A few movies

May 26th, 2009

This being a three-day weekend, I had an extra day to relax, and took full advantage of it by watching some movies. Figured I’d pretend that was a productive use of my time by writing a bit about them. In viewing order:

White Noise 2: The Light
I must admit up front that my desire to watch this flick was entirely based on the presence of Nathan Fillion. During the wait to find out whether or not Castle would be picked up for a second season, I stated (to anyone who would listen) that I’d happily spend one hour a week watching a series that just consisted of Fillion sitting in a crowded bar interacting with people. He’s thoroughly entertaining, and I was surprised to find out there’s something he’s been in recently that I hadn’t watched. The film itself is pretty good, but I’d put it about average if not for Fillion’s performance. Some of the plot points aren’t as surprising as it seems like they were expected to be, but there’s at least a bit of the ethical dilemna that makes a good movie for me. Is this film going to make AFI’s top 100 all time greats? No. Is it worth spending a couple hours watching? Absolutely.

Fanboys (Yes, it finally got released)
Been waiting for this flick for what seems like forever. I first heard about it on Ernie Cline’s website (he wrote it something like a decade ago). Then I found out Kristen Bell was going to be in it, and got even more excited. Then I found out they’d gotten permission from Lucas to film at Skywalker Ranch, and became giddy. Then I waited like TWO FUCKING YEARS to actually see it (it never touched a theater within two hours of me), and I got angry, but no less excited. So, did it live up to my expectations? Mostly. It was certainly less of a letdown than Episode 1. This is a flick made for Star Wars fans by other, more famous Star Wars fans. It has tons of references and cameos. It has all the jokes you need and want it to have. It’s got Kristen Bell as a hot geek chick. The only real complaint I could have about the film is that it’s got a lot of Trek hate, but I can forgive that, since Trekkies are pretty annoying if you aren’t one of them (yes, I’ve been to Starbase Indy a few times, and enjoyed it). The bottom line is that SW fans will thoroughly enjoy it, but most others will probably be moderately entertained at best. That being said, I don’t think anyone actually reads this site, and anyone who does read it has a decently high chance of being a fan, so just go rent/buy the DVD.

The Godfather
I’ve caught so much flak over the years for not having seen this, and the HD movie channel had the whole trilogy on this weekend, so I DVR’d them. When I finally had to go to bed last night, I was halfway through the second one. That’s 286 minutes (so far) of viewing. I never knew these flicks were three effing hours long each. The first one got me hooked, though. The second has me drawn in, if mostly for the backstory of Vito rising to power. I’m not sure I love the movies enough to justify the emphasis some of my friends have put on them, but I’l definitely be watching the rest of the second and then the third when I have a chance. I’ll probably leave them on the DVR and go back and re-watch them at some point, too, for the stuff that I’ve missed.

Update: I watched the rest of the Godfather trilogy. The best part(s)? The backstory of Vito. The rest was decent, but Vito is a guy I could get behind.

Handling Problems

May 22nd, 2009

So something bad happened. You might have offended someone. You might have made a choice that you wish you could undo. It might have been something bad that happened to you. You’ve got regrets. You’re in a rough place now. What do you do? Well, there are a lot of choices here. All of them will change the situation in some way, and they all have their own goals. The trick is thinking through far enough to see what it is that you want as an outcome, and picking the right path to get there. I’m going to do my best to break the options down below, and what good and bad can come from each one.

Denial. “Nothing happened. Nobody made a mistake. Nothing’s wrong. I would never do that. There’s nothing to see here.” This is an old favorite, and may very well be the number one response in terms of frequency. It’s about getting your message to everyone before the truth gets to them, and hoping yours sticks. If you don’t get this one going fast enough, you might just have to try yelling it loud enough to drown out the truth.

What does this one accomplish? Well, if the people in question are apathetic or uninterested, it can “solve” the problem instantly.

What’s the drawback? Well, if the damage done was sufficient, you face not only the negative effects that occurred, but also the damage to your reputation for lying about it. Also, this one only works if nobody is paying attention well enough to notice. Of course, you can just make your denial louder and more emotional, and eventually the problem will be “solved” because the person will give up and not want to interact with you anymore. I’m putting this in the drawback category since I can’t imagine anyone who’s not a sociopath would want to drive away worthwhile people out of fear or unwillingness to acknowledge the truth.

Place blame (external). “It was John’s fault! He didn’t do his part so I couldn’t possibly do my part because it relies on his!” This is your standard buck-passing. Find an external entity (bonus points for using whoever noticed the problem) and make up some tenuous logic to tie it around their neck.

