Tom Dalton :: Doer of Good

It could seem like fun. An easy way to gain acceptance to a group that may not be terribly appealing, but may actually be to the right person. It may seem like a quick way to escape from problems -- but I wonder if that's ever actually the reason somebody starts. That seems more like something that would come after your body is conditioned a little bit and knows what will happen. I don't know why people start. I bet mostly they just start young, when dumb things happen for no good reason.

And I don't know if it inevitably destroys. I'm no expert, and all I really know is what they taught me in D.A.R.E. And I know that it does at least occasionally, and I believe that it does eventually, far more often than not.

We call it "doing drugs." That's a broad name for a problem with many faces. Does the domestic prescription drug abuser need different treatment than the sometimes-burglar who shoots up on a street corner? Should policy and practice differ for those cases?

The sponsor of this post, Stone Hawk, runs a drug treatment program that boasts a 75% recovery rate. It's awesome that they can help so many people, but scary that even if addicts pay the program costs, relocate to Michigan, and live in a dedicated drug rehabilitation community for an extended period of time, 25% will still relapse.

I was lucky -- blessed with a family and community around me that made it easy for me to never touch drugs or alcohol. I hope I never allow myself to think badly of people who were not so fortunate.

I hope they can find help.

'Smack' by Melvin Burgess. That's one of just a few books I've read about drugs that really conveyed a sense of the despair and human reasoning behind drugs. It's not light reading, and it's offensive, but it's like having a conversation with an addict who spits on you.

That's probably a good analogy, actually. I appreciated the experience, but I don't suppose most of my friends/family/associates would. So don't go read it.

Sheesh. And I'm getting all weirded-out just sitting here thinking about it again. What a terrible scourge drugs are to society.

To balance out my last entry, I want to share the experience I had this afternoon:

Shopping for some hardware, and specifically for 'bulldog clips.' I didn't know they were called that, just that they are those metal clips that sometimes have magnets on them, so you can clip them to the fridge and hang pictures with them.

I drove to Home Depot. No luck. Wal-Mart had some, in two packs with colored plastic pieces. I needed all silver. Target. No luck. Getting ready to head out to Bed Bath and Beyond, I decided to pull out my GPS and cell phone. With the GPS, I identified all the hardware and craft stores within a 10-miles radius. (In Virginia, that amounts to a billion stores. In Utah, I'd have been lucky to get one.) With the cell phone, I called each one.

Eliminated them all. But at least I didn't have to drive to them all to do that.

And the point of this post is that while I was sitting there in the car, marvelling at how cool my GPS is, I thought to myself, "the pioneers didn't have GPS, and it would have taken them ALL DAY to go to each of those stores to see if anybody has those clips!"

I proceeded to think through the fact that pioneers wouldn't have had that many stores, wouldn't have gone to them all, wouldn't have needed the clips in the first place, would probably have died of dysentery years ago...

Anyway, then I came home and used the Inter-webs to find more info. That was when I learned the name "bulldog clip" and found a craft store 11 miles away that actually had them in stock.

So I went and bought 20 of them. For four dollars. Then went to the library and checked out comic books and a Tom Clancy novel.

Now I'm going to go make dinner and start working on a fun project.

How much do you owe?

TV ads always focus on revolving consumer debt. "Do you owe two, three, even as much as five thousand dollars on your credit cards?"

That pales in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of dollars many people owe on their houses. (Or, in certain areas, their tiny condos.) I wonder how many people actually consider that when they think about debt.

I know that I typically think of myself as being debt-free. And I am free from much of the debt that typically plagues people my age -- no student loans, no car payments, no credit card debt. No alimony! That's a nice side benefit of being best friends with my wife. :o) But I still have a monthly payment that could kill me (figuratively speaking only -- I think we've revised those sections of the penal code since the Middle Ages) and I can't easily get out of it.

So there are companies that address the plight of the indebted consumer. The sponsor of this post, UK Personal Loan Store, offers services such as IVA and debt consolidation, which can help people get started on the path to debt-freedom. They also want me to include this link: Bad debt mortgages. I have never heard of a 'bad debt mortgage,' per se, but it sounds awful and it's probably a good thing to get rid of.

Are programs like these the best way to go? Hard for me to say, since I've managed to live inexpensively and never run into serious problems. And I strongly suspect that's the best answer overall -- don't let yourself get into a situation where you need a third party to help!

