So you might have heard about an article that Ars Technica ran, titled Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love.  You might also have read the reply to this post on Brian Carper’s blog, Advertising is devastating to my well-being.  I actually found out about this here on John Gruber’s blog (Daring Fireball), which I follow through RSS – I don’t read Ars Technica or Brian Carper’s blog.

The basic gist is very simple, as if you couldn’t tell from the article names – Ars Technica argues that viewers on their site should not be turning off adblockers; Carper calls this stance “repugnant”; and Gruber states that he doesn’t know what the easy answer is, but links to an article on Rob Sayre’s Mozilla Blog, Why Ad Blockers Work.

I know, I know.  I just tossed up four different links, and some of ‘em are textwalls.  Basically, I think that Ars’ article is full of shit.  I find their argument irrational and many parts of it specious at best.  They do mention at the beginning of their article that they’re not saying that adblocking is theft, immoral, or unethical.  But then they spend the rest of their thousand-word article trying to convince people that:

If you read a site and care about its well being, then you should not block ads (or you subscribe [link removed] to sites like Ars that offer ads-free versions of the site). If a site has advertising you don’t agree with, don’t go there. I think it is far better to vote with page views than to show up and consume resources without giving anything in return.

As Carper says in the comments section of his blog post, “A ‘should’ is an ethical statement in my mind.”  To me, Ars is saying that it is right and proper that users not be running adblockers when on their site, and that if you are, it is not a Good Thing ™.  Oh, I should probably note here that I run AdBlock – and that I hate using a browser without it.  AdBlock is the one sliver of sanity that renders the web into relevance for me.  Without it, I’m awash in a sea of advertising garbage.

I also don’t agree with the concept of not going to a site if I disagree with their advertising.  In fact, I think it speaks stronger to the site if they get the pageviews, but not the advertising revenue – i.e., people still want the content, but they despise the ads.  After all, Content is King, right?  There are countless sites where I want to view the content, but the ads bug the hell out of me.  Honestly, it drives me insane because the articles – or whatever it is I’m on a site for – are great, but the ads are distracting and actually detract from my experience of the site.

In my opinion, Ars took the issue way off the deep end.  Telling the readers that people get fired because people have adblockers on, that because revenue margins decrease, people look into more ‘questionable’ forms of advertisement to recoup on losses, and blaming this on the readerbase – that’s a shitty thing to do.  We the readers are not to blame for this.  Not for the most part.

The top three reasons for blocking ads seems to be:

1. They are disrupting the web experience, and/or degrading the site content material;
2. Ads also perform tracking, generally by putting cookies on your computer, which people wish to avoid; and
3. Some ads, such as ones that are done in Flash, eat up system resources.

I think that all three of these are legitimate reasons to use an adblocker.   And I think even if the reason is completely malicious – the reader wants to consume the site’s content without allowing the site to make any advertising revenue off of him – there is nothing technically wrong with this.  Adblocking is not illegal, immoral, or unethical.  It is a tool, and regardless of what the intention is, the end result is the same.

I don’t think that Carper has a right to say the things he says, either.  Okay, no, he has the right to say them, they’re just… way far off on the other extreme.  Yes, there are ads everywhere.  I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with sites choosing to deploy ads as a form of revenue instead of going purely the subscriber route.  For a site like Ars Technica, you can choose to pay and subscribe to view it without advertising, and I think that’s a good model.  To say that ads are making the world a “garish and hideous place to live” is an overstatement of the nth degree.  But he does say something I agree with:

If you want to force me to look at your ads, make me sign a contract or consent to an agreement before you display your site to me. Otherwise I owe you nothing. If your business is about to go bankrupt, and your business is so important to me that I want it to stick around, I’ll give you money. Real money. I’ve done it before.

And that’s just the thing.  You can put ads on your site, but you can’t force me to load them, look at them, click on them, or anything else along those lines.  I say this because Ars, according to their article, tried for twelve hours to make their site such that if the ads weren’t loading, the content wouldn’t either.  Basically, if you’re not making them money one way or another (ads or subscription), you weren’t gonna get any of the content.

What the bald-faced bullshit fuck is this?

I mean, if that’s what they want to do, then all the power to them.  But don’t act surprised when people retaliate in reaction.  That’s a douchebag move that really shows that they don’t understand the advertising or marketing side of things at all.  That’s the kind of move you make out of sheer desperation when you’re sinking hard (and already sunk well into a bottle of whiskey).

And while others showed up to support our actions, there was a healthy mob of people criticizing us for daring to take any kind of action against those who would deny us revenue even though they knew they were doing so.

Gee, why would that be, Ars?  Your whole article is half-begging and half-angry ranting for people to stop adblocking on your site so that you can make extra cashmonies.  You’re a business, you’re in it to make money, I get that.  You’re not there to throw your content into the wilderness of the Internet for free, and it’s not free for you to host your site or to generate and publish your content.  But act like a petulant thirteen-year-old, and you’re gonna lose a lot more of that revenue.  Seriously.  I already know I’m never going to your site now.

I, like Carper, run all my sites and services without advertisement.  Advertising on my sites would be a joke, anyway – I’d make maybe enough to break even on hosting and bandwidth costs, and that’s if I’m lucky.  So I don’t pretend that this is out of some altruistic ideal (Carper claims he doesn’t run ads because he’d rather take a loss than force people to look at ads), although I do host a handful of my friends’ sites and servers on mine at no cost.  But again, that’s small stuff for the most part that isn’t taking up much space, bandwidth, or processor/memory overhead.

I once purchased an advertising space on a forum (one that had thousands of daily user logins) for a couple months.  It was just a small badge, probably about 150 x 150, and I paid by the month instead of by views or clickthroughs.  When I went to see if it was working properly, I noticed that it wasn’t showing up for me – ironically, it was getting blocked by AdBlock because of the file-structure of where the graphic was on the server.

I contacted the administrator and pointed this out to him, and had a nice friendly chat with him in Google Chat as we both sat in our Gmails, trying to figure out why it was showing up for him but not for me.  At last, I figured out that it was AdBlock, and explained to him how we could get it – and the other couple graphics that were being blocked – to show up to those who were running adblockers.

