a round tuit » whatever

DrawSomething! notes from an addict

kate — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 18:36:51 +0000

Just a couple of weeks ago, my step-daughter suggested I get the app, DrawSomething. A few minutes later, I was an addict.

I check my app in the morning, in the afternoon, at night before bed. Why? It’s just such interactive fun with my peeps!

Today’s local paper has an article that says it’s a viral hit and over 13 million people are playing it already and it’s topped the chart of free apps in iTunes and it’s the #1 word game in more than 80 countries.

You don’t have to have ANY drawing skills to use this. Part of the fun is watching myself and others try to draw whatever will elicit a guess at the word being drawn. Sometimes it’s the most terrible, stick-figure, hilarious attempts at drawing reality that give the best clues.

If you’re old enough to remember those long evenings enjoying a group game of Pictionary, you’ll understand. If you’re not, give DrawSomething a try and you’ll definitely understand within minutes.

But! Once again, my warning: It’s addictive, so don’t try it unless you have time for it!

full frontal wack-a-doodle

kate — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 21:23:03 +0000

I’m definitely sympatico with Chuck Lorre on this one!

Chuck Lorre Production #359
Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 8:35PM

“Okay, I’m just gonna say it out loud. There are times when going crazy looks attractive. And I’m not talking about becoming charmingly eccentric. I’ve already got that covered none ways to Sunday. No, I’m talking about purposely emigrating to the land of lunacy. That special psychological zip code where The Ancient Laws of Behave Yourself no longer apply. My “reasoning” is simple. It takes a great deal of effort to sustain a conservative, trustworthy persona. Surrendering that effort would involve, from a Freudian perspective, a conscious dismantling of the super ego-that part of the psyche entrusted with enforcing parental and socially approved actions. And therein lies the allure of going full frontal wack-a-doodle. The constant energy required to pass as normal would suddenly become available for doing and saying whatever pleases me in the moment. Imagine it. The id and libido completely unbound by any and all mortal or cultural restrictions. Hmm… Probably won’t need the shrink anymore… might need a lawyer.”
~ Chuck Lorre

fear of heights?

kate — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 18:13:21 +0000

I can hardly watch this video. For me, watching this is like being there. Like in a real fear situation, it feels like FOREVER before the video ends. My first time watching, I had to take a break partway through it.

Watching it will be great practice for my work on my adrenalin-induced fear reactions. Somebody taught me that when I feel the fear, feel that very physical reaction that I get in my chest/gut and my legs turn to jello, it helps to work on moving the fear-feelings down into the bottom of my abdomen. There, it’s easier to handle for some reason. So watching this video gives me an opportunity to practice doing that.

[Link to video via today's WinXPnews.]

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wasting time

kate — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:57:14 +0000

“Time you enjoyed wasting was not wasted.” [John Lennon]

(Photo taken in English Bay, Vancouver, aboard Chi-Ling)

“Honor yourself in deciding how to spend your time, and then let yourself be and enjoy it. Moments come and go too quickly to waste one worrying about another that’s past. So enjoy your moments today, whatever that means to you, and know in doing that you’ve had a successful day.” [from tinybuddha.com]

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slurls

kate — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 17:34:22 +0000

A new term for me today, “slurls” — slurred URLs. The sometimes unfortunate results of putting company names into URLs without spaces. Read the following URLs. I mean read them.

www.whorepresents.com – Who Represents, celebrity agent database
www.lesbocages.com – Les Bocages, tree nursery
www.expertsexchange.com - Experts Exchange, where programmers can trade advice
www.ladrape.co.uk – La Drape sells high-end quilted bedspreads
www.angelfire.com/alt/americanscrapmetal – American Scrap Metal, recycling
www.speedofart.com – Speed of Art, art designers collective
www.therapistfinder.com – Therapist Finder directory

Andy Geldman, author, has compiled 150 pages of slurls in his book Slurls: They Called Their Website What? Gelman said, “In a world without spaces we mentally insert out own. And you might not stick yours where I stick mine.”

