The Omnigeek

bal·ance /ˈbaləns/

Noun: An even distribution of weight enabling someone or something to remain upright and steady.

Verb: Keep or put (something) in a steady position so that it does not fall: “a mug that she balanced on her knee”.

When my brain got going this morning, it was churning on this week’s American politics: The President’s inauguration speech on Monday and the various 180° points of view emanating from the talking heads on the other side. What the American people want is something in between. We need balance.

Naturally I started thinking about issues like how too much government is bad but too little government is bad too. The ultimate in liberty and freedom is called anarchy. We have to have balance. My mind started coming up with analogies which are common place to help illustrate a point. But I decided that this blog was probably not the best outlet for doing a political post. After all, this is a Geek blog and we need to focus on all things geek and well discussing balance is something that can benefit everyone.

There is an old saying that too much of anything is bad. Candy is awesome. Too much candy and your teeth fall out (and a host of other problems) but living life in fear of the ills that candy can do to you would mean not being able to enjoy the pure joy that chocolate brings to your senses. Should I have a Snickers &tm; or M&M’s &tm; today?

Balance is important in all aspects of our life. Too much government? Police State; too little: Anarchy — Mad Max anyone? Too much sun? Sun burns; too little: depression, chronic fatigue, diabetes, heart disease, stroke and osteoporosis. Too much work: stress, burnout; not enough: boredom, laziness, poorness.

Every where you turn too, on need to strive to balance out both sides of the equation. We can look to mathematics to help with the answer. To reach a state of equality, both sides of the equation have to balance out and well… be equal.

In Chinese philosophy there is the concept of “Yin and Yang” where life is filled with dualities: light and dark, wet and dry, hot and cold and so on. They represent opposing forces yet while seemingly contrary, they are very interrelated, interconnected and very dependent on each other.

It is your responsibility to work to maintain the balance in your life. Once you grow up, it’s not your parents job any more. You have to take responsibility to bring yourself back to center in every aspect of your life.

Balance.

We love our social networking…  Let me count the ways (and in no particular order): Google+, Facebook, Plurk, Twitter, Model Mayhem, My Space (yea, I still have a My Space account) and of course, being a photographer Flickr.

We love our different social nets for various reasons and frequently our friends are with us in multiple places.  But you have enough friend that are unique in each one that you want to share with all of them.  Also, various networks popularity wanes and waxes with times (i.e. fades in and out — hey, this is a geek blog, I can use geek terms!)

But what frustrates the hell out of me is that I can’t use one service to collect all my feed back.  While I can, as I did tonight with this photo:
I uploaded it to Flickr, where as of the time of this post, its up to 33 views already.

From Flickr, I can post them to Facebook, Twitter, and my photo blog at http://robmiracle.com/blog. I also took the Flickr link, posted to Plurk.

The problem is my feed back is all fragmented and I don’t get credit for any views and my comments are spread out all over the place.

On Facebook, I’ve accumulated 4 likes and 3 comments.  But to do that I’ve had to not only post it to Facebook from Flickr, but had to upload it directly to post it into a photo group.  I have at least one more group to share it with and of course I need to upload it to my fan page.  Even Facebook won’t let me upload once and put it in multiple places.

Then several people told me to upload it to Google+ which has already gotten a couple of likes and comments there.  Plurk Friends have already laid down a hand full of comments too.  While I can’t see views from these other services in the brief hour this photo has been online, its gotten 10+ comments and the equivalent of 6 favorites or so.

I so wish that these social nets would drive traffic back to Flickr so I could have all my comments in one place.

Oh and Facebook/Flickr/Yahoo.  I DO NOT want you to send everything I upload to Flickr to Facebook.  Let me click on the Facebook button on Flickr to decide which photos I want to share over there.  THAIXBAI!

 

One of the interesting challenges that a lot of people have is being punctual. We tend to run late and unless you live in Key West, where things run on Island Time where what time you show up, just doesn’t matter. People even have trouble guessing how much time has elapsed or how long things will take.