What does this one accomplish? It takes the focus off of you, and if played right it can even move you into the next category (victimhood). You are exonerated, and maybe even damage the reputation of someone who you don’t like. If you are the one who originally noticed the problem, you’ve got a decent chance of passing this off as truth. Hell, in a lot of cases it might be based on truth.

What’s the drawback? Your audience might not be stupid. They might recognize the poor logic you used to tie this one off to someone else. In that case, you’re not just dishonest, you’re also a back-stabber. Who wants to deal with you once that gets around? If you weren’t lying and the entity you’re blaming really did cause the problem initially, you’ve still wasted time and emotion on blaming when you could have been working on actually solving the problem.

Claim victimhood. It was my upbringing! It was societal pressure! It was my disability! You’re only saying I did something wrong because I’m [insert victimized group label here]!” This is an additional twist on the standard external blaming. Here we take the game to a whole new level. Not only are you not at fault, but you deserve special treatment because of a victimization. Maybe you shouldn’t have even been given any responsibility in the first place, because asking you to do [insert whatever you don't like doing] was just unfair to begin with.

What does this one accomplish? Not only are you no longer in trouble for whatever it was you were in trouble for, now you can ask for special treatment! Plus, there’s much less of a chance that you will be questioned, because it’s socially unacceptable to question the story of a victim. Also, you don’t have to take any responsibility for solving the problem, since you are just the victim of it, and so everyone else owes you something now, and they should take care of it, right?

What’s the drawback? This one has the same risk as the previous method, in that the holes in your logic might be spotted. It’s a little less likely, though, since victims are a protected group, so whoever notices your B.S. is running the risk of not convincing enough people, and therefore ending up looking like a villain themselves. The real risk of this one is that you start to believe your own story. It’s human nature to only work as hard as you have to in order to accomplish what you want. If you manage to get away with calling yourself a victim, you have just put a roadblock in your own path to happiness. It’s no secret that your perception of the world is an important part of how much you enjoy it. If you can convince everyone you’re the downtrodden, and get rewarded for doing that, you run the very real risk of spending the rest of your life playing miserable. Pretty quickly, that playing colors your view of life, and you really will become miserable. Is that worth it just to avoid having to take part in fixing the problem?

Lash out/redirect. “How dare you question me!? You do worse than this all the time!” This is mostly for problems that originated from you. Make it a competition of who has done more bad things. If you’re lucky (or talented at arguing) you’ll manage to convince the person that your transgression was inconsequential compared to their flaws.

What does this one accomplish? It gets people to stop talking about whatever mistake you made, since they recognize quickly that you’re just going to point out their flaws and make them feel bad for as long as they are talking about it.

What’s the drawback? This one can go bad one of two ways. Either the folks buy in/play along, and they end up not wanting to spend time with you anymore (since you are always making them feel bad about themselves), or they are willing/able to ignore your deflection and point out that their faults don’t negate your mistake (at which point this method fails miserably, and you’re left falling back to a different one).

Shut down/give up. Don’t do anything or make any decisions. This tends to be based on a fear of making things worse. You just stop trying to do anything, and you start coasting instead of having the drive that is an integral part of living people. You’re not living, you’re just surviving. This one can be silent or loud. The silent types become hermits. They stop interacting. The loud ones want to argue with everyone about how meaningless and hopeless it all is. Some folks switch between loud and silent (or just turn loud when someone tries to get them going again). Generally (in my experience) if a person started out as an introvert, they’re silent, and if they started out as an extrovert, they’re loud. In devoutly religious people there’s an interesting crossover between this and victimization, since the hopeless situation must have been created intentionally by a deity.

What does this one accomplish? It gets you pity and sympathy. It can get you a lot of that, actually. People stop asking you for things when they see you’re no longer even doing things for yourself, and some types of people will start doing stuff for you out of a hope/belief that this is temporary and you’ll snap out of it.

What’s the drawback? Ummm, you stopped living. You’re still technically alive, but you’re missing out on all the great stuff that life has to offer. Plus, there’s no guarantee that things will ever get better (or even not get worse) if you just sit there. People might try to help you at first, but their willingness to do so is finite. You can’t fix a physical black hole by dumping material into it, and that applies to emotional black holes, as well.

Place blame (internal). “It’s all my fault. I’m a terrible person. I mess up everything.” This is another pity-seeking behavior. If you say enough bad things about yourself, certain types of people will start to argue with you. At that point, you’ve got them suckered in (because nobody likes to lose an argument). You keep saying bad stuff about yourself, and they counter with nice things about you.

