Category Archives: Opinion

Dear Post Office,

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I’m sorry I had the wrong address, my information was obviously outdated. And I thank you for giving me the correct address, yet I can’t fathom why you would send me the correct address on the front of letter I was trying to send.

I mean, I’m trying to get a letter to someone and you not only know who, but also the correct address to reach them.

All I’m saying is that I don’t understand how this benefits anyone. It doesn’t help me because I have to find another stamp, possibly another envelope and mail this letter out again. It doesn’t help you because you have to handle it again to send it back to me and then a third time to send it to the original recipient.

Now, I get the fact that you don’t want everyone sending out misaddressed letters. I can tell from this label that you have a “window” of time where you will forward the letter without problem. I just think there has to be a better way to handle these things.

For example, maybe after the “free forwarding window” has ended you can simply continue to forward the mail (provided you know the correct address) and then send a humiliating postcard back to the original sender. It can say something like “you are a bad person” or “you don’t know much about so-and-so, do you?” or “have you talked to so-and-so lately? They’ve moved.”

Perhaps you can augment this strong language with an obnoxious picture or perhaps a small bill which contains a small forwarding fee that needs to be paid. Maybe you can flag our mailboxes with a “this person sends bad letters” flag after a few bad letters have been sent.

You know where we live, it’s not like we are hiding from you guys.

What it really comes down to is that we live in the 21st century. The whole aspect of sending a physical letter is actually rather inconvenient for someone who does most of their work online. Having to resend a letter only makes the whole process more inconvenient and makes me think that it really isn’t worth the trouble.

Despite the wealth of personal information we put online today, very few of my friends and family actually list their mailing address on Facebook or other social networks. The Post Office, however, has a list of EVERYONE’s address. If there was only some way to tap into that.

Now, I realize I could simply ask all my friends and family for their addresses, but this entails a lot of work. (I’m sure you know all about keeping track of addresses.) Many of my friends are moving throughout the year. Others I don’t see or don’t respond to my inquiries. (Yes, I have considered this to be an indication that they don’t want me sending them mail.) Also, it ruins any surprise that they will be getting a letter from me.

My solutions as listed here might not be perfect, and in some instances it might actually be a bad idea. All I ask though, is that you take a careful look at what you are actually doing and find some ways to make the user experience better. The last thing you need to do right now is force more people away to using electronic or alternative means to deliver their messages.

Thank you for your time, and your help in the past to deliver messages.

Hope you can figure something out.

-Philip

In the event of an Apocalypse…

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I’ve been watching a lot of depressing movies lately. Not necessarily on purpose, it just turned out that way. First I saw The Road (my rating: 1/5), then I saw Daybreakers (4.5/5), followed by Doomsday (3/5), and then Carriers (4/5) (reminded me of Zombie Land (4/5)), and finally Twilight: Eclipse (2/5).

So on my drive home from work today, I started thinking: “If I was the only person that was alive in the world, what would I do?”

The answer came to me rather quickly. I would drive.

I would drive like I was in a movie. I would take fast corners, spin donuts, teach myself those crazy hand break turns. When my car died, I would simply find another one. Maybe I would even find another one first. But I would drive.

Ultimately, this wouldn’t really matter much, because if I honestly was the last person alive things would get really boring really quickly, but still, I think that’s what I would do.

What would you do if you were the last one alive?

Blind as a bat

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It has come to my attention that the phrase “blind as a bat” is not at all politically correct. Bats are not actually blind, they just don’t see the way we see. That is to say, they see things differently than we do. In todays society of tolerated opinions, saying someone is blind because they don’t see things the way you do is not only frowned upon, but grossly inappropriate.

Think about it.

Time Travel

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Tova 1Many people have talked about the possibility of time travel and the implications it might have. No one, though, has come close to imagining the true potential of time travel. That is, until now.

The real potential of time travel is huge: food will never spoil. Now, I know what you are thinking. You think if you find some old turkey in your fridge then you can simply go back in time a few days and make a turkey sandwich. That is just stupid. For, you see, if I go back in time a few days, chances are I won’t be in the mood for a turkey sandwich at all. Rather than go back in time, it would be better if I bought some turkey from the future to keep in case I ever needed a turkey sandwich.

How would this work you ask?

Take milk for example, a fresh gallon of milk usually has an expiration date of about two weeks. Now, if you sent that milk two weeks into the past, it’s expiration date would be four weeks into the future. The milk would essentially be good for a month.

