Analog2Digital

Monday, February 9

I haven't posted on this thing in forever and a day, but I had to add a note for this: Mozilla Firefox 0.8 is out. It's the best web browser on the planet. It will make you like using the Web much more, and it will make the time spent more efficient. Download it now.

Sunday, May 18

From a posting on a Taoist mailing list:

Hi Meg,

I was raised Catholic also, went to Catholic grade school, and gradually fell out of a belief in "God" through high school and college. In college I discovered Taoism, and have grown more solid in my recognition of the Tao every day.

I think the situation you pose is one of the several big reasons I couldn't continue to follow Catholicism. I knew many people who attributed every good thing they worked for and earned to God, and left every difficult decision and problem in the hands of God. A Catholic would pray to God and ask that the gas they had left last long enough to reach another gas station. A Taoist would check his gas before he ran out, and, if he couldn't avoid running out of gas, would do what he could once he ran out to get more gas, or find another means of transportation.

I think the difference is in accepting the reality of reality as it is, rather than believing in an idealized version of reality that will repeatedly disappoint. I think the difference is trying to attribute every situation to someone, whether human or God, rather than attributing situations to their actual causes and substance. I think the difference is, at root, whether or not you take life to be as you see and feel it, or something other than what you see and feel.

Taoism is not as narrow a philosophy as Rationalism or Objectivism, which believe that our human capacity to reason is all we can rely on, because the world has an order and energy all its own which reason often fights against or thinks it can contradict. Taoism also doesn't posit humanity as paramount or unique among the universe, because although our brains give us certain advantages, they also create as many problems; and other plants, animals, and elements have other advantages that make them better equipped for their own spaces (for example, would you say that a human is superior to a fish, if a human being would die from drowning by attempting to live one day as a fish? or would you say that a human is superior to a bird, if a human can't even fly?).

Taoism is also not as limiting as modern Psychology or Post-Structuralism, which believe that we only have access to the world through ideology, language and perception, and therefore can never experience reality as it is. Taoism recognizes that language and perception are the way we usually interact with the universe ("The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao" "... for convenience I have called it Tao"), but proposes that if we quiet, "still", our rational minds, we can come to understand the unity and complexity of reality on an almost intuitive level, and understanding that makes everything else clear.

Meg, and others reading, I don't mean to dismiss Catholicism, and I think coming from a background of Catholicism can help you in undertstanding the Tao. But there are certain beliefs I believe you do have to overcome (that our access to God comes through the church, that God will provide or make true what nature doesn't, that heaven exists only after we die) before you can really understand the teachings of the Tao. These are realizations that you have to come to yourself, in your own way, but the more you read and talk about Taoism, and relate them to your own life and reality as you see it around you, the deeper your connection to the universe, and the easier you'll be able to answer a question like what to do when you run out of gas.

Have fun with it, though. Life is ultimately a wonderful gift given by no one, a fortuitous state of events that makes us aware of itself, and you should laugh and enjoy it.

-Bill Pena

> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 17 May 2003 12:25:04 -0000
> From: "meg"
> Subject: kinda talkin to myself here....
>
> keep in mind that i was brought up catholic ;-)
>
> im driving down the road and i think to myself, what if i suddenly
> realized i have NO gas left in my car. as a catholic, i would say a
> prayer that i "PLEASE dont run out of gas and just make it safely to
> the next gas station".
>
> so then i wonder, as a taoist, what would i do/say/think?
>
> then i remember that a taoist "goes with the flow" and trusts in the
> tao and the natural progression of things. so i may run out of gas,
> or i may not, but either way i flow along easily and be content. and
>
> in a way, this reminds me of the catholic teaching of letting god's
> will be done.
>
> what do you guys think?
>
> meg

Sunday, March 30

So I haven't written anything here for a long time. I'm working on setting up a Movable Type weblog that will work more consistently than Blogger. I appreciate Blogger and everything it's done to make setting up basic weblogs easy for the non-techies of the world, but it goes down way too often and was way too many bugs. Maybe their recent purchase by Google will give them some more resources, but Moveable Type works now, it's Perl-based so I can hack at it myself, and has features that aren't even on Blogger's horizon. Hopefully I'll have the time to get this up and running soon.

Wednesday, August 21

I've got a job! I was getting sick of looking for a job, and despondent over the prospects for a web designer in this economy. So, I'm now working as a Help Desk Technician, doing tech support for Matthew Ferrara Seminars. It's kinda cool how my job now is, well, to be a total geek. I've done tech support before, while in school, but now I'm helping real people solve a weird variety of computer problems, and it feels good. It's my job to futz with computers and learn their ins and outs, and I know I'm actually helping real people whose lives are not centered around technology with their real problems. It's a huge divergence from my Web/Information Designer gig at O'Reilly, the oracle of the uber-geeks, and it's giving me a little more perspective on where the Internet really stands with normal human beings. Tech is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.

Dammit!! I am officially sick of Blogger. I'm having all sorts of problems with my site template ot loading, and I've been forced to use one of their templates now so I can get my posts back up. I don't get. So, if anyone has any great things to say about any other weblog services or software, please tell me. I gotta switch to something that works *always*.

Tuesday, August 13

One of the biggest questions that has ever faced humanity, second only to "Why are we here?," is "How did we get here?" Cultures around the world have come up with creation myths, and now there's a fantastic (Flash-based) site that has brought many of them together as The Big Myth.

