I'm convinced that the truest act of courage is to sacrifice ourselves for others. To be human is to willingly suffer for the well being of others. God help us to be human.
Cesar Chavez
RMH
Claire Keane
Sade Olutola

Kaledo Art
No title available

if i look back, i am lost
Xuebing Du

ellievsbear
we're not kids anymore.
i don't do bad sauce passes

Origami Around

★
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
DEAR READER

PR's Tumblrdome
wallacepolsom
Misplaced Lens Cap
Monterey Bay Aquarium

titsay
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

seen from Malaysia
seen from United States

seen from Canada
seen from Germany

seen from United Kingdom

seen from Maldives
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Guatemala

seen from France

seen from Australia

seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from United States
@inalpha-blog
I'm convinced that the truest act of courage is to sacrifice ourselves for others. To be human is to willingly suffer for the well being of others. God help us to be human.
Cesar Chavez
Securing phones and tablets with Umbrella by OpenDNS.
Highly recommended: OpenDNS Umbrella VPN service for our Macbook, Desktop, iPhones, iPads, iPod touch + Home VIP service for our home network.
Backstory:
As our kids are getting older and the number of devices proliferates in our house, it's getting more challenging to manage everything. But it's more than just managing the amount of time on the devices; it's also about ensuring that the content we are accessing is safe.
While I can't seem to find anything decent to control or limit their access (I have some ideas...more on that later), I was looking for software that would protect our home network and ensure that everything in our network is protected from port scanning, phishing attacks, viruses and the like.
At the same time, when we're out and about I want to protect ourselves from malicious threats (blackhats, script kiddies). At first I looked at setting up Hamachi from LogMeIn, which would have forced all of our devices to connect to our home network, where the host VPN service would be. I set that up last summer, but it was a little complicated and slow, so I've been looking for another option. Enter Umbrella Mobility Service by OpenDNS.
So here's how we're doing it. I'm using the Umbrella Mobility Service, which uses a light client on the Macbook, or an app-installed VPN certificate on the mobile devices. That's how I can see very easily whether everything is protected when I'm out. Here's what it looks like right now on my Macbook:
On the iphone, I can also see the VPN enabled:
By using their service, which costs $20 for a year for all of our mobile devices, I know that our data is protected when we're out of the house.
I'll cover the home network service (Home VIP) in another post.
Day after thanksgiving hike at the Subway, Zions National Park.
Recommended: What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly (Part 1)
I finally got around to reading this book by Kevin Kelly. It was, most decidedly, not a book to plow through in a single sitting. For me it took a lot of time -- months, in fact, digesting it slowly, and sometimes just as a background process. The final sprint was a rush: I covered the second half of the book in about a week's time.
I wrote out a couple of pages of notes to capture the essential takeaways, which I might eventually post, but I still want to distill its essence below. This is part one.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Technium includes all things made by humans. It captures more than we would simply refer to as "technology." Its current incarnation exists as a result of:
Preordained technology:....the laws of physics, and the self organizing tendencies of large, complex, adaptive system.
The gravity of the past -- the momentum of history, if you will -- constrains our choices going forward. We have built systems that are part of the infrastructure and force us down a constrained path.
Our collective choices, given #1-2. This is not the given, but the choices we make. Telephones were inevitable, but the iPhone wasn't.
Adopting Tech
The Amish are very selective in the technology they will allow into their lives. They are selective, and reject more than they accept. They evaluate by experience over theory. They adopt on several criteria: does it enhance family and community, and keep the world at a distance? Their choices and decisions are communal, not individual.
Question: Is it an addiction? The dopamine rush of the new? Are we addicted but unaware? Or do we willingly choose?
Answer: We freely choose it, because on the whole, it offers a greater benefit, but not by much. We embrace it and pay the price.
Lesson: Be selective in what you embrace.
The Battle in Managing Our Technology
How can we personally minimize stuff close to us while trying to expand it globally?
to maximize our own contentment, we seek to minimize the amount of technology in our lives.
to maximize the contentment of others, we must maximize the amount of technology in the world.
we can only find our own minimal tools if other create a maximum pool of options to choose from.
The Technium's Imperative
When we first meet a new technology, we don't know how it will grow up. We are blinded by imagining it will do an old job better. When new technologies emerge, we see an intended use, and an actual use. The positive effects are easy to imagine; second- and third-order effects are more difficult to imagine. They require a certain density or ubiquity to reveal themselves: traffic jams, global warming, accidents and deaths, road rage, etc.