If we began producing food or milk 200 years in the future and ship it back to the current present, then we will have milk that will last for 200 years and two weeks.

What’s more, in the future, we may discover better or more efficient ways to produce things like milk. Perhaps the milking process can be made even more humane, provided I am allowed to use that word to describe a cow. Indeed I am hesitant to use such language when commenting on the animal kingdom. You see, cows are not human. They don’t know what it is like to be human and therefore, have no reason to be treated humanely.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t approve the mistreatment or neglect of animals, but I do feel that humanity should not take it’s humaneness lightly. We have worked hard at being humane and I would hate to have all this effort stolen by a bunch of bovine who do nothing but stand and eat all day.

On those same lines, if I was a cow, which I am most certainly not, I would not expect a free handout from humans wishing to treat me more like them. I don’t want a two story house or a bed or a boat. I don’t want a steak dinner and I don’t need the government to step in with a new healthcare plan. All I need is a patch of grass and a few hundred gallons of water, or perhaps a few wine coolers on a hot day.

Five personalities I want to see play Harry Potter

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Johnny Bravo “Whoa momma! Wanna watch me comb my hair really fast?”
The Joker “You wanna know how I got this scar?”
River Tam “Nothing in the ‘verse can stop me.”
Billy Mays “I’M HARRY POTTER AND TODAY I WANT TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT…”
Sponge Bob “I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready…”

This still bothers me

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‘Cause she’s so high
High above me, she’s so lovely
She’s so high, like Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, or Aphrodite
She’s so high, high above me

She’s so high by Tal Bachman

Am I the only person who has actually listened to these lyrics? Tal Bachman is comparing a lovely woman to three people: Cleopatra, Joan of Arc and Aphrodite. What do we know about these women?

Cleopatra was widely regarded as a very beautiful woman, if not the most beautiful woman in the world.

Aphrodite was (is?) the greek goddess of love and beauty. Hard to match that, eh?

Joan of Arc was a French Peasant girl who was burned at the stake for causing an uprising at the age of 19.

I have never heard anything about Joan of Arc being beautiful. In fact, there is little if any talk about her personal appearance at all. When I think of peasants from the 1400′s I don’t imagine beauty queens.

I haven’t massively researched this topic, but I’ve done some causal searches. One would think if Joan of Arc was beautiful, people would talk about it right?

Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orléans, was neither a queen, nor a courtesan, nor a beauty, nor a mother.

The Independent

Joan of Arc was not beautiful. She probably wasn’t even remotely pretty. Why then, good people, is Joan of Arc’s name right along side Cleopatra and Aphrodite? Does Tal Bachman even know who Joan of Arc is?!

What’s even worse, at least from my standpoint, is that I have never heard anyone else questions this. Everyone is like “yeah, that’s a good song.”

Since when is it not only possible, but popularly accepted to compare Greek goddesses with French peasant girls? I mean, am I missing something here?

HR3200

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(My thoughts on the healthcare bill.)

I’ve looked at the bill. I’ve tried to read the bill. I can’t get a decent grasp on what it is exactly saying.

I have found a number of articles about the bill which point out mostly bad things about it. ( http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2300451/posts ) I’ve looked up some of the page numbers listed and I still can’t understand it. My problem with this type of ‘translation’ is it doesn’t provide enough information to explain things.

So I went looking for a different approach, one that wasn’t fully against the bill. I came across this ‘translation’ of the bill ( http://eshoo.house.gov/images//hr3200sectionbysection.pdf ). I felt this one also didn’t provide enough information to explain what was really going on and still was hard for me to understand.

I have two main issues with this bill. First is that it’s both an important (ie powerful/overarching) bill and yet hard to read. For something that will affect so many Americans, I don’t care if it’s good or bad, the people who will be affected need to understand the bill. The people PASSING the bill need to understand the bill. Usually, I’m suspicious about things I don’t understand.

There’s a lot of confusion about this bill. The fact that the whitehouse has a website devoted to “debunking myths” about it is proof of the misunderstandings that have come from this bill. There is a reason there are “myths” about the bill. IT’S NOT CLEAR. If they would have made the bill clear and readable, they wouldn’t have to be doing this “myth debunking.”

More importantly (in my mind) my problem is with the governmental control. I don’t think our government has handled our military conflicts very well. I don’t think they are handling social security well. They don’t handle national security well. I have a hard time believing they will handle health care well. I’m not saying the system is good right now, I’m just saying I don’t think handing the system to the government is the best way to go.

