Posts Tagged ‘chad calease’
experience
Experience is the move. The move to a new understanding, a motion towards a richer perspective. We spend our lives chasing it, striving to open up new opportunities for it, while surrounding ourselves with those who have it. A simple thing shrouded in a complicated skin, we crave it. Like water, we want to sit by it, live next to it, walk along it, sail across it, swim in it, drink it. Be it.
So many things contribute to the quality of our experience. Our choices in friends, careers, and habits are shaped by our interests and desires, which are likewise shaped by the friends, careers, and habits we allow into our lives. The cycle is fascinating and seemingly both within our control and without it at the same time. Perhaps, that’s what makes it such an elusive yet tangible thing all at once. The best things seem to work this way. A combination of choice and fate at work all at once. The simple wrapped up snugly in the complex.
Those of us with great experience generally tend to take it for granted while others seeking any at all wonder how to obtain it. A wise woman who mentored me once shared her secret to gaining experience, while ensuring its quality. She said,
Listen closely to the perspectives of someone who has not done something before. Their perspective is still fragile and open to influence. When we have experience, we tend to close our ears to amateurs, thinking we have a grasp of a skill or trade. Amateurs have an advantage in the potential of discovering things we missed along the way. Amateurs may in fact have much to teach us. Experience alone doesn’t optimize opportunities for innovation and discovery. Only openness to experience can.
From the Water
I think about water. A lot. I think about water because it has this exquisite power: water can change dramatically while retaining its original properties. It morphs into unrecognizably different states of matter while continuing to be itself, unaltered.
It is easy to resist change. We are conditioned against it in most of our cultures, generally speaking. Is it a natural reflex to resist it? Many of us make great sacrifice to avoid it. Laws are written and put into place to stymy it. Large, expensive buildings are built to protect against it. Minds are made up against it and reject ideas that even hint at it. Blockades of all sorts are built against experience that may lead to it. The fights against it use energy we don’t even have to spare. In some cases, some put themselves at risk in the process physically, emotionally. Heavy stuff.
Steeped in a culture of change, I anticipate it, ride it, enjoy and thrive in it. They say change is the only thing that stays the same so, even as a child, it was clear: why not make friends with it and welcome such opportunities for growth and learning? I owe my resiliency to having a family that faced many changes and stayed together through each and every one, relying on change, even as it was difficult. We collectively and individually learned to make the most of each one and find lessons in change that could not have been learned from any school. We taught ourselves to live better through it and within it. I owe the quality of my life and my capacity for experience to these lessons and to my family for providing access to them.
Wherever I go I meet people who spend a lot of time, energy, and resources fighting change. Inevitably change wins out and I am forced then to watch them tire and cave into it reluctantly, sometimes painfully. I try and not speak during such situations. I have only the choice to let others make their own mistakes in whatever way they choose. There is no other way to learn. We can try to tell them to just let change take them on the ride and enjoy it, but that doesn’t work. It only inspires them to resist more zealously.
I think about water. While I’m watching those I barely know or those I love with all my heart as they adapt to change, I think about water. I think about how long water has been doing it, changing, adapting, enduring, and yet it does not really change. Water does not waste time or energy in the face of the inevitable. It literally just rolls with it. It finds a way around obstacles. Every time.
I think about children, too. In children lies this spirit, willing to explore change, even revel in it. Somewhere along the line most of us seem to lose touch with a kind of innocent tenacity, the way a child solves a problem in play. The effort to change is transparent in children, like water. They have the ability to exhaustively problem-solve using none of the biased doubt (I call it ‘obstructionism’) often found in grown-ups. We make excuses and use our amazing brain-machines to come up with answers for everything, or create atmospheres of resistance, even subconsciously trying to derail change, arrogantly, ignorantly, trying everything except friendly solutions to accepting it and making it work for us.
Being afraid is no fun. It causes stress. It is no good. It affects everyone around us while we give into it. My strategies for dealing with it is this: I think about water. I think about children. Mostly water. I come from the water.
