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Smiley's Synopses

Reminisces of a has-been SysOp

Internet's revenio BBS versa The Net

Monday, 7. September 2009, 23:40:57

I really approve of this new evolving community on the internet, it feels more like the old Bulletin Board Systems that I consider to be the roots of "The Net" toward which we're evolving. David Brin coined this term in his book EARTH back in 1990 and it so closely coincided with my perception of how personal computers were supposed to interface with our lives I've been using it ever since.
One of his postulates was a "dragon" or "weasel" that could ferret out the data you were seeking by sifting the unbelievable amount of material available on the Net and giving you a managable degree in a comfortable format. That was one of the "personal itches" of our heroine in David's story. Fortunately for us, Google has done a wonderful job of filling that need and is continuously developing more tools to empower us in managing the growing data storm available. Now though, comes that key word "available" because not all the data we might need is freely available today. Availability is vastly improved over the Compuserve and America On-Line days of yesteryear (which includes my beloved BBS era as well), but there are still interests involved in this evolution trying to lock up their data availability to subscribers only.
However, this is not my tirade for today, merely a side path to today's issue which is about administration of this new community.
My research into finding a better employment situation has uncovered some fascinating reading.
Dana tells a story about Rick Featherstone getting laid off of his job at DHL and how he used our emerging Social Networking technology to find another job. Dana's main premise was how fast a rolodex can get stale and the need to use old connections in finding employment. She plugged LinkedIn and Plaxo whose stated purpose each is to help professionals maintain connection so that they can leverage them against professional goals and agendas. Michael Calore calls it "Lifestreaming" and although he doesn't like FaceBook (leaning toward Google's more open FriendFeed) I've adopted them because they already had so many of my friends as members. Besides, my plunge into this new game is evolving as well, and I can make bad choices right along with the rest of the neophytes. My LinkedIn account is fairly old, I think I was introduced to it by Mark Peden, but it might have been Riggs too. Plaxo I discovered through Bud Hayes whom jokingly told me he shouldn't have to explain why he invited me because I was the one that tried to get him involved in BBS'n back in the bad old days. Bud is a really good guy.
As a matter of fact I've got a whole bunch of really good folks in my past life. Actually several lives depending on how you want to define the term. Grade School was a very different life to that in High School and then I went into the Army. Military is an extremely different life to that of any other and mine was exacerbated by being in Germany which is a completely different culture surrounded by many other diverse cultures. That coupled with the fact I was a tender 21 years of age is another parameter contributing to the difference. College was another culture shock, even though I did it in my hometown of Ashland so had very familiar haunts to frequent while wending my way through the hallowed halls, as it were. Then it was on to a variety of different "career opportunities" each with it's own failures and wins, foibles and wows, but all of those lives had good folks with whom I'd love to maintain a connection. Christmas card/letter technology (the old standby before the Net) falls down with me because I can't find enough round tuits.
BBS'n jumped to the fore in my life because I could type up a quick note, post it to the board and all my friends could keep up with me just by reading the public mail. Now it works very similarly with FaceBook and I get to keep up with them as well. I'm not really enamoured of the Farmville, Mafia Wars and which Greek God are you games on FaceBook and I'm still leary of Relations engines that you can join because I haven't completed researching the security aspects of this new game, that hasn't deterred me from having a lot of fun with it while doing the research.

How do I make it work for me though? I've been doing searches for old friends and that's the way to start according to all the help files and blog entries I've read so far. Administration is already showing as the weak point for me in this game because there are just too many aspects to it already. My blog is on my.opera.com, FaceBook is rapidly becoming "home", but I've also got Plaxo and LinkedIn, a Yahoo account, AOL account, MobileMe (used to be dotMac), my own domain PMAco.com and doing an occassional vanity search turns up a variety of Yellow Pages wannabes that have incorporated my company name in their databases, often with data badly in need of updating. For immediately I think I'll just tweak my homepage around to give me the links I need to get to each of these sites and keep them up to date, but ultimately I'm going to need David Brin's weasel or dragon to keep this from becoming another vocation. Another launch I did for the updates was to rifle all my old digital photos on the N-Drive and crop a bunch of 200x200 pixel "mugshots" which I stashed in a subdirectory of my Blog_Photos subdirectory and uploaded most of them to FaceBook. When I'm searching for friends it makes it SO much easier if there is a somewhat current picture on their profile, so I've been getting those added to each of my accounts. With that completed I'll get started on the friend search in earnest and collect them according to category in LinkedIn, FaceBook and Plaxo.