I'd like to see a little Flash game about the dangers of consumerism and revolving credit. Maybe you're in a store, and you have to dodge the end-caps and premium brands, to get everything you need at the lowest price and avoid impulse buys. And if your character's field-of-vision passes anything, your inherent resistance to temptation is the only thing that can keep you from buying it. Harder levels could be like Best Buy, where everything is a giant, flat-panel TV. Mmm...

Flat panel TV. Only $90 per month for the next eighty years! I can't afford NOT to buy it!

April developed a 'personal philosophy of learning' the other day. She was asked to define what 'learning' means to her. As we talked about it, we decided that there are a couple kinds of learning: memorizing facts, becoming able to do things, and actually being wise and understanding things.

So I've been wondering about what online learning is good for. For me, it's a great way to be exposed to facts. I don't memorize them -- I'm not a big memorizer. Online courses rarely offer enough practice for people to become able to do things. And wisdom from an online course?

But online learning is accessible. Available at the moment I need it. So even if they're not a good substitute for real classes, when real classes aren't available they're better than nothing.

And that's about as strong a recommendation I can make for online learning.

When I hear "file sharing," I think "file stealing." The MPAA has conditioned me well, I suppose. But -- and I say this fully conscious of the seeming sponsorship-fueled hyperbole it sounds like -- there's an online file storage company so good it's *like* I'm stealing... from them!

I dunno. That's painful. (Note to self: rewrite intro. Embarrassingly bad.)

The point is, Driveway.com has a cool file sharing system that you don't even have to register to use. The home page has a file upload box. Click it, pick a file from your computer. It uploads the file and gives you the new URL for the file. Up to 500MB for a file.

Awe-some.

Now, as I said, they're sponsoring this post. But I'd recommend them anyway. (But for the fact that I'm too lazy these days to just write a post for fun.) Temporary, free online storage. The FAQ doesn't answer any of the questions that have frequently occurred to me -- what else are they doing with the files? What info is logged with uploads and downloads? How on Earth do they plan to stay in business more than a week or two? And is the answer to that question related to the first two? (Are they going to be opening a set of content sites in a few weeks, with lots of pictures and documents they magically 'found' on one of their servers?)

So don't use it for anything sensitive. And don't expect the files to hang around for a long time. But for routine gunk that won't fit in email, Driveway's a lot easier than burning a CD and mailing it to somebody!

I bookmarked it, which is the Tom Dalton Seal of Approval. Until they go out of business, they'll be frequent, um, customers of mine. (Frequent servers of mine? Servants? We're reached the edge of the English language! Oh no!)

Friends, this is a difficult time for me. Recent events have made inescapably clear the truth that I had hidden from myself, behind a veil of shadows and deception. Perhaps I was only fooling myself. Certainly, I was living a lie.

I have sold out to the man.

You may have noticed my blog turning a bit... corporate-y?

It was the filthy lucre! The proverbial dump truck full of money and Nintendo Wii's! I'm not made of stone!

I have sold my blogging soul out to PayPerPost, for a mess of pottage, valued at $79.00 and growing (at a steady five to ten dollars per post, directly deposited into my PayPal account).

Now, I know I've railed in the past against the sins of corporate corruption of the noble Internet. The noble, noble Internet.

So I hang my head (that is, crane my neck forward, not stage a repeat of Saddam's final performance) and ask humbly for your forgiveness. For both my past and nearly inevitable future corporatey blog posts.

For you see, until I reach my goal -- my hastily conceived and highly wasteful goal -- of obtaining a Nintendo Wii, I will continue. I must continue.

Yes, I have found myself wondering if the Wii is worth it. Would I rather have a green laser pointer and that awesome blue LED faucet adapter from ThinkGeek? Or one of those adapters that turns your faucet into a drinking fountain? Mmm...

And those temptations are very real demons I face each day. I can again only ask for your forbearance as I carry this burden.

To you children, especially, who read and set your stars by this blog -- please understand. I'm not forsaking the higher principles, the higher road of blogging. I've just gone into the bushes to collect some of the gold coins. Like in Legend of Zelda, once you get the blue candle?

That's me. I'm like Link. The bushes are like good blog posts. The blue candle is PayPerPost. See. It's a perfect metaphor. A Perfect Metaphor.

So no more sneaky Facebook wall postings. No more dark alleys and daggers. No more daylight robberies of armored convoys and leaping from the top of the bank and running into the stupid escape zone before I can zoom in and find you again because you were at 100% health and it only takes you down to 30% to make that jump that would have certainly broken both of your legs and probably also severed your spine in real life, especially with all that armor and weaponry you're carrying (plus, where did you put all the gold you stole?).