When a new technology is created, there is suddenly a new choice that did not exist before. As new technologies emerge, we will be tempted to reject them, but we should prefer a bad idea to no idea at all, because at least a bad idea can be reformed.
"The evolution of technology is inevitable. The character of each technology is up to us."
This gives us a scope for evaluating tech:
> Anticipation
> Continuing assessment
> Prioritization of risks
> Rapid correction of harm
> Not prohibition, but redirection
And then, a framework for having a convivial relationship with technology.
Cooperation: it promotes collaboration among people.
Transparency: Its ownership and origins are clear.
Decentralization: ownership, production and control are distributed, and it's not monopolized by professionals.
Flexibility: that it's easy for others to modify, adapt, improve, or inspect its core.
Redundancy: it's not the only option
and Efficiency: It minimizes the impact on ecosystems.
Choose Yourself by James Altucher
I just finished reading James Altucher's book Choose Yourself. What an excellent read. I rarely read a book cover to cover within a 24 hour period as I did this one, but I could instantly tell that this book was written for people like me. Getting acquainted - and then comfortable - with your entrepreneurial nature can be a painful process. Even for people who don't think of themselves as entrepreneurial, today's economy is already forcing all of us to be more flexible and assert some control over our lives.
For some, unbridled enthusiasm and a clear vision drive them forward. For others, especially those who are inclined to reflection (or rumination, depending on the day) as I am, it much more of a challenge. It's hard to reconcile the fact that you aren't ever going to be an expert in any one area. Although you can certainly "go deep" in any subject, there will be no "Outlier" breakthroughs from me - that's for the research-based entrepreneur. My breakthroughs will come from generating ideas and seeing associations, which can be just as valuable.
This book is an honest discussion of how to live up to your entrepreneurial nature, and how to be healthy enough to not let the failures overwhelm you. I'll post some of my book notes when I get a minute. Of course, that might be never.
Spiritual materialism
This is a book by Chögyam Trungpa. The idea that even in the quest for spiritual growth, the ego gets in and interferes. "Being spiritual" is a form of materialism. Which makes this post feel horribly ironic.
Setting up some family routines
It's an understatement to say that Suzi and I are not, by nature, highly structured people. But we'd like to get better at it. I recently read The Secrets of Happy Families, and then have started reading The Power of Habit. It made sense to me that our brains actually like routines and habits because we don't have to constantly make decisions - we can just be on autopilot (which can be a good thing if it's a good habit).
So pulling from these two books, I've been thinking about creating a family chore chart based on Agile. Predictably, the perfect is the enemy of the good, as I'd like to create a system that is powered by a Raspberry Pi and complete with a touchscreen that is inspired by Status Board from the media/software company Panic. But I'll probably do something more practical in the short term just to start iterating on the key learnings.
The main components to have in place are:
An information radiator to display things that need doing
A reward system, including points and "cotchas" (borrowed from David Starr, as in "caught ya doing something good")
A weekly meeting to review them with buyin from the family
Keep iterating and changing as needed. Might need to publish or print a calendar each week to include in the family meeting and that is easy to see.
I like David Starr's original article Agile Practices for Families, as well as his updates with helpful pictures.
It's good stuff. We'll see how it goes.
I've attempted to use a to-do list from time to time, and the problem is that they are never quite convenient enough for me. Gina Tripani's TODO.TXT is ideal for someone like me, who needs access to the same list from any device, all syncronized in one place - Dropbox.
This tool is not for non-technical people at this point, but if you want to beef up your skills, this is a great reason to do so. I've also connected this to another favorite tool, IFTTT, so that I can add todo items to Suzi's list via email using just a hashtag and the item name in the subject line. So great, so useful, so satisfying.
Track your tasks and projects in a plain text file, todo.txt. A todo.txt is software and operating system agnostic; it's searchable, portable, lightweight and easily manipulated.
Come, let us be friends for once Let us make life easy on us, Let us be lovers and loved ones, The earth shall be left to no one.
Yunus Emre
Adventures in Moab
Suzi and I decided to go to Moab last week. Although I've been to Arches a bunch of times, I'd never made the trek to Delicate Arch. And I have to say, if you haven't been there, do it the next time you're in the area. If you decide to go for the sunset view, pay attention on your way up, and bring a headlamp. I had mine, but it was tricky getting down in total darkness - the cairns are pretty far apart on the exposed slickrock portion of the trail.
We also decided to go crazy and do some rappelling at Morning Glory Arch - wow! Two rappels, and they were monsters (at least for us) of 90 and 120 feet. Photos follow.
Time to catalog.
I'm a little self conscious to be writing a blog, but I really need a place to catalog my thoughts and possibly even refer people to specific posts.