Perette's Journal

A thought on social media

2012-05-12T18:59:00-04:00

The idea of social media as metadata occurred to me today. I'm not sure it's accurate, but it yields some interesting perspectives; in particular, people's tendency to use social media to define the state of their lives. And it clarifies my feelings—perpetually tinkering with the metadata achieves nothing; there's actual living to be done.

Funny man pages

2012-04-27T11:09:00-04:00

One thing I love sometimes is when things are written in a way that important inferences are left up to the reader:

     "If SO_LINGER is disabled and a close is issued, the system will process
     the close in a manner that allows the process to continue as quickly as
     possible."

In other words, if SO_LINGER is disabled and close is issued, the system may shitcan the rest of the data in the pipe in attempting to continue as quickly as possible.

Spam

2012-04-23T22:46:00-04:00

So I just got an email that starts:

  Did you receive the e-mail which we sent to you recently (copied here-below)?
  Please confirm since I have had problems lately with emails
  intercepted by spam-filters set too high.

Let me assure you, you bastard, that my spam filters are set at exactly the appropriate levels.

Perhaps I should reply to him via way of SpamCop, in hopes of encouraging cluefulness.

Pick any two

2012-04-23T09:26:00-04:00

I am reminded of an old engineer's saying: Good, fast, cheap—pick any two.

I can have a job. It takes 40 hours of my week. I can do it to earn money, but it doesn't make me happy. The projects don't interest me; I wouldn't do it if they didn't pay me, or if I didn't need the money. A job is an active process, it takes effort and energy—but it doesn't make me happy. It's just something I'm obligated to do to have the resources to survive.

I can perform the stabilizing skills that I learned in DBT and over the last few years—which, when it comes down to it, is vacuuming, making my own food, which in turn requires going shopping (preferably at the public market), keeping up with dishes, etc. (Part of the stabilizing influence of these is maintaining my life in good order, the other part is that it's fairly rote, procedural work that gets me away from thinking and the machines.) It's also just having veg time, watching TV or reading a book. These are passive activities; they don't require major effort but don't create happiness or unhappiness. But in that, they stabilize my emotions.

I can do things that interest me. This is things like interacting with others, participating in RKS, and building things of interest. Often it's writing pieces of software, like the auction manager, the RKS website; other times it's writing position pieces or thinking about how to take capitalism down. These are creative, and they require thought and effort—they are active, and draining. But doing them satisfies me, makes me happy.

All of these are "heavyweight" processes. They require substantial time commitments.

  - Stability + personal interests leaves a problem with money.
  - Stability + work leaves me unsatisfied with my life; I feel empty
     because I'm not pursuing any interests.
  - Personal interests + work over stimulates me; I become ungrounded,
     I become so busy with ideas and interests I lose the ability to
     sleep, and from insomnia madness derives.

They are all required to allow me to enjoy a fufilling yet stable existence. Yet they simply don't fit in the available time. I don't see how to resolve this; the best I can guess is to either oscillate every few weeks between work + stability and work + interests, and seeing if I can modulate something useful out of that. But that seems like a shitty, stupid, and dangerous solution.

The other alternative is what seems to have been the de facto result, doing work + a half ass balance of the other two until I crash and burn, stacking up money as I go fast as I can; then switch to personal interests + stability as long as viable. But that leaves the eventual financial fears looming over my head, and creates massive turmoil around the transition points...It's far from a good solution.

There must be a viable solution. I just can't see what it is, or how to achieve it.

The real Killroys

2012-04-10T21:22:00-04:00

In my job recently I've been doing some analytic setup and tracking stuff. For those unacquainted, I'm setting up the stuff that allows websites to follow what you're doing, and report that data later later on—typically in summary form, but they could track individually.

In the past I've dismissed the seeming comspiracy minded thoughts of friends like fuschia; as much as I respected there was potential for abuse, I thought she and her kind were probably a little over zealous on the argument. I am not of that mistaken opinion any longer.

Part of why I thought it was tolerable was that it was a merchant I chose to do business with, or consider doing business with. This is not a valid argument. In the early form, social sites worked by getting webmasters to add links to their sites (you'll find a few of these around my website). The sites typically had button graphics, but webmasters were savvy enough in those days to make and/or host their own image, thus preventing these social sites from "leaching" data every time somebody requested the button (when you request the image, your browser announces the site it is for).

Nowadays, webmasters either (a) aren't smart enough, (b) don't care, both resulting in more data collection.

The information gathering done by social media is more refined and more valuable (which justifies investing money in further refining the process).

So (c) data is collected more accurately, and (d) data is processed into more useful results.

The masses have bought into/been sold the idea of the social web, and so they're happy to use it. Furthermore, the caliber of intellect/technological awareness of the average Internet user has declined—we're no longer all brainy techies that have the ability to be skeptical about the reasons we're given.

So (e) people are less resistant, and even worse, people (f) actively want social integration in the sites they use.