The trade-offs of trading up
This past week alone, two pals of mine, who have historically resisted change, have traded their old-school cell phones (of the Symbian variety) for next-gen SmartPhones. One, an Android, the other, an iPhone. Upon getting home and beginning to introduce themselves to a new paradigm in communication technologies, each contacted me separately to ask what they need to know to get each to work the way they want, having discovered things about each that come up short.
Technology, by the way, is always a trade-off. For each convenience offered, there are always new obstacles to overcome.
As far as operating systems go, this is a seemingly timeless (and predictably endless), Coke vs. Pepsi debate. The two leading mobile/tablet platforms, Android and iOS are both far from perfect on their own. While they do have much in common, such as superb haptic interfaces and decent battery life, this is true especially when it comes to making each work the way we want, out-of-the-box. There is a tradeoff involved in each of them. This overhead includes installing and configuring them to work just the way we like.
iOS, for example, while far more mature, stable, and predictable in performance, is missing a great deal of core functionality, requiring that each be jailbreak it in order to fully realize the device’s potential as a tool, both for work and play.
Android, on the other hand, is friendlier in this regard, however, lacks much of the stability and ease-of-use, requiring third party ROMs installed for seemingly every other app. This is reminiscent of Windows’ driver requirements, each of which further contributes to a system’s unpredictable performance.
Much of this is due to the Android Market being less discerning in terms of the quality of apps it allows into the wild. We do complain about Apple’s App Store for not being as utilitarian as we’d like, however, it is far more discriminating about the quality of apps offered. This, in addition to superior hardware design, contribute to making iOS the more stable and predictable platform.
The best of breed, IMHO, is jailbroken iOS. The addition of tools, such as coreutils, Terminal, OpenSSH, and SBSSettings, adds the invaluable functionality of Debian to the stability of the existing platform atop the elegant design and usability of the hardware.
As stated earlier, though, not without a little time and effort ; )
As an example, one of the additional steps required on iOS (post-jailbreak) occurs after installing and configuring OpenSSH. Upon connecting to devices, we see the following error once we are logged into a shell and perform the ls command to view contents of the current directory:
>ls
>ls: unrecognized prefix: hl
>ls: unparsable value for LS_COLORS environment variable
This issue is well known and documented in a Debian Bug report log:
#544871 – coreutils: ls complains about LS_COLORS: unrecognized prefix: hl, color define has been changed from hl to mh, which produced the error.
There is a simple solution to this. Do:
vi /etc/profile.d/coreutils.sh
modify the dircolors value thus: eval “$(dircolors -b | sed s/hl/mh/)”
then do: source /etc/profile.d/coreutils.sh
Well-known is documented is great, however, it is preferable to not have to modify anything at all and without requiring additional time researching and/or sleuthing. Things are indeed getting better, though, and as each evolves, we will continue to see improvement in the way each is used and developed, requiring less and less overhead at the outset in order to have access to the modern Swiss Army Knife that each can and will eventually be – out-of-the-box : )
In the not-too-distant future
I will describe keyboards to my son one day in a not-too-distant future when he asks about them. That is when he and I will ask the computer to show us some examples. We will spend a rainy afternoon making make-believe keyboards (QWERTY and Dvorak) out of cardboard and crayons and pretend to type in our queries. The computer will humor us and play along.
It is interesting to think about the ways human interface devices (keyboards, mice, etc) have influenced the way we interact with machines. As I write this, haptics are clearly leading the way into the future. Tt is even more exciting to see how much more intuitive and user-friendly using complex systems will be with access to these interfaces. It is only getting better, in that context.
On the other hand, managing our time, how much we use them, and in what capacities, will continue to be a challenge, along with balancing their use with analog activities like playing outside, for example. For now, typing and staring blankly, alone, into a glowing box in the dark is just one way to spend moments of our lives we’ll never get back. Perhaps, that is what I see as the greatest potential for haptic interface devices, such as tablets. Children are more open to sharing in the physical world with them. Whereas while using laptops they completely zone out even while others are in close proximity. Haptic interfaces allow us to be truly social while interacting with technology.
How will touch interfaces further shape how we ask for, receive, and interpret information from machines in the future?
Heroes and Icons
How do you choose your heroes and icons?