Have we a temporary deal? I promise. Once I have enough money, I'll return to the paths of truth and light.

(Enough money = (enough that my desire not to write corporate blog posts > my desire for the incremental $5-10))

(And I thought I'd never use math as a grownup...)

Remote Access is the wave of the future. And like most waves, it is generated by a combination of wind, tides, and currents. Or electromagnetic radiation. Or people in a stadium. Or people saying goodbye. Or bad haircuts from the '80s?

Okay, this is in my "technology" section because I'm talking about accessing your home computer from a remote location. (Get it? That's why it's called remote access.)

Gmail. Remote access to my mail. Used to pull everything down to Outlook and fight with pst files to syncronize everything. Gmail is much better. Mail on my upstairs computer? There. On the downstairs computer? There. On my cell phone? There. And not disappearing from any of those places when I access it somewhere else.

Media Service. The laptop connected to my stereo and TV. Wi-fi. Winamp server. From any computer in the house, I can start and stop and fast-forward and add or remove songs from the playlist. Step two is coming soon: play movies the same way.

Remote access to entire computers? A little scarier, and a little cooler when it works. Scarier because if you open remote access up to anyone, you open it up to potentially everyone. Hackers love looking for things like that.

So I've shied away from using the Windows built-in remote access stuff. (It's SSL! It's totally secure! Yeah. Next time I get a few days, I'm going to implement my man-in-the-middle SSL system that will read all the SSL sessions from my own computers. So ifyou come to visit, be sure you don't check your secure webmail. Because I'll be reading it!) (Except I won't really be reading it. But I'll have the power to!)

Today's sponsor, RemotePC, offers a commercial approach to remote PC access that promises to be more secure and convenient than the built-in Windows client. The other neat trick is having up to 10 people sharing one desktop. Could get messy, if you ask me. But if that great power were used responsibly (think Peter saving that train, not Peter dancing with Gwen in the nightclub) it could be pretty cool.

But I don't know that it's all such a good idea. I read a story once about a monkey whose brain was linked (remotely!) to a massive computer, so she became super-smart and escaped from the evil experimenters. But then she got too far away, so signal lag caused her brain to break down and she became a normal monkey again.

A normal monkey! And if we rely too heavily on remote access, we will surely suffer the same fate.

You have been warned.

Hello, simpering Consumer. You are ugly, unpopular, and unsuccessful. Why?

Because you don't have OUR PRODUCT!

But you can GET our product for just SOME OF YOUR DISCRETIONARY INCOME!

Then you will be HAPPY. And HAPPINESS is the most important thing ever.

This vision of your potential happiness brought to you by Advertising. The lowest form of marketing, but occasionally a high form of entertainment.

Here are some beautiful ads that I can never remember what they're for and I'll never buy whatever the products are:

Cabrio - Pink Moon
Creative Mystery Ad

Have fun. Be good.

Social networking, at its best, harvests our combined intelligence to create things better than most of us would create on our own. Digg is a pretty good example -- technology news and other nerd news, compiled and gatekept far more effectively than centralized sites like CNN can do. It's the whole war between socialism and capitalism, waged in Media.

And like capitalism, social networking can sometimes be applied to wide ranges of things. Like celebrity. Capitalism promotes Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton to self-destructive heights of stupor and celebrity. Social networking now has an answer: CelebrityGossip.com.

Since CG is the sponsor of this post, and celebrity pictures is the phrase they want me to hyperlink, I've taken the liberty of hyperlinking it. I'm friendly that way. The site is like Digg, in that it features lots of stories with votes and comments. So if you're really in to celeb gossip, I can only assume that it's WAY better than reading People or watching that horrible TV show that used to have that guy who writes all the new age music now. And he has that radio show. John Tesh.

The great advantage a site like Digg has is that 100% of its target audience is online and rating things and posting comments and being geeky. I think for a site like CG to succeed, it needs to make rating and posting easier. Let people rate and post by texting. No need to log in or register -- every post comes with a unique phone number.

And pink?

Not for me.

I was about to return my new USB-based Clearplay DVD player to Target. I opened up the box to drop the DVD player in and out drifted a little, yellow Important Notice. "If you have any questions or problems, please contact ClearPlay directly. DO NOT CONTACT THE STORE WHERE YOU PURCHASED THIS."

I pondered for a moment. I assume ClearPlay would lose distribution channels if the retailers had to deal with too many returns, so its in their best interest to have customers deal directly with them. Also, theoretically, their people should be able to provide better support and maybe actually solve problems rather than simply process returns.

