I clicked "next blog" on the blogger header and was taken to a surprisingly interesting blog: have u done ur book review?. I was especially taken with a post entitled “Everyday Philosophy”.

I have an abiding interest in personal wiki, so when I read the post Everyday Philosophy, I start thinkin' cool. Personal Philosophy. This could be very useful. How about adding a few personal philosophy pages to my personal wiki, I asked myself

Folks without an explicit understanding of their personal philosophy often find themselves engaging in self-serving rationalizations. So, to prevent this, get a personal philosophy before the shit hits the fan, before the temptation offers you a lap dance, before you find yourself up to your eyeballs in trouble.

So what is a personal philosophy? This blog really hit the nail on the head:

There are two kinds of philosophy – the academic kind, and the everyday, personal kind.

It is your everyday, personal philosophy that really counts.

Your everyday philosophy is what you believe about everyday stuff about work, money, worry, failure, friendship, family, the future.

Everyday philosophy is what we use to explain life’s ups and downs: it is the foundation on which we build our life.

Our personal philosophy is the lens through which we view every problem and every opportunity.

Often, it is the reason that we give ourselves to persist – or to quit.

People who live happily are not necessarily the smartest or the riches or the most talented. But they have a personal philosophy that serves them well.

Simple ideas. Brilliantly put.

Three cheers. I have known many a poor soul twisted by the cruel effects of academic philosophy. Phooey. Who needs it?

This got me thinking. What is my personal philosophy? So, there's the exercise to do ==> write down my personal philosophy. Memorize the answers. So the questions: What do I believe about work? About money? About worry, failure, freindship, family, the future?

C'mon, you do it too. You do not want to wind up like the Great Gazoo, being the last kid on the block to document your personal philosphy (perhaps in your personal wiki)? Now do you?

Explcitly putting this stuff on paper would be a very valuable tool to getting past all the gimcrack of the busy, modern life.

Oh, and one more thing. Rumour has it folks with a simple personal philosophy enjoy a marvelous side-effect ==> they're happier than the average joe or jodie.


Tags: personalwiki personalphilosophy personal

Tags: bullshit wow

What have we got here? Tableware decorated with early 21st centruy scenery.



Echoes of 18th century design. Give ya shivvers?

vases by stella | story finder


Tags: urbandesign tableware thatswhatilike

Honestly, after a week or so of active blogging, I have stumbled upon a strategic breakthrough: blogging is stupid. I have no interest in communicating anything. Or sharing. Or connecting. Whatevers. I hate this blog. I hate this blogging. Whatevers. Does that mean this blog is thru? Kaput? No. Not bloody likely.



Tags: blogging bloggingisstupid strategicbreakthrough

Quick Launch Workspaces are the answer to all your problems. Adopt & transform you life with workspaces. Maybe stave off carpal tunnel syndrom for a few more years! Praise be to lifehacker.com for this one!

For a detailed description of how to create a quick launch workspace, dig this noise.

Here's the I'm assuming you're experienced five easy pieces:

1. create myworkspace folder
2. put any and all shortcuts to files, folders or programs you want to open
3. write a bat file for your workspace (sample below)
4. create a shortcut to the bat file(s)
5. launch the workspace shortcut & all the stuff in the bat file will open; sweet, what?

.BAT FILE EXAMPLE
HOW TO: create a txt file; type this kind of crap into; then change the file extention from .txt to .bat.

Title WORKSPACE MANAGER


@echo off
echo . .
echo . .
echo . .
echo Managing Workspace
echo . .
echo . .
echo . .

start Paint
start PowerPoint
Start Visio

Tags: workspaces quicklaunchworkspaces carpaltunnelsyndrom folkremedies instantpositivemeaningfulchange

God Bless Boing Boing for helping me--finally--find my long lost daddy. It's a miracle.

Tags: bullshit bullshiting whatevers

The Googlag guy writes: Show your solidarity with the global movement to stop Google facilitation of Chinese censorship. All profits are donated directly by Cafe Press to Human Rights in China, an international, Chinese, non-governmental organization with a mission to promote universally recognized human rights and advance the institutional protection of these rights in the Peoples Republic of China. HRIC is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.

So, what about Walmart? The numbers suggest they're the real engine financing repression in China.