I hear many people saying that this isn’t about a ‘government takeover’ but rather to ‘provide an option’ for people. Some almost seem to go as far as to say that this won’t affect private health care in the least. I don’t see how making a change a big as this can NOT affect other aspects of health care.

Governments are notoriously slow moving bodies. (There is much to be said for going about things slowly.) I can’t help but think about all the copyright, patent and technology (net neutrality) issues that people are clamoring need to be fixed. At one point in time, these things were solutions to problems (protecting intellectual property) or they weren’t problems (net neutrality). But now we think they are problems and need to be changed.

Sure, some aspects of this plan might look good right now, but honestly, I want to know what they plan to do in 10 years when this bill is no longer relevant and needs to be updated?

People are also notorious for not seeing the big picture. Far too often I think our governing bodies (and corporate bodies) aim to fix symptoms of a problem rather than the problem itself. From my knowledge of the bill, I don’t believe it’s going to solve any problems.

I’m a firm believer in alternatives. The bill is being passed as a false dichotomy: pass this and fix everything or don’t pass it and we are ruined. I think there’s more options than that and I wish people would be more open to discussion and less flippant with their name calling on this issue.

Other thoughts on http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/

In video “Reform will stop “rationing” – not increase it” Kavit reads a question “How are you going to ensure that rationing of services do not occur.” Her answer to the question is “Rationing of services occurs right now.” She doesn’t go on to explain how it will stop, she simply says it’s happening now, this is how it happens and we want reform so everyone has help.

Museum of Haunted Houses

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DemonsI went to an art museum the other day and came home with the ultimate idea for a “haunted house” attraction.

First off I wouldn’t call it a haunted house. Only a certain crowd of people go to haunted houses. If you really want to scare people, you need people who are not expecting to be horrified. For this reason I would call it something along the lines of “Museum of Horror” or perhaps “Museum of Haunted Houses.”

Next, I would model the attraction after a museum. It would be completely white inside, have marble floors and high ceilings. The first few rooms would have bizarre art pieces, artifacts and a few models of famous haunted houses with information about them.

The first floor would offer a maze of directions and exhibitions. This would make it seem like there was a lot to see and also encourage people to wanter about, potentially separating themselves from their group.

No music would be playing in the museum. It would be silent except for the whispers of those visiting. (Some rooms might have music or sounds, but I’ll touch on that later.)

Around the middle of the first floor there would be a few secret rooms which would entice a visitor in. (Some might be labeled with a “one person at a time” sign.) The inside of these rooms would be dark with only a few lights shining on display cases. A sophisticated camera, thermal and motion tracking system would watch a visitor enter a room, make sure no one was in the vicinity or watching the door and quickly perform a few tasks. The first would be to drop the lights for a second. In the pitch darkness, covered by any potential screams, the entrance to the room would vanish and be replaced by a different exit. The lights would snap back on and the visitor would go on their way, only to discover they came out in a different part of the museum.

Borg DuckyThe bizarre artwork would continue throughout the museum. Many pieces could be sculptures and paintings of demons and malformed beings/creatures. Other pieces would be of things like clowns or grotesque monkeys. It might also be creepy to have some sort of mangled doll that keeps appearing in or on the artwork of different rooms.

One of the art pieces would be a realistic sculpture of a girl who drown herself. She would be pale and have wet hair with a muddy face and hands. Her dress would be wet, warn, frayed and perhaps ripped a bit. a few rooms later, I would have wet footprints on the floor and a pool of water in front of a painting. This might happen in other places as well.

The stairway going up would discretely skip at least one floor on the way up. (Perhaps having the levels offset one step for every floor, perhaps all in one go. The tall ceiling can help to fake this. Also many museums have half levels or partial levels that go up a few steps at a time.) This way they visitor will encounter new and strange floors on their way back down. It will also mess with their perception as they go down more floors than they went up.

There would be a number of rooms on different floors and in different areas that would be identical, except that they would all be facing different directions. This would help to disorient the visitor to thinking they know where they are going when they really don’t have a clue.

Sound and sound effects will come into play in later floors and rooms. In the museum I visited there was a panel of speakers in the wall where a voice kept saying things like “na na na na” when heard from adjacent rooms it actually sounded creepy. If odd noises like that continued to occur from time to time it would be very scary. Especially if you didn’t know where it was coming from. Again using cameras, motion and thermal sensors, it would be easy to trigger sound events in rooms that are either adjacent or near someone walking through. A simple AI program could ensure that it doesn’t happen rhythmically or systematically but rather have a randomness so the visitor does not realize it is automated. Another sound effect to use would be footsteps to make it sound like other people are walking around.