Check out the hilarious slurls quiz on Facebook.

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the rear view mirror

kate — Sun, 16 May 2010 20:07:10 +0000

Yup, retirement is certainly proving to be a great b’day present to self. I’m enjoying it enormously. Have pretty much gotten over the “I’m bored, what should I do?” stage already. Ian, my partner, calls that the decompression stage of retiring. (SCUBA diver talk.)

But anyway, it’s so great to officially not have anything to do, to be able to flow from one activity to another willy-nilly, doing just whatever as it occurs to me. What kind of a life is that! Unimaginable, prior to having it. Pretty awesome.

Turns out, retirement isn’t about having nothing to do. I’m mostly doing something all the time. But now there are no shoulds or have-tos, and now there’s no schedule. Daily life has become a flow of spontaneous activity. I even leave tasks unfinished, to return to later! (or not!)

Trouble is, when I do schedule some activity or another that has a certain time to do it and a certain place… it feels intrusive. Nevertheless, I’ve decided that I need to have some scheduled days, just to tune-up my feelings of appreciation for the days when there’s nothing I have to do. And appreciation for the willy-nilly flow of unscheduled life.

So maybe a better way to think of retirement, instead of “having nothing to do”, is “not having to do anything”.

And: “life, unscheduled“.

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swarm intelligence favors NOVELTY

kate — Sun, 02 May 2010 18:22:56 +0000

Bees fascinate me. I’d like to have my own bee farm, but alas condo living doesn’t allow for it.

Here’s a fascinating video about the bee waggle dance, in which forager bees tell their buddies back at the hive about EXACTLY where to find some great nectar.

I got the above from a very interesting article about Complexity and Swarm Intelligence, in which the author uses bee and ant behaviors to illustrate his thoughts. Bee behavior demonstrates systems, network theory, the power of working with a quorum, the significance of novelty within swarm intelligence, self-organization, and the process of group-decision making where there’s no leader to snuff out dissent.The article illustrates “how something approaching intelligence arises in a complex system comprising of non-intelligent individuals” and “how honeybees in a beehive, and ants in an ant colony, operate as a single, intelligent, super-organism.“

The 2 points in the article I found most fascinating are:

#13: The evolutionary (internal rules) part of the behaviour of the bees can also be explained in terms of emergent behaviour. The networked swarm is adaptable and resilient, and it nurtures small failures so that large failures do not happen frequently. This helps not only survival and propagation, but also favours NOVELTY. The large number of combinations and permutations possible among the interacting agents has the potential for new possibilities. And if heritability is brought in, individual behaviour and experimentation leads to PERPETUAL NOVELTY, the hallmark of evolution.

#14: The beehive can teach us a thing or two about decision making by groups of individuals, particularly the compromise between good decisions and swift decisions. Swift decisions may be necessary at times, even at the risk of some mistakes.

And then:

How to understand human intelligence as a kind of swarm intelligence. Human intelligence emerges from the interactions among neurons, in spite of the fact that any particular neuron is as dumb as can be.

Huh!

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can the anti-HST campaign work?

kate — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 15:38:10 +0000

This isn’t about my opinion about HST (harmonized sales tax), one way or the other. But as 80% of BC people object to our provincial government’s upcoming instigation of HST, I’ve been wondering whether everybody knows the extent of what it’s going to take to block this from happening.

The following is from a CBC-online article that explains the steps:
……..

Citizen’s initiative rules

If the petition is successful, it could trigger a province-wide referendum on the proposed draft bill it contains.