I however seem to have an internal clock that is insanely accurate. I have a quasi-game I play with my wife, where I insist on stupidly accurate numbers as any good science loving geek would do.  Relative to this post, I tend to give time estimates to an accuracy with in a minute, such as: I’ll be there in 17 minutes. What’s odd, is I tend to be correct within that minutes.

Today I pulled two time estimates out of my proverbial derriere. We were in Virginia Beach and my oldest son, Brandon wanted to be texted when we we left. I texted him: “We will be home at 8:52″. We were over 3.5-4 hours away depending on traffic, weather, stops and so on. The SUV was put into park at 8:53:15, a mere 16 seconds over my estimate. Maybe it was the extra nature stop that I didn’t plan for or it was the two cars that turned in front of us as we entered our neighborhood (delayed us by about 15 seconds). A 3.5+ hour drive nailed to a 30 second window.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done this. Its happens more often than not.

But I’m perhaps more surprised at my other time estimate that at around 2:59pm, earlier in the day my oldest son called wanting to know when we would show up. We still had not had lunch with my younger, hockey playing son. There is no telling how long lunch would take. Chris was not even out of the locker room yet. There is no idea how long the goodbye hugs would take. With no reference point on when we would leave, but I told Brandon “We will be there between 8:45 and 9:00pm”. So off to lunch, hugs good bye, and we were on the road.

8:52:30 was the mid-point of that original estimate. So not only did we pull in within one minute of my mid-point that I texted my son once we were on the road, but I pulled that 15 minute window seemingly totally out of the air.

Yea, bow to my inner-clock.

Now to figure out how to get people to use accurate times on mircowaves and let the the time expire instead of leaving 9 seconds on the clock for the next person.

(Evil Laugh!!!)

We have long envisioned Santa Claus as a jolly fat man in a red suit with elves and magical reindeer spending their lives making wooden trains and so on.

Well that was the old Santa who made toys for your parents. Today, kids want toys from Mattel and Hasbro. They are un-happy with generic dolls and jack-in-the-box’s. Elves don’t make Transformers or stitch Barbie’s latest fashions.

Santa realizing this to be the case several years ago, seeing his stock of trains, wagons, and nut cracker’s build up in his warehouse decided to reorganize. Santa now runs a large toy distribution system and it works like this.

You, the child take your parents to special viewing centers where you can see what toys Santa has available this year. These viewing centers are known as Toys ‘R Us, Walmart and so on. Santa allows your parents to have Christmas year round by selecting toys right away for you. But for Christmas, which is the special time, your parents can request what you want and send that information to Santa.

You used to have to write a letter to Santa letting him know what you want, but now, you can just tell your parents or show them. Santa, who now lives in a large office in Fargo, North Dakota. Its disguised, but I’ll let you in on a little secret. Look for a building with a big “Citicorp” sign. He uses a special card that he gives to each parent. They can use that card and let Santa know the right house, kid, and items that he is to deliver on Christmas night.

Your parents can use this special card while in the viewing centers to tell Santa what you need, or then can use their computer to tell Santa your holiday wishes.

Once your parents use the card to enter the information into Santa’s computers, the order goes to the Elves in North Dakota. They processes the orders and send them on to Elves located regionally. Because the world is so large and the toys no longer come from Santa’s workshop, the local elves handle bringing the toys to your house. They however can’t be seen while delivering the toys, so the sleighs have been disguised as are the elves. They use a brown truck and dress in brown clothes to help hide themselves better.

Santa also employees sub-Santa’s to work at the malls in case you want to get your wish list directly to Santa and not go through your parents. This local Santa will send your Christmas needs to Santa to be entered into the system.

Everything runs seamlessly with this system and you stand a good chance at getting your Darth Vadar talking mask this holiday season instead of a pretty red wooden nut cracker.