The other sound I would use is the sound of little children laughing or playing. For those that played Zelda: Twilight Princess, the Celestia temple in the sky had creepy background music. It really made me uneasy when I played it. I would do something similar for some of the rooms, although I wouldn’t have as much or any background music, just the young-children-esque sounds.

Using projectors, (with the sensory equipment) I would make people appear in the room ahead of the visitor and walk out of sight (around a corner), then disappear. Neat shadow effects could be done as well. The projectors would have to be hidden in such a way that no visitor would ever see them. This could be done in a number of ways, but it is vital to the efforts of terror.

There are artists that create 3D murals on the side of buildings. I would have a room that featured a giant 3D painting on two of the walls. I would have several doorways in the painting, most of which would just be painted doorways. One of them would be real, though. It wouldn’t be *hard* to find your way out of the room, it would just cause some confusion at first.

At one of the half stairways I would place a pool of fake blood, with a trail to make it look like a body was dragged away.

Most of the museum would be well lit, minus a few strategic locations where some trickery must be done. One room, or perhaps a small cluster of rooms would have lights that flicker on and off, like there was a broken or faulty power cable. I would take advantage of this lighting to maybe have a picture or two switch positions from time to time.

Something potentially harder to pull off, but even cooler to do, would be to have a couch that was indented like an invisible person was sitting on it. When a visitor entered the room, it would expand out, as if someone stood up and left. A similar feat could include a table chair that gets pushed back from the table accompanied by footsteps of someone walking away. (Motors and/or magnets would have to be used here, but it would be vitally important that the visitor could not see any mechanics behind it.)

The main concept of my haunted house would be that of emptiness and loneliness. Many haunted houses try to do scare visitors by surprises and darkness. I think open empty whiteness is more likely to freak people out and create a memory that will last longer in-your-face jack-in-the-box style events.

What do you think? Good idea? Bad idea? Where can I improve things? Does anyone want to fund this project?

Think it over

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Patience 3I take on a lot of personal projects, more than I should, I sometimes more than I am able to finish. I’m pretty sure I have a good dozen or so unfinished projects just waiting for a rainy day. I think in some instances the design and creation process is really what I am looking for.

Out of many of my projects I have taken on, only a few stand out as being spectacularly successful. The difference with these projects is that I didn’t jump on them immediately, but I mulled them over in the back of my mind for weeks, if not months, before any action was taken.

The one project was a piece of software I call “DeChaos” which I use to sort the photos I have taken. Rather than use iPhoto, Lightroom or Aperture, I wanted folders to store my images. I wanted image files to be named appropriately as well. I looked at what software was already on the market, tried out some demos, but nothing did quite what I wanted. So I started playing around with an idea. I drew diagrams, decided what the program needed to do, and finally I got around to writing it. It took another several months of revision to complete my program and when I finished it was one of the coolest moments of my life. (The program is actually still incomplete, but I ran into some bugs afterwards that I have learned to live with.)

The other two projects that stand out have both been photography projects. The first one was called “A Study on Studies” and the second is “Liquidated Laptops.” When I first got the idea for “A Study on Studies” I had just three or four ideas. But I didn’t act on my idea. I told myself that I should, but I never felt I had time and I wanted more than just the three or four photos. Over the course of the next year or so, I continued to think back to my idea, make lists, see the photos in my head. By the time I started, I had a really good idea of what I wanted to capture. The same type of story goes for “Liquidated Laptops” although, certain deadlines caused me to work faster.

These two photography projects are probably the coolest things I have ever accomplished. As I look back at them, the time I spent in planning was priceless. I thought about my project, I dreamt about my project and I talked to a few trusted souls about my project. That way, when it was time to act, I knew exactly what I wanted and exactly what I needed to do to accomplish it.

Society and technology today push us to act on impulse. There are some instances when impulsive action is good, perhaps even required. But it is vital to remember that good planning makes things go smoothly. Even if it’s a small or personal project, planning is key.

Free WiFi

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If there is one thing I hate when traveling it is trying to find access to the Internet. It seems that no one offers free Internet for customers or visiters, but will gladly charge you hansomely for a few hours of access.

Recently, on a family vacation to the North Shore of Lake Superior, my domain name expired. I knew it was going to expire soon, but I thought I still had a few weeks because I had been ignoring the spam like emails that MyDomain was sending out every few days for the last two months. (Side note, I don’t see the point of renewing a domain name 60 days ahead of schedule, so stop bloody bugging me about it!)

Anyway, two days after my domain name expired I was in the town of Grand Marais, MN. Most of the town us covered by a BorealWireless service. (Which supplies wireless to most of the city, several busineses, and even their library.) Fortunately for me I found an open network called “NETGEAR” and was able to check my email on my iPod Touch. Even more fortunately, I actually read my email from MyDomains which told me I had an expired Domain. (Side note: I don’t trust them to hold onto my credit card info so the auto renew failed.) I was unable to renew my domain via my iPod, but I was able to call and renew my domain for another year.

Okay, so where am I going with this? This incident got me thinking. I don’t want to pay for an hours worth of time so I can spend 30 seconds checking my email to see if there is an emergency. What I would like to see happen can be described in two senarios:

(Mediocre solution) WiFi providers offer a 5 or 10 minute wireless plan for a small fee. Just enough time so you can check in on things. Then, if the need were to arise, the user could buy a longer block of time.

(Better solution) WiFi providers offer a limited 2 or 5 minute free period wherein the user may check in on things and decide if the need to purchase more online time.

Here is a novel idea, rather than charging people an exorbitant fee for a pathetic service, give customers something they are willing to pay for.

Broken Technology (Finder Search and swf files)

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Okay. I just spent the better part of two hours doing something that should have taken me 15 minutes tops.

I had a problem with Finder and I thought I could whip up a short screen cast and put it online in order to vent. I have a free screen recording program, which was getting 2 frames per second, which wasn’t enough, so I decided to try Jing, the other free program I have.

Jing worked nicely, but outputs a swf flash file, which means, no editing, and no uploading to YouTube.

So I spent a good half hour or more searching for a viable means to convert from swf to a movie file that I could edit in say, iMovie or FCP or even Window Movie Maker if need be. Anything so I can trim down the file and put it online.

I tried several programs for Mac and Windows, none of them did what I wanted and were also free. I wouldn’t mind paying for software that did this and did it well, if I knew I was going to be doing this on a regular basis. But I don’t know this, and for a one time use I don’t want to shell out $20 or $40 or $80 for the type of software I would need. Several of the pieces of software that looked promising, either didn’t perform quite as expected, or were even advertised as a “free download” but the programs themselves were not free.

Anyway, I have finally given up. I am entirely sick of technology tonight and thus I have uploaded the unedited version of my complaint to my website, and post a link here (below) for all to see. (It’s about a 6MB file, for those who are bandwidth conscious.)

If anyone has any suggestions for dealing with these type of issues in the future, drop me a line. (And yes, I know buying a decent screen recording program would solve all my issues, but I can’t justify that type of financial purchase at the moment.)

Here is the link: Finder’s Search is Broken.

A Country’s Music

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Several years ago in high school I remember hearing this phrase:

Let me control a country’s music and I will control the country.

At the time I assumed it was a quote, probably from one of the “great” dictators. But after searching all over for it for several years I could not find it. I tried different variations of quote and asked everywhere I could, nothing came up.

Until now. Reading for a class assignment I ran across the following quote in a communication theory book.

If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation. – Andrew Fletcher

At long last, I have found the quote, or at least a similar and official deviant. (Which is a shame, I would have like to take credit for the first one.)

At any rate, this saying is very controversial, but also expandable. Today could we change it to say

If a man were permitted to make all the TV shows, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.

Or maybe not TV shows, maybe movies instead. Is this a legitimate claim? Are we shaped by media or do we shape the media?

On one hand, if we absorb what is put in front of us without a second thought, we become what we are told to become. But, as a consumer, we drive what is created. If no one watches a TV show, the company will stop producing the TV show. As a consumer body, we have control over what gets produced. The problem lies with apathy. If people don’t care what they are fed, or they don’t care what products are produced, they won’t have any say in their creation. Yet, if people do care they can make a change.

If everyone stopped eating food at McDonalds, we would collectively make McDonalds rethink their corporate strategy. But if no one cares what McDonalds does, they will have no reason to boycott. (Disclaimer: I am not anti McDonalds.)

Here is my point. Far too often the solution that is proposed is a change of policy, but often for true change to be enacted it means a change in behavior. And as the old adage goes: old habits die hard.