Though most of the myths are pretty different, there are some interesting trends. Many of the myths include the idea that there have been previous "unworthy" lots of humanity, whether created shoddily or just misguided, some that were destroyed by God(s) by a Great Flood, banishment to the Underworld, or some other mass extermination.

There's also a theme of the sky and earth being two embodied Gods in a tight embrace, who had children that struggled to break the embrace of there parents - separating the earth and the sky - in order to be free. In most of the myths there's a male and female being that create the rest of the world, but in a few they love each other so much that their children have to break them apart or kill one of them in order to be born.

Lastly, I was surprised at how few Gods demanded worship from their creations, something I thought was pretty "universal." Some of them were lonely, and just wanted companions; some of them had children who, in later generations, became humans; and sometimes humans just "happened" out of the primordial earth. Most of the Gods seemed to treat humans as their children or wards, rather than their servants, and stressed interdependence - between individuals, between men and women, between heaven, earth and humanity - as the way to order.

In the end, I think I just learned that, again, that probably no one has it right, either now or in ancient times, but that creation myths can tell us a lot about the development of ancient cultures and their value systems. And that's all we have; ourselves, each other, or ways of life. However we choose to begin the story, its the current chapter that really matters.

Monday, July 29

This job search thing is debilitating. It's taking me forever to find job, and it's driving me stir-crazy. I've got a ton of skills, but they're all for an industry that seems to be suffering the biggest slump of all, New Media. I need to do something, but I don't know what. I've sent out a ton of resumes, now that I've moved to Massachusetts, but no one's biting. Then I read more depressing articles in the Boston Globe of other people who are hung out to dry, about the paucity of work in the tech sector, and it just makes me wonder whether I'm even in the right career. For so long I've been caught up in what's avant-garde, and now, after 9/11, everyone's going back to basics; I feel like an anachronism. A forward-looking artist type in a country that's fighting for survival, fighting problems that go back centuries. And the more I wait, the more I'm thinking advancement will mean spending more money on new training and certification, money that I don't have. With my mother retired and disabled, and my fiancee disabled from a ruptured disc in her back, I don't have another source help to pay for school; in fact, I'm spending time and money helping them, too. So should I scale back my dreams? Find a job in retail or I don't know what, something that will at least guarantee me health insurance? I thought that having written a book on web design would get me somewhere, but I'm seeing nothing. Ugh. So I'm losing sleep aimlessly worrying, wondering what else I can do.

Saturday, June 22

Father's Day update -- You can rest easy, I found him. I got a call from him, in fact.

Sunday, June 16

I've always hated Father's Day. I probably always will. Although I've come to know people who have nothing but good things to say about their fathers, and are close to them throughout adulthood, I can't shake the feeling that this contrived celebration lets everyone forget what a divorce rate of 50% means. Some of us don't have fathers. Some of us probably never will.

My parents divorced when I was 1 year old, and, from what I've heard, I'm glad they did. But after that, I've only seen my father sporadically, known him through short visits spaced by 3-5 years. I honestly don't know how many times I've seen my father, though I have a crystal-clear image in my mind, one that I can't remember to forget. So this Father's Day, I tried to call him, after 4 years since our last meeting.

I don't have his phone number. And, apparently, it's unlisted. So I tried to call my grandmother and get his number from her; I'd tried on Mother's Day, and it didn't work. I tried again, and it's not their number anymore. This scared me, because I haven't talked to her in as long as I haven't talked to my father this time, I was scared, and now, I don't even know if my grandmother's dead.

So I called my uncle, and I left a message on an anonymous answering machine, hoping it was his, hoping he can call me back. I even tried an online US Search service, but my credit card is overdrawn. Great.

So I still hate Father's Day. It reminds me of all the time I longed for a dad. It frustrates me as I try to make amends. But it makes me take stock, and makes me want to love it some day. So I'm trying.

Wednesday, June 12

When Mozilla 1.0 came out, C|Net gave it a rather bizarre review, in which they harp on Mozilla's inability to render Internet Explorer-specific web pages. They claim that, since IE is the market leader, pages tailored for IE should be acceptable as Web standard; "That's reality," according to C|Net. That is absolutely insane, dangerous to the very structure of the Web, and biased toward Microsoft's market share and against the health of the industry.

Let's make this perfectly clear. There is one standards body for the Web. It is headed by the man who *invented* the World Wide Web, and its mission is to collect the best ideas of different companies, including Microsoft, Netscape, Sun, and research labs and universities, to foster the most useful, accessible and cohesive hypertext network possible. Microsoft is an enormous corporation, but they are not the owners, inventors or legislators of the Web. The W3C is the only standard that all browsers should follow, and anyone not writing web sites in standard HTML/CSS/XML/JavaScript takes on the reponsibility of alienating part of their audience and hindering the free exchange of free information. I wrote my book in part to show and prove this point, and C|Net is creating a huge disservice by propogating the idea that Microsoft-only extensions to open technologies should be followed merely because of Microsoft's size.

On a sidenote, they also criticized the IRC client "ChatZilla" for not being compatible with AOL Instant Messenger or any other IM services. Of course, they missed the point; IRC is a unique system incomparable with anything resembling a "Buddy List" or AOL's "Chat Rooms". Don't believe me? Check out the Quote Database - distilling disinformation for your comedic pleasure.