Hello, please hold
By now we're all used to the fun of automated phone systems and waiting on hold for "the next available associate", but I was pretty surprised a few minutes ago when I received a phone call, and on answering the unknown number was greeted by a voice telling me all associates are busy.
Now seriously, what the hell? Who calls you up and puts you on hold? I didn't wait to find out and instead hung up the phone. Clearly if enough people are willing to be called in the middle of the day and placed on hold to then wait for someone to explain why they were called, more companies will do it. I'm irritated enough as it is by the calls where I say "Hello, this is Matt" only to hear a long pause on the other end, followed by "Hi, can I please speak to Matthew?". We will only be subjected to this if it works, if we put up with it. I, as a consumer, will not tolerate it, and I urge others to do the same. If some faceless corporation needs to get a hold of me, they can get someone on the other end of the line when they call me.
Influence
I've been thinking a lot recently about influencing people. For a long time I've held a somewhat laissez faire attitude that was equal parts live and let live and a belief that people have reasons for the things they believe. Somehow it isn't my right to try to change the way other people think. That I have my opinion and they have theirs, and that's as it should be. This concept has driven a lot of the way I interact with people, where I express my opinion and give my reasons for thinking, then listen to the other persons opinion for anything that is new information that I haven't factored into my perspective. My assumption is that others take a similar tack, though ultimately it's up to them.
However, having held this attitude for many years, I'm coming to a realization that if everyone took this stance perhaps the world would be fine, but many people don't. There are many people in positions both significant and not that influence those around them, that inspire in other people a desire to hold a belief. Sometimes this can be a powerful force for good, and other times that motivation can lead to fear mongering and manipulation. The media makes a lot of effort to appear unbiased while most elements are pushing a particular agenda. People gravitate to media that reinforces their beliefs and then guides those people to hold other beliefs, be it left wing or right wing.
I see the difference that it makes when you have people in positions of leadership that inspire others. I've seen how that can bring about incredible change, for good or ill. What gives these people the mandate or the right to direct the forces of public perception or bring about social change? The answer is that nothing does. They are in a position of influence because of their ability to influence. It is a reinforcing system that elevates to the top not those that make the best decisions, but those that can make the case for their decisions. When you look back at presidential candidates that didn't make it, at a teacher that bored you, a manager that didn't make you happy to come to work, or anyone in authority that you didn't listen to, didn't believe in, and didn't care about, they all failed to inspire. Perhaps they inspired some, but not enough to make a difference. Maybe they even got close, but someone else ultimately made a strong enough case against them.
What is the difference between a leader that lays out broad plans and everyone says 'yeah, right' and one that lays out a vision that everyone says 'let's get started'? It's not the words they use and it isn't the idea they have, though those are certainly factors. Some people seem to have a knack for being inspirational, others are cliched and trite, still others are focused on the wrong things.
There's a saying that you see on bumper stickers and in other equally banal places. It says "Be the change you want to see in the world". I like to think that the way I live my life reflects a lot of the attitudes and behaviors I'd like to see in others, that the way I treat other people and the way that I conduct my business is honest and fair. I think I give people the benefit of the doubt and look for the good in others, that I have integrity and good judgement. What I'm starting to realize is that it isn't enough. What I'm doing will not bring about change in others, and it won't lead to the world I want to see.
There are so many forces at work trying to pull people down, to make them see evil in others that isn't there, and to divide us along every line imaginable. All around the world are those that profit from fomenting discontent, those look down on their fellow man as if they have done anything to distinguish themselves, and those that prey on ignorance and beat back against progress with fervor and lies.
We all have our own lives, our own sphere of interest, and enough troubles and trials to fill our days. How many days will go by before you look back and wonder what happened, where you could have really made a difference in the world instead of just being a drop of water in the wave. I am thinking now about how I can influence others, about how I can inspire, and whether I can be a leader. I don't know where this road goes, or if it will be swallowed quickly by the world once more, leaving me to again regard others with some degree of indifference, and if they will do the same.