He consulted with his staff and then returned to me with their decision.  They would not be using my method of circumventing it – they would be doing the exact opposite, they would make sure that the other ads that were showing up for me would also be blocked by the software.  I was stunned stupid for a moment as that sank in.  His words still stick with me: “We don’t want to override user preference.”   If they’re running AdBlock, they don’t want to see ads, so we’ll make sure they don’t show up.  That’s what he was telling me.

Granted, as I mentioned, I paid by the month, not by views or clicks.  So the site got the same amount of money either way, whether or not anyone was seeing my ad.  For me, being the advertiser in this scenario, I obviously wanted my little 150 x 150 graphic to reach every single person who came onto the site.  But I understood the administrator’s reasoning, and agreed with it (yes, he’d actually given me a choice and asked if their decision was all right with me).

Just like there’s nothing people can really do to stop piracy or illegal downloading, there’s not really much that people can do about adblockers.  The difference is, ad blocking is legal.  So I’d advise sites (and the publishers, the designers, and everyone else involved) to stop spending so much effort trying to get around adblockers and focus more on relevant, integrated advertising.  And that is pretty much what I believe Sayre’s trying to convey in his article.

Until then, AdBlock stays on for me.

Everybody has their coping mechanisms.  Some people eat, some drink, some work out, some clean – me, I drive.  When I get angry, when I get overwhelmed, when I want to go out and clear my head, there’s nothing that’s quite as soothing to me as getting behind the wheel, filling up my tank, and blasting it down long and winding country roads – or whatever’s closest to ‘em where I’m at.

There’s something about driving that really gets me.  I could drive forever.  Not the bustling, busy city streets with stop signs, traffic lights, and pedestrians – no, that only serves to further whatever tendencies of rage I house within my head.  When I’m driving in the city, I wish I had a fifty-cal turret-mounted to my vehicle.  But when I’m driving out on the back roads, I feel serene.

It’s such an all-encompassing experience.  I’m strapped into a metal box on wheels going a hundred, hundred fifty kilometers per hour.  The window’s down, the music’s cranked, and I’ve got a cigarette in my hand.  Just watching the world go rushing by, watching the rain falling on my windshield, watching the sun go down…  Me and my car.  Me in my car.  Me as my car.

There are a few things in life which I think are transcendental experiences.  For me, these are when I am not doing something, but when something is happening through me, or when I think I’m channeling something completely other to myself.  This experience, to me, is perfectly summed up in one quote from Bruce Lee’s Tao of Jeet Kune Do:

I’m moving and not moving at all.  I’m like the moon underneath the waves that ever go on rolling and rocking.  It is not, “I am doing this,” but rather, an inner realization that “this is happening through me,” or “it is doing this for me.”  The consciousness of self is the greatest hindrance to the proper execution of all physical action.

That’s from the very first page from the first chapter, On Zen.  And I do think that when I’m in that zone where I’ve gone past the self that I’m starting to find my path to the Tao.  Martial arts is an obvious one.  When I’m really in the right frame of mind – which is no mind at all – I am greater than myself.  Acting – when I used to act, anyway.  When it wasn’t just memorization of lines and blocking and thinking about what I’m doing, what I should be doing, and what I’m going to be doing next, but when I actually become the character and realize him in my body.

Writing, too, though this happens much less often for me nowadays if at all.  Writing and music both.  I used to call it the muse, but to me, what I call the muse is part of the Tao.  It’s when I can write something – a piece of poetry, lyrics, music, stories, what have you – without even knowing what I’m writing.  I’m not grasping for my theory or reaching for words.  Something just flows out of me, and that’s when I know it’s real.  When I’m thinking and writing, trying to force something out, I know it’s not true writing.  I remember some times when I wrote something, looked down at the page, and couldn’t understand what I’d written until someone else read it and explained it to me.

Driving can sometimes be a Zen experience for me.  Seriously, stop laughing.  I know it sounds retarded.  But there’s just something so liberating and open about just driving without knowing where you’re going.  I don’t think, I don’t react – I just drive.  The roads open up before me, and I choose to go down them or not.  I drink in the sights and smells of the world around me.  I am invigorated, renewed, I am alive and in motion.

I’ll catch myself singing along to the music without even knowing that I’m doing it sometimes.  I’ll open up my mind and think.  Receive without transmitting.  I let it all flow through me.  I know that this probably sounds less like a meditative experience and more like just dangerous driving – if it sounds like that, then in my defense, I think I’m just describing this extremely poorly.

A meditative experience – in my eyes – is not necessarily analogous to sitting down in an empty room, hands folded in my lap, eyes closed.  It can be very passive, yes, but it doesn’t mean inattentive or unresponsive.  Fighting is a meditative experience.  Improvising jazz on a live stage is a meditative experience.

Does it sound like hippie horseshit?  Sure, you know, I can admit to that.  Even as I’m writing it, I’m kinda shaking my head because it all sounds so damn silly.  But I find peace in it.  Just the other day, I went for a drive.  Only about an hour’s worth, really, and the whole ordeal took me about eight hours total – I had to take my car into the shop to get a bunch of work done on her first, and then had to take her back into another shop when I hit the first town (I’d left the car for months while I was away) for more work.

Even after waiting for hours upon hours for mechanics to work their magic and dropping an unexpected amount of money on repairs, not to mention all the shit that made me want to go for a drive in the first place, I finally hit the road again.  It was dark, and it was perfect.  It’s so different from being in the city, where I’m just frustrated and angry and so different from being on the big highway, where I’m just bored and half-asleep (as well as frustrated and angry, most of the time – on the 401, at least).

I think that I love driving like that almost more than anything else.  It’s more calming than my other relaxations – and it comes to me easier.  If I won the lottery, I’d love to get a place out on the edge of some town with a nice, powerful, but old car and just drive.  New cars are nice – and I’d rather have a new car than the one I’ve got now, don’t get me wrong – but old vehicles with ‘personality’ are the best for cruising, I find.

Ride on.

Although it stands to reason that a samurai should be mindful of the Way of the Samurai, it would seem that we are all negligent. Consequently, if someone were to ask, “What is the true meaning of the Way of the Samurai?” the person who would be able to answer promptly is rare. This is because it has not been established in one’s mind beforehand. From this, one’s unmindfulness of the Way can be known.  Negligence is an extreme thing.