Okay every once in a while these Facebook chain notes come around and some are worth playing along with. So here my “3′s of Me”
Three names I go by
1. Rob
2. Robbie
3. Dad

Three jobs I have had in my life
1. Computer Programmer
2. Photographer
3. Corporate IT Trainer

Three places I have lived
1. Louisville, KY
2. Key West, FL
3. Cary, NC

Three favorite drinks
1. Mountain Dew
2. Lemonade
3. Drinks with Tequila

Three TV shows that I watch (regular season)
1. Criminal Minds
2. Big Bang Theory
3. NUMB3RS

Three places I have been
1. Anchorage , AK
2. San Francisco, CA
3. Chicago, IL

Three of my favorite foods
1. Pizza
2. Chicken
3. Snickers

Three people I would like to meet (living)
1. The President
2. Taylor Swift
3. Christian Amanpour

Three friends I think will respond
1. I
2. Have
3. No Idea

Three things I am looking forward to
1. Watching my son play hockey
2. Taking photos
3. Working on my website

Your turn!

or flying in the face of grammar and style rules….

To my friends who edit professionally, please take this with the humor its meant to be. I’m making fun of myself more than anything. You are important to me. You make my writing good!

Its been a well understood fact that photographers, like me, can’t write captions very well. Editors of the publications we shoot for are constantly having to rewrite our captions. We work with light, they work with words and that’s the way it supposed to be.

In my current incarnation as a trainer of information technology products for a company comprised mostly of print publications, I have to produce various documents needed for our training sessions, including Microsoft Powerpoint presentations.

In my workgroup, I have the pleasure of working with a few wonderful copy editors and my products have to satisfy copy editors at the individual publications. I have an audience where my language fopah’s (oops that should be “faux pas”) are going to stand out like a sore thumb. And being a photographer, my writing skills are suspect and my co-workers frequently have to “bust me”, er. correct my mistakes.

In the Internet blogosphere there are a lot of writers who either do not have a writing background or do not have a copy editor. A lot of spelling and grammatical errors creep into their writing.

Lets step back and discuss where our grammar rules come from. Spelling is pretty straight forward (except for those “do you use glamor or glamour?” type questions). Our tools, in particular if you use Firefox or Safari as your web browser, are good at helping us with misspelled words. They however cannot correct when you use the wrong version of words. If you use “your” when you meant “you are” or “you’re”, these tools don’t catch those blunders. Word processing tools like Microsoft’s “Word” does attempt grammar correction, but its not perfect.

Our grammar rules come from books called “Style Guides”. There are two primary guides in use in the United States. The one you find in your English classes and is a required text book in most college English 101 classes is Strunk and White’s “Elements of Style”. This book was first published in 1918 and has been updated as our language rules have changed over time (though not much!).

The other primary style guide in use, in particular in news media is the Associate Press Style Book. For the most part, these two books have the same rules. My introduction to both style books dates back to the 80′s and I remember having to deal with rules where the AP says you write single digits as words, and starting with double digits, you write them as numbers. S&W says the same thing except for the number 10, which AP says to write as “10″, S&W says to write as “ten”. These subtleties though are enough to drive someone batty.

In my constant struggle with my photographer’s grammar I realized that I should produce my own style guide. Without further ado, I present the Robbie Style Guide

Rule Number 1. “Interpret”.

My wife was keen to always tell me and the boys that when we would be trying to read “between the lines” on things and got hung up on it and a heated dialog would start. Well this makes good sense. When you read a blog with bad grammar or a misused word, you figure out what they really meant. Perhaps we should take the rules of grammar and consider them guidelines open to artistic interpretation. Speed to press is important. Languages evolve. Be part of the evolution.

Rule Number 2. Spelling, who needs it.

Get it close. Our brains figure it out. Humans can figure out words as long as they have the length and first and last letters correct. Spelling just isn’t that important at the end of the day.

Rule Number 3. Don’t get hung up on “affect” vs. “effect”.

Even the online dictionaries confuse themselves when trying to explain it. Feel free to use either word interchangeably. I recently used this language in a PowerPoint:

It also affects images being added to a gallery.

My friends and co-workers passed this one, so I musta got it right, but if you follow the online dictionary’s rules linked above, I could use either. Language purists will argue this point, but if you write it either way you get the point don’t you?

