Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Principle #1 - Give Love Freely
May 22, 2009

Yesterday, I announced I was going to list a few of my personal principles. This is the first. This is a new one for me, and I think it's perhaps the hardest principle of the lot for me to follow. The idea seems pretty obvious, but I think - as with all these principles, and with most things from which you can derive wisdom - there are undertones and tributaries that make it complex.

How did I discover this rule? It's an odd story, as you'll likely discover as I tell the story of each of these rules.

Owen's Unrefined Principles
May 21, 2009
principles

It would be unfortunate to have to be dead before my thoughts on life would be taken "seriously", even if that's the usual way you come to be aware of people like Randy Pausch. Since I've been thinking about this more lately - not the dieing part, but the passing on of wisdom even if it's not quite ripe - I thought I would get a head start.

As it turns out, there are a few "rules" that I follow to help get through my day-to-day existence. I talk about some of them with reasonable frequency. Others are fairly new, but I can see a pattern of positivity in my historically ignorant application of them -- and negativity when I failed to. Rules like these are sometimes obvious, but many of these feel ridiculous sometimes. Some of the rules I know and don't talk about because I know without a thorough explanation they'd either not make any sense or make people upset.

My New Bike
May 18, 2009

I’ve got a backlog of stuff to talk about from last week’s legendary “retarded week”, and I figured I’d kick this off with the bike news.

We decided to get Riley a real bike with pedals last week. He’s been scooting around on this thing called a “Runner”, which is a two-wheeler, but has no pedals. He can balance himself just fine on it, and he’s outgrown it so it was time for a new two-wheeler with pedals.

Web Three Oh
May 14, 2009

I had an epiphany over the past month, one in an area where no person should spend much time dwelling or prognosticating. It happened after looking at the demo videos for the Pre again, while skimming through Windows Live looking for their calendar.

I don’t even really know what Web 2.0 was about. Presumably, this arbitrary numbering system is a kind of global consensus of paradigm shift. In the case of 2.0, I perceive it as the change from static, posted state change web content, to applications that run in the browser, powered mostly by degradable Ajax. Maybe that’s wrong, but for the sake of our conversation, consider that the major version number is the indicator of paradigm shift.

International (Post)Man of Mystery
May 12, 2009

I recently had the opportunity to indulge in my impish fantasies of being an international importer/exporter. I’ve always thought that it would be neat to have a network of folks, connected via the internet, that would export specific local goodies to other countries to make them available faster in the destination country. Japanese animation comes to mind specifically.

Anyway, I was sending a couple of toys to Norway, and I found myself at the post office. As it turns out, the only way to avoid spending more than $40 on shipping from the US to Norway is to use first class mail. And when you’re using first class mail, you cannot buy postage online and print it like you can with priority or express mail, even though it’s pretty much flat rate for a box under certain dimensions and weight. No, you must go to the post office.