However, the laws I currently live under are not the laws of the working man. The free man wakes up whenever, and does business whenever, because he has evolved to the way of the Internet and knows where to find other worms in other time zones.

Same idea as the horribly unsuccessful MIT football team’s warcry: “M.I.T. P.H.D. M.O.N.E.Y.;” but only without all the flashy nonsense and methods that bypass stretching concepts easily observed in other things over half a decade in a bunch of magazine articles (a thesis.) If they are lucky, sometimes businesses come out of these associations.

However, if economic slavery is your only known survival mechanism, then so be it. Modern businesses run 24/7 without employees.

How do you solve a math equation?

Fuckin mnemonics. That’s how. Nothing logical! Just a bunch of trivia. Unless you obsess, you will forget it.

Please forgive my dear Aunt Sally…she didn’t know any better

Education.

Right now, a few things are making it suck–real hard. The funding, the kids, and approach all need reconsideration. This is nothing new to complain about; I just feel like expressing it.
I realize how as a strapping young lad, I was part of that problem, but I realize I am not the only part of the problem. Maybe in the good ol’days I would have gotten by–yet I might be slightly traumatized by being smacked with a ruler in response to an incorrect answer, but at the very least the numbers would have looked good.

Concepts such as these help me understand why some adults are deathly afraid to try things they know nothing about. Some of them were assaulted on a daily basis during their ’schooling’ so, god forbid–if they had forgotten a bit trivia they would most likely not be applying to anything.

The adults I’ve met who bravely pursue the unknown, I salute you: you do not care if you screw up. You realized you are allowed to correct your mistakes after learning from them.

BSDM Nuns with primitive, improvised spanking apparatuses are not the only problem our educational system has faced

Edit: Apparently, it is BDSM. Sorry BDSM people.

No child left behind. Numbers. Assumptions. Ultimatums; funding for perpetuation. I spent many years of my childhood too drugged up on MAOIs to have a meaningful creative outlet during school hours. Weekends and nights were like the forth of July the moment I came back. Even better, it turns out I was misdiagnosed from the beginning. They got their extra funding for all of it, so I guess there was some ‘good’ incentive. Mom is pretty rip shit about the whole subject. I avoid it. If anything, I am remorseful; but rather not talk about it.

Ask yourself: Why would we desire processes where the minds of our future are nothing more than cattle? Why would we want to stick to our guns after we knew we screwed up?

Would we lose our achievements? Maybe we shouldn’t pay attention to it. People might learn from these mistakes; but I only worry about myself.

Sincerely,

no child left behind <3 xo xo

ps — bend over ; you better like it.

At the end of the day

We forgot why we had enrolled for these duties and focused more on the terror of making it to the next paycheck while trying to reprogram a generation too caught up in hormones, nonsense, and the present to care. Maybe we are incapable of truly learning from our mistakes.

Numbers are the facade we turned to when we determined the task of equipping our next generation as best we could was simply too much work for the salary provided. Or maybe the youth were too much of a pain in the ass to care. Or some other excuse. Either way, we developed a bullshit system to reduce the amount of bullshit in our system, instead of making scenarios where bullshit had less opportunity to reign supreme. I do not care what your credentials are, if you try to summarize someone with a number I will laugh at you. The only way you can possibly feel comfortable making such an observation requires a completely deluded notion of how a human brain operates.

The hypothetical recreation of the meeting over how to summarize a person’s knowledge in a useful manner

Guy 1: “No one thinks the same way. Even if you could copy someone on a molecular level–instantaneously, where everything matched at that initial moment–functionality from the upper and lower tiers will offset the outcome of the two eventually. At the very most, we have similar ways, and even those have enough intricacies to make your head spin. What can a number tell you? Did they have a serious misunderstanding, or just a minor one? Did they learn this through experiences with long term importance, or was it trivia?”

Guy #2: “Makes sense. There are many  important things to consider abou…oh wow a number, that explains everything; wait…what were we talking about? Numbers are good enough. Meeting over.”

After the decision was made

All the elders from the different villages across the land got together, so they could have bitching contests with each other about their despondent and unmotivated youth.

Only a heretic would believe external stimuli was not provided adequately. There was only one right way, and that was the bullshit way.

These finger pointing meetings had little effect. One revolutionary suggestion was to blame their failures on issues widely unfamiliar to the villagers.

For a while, this bullshit was prosperous–until it became evident that their bullshit was just…bullshit, in the extended increase of the supposed cause’s absence.

