID and say, “Ha ha! Thanks for asking!” I’ll frown and give a frustrated sigh that’s so immature that maybe then I’ll feel that there’s justification for asking for my ID.

For those of you following along at home, you’ll know that I’ve set aside Tuesday as a day to talk about various topics from the tech world that strike my fancy. It’s not enough to do a blog, but it’s enough to ramble on incoherently about. Come on along!

Anywhere.fm
I finally gave anywhere.fm a try this week. Think of it as an online iTunes, and you can share it. I was looking for ways that I could listen to music at my new, lonely solitary-confined office, and this seemed as good as any. Well sir, it turns out that it’s still FAR from being a replacement for iTunes. The upload works somewhat, but isn’t great. In theory, you could put your whole library in there…if you have several days.

I tried this for about half a day, but I realized that my dream of having my entire music library somewhere off in the cloud, available from truly anywhere, is still a wait away.

Open Source vs. Pay Software
I found myself with a very frustrating problem last week: I need to to use Microsoft Project, but the money to buy it was still in the works, so I had to deal first with a lousy trial version, then switch over to OpenProj, which didn’t work exactly as advertised, so I had to recreate and entire project plan.

Ultimately, this is why I usually go with Open Source. It’s not that I’m such a cheapskate that I just refuse to pay for anything that I can get for free (though I am a cheapskate). It’s that you so often have to jump through so many hoops to buy something that it becomes a detriment on your time as well as your wallet. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

The music industry is finally learning its lesson, and you can get unprotected mp3s on Amazon. And I’ve started buying most of my music again. It wasn’t the fact that I had to pay for it before; it was that it was extremely simple to have the free, unprotected version (and much better quality) than it was to pay and have to worry about how many computers it existed on.

I love Google, but mostly I use their stuff because it’s so much easier. You’re not constantly running into features that you have to pay to use, you’re up and running in no time, there’s no passwords or verification codes: you just use it. Microsoft (and plenty of other companies. I’m looking at you, Adobe) could learn something. Fine; have people pay for it. But once they do, let them go with it.

Blogger vs. Wordpress
I’ve started using Blogger again, since we were looking for a free and easy home for Naive Harmonies. After time away from Blogger in favor of Wordpress, I’ve found that Blogger is WAY behind the curve, which is surprising. I don’t know if this is a very, very low priority for Google or if there’s some big redesign coming (a la Google Analytics), but it seems that they should pay a little more attention to it, considering that a lot of the blogs serve up AdSense, something that Wordpress blogs can’t do. But apart from it being free, and being able to host javascript and AdSense (all good reasons, granted), there’s no reason to use Blogger over Wordpress. The interface is so far behind Wordpress, there’s got to be at least a few Google employees who feel embarrassed about it. Naive Harmonies is on Blogger, due to the “free” part, but…I don’t know for how much longer.

The fate of Yahoo(!)
I have to admit I’m getting a little nervous about the fate of Yahoo. I guess that it’s unlikely that they’ll go completely belly-up, but it’s starting to look bad. I wouldn’t miss the mail (worst. free. email. ever), but losing Pipes would be a huge blow, and the fantasy football has been a comforting constant through the years. Here’s to hoping they get things fixed up.

My brain wandered off this morning (as my brain tends to do) and when I found it again, it was thinking about robot drone planes for some odd reason. In an effort to get my brain back to the things it was supposed to be thinking about, we thought it through a little bit.

The US Military has been using robot drone planes for a little while now, and there’s a certain part of me (specifically, the 9-year-old who had a toy chest full of Star Wars toys) that thinks this is–not to put too fine a point on it–totally fucking awesome. I mean, robot planes? That is so cool.

But then there’s the adult part of me, the part that saw a bit on the cable TV on fighter planes that said that the only restriction on planes going faster is that the human pilots are unable to withstand the pressure, that gets at least unnerved if not downright and outright scared by the development. What will happen to warfare if the possibility of your own troops dying–one of the chief reasons that even the most hardened hawks will hesitate to go to war–is removed?

Then there’s the second amendment. If not a full believer of the second amendment, I am at least an understander of its chief aim, which is to make the government afraid of the people, at least enough so that they won’t attempt to use the military to keep the public from their rights. But the more robotic the military becomes, the more difficult it would be for an armed public to take control away from the government.

