DgtizeD

This was written in response to an assertion that the people we associate with should only be people that made us feel good all of the time. My apologies but I find myself forced to disagree.

I never met anyone in the world that I associated with that made me feel good all of the time.

This includes myself. Especially me.

So I certainly wouldn’t hold anyone else other then me to such a high standard that I frequently recriminate myself for not successfully matching.

That said, there is definitely a threshold at which point it is not worth it to deal with someone . I dunno if it’s above “most of the time”, “some of the time”, “a good portion of the time.” I do think it’s probably below “a bit of the time”, that seems to be below the threshold. Whatever the case the threshold definitely exists, and anyone below threshold is below threshold and not worth it. There are some people who are very borderline and those are the most dangerous to deal with.

Often because the only way they are at the threshold is that there is a simultaneous draw for them to be automatically below threshold and above threshold. Often the reasons for them to be in either place is complicated, horrible, wonderful, crazy, stupid, hateful, and any other emotional or rational overtone possible in the world.

This is simultaneously fortuneatly and unfortuneatly one of the central causes of the human condition. Hence why the human condition itself falls into said borderline threshold category. Anyway that’s my general opinion. Apologies for that. It leaves us with a wonderful horrible little tautology paradoxy thingy though. So I guess that’s cool. For the society for the study of wonderful horrible little paradoxical tautologies. If it exists. It should if it doesn’t. Maybe it’s called philosophy, science, or religion, right, maybe that was it. Can I answer all of the above? I never can remember.

As Douglas Adams stated so nicely in So Long and Thanks for All the Fish:
bq. God’s Final Message To His Creation is written in fire in letters
thirty-foot-high on the far side of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains in the land of Sevorbeupstry on the planet of Preliumtarn, which orbits the star Zarss, which is located in the Gray Binding Fiefdoms of Saxaquine. The long path to the message is lined with souvenir stands at spaced-out intervals and the message says, “We apologise¹ for the inconvenience.”

From the “we should look at things from other perspectives, but hopefully it won’t offend anyone” division

Or also perhaps the “This is all nonsense” division.

¹ Apparently this is the british spelling or something according to my original source.

So I went to the Tivoli on thursday evening to see Bruce Campbell. He was almost exactly how I expected him to be. An amusing, witty jackass that knows he’s famous, but knows it doesn’t really make him all that. He talked about 15 or 20 minutes before showing his directorial debut, a movie set in bulgaria about gypsies, russian cab drivers with bling-bling, robots, frankenstein, Bruce Campbell doing a strange approximation of John Cleese, and random associated hijinks.

Just in case it isn’t clear, the movie was very low budget, silly and strange.

I don’t think I would necessarily sit through it again. It was pretty amusing to watch though, perhaps mostly since we had been warned by Mr Campbell at the beginning of the show, that we shouldn’t complement him on the movie until we actually saw it, as we might want our money back. He also warned that it had been funded by the Sci-Fi channel.

Most of his time talking before the show was spent answering questions from the audience about the movie, and random other things. I’m not entirely sure why but a number of the people asking questions were total morons. An opinion Mr. Campbell seemed to share, as he informed them as such. A choice example was a question asking if Mr Campbell was aware of an article that the questioner had read somewhere that suggested that due to the number of cameos and evil dead movies, Mr. Campbell’s face was more recognizable then any movie star.

While walking by a number of people leaving a bar I overheard three people having a discussion about who was sober enough to drive home. The line in particular that caught my attention however was:

No, no, I’m alright to drive. You know why? Because I only drank beer tonight.

<sarcasm>Cause you know that beer, it don’t get you nearly as drunk as that hard alcohol, clearly A-OK to drive.</sarcasm> I’m just hoping I misheard and that what she actually said was “because I only drank a beer tonight”.

Some people do believe some interesting “facts” though…

I was reading this forbes article and it made me curious about customer habit datamining. Customer habit datamining is of course the process of trying to identify what sort of customer a person is by there buying/reading/viewing habits. Specifically to determine what would be best products/services/information to provide for the customer. Amazon of course does it’s bayesian based book suggestions. They maximize the probability of next item to purchase from what you have purchased and viewed already with what everyone else using amazon has done. Tivo of course does the same thing. Google even does it for it’s adwords by maximizing the advertising market value of a keyword against the page it is on.

The concept of Google doing this type of targeted marketing across all of it’s services seems to terrify people however. Cries of 1984, Big Brother, and the ensuing multitude of corporate dystopian futures ring throughout the air. As well they should. That data is our informational identity in the modern world. A ghost psyche if you will. It falls back on the dangers inheritant in people knowing your true name in cultures that believed in some types of magic, of voodoo dolls, and photographs that steal a persons soul. A modern cause for an ancient superstition. Once aquired by someone it could be bought, sold, traded, used to impersonate, advertise to, convict, and a whole host of other worries and fears, both rational and superstitious.

Yet at the same time many of the potential services available from something else being able to predict your next action are useful. People around the world depend on eachother for many of these predictions. From common interests in books, topics for study, potential friends, and even significant others, people use these predictions from others all of the time. Really it’s a question of trust, of intended use, and how much privacy you personally want.