I want to talk about friends now. God gave me a wonderful knack of making friends easily, but not all friends are created equal and therefore some are not connections I'm desirous of maintaining. Some of my past friends are extremely welcome to fade into the dim past of a blissfully bad memory and others have a signal to noise ratio way out of proportion to true value. So in my administration of this new game, I'm going to evaluate my "new" connections against a fairly lengthy spec before accepting them. Worse, I think I'll also be guilty of dropping friends off my list if the signal to noise ratio gets out of balance. I say that because my purpose here is to maintain a COMMUNITY of friendly connections, not collect people so that I can say I have over 1000 friends. Coming home to 380 new wall postings might be fun, but it could also turn into a job unto itself.

The adventure continues. .

1 comment

Choose wisely the hill for which you are willing to die.

Sunday, 23. August 2009, 16:00:00





My Mom gave me that quote when I was whining about the children a while back and I've been thinking with it since. It is a powerful datum to use in dealing with children, but I am finding myself using military metaphors WAY too much lately. the kids really aren't the enemy. That's the real failing, military technology has as it's underlying purpose breaking the enemy's spirit because a demoralized opponent is easiest to manipulate to our will. This is similar to our technology for handling pets, break them to our will and they stop pooping on the rug, tearing or chewing the furniture and our clothes, etc. The problem with using that strategy with children should be fairly obvious, ultimately we want them to grow up into contributing members of our society and their contribution will be a result of their own determination.

My travails at work have been a heavy contributing factor to this philosophy. It really has been feeling like a war zone with the changes brought on by our new General Manager. Well, to be completely honest also with the loss of our old Ops Mgr, Mike Long, for whom I served happily both at Sitel for General Motors, and then relatively happily with this employer at the outset. Our new GM is also a Mike, but his management style is at the far end of military to almost Penal colony. In other words, "my way or the highway" is on his GOOD days and there aren't very many of those. Working for ACS started out being "way better than nothing" and I really can't see any improvement of that condition down the road our leaders are mapping for us now. However, it still is better than nothing and nothing seems to be the alternative as our country struggles out of the economy left us by the Bush Trillion Legacy, so I'm trying to stifle my grumbles around the workplace. This new "Stifled Policy" seems to be netting dividends too, I started a new shift today, Monday through Wednesday plus Saturday, 7:00a to 6:00p with one of the best supervisors still available, Rick Johnson. There isn't any hope for more money, which is vital, but it does reduce my commute expenses by 20% which is a very good thing.

Sorry, I digress because the subject isn't really my deplorable employment scene, it is how do I deal with my new role as "Poppy" to Nick and Ty and although this scene is going to color my attitude, it's really just an excuse for mismanaging the raising of the kids. And, military or pet breaking technology ain't gonna get it if we want our children's self-determination intact upon completion. Even if it were possible to break the kids, which it isn't with our children (they both got full measure of their mother's stubornness which is considerable to almost extraordinary) we'd still have to enforce our will on the broken children on a constant basis. Constant vigilance toward enforcement is more like Prison technology and I'm certainly not sanguine about the potential results of raising them like criminals. So, shackles, dead bolts and closed circuit cameras / monitors aren't going to be necessary either. So how do we protect our carpets, doors, and other possessions from the onslaught of out-of-control children? Yeah, there's the rub, eh?

Erde50 wrote a wonderful blog about the handling of his teenager on an incident that could have been a "standard disaster". I particularly enjoyed his "He knows by now, that in situations like this, I’ll cheat and lie to win, . . ." Reminds me of "Old age and treachery will beat skill and youthful enthusiasm every time." I've got a little over five years before I'll be dealing with a teenager, but that day is going to come unless God calls me home early for good behavior (not likely:). And the journey continues with me and Maggie a few clues richer.


One hill for which I was willing to die was a pretty enormous one. We left our extremely cool home on Mom's farm to move into Newberg because their Public School system was one of the best in Northwest Oregon. This was not an easy decision to make and implementation has been a total nightmare. This photo shows Mom's house on the right, then moving left is our "not home", Mom's greenhouse, the Equipment shed, Big Barn and Llama Barn. This photo doesn't let you see the Chicken Coop behind Big Barn where Maggie had to give away her 25 "ladies" as a consequence of this decision.


Now you can see the Wiggle-Line-Sign on College St that reminds me to turn on my blinker preparatory to the left turn into MountainView Duplex Homes






and the slow down to <10mph to navigate into my parking spot. Don't fail on the speed limit, not only are there speed bumps in the road, there're 9 children that live here and a bunch of more that visit with little or no warning.



See? There's two of them now dutifully wearing their helmets so they can ride around on the easement without suffering the wrath of Grammy or Poppy if they get caught riding without being shod in shoes and helmet! BWaahhaahhaa




And now we arrive at #15, new home of Doug, Maggie, Nicholas and Tyrone.




Did you notice the Greenhouse, Equipment shed, Big Barn, Llama Barn or Chicken Coop? Did you notice the half mile lane of beautiful crops on the approach to the house? Right, you probably didn't notice the 60 acres out back behind the orchard either did you? Know why? Because they ain't there!