When I began training in Kendo many years ago (as well as other arts like Kenjutsu and Iaijutsu), I picked up a copy of Hagakure, the “book of the Samurai”.  It was more as a point of interest to the mentality and philosophy of the warriors of old – but alongside the Tao te Ching, it ended up being one of the few books that entirely changed my life.  The quote above, which is the first verse of Chapter One, is one of the main points of the philosophy which hit home for me.  The necessity in meditating upon that which guides our lives and our beliefs, such that when it comes time that you are asked a question or forced to make a decision, you know where you stand without a doubt.

I could sit here all day and quote-spam from the book, but that’s not my intention.  Rather, I’d like to focus on that one thought as the main point for this post.  Obviously, I’m not expounding on the true meaning of the Bushido but rather expanding it to encompass what beliefs and principles you believe in – more specifically, what beliefs and principles I believe in.  Meditative reflection is something I’ve fallen out of touch with as I’ve moved farther and farther away from such practices, and that’s something I need to correct.

My upbringing was a Christian one.  My parents were extremely conservative and religious; we went to church every Sunday, paid our tithes, memorized our Bible.  I was on the worship team, went to canoe-camping retreats, all that stuff.  And the thing about religion is that it really makes you think about what you believe, whether you agree with your holy text (or equivalent) or not.  When the religious aspect is taken out of religion and it’s viewed as a philosophy, it’s a very effective model in many aspects, or so it seems to me.  A convocation of those of like beliefs, supporting each other.  A meditative ritual, often times inwardly reflective in nature.

I knew then what I believed and what I held as right and wrong – because I was forced to contemplate the regulations of my religion.  When the church said that homosexuality was wrong and a sin, I disagreed.  Lying and stealing were also wrong, with which I agreed, but with which I didn’t comply.  But whether or not I agreed, whether or not I acted upon those convictions, I had thought about them and knew where I stood in principle and in practice.

I fell away from religion during my latter years of high school for a multitude of reasons.  I underwent a long period of philosophical self-examination and doubt.  But the farther I went away from religion, the lesser my questioning of morality, ethics, and principles.  It was no longer a routine thing for me to ponder questions of right and wrong and where I stood in the grand scheme of things.  Kant’s Categorical Imperative was collecting dust on a shelf in my brain.

I had no Scripture.  There was no God for me to speak to.  So I fell out of constantly re-acquainting myself with my own beliefs, fell out of that meditative relationship with the Oneness or the Spirit or whatever you want to call it.  And this is a dangerous thing – for you to be obscured to your own self.  I got lost in the haze of secular life and forgot the connected spiritual essence of being.  I was disconnected from my wonder at the world, the exuberance of existence.  I unwittingly became less of an atheist and more of a nihilist.

There’s a difficulty with atheism, or at least in my experience.  Those of us who have become disenchanted with religion or disenfranchised from previous belief systems are left scattered with a generalized label: Unbeliever.  When asked what my religious or spiritual beliefs were, the best I could muster (half-jokingly) was “Semi-Taoist Existentialist”.  But the problem is that it’s so hard to find others who believe as you do, especially since there are so many areas in which disagreements arise.  The nature of the universe, the origins of life, afterlife, morality and ethics, philosophy, sophistry, the list goes on.  If the Church has splintered into so many factions just from one purported set of teachings, how can atheists find like-minded and like-hearted groups to form a community?

Many simply agree to disagree.  They are united by their atheism and their atheism alone (or agnosticism) – but this is hardly ideal, as you can’t share your values with them and become fully supportive of one another.  It’s good in the way that discussion is fostered, if arguments can be kept civil, and it allows you to debate the merits or downsides of your beliefs and in so doing strengthen them.  But when most if not all of your interaction with your fellow-community is comparative or detractive instead of reaffirming and supportive, it doesn’t have the opportunity to build and grow.

Atheism is defined not by what it is, but by what it is not.  This is obvious just from the name alone.  Under the broad umbrella of atheism are many different groups which covers many people, and many of these people can find a community of their own and flourish.  But for those of us without an easily unified set of beliefs, those of us who pick up bits and pieces of different philosophies and create a system of their own – we’re often left behind.  Again, that’s the nature of the beast.

I started this post thinking that I was going to talk about my own beliefs and try to lay them out – for my benefit as much as others’.  But it’s obviously taken a vastly different tone, although tangential to my original trajectory.  I’m not trying to say that all or even most atheists are as lost and isolated as I feel that I am at times; but that coming from a religious tradition, I feel a distinct lack of something at least in my immediate community of peers.  When you don’t have a God, to whom or what can you sing songs?  Music being what it is for me, it’s hard to imagine spirituality without music.  When you don’t have a Scripture, what do you study?

There exists a necessity, I think, for individuals to create their own scripture, to define the narrative of their beliefs and principles, and to codify them for themselves.  This is especially true to those who fall outside of belief groups where they have a community of belonging, when they are philosophically or religiously isolated; it’s important for you to spell out who you are and what you are.  Not to say that we are defined by our labels or generalized descriptions – “Semi-Taoist Existentialist” really raises more questions than it answers – but because it’s important to be thoroughly self-aware.

Negligence is an extreme thing.

I don’t know if this is a recent trend or not – I highly doubt it – but a theme has been making itself very evident to me lately all over the place.  In real life, in articles I read all across the interwebs, it seems that a large amount of people are trying to deal with the adjustment of moving from a school environment into what we call “the real world”.  While some have been able to transition with relative ease, others are struggling with the differences.  There seems to be a period of chaos in moving from the world of academia into the career life.

Let me start off by saying I went to private school.  I don’t like to tell people that, because invariably, whenever I tell someone that I went to private school from Grade 6 until graduation of high school, the response is always the same: “Oh, you were a rich kid.”  To be fair, my family was fairly well off.  My parents put me through piano lessons, martial arts, and all that jazz.  I’ll never understand how they managed to do so, and still puzzle over it to this day.  While they were international bankers back before we moved to Canada, they now own and run a small post office/gift ship in Toronto.

Anyway, back to my point about school.  It was a private gifted school for which I passed my tests in Grade 5.  It was a school that offered primarily only “academic” courses, focusing heavily on math and science – there was no Home Ec, no Gym, just Physics and Calculus and Biology and the like.  The only “non-academic” courses that were offered were Theater, Music, and Art – and even then, it wasn’t an option to take throughout all of high school.

