Category Archives: Internet

lost opportunities

February 14, 2014 6:51 AM , 2 Comments ,

I know what you say when an idea is so obvious that you’re stunned that you didn’t implement it.

“Why didn’t I think of that?”.  

But what do you say when you did have that idea and had to watch it take off without you due to other people’s short-sighted vision?

Let’s go back to the mid to late 90s.  I’m working at a small consultancy that mainly did support work for the big oil companies.  We used satellite images to create geological maps for exploration projects overseas.  But satellite maps have various other applications such as agriculture, forestry, and city planning.  My supervisor was interested in the last.  He had contacts up in the city planning department and he had an idea.

We could use satellite images and the power of GIS (geographic information systems) to create online maps that would be used to catalog every feature on every property that the city owned and be able to serve it up over the web.  We decided on a small park just south of downtown as our pilot project.

Emancipation park is a large pretty park with baseball fields, a pool, and plenty of green space.  My supervisor and I spent an entire day with GPS units, a primitive digital camera, and lots of notepads to take measurements and record everything about the park.

Back at the office we took a satellite image and put it into the GIS and laboriously outlined the baseball fields, the pool, the playground, the sidewalks, the buildings, in short everything about the park.  Next we coded every feature we could think of and made large cross referenced databases.

Now came the bit that was exclusively my own.  I was no web designer or guru but I was a good second rater and had hand coded and designed the company website.  I added the satellite image of the map and coded regions inside the image to correspond to various web pages that would display information about various features in the park.  Everything from land use statistics to pictures to contact numbers.  Theoretically, a park superintendent could call up every piece of information he needed online.  My supervisor and I played with the website for hours, trying every feature and adding improvements here and there.  We amazed ourselves at how well it worked.

We loaded it onto a laptop and took it to a meeting with the Houston parks official my supervisor knew.  We explained the idea thoroughly and let him play with the website on the laptop.  He kept on going back to the statistics page and exclaimed “this is exactly what I need”

We thought we had him sold.  But as it turned out he was referring to the statistics.  He said that they were always looking for statistics to turn over to city council.  What he wanted was a nice thick binder of data to present to the council for budget time.  As for the website?  No thanks.  Too fancy and complicated for him.  It would never catch on he said.

So we had a very long and quiet drive back to the office.  The company owner said it had been a waste of time to try this project and we shelved it and went back to serving only oil customers.

But I kept at it.  I would tweak and poke at it in my spare time as best as I could without any formal coding education and without the benefit of the expensive GIS programs.

2002.  The company had folded and I was out on my own, trying to scare up consultancy work here and there.  I had secured a copy of the website we had made and got permission to use it as my own.  I pleaded and begged and got another appointment at the planning department and presented the website.  Again it fell flat.  But for different reasons this time.  The official I met typed in his own website and brought up the planning department’s new internal web-based site.

Time had not only caught up but passed me by.  It was all that we had made and more.

Today you can pull out any smartphone or tablet and bring up detailed maps that will find pizza places near you, calculate routes to get where you need to go, and even call ahead to make reservations.

I don’t claim to be the originator of any of these.  Many companies and individuals were working along parallel lines back in the 90’s.  But I do have to wonder what we could have accomplished if we had persisted a little longer or if we could have made that first sale.

Posted in: business, ideas, internet

The new experts

January 25, 2014 7:21 AM , 1 Comment ,

I was part of the last generation to rely exclusively on libraries and books for research.  Back in college I would do reports looking up books and theses on an old computer catalog (or sometimes on paper catalogs) and then hunt them down on the various floors of Evans Library.

Evans became like a second home to me.  if I wasn’t in class or at home that’s where I could usually be found.  Despite the fact that the library staff was constantly replacing books I would always seem to end up looking for that one book that was never where it was supposed to be.  If I found the book I would then be hunched over a copier making copies of the relevant pages and scribbling down bibliographical notes for reports that I would later laboriously type out on an actual typewriter.  After college I didn’t need to do all that much research but the local library was always around if I needed to.