Rule Number 4. Quotes and Periods.

The normal rule is periods ALWAYS go inside quotes. For quotes, I agree:

Kat said “Rob, this is a stupid blog post.”

This is the absolutely right way to handle this. But what if you are writing:

Set the CSS style to “width:300px.”

While S&W and the AP would say this is correct. It is far from correct. The quotes here have a default implication of taking the text inside the quotes in a specific context. I should be able to cut and paste that text or type it in exactly as needed. That rogue period will foul up things. Using the Robbie Style Guide that period would be outside the quotes since the contents inside are in a specific context and is not a sentence to be completed. I’m right on this, you know I am.

Rule Number 5. Ending sentences with emoticons.

We all like our smiley faces. I’m old school so I like mine as :-) and :-( for example. Being the purist :) and :( would be incorrect, but hey, time is money so keystrokes are money, so I can’t fight the two character versions to much.

Frequently when I write something that should be read a bit lighter, I’ll end the sentence with :-). See how weird that period looks? That’s not part of the emoticon. If I put a space in such as :-) . would be even weirder. So the correct way is to just not use the period at all and allow the emoticon close the sentence. After all, we use ? and ! to express emotion in our writings. Emoticons are just longer strings of closing characters.

You also have to concern yourself when you use things in parenthesis (much like this :-))

This one is problematic for a couple of reasons. The double )) doesn’t look right or it could be interpreted as a “double chin”. The right paren that makes up the emoticon closes the left paren nicely, however; many software programs, like email clients, instant messenger programs, twitter clients and such will take the smiley :-) and turn it into a graphical emoticon . In fact, this blog, which is built in WordPress by default converts them for you.

So if you use a :-) and your viewer’s software translates it you would end up with something that looks (much like this

In this case, the left paren has not been balanced. So my recommendation is to write all software makers and request that they cease and desist from using graphical emoticons. Since that’s unlikely to happen and you can’t win with this rule, just close it with one right paren so it will look right to the readers who see text emoticons and the graphical readers will just have to deal.

Rule Number 6. Those pesky commas!

I love commas. You should use them freely. My wife who edits a lot of my work thinks I use too many. I took four years of Chorus in high school. Having places to breathe in a sentence is important. We don’t want to write short, choppy sentences just to put periods in to breathe. Commas are good short breath points. A good point to add commas are before connecting and’s, or’s and but’s. Most style guides say to never use a comma before and’s and or’s, by the way.

I’m going to see Holly and Emily

I agree, no comma.

I enjoy Lori, Kristi and Steve’s company.

or

I enjoy Lori, Kristi, and Steve’s company.

The main style guides would ban the comma before the and. I would suggest that in this case it just doesn’t matter.

I’m going to the store to get eggs, bacon, biscuits, orange juice and jelly.

Again the main style guides would say no comma, but the longer that list gets, the more important that comma becomes.

I’m going to the store to get eggs, bacon, biscuits, orange juice, and jelly.

Now since we are working with an obvious list that we may want to convert to an unordered list in HTML or parse into some grocery list database, having that comma helps with parsing. I could do a couple of simple regular expressions and voila, I’ve got data I can use.

s/and\s// s/\s(.*),\s+/<li>($1)</li>/

1 2	s/and\s// s/\s(.*),\s+/<li>($1)</li>/

would produce:

<li>eggs</li><li>bacon</li><li>biscuits</li><li>orange juice</li><li>jelly</li>

1	<li>eggs</li><li>bacon</li><li>biscuits</li><li>orange juice</li><li>jelly</li>

See the beauty of having that comma to help parse each of the list items? Love them, embrace them, use them.

Rule number 7. Your vs. You’re, Its vs It’s, etc.

Does it really matter? “Your reading my blog post right now.” You understood that. Why should I have to write extra stuff to “make it right”. It should have read “You’re reading my blog post right now”. Now of course “Your” is a possessive meaning something that belongs to you, like “your car” where “you’re” is