My memories of high school are fond.  Granted, my high school experience probably differs greatly from many others’.  For one, I skipped nearly all classes in my final two years.  I think the only classes that I showed up consistently for were English and Philosophy.  I spent most of my time playing guitar in the common room, smoking in the back of the school, out playing pool with friends (who were, uh, also skipping class), or just… not going to class.

Ironically, I was heavily involved in the school.  Being what it was, it had a very small student body – at my time there, I believe the numbers peaked at 350 students for all of grades one through thirteen.  For American readers: yes, we used to have a thirteenth year, the last year of high school, which no longer exists.  I was in the last year to experience that wonderful transition.  I was on Student Council all the way through, staying Vice President in my last two years.  I ran extra-curricular activities, watched over kids during lunch hour, did the morning announcements every day, and played on almost every sports team.  I was in just about every play and musical as well as Captain of the Improv Team.   I was in a band, dating girls, doing my High School thing.

I thought I was King Shit of the world.  I was popular, I was cool, I was invited the parties and enjoying life.  I was doing well in school, eventually graduating with around 95 average for my top six classes, which would get me easily into university.  University – that shining, glimmering, golden goal.  The light at the end of the tunnel.  My gateway into the Real World.  All throughout high school, I couldn’t wait to go to university.  To live on my own, to be able to study what I wanted to study (and I told myself that I would actually start applying myself there, whereas I just winged it in high school), and to prepare for the rest of my life.

The first problem?  I chose Fine Arts Theater as my major.  I’m being facetious, of course, but it did present some real problems for me.  It was a very specific major with very specific application.  I narrowed down my field of opportunities from the beginning by making that choice.  I disappointed a lot of people by choosing that major.  First amongst them, myself.  By the middle of the first semester, I was already thinking about transferring out to University of Toronto and into a different program.  By the second semester, I wasn’t even attending most of my courses.

I can’t say for certain how much of that is because of my program and how much of it is because of the university experience itself and how much I was let down by my grand expectations.  I had high hopes for the York University Theater program, especially since they were touting Rachel McAdams as a graduate, and hell, she made it big.  But first year was a joke at best.  There was so much to learn on the technical side of stagecraft, and those classes I enjoyed to the fullest (minus the part where they slave-labored us as part of the course) – but just about every other class had me going, “Seriously?”  The one class I was taking out of my major, Philosophy, was mind-numbingly painful.  The Teaching Assistant knew more than the Professor did.  I started going only to the discussion groups, and skipped the lectures completely in favor of just reading the assigned texts.

I thought that University would be a shining beacon of intelligence.  I thought that I could drink my fill of the wisdom of my superiors, enough to start vomiting my own half-baked awesomeness once I was finished.  But I soon found that it was full of mediocrity – at least in my experience – and that moments of true learning had to be laboriously hunted down and shot.  I had a small group of friends that I would hang out and talk with, and largely ignored everybody else on that campus.  The level of pretension and jargon-slinging were just absolutely incredible.

This is starting to sound like an incredibly bitter post against education, and that’s not my intent in the least.  Case and point: I’m trying desperately to get back into university this year, hopefully by the summer semester, to complete my undergraduate degree at Queen’s University.  It’s one of the many reasons that I joined the military, because they’re willing to pay for my education.  What I’m trying to say is that I was very disillusioned with my first university experience.  It seemed like everyone was having a a themed party and I showed up completely out of dress and got handed the skunky beer.

I think that out of all of my friends, I hit the “Real World” first.  By nineteen, I had dropped out of university and enlisted in the military.  I was working full-time for the first time in my life, and it wasn’t a coffeeshop or a restaurant – I was firing live ammunition, living out in the field, slapping on cam paint and HOORAH.  I had a child to look after, a family to provide for, bills to pay, debts to manage, ridiculous supervisors to appease, insufferable coworkers to handle, and so forth.  Not to say that military life is necessarily Real World – it can be very much a macrocosm at some points – but you get the gist of what I’m saying.

So here I am.  I’ve spent three years in the military exactly to this date.  On 21 Feb 2007, I showed up for Basic Military Qualification, AKA Boot Camp, in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec.  And now I watch as many of my friends struggle to transition out of the University life and into their own, trying to find their way, trying to figure it out.

I think that the education system gives us this impression that there’s an endstate to all this.  I don’t quite know what “all this” actually is, but there it is.  But so many people are fighting even just to find a job or an internship.  A large number of them have gone abroad, traveled much, and accomplished great things.  But an even larger number of them have retreated back into the education system, going for a second degree or a graduate degree in the hopes that it will help them in their future lives.  Some have just gotten out of university and gone into college for something applicable that they want to pursue.  Others languish.

I say “retreated” back into the education system not necessarily because these people were frightened off or anything – many of them had a graduate program in their sights before they even began undergrad – but because in my eyes, the education system is a fortress.  It’s something completely apart from this thing that they call life, and in many ways, that’s a good thing.  It’s an isolated, fabricated environment dedicated to students learning.  But what are they learning?

They say that school teaches us how to think, how to analyze, how to question and come to our own conclusions.  I disagree.  I think that at best, school teaches us facts and information.  It teaches us how to learn.  It’s up to us, then, to figure out how to process that information and transform it into something relevant and real – to bring the theoretical into the realm of the practical.  Some of us go through internships and work terms to help ease us through.  Some of us hit the ground running.

I’ll try to refrain from speaking generally because I know that my experience doesn’t necessarily mirror many others’ for whatever reason.  For myself, I had a hard time adjusting.  In school, I was friends with many of my teachers.  Even though I skipped most of my classes, they were still people I would talk to and joke with, people that I had respect for and people who (I hope) respected me in return.  I got good marks on my assignments.  I did well on my exams.

Well, that doesn’t count for shit out here.  Nobody really cares that I went to a good school and got good marks.  Nobody cares that I gave a seminar minutes after getting a tooth literally knocked right out, bleeding all over my presentation (well, except that it makes for a good story).  All that really matters is: how good are you at doing your job?  There are guys that I work with who failed out of high school.  There are guys that I work with that have college or university diplomas.  But when it comes to your evaluation as a person, your worth as a soldier, nobody really cares about that expensive piece of paper.  And to be honest, I prefer to work with a lot of the guys that struggled through school instead of those who excelled in the system.  They’re smarter, faster, and get the job done better.

