jotsheet

Guys love to talk about beer. Well, normal guys, that is. I’m not sure what girls who don’t know each other talk about—clothes, maybe?—but beer is a safe area for guys. I like talking about beer. Beer is a good topic.

It’s important to have a couple of beers around which to rally. Call them your Beer Stallions. You champion your Stallions and praise their virtues against those of your conversation mates’. It’s all in good fun, but it also helps you to learn about just what kind of guys you’re dealing with.
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I love the way music catapults me back in time. It’s one of the coolest feelings I know. I hear an old song, and suddently I’m that age again, that mood, that person. Call them Song Timewarps

The best thing is that the songs are often total crap. I have a habit of getting obsessed with bad songs and listening to them over and over again. Call it a numbness to stimuli.

Well, my current song is “Gravity Rides Everything” by Modest Mouse, which I picked up from a Nissan Quest commercial. I’ve got plenty more.

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Growing up is like, complicated. I have all these things to learn. I’ve recently had to figure out how to do the insurance thing, the prescription drug thing, the public transportation thing, the bank account thing, the asking-your-boss-for-things thing, the getting-your-car-fixed thing, the dealing-with-crazy-people thing, and many other things. Amazing that people can “do life.” I find it quite complicated.

Today’s challenge was grapefruits. I ate three of them. Delicious red grapefruits they were, but I had (and have) one problem: I don’t really know how to eat them. They are tasty and juicy and sour—three excellent qualities—but their seeds and stringy entrails present eating challenges.

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Pretend you’re self-appointed expert on “usability” and design—of websites, software, anything.

Pretend you run a corporate racket and charge hundreds of dollars to download PDF reports. Pretend you’ve cornered the market on quantitive studies of a qualitative subject.

Pretend you are so brash that you use inflammatory language like “narrow-mindedly insular” to describe the companies that manufacture products you review.

Pretend all of those things. All done? If you’re that person, you had better fucking be able to walk the walk.

That person exists. His name is Jakob Nielsen, and he can’t walk the walk.
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If I had to choose one word to describe computer, it would be dumb. (If I had to choose two words, they would be dumb and fast.)

I recently opened a BankOne account and deposited $20. I subsequently wrote a much larger check to myself to transfer funds from my account in Champaign to my new BankOne account. It was a check from Thomas P. Sherman to Thomas P. Sherman. Simple.

Then I got a letter in the mail. Here is what a dumb computer had to tell me:

Please note that a hold(s) has been placed on a recent deposit to your account. … Hold reason: because the transaction is not consistent with the account’s normal deposit activity

That is idiotic. It is for a transaction to be consistent or inconsistent with my account’s normal activity. It HAS no activity. It is, in a word, activity-less.

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Take a simple concept from high school biology class. The most innate human reaction to a threat is the fight-or-flight response. Given a threatening situation, a human chooses either to confront the source of the threat or to avoid the source of the threat. Fight-or-flight is the foundation of survival.

Terrorism is a threat. Its primary purpose is to instill fear, and the brand of extreme Islamist terror practiced today seems to have little agenda but to instill fear; al Qaeda has no demands, no “note” it sends prior to bombings. al Qaeda kills to instill fear, not to invoke change.

As Westerners, we stand in the face of terrorism. We are threatened. We are in fear. And we are faced with the most basic of choices: the fight-or-flight choice. To fight is to confront the source of the threat, to meet it head-on, and to attempt to eradicate it. To flee is to placate, to appease, and to hope that the source of the threat goes away or becomes unthreatening.
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Maybe this will become a tradition for me. The NCAA selection committee releases the tournament brackets on Sunday at 5 p.m., and I have a fit, ranting and raving about what idiots they are. Then I go about my business for a few days and realize the world hasn’t ended.

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