Tags: repression  china  collaboration  appeasement  terrorstate

Browsing is the attempt to keep alive a last irratational remnant of the old world, the lost wold of divination and magic signs. "Seek and yee shall find." I know I'm doing something a machine can't do. A machine cannot be so purposefully arbitrary, cannot close its eyes and make a whish at the same time. It cannot seek to get lost in this fashion, allowing istelf to drop in confident free fall toward the heart of a wilderness. It cannot find what it has not been programmed to seize on. - Geoffrey O' Brien, The Browser's Ecstacy

• Recreational shoppers savor the whole shopping experience, whether it be simply browsing or stopping to eat dinner in the mall.... - Cathy Keen, UF Study: Recreational Shoppers Search For Happiness, Completed Selves


Tags: browsing reading shopping miscellany

When you got source code at your fingertips, the coding is never done. Here's the latest mod I've dropped into SDI Desk.

When ending a bulleted line with a bullet (i.e. an asterik, *) Phil had the entry struck out this way:

• item one

I wanted to keep that as a way to highlight a bulleted line, but I also wanted to strikeout or cross-off items from a bulleted list, kind of like this:

• item one

The solution: put one star at the end of a bulleted line to get the strikeout and put two stars at the end of a bulleted line to get the classic highlight. Implementing this mod took a few mintues. Here's the how to for the smart, disorganized individuals out there.

Added this modified code to the class WikiToHTML:

If Right(l, 1) <> "*" Then 'NO STAR
   l = "<li>" + Right(l, Len(l) - (noBullets - 1)) + "</li>"
 Else
   If Right(l, 2) <> "**" Then 'ONE STAR (USE STRIKEOUT)
    l = "<li><del>" & _
    st.trimRight(Right(l, Len(l) - (noBullets - 1))) + "</del></li>"
   Else 'TWO STAR (USE highlight)
     Do While Right(l, 1) = "*" 'clear stars at end
    l = Left(l, Len(l) - 1)
     Loop
     Do While Left(l, 1) = "*" 'clear stars at start
    l = Right(l, Len(l) - 1)
     Loop
     l = "<li><span style='background-color:#ddddff'>" & l & "</span></li>"
   End If
 End If

To find this chunk of code in the original code, just search on 'background-color:#ddddff'.

Tags: PersonalWiki wiki SDIdesk

In a candid and moving report to the media, Professor Nelson Small-Legs Jr revealed that "Spellcheck is for suckers."


Tags: spellcheckisforsuckers nelsonsmall-legsjr funny

They'll have a working version of this thing by 2010. Not bloody soon enough, right?

I learned from Season Five of South Park (in the Episode "The Entity") that the government bailed out the Airline industry to the tune of 10 billion dollars.

If that is true, then why not 10 billion to build these big balloons?

That would be cool. Wouldn't it?

Then it would be possible for these airships to ship huge amounts of goods to remote locations at reduced costs. Then people could live in those remote location - and not live in crowded cities. Of course, they would have to promise not to build a city in the remote location.

10 billion should get these balloons up and flying by next year!

Story Link


Tags: zepplin airship transportation

Sony is a big beautiful company. Blond perhaps. Cuz, for all their brains and money, they are idiots. Bold statements. The proof: the upcoming eReader.

The eReader will zoom to a dizzying height, then crash, then burn.

Why? When folks figure out that to read anything on the eReader, even the formats they say the eReader can read (but footnote: These formats require file conversion to BBeB using supplied software.) need to be converted to their PROPRIETARY format - why, there will be rioting in the streets.

UPDATE: Engadget gets it! In a story today. A delightful rant on Sony's chunderheaded approach to formats. Almost all the Sony format imperialism has failed. So too will the BBeB format fail.

Doesn't Sony know we are exhausted? The format conversion burden is weighing heavily on us. We want convenience. We want ease of use. We don't want conversion software bloating our 'puters.

What nut-sakks. Poor beautiful Sony has not learnt their PROPRIETARY lesson yet. Conversion burn-out will come and bite them in their corporate arse, as it (ATRAK or whatever it was called vs MP3) has in the past.

As the eBook/eInk market develops, do they really think BBeB will beat TXT or PDF or DOC or HTML? Poor half-wit corporate schlomos.