So I gave ClearPlay a call. And the nice support person suggested I perform a firmware update. He emailed it to me and promised it would resolve the problems I've experienced.

I haven't tried it yet. I just finished unclogging two drains and I'm still grossed out over that. But soon... Soon...

And does anybody know for sure why manufacturers put those notes in their products sometimes? (Anybody who works in package design for a manufacturer who retails through big-box stores, for instance?)

Probably nobody I know. So I'll just assume I'm right and relay it to others as Truth. :o)

...

Much later...

"No, really, I don't ever do that!" Tom screamed, as they dragged him down the dark hallway toward his doom...

Layered reality is one of the funnest ideas I've run across in a while. Google Maps (or Earth) is cool because it lets you add layers to reality. The whole application itself is a layer on top of reality. The earth itself is the reality. A satellite photo is the first layer of abstraction. A map on top of that is the second. The 3d images of buildings, another. And the flags of interesting locations. So we add these abstractions on top that make it more useful, more accessible, or more fun.

A role-playing game is the same thing. It's just some people sitting around in a room. But add on the mutually accepted layer, and it becomes a party of adventurers exploring an ancient tomb.

A group of people playing an Alternate Reality game exploits the same basic idea -- a 'normal' task becomes much more exciting when it's suddenly part of an interesting, broader story. Coming up with the broader story is one part of the problem. Coming up the normal tasks is the other, because I don't think normal activities are really fun enough.

So I was thinking... Paintball! Now, this post is sponsored by Ultimate Paintball, a paintball company who sells things like guns and helmets (and the key link for this sponsorship: paintball mask). But paintball would be a fun thing to tie in to an ARG.

You're thinking, "no, that would be lame -- it's already a game, and could only exist as a subgame." (Okay, you're not really thinking that, but you would be if you were thinking about this the same way I am.) It has its own rules and its own layers of abstraction from base reality.

But remember that James Bond movie where they were doing the military exercise, and that was when somebody decided to really infiltrate the base? Paintball as its own game would be fun, and then it offers tremendous potential for clever story hooks.

Maybe while the players are paintballing, another objective comes up. You have to find a secret message, from somebody who's not playing the game, and it's in the enemy camp. The rules of the real paintball game make that a risky thing to do. But the rules of the ARG require you to do it.

It's that blending of rules that makes things tricky. From a design standpoint, the biggest deal is I have to be sure not to force players into bending any legal framework. If that secret message is inside a diamond store, you can't break in at night to get it. If police think you look suspicious leaving that brown, paper-wrapped package under the park bench, you're in trouble.

So artificial social constructs that offer their own set of rules that we CAN break are ideal. The world of paintball has many rules that you don't want to break, but can in the ARG without reaping too-serious consequences.

I'll be on the lookout for other things like this that would work, too.

A fascinating discussion brewing on Digg.com: is there science without faith?

I just want to highlight a few interesting points that struck me.

It is generally assumed that the laws of physics are the same for all observers... These are the sort of core assumptions atheists make. If such basic ideas are called "acts of faith," then almost everything we know must be said to be based on of faith, and the term loses its meaning.

I don't think that makes the term lose its meaning. The very idea that we can know anything requires a certain level of faith. That we exist, that there is continuity in time. That people continue exist even if they leave the room. That my memories actually happened, and weren't just implanted moments ago in my mind. All of these terribly important assumptions are simply assumptions; we have to either accept them or go mad. That's faith, and it doesn't damage our ability to learn and know.

Further, science is based upon verifiability. I can trust the word of a scientist because I can verify his claims. Religions OTOH, rely on the fallacy of appeal to authority, and their claims cannot be independently verified.

Religions ought not appeal to authority, exactly, in the sense of appealing to the authority of a priest or other earthly interpretor of God.

James 1:5 -- "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him."

Moroni 10:4 -- "And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost."

Religion asks you to find out for yourself. Faith based simply on authority -- my parents said so, my priest said so -- isn't the end point.

One fundamental difference between science and religion is that scientific text is constantly updated whereas holy scripture remains constant. Historically many scientists' conjectures have been inaccurate but when there is sufficient evidence to reject them, scientists cease to advocate them. In contrast, the religious community refuse to change any holy text under any circumstances.

...Many of the criticisms of religion stem from the underlying belief that religion is false. Unchangingness is sometimes absolutely the right thing to do, when you're right.(Sometimes even when you're right, the right thing to do is change. But that probably has more to do with relationships than absolute truth.)

Anyway, that's enough for now. Just had to respond somewhere less crazy than a Digg comment thread.