So where does that leave me?  I’ve never believed that the education system was an effective model for personal growth.  I believe that it does work for learning, and learning how to learn.  And I do want to learn.  But for me, it’s a means to an end.  Undergraduate is the new high school, everybody knows that – it’s hard to get credibility in the world at large without at least an undergrad.  Even then, it’s nothing special.  Hell, even a Master’s doesn’t impress half the time.  Moreover, from my group of friends at least, having a degree doesn’t even mean you’ll find a decent job, or even a job in the field you studied.

Part of what makes the whole deal so hard, as many articles I’ve read have quipped, is that students are often coddled throughout their educational careers.  There’s a fair bit of handholding and inspirational talks from teachers and professors, helping that struggling student across the finish line.  Everyone is told that they are unique, special, smart.  In the scheme of the macrocosm, they feel connected and important.  But once they get out of school, how much of that is relevant and applicable?

In the end, the world is what we make of it.  I think I could’ve had a much easier time of things if I’d been helped along, which is where I think parents come into the picture.  Parents should be the one helping their children through that transition, and kids should be free to reach out for their parents for advice and assistance.  I’ve never had a good relationship with my parents, personally, and I was actually disowned slash cut off slash whatever you want to call it by the end of my first year university.  My father figure through school was my Theater teacher, which I think contributed heavily to my choice of major.  Look, I can sit here and talk about daddy issues all day, but my point at the end of the day is this: let school teach facts and learning.  Parents should be the ones teaching Real Life.

I thought that by the time I got to University, I knew everything worth knowing.  Who am I kidding, I thought that by first year of high school.  Who needs parents?  They’re stupid and they just get in the way.  They live in a whole different world, and they don’t understand how anything works nowadays.  The typical teenage stance.  But I’ve come to realize just how much of an impact they could have had on my life had we had a real relationship.  And how much I’m missing because we didn’t.  Yes, especially with my father.

What I couldn’t receive from the wisdom of my parents, I’ve had to learn the hard way.  Through fucking up.  Over and over again.  Hell, half the shit that they tried to teach me, I discarded and learned the hard way.  But through that experience, I smartened up a bit and realized that yes, my parents are ridiculous; yes, they have no idea how much the cultural climate and the world around them has changed; yes, they are conservative relics of the old country – but they know what they’re talking about.  They’ve done their fair share of fucking up and learning, and they’re trying to teach me so I don’t have to go through that pain.

It goes hand in hand with schooling.  Just like you should be learning in all the time that you’re at school but not in class – the schoolyard politics, the socialization – you should be learning when you’re at home.  If you ask me, there should be a three to five-year gap between high school and university to let people out into the Real World and learn before committing themselves back into the hands of the education system if they so choose to do so.  I think that would be best, and that University (or College) would be far more effective at that stage of personal development rather than going back-to-back with high school.

What a completely unstructured and all-over-the-place post this was.  Cut me some slack, I’m still getting back onto my blogging legs, and I’ve only had one coffee today.

Image from http://jangosteve.com

A great little blog post popped up on my Recommended Items list in Google Reader which caught me just from the title.  Intrigued, I decided to go and have a read.  In the article, Steve Schwartz discusses the scenario of people who feel like they have no clue what they’re doing but appear to be recognized and praised by others as being not only competent but exceeding expectations.  Of course, the piece spoke directly to me – and I think many others of us as well.  So here I ramble on.

I’ve been meaning to write a post about this for a while, so I’m glad that this article gave me the segue to do so.  I am definitely one of those who has no clue what he’s doing but is often pointed out as the go-to guy, subject matter expert, or whatever you want to call it.  And the reason that this happens is not necessarily because I know more than others or have more experience than others – often times, quite to the contrary – but because I am thorough and complete.

Basically, it boils down to this for me.  I’m a jack of all trades but a master of none.  I’m decent and competent at most things I apply myself to, from music to martial arts to networks to writing and everything else; but I never really excel at any of them.  I know just enough to do most things that need to be done, and just enough experience to be able to execute it to standard, but when I have to go above and beyond the norm, it takes me a while.

But many people come to me for my opinion or help on certain matters (interestingly enough, I just helped a fellow webmaster faultfind some troublesome code).  Referring back to the originally linked article, that’s not because I have a broad Shit I Know field, but a broader Shit I Know I Don’t Know area.  What that means for me is that I’m forced to be thorough and logical in the way I conduct business – checking my blind spots instead of ignoring them, and considering dozens of possibilities that others may easily disregard.

A voracity for learning helps, but moreso a step-by-step thought process that doesn’t skip past any points.  Each consideration is weighed, calculated, then assessed.  What I don’t know or understand, I research as thoroughly as possible.  I contact friends, departments, experts, or just consult and brainstorm with those available to me in order to create as complete a picture as possible.  And I don’t consider a matter concluded or completed until it’s tested and confirmed to be working as it should be.

You’d think that these things would be par for the course for everyone, and for a lot of the people I know, they are.  They are just as methodical and thorough as I am, and will go far out of their way to find solutions.  Compared to these people, the only difference that I can find with myself is that I am more often than not able to convey my thoughts and ideas clearly and concisely without confusion.

There are many people who are great at what they do, but aren’t perceived as such.  Whereas others, like myself, aren’t very great at all but influence others to think that we’re awesome.  The difference is an important one to mark, and one that isn’t lost on me.  I think that what I can do and how I do it are good things, but I sometimes wish that there was some field or aspect in which I excelled.  Maybe one day, with enough time and experience, I can get there.

Remember: shit you don’t know you don’t know can kill you.

So almost a month ago, I set some goals for myself to achieve in 2010.  It’s nearly February now, and I’ve been out here on domestic operations for the Olympics for a while – things are starting to settle down a bit for me, but it’s been hectic as hell.  So I’ll review how I did for January and hopefully get back on track for the next month.

So, goal 1 was to blog once a week, every week.  That failed pretty hard; I managed to blog twice the first week and then went radio silence after that.  This should have really been the easiest one of them all.  So I need to catch up and get back into it – I’ll be aiming for twice a week in February.

Goal 2: university and grades.  I haven’t started yet, since I won’t be until at least the summer semester, but I’ve got my enrollment in and I’m just waiting to hear back now.   Goal 3 was regular exercise and I’ve been doing fairly OK with that.  I’ve averaged about five hours a week exercising, whether it was at the gym, going for a run, or doing martial arts.