But here's the silver lining. With the push on the eReader competitors will enter the market. To diferentiate themselves, they'll make sure they can display plain text. And HTML. And so on and so forth. And so you see, once the ban on stem cell research has been lifted, future eBook readers will be all that we ever hoped they could be. And this is all because of brave Sony putting it's big dumb blond toe in the eBook water.

Tags: sony eReader eBook BBeB formatwars engadget

The Invisible Hand Theory is a fairy tale for children, big and small.

I've always been amused with how the world of economics and finance cloak themselves in high math and rationality. Wall Street is chock-a-block with rational and intellectually superior MBAs and international banking types. But the moment the market moves one way or the other, displays a bit of drama, these same financial geniuses "panic" and the next day in the news their actions are describe in emotional terms, the same way we'd describe gamblers or children. How is it that Wall Street braniacs can get "spooked"? How is it grown and educated high-performance professionals can, in the next breath, yabber on about the Invisible Hand Theory? And how is it, that these same folks can sit around fancy dinner tables and yabber on about how foolish the notion of Intelligent Design is? Yikes.

The fairy tale-like "invisible hand" being referenced here is not the "invisible hand" metaphor developed by Adam Smith — who never ever advocated that merchants and financiers and business types be left to do as they pleased or that governments take no active role in the economic life of a country. The reference is to the 19th, 20th, and 21st Century "invisible hand theory", a self-serving perversion of Smith's "invisible hand metaphor", which advocates that capitalists should be left to do just as they (bloody well) please—in accordance with the doctrine of laissez-faire economics—without any interference (be it help or hindrance) from governments (a.k.a.: we the people).

Of course, the Invisible Hand Theoriest and their acolytes are the first to agitate for a "rugged individualist subsidy" the moment the going gets tough. Sigh.

Here's what I recently posted over at Prefessor Kennedy's Adam Smith's Lost Legacy recently

The Real Agricola said...

I hope the notion of Mr. Smith the Diest is not a launch pad from which to surmise that Smith's invisible hand Aanalogy is in any way shape or form connected to modern superstitions that have congealed around the invisible hand theory which has been falsely connected with Mr. Smith.

The notion that Smith, through subtextual currents, was hinting at intelligent design in his writing stretches credulity and only deepens--correct me if I'm wrong--modern misapprehension of 1. Mr. Smith; 2. the ragmatical mass-intellectual debacle we so fondly refer to as the Great Invisible Hand Analogy/Theory Confusion; and, 3. the nature of Deism itself.

Tags: adamsmith invisiblehand economics

Want to become a cyborg? Augment your brain? Well, go with a personal wiki and you'll be well on your way to joining the ranks of the augmented, or the cyborgs . . . if you will.

Based on notes from my SDI Desk personal wiki I've cobbled together a list of twelve things a personal wiki can be used for:

01. a vehicle for personal Information Management, PIM

A personal wiki can act as a PIM application by storing and organizing traditional PIM data, such as, but not limited to,: contacts, emails, scheduling, journaling, etc. PIM is basically supported by databases in other products. In this wiki, contacts is supported by the concept of a free-form database.

02. a personal knowledge base, PKB

A wiki (or application) where personal information & knowledge is stored in an organized fashion, using a formal taxonomy or informal folksonomy, or better yet a PerXonomy.

03. Personal knowledge management, PKM

PIM assists with the organization of personal information (contacts, scheduling, coordination, visualization, reminding), think personal planners, PDAs, day timers. A PKM would then be more along the lines of personal information thoughts, knowledge, wisdom/insights, work products, viewpoints/opinions, information scrapbook items, journal entries.

04. a free-form database (contacts, bookmarks, terminology, etc)

The tags are distributed rows in a larger tag collection. The contacts are distributed rows that can be aggregated into a larger collection of contacts and incorporate the beginnings of PIM functionality into the wiki. Tags: and CONTACT: are used to identify/flag distributed rows for the tags and contact tables.

The free-form entry of "rows" in the virtual table, need to come together...on one page or a series of pages, in order to make the database useful.