New information sources were becoming available.  Computer disc sets such as Encarta were vying to replace the venerable old Encyclopaedia Britannica as a repository of knowledge.  Truthfully, the couple of times I tried the “free” trials of products like Encarta, I wasn’t impressed.  The articles were usually short little blurbs and never really gave in-depth details or references.  They were very impressive to look at with colorful pictures and even videos but short on hard facts and references.

With the rise of the web a floodgate of information opened up to the general public.  Hypertext linking and search engines simplified the tasks of research.  You could enter some vague terms into a search engine and be transported to a website where people were talking about whatever you wanted.  Sometimes it was a website full of experts, sometimes a website of full of amateurs.  Some educators wrote articles expressing concern about the quality of research that kids did for reports using the internet.

The biggest culprit in educator’s minds was Wikipedia.  Started as an online collaborative effort to provide an online encyclopedia to anyone about anything, Wikipedia allowed any person to come in and enter and edit articles without regard to their qualifications.  This set off a panic in the educational community as they saw what they regarded as amateurs expressing opinions on matters that should be best left to properly qualified and degreed experts.  They urged kids not to eschew the traditional library and return to books as the one and only source of knowledge.

In truth there was some cause for concern in the early days.  Some contributors wrote articles based off pure opinion and conjecture.  Sometimes online vandals would come in and wreck pages just for fun.  Some groups would blank out pages for political or other reasons.

Wikipedia as any organization went through several trial and error periods until it finally began a more comprehensive and meticulous editing process.  Articles are no longer left up to single individuals and roving editors patrol the entries constantly to monitor the quality of the articles.

In addition entries now provide (almost demand) references to source materials be included in the articles for readers to do their own follow-up research.

The error rate has dropped significantly and several studies now show it to be on par with more traditional encyclopedias.

So does this mean the death of the traditional brick and mortar library and the printed word as the repository of expert research?  Possibly, but not for a generation or two.

Books have built up a type of cultural inertia in the minds of the general public.  Until the last few decades it has been a major undertaking to publish books.  The thinking was that if the publishers were willing to invest so many resources into a hardbound book then they must be very confident in the accuracy of the contents.

Nowadays wood pulp and ink are cheap and the major component of book costs is transporting them from the printers to the point of sale and paying the authors.

This perception that books are the only trustworthy source of knowledge is changing and more and more people are turning to online sources of information as dependable fonts of data.  I would hazard to guess that within 100 years that the only books that you could buy would be presentation pieces bound in leather and custom-made to order.

Could this trend to store information online only be dangerous?  Very much so!  I don’t have to touch upon Orwell’s “memory hole” or the great Chinese firewall to point out how information can be erased or restricted from a culture’s collective mind.  I think most people are aware of this.

However we have to be more cognizant of the fact that knowledge is power and that therefore those that can control or steer the distribution of that power are themselves powerful.  We must be ever vigilant that information is not tampered with, manipulated, fettered, or restricted to a privileged few and that it can be accessed by all in its purest and raw form.

At least for now that knowledge has a safe place to rest on the pages of the printed book.

Posted in: books, computers, education, internet, school, technology

Social network pluses and minuses

December 18, 2013 9:26 PM , 1 Comment ,

So there I am sitting in the Commons lobby at Texas A&M in 1989.  My friend Lynn, a computer major, says “come on bill, let’s go check out the new VAX terminals”.  They had just installed a new computing center in the commons lobby for students to use the shared VAX terminals on campus.

Being a freshman I had no clue what to do but Lynn set up my account and pointed me to the talk function.  Soon I was chatting away with strangers from other universities around the country and around the world.  This was my first exposure to the social side of the internet.

This was quickly followed up by the USENET newsgroups.  Basically forums on the early internet where people talked about particular subjects.  Over time I developed friends and enemies on these groups.  Discussions became quite heated and on more than one occasion I would get carried away.  These were the legendary flame wars of the 1990s.  The passion of youth I suppose.