Chronicles of Automotive Entropy
Those that have been reading my Journal have been subjected to my ongoing litany of woes when it comes to my car (and Sarah's). Just this week I've been treated to a bad headlight and today the driver information system added a brake pad warning to the list. Now, brake pads wear out. I understand this, having replaced them on this car before (in October of 2006, actually). It's mostly just the frequency of problems that is getting to me. Allow me to go over the recent past of my car, a 2004 Audi A4 Quattro 1.8T that now has about 85,000 miles on it. If you're already sick of this (believe me, I am) feel free not to read on.
Back in September of last year I bought four new tires. The tires weren't that old, but a combination of two bent rims and the resulting uneven tread wear, as well as a slow leak and a previous flat that both had bulging sidewalls went along with some 75,000 mile maintenance to make a very expensive trip to the dealer. I didn't replace the rims, but put the really bad one on the spare because they wanted to charge me $575 each.
That trip to the dealer came after replacing my windshield because I had cracked it replacing the wiper assembly that had seized up one day. It did not resolve the two power windows that don't work properly due to broken window regulators. Incidentally, the windshield wipers have seized up since replacing the assembly once or twice.
In January I bought the car out of lease because I owed less than it was worth, I was over my miles, and I didn't want to pay for the broken window regulators or the bent rims. I didn't want a car payment so I paid it off with money I had saved. The theory goes that it is a bad idea to finance a depreciating asset. The lack of a car payment was also very appealing after paying so much in repairs on top of four years of fairly high payments. The day after I sent off the check, the car broke down on the way to work not far from home, which wound up being the ignition coils which I replaced along with the spark plugs for good measure.
Not long after this the check engine light returned with a catalytic converter code. I suspect the ignition coil problem may have caused this, given that the manifold was glowing because fuel wasn't burning in the cylinder, but I don't know for certain. The government requires manufacturers to warranty the catalytic converter to 80,000 miles, which I am of course over.
Within a week or so I hit a pot hole and get a flat tire. Of course it can't be patched (bulging sidewall) so I get a new tire and then find that my alignment is out. Before I get the alignment done I have to replace two tail lights that have gone out (a chronic problem). About a week later the aforementioned headlight goes which took me two hours to replace because the screwdriver bit fell into the engine bay, and two days later I get the brake pad warning.
Tonight I ordered two window regulators. The check engine light hasn't come on since I reset it a couple days ago, but I have a healthy degree of skepticism that it's just biding its time. In addition to the brake pads, its due for an oil change. The timing belt and the ribbed belt are also due and the center console armrest lid has a broken latch. I did find the rims online for $180, so I'll probably get those in a couple of months. I may also get some led tail lights to prevent the bulb failure problem.
My frustration through all of this is that I keep expecting it to pass. I keep thinking that I will reach some level of stability, where I don't turn the car on with a sense of apprehension. I really want to work through the problems one by one and think of the car as a collection of parts rather than a whole being with a penchant for failure or a desire to cause me misery. I am trying to regard the situation with patience and evaluate it logically. Unfortunately, while overall the problems I've had are mostly not that expensive so long as I avoid Glenview Audi, cars are very much an emotional experience. Despite my best efforts I am developing hate of the machine; an expectation of frustration and disappointment. That isn't the experience I want to have when I drive, and I don't know if I can get past it, particularly when things keep breaking.
More Than Survival
In one of those hypothetical scenarios where you're a survivor in a post-apocalyptic world (the more likely scenarios where you don't survive are a lot less interesting) and presumably others have survived as well, I started wondering what life would be like. An alternate version involves being thrown back in time or stranded on a deserted island, but we'll go with post-apocalyptic here. The basic premise is that you're in a natural environment, with no supplies, tools, or man-made stuff with some number of other people, say twenty to fifty. I'm fairly sure that we could survive, build shelter, find food and water, etc. The question gets more interesting when you consider what skills you truly possess that would be useful.
For example, in a future without electricity, web programming becomes less important. Even fixing a car is kind of out of the realm. I'm thinking about how to make cloth, work metal, maybe fire pottery. The basic supplies that civilization requires quickly outstrip the utility of rocks and carved wood. Do you know anyone that can smelt ore? I mean, to move past hunting and gathering you're going to want to farm. Stone plows are great and all, but metal would be really handy for a lot of things. With metal you can even start thinking about motors, gears, and electricity again.