Goal 5: Web stuff.  I’ve been reading up and making myself standards-compliant in the brain anyway, even if not in practice.  I’m planning on recoding one of my sites from the ground up to make it better, faster, stronger.  But that’ll probably not be until this operation is over.  So I’m doing OK on this one too.

6 and 7 are touch and go sometimes – I’ve lost a lot of my writing ability, but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the novel project and refining some of the ideas I’d been working with.  I’ve got my guitar here as well and a little Roland Microcube and I’ve been writing some wicked riffs – now if only I could turn them into actual songs, I’d be happy.

So maybe it’s not so much a FAIL on these overall so much as that I’m disappointed with myself so far.  I can definitely kick this up a notch and do better.  Just a quick update for my progress so far – I’ll be posting actual stuff soon.

Conceptual "iSlate" render from www.gizmodo.com

The internet’s been abuzz with speculations about the “iSlate”, the rumored Apple Tablet that’s going to be announced on January 26th.  Tips and rumors have trickled in to countless websites, allowing drooling consumers eagerly awaiting its release to form some conception of what they can expect from Apple in 2010.  Not to mention that my face is bright red from facepalming each time someone makes a Moses/tablet joke in connection with this thing, which is just about every blog post.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball has a pretty good summation of all things leading up to where we are now.  But so far, most of the speculation has been about things that are pretty cut-and-dry.  Yes, it might come in 7- and 10-inch varieties, with the possibility of an OLED screen.  It’ll have high-resolution, full-color e-reader capability; newspapers and magazines will offer subscription services.  It’ll also vacuum your house and wax your car.

The part that I’m focused on is not the hardware – I’m sure that it’ll be drop-dead sexy and smudge like a motherfucker within two seconds of use.  While following Apple on the hardware side can be pretty fun (as I sit here eagerly awaiting the Core i7 Macbook Pro refresh), it will undoubtedly be the software side of the house that will set this tablet apart.  To quote Gruber,

I say they’re swinging big — redefining the experience of personal computing.

Apple’s been known for being “revolutionary” in whatever field they enter.  From bringing us the mouse (and evolving through their own hideous creations until the gorgeous Magic Mouse emerged) to the iPod and more recently the iPhone amongst other things, they have been game-changers in the industry even though their market share is so minute.  And as millions of people have stated, the epiphany comes not from hardware (alone) but from design, usability, and interface.

I do think that Apple puts design before all else.  Their creations put aesthetic and art before functionality in many cases – I only need to look down at my Macbook to prove the point.  The aluminum unibody case is sturdy and sexy, sure, but two USB ports?  And crammed so close together that I can’t have my mouse and a USB stick plugged in at the same time?  What blasphemy is this?

But there are times when the lightning strikes, and simplicity wins.  The iPhone is the clearest indicator of this.  So the question that everyone’s been asking is, where does the iSlate fall in relation to the iPhone and the Macbook – from the mobile fit-in-your-pocket simplicity of design to the portable take-it-anywhere slim profile, between the 3.5″ multitouch screen to the 13″ display.  Will it supplant the Macbook?  Gruber thinks so.

Sitting around a rumored $800 pricetag, it’s actually not much more expensive than an iPhone and not all that much cheaper than a Macbook.  But the software, man, the software!  Talk of it running a souped-up iPhone OS makes me cringe with dread.  And yet to have it run Mac OS X might be asking too much.  Could it be running a newer, somewhere-in-between OS?  The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) seems to think it’s a possibility:

Apple really won’t release something unless it is speedy enough. They don’t even let you run a background app or multitask on the iPhone due to speed issues. If they wanted to make a speedier tablet it would make sense that they would [deliver] a hybrid of the two operating systems, allowing better speed, battery, and more functionality than the iPhone, yet something not as relatively bulky as Snow Leopard.

I think – and hope – that it will run a slimmed-down and specialized version of Snow Leopard.  The biggest point that trips me up is that some developers have been asked to create higher-res versions of their iPhone apps, presumably for a larger screen and therefore to display on the iSlate.  Could the iSlate be part of the App Store world?

If it is, the hopes of it running Mac OS X seem greatly diminished.  After all, if Apple wants to push their iTunes Store – over which they rule with an iron fist – then having full OS capabilities would be counterintuitive, since people could just download their apps from wherever they wanted.  Could it be that the iSlate will function as a display or secondary device?

How awesome would it be if you could link up your tablet to your computer – your Macbook Pro, your iMac – and use it as you would use a Wacom tablet?  Or just as a smaller secondary display, for putting up widgets or side windows like IMs?  And if you could link up your iPhone to it to have a larger, richer display capability when you’re not completely mobile to increase productivity or gaming?  But that’s probably too far-fetched.

I think we need to stop looking at the iSlate as the Apple response to netbooks and e-readers.  It may fulfill those functions, potentially, but that’s not its primary purpose.  When I try to think, “What would Jobs do?“, I think of three things: design, usability, and interface.

Tons of conceptual renders have turned up on the internet, mostly basing their design off the iPhone.  I don’t think they’re too far off, personally.  I think that the design will land somewhere between the iPhone and the Macbook Air, between the mobile and the ultraportable.  As for the design of the OS, I can only pray that they’ve cooked up something that makes full use of multitouch abilities – maybe something in the vein of 10/GUI.  CoverFlow will probably be used extensively as it’s made its way deep into Snow Leopard already.

Usability – the thing that makes Mac what it is, at least, for me.  Why I switched and never looked back when Apple went Intel.  But how could a 7- or 10-inch screen in tablet form possibly be the ultimate killer that Jobs is banking on now?  I have nowhere near the screen real estate I need with this 13″ Macbook.  It’ll be highly portable, yes, but so’s my laptop – it goes with me whenever I travel with no real difficulty.

And whenever I don’t have access to my laptop, I use my iPhone.  I use the little sucker for everything.  Email and IMs on the go so people can get a hold of me no matter where I am – even when I’m traipsing all over the globe with my job.  Problem with my server?  I can SSH in with this tiny thing and do what I need to do.  Online banking.  Read my RSS feed.  The compromise of the small form factor is not so huge for my critical services.