These are just a few of the thoughts that keep my brain and I busy in idle moments. Your thoughts–especially those of Hans, aka “Mr. I Love Articles About Robots”–are welcome.

Passing by a 7-Eleven earlier tonight, I saw that there was a new flavor of slurpee that ties in with the new Incredible Hulk movie.  The flavor?  “Radioactive Rush”.  I get the tie-in and everything, but would you really be interesting in drinking a drink that had the word “radioactive” in the title?  If you answered “yes” to that question, then I have a few more drink flavors you might be interested in:

• Sewage Surge!
• Very Berry Beriberi
• Contamamint
• Die A Real!
• Lychees ‘n’ Lesions
• Lepro-C Vitamin Water
• Spongebob Squeeze
• Guano-ade (tie in with Batman)
• StigMate

I’m going to pitch this to the marketing people that came up with Radioactive Rush.  My guess is that they’re the same people who figured that “Viper” and “Great White” are perfectly logical scents for deodorants, so I can’t image that they won’t go for it.  When I’m a millionaire, I’ll buy you a drink.

…for the people who all get on whichever Metro train is directly in front of the escalator that they get off of. These are the people that prove the blind following tendencies of humans. They’ll cram into a ridiculously crowded metro train, not taking any steps to make their train trip any easier, simply because that’s where they were put by the escalator.  There’s no attempt to solve the problem, only to carry on with the problem and complain about it.

Any suggestions for a word?  I need to stop just calling them dumb, because it’s much more than that.

The cleverness of biology (or God, whichever you prefer) is hard to miss when hanging out with little kids.  At an age when people are at their most difficult is also when they’re at their cutest, meaning it’s a lot easier to stand the temper-stoking aggravation when it’s tempered with things that make you go “awwww”.

A few minutes ago, my two-year-old nephew headed down our beach house’s deck walk in spite of all of us yelling, “No!”, then gave us a really cute scampish look before heading down the stairs to the beach.  I almost wanted to let him go, he looked so cute.  Then, as I caught him and picked him up as he was halfway to the water and started carrying him back to the house, he broke into “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”.  Come on.  How can you be annoyed?

A few years ago, I went to both the Orioles stadium and the Ravens stadium in the span of a couple of months, and was really struck by how the differences in these two relatively new ballparks told a lot about the sports. Baseball has over 80 home games, and the ebb-and-flow of the standings (read: if they lose, it’s not an enormous deal) and the summer-dominated season were reflected in what was around: lots of restaurants, a warmer vibe, and just generally more than the game. The Ravens stadium had plenty of modern amenities, but was pretty basic: LOTS of concrete and total focus on football. There’s plenty of places to get something to eat, but the message is clear: get back in your seat and watch the game, because there’s only eight of these games.

The only other ballpark I’ve been to in the last few years was Nationals games at RFK, and actually felt that RFK was a pretty warm, fun place (except when it was cold and rainy). It’s an old place, and was definitely of its era, but its quirks seemed to fit baseball.

So in my brief visit to the new Nationals stadium last night, I was really surprised to find that it has the same feel of the Ravens stadium. Sure, it’s nice, and maybe after I’ve been to a few more games, I’ll warm to it, but it just felt like a concrete box. The concessions stands feel like they were imported from some 70’s-era amusement park: all identical except for the wording on the signs. There’s really no character to the place. Some people bemoan the forced unique personality of new stadiums, but over time, these things will become actual personality. Concrete utility will stay concrete utility.

The whole thing just feels pretty sterile. Again, this was with me not being able to focus on the game, because for most of the time I was there, there wasn’t any game, so maybe when I go to see the Astros in July, I’ll be able to concentrate a little more on the game, but last night? Color me underwhelmed.

You may have noticed (you probably did not notice) that I haven’t been writing as much here. It’s not actually because I have nothing to write about. In fact, I have too much to write about. I think of at least three or four topics a day, but don’t have the time to turn those topics into considered posts.  Not only that, but I have a number of topics I’d love to turn into their own blogs:

• My book idea about human behavior on city streets as indicator for all of human behavior
• My book idea about US intrastate migration as seen through sports fandom
• A music blog (this one is likely to happen, and soon)
• A blog about the struggles of learning project management by someone with little experience as a project manager.