They asked the shaman why the mindless repetition had inadequate results, and he said “let there be more bullshit.” And there was much more bullshit.

Eventually, people had to team together in order to safely bullshit their way through all the bullshit thrown at them.

Others would see this bullshit as it was, and choose alternate ways to acquire observations. The bullshit tribes cried “bullshit!” and did their best to exile them.

Then the day came where they all banged their heads against the wall when the half-assed convenient approaches became the law of the land, and the bullshit was plentiful for all. The end.

Perhaps we should have been more open minded. Could we adapt? “Blasphemy!”

Personally, I would like the latter.

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Before I begin working I typically write out the concepts, structure, and features on paper to determine the requirements of a project. This is a good habit to have, but it takes away from my time to make a concept into something tangible.

The objective is not to eliminate planning from the development process. There should not even be a need for me to stress how important planning-before-doing is. What I want to do is become proficient at forming detailed, organized plans in extremely short periods of time. I do not want to have to do pre-plan-planning. I want to improve how I communicate the technical parts in a functional structure of a feature without having to really think hard about it. I want to share in concise terms anyone can understand, yet preserve the underlying technicalities.

Why it will be important for me to become a more organized thinker

I am entering a situation in my life where I may be able to finally work with other people who love creating things. I want to work with as many of them as I possibly can. If I want to succeed in this it is critical for me to become extremely efficient with how I spend my time. Otherwise, what I have been preparing for all these years since high school may fall apart if  I fail to organize my efforts correctly.

In the past, many things prevented me from having the opportunity of working with others in my field. For example, colleges are a great place to find people who want to work on projects. It has come to my attention it may be very difficult for me to enroll in a good college, given the fact they rely so heavily on numbers to define what I am capable of. This brings me to the next subject: why do we rely on credentials so much?

It may be smart to stop thinking others are not good enough.

Ingenuity and unconventional thinking probably play into the process way more than we would like to acknowledge. A label or good reputation can go an extremely long way. At face value you may feel this is good, but it is actually a huge problem. After all, what better way to filter people out and find the talented people quickly over the average person?

Recent cases suggest the possibility of average people containing grey-matter

I saw an video recently that was very vindicating to my ideals. A few test projects have been run to see how useful average people could be in complicated projects. One good example involved a crowd-sourced effort to solve a complex mathematical problem. The problem involved a board game which had all the same rules, only with many extra dimensions added. This was the difficult part. As you can see in the aforementioned link, the problem was made public on the blog of a reputable mathematician, and in about 30 days the problem was solved by random people who found it online and decided to contribute. There are many other cases noted in the video proving how normal people can out-perform people with PhD’s, so I think this one example is notable enough.

Two-hundred-thousand heads are better than one.

The people with PhD’s should understand their work well enough to make their process understandable to the average person. Distributing small parts of a time consuming task to interested individuals can speed things up greatly, and some things still can not be done well enough by computers.

Those olde ways

Our history has been stained with greed. So much progress has been held back or made dependant by petty behaviorisms linked to our primates. We are not apes, anymore. You may argue that there is still a need to monetize our civilization because lots of ‘crazy things’ will happen if we remove it. “How could people adjust to a world where they no longer needed to work anymore? Everything would collapse because nothing would ever get done.”  This is true, and so I propose we consider a restructuring of the system for people interested in improving things.

My proposal to help streamline innovation

Zeitgeist addendum is admirable, but very idealistic, which is actually makes it extremely unrealistic, sadly. I think it is very important though that we do focus more on improving things for the sake of improving things.

Monetization is removed from the system—research and development-wise, but the labor industry would have to continue as it always has for the aforementioned reasons. We must take into account how many people will try to take advantage of their situations, if something like zeitgeist were to actually happen.

It would be great if people did not have to worry about supporting themselves while committing to a project they find worthy. There are many other things hindering innovation, but I feel money plays the largest part in screwing it up.

While they are working on projects, researchers should be able to be worry free of finances, within reason. Only when a researcher exits a project, should they need to deal with monetization. They could be given an appropriate amount of money to regroup on a vacation or something; or find another project to work on; or join the old fashioned labor force. This will give people the option to innovate with nothing holding them back, or continue chugging along like we all have since the 1800s.

Important projects will not require money to begin, providing they can present a strong case as to why it would help society or improve something. After researchers prove they are joining the cause for the long haul, or have put in an extended amount of time they should be taken care of financially for their contributions.

