Archives for January 2006

Intuition vs. Feeling

From Boundaries of the Soul: Intuition is the perceiving function that sees things whole, or in the broad context. It grasps the big picture and also sees the implications. When it looks at something, it imagines where it came from and how it arrived at this place. It looks for antecedents, for history, for broad […]

Tear Up Notio!

Grab the chainsaw, express your inner anger, and tear up Notio!

Love Requires Depth

From The Love Problem of the Student: Love requires depth and loyalty of feeling; without them it is not love but mere caprice. […] Every true and deep love is a sacrifice. The lover sacrifices all possibilities, or rather, the illusion that such possibilities exist. If this sacrifice is not made, his illusions prevent the […]

What Google Knows

John Battelle, author of Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, asked Google: 1) “Given a list of search terms, can Google produce a list of people who searched for that term, identified by IP address and/or Google cookie value?” 2) “Given an IP address or Google […]

Expressing Anger

Three of my women friends think I’m not expressing my anger. As a self-identified pacifist, this is somewhat amusing. It first came up a few years ago too, in a series of conversations that went something like this: “You should express your anger more.” “Uh, could you re-phrase that as an ‘I statement?’” “I think […]

Webloging With MarsEdit

I mentioned this briefly back in October 2004, but if you are publishing a weblog and still using the browser for writing and editing, and you’re on an OS X Mac, you should really check out MarsEdit. It’s more like an email client, and provides lots of features – like a spell-checker, easy tagging, a […]

Microsoft ftpd Madness

So, to transfer files between computers there’s this protocol called FTP – File Transfer Protocol. It’s been around forever, and on dozens of different Unix operating systems when you do a directory listing it looks something like this: -rw-r–r– 1 187 6358 Jul 18 2005 index.html Then along comes Microsoft. For some reason, this return […]

Rapport vs. Communication

Good Marshall McLuhan quote from Richard Cavell’s McLuhan In Space. Communication, in the conventional sense, is difficult under any conditions. People prefer rapport through smoking or drinking together. There is more communication there than there ever is by verbal means. We can share environments, we can share weather, we can share all sorts of cultural […]

Comments Back On

I just went through 4,349 weblog comments here at Notio World Headquarters, and approximately 4,100 of them were junk. Then, after I hit the delete button, the cgi process at pair.com timed-out, crashing half-way through. So there are 2,166 left to go through again. Joy. So I’ve temporarily turned off comments until I can figure […]

Exercise

I think I may have finally hit the tipping point on enjoying exercise. I’m not quite ready to declare victory, but there’s been certain progress. Since about 1980 I haven’t considered myself a “natural exerciser.” That is, it doesn’t come naturally to me, I haven’t really enjoyed it much, and I live mostly in my […]

It Could Happen

It’s really not so much of a stretch.

Upper Valley Community Band

Lynne and I had a dinner date last night and after eating at Three Tomatoes we spent $5 each to see the Upper Valley Community Band at the Opera House. It’s hard to tell when a “band” ends and when an “orchestra” begins, but I’m pretty sure when you’ve got 65 people on stage, and […]

Frank Zappa Listening Party, Week Three

Frank Zappa has always been one of my favorite artists, and I’ve been on a real Zappa listening spree lately. Many people think of Zappa as some sort of weird offensive freak, which he is, but he is also a serious and prolific composer. With 75 albums, including many doubles and some triples, his catalog […]

What Is Friendship?

Dave Winer occasionally writes a good essay unrelated to technology, as he did today. Friendship is not a state of mind, it’s an act. It’s something you do, it’s not about whether you’re good or not, it’s not a reflection of you, it’s a balanced relationship between people. That doesn’t mean it’s always balanced at […]

GTI Project Fast

Volkswagen has launched what must be an online viral marketing campaign for the new GTI. Dear Michael J., You have been chosen by the Volkswagen GTI Mk V research and development team to take part in a nationwide research experiment exploring the psychological and social concept of “fast.” To take part, please visit: http://e.vw.com/a/tBD2TOmAQU8iiAcPMnoAHVDnpah/fasturl NOTE: […]

Political Bias as Addiction Response

This doesn’t surprise me at all: The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say. Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But […]

Circular Cluelessness

It must be time to go to sleep. I just surfed over to Notio, and wondered why it hadn’t been updated today. Then I realized, duh, it’s my blog, and I’m the only one who’s going to post there. As they say in Maine, “Wicked.” Maybe I’ll post tomorrow.

Individuation

I’ll try not to bore my dozen readers by quoting from this book too much (pg 59): The process of individuation is a process of inner growth to which one is attached; one cannot get away from it. If one says no to it and does not accept it, then, since you are not in […]

Foolish, Dumb, or Both?

A mistake I made reminds me of the time I pulled the chair out from under my eighth-grade english teacher as she was sitting down in the break room. The slow motion change of expression as she passed through the plane where the seat should have been, the realization, too late, that she was going […]

Transparency and Decision-Making

On a long conference call today 19 of us were discussing group process in decision-making. Specifically, how to assign consultants to incoming work requests. The issue is fraught with flaws that undermine community. For instance, central decisions might be made too quickly, based on who knows whom, using old bios, overlooking a more qualified newcomer […]