Years passed and the World Wide Web arose.  Social media got more sophisticated with the advent of the chat room.  Dozens and sometimes hundreds of people chatting at once, making little cliques, building friendships, just hanging out together.  In time advertisers learned about these and over time began to infiltrate bots into the rooms.  These were automated programs posing as real humans meant to advertise and sell things.  These along with the ever-present cyber bullies spelled the end of the chat rooms.

Along came the MMO.  the Massively Multiplayer Online game.  Now you not only had a name tag you had a body as well and a shared activity.  We lived lifetimes online.  We also died together and we built up close bonds.  But over time people drifted off and my time on those came to an end.

And now comes social media fully matured and developed in the form of Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

A few things I’ve noticed during all my travels online:

  • All of these communities have a beginning, middle, and end.
  • While we are in those communities we can’t fathom ever leaving
  • The end comes abruptly and almost unexpectedly
  • When it’s time to go, it’s time to go.

I don’t know if it’s time to leave these current communities.  I will be totally honest.  I don’t get Twitter.  I’ve tried for a year and it just doesn’t click with me.  To me it’s a technology that’s at least 5 years old and very limiting.  Facebook I understand and enjoy more.  It’s pretty well-developed and has many features.  Google+…..  I looked at once and left.  I don’t doubt it’s well done but it came too late to the party.  The others rule the social media roost.

Yet, more and more often I am coming down with social media fatigue and a feeling of deja vu as if I’m just repeating the same things over and over again.  I’ve explored all aspects of these sites and I don’t see anything new to capture my attention.

It’s gotten to the point that on a whim I looked up the steps for erasing my profiles on these social media sites.  So far I don’t have any plans to carry this out but I do think that it’s telling that I looked into this.

I don’t yet see the next big thing on the net, though I don’t doubt that it’s coming.  I will probably hop on when it does arrive.  Or maybe I will go totally offline and go back to living a life without the net.

I am part of the last generation that started life in the analog world and had to adapt to life in the digital age.  The Millennials that came after me have no clue about life without the video monitor or the computer.  This is their world and it’s the world of the generations to come.

Maybe it’s time to go back to the old analog world.  After all, I lived there once before and I can do it again.

Posted in: internet, pop culture, relationships, social networks

Online lives – Everquest

September 9, 2013 8:41 PM , Leave a Comment ,

So there we “were”.  My girlfriend and I doing the same old thing on a Friday night.  Hanging out in greater faydark killing orcs in Everquest.  We had 2 low-level players and weren’t really advancing in the game.  She got bored (as she often did) and suggested we make human characters.

We decided on Freeport as our home city and she made a Bard and I made a Cleric.  I figured these characters would last maybe a week before she got bored and deleted the new character (I was right in her case).  I was playing and watching Adult swim on the cartoon network at the same time and the “Brack show” was on.  So I called my new character Brackie since I figured this was going to be a short-term character and that the name wouldn’t be important.

As I had some money and some experience I was able to outfit the new character better than most and he was soon zooming up the levels.  What’s more I found that healers were in wide demand.  In a game that’s very proactive and promotes aggressive playing, players that are willing to sit back and play support roles are extremely sought after.  I could get into any group I wanted and I soon was accepted into a guild (a player club).

I was soon raiding.  Raids are large encounters where sometimes as many as 72 people gather together to do a multi hour adventure.  These raids require special tactics and planning.  I was the senior most healer in the guild and got assigned the task of developing our healing strategies.  I turned to the healing chain.

In the ultimate encounter of a raid the toughest meanest fighter takes on the boss monster.  All the other warriors take up supporting roles while the healers in the raid form the chain.  A single healer would be overwhelmed by the encounter but a whole host of healers working in concert could sustain that one lone fighter.  So I organized our chain of healers.  One healer would heal and then the next and the next.  We kept the chain going on a nice steady pace.  Casting spells with machine like precision.  Usually it might last 5 or 10 minutes.  One encounter lasted a full hour.  Over time we got to be pretty good at this and we attracted players due to our reputation.