So how’s he going to convince me to buy this thing; how is Apple going to reach into my wallet for my hard-earned cash, in this recession?  It won’t be as powerful as the Macbook and not as mobile as the iPhone.  What’s the game-changer here?

I think that it’ll be in the OS and its capabilities.  And this is where usability merges with interface as well as design.  Will this thing use a pen like most tablets on the market do?  I think not.  According to a tip given to the New York Times, “You will be very surprised how you interact with the new tablet.”

Snow Leopard has been moving more and more in the direction of a fully multitouch-capable OS, especially with further integration of CoverFlow.  The simplicity of interface with the iPhone with its multitouch screen, as well as the new Magic Mouse, points to a complete move away from the analog for Apple.  The tablet will, once again, redefine computer interactions for us.

But there’s a glaring problem here.  If the tablet uses pure multitouch, it’ll run into the same problem that the iPhone does – when the keyboard comes up, it obscures so much and you lose a huge chunk of the usable screen.  It’s too big, I assume, for you to type with just your thumbs like you can on the iPhone – but if you use it on your lap or on a desk, it completely destroys any sense of ergonomics and you’ll strain your neck.

So how is the tablet supposed to be used?  I agree with Gruber’s statement that a fold-out arm to prop it up is inelegant – and it would be un-Apple in design.  This will probably be another point where we the consumers will be surprised by Apple’s choices in design, and I have no good ideas.

Will it slide out with a dedicated keyboard?  If it does, it would seem to me to be cannibalizing the Macbook line.  But maybe this is the future of the Macbook line – portable computing redefined, transforming before our eyes once again as did the mobile music and cell phone concepts.

The best I can come up with is a sort of dock/stand which will consist of a USB hub, possibly FireWire, and display input/output.  Yes, I’m still holding onto that hope of it having the capability of being used as a display.  Will the iSlate be the first to integrate LightPeak?  That would be too many leaps in one device, I think.  The dock idea kind of lessens the portability aspect, though.

You will be very surprised how you interact with the new tablet.  I think this is the biggest telling key of all the rumors that are flying about.  To quote that same post from TUAW,

Everybody pre-conceived the iPhone based on the iPod and, to a lesser extent, the Newton. Everybody was wrong. Today, most everybody is pre-conceiving the tablet based on the iPhone. Maybe we’re all wrong again, or maybe the leaks are better this time.

I don’t think that we’re going to continue along the lines that we’re familiar with, the iPhone and the Macbook.  We keep trying to interpolate between those two because that’s what we know – but this will be something new, something unknown, and the interface – which will define the interaction – will be the greatest selling point.  Sleek, sexy, simple.

I think I’ve asked more questions than I’ve answered; but I suppose that’s to be expected.  My state is more curious and speculative than it is anything knowledgeable.  I’m no hardware or software engineer, after all, just a consumer who’s intrigued and hopeful.

New decade, new computing.  Or perhaps the point where Apple takes big risks with the iSlate and LightPeak technology and suffers for it.  We’re all waiting with baited breath to see how it all unfolds.

1. Blog at least once a week, every week.  If my plans are any indication, this is going to be the busiest year for me yet.  But I want to increase my online persona and presence instead of constantly diminishing.  And instead of only blogging about random thoughts and musings, I’ll also seek to expand my topics of discussion as suits my current projects and state of mind.

2. Start university again; maintain all courses above a 90. I don’t just want an above-90 average, I want all courses above 90.  I received approval last year through the Army to attend Queen’s University here in Kingston, Ontario (through distance/correspondence courses, of course) and I’ve been emailing back and forth with them to try and figure out how I want to start.  But in the end, it doesn’t matter; I want to start as soon as I can (summer semester) and kick ass fully and completely.

The last time I was in university, it was York University and I ended up dropping out, back in 2005-2006.  I finished zero courses and lived the unhealthiest life possible.  I finished high school with a 95 average, but that was without putting forth effort and dedication – meaning I had mixed marks ranging from 75 to 99.  That’s not what I want this time around.

3. Whip my sorry ass back into shape. I’ve had a billion and one excuses for not continually exercising and maintaining myself this year, and that’s crap.  I’ve gained some strength but lost my agility, coordination, and flexibility – not to mention that my cardio is completely in the shits.  This year, I will exercise regularly – regardless of whether I’m on leave, been working retarded hours, or stressed out to hell and back.  For me, this means at least five hours a week  of exercise.  An aside of this is getting back seriously into martial arts – re-training everything that I’ve lost or forgotten in the last five years and continuing to expand.  I’ll hopefully be tracking this on the blog so that I can’t just make excuses.

4. Whip my sorry brain back into shape. I’ve been lax and neglecting my mind.  I haven’t read, questioned, and examined the way I like to do; I can feel that my critical reasoning, quick thinking, and memory are far worse than they used to be.  The mind has to constantly exercised in the same way the body must be.  So.  I want to read at least two new books per month and be constantly learning something new.  University should definitely help with this.

5. Bring myself back up to speed on web-related stuff. Once again, I’ve been using the do-what-works approach and neglecting actually doing things properly.  First item on the list is bringing myself back up to web standards for XHTML, CSS, PHP, and SQL.  That shouldn’t take too long.  I also want to delve into Linux at least enough to competently manage a server by myself – I can do most of the basics right now, but that’s not enough.  I also need to get back into graphic design and actually use Photoshop CS4 in a relevant way.  If I can get myself back up to speed on those things, I’ll be happy – and can focus on getting back into actual programming for the next year.

6. Write, write, write. This was one of my only goals for this year, and it fell woefully by the wayside.  I need to challenge myself once again and write short stories and poetry to engage my mind, and make some headway on that novel project I wanted to have a draft of by this time.  Once again, I want a rough first draft of my novel done by this time in 2011.  And maybe I can actually do NaNoWriMo this year.

7. Get back in tune with music. I keep catching glimpses of riffs, getting them down, finding inspiration, but then not finishing any songs.  I have a collection of half-songs that just won’t go anywhere.  I need to get back into writing music and actually finish things even if they’re complete garbage.  And I have to start actually practicing more to re-gain my technical footing and music theory.  Additionally, I have to get a bass, because I can’t write songs on guitar alone – I need to be able to write both sides simultaneously (with vocals) because that’s just the way I work.