The concept of this restructuring is much like venture capitalism, but it removes a lot of the nonsense involved with getting the idea off the ground—with a working team.

The idea could probably use a bit of cleaning up

I’d love to hear what you think about ways this could be improved, or what is wrong with it. I think society is already going in this direction, and the rise of results only work environments, and services like Meetlie aiding the open office hours movement are a great place to start.

Someday I hope we can get past this money hording lifestyle / idealism, and just learn to enjoy living a comfortable life, without the need for extravagance, and commit ourselves to improving as many things as we can—just because we can.

You are Jack’s self-fulfilling prophecy.

Although I do not read many amateur blogs, I would like to point out how poorly written material is capable of holding valuable information. Commenter number sixty-one, (see http://www.copyblogger.com/the-first-rule-of-copyblogger/#comment-780055) Antti Kokkonen, made a more valuable contribution: saying how if we think the writer should improve his or her skills, then perhaps it would be better to help them improve. For those new to this concept, this involves saying why we feel that way, and use the Internet to provide them with a link to a resource they can reference. Who would have thought. However, that would take extra effort, which would be really hard. We must take into consideration the article was about how people are too lazy to improve. Maybe they are uninformed, instead. If you really care about your experience in the world, maybe you should try to improve it, in contrast to sitting around, complaining about it. My point: If we do not help eachother how are we supposed to progress forward?

Playing Devil’s Advocate

However, Sonia is a professional writer; thus, I should not challenge this way of her professional thinking. Instead, I will complement it and expand upon it. If you have a passion for something, but you are unsure of your abillity to do it well, then there is absolutely no point in ever trying. Ever…Right? After all, what is worse than failure? It is almost like you never tried. Haaaah.

Please bare with all of my cynicism and  sarcasm

So all of you researchers, who may never find the answers you seek; or programmers who might not be good at programming yet; or artists who are not yet appreciated; or entrepeneurs who are still trying to find that niche: give up. OH: wait, then there are all of the philosophers, photographers, musicians, poets, etc–all of you–who have not yet rivaled the likes of the masters in your field: save yourself the time and give up. There are no guarantees the efforts, time, and money you poured into your passion will go anywhere, so do not bother those ‘professional people’ with your efforts to do something with your life, they will just get all bent out of shape and write complaints all over their blogs. Save us some time: Go home and play nintendo; and please do eat a lot of cake, while you are at it. Then you can be fat, unmotivated, AND unsuccessful. In the process of doing so, you prevented the possiblity of anything extra being added to their horribly stressful lives.

Please break the rules, and say to hell with ‘rule number one.’

Now please, tell me the above is wrong. I would like someone intelligent–no, anyone, to tell me how many failed attempts it took to push something great out into this world. There will be only one rule, and that is do whatever it is you believe in; and try your damn best at it. Listening to all the nay-sayers, skeptics, critics, and quitters will not make anything new happen. Maybe you will be dead in the ground someday, and someone might stumble upon something you did. Maybe that proclaimed piece of shit will be inspirational to them. Maybe that trash will make everyone’s life better with whatever they do with it. The fact that you did not do a good enough job, or have the means to accomplish it, does not mean it is worthless. Keep trying to do your best. Do it because you enjoy it; and do not let their bullshit get in your way. The only reason you would ever need someone else’s approval for your work is if you did not appreciate yourself for who you are. Look at what that failure named Leonardo Divinci did, for example.

Regarding those people who only care about image:

Silly labels, degrees, higher numbers than someone else on trivial GPA documents, or even money in your pocket, will not define who you are, and it does not define what you do. They say presentation is everything, and I guess it is…if you are thinking with your ape brain. I enjoy finding the meaning in things. I think my life would be empty without it. Maybe you do not have the time for it. Maybe I should make a slideshow for you instead, and I’ll even give it a good background image to get your attention. I will wrap this up by saying there are no copyrights or copylefts on this, or any of my articles; and you may distribute it freely to spam the internet and be a horrible failure.

Many people are excited about using Wave; mainly because of the limited access, and its monstrous waiting list which more or less, converts into curious fanboys.

So far only certain groups of developers and people with connections have been given access to it through invitations issued to current users by Google.

Advancements and Adoption of Google Wave

From what I observed so far, Google Wave has had mixed reviews. One fairly well known developer from the Boston area even acted like he thought it was a joke when talking with me about it.