This last point means the social sites can be more aggressive. Instead of a static code snippet, the most recent ones use a script that runs on every page. (Part of the reason your old web browser/machine dogs down new sites—all the scripts.) And since the caliber of webmaster has dropped, many now being just average salespeople or whatnot, that works for them—they don't have the capability to add custom code or prevent tracking. Not that they'd want to, because the social sites give them statistics and analysis in exchange for the abuse of their shoppers' privacy.

(g) the social sites collect more aggressively, (h) webmasters don't resist or watch over their users, and in fact (i) webmasters buy into the "free" data access too.

This has caused a proliferation of social web sites—link sharing, social bookmarking, blogging, image sharing, etc. The hundreds of buttons available out there has resulted in meta-sites, sites whose "purpose" is supplying widgets that create the other buttons. For webmasters, they offer a simple, consistent way to add buttons for the other social sites—perfect for a webmaster who just wants it easy, doesn't give a shit about his user's privacy, just wants to increase his bottom line. And, guess what, after you add their script to your site they too collect data. In fact, the amount of data these fuckers must take home blows me away, because almost all the merchants I work with have taken to using them.

(j) The metasites offer nothing of their own, but harvest the data like wheat in August.

That merchants use Google Analytics to see what their users are up to does not bother me. It's the data collection that's under the guise of something else, and in particular, (j) really gives me the jitters.

The thing that really drove the point home recently though? For years, I suppose sites have been trying to sell me stuff, and I guess I habituated to the kinds of things they try to sell me. But now I work in the industry, and in the last few weeks I've been debugging and making small enhancements for our merchants. That means visitng a lot of websites to check the way a product displays, shop around a bit and make sure that new social media button looks okay, stuff like that.

And all of a sudden, Google Product Search (better known as Froogle) is broken. It doesn't suggest RAM upgrades or a hard disc, it's offering me clothing and lingerie, overpriced purses, baby strollers and clothing. It thinks i might want to buy shit I couldn't care less about—but is spot-on with the websites I've been working on the last 2 weeks.

If I could, I'd just block a lot of the sites...but I need them to work to do my job. If there's a silver lining in all this, it's that at least I can go to bed knowing they're data on me is presently hopelessly corrupt.

The damage done unknowingly...

2012-04-10T08:13:00-04:00

It's odd being me. The values I have, the way I process information, the way I interact with others, the way I learn things (especially interpersonal skills) seem different from the rest of everybody. Not that I'm completely unique of different; what I want out of life is to be happy—but if you compare how I think that can be achieved, it's not the standard response you'll get.

The best explanation I've found so far is the likelihood of Asperger's ("AS"), although it's a sort of useless diagnosis: it explains but doesn't change anything. As a side note, an interesting effect I've experienced is reduction in AS-type traits when living without testosterone ("T"), including being less goal oriented, interest in being social, experience of emotions, loss of ability to lose myself in interesting projects. These have all returned since being on T for a waning sex drive, with the nice effect of anxiety being less overwhelming at the expense of having all emotions muted (it's like they're the other side of a strong tempered-glass wall, where I can see them and vaguely hear them, but not enough to get my interest). But a sample of two (one being T removal circa 1993, the other the subsequent restoration circa 2009) is not good science, which makes it difficult to trust the T datapoint, because it could be coincidence. But I've digressed.

When I was struggling to find enough business in 2009/2010, David and his daughter persuaded me that I should stop living an open life, and not write about myself in this journal anymore. It didn't make sense then, as living my life openly has always seemed to improve it. Closets and all that. But I also recognize my own limitations, especially interpersonal ones—I used to talk with Jan about this, he would give good critical feedback that helped me understand how my behaviors are interpreted by others and thus helped me grow and change.

In acquiescing, I think I may have allowed an important tool to be taken away. Writing in this journal, whether or not anyone actually reads or cares what I write, nevertheless presents the possibility of people reading it. It's thus in my interest to be clear about my feelings and experiences. Writing about those required I think about them and sort them out, to have sufficient understanding that it's possible to write coherently about what I experience or how I perceive the world. In retrospect, it seems likely this was probably one of the processes that helped me understand myself, reflect on it, and to grow and adapt.

Of course, discontinuation of journal writing approximately correlates with resuming T, so it could be that. Back to 2 data points, bad science, can I trust any of it? And there's no reason they can't both be influential.

I won't say I believe the journal is a resolve-all solution. It's slow, resource intensive (taking time and effort to form my words), deliberate and not spontaneous. But if we assume the Asperger's premise is true, then considering AS's stereotype (inflexible, procedural, resisting change) then any change at all is a good step. Over the last 2 years, I've shown remission of many of the AS traits, a regression in personality—but more than that, a distinct lack of interest or ability in personality revision or improvement. I have no way of being sure or proving it, but I'm nevertheless suspicious that without Jan's feedback, and without writing in my journal to do it myself, the underlying feedback processes that create change are gone.

Training tools

2012-04-05T14:38:00-04:00

A co-worker send this along as useful design tips. It really is spot-on, and funny as shit.

	http://theoatmeal.com/comics/shopping_cart