The problem with all of those, of course, is that I don’t have any time for the one blog, so why do I think I’d have time for five?  More than that, though, is that I’ve been stricken with that dreaded flavor of blog-writers block: Why Would Anyone Be Interested In That disease. I’ve become too aware that this page has an audience (no matter how small), and all of the voices of the blog skeptics and haters (”Who cares about what your thoughts on ____ are?”) start sounding louder.

But interestingly, I’ve also started caring less about how things I write are received. It’s not that I don’t care about you, my dearest readers. I can’t believe that some of you have stuck with me for so long, and it sends appreciation coursing from my head to my toes and makes me wonder if I could sell my appreciation as a drug. But I’ve found that I look at my site statistics less and I (finally) turned on the full RSS feed so that you don’t even have to come to the site to read the posts.

Plus, I remind myself why I started this page in the first place: as writing exercise. I don’t want to block myself into writing only long posts when really what I just want to do is get a thought out.

This big, messy, rambling equation still isn’t totally solved yet, but it looks like the sum of it is that I’m actually going to be posting more. I tried using my Tumblr page as a spinoff for my less-formed thoughts, and I may keep to that, but slicing up my web life has actually been a little frustrating. It’s one thing to have to consider how I’m going to write something without having to stop and consider where I’m going to write it. So the most likely outcome is that areseven.com will be a place for everything and anything. It means that the writing will be less considered and sloppier and even more (even more?!) difficult to comprehend, but I think it’s what’s right.

Don’t worry, though: I’ve still got your back. The minor thoughts will have their own category as soon as I can come up with a short word for them, and I’ll be sure to offer RSS feeds that allow you to get only what you want out of the site, including combination RSS feeds so that if there’s one part of the site you’re not really interested in, you don’t have to deal with it.

Don’t think that what you want out of the site isn’t important to me, because it is. Any suggestions, things you want to see more of, things you want to see less of…give it up.

In high school or even college, when you hear people talking about benefits and retirement plans, they’re talking in another language that it’s hard to comprehend at the time, but you shrug it off, knowing that one day, it’ll all make sense and you’ll be able to have the same confident conversations.

Then that day comes, and some HR person drops a pile of envelopes and brochures and opt-in forms that land with a ominious, reverbed-out thud, and you’re told to make a choice.  And you have no idea.  And 10 years after that first reverbed-out thud, you still have no real idea, but you’ve learned how to guess, and you just hope for the best.

Guessing is the way I always filled out my benefits forms, checking boxes based on the conventional wisdom of conversations that resemble those grownup conversations that sounded so foreign so long ago.  But I never really knew what I was doing, especially when it came to health care. The Growup-To-English dictionary told me that PPOs are “good” and HMOs are “bad”, but I didn’t really know why.  I vaguely recalled HMO horror stories, but I’d had PPO horror stories of my own.

I got a little bit of an eye-opener when I started my new job.  Instead of throwing down a huge stack of forms, I got a two-hour orientation on benefits.  You might cringe a little bit at the thought of a two-hour benefits orientation, but it was fantastic.  For the first time, I got anecdotes and a side-by-side comparison of HMOs and PPOs.  For the first time, I saw that PPOs were not only a more expensive, but three times more expensive.  I added it up and saw that I would be spending $1400 more on the PPO.  And with Mint.com nagging me all the time about my money these days, it seemed hard to swallow that much money when my stupid boy tendencies never take me to the doctor until I need it.

I posed my dilemma to just about everyone, and was about to go HMO until I talked to my former/current/new boss Alphonse.  Not only did he remind me of my own run-in with insurance companies and “you never know what could happen one Sunday in February“, but he provided a few more scary insurance stories and finally gave it an underscore.  Raised in England, he has a healthy skepticism of the American health care system and his take was that the health care is so risky, so screwed up, so difficult and weird that he never wants to take any chances.  It’s worth almost any amount of money to avoid having to getting your health care approved, to be able to choose and change your own doctors.

I agreed.  I went with the PPO.