Ramblings From Justin Penney

Puddle Jumper's was good. The 359s played at Ricochet's again and a good time was had by all. Jon was sober, I was witty, and there were giant breast implants ... what a great PJ Days!

Now that I am a dog owner, I am even more frustrated and angry at shitty dog owners. There are a bunch in my neighborhood that live outside and get no interaction. They bark and freak out all the time. It's so fun and rewarding to interact with a dog. Wendy is a lot of fun, especially when we work on obedience and tricks. I can't believe all of the dogs that are left to their own devices.

I should mention that Wendy doesn't do well when left alone in the back yard. We were doing some work on the house and had to put her outside. She was in the back yard, alone. I was in the garage grabbing tools when Wendy came running around the corner with her tail wagging and tongue hanging out. I acted really excited to see her (rewarding coming to me) as we walked around to see three shattered fence boards. I don't want to discourage her coming to me ... but I don't like that we can't leave her unattended in the back yard.

Lily was complaining of getting headaches when she was reading. True to her genes, the ones that come from me, she has an astigmatism. She got two pairs of really cute glasses. One is the prescription from the eye doctor and the other are off the shelf reading glasses in the closest approximation to her prescription. She takes the off the shelf glasses to her mothers. They aren't working for her as well as the prescription glasses.

Reading glasses are terrible! I have a pair that I am supposed to use whenever I am at a computer or reading. On top of the astigmatism I also have pretty bad eye strain from staring at computer screens all day. My strain is not as bad now that I have LCDs everywhere. When I have my glasses on, everything withing 3 feet looks amazing. Everything beyond that 3 foot boundary is a jumbled mess. I need bifocals ... or a lame ass chain for my glasses to keep them around my neck.

The "new" Facebook is really nice! I just enabled it and Jacey started a chat with me. When she would do things it would pop up in the chat window. Also, I accidentally closed the chat window and when I started another chat with her the messages that I had missed were in the chat waiting for me.

I really wish that I could take all of the people that I interact with on MySpace and just move them to Facebook. The MySpace interface just gets worse and worse! On "Marketplace" they were talking about the lack of advertising dollars going to MySpace. My only thought was, "are they giving it away for free?" There are ads all over MySpace. Everytime I hit the home page, my profile, groups ... ads everywhere. The whole layout of the page is centered around ads. They then went on to targetting ads and that problems that they are having with it. They brought up the situation of "questionable content" and users associating the ad with bad content. They used and example of a kitten on fire. This shows to me that the people at the upper echelons of marketing really think that people are retarded. I don't see how any reasonable person would confuse and ad on MySapce as supporting whatever user generated content it was supplied with. I think that most people that are on the internet are pretty familiar with contextual advertising. Look at the Google AdWords all over the place. Sometimes they clash or coincide nicely with the content. The times when the ads end up ironic in context really make me pay attention. That attention bleeds over into other times that I see those little "ads by Google" boxes.

Marketers ... learn to deal with content created by the common man. We understand keywords and will not confuse an ad with support of that content. This isn't a politically leaning newspaper, it's still the (mostly) free-for-all Internet.

As I get older I care less about the nuts and bolts. I don't care how we're making technology work; I care about how it is interacting with the people that use it. I don't care to get into the gory details ... I want to see the end result. Really I want to see transparent technology ... meaning NOT see it. I want to see programming languages evolved to human standards. We control the machines ... they don't control us. I want to see transparent data access to disparate sources. SQL is a great example of a stepping stone: the basics are easy, it's fairly standardised, it's not tied to any one vendor. But it sucks. The syntax is not human enough. Some of the concepts are easy to describe but hard to create a proper query. The database engines are all too easy to bring to their knees with a bad query. People will ask poorly formed questions, the computer needs to account for that. Unfortunately, due to my lack of care for the underpinnings, I will likely do nothing to being this concept along.

People are not easily repeatable. I should qualify that statement with smart, creative, interesting people are not creative. They mix up their actions all the time. It seems like the smarter that someone is the harder it is to pin down their action, or reaction, to something. They won't perform the same action 20 times. They'll tweak it each time, observe, then catalog those results. The constant change, test method is at work all of the time. It's terribly frustrating!

# posted by Justin @ 10:56 PM