Seven goals.  Some of them seem a bit nebulous and undefined, but I do have definite goals for myself set in a measurable way, it would just take me too long to try and fully delineate them.  Basically, 2009 was a sloppy year for me.  I slid by by being good, but not great; and that’s not good enough.  In 2010, I want to push myself and get out of this lazy funk.  If I can actively assert myself instead of passively reacting to what comes my way, then I can start building more and more of myself as a strong foundation for what’s to come.

How much of this optimistic motivation can I maintain?  Who knows.  Hopefully, enough of it to carry me through all of these, because I do feel strongly about them and have for the past… however long.  All of these are more or less concurrent – on top of everything else I’m doing.  Back to Vancouver for the Winter Olympics in a few days, and then the G8/G20 summit after that, and then, hopefully, Afghanistan.  So I’m going to be a busy boy.  That’s when I thrive, though, is when I’m managing twenty different things at the same time.  I shine under pressure.

So let’s do this shit already.  I’m going to attempt to actively track these things on a weekly and/or monthly basis so I can keep myself motivated, and so you can point and laugh at me when I fall short.

Frigid winds blow cold. Leaves fall and crumble away. People die and leave only ashes and memories. Darkness comes and leaves but loneliness. Old friends whom you once loved go their own ways. Treasured memories become blurred, hazy, and then are forgotten. These are all beautiful things, to be treasured in and of themselves, not to be despaired over with the silent hope for better days.

The soul may be eternal, but life is limited. We never got to choose what stage of human history we would be born in, nor the family we would grow up with, nor the society that would condition us. We never got to browse and decide our genetic heritage to have perfect eyesight, no predisposition to diseases, and a killer metabolism. We were never asked if we wanted to have fathers who beat us, siblings who fell prey to drug addictions, or a mother who would die giving us life. We never chose pain. Life goes on.

But we do make choices. All day, every day. We continually add to the eternal now and bring about change, slowly nudging the state of all human wisdom toward a greater future. We believe in days of happiness, and blissful love, and a better standard of living for our children. We strive to emulate those whom we admire and hope that something of what we admire in them becomes bred into us so that we can grow. Our legends value courage, wisdom, truth, honor. We exalt those of strong morals and unshakable integrity.

Our bodies confined to the ground, our souls take flight. We create beautiful dreams and inspiring songs. We revel in the worlds of our mind, escaping from the confines of everyday living. We create bonds with others and establish community and communicate with language. We laugh at jokes and weep at tragedy. We idealize the past and simplify values. We are human beings.

And as such, we make mistakes. We indulge in vices. We cause pain and sorrow. We hurt ourselves and others and the natural world around us. We dominate with our strong wills. We wage wars. We kill. We steal. We turn blind eyes. We laugh at misfortune.

Still, we all shiver in the cold and drown in the sea. We are cohabitants of a beautiful world and a common body. We are all connected and we find ways to express the fleeting glimpses of momentary existence in an arbitrary world. We believe in gods, whether their names be Allah or Yahweh or Money or Science. We act upon our intuition and social conditionings. We are all the same people living the same lives and sharing the same experiences over and over again.

I believed, when I was younger, that I was different. I believed that I was smarter and better looking and funnier than everyone else, and that I was born for a great destiny. Now I know that we are all born for the same destiny that meets all living things: death. And that the only thing that makes that destiny great is the singular experience of the journey of life. Death is the ultimate purpose that defines every thought, every spoken word, and every action as significant.

We die in every moment so that we may live. We may not think of it, but our mortality stares us starkly in the eyes from the moment of our birth. We avert our eyes, we try to draw its attention elsewhere, we ignore its presence – and then, slowly but surely, we glance toward it, are intrigued by it, and eventually, meet its gaze. We smile. We understand that death is not to be feared, but welcomed; it is our friend, our mentor. Death is not against us. It does not destroy us. It is not a release, it is not a monster, and it is not an unknown. It is not Other; it is the very essence of who we are.

And so we learn to define ourselves in relation to other things. We observe, compare, and understand. We say, “I am taller than him but shorter than her; I am more inclined to this than they but possess less predilection to such a thing or other.” We distinguish between the physical and the emotional and the spiritual. In relationships to others, we begin to realize that they are in fact all relationships to oneself. We begin to suspect that our relationship with death will more clearly define who we are than any other in our lives.

Then we begin to mature as persons. We question, “Why do I do what I do? Why do I believe this, and respond with cynicism to that? Why am I gifted at the one, and unskilled at the other?” We begin to analyze the narrative of our existence, engaging in the eternal dialectic that has existed since the dawn of human cognizance. We embark on the journey of a dying man, apprentices to the art of life. Just as a writer strives to perfect his work so that every word is significant, we strive to perfect our work. We pare down the unnecessary. We excise what we dislike. We are sculptors, who have been given supplies with which to work, and not everyone is given the same ones. Some mistakes are reparable to some, while fatal to others.

Endlessly, we chip at the stone every day, defining continuously. We learn that careless strokes are unfavorable. We integrate the styles of art we observe others practice. We work and work, always with a vision of the finished product in our mind’s eye. But before we are ever able to set eyes upon that finished product, the statue we worked upon our entire lives crumbles away and leaves only dust. We realize that it was not the end goal that mattered. We are not sad that we did not attain it. Instead, we revel in the moments we spent in its crafting: the hours of frustration, the exasperated confusion, the longing for better tools and more competent help; the moments of bursting joy, the grandeur of the project and dream, the tireless toil and rich sweat of our labors.

We live as journeymen, never attaining the title of Master. And we’re fine with that. It is, after all, only life. We smile, at peace, and sweep the dust away into the wind to make room for others to come in after us to practice their art as well.

We attain perfect simplicity in every moment, by walking with death. We do not attach ourselves too much or become too dependent on people and objects, knowing that at any given time, everything can be taken away from us. We are content to be in the moment, cherishing the paradoxes inherent in existence. We know that there will be a moment, one day, when all moments are one in a blinding realization of all things true, and that moment will be forever, and there will be no more moments after that. We seek to experience that moment in all moments.

We are the masters of our own destinies and pioneers of fate. We are architects of beauty and and soldiers of choice. We are the individual embodiments of the entirety of humanity, with all the eminence and responsibility thereto pertaining. And as such, above all things, we know and regard one truth above all other truths, for it is the core of who and what we are:

Death is beautiful.

Click here to view the embedded video.