Although you have to admit that the back yard here is pretty fantastic for a 4 bedroom, 2 bath duplex home rental that I can afford on nowhere near enough money. We are definitely enjoying some heavenly assistance on this endeavor. I'm truly hoping that heavenly assistance will continue through this coming times because now that we're abandoning military, police and penal technology in raising Nick and Ty,
that leaves me with Sales technology. We're going to try and convince the kids that they actually WANT to behave in a civilized manner. We've already started today, I'll probably let you know how it goes. .

5 comments

Internet evolving back to BBS roots

Thursday, 13. August 2009, 07:59:58

I miss taglines. It used to be huge entertainment for me to steal taglines as I cruised the message bases of Bulletin Board Systems in the late '80's and now that large collection has faded into sorely-missed history with the advent of the internet. ProComm was the terminal emulator I used in the original days, it had a tagline stealing feature that contained a half dozen or so "starter taglines" in it's database; "I am in shape, round is a shape isn't it?" was one of those defaults and I saw it quoted this last weekend at the Vernonia Friendship Jamboree parade on a teeshirt worn by a member of the Get A Life Marching Band I was watching from the sidelines this year rather than being in the parade with Nicky like last year.
Taglines had to be only a certain number of characters (one line's worth) in the bad old days and I'm the one that coined
"Pizza like sex,good=GREAT,Bad=still pretty good"
to make it fit into the one line parameter. ProComm Plus got replaced with GTPowerComm for a brief while as I played at being the SysOp of Nebeaux Nerdinski BBS and then by RoboComm which would collect QWK packets all the while stealing more taglines. A person's tagline collection was a good index of their personality and we got to know each other very well in our BBS communities. As an example, my wife Maggie and I met originally on NoName BBS and I still have many close relationships that were forged in those message bases on DawgGone Disgusted, NoName, Nebeaux, and NWCS-Online. Maggie and I are celebrating our Fifteenth Anniversary today and we started by playing Global Wars on one of the few remaining BBSes we can find and JumpStart BBS closed my session with a wonderful tagline.

Today is more than a decade since I dropped out of the message bases of my beloved old BBSes. AOL Instant Messager didn't come close to replacing them, E-mail is a wonderful tool, but just not the same as posting a note on a virtual bulletin board for the "world" to come see and then comment upon. Web based PHP code tried to emulate BBSes and failed miserably.
Now we've got Plaxo, LinkedIn, FaceBook, MySpace and Blogs. It's getting closer to that old community I remember and the buzz-word is "Social Networking". I'll have to admit that the attempt to return to the good part of the bad old days is fraught with dangers inherent in blowing a good concept up in size by several orders of magnitude. In their heyday, BBSes might represent several hundreds of users and you could possibly manage administering memberships in half a dozen or so different boards. Today, the "boards" have memberships measured in millions of users and some have hundreds of millions. Administration is a nightmare and the security considerations with your identity have to go WAY up as well. I don't have time to get into the security aspect with this article because I really want to do something nice for my wife tonight and these blog entries just murder my schedule, but I do want to talk about these new networks as a tool. It shouldn't be a secret that I'm less than enthusiastic about my current employment situation and I don't see serious improvement on the horizon short of uprooting and starting over somewhere else. Plaxo and LinkedIN each have the stated purpose of helping professionals find better employment opportunities, but you have to USE them as tools, they aren't a magic pill any more than any tool is, and their use means administration again. I haven't tried MySpace because it just seems untenable and I don't feel comfortable over there, FaceBook seems more comfortable to me and that's where I'm going to settle at least for the time being as my "living room" where I can keep tabs on the gossip as it were. This still leaves administration as a problem though, I don't like any of my "spots" as the nexus for administration, though all of them try to make me comfortable in their version of my HOME on the web. Yahoo was probably my first attempt to create a comfortable nest, though AOL was my first "internet home" and still my oldest email @dress. I'll probably do another recreation of my personal home page on pmaco.com when all is said and done, and that is still on the wish list for my future.

.

3 comments

Computer gender?

Monday, 3. August 2009, 00:35:46



Miriam sent this to me this morning. It's one of those "forward forever" emails that I usually dislike, but this one is cute. I should probably post it on my humor page, but haven't really took the time to cobble HTML at that level for a number of years. It's depressing how long it takes me because I'm not very good at it. However, I think you'll like this one:

A SPANISH Teacher was explaining to her class that in Spanish, unlike English, nouns are designated as either masculine or feminine.

'House' for instance, is feminine: 'la casa.'
'Pencil,' however, is masculine: 'el lapiz.'

A student asked, 'What gender is 'computer'?'

Instead of giving the answer, the teacher split the class into two groups, male and female, and asked them to decide for themselves whether computer' should be a masculine or a feminine noun. Each group was asked to give four reasons for its recommendation.