Do you know how to make thread from cotton, wool, or hemp? Once you have thread, do you know how to make a loom? Could you find clay, mold it into a bowl, build a kiln and fire it? I think a lot of people possess the basic fire-making, hunting, camping, even boiling water skills, but once you get past that there's a whole level of technologies that in the modern world have been supplanted, industrialized, and in general moved beyond the scope of the average person to recreate. What about recognizing various species of plants for food and medicine? If you're with a completely random set of 20-50 people, how likely is it that you're going to have among you the knowledge necessary to progress beyond the most primitive state of man?
I'm not the sort of person that actually believes that an asteroid is going to wipe out most of the planet and leave me to fend for myself, but it does interest me to think about the skills that our civilization lets slip away. I know that there are people out there that know and understand everything I've mentioned, but how common are they? What are the odds that your little camp of survivors will have a Professor that can make a radio from coconuts? What critical knowledge could you gain right now that would benefit you and your group immensely if you just bothered to look it up? With the scenario being so improbable, is it even worth it to know these things? I don't know that there is any practical use unless you're going to a historical reenactment. I don't really have a point in all of this. It's just one of those random thoughts that this page exists to express.
xkcd
A long while back I heard about xkcd and read a few, but I didn't really get into it. Apparently some time after that evaluation, it got pretty funny and insightful. So I've been catching up on it and I came across one just now that I think is awesome. So, with that said, I'm doing a link and run:
xkcd - Dreams
Nutrition Rating System
Last night Sarah and I got into a discussion about corporate marketing techniques versus personal responsibility. I believe that people are ultimately responsible for the products that they buy and that so long as companies are not misleading or untruthful in their advertising they can use whatever coercive tactics they want. I may find it annoying, and I may protest some of the more intrusive advertisements and some of the tackier product placements or truth-stretching statements, but I have the option of not buying from companies whose methods I disagree with. That extends beyond advertising to any and all of their business practices.
At the same time, I have made a conscious effort in recent years not develop strong emotions about companies, and to reduce the strength of emotion that I have accrued over the years. I feel that strong attachment or hate for a company is a form of anthropomorphism. Every company has multiple employees that each make different decisions that may impact how that company is perceived, and the sum of the experiences a person has from their own interactions, from what they see in advertisements, and from what they read or hear develops into that person's perception of that company. For myself, I want to base my decision to patronize a company or not to be based on that information and those perceptions, while still keeping a healthy detachment in how I think about what really isn't a singular entity. From Walmart to Starbucks to Microsoft and Apple, I'm trying to keep in mind that these are large, complex organizations that shouldn't be summed up with love or hate.
One of the things we talked about is that the most people seem to fall prey to this marketing, thinking that they need or deserve or should want something because of the way it is advertised, because of the consumer culture we live in, and because of perceived social pressures. In a lot of cases, though, the products are genuinely useful and worthwhile. Communities can develop around the experiences with different products, from a bicycle or motorcycle to a Gameboy or an Xbox, and being part of them can be rewarding.
Ultimately I believe the problem isn't companies and their marketing, it's people making often poor decisions with their money. Granted it is their money to spend as they wish, but while I have a fair share of libertarian leanings I feel education is a powerful force for social good. Often people make poor decisions because they don't have all of the information or the information is not presented in a form that is simple to understand. I don't believe for a second that people are too stupid to make good decisions when we've seen generations of people with better spending habits than are prevalent today. Today I happened across a story in the New York Times that underscored that belief.
A chain of grocery stores on the East coast started labelling all of the foods they sell with a nutritional star system. The more stars, the healthier it is for you. They found after doing this for a year that the products people chose shifted toward the healthier items. Some products marketed as health foods got no stars because they contained too much sugar or salt. Other products saw an uptick in sales once the stars showed people that it was a healthier food choice. With our already mandated nutritional labels, how difficult would it be for a standard set of criteria for determining healthiness to be developed by the FDA and a star system implemented for nutritional labels? How would this shift the ingredients that companies choose to put in their foods and the buying habits of Americans? If they could plainly see not by weighing various ingredients or daily diet percentages but by a simple to read and understand overall nutritional rating, it could even have an impact on the obesity of the country.