Still amazes me how much time and effort I invested into all of this.  How involved the community was in the whole game.  I mean we had online worldwide rankings!  Items in the game (computer files) could be sold in the real world for real world money.  People would dress up as their characters.  We had our own language of online terms that we could use easily and freely with each other.

Eventually all good things come to an end.  That character that I was going to throw away in a week lasted me nearly five years.  I had reached the ultimate level (at that time) that was allowed in the game.  His equipment was the best and we had beaten all the boss monsters available.  New expansions were coming out and new content and adventures but I felt that I had accomplished what I set out to do with that character.

Reluctantly I pulled the plug on that chapter of my online life.  I had a wonderful time but I felt that I had new places to visit and new experiences to be explored.

Posted in: games, hobbies, internet

Social Networks, social responsibility, so what

August 26, 2013 8:43 PM , Leave a Comment ,

This last week the main topics that everyone discussed were Ben Affleck landing the role of Batman in an upcoming movie and the Miley Cyrus performance at the video music awards.

Neither topic really affects me in any way and normally I would not even comment on them except to make a joke or two here and there.

What was of interest to me were some of the reactions to the discussions.  Some folks were genuinely put off by everyone being somewhat obsessed by these events while other things such as the chemical gas attack in Syria get little to no regard by the average tweeter or facebooker.

I suppose some folks see social networks as a way to affect change and make the world a better place.  Laudable in its own way but let’s take a hard look at what we’re dealing with here.  These are networks that were made to get people chatting on their off time, to connect to friends, to allow groups to share common interests together despite geographical distance, and of course to make money.  Granted that these networks have considerable political and social interest groups in them but it’s really not their main function.

I suppose that people in this country are looking for an “Arab Spring” or “Iranian election” moment where people in other countries used these networks to organize and affect change in their regions.

Really I don’t see that happening here in the US.  In those regions news and information is so heavily restricted that the advent of these networks were very welcome and embraced enthusiastically.  Finally you could get unfiltered news and in real-time,

We on the other hand have such a cacophony of information screaming and yelling at us from so many different directions that no additional prodding from a social network will help that much.  What we need are more filters not more news sources.

You can argue that these networks have a responsibility almost akin to that of a public utility to keep the greater good in mind.  I would argue that we as individuals have that responsibility.  We all need to decide thoughtfully what we will and won’t listen to.

After all, just because they talk about inane subjects doesn’t mean you need to listen.

 

Posted in: internet, social networks , Tagged: , , ,

online and offline integration

August 22, 2013 8:32 PM , Leave a Comment ,

Recently I had to make some major upgrades technology wise.  Perhaps as a coincidence or perhaps by pattern in the last year I’ve gotten a tablet, a new phone, a new desktop, and a new laptop.  Things have either worn out or have become almost obsolescent.

Quite a bit of money involved.  But more than that the latest round of hardware and software improvements make me more aware of how integrated our online existence is becoming and how this is beginning to make our offline life also integrated and even dependent on who we are online.

Some examples?  As I run Android devices I am tied into the Google play website for an applications.  These depend on payments through Google through an account I have.  I can in turn buy or pay for anything online with this and have.  Any application I buy is immediately available to all the other Android devices.  I keep only a few hundred dollars in this account but that is quickly disappearing so I may have to add more or tie in my main account.

Google is also getting into televisions as well and soon if I choose I could buy movies off a Google device plugged to the side of the TV.  I may also soon be able to use my Google account offline for food or services.

Another good example is the Microsoft Office package.  Once I had to buy physical disks, now it is available by download and I have to pay for it online.

Of course all of these transactions leave a digital paper trail.  No matter how innocuous or innocent that trail is, it is still something that I don’t want being recorded.