The draft bill proposes to reinstate the seven per cent provincial sales tax (PST) as the only sales tax in British Columbia for the purposes of raising provincial revenue.
For that referendum to pass, more than 50 per cent of registered voters in at least two-thirds of the electoral districts in the province would have to vote in favour of the draft bill.
If that happened, the government would be required to introduce the draft bill in the legislature for a vote.
The government also has the option of sending the draft bill directly to the legislature for a vote, without a referendum.
But if either of those options succeed, there is no requirement for the government, which has a majority in the legislature, to pass the draft bill after it is introduced, and it could die on the floor of the house, just like many private member’s bills.

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Grab-and-go breakfast bars. Yum + healthy!

kate — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 01:13:04 +0000

I just saw this recipe at the RealAge.com website (one of my favorite health-inducing websites). I’m putting these yummers on my to-make-soon list!

How-to-make-them video: http://bit.ly/dhEebJ

Or here is direct link to the recipe: http://bit.ly/aMtjyE

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which blogging platform?

kate — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 20:38:48 +0000

Help! I need some feedback: WordPress or Blogger or Posterous????

I think I might start blogging regularly again. I enjoyed creating my recent travelogue blog and I also enjoyed the feedback. So I’ve begun weighing which blogging platform to use regularly. I have blogger.com blogs, a wordpress blog, and a posterous blog. I like them all for different reasons.

But I want to narrow things down to just one location as I move forward into a simpler blogging life. My preferences for online activity have changed so much over the last 2 years. Retirement does wonders to the mind. For me, for now, KISS is the rule in everything. Keep It Simple, Silly.

For WordPress, I took a mini-course in how to set it up and manage it. Now I can do it all, I have the expertise, but it’s tediously not-simple. The last few times I worked in WordPress, I was asking myself why I was bothering with it. My WordPress blog looks very professional, but I’ve come to a place where, um, who cares. Casual and simple is just fine for me now.

Blogger does and has everything I need, really. Blogger is where I cut my blogging teeth back when it first came out. Blogger is simple for me because I know all its ins and outs, including customizing my templates. I see it even allows for email posting now (my all-time favorite feature of Posterous). Posting by email: so sweet, that’s what I’m doing right now. So why not just use it and stop the debate about the other two? I don’t know, but something……

Posterous, I’ve loved it since the day the guys put it out and I rushed to set up my blog here. It was entirely lacking in features back then (which was actually the best feature about it!). Since then, the guys just keep adding more abilities, always considering blogger needs above all. So I’m thinking Posterous is the way to go for my renewed thrust into blogging. At the same time, I do love tweaking and mucking with HTML from time to time. Can’t do much of that with Posterous. I also love adding gadgets to a blog site, some for me, some for my readers. Can’t do that with Posterous. But I do love my Posterous for its simplicity.

All three platforms allow me to put my blog into a custom domain. I want to do that. Currently, my WordPress blog is the only one at my home/domain website. But I could do that with Blogger or Posterous with a little fiddling.

Hmmmm.

Funny, there isn’t a whole lot of comparison commentary in cyberspace. I did find this one article very helpful because it’s fairly thorough and entirely unbiased.
http://www.techanalyze.com/2009/11/11/wordpress-blogger-posterous/
This other short article is somebody else debating which to use.
http://uleadin.posterous.com/from-blogger-to-wordpress-to-posterous
This person, and most others who have posted about their own “which platform” debate, come down on the side of keeping and/or using them all and cross-posting. I don’t get the real point of that, other than trying to keep established followers who have the URL of our existing blogs. But there again, I’ve gotten like, um, who cares, they’ll find me if they need me. I’ve mostly become detached from the need to have thousands of readers. Those who care will still read me. Oh, and of course I can put a post on my other blogs telling people they need to change their bookmark(s) to my blatherings.

So anyway, I don’t yet know where I’ll end up doing the bulk of my posting. (If I even DO start doing more posting!) (Maybe I’ll get back to twitter someday soon too?)

Stay tuned. All feedback and opinions on this topic will be MOST welcome! Also, please post any links to articles that discuss the same debate.

[I'm posting this via email to Posterous, which is cross-posting to my WordPress blog, to twitter, and to facebook.]

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