Free-form refers to liberation from the table, but not from structure. Each row must conform to a very specific syntax. For example, for a contact to be recognized by the contact aggregator, the line must begin with CONTACT:. Then after CONTACT comes a semi-colon delimited list, the first item being the name of the contact; after the name, anything can be listed, usually using a named pair, ie. Category + value, again, the named pair is delimited using a colon, with the category being rendered in bold and the value as regular text. It might look like this.... CATEGORY: Some Name; Tel:222-2222; Email:somename@somesite.com

Aggregation can be done via a search. Also, building an aggregation feature into the wiki software is another aggregation method, and an option that makes using the free-form database easier for selected subjects: tags, contacts...(other?).

05. a journal

I guess we all know what a journal is. Huh?

06. An info scrapbook

A scrapbook of information. Huh? Like a personal website organizing information you deem there to be utility in collecting.

07. a nonlinear notebook

If you Google "nonlinear notebook" you'll get five results. Whatever. You can use a personal wiki like any notebook, only because it is easy to create links between the pages you write, it's as good as the notebook, and better cuz it's nonlinear.

08. GTD lists

Use the personal wiki to manage your Getting Things Done Lists.

09. Catalogs

Personal wikis are ideal for cataloging you stuff. What's cataloging? The American Heritage ® Dictionary of the English Language suggest that in its noun form catalog means: 1. A list or itemized display, as of titles, course offerings, or articles for exhibition or sale, usually including descriptive information or illustrations. 2. A publication, such as a book or pamphlet, containing such a list or display: a catalog of fall fashions; a seed catalog. 2. A list or enumeration. 3. A card catalog.

10. Brain dump -— an outboard brain

Put all you know in a personal wiki and is soon becomes your outboard brain. Put stuff you need to remember, but can'committt to memory, in the wiki and it soon becomes your outboard brain.

11. Wish lists or any list

What to say about this one. Get a personal wiki and then make lists. Refer to the said lists as you deem necessary. And, voila, you're rocking in the free world.

12. Developmentnt space

Get on the bleeding edge and use your wiki as a development space. Use your highest level programming skills to marry business, personal and technical needs in one brilliant personal development space.


Tags: PersonalWiki wiki

My friends, I implore you:

Stay in rapore with source engergy!

Be in a state of harmony!




Tags: motivation parody InstantPositiveMeaningfulChange

A few years ago my hands began to ache when using the computer. The cause: too much mousing. Too much computi time.



I know a bunch of people who have had carpal or near-carpal trouble. Unfortunately, most of us earn a living at the keyboard. We're a pack of analysts, economists, programmers, info-operatives, and executive assistants. (You can always spot the economystics: they're the ones always shouting "stop browbeating me, cant you see I'm sexy....) More than a few visted the doctor and wound up having surgery to cure their pains. To a person, they attest to the fact that the cutting failed to bring any relief. The carpal Tunnel Syndicate got paid but did not deliver on the promised pain relief.

To avoid the worsening ravages a number of strategies have been developed.

• 1. get off the computer as often as possible (which is kind of like just saying no to drugs)
• 2. use different kinds of mice at your various computers
  
• 3. become a street person or surf-bum
  
• 4. get into the used car game
  
• 5. the one that really helped me: switch mousing hands, I went from a right-handed mouser to a lefty
• 6. Use Quick Launch Workspaces to cut down on your daily clicks

Any other bright ideas for staving off the ravages of carpal?

Updated: 17 February 2006


Tags: CarpalTunnelSyndrome typing mousing PainAvoidance

Somewhere between Taxonomy & Folksonomy lies a fascinating space, perxonomy, an area of '''personal taxonomy'''. But it was unnamed. So I named it: perxonomy.

How should one categorize all the little bits of information one runs across? What's the easy hierachy? What are the categories? The answer, just tag it...and whatever form the collection of tags takes, that's the unique perxonomy of your information, perhaps of your life. A taxonomy of tags for one.

Every person is unique. Every perxonomy is singular.

A perxonomy is an augmented heirarchy (gloriously unscalable beyond the single user) unfettered filing of single things in multiple virtual folders, crashing joyously into the free-spirit zeitgeist of keywords. The folder metaphor? The keyword metaphor? Pick one. Pick both. Perxonomy plays no favorites and cares not for the multiple conflicting purposes that may arise. Any paradigm will do, as long as there's a tag invovled.

Perxonomy flips the bird to the canonical and does the twist with the contextual.