With all of the signals people get from TV, magazines, and the Internet about gadgets, luxuries, and lifestyle, maybe what we need are some PSAs reminding us to stay grounded, to be a bit more conservative in our spending, and to think about the choices we make every day. On the other hand, our government is just as bad about spending money it doesn't have, and our economy is already precariously upheld by rampant consumer spending. If nothing else, it's food for thought.
Running in Place
I haven't posted many Thoughts recently, and what I have posted has been Site News. I was on a good roll for a while posting new things about every week. Unfortunately the frequency has been on a steady decline for months, and I've identified two reasons. The first and simpler answer is that I haven't seen nearly as many articles or videos or developments that I wanted to share. Maybe there are fewer cool things going on, maybe I'm in a mood to find things less interesting, I'm not sure.
The other is that Thoughts is usually just that: what I'm thinking about. Recently, especially very recently, most of my thinking has been somewhat personal and introspective, and not what I feel like sharing on the Internet. Part of it is that the ideas I have are not fully formed or not worth discussing. Part of it concerns where I'm going personally, professionally, and what my greater direction is, and those are deliberations that need to be private until I actually make decisions.
What I can share is that with my birthday last week, and another year of my life past, I'm feeling introspective in that I want to make sure that what I am doing will get me where I want to be. A large part of that is looking at what I've done in the last five years or so and deciding what has worked and what hasn't, and more importantly, why various things succeeded or failed. Ultimately I know where I want to get, who I want to be, and what I want to do, the struggle is always in how I get there. At this stage I am concluding that I am not currently on a track that will get me there, and that what I have done thus far has not gotten me where I feel I need to be.
With each passing year, getting to where I want to be when I want to be there becomes a steeper hill if I'm not improving my situation as quickly as I want to. The biggest challenge in all of this is striking the balance between living today the way I want to, and preparing for the tomorrow I want. Just as I am not willing to give up enjoying summers and spending weekends with friends and family, I'm not willing to postpone efforts either, and that is causing me to reevaluate some other priorities. Ultimately, one will have to give to the other, and I think the past few years has seen me favor the wrong side.
Ongoing Frustrations
For reasons that are not clear to me, most tasks I undertake seem to be far more complicated than anticipated, or really ought to be. I'm still trying to work out where the problem is, if it is my perception that it happens more often than it does, or if I oversimplify things, or I don't plan well, or I just expect things to work when that isn't reasonable. In any case, much as my previously described adventure with the new router took three trips to Best Buy, my recent brake light replacing ordeal took three trips to Auto Zone.
This started when my car beeped at me that my left brake light was out. My car has had a lot of light bulb problems in the three years I've owned it. On the one hand, light bulbs are a fairly cheap problem to have. On the other, new cars shouldn't habitually lose head lights, turn lights, and tail lights, or have any problems at all for that matter. So after a couple days of it beeping at me every time I turned on the car I went to Auto Zone. I asked the guy for the bulb, he looked it up, picked it off the rack and handed it to me. Since I was not involved in any part of this process, I feel fairly secure in saying this part was not my fault, since ultimately this proved to be the wrong bulb, and the start of my problems.
Perhaps in the future I won't trust the guy at Auto Zone to competently read information from the computer, match it to text on the label, and hand me the correct item. However, once you stop trusting people to have even this level of job mastery, you have to do a lot of double checking, and frankly I'm not sure I'm up to it. In any case, this leads to problem two: upon disassembly of the light, I break the plastic clip on the wire harness. This seems to happen every time I touch the car, so I guess I should be more careful or used to it, but there wasn't any real harm done, so I'll move on.
Problem three was when I made the mistake of thinking the bulb on the bottom in the middle was the brake light. First, it had nothing in common with the bulb from Auto Zone. However, the bulb from Auto Zone also didn't fit into any of the sockets, so that wasn't much of a statement. I opened up the other tail light assembly and found a bulb missing from that socket. Now I start to wonder if the missing bulb was triggering the alarm, even though it is on the right side and the message said left. Before resolution is reached I lock myself out of the house and the garage, and go see a movie.