Overall, the biggest complaints seem to be issues they are currently working on, like the lack of the Remove Participant feature. Other huge complaints involve the lack of people using it during the day, which is silly because not many people are even on it yet, and the speed of the system’s responses.

These are all issues that will work themselves out, and it blows my mind that people are making such a big deal over them. Right now, I am pretty happy wit the way the system operates, and I think it has a ton of potenial. (See Below.)

Federated Servers

The Google Wave Protocol does not have to run on the Google Wave Client. You can make your own web applications that can communicate over the Wave Protocol (XMPP – http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3920).

This allows for completely unstructured distribution and access of whatever the form of communication is.

For example, you can make your own web service on the wave platform with a custom client to suit the need of the application, and integrating it with a Wave is as simple as making a gadget and/or robot to interface with it. You could also embed the waves on your application, site, or service — so there could be constant connectivity between work environments in real time, regardless of where the work is happening from.

This would allow you to make basically anything you wanted, and the two could communicate simultaneously. The future is going to be exciting.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteRule ^goto/([a-z]+)/?$ /$1/ [R]
</IfModule>

What it does

This allows us to request URLs like:

Why I believe this is useful

It could be used for passing values between form submissions and destination pages gracefully, without having to use header(“location: http://blah.beep“) inside page’s code.

By checking the referrer address, you could use it like an array key to load a file located in the destination directory to handle the parameters for that specific referrer. By doing this, pages that receive form data from many different locations will be easier to troubleshoot and manage, because there would not be gigantic files to go through; everything would be organized and separate from each other.

Why it probably is secure…

“I think as long as the server is configured correctly and the files handle authentication autonomously, then it shouldn’t be a security issue. Also, being that the rewrite rule only works with characters a-z and one slash I doubt they could jump around directories by injecting stuff into the URL, I think…”

Probably is not enough: Determining if it is Secure

I posted this earlier today, and I haven’t heard back yet. When I do I will post how the community feels about the idea. I am not concerned if I may be wrong; knowledge gained from this attempt would be enough for me.

The Albany area has been a frequent spot to film car chase scenes it seems. Previously, Salt (2010) had been filmed there for the same purpose. I was sad to hear casting for Salt had more submissions than they knew what to do with. I would not be surprised to learn this feature film has equally as many. My best bet would involve an early arrival.

If casting does choose to use me, this will be the second movie I have had the opportunity to be in. I am very excited to see what unfolds.

The GoTime service has both the ability and the potential to become a very powerful tool that could benefit much more than its current demographic. More on that later.

The new Design of GoTime

Although I liked the original design, they recently upgraded to a new easier to navigate design. With enough listings to make your head spin, this update really made their content more accessible.

GoTime uses tags to make it easy finding the right atmosphere for you and those who are accompanying you.

The GoTime Blog

The GoTime Blog occasionally has in depth reviews of Restaurants, popular upcoming Events, and lessons they have learned from operating their business; among other things.

Recently, GoTime 9 published nine date worthy restaurants you should check out for the next time you are in the Seattle area.

Where will GoTime go next?

That is entirely up to us. Submitting information on new places and events in your area can help this service mature into something bigger than it is now.

I have begun submitting entrees into their database and I am planning on forwarding links to a few people I know who would probably have interest in contributing.

Sharing your plans on Gotime

Smart Phone owners will benefit greatly. GoTime Mobile Phone Applications are available for several models, including Google Android and the iPhone.

The site already supports Facebook and Twitter integration, so you can send directions and other info to your friend(s) before heading out to the destination.

Cya there!

Reserved variables are often structured as arrays. I saw a recent note on the PHP documentation site that made me cringe:
http://us2.php.net/manual/en/reserved.variables.server.php#91080

This is a very painstaking approach for viewing all that information.

I didn’t count how many lines there were in that, but…

There is a simple way to do the same thing:


foreach($_SERVER as $k => $v){
echo "<strong>".$k."</strong> = <em>".$v."</em><br />";
}

Why not test all reserved variables at once?!

<?php
$reserved=array(
  "GET"=>$_GET,
  "POST"=>$_POST,
  "SERVER"=>$_SERVER,
  "SESSION"=>$_SESSION,
  "COOKIE"=>$_COOKIE
);
foreach($reserved as $a => $r){
  echo "<h2>\$_".$a."</h2><p>";
  foreach($r as $k => $v){
    echo "\$_".$a."[<strong>".$k."</strong>]"
           ."= <em>".$v."</em><br />";
  }
  echo "</p>";
}
?>