Imagine a folksonomy of one. Metadata without painstaking design or just plain without design. Your personal categorization scheme. Meta-chaos to the others. Sensible to you.


Tags: PersonalWiki wiki SDIdesk taxonomy folksonomy perxsonomy

Whenever I feel homesick, I always tool over to My Private Tokyo, one of the best photoblogs going, and then I don't feel so bad..



Tags: tokyo homesick goldcoast australia

"Wiki is a kind of genius. As you start to load it with more interlinked pages, you start to find yourself discovering new connections between ideas you hadn't associated before. There's no technological wizardry about it. It's just that you connect X to Y, and find that Y is already connected to Z, but you'd never thought about X and Z together at the same time. Now you do, and often the results is a little mental explosion." — Phil Jones

[Wikis] are good tools for summarizing, annotating and connecting information. These are the actions of a knowledge enhancement system. — Chris Dent

Cool wiki quotes, huh? Just for fun, I'll create some so-called quoteable quotes of my ownsome:

Asking the question "Why have a personal wiki?" is no more interesting than the question "Why have a brain?" or more specifically "Why have an outboard brain" or more generally "Why have augmented intelligence?" or most pointedly "Why have paper?" or more basically "Why have fire?". - August Agricola.

Why do people with wikis think they're bigshots? - The Real Agricola

Winter Olympics minus Wiki equals boring. - Auggie Agricola

Tags: PersonalWiki wiki SDIdesk quotes

SDI Desk is the way to go for all yur personal wiki needz. Of course, it is not an out-of-the-box deal. Cumz with all the code. Still, the codeless meet at the ranch and ask for new features (U can dwnload SDI desk from this site too -- do so if you haven't done so).

Phil recently reckoned that the reason there hasn't been much action on SDI desk was cuz he wuz using VB. Not to get too lachrymose-with-it, but I reckkon SDI action is/was slow cuz it's centered on a personal website; things might turn out cooler if Phill chooses to (has the time or energy too) open up shop on sourceforge.net - or any other place that gives a bit of formatily and seriousness to open source efforts.

The toolz for foolz with time and inclination. I like what Phil Jones started. But had to mod the buhjeebers outa this one.

Mods inlcude:

• total rework of the main form (have gui issues);
  
• externalized (wiki pages as config files) headers and footers and caption;
  
• externalized markedown engine (or template or whatever) -- defaults to usemod, but I wanted to have a personal/singular markup, this mod provides that ability;
  
• delta wiki button (cycle through/to multiple wikis;
  
• auto web (html) export on page save;
  
• auto xml export on page save;
  
• page count on F11;
  
• named calendars;
  
• tags;
  
• keywords customizable and a few hardcoded; text include macro;
  
• free-form database function;
  
• randompicture macro;
  
• picture gallery macro;
  
• print, page set up, print preview added to menu

Most of this modding done between may & june 05; got to version 28 and then, then it just worked, and I didn't have to work on srcode anywhenever at all. All this modding gave me carple. So now that my modz are done; i can get back to first luv, just using.

Have been using everyday since july 05 as my "outboard brain" ; allz cool. That picture there, yup, thatz my modded SDI Desk. Thanks to Brazil Phil. He da man.

If yur into personal wiki, stick with it. I'll post sum more thoughts on personal wiki. In the next few dayz, i'll try and get something down (ur...up) on the new taxonomy frontier: perxonomy.


Tags: PersonalWiki wiki SDIdesk birthofamovement

Professor Wee Singer Jr. is working on an algorythm to analyse all the text on the Internet. Why? Professor Wee plans to spider the entire Internet, using his portable mega cluster (supercomputer in a trailer), and crunch the results, using sophisticated phenomregression techniques, the upshot of which will be to reconstitute the lost language of atlantis. Singer Jr. is the world's formost radical-crypto-forensic-grammarian. Once he publishes, I fully intend to kiss off Enlish and do all my posting in the lost language of atlantis.


Tags: atlantis wiki

This was a delicous burger. A work every bit as brilliant as the finest works of Dostoyevsky. I can see why they trademarked it. Some folks (âme de boue) say it's like Oprah in a bikini -- it'll be the arbiter elegantiae of all things, just like Oprah . . . but mostly it'll just make ya taste puke!



Tags: hamburgers oprah

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