What does this one accomplish? You trick someone into saying nice things about you.

What’s the drawback? Remember the emotional black hole thing from above? Eventually people get tired of being your cheerleader, and they give up and move on. Maybe you’re even good enough at arguing that you manage to convince them you’re not worthwhile. Then you actually win by losing. Cute trick, you can enjoy the hell out of your success while you sit alone and miserable.

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Okay, I think that covers the wrong ways to handle problems and mistakes. What’s the alternative, though? There are four parts to properly handling bad stuff that has happened, whether you caused it or not.

1. Acknowledge it. If you screwed up, admit it. Don’t add unnecessary emotional words, and don’t be dismissive. Be sincere, and apologize if it’s appropriate. If something bad happened that’s not your fault, acknowledge the problem, but don’t go looking for where to place anger. Emotional reactions don’t solve problems.

2. Analyze the situation. Figure out the chain of events that led up to the negative event. If it was caused by a person, try to get to the root of why that individual made the decisions they did. This is easier if it was you, but can be done with anyone if you can gather enough information. Think about the motivations and the information available to that person at the time. People’s decisions are always based on the information available to them and their desired outcomes. Sometimes it’s as simple as adding more information into the situation in the form of the results of the action/decision. Whatever the decisions/actions/etc. leading up to the event, try to understand what took place well enough that you can move on to the third and/or fourth steps.

3. Fix the problem. This might actually happen before step two, depending on the situation. If someone falls off a balcony, you don’t need to investigate the handrail before you take them to the hospital. In less emergent situations, though, you will find you can often fix the problems more effectively if you know how they originated.

4. Learn from what happened. Once you’ve pieced together how it came to pass, and dealt with the present problems caused by it, now’s the time to start integrating that new knowledge into your future actions. Can this problem be prevented next time? Can you plan in such a way that even if it does happen again, the effect won’t be as negative? Don’t assume that you can change people’s motivations, but rather work on finding solutions where more people can get what they want out of the situation.

What are the benefits of this method? Well, like I said earlier, in a lot of cases we can fix problems better if we know how they occurred. Also, doing things this way, we can actually start to prevent the negative events from happening in the future, and therefore can derive more happiness from our lives. We also avoid the traps of the “quick fixes” that I talked about above. There’s great power that can be derived from taking responsibility for a situation and working to improve it.

What are the drawbacks? This isn’t an easy transition to make. Those less ideal behaviors are learned and used for a reason. They’re effective at what they do. In many cases it can seem (and even be) easier to take one of those shortcuts, especially if you have a lot of experience doing it. It’s hard to change your behaviors.

I’m not claiming to have all the answers here, or to be an expert at handling things as they should be handled, but I thought maybe this perspective on life and how to handle its challenges might be useful to some folks. If it was beneficial to you, great. If not, I appreciate your patience and I apologize for taking up so much of your time.

TED

April 30th, 2009

This is one of those gems that a surprising number of people haven’t heard of, so I though it would be worth posting about.  TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design.  They basically bring together a group of people with interesting ideas and get them communicating with each other.  The site itself is here: http://www.ted.com/index.php/

Given how much time I’ve spent recently watching the talks hosted by TED (they stream a bunch of the presentations online) I thought I’d actually give you a few suggested videos to get you started.

For starters, here’s John Wooden talking about success and how to define it.  Whether or not you’re a fan of sports, this man can teach you something about how to live.

For those of you who feel that creative energy burning inside you, here’s Elizabeth Gilbert with a (possibly) healthier perspective on creativity.

For the scientists in the audience, how about some amazing research on how bacteria communicate, and how it can be hacked.

Here’s a guy who made a vending machine for crows.  It’s even cooler than it sounds.

There are dozens more amazing presentations on a wide range of topics.  Some of them get political to the point of being a little preachy, but there are so many great ones it’s well worth it.  Enjoy!

Perspective is everything

February 19th, 2009

You know how people will say “anything is possible” and you’ll roll your eyes and snort and cite some impossible feat as an example of how silly their statement is?  Well, they’re exaggerating (obviously) but they might have the right idea, after all.  There’s some work being done by a Stanford psychologist by the name of Carol Dweck who is making a pretty convincing (and thoroughly logical) case for how your perspective on things affects your actual abilities.  According to Dweck, if you believe abilities to be based on inherent or inborn traits, failures will discourage you (and, according to at least one study, actually make you start failing at things you could do before that point).  If, however, you believe that anything is possible with the right amount of time and effort invested in accomplishing it, you will take a more constructive look at failures, and accept them as lessons.