On the way back we go to Auto Zone a second time, and while I haven't remembered to bring the light bulb I removed, this too proves irrelevant, since the bulb I removed later turned out to be the wrong one. I pick a bulb that looks right (and indeed was nearly identical in shape and visual attributes) and head home. This morning I go out to install it, only to find that no combination of any of the bulbs at my disposal, including the ones I removed can now make either side brake light come on.
I finally drive to Auto Zone a third time after checking Sylvania's web site to determine the bulb I should be getting, with only the center brake light functioning. I purchase two packages that both match the wattage and form factor of the two different bulb types I believe to be involved and replace them in the parking lot. Finally, the warning goes away, and while I can't see the back of the car while pressing the brake pedal, I'm fairly confident the lights are working. I later determine that the bulb I replaced at the outset that was "missing" from the right side, was in fact the rear fog light, of which there is only one.
Maybe I'm exaggerating, but it seems like I run into this type of thing every time I undertake any seemingly simple task. The map in the office, more than one computer upgrade, several car projects, pretty much any software configuration or scripting, and a laundry list of things I've mostly forgotten are all unabashedly difficult, and contain seemingly unforeseeable complications. I'll keep trying, of course. I'm not going to give up trying to do things, but I really wish there was something I could do to prevent it from happening, or at least mitigate the worst of it.
Cleaning
A few years ago Eriq and I started regularly working out twice a week. In addition, my house was the location for our Sunday night movie viewing. As a result of this, I got used to keeping my house picked up and clean. It wasn't especially difficult, time consuming, or even hard to get into the habit. One thing I found about the process, was that cleanliness breeds cleanliness, and messiness breeds messiness. When your home is clean, and there's something out of place, you notice it. When everything is out of place, one more thing hardly seems to matter.
So at some point, as the various social activities moved or changed form or ended altogether, the need to keep the place clean faded, and with the need went the habits. I like having a clean place when people are over; certainly not an uncommon thing. But without the regular impetus to maintain, the tendencies run towards letting dishes and clothes pile up, letting clutter accumulate, and leaving vaccuming undone.
After cleaning like crazy this weekend because the house had gotten to be such a mess, it's now time to return to the maintain habit. We don't have the regular stream of visitors I once had, but hopefully it is still possible to do without that reminder.
The Year
For the last four years, Mike, Eriq and I toasted New Year's in with the promise and decree that this year we will embark upon a plan to improve our lot in life. Each year with slightly more cynicism, we regard the coming year and attempt to determine what avenue we will take that will set us on the road to financial independence. We have not taken these proclamations lightly, and each year in some way we have attempted follow through on our intentions.
That is not to say that we have not improved our respective lots in life in the last four years. Since that first year, we have gotten better jobs, bought homes, and though each time ultimately unsuccessful, we have started no fewer than three companies. We've made multiple websites, learned new skills, and tackled each new idea with hope and optimism. From remodeling Mike's upstairs to long nights of 3-D modeling and rendering, from listening to Carlton Sheets CDs to researching battery powered vacuums for sucking up dog shit, it's safe to say we have not raised those glasses lightly.
Now, New Year's again approaches, and our thoughts turn to whether or not we will again make our toast. In all of our efforts we have ultimately run against our own tendencies towards procrastination, our own lack of follow-through when fun turns to work, and a resistance to taking real risks. I do not think I am alone in thinking that making this toast again only to see it result in the same failures it has thus far accomplished is not worth the disappointment. That can mean one of two things, either we do not make this toast again or we make it only after we believe we have a plan that we can pursue that has a chance of success.
I for one have been racking my brain trying to come up with some plan, some idea, or some untried avenue that if diligently pursued would result in us achieving what we have set out to for so long. With less than two weeks to go, and those two weeks full of the holidays and all of the busyness that goes with them, it's looking like 2007 will be another year of trudging along for The Man. Perhaps a year where we don't make that toast will help us realize how important it is, and through that help us determine what our one simple plan is.