Don't people watch foreign language films?
The following occurred at twenty-three hundred hours, nine hundred thirty highway eighty-one, east McDonough, Georgia.
I picked up
2046 at Blockbuster and the counter chick asked me what language it's in.
"Chinese," I reply.
"You speak Chinese?" she says, astonished and curious.
"No," I laugh. "I'll be watching it with subtitles."
Beware of FREE
Ian Murdock wrote about
his love for GMail. I found this highly strange and more than a little ironic: The creator of
Debian, the GNU/Linux distribution most blessed by the FSF, is using and promoting an application which is not only closed-source but hosted on foreign servers.
IOW, Ian has no control over this product. If Google wiped all of his data, where would he be? If Google folded, closed the service, sold it, changed it's Terms of Service (TOS)...what recourse would he have? He even recognizes that Google may disable the service if he uses it in ways they don't like but he thinks are legitimate.
One of the many distinctions made in F/OSS is between "free as in beer" and "free as in speech". Unless you own the box, how much can you own what's in the box?
Too often we're lured by "free" online services without considering the incidental costs or the cost of loss--once you've begun to
rely on these "free" services, what is the cost if you lose it? If you have an account with a social networking site/group, what would it cost you if that account was shut down without notice? If the only email people had was your "free" one that was suddenly dropped, what is the cost to
YOU? Numerous vendors moved many of their services to pay products (even if they continued "free" versions with fewer features) or discontinued them entirely because they weren't worth the cost of operating. Ian uses Google's paid Premier Edition but that only gives him more features, not transparency. Even with a commercial product you have very little recourse other than a lawsuit which may garner you money but not what was lost. Most services have a clause that they owe you no more than you've paid them.
These business practices is one reason F/OSS was developed; not only as an option but an antithesis.
Hey, I'm writing this using a "free" service. If I lost it...I'd shrug and move on. I should keep backups of my posts (quite easy and permitted under the TOS) but otherwise I'm fine: Only a few friends read it and I use it more as a personal journal than a community resource. The loss of this wouldn't impact my business or personal life.
We need to see these products as what they are--provided without charge but not without cost.
Tapestries
Is life just a constant stream of badly timed encounters? Moments that slip in while we're unprepared--however much we might want them, they arrive inconveniently and against our plans and expectations?
We often hear the question, "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" How much can we know about our future, even where we'll be tomorrow? I often muse about how much humanity ascribes to planning and effort that is entirely timing, the
click that happens in an instant because of how we feel at
that exact moment. How much of our lives is entirely dependent upon the seemingly small things that build upon themselves, bricks in our foundation? Infinitely minute trajectory changes, nudges to our character, until who we are is not who we intended to become. For better or for worse.
The truth: Life
is a constant stream of badly timed encounters. Things don't go according to planning and they deviate from our hard efforts. Sliding doors play as great of a role and it's our responsibility to accept these events and move forward, to do the best that we can with what opportunity has presented us. We cannot change who we are today, only who we will be tomorrow. Roads we see will soon be hidden from view, if not bulldozed completely.
We are never ready for all that comes at us. So many people strive for security and stability and safety within predictability and plotting; it can't be obtained without the price of maturity through the unknown. Those who only experience those things which they are prepared for never grow, never expand their horizons. They ignore anything which they're unprepared for; for them, it doesn't exist. We grow by being challenged. Change is inevitable; growth is not.
The lesson is not to plan, or at least not over-plan, and to remove the rigity from our lives and enjoy the trip. If we cannot prepare for the unexpected, we should train ourselves to spot the rabbit hole and look inside. Perhaps we get bitten on the nose by a pissed off rabbit; perhaps we find adventures in wonderland. Appreciate the unplanned surprises--they are here
now and only
now. Life is a tapestry of events woven together until the beauty exists in the whole, not the individual threads.
News Flash About Weight Loss
There are
no shortcuts.
Put down the 3/4lbs. burger and the Biggie fries and eat a salad. Then, walk your happy, fat ass to the end of the parking lot where you locked your bicycle.