In 1977, I was 5 years old when my parents took me to my first movie but, it wasn’t just a movie, it was a drive-in movie. The movie? Star Wars. Needless to say, it flipped me right out.
Unlike most of my pals, who were drawn to Luke or Chewbacca or Han or whatever, I was obsessively drawn to R2-D2. I wasn’t just into R2, I wanted to BE R2. Something about his character, his utility, his outright usefulness in so many contexts and situations captivated and appealed to me. So, my room had models of R2 on the shelves, my bedside table had an R2 alarm clock, my watch was an homage to R2, and my birthday cakes were more than once adorned with his image in crystalline sugar.
The obsession continued throughout my elementary and middle school years. I might even say it never actually ended. I saw, and continue to see, his influence everywhere. In the functionality of tools, vehicles, and other simple machines, devices, industrial design, consumer gadgets, and systems theories.
Here’s the thing: R2′s sheer ability, willingness, and selflessness to adapt so readily, without fear or delay, to so many challenges on behalf of the goals of his peers inspired me as my family moved around. As a kid, I was constantly having to adapt to new environments, new geographic layouts, people, styles, vocabularies, dialects, the whole thing. Since that wasn’t easy, I often imagined what R2 would do, moving through situations as if I were him, though slightly taller and more maneuverable. Just the idea of him, imagining myself as having his chutzpah, gave me confidence when I needed it and, I admit, continues to influence me to this day. Silly? So what?
Imagination makes us powerful. As children we imagine ourselves as someone else, someone more capable of accomplishing what we feel we cannot. It is through these personas many of us are able to make our first, significant achievements. Whether faced with the adversity of a spelling bee, school play, or the playground rights of passage, we resort to the power of our imagination to envision ourselves accomplishing something seemingly beyond our reach. As we age, some of us seem to either pull back on this while others expand on it and, in some cases, become Jack Whites, Oprah Winfreys, and Michael Jordans.
Success pivots on something simple: the will to believe.
Independence
Unnamed pals preparing to light up the sky at a discreet location.
This year it means something personal. This past year has included a great many changes for your humble narrator. Changes he is grateful for. Changes he had consciously and patiently been waiting for and working towards. These included trading a life he had reluctantly planned for the one that was waiting for him, all along. This is a lesson that has reinforced a notion to always follow his instincts and believe, especially in the face of adversity. As a result, this new-found independence has afforded him many new experiences, uncovered new talents, and new pals. Gifts like these make the gratitude a small price to pay, he’d say.
So, with that in mind, regardless of what the word, or the holiday, meant or means to you in your corner of the world this year, Happy Independence Day. Please enjoy that photo up there that your host took of two of his new pals celebrating the way they enjoy most in a place they love best. Sums it up rather nicely. Click it for a better view. Cheers.
Experience
Experience is the move. The move to a new understanding, a motion towards a richer perspective. We spend our lives chasing it, striving to open up new opportunities for it, while surrounding ourselves with those who have it. A simple thing shrouded in a complicated skin, we crave it. Like water, we want to sit by it, live next to it, walk along it, sail across it, swim in it, drink it. Be it.
So many things contribute to the quality of our experience. Our choices in friends, careers, and habits are shaped by our interests and desires, which are likewise shaped by the friends, careers, and habits we allow into our lives. The cycle is fascinating and seemingly both within our control and without it at the same time. Perhaps, that’s what makes it such an elusive yet tangible thing all at once. The best things seem to work this way. A combination of choice and fate at work all at once. The simple wrapped up snugly in the complex.
Those of us with great experience generally tend to take it for granted while others seeking any at all wonder how to obtain it. A wise woman who mentored me once shared her secret to gaining experience, while ensuring its quality. She said,
Listen closely to the perspectives of someone who has not done something before. Their perspective is still fragile and open to influence. When we have experience, we tend to close our ears to amateurs, thinking we have a grasp of a skill or trade. Amateurs have an advantage in the potential of discovering things we missed along the way. Amateurs may in fact have much to teach us. Experience alone doesn’t optimize opportunities for innovation and discovery. Only openness to experience can.