It is so seductive to fall into that trap isn’t it?  You can argue that it will just make my life easier but I argue that it makes me artificially dependent on a service that could be pulled at any moment.

I am very aware of this and I use the service sparingly as possible.  It argues that it will make my life easier but really it may end up making my life more complicated.

 

Posted in: internet, technology

My online presence

July 31, 2013 6:20 PM , Leave a Comment ,

Have you ever Googled your name?  Or used Bing or Yahoo! to search for them?  (Note I refuse to use Bing and Yahoo! as verbs.)

I have been going over my online presence and it has blossomed in the last few years.  From about 36 unique results back in 2010 to over 800 results in 2013. The results are pretty similar in all the search engines.  Mainly it brings up my Facebook account, this blog, my Twitter handle, my Google+ account (which I pretty much abandoned on the first day of use) and some other random pages where my name pops up on the first few pages.

But a little digging brings up stuff that is more intrusive.  My address, various emails I have had in the past and present, my phone numbers through the years, the value of my house.  Things I don’t necessarily want random strangers to know.  Services do exist to purge some of these records but some things simply will not erase.

No doubt I have to exercise more care online with regards to what I release to the general public.  I already take some steps in this regard.  For instance I heavily restrict my Facebook account (my primary social network) to friends only.  On secondary service accounts such as Photobucket I use pseudonyms as much as I can and again I use the privacy controls as best as possible.

So why police your online presence?  Several types of people benefit from what you put out there.  Let’s go from least to most dangerous and just for argument’s sake let’s say I was a neophyte user that loves to fill out online forms, never uses privacy options, and “likes” or “favorites” everything he sees.  Let’s call this user neo-bill

Marketers

The internet is such a blessing to people in advertising and marketing.  So much chewy and yummy data out there.  What can we learn about neo-bill?

Running some cursory checks we can learn his age range, we can learn his height and weight, his ethnicity, his food and drink preferences, what he thinks is a good song, his income bracket, and education level.  We can entice him with 10% coupons to fill out forms, free demo songs to try out products.  We can draw him in to fill out credit applications for “free items” and learn his phone number, address, his social security number and then learn about his credit score.  In short we can build up a complete preferences library of this individual.  You can then catalog and tag this specimen and follow him through his life and see how his preferences change.

Human Resource managers

it’s a picnic for these folks too.  Everything that is readily available is out there for them to see.  In some cases even stuff not readily available.  Some HR people are demanding access to your online accounts to see what you like or post.  If you want that job, you have to give up your privacy.

Criminals

Well I mentioned credit applications above.  Criminals don’t even need to use trickery.  Over the last few years there have been major data breaches at well-respected credit card and store card companies that store private information.  Thefts have included not only account numbers but personal information of users that would allow thieves to set up secondary accounts.  The only real defense against this is the anonymity of the herd.  You’re only safe because there are so many of you out there to choose from that the wolves haven’t gotten to you yet.

Aide from this you get the older style con jobs like infecting your computer and then extorting a small amount of money to release your computer.  You have the ancient but puzzlingly still effective “Nigerian prince” scams that target older computer users.

Lastly you have worm programs that turn your computer into a zombie being directed by someone else to do their bidding and commit crimes.

The government

When I started out on the net nearly 25 years ago it was an empty an open void.  The presence of the government was almost unknown at the time and pretty much everyone had an “anything goes” attitude.

Slowly over time we have sanitized and cleaned up the net and those of us that complained about privacy issues or overregulation were shouted down or ridiculed as paranoids.  Then 9/11 hit and all the arguments were shelved in favor of security concerns.

Monitoring of everything you say or post on the net is here to stay.  Massive facilities around the world (including the US) now record for all time everything you put in the net.  Including those private emails. texts. etc, etc.

For most folks it doesn’t mean much.  They see it as the price to pay for fighting terrorists.  From my perspective I find it incredible that a few thousand terrorists can force the major governments of the world to hold their own populations hostage just to keep them safe.  What is more incredible is that almost nobody cares about the potential abuse of power.