The men's group decided that 'computer' should definitely be of the feminine gender ('la computadora'), because:

1. No one but their creator understands their internal logic;

2 The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else;

3. Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for possible later retrieval; and

4. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

(THIS GETS BETTER!)

The women's group, however, concluded that computers should be Masculine ('el computador'), because:

1. In order to do anything with them, you have to turn them on;

2. They have a lot of data but still can't think for themselves;

3. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they ARE the problem; and

4. As soon as you commit to one, you realize that if you had waited a little longer, you could have gotten a better model.

The women won.

End Quote
No need to stop the presses on this one Miriam, the fact that the women won is no longer headlines.
As a matter of fact it's probably not newsworthy at all. AHAHHAHahahhahahhahahhaaaaaa .

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Used Oats plus thirteen years

Thursday, 23. July 2009, 00:54:49


The Apple Way
- Deliver a superior product
- Charge a premium price
- Deliver excellent customer service after the sale
- Data Mine feedback for future improvements on the product for which customers will pay
- keep the customer for life because they want to become accustomed to having the best
- broadcast these facts loudly on every advertising medium
- develop an infrastructure that will continue delivering the above points at a profit

The Walmart way
- Deliver a cheap product
- Charge a very low price
- No customer service (or as little as the law will allow)
- return customers will buy more products that failed due to inadequate quality in point one
- customer loyalty unneccessary because there will always be more customers that want cheap prices
- broadcast these facts loudly on every advertising medium
- develop an infrastructure that will continue delivering the above points at a profit

As a child--okay, as a naive young adult (call it the late Sixties)--I called the above "The American Way" and "The Japanese Way" and we shortened the concept even further to "You get what you pay for" so maybe you should be paying more. Today it's more accurate to use Apple and Walmart as examples of the same concept because Japanese corporations are using the "Apple Way" and American corporations are subscribing to the "Walmart Way" in ever increasing numbers. Look at Cadillac and Buick as an example, a call to their customer service nets you an agent in Argentina or Puerto Rico. But they at least do have customer service, anyone know the 800 number for Microsoft tech support?

800-My-Apple will get you tech support on your iMac or MacBook and the agent will speak English (actually American) as his/her primary language with technical expertise unsurpassed by any of your previous experiences. 800-My-iPhone will get you a very similar experience on your iPhone. You have to pay for these services, they aren't "free" just like the agents you get on the line aren't free. However, after you pay the price for them and receive their ministrations you are not going to be satisfied, you are going to be delighted. And that's too bad because 40 years ago you would have shrugged the same experience off as expected, that's just way it's supposed to be. Ten years ago I wrote "Used Oats" railing against this new pattern and today it is predictably worse as the Walmart Way continues to make inroads into the decline of Western Civilization.

Where did the pride go?


Don't sweat it, it's a retorical question. I don't have the answers, I just want to whine because I'm about to lose my job over the basic refusal to give up my own personal pride in a job well done for every customer I help. I've subscribed to the Apple Way since the beginning of time and now deliver Tech Support for their iPhone each weekday for an employer that subscribes to the Walmart Way and it is very difficult for me to "learn" how to be cheap at my ripe old age.

Notice that Promotion and Profit are common threads to each philosophy? Both are vital in a capitalist society, but the Apple Way tends toward a symbiotic relationship with civilization where the Walmart Way tends toward a parasitic relationship. To achieve profit in the Apple Way they charge more money which they invest in R&D and continued training of Customer Service personnel and then work hard to retain the expertise they've created by paying for decent wages and benefits packages. All these things feed back into civilization in the form of employees that can actually afford Apple products and have the desire to acquire them. The Walmart way achieves profit by not investing in R&D and hiring people at way less than a decent wage which allows them to get their benefits from the gov't which doesn't show up on Walmart's balance sheet. What keeps the business model afloat is the seemingly endless supply of personnel willing to do part-time work at low pay and then get food stamps, subsidized housing and gov't sponsored health care benefits to eke out an existence. These folks are not going to buy an iMac or an iPhone and probably aren't going to buy internet access either. Their concept of a splurge is going to be a Big Mac and RedBox movie.

The symbiotic relationship gently moves our civilization forward toward a better future feeding energy into that motion where the parasitic relationship tends to slow progress by sucking the life energy out of the host. I take great comfort in the fact that Apple is not getting smaller while being true to the symbiotic philosophy, but conversely, Walmart isn't getting smaller either. General Motors is basically gone having been absorbed by "the State", it just hasn't discovered it's death enough to fall over yet.
And with Unemployment steadily heading for 1930's vintage highs, we're not going to see a lot of refusal to accept Walmart class jobs anytime soon. As a matter of fact, I'll probably be working there next month. .

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