Read more:

http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2007/marapr/features/dweck.html

Never talk to the police.

February 4th, 2009

This video is long (about 45 minutes) but worth watching, even if you think you know all there is to know about talking to the police.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8167533318153586646&hl=en

The one thing that wasn’t ever said directly (I don’t think) was that you won’t be in the interview (interrogation) room unless the officer(s) believe there’s something to get out of you.  If you find yourself in there, the only smart thing to do is shut your mouth.  At that point, they’re trying to get enough information to prosecute, and if you have something useful to say, you’ll get your chance in court.

Being great is about not getting discouraged.

December 3rd, 2008

Got this link from Felicia Day on twitter. (Yes, I used to follow some celebs on twitter, which is a little creepy since I know what they’re up to even though I don’t actually know them, but let’s move past the stalkerish nature of social networking).

The post/article/whatever is about how it takes consistent persistence to improve at, well, anything. The topic at hand is photography, but you can apply these lessons to almost anything. The trick is just sticking with it, and not being afraid to make mistakes, since those are what teach you the most.

Without further ado:
Photography, and the Tolerance for Courageous Sucking | 43 Folders

More links

December 2nd, 2008

Here are some more pages for your consideration:

The Philosophy of Liberty

Isaiah’s Job by Albert Jay Nock

An Open Letter to Congress

The End of Wall Street’s Boom - National Business News - Print - Portfolio.com

Some links for you.

October 29th, 2008

Just when you thought you had found everything you can do with duct tape:
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/37928/title/Magic_tape

A nifty-ish list of people on twitter:
http://mashable.com/2008/10/20/25-celebrity-twitter-users/

The Jargon File (geek history for you kids these days):
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/

And some classic sarcastic quotes:
http://www.allowe.com/Humor/book/When%20Insults%20Had%20Class.htm

Oooh! Nifty!

October 11th, 2008

One of my failings as a geek is that I sometimes grow complacent when it comes to things not working the way I wish they would. I will work on stuff for quite a while in order to make it behave the way I want it to, but once I’ve deemed something too much of a PITA to fix, I just learn to deal with it. Because of this, I often keep doing something the “hard way” long after someone has come along and made it work the way it always should have. This is the case with using Gmail for mailto: links in web pages. I had given up on being able to click those links and use something besides a mail client configured in the OS. That being said, I’ve yet to find a mail client that I actually like, so I just use the web interface for my beloved gmail account, and for as long as I can remember, have just copied the To: address out of mailto: links and then gone over to gmail to do my thing. Well, that was dumb of me, check this out:
http://lifehacker.com/392287/set-firefox-3-to-launch-gmail-for-mailto-links

Nifty, huh?

It reminds me of a quote I heard a while back. “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” - George Bernard Shaw

I salute you, unreasonable people, and thank you for making my life better.

Jury Nullification of Law

October 11th, 2008

Every once in a while, this subject comes up when I’m talking to someone, and it always amazes me how few people are familiar with the concept.  The standard wording of this (when it’s written out, as it is in the Indiana Constitution) is “the jury shall have the right to determine [or judge] the law and the facts.”  What does that mean, though?  It means juries can find someone “not guilty.”  In the common law system on which our courts are based, there wasn’t always this right.  Back then, the verdict if someone didn’t commit the crime was frequently worded as “not proven.”  The “not guilty” wording actually came forth from juries not wanting to convict people in cases where the letter of the law would otherwise have put them in prison (or worse) for something that the jury did not believe was sufficiently criminal.  Indeed, this is the sum of the power of a trial by jury in the first place.  If all that mattered was following the letter of the law, there would be no need for juries, because judges are obviously more qualified for that task.  Juries exist to put an additional vital constraint on government power.  By ensuring a citizen the right of a trial by jury, you promise them that they have a fighting chance of not being sent to prison (or even executed) under an unjust law.

This is why it is so important for people to understand what jury nullification is.  You can argue (and be correct) that your vote in an election is very nearly meaningless.  You can write letters to your “representatives” until you bankrupt yourself with postage, and never inspire any change.  You can believe in the power of an individual citizen all you want, but the only place where that power really shines through is in the juries that most people in this country try like hell to avoid serving on.

Okay, that’s enough of me talking, go read about it:

Wikipedia Article on Jury Trials
Wikipedia Article on Jury Nullification
Another article about nullification
And another article on it
The Fully Informed Jury Association
The Indiana Constitution, Article 1. See Section 19. (if you live in another state, google is your friend.)