So what can we do?  Live off the net?  Hardly possible for those of us in the information and service industry.  All I can do for now is limit what I release into the public sphere, watch and edit what I do release, make myself as small a target as possible, and hope for the day I can retire and get myself off the digital world.  I have to remind myself that I once lived off the net for a good long time.  It’s still possible my friends, it’s still possible.

Posted in: internet

Persistent Bastards

July 9, 2013 6:48 PM , Leave a Comment ,

It was raining blood again.  Not uncommon on the plane of fear but it just made everyone’s mood gloomier.

Here we were again on our third attempt at Cazic Thule, the lord of the plane of fear.  Our guild leaders had to practically get on their knees to beg the raiding council on our Everquest server for this opportunity.  The raid council was a group that controlled what guilds went where for special encounters like this.  They scheduled you and denied you as they saw fit.  In essence they ran the server.  Plane of fear was an older raid.  The top guilds had moved on to newer, bigger and better raids.  Yet they refused to relinquish any control.  They were adamant that any guild that failed a raid on three separate dates would be banned from raiding anymore.

Our little guild (only about 30 members) had attempted this raid twice before and had failed miserably both times and it looked like this was going no better.  We had already been wiped out twice tonight and everyone was getting tired.  The basic problem was that we were not causing sufficient damage.  None of our guildies were high level or had special equipment.  Whatever combination or tactic we tried just wasn’t working.

We had too many healers that night so I was running on a friend’s account and using her enchanter.  Our clerics and healers sounded out a warning.  They were running low on magic and could not keep up their healing and protection.  We had to prepare.  This meant that non essential guild mates would camp, or log out.  They would wait offline for five or so minutes and then collect the bodies of those that had stayed behind fighting.  The fighting would be over in less than a minute and everyone left behind would be massacred.  The five minute rule was just to make sure no monsters hung around waiting for people to come back in.  The survivors would then resurrect and try again.

Only in this case it didn’t look likely that there would be another attempt.  It was late, everyone was despondent, just a general feeling of futility all around.  We would fail our third attempt.  We would be banned from all the higher level content.  We would be a disgraced guild.  Might as well quit the game.

I logged out as ordered and waited watching the clock on the monitor.  1 minute, despodent, 2 minutes, angry, 3 minutes….  Hell with it, going back in and going to go out fighting.

The loading screen was exceptionally slow.  Explosions and noises all around me.  I walked into the middle of a battlefield.  They were still fighting!  Someone was particularly stubborn or angry or both but they had held on.  I threw myself into the fight.

Other guildies started logging back in.  Apparently I wasn’t the only one disgusted at the thought of quitting the fight.  If it was possible for a computer generated character to look nonplussed then that described Cazic Thule at that moment.  The 30 foot tall god of fear seemed immobile and didn’t know what to do.  This wasn’t going according to script.

Total confusion.  Healers and magicians, out of magic, going in and attacking with staves, daggers, or fists.  A tooth and nail fight.  No strategy, no tactics, just do more damage.  We counted off the percentages, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1….A small earth shattering thud as Cazic finally fell.

After raid chores.  resting up the healers and resurrecting the dead, policing up loot and distribution of the same.  Taking pictures atop the giant god’s carcass.  Proof of our victory.

Not the biggest victory in the world, not even in the make believe world of Everquest, it hardly got a notice in the raid council.  But we had done it.  No one that had been in that raid that night had logged out without a feeling of achievement.

That was the turning point for our guild.  We then went through a year long tear through the higher level raids.  Ripping apart enemy after enemy with a furious energy born from that desperate night’s battle.  We became more professional, and if not revered well at least respected.  I would eventually become top healer in the guild and was ranked (for a short time) as one of the better healers on the server.

A small victory yes but something that I still remember fondly.  What do I take away from it to the real world picture?  Mainly that I keep trying.  No matter how hopeless, pointless, and futile the fight is.  I just don’t quit.  I’ve written before that I sometimes need to know when to quit but really, this is the only real strength I have.

Maybe I should embrace that.

Posted in: games, internet

must like cats

June 7, 2013 1:52 PM , Leave a Comment ,

Have you ever used online dating?  I haven’t been on a dating website in awhile.

My profile is still on a couple of sites but I never check on them and over the years even the automated emails from the sites have stopped coming.

None of the sites were ever satisfactory.  What I found was that these sites mainly tended to boil down the matching experience to what people looked like on their profiles and that most people there were on the site to score some quick dates.

People come on the sites and have the most extremely rigid requirements for a partner.  Must be so tall, weigh no more than this, like nutella but not peanut butter, like cats and hate dogs, and so on.

I suppose that people have a faith in technology that tells them that if it’s being handled by computer then there must be a match for them somewhere because in its own way technology can do anything.

But it really can’t.  These sites use slightly different versions of the same matching programs and the only difference might be in the database pool that they have to draw upon.

Worst of all are the matching functions that tend to match better looking people together.  Facial recognition software does this in the background and is based on some standards that only the programmers know and suggests people to talk to based on looks.

The last site I tried was about four years ago.  I gave it about six month till I realized it was the same experience as the others.  However this site had a blogging function and a forum function where people could meet and chat away on any subject.

I quit actively looking for dates but couldn’t get enough of the forums and the blogs which were much more interesting to read.  As a dating site it was unsatisfactory, as a source of friends and online companions it was great.  Like all good things though people drifted off the site.  I still maintain contact with several of them through Facebook though.

Have you ever tried these sites?  What was your experience?

Posted in: internet, relationships

cross-pollination

May 20, 2013 1:16 AM , 1 Comment ,

Earlier this year I was driving around running some errands and I had the car radio tuned to NPR.  A lecture had just begun.  I was just about to my destination but I kept on driving because the topic was so interesting.  I soon put on another 20 miles aimlessly driving around and listening to the lecture for the next hour.

Mainly it dealt with the rise of the modern age and how it been so shocking when it arrived in 1913.

One of the topics covered in the lecture was the cross-pollination of many different fields and how they inspired or altered one another to create new ideas and new concepts.

Artists read evolutionary theory and it inspired them to try out different styles of painting, music, and dance.  Doctors looked at the art and started thinking about mental illness and conditions in a different ways.  Scientists consulting artists and vice versa.  Architects, engineers, political theorists.  So many different fields intersecting, altering, and redefining themselves.

Now I look at our contemporary world (saying modern world would not be technically correct).  We have got to be the most interconnected people in history.  Yet we do so little with it.  Sure there are online groups for everything and anything you care to mention but they’re so insular sometimes.  They have their own rules, their own interests, own languages and coming in as an outsider is not always easy.

TED talks you say?  The TED talks are a series of global conferences that attempt to bring attention to new ideas and provide a platform for people with new ideas to spread those ideas.  If you have a day or two to spare, look them up on YouTube.

It’s a noble effort but I have seen in the last years that the TED talks are moving in the direction of becoming merely entertainment opportunities for the geeky.

Real cross-pollination happens when people from diverse disciplines come together without expectations, without agendas, and with an open mind ready to listen to one another.

An evening spent in a cafe just talking.  Gathering round a fireplace and chatting with friends with a cup of tea.  Being in the backyard with a couple cold ones and letting the late afternoon turn to early evening.

Food and beverage seem to play a role in the creative process.  As I recall Compaq computers was founded by two engineers sitting down at the House of Pies

Perhaps it’s because the activity of sharing a meal or a drink makes the mind a little more relaxed and receptive.  You may think to yourself that no matter what else happens you will at least get some food or drink out of the process.

I try to keep up with people from different walks of life.  From different perspectives.  Sometimes I don’t like what I hear, many times I don’t understand.  But I am always willing to listen

Posted in: food and drink, internet, talking, technology