eponymousX

a discerning viewpoint

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Ideas: A Stasis Between Desire And Ability

July 18th, 2009 • Brian Caldwell
Life's Parentheticals

Ideas are wonderful things that help make us humans feel productive. Yet for some people, an idea alone can be a seductive fallacy if not co-joined with additional, actionable, elements.

The place of ideas in an economic sense is, of course, a priori. We cannot create a plan of action without the seed idea from which to germinate a full plan. Humans cannot build work-flow maps, create processes and implement design methods to reach the moon without the desire to visit the moon. Not to mention all of the innovative ideas that go into the building of “the things that get us there.”

Of course, our personal achievements are throttled by our abilities. If our desire is to see an idea converted into something that other humans use, consume or ponder in some mainstream manner, then we face the daunting task of overcoming our in-abilities. If we lack vision, then our ideas may lead to achievement levels that earn a level of notoriety which remains hidden in the noise of society. If we lack skills, resources, connections, acumen or voice, then we are limited in our chances of achieving any sort of reasonable return on the effort we put into turning an idea from ethereal to substantial, without risking it becoming ephemeral as well.

(Ideas + Action) / Ability = Achievement.

So. Ideas in stasis are at that balance point between what we can intuit in our minds and our desire or ability to identify and achieve a goal.

Is the act of brainstorming as pure sport, simply for the pleasure of the neuronic exercise a waste of time? Of course not! Just as the emptying of one’s mind and staring into the sky to admire the shape and color of the clouds can bring that blissful state of being, so can the creation of ideas bring a mind to joy without requiring achievement to be part of the equation.

So why am I writing this?

There are certain people in our society who feel that ideas without action are worthless. I simply wanted to state that achievement without ideas is impossible and the generation of a multitude of ideas, some of which cannot/should not/will not be acted upon, is appropriate for any individual. Period. Simply for the joy of creation.

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I Love Word Clouds

September 20th, 2008 • Brian Caldwell
Tagclouds

Ever since the tag cloud became part of the UI existence, I’ve been fascinated with the visual representation of ideas via dynamic word interfaces. I just like words.

With Wordle.net you can create interesting word visualizations from a few simple inputs.

Input options include:
1. Entering a group of words that you hand pick
2. Entering an ATOM or RSS URL
3. Providing your Delicious.com username

It took seconds to create these clouds:

Me on Delicious.com

wordle.net - delicious.com word cloud

wordle.net - delicious.com word cloud

The Web 2.0 Expo

Web 2.0 Expo Word Cloud

Web 2.0 Expo Word Cloud

I can see myself using this simple tool when creating presentations or posting online.

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Social Weavers – How Do You Define Attention?

April 18th, 2008 • Brian Caldwell
Diatribe

We interweave every day, application to application, to web page, etc. Yet we don’t just VISIT something, we DO something, we have intent, purpose, machinations even.

We can track certain aspects of this weaving, we can try to label that tracking as “attention”, but it’s not really. Attention involves more than the process of weaving our lives together, we have a mind with synapses that form on new concepts and apply thought to determine a desired outcome.

Interestingly, attention can be defined as a courteous act indicating affection; “she tried to win his heart with her many attentions”

In many ways this applies to the landscape created by the disparate parts of our online social interaction.

We try to influence the external world of people places and things by our presence; when online our digital ghost provides an influencing framework through a continually contextual presence interacting with our social wake and bow wave. Our acts of attempted influence is our attention, just as much as our attention, when speaking in the language of quantum physics, creates our reality.

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Google Blog Alerts can defeat Live Journal’s privacy settings?

February 6th, 2008 • Brian Caldwell
Google, OpenID

Today I was reviewing my Google Blog Alerts and spotted a posting that surprised me. I was surprised because the post obviously may have an impact on the person who posted it because it contains some sensitive information that could have negative ramifications if it were made public.

Google Alert does not respect Live Journal privacy settings?
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I was curious, so I clicked to visit the Live Journal page that Google had obviously crawled. I logged in using my OpenId, but was stopped from viewing the post via Live Journals privacy settings on the post.

LiveJournal Private Post
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Now I’m wondering how Google was able to see the post, why they would crawl private posts at all and how this might impact users if it were made public. So I’m making it public. What do you think of this revelation?

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Pandora Scores a Hit with Classical Music Addition

November 14th, 2007 • Brian Caldwell
Internet Audio

Last night Pandora officially introduced their new Classical music genre.

After hundreds of hours of music analysis by the highly trained staff at Pandora, based in Oakland, CA, the company best known for the free play approach to music streaming, announced the availability of a Classical music genre into their public music discovery engine.

Held at The Regency Center on Sutter Street in SF, tonights event was a skit/performance including cast of Tim Westergren, an on-command orchestra, individual performances by an artist with an alto? recorder, an opera singer and a totally fantastic trumpet/brass artist. Open bar and Bose as sponsors rounded out the night. Bose does have some fantastic products for computer originated sound.

Pandora knows how to throw a good party, that’s certain. With ambient red and blue light party atmosphere, roving waiters, interesting people, the evening was entertaining, interesting and a wonderful chance to salute a revolutionary company.

Pandora continues to help me find the most interesting new bands, but also now let’s me discover different older, original masters of the audio arts.

Now, enjoy a few photos.

Tim Westergren kicks off the night's performance

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un-voiced rants, do they make a noise?

November 12th, 2007 • Brian Caldwell
Diatribe, Jumped The Shark, social spam

The IM stream started out fairly peaceful, if a bit, umm.. I dunno, antagonistic maybe.

THE RANT

there should be a law that says that no consumer should be held accountable in a contract in which the consumer cannot be expected to understand the language of the contract.

I said:

“lol
I might twitter that if I were you
some of the twitter ranters have quite a following”

Then he went on to say:

speaking of having a following, don’t you think you are more likely to fall into domestic wiretapping if you have followers in social networking with links to al quida?

what do you think the chances are you are literally 2 degrees away from a terrorist?

you early adopters are like the cavemen who tried the new berries. i’m watching you to find out what happens.\

i want to delete my facebook account because there are people adding me as a friend that i don’t want the world to confuse as an actual friend.

i now report all linkedin emails as spam. the only thing linked in ever sends me is spam.

i get requests to link into people i’ve never heard of. and i get 3 reminder emails every time i try to ignore it, so it’s in fact 3x worse than spam.

i am hiding my connections list on linkedin.

recruiters have been able to use me to get to my network without my consent and without going through reasonable channels. i was a zombie social spam node.

facebook is very scary to me. you tell facebook about your personal relationships, and facebook will notify all of your friends when you break up with your girlfriend. all your friends at once. you no longer are empowered to pick and choose how you communicate sensitive information. social networking is like 21st centry nudism.

it all hangs out where everybody can see.


IF NOBODY HEARS YOU

In my opinion my friend has a very good point here and there. He speaks with force and conviction. Shows his passion well. Problem is, of course, I’m the only person that hears his “voice”. And I’ve heard the general concept before. He does continue to come up with relevant points, but I expect that.

That which he is against is that which can make his point heard by more people, who might qualify and maybe modify his point of view. A catch-22 situation. What to do?

If anyone reads this, I’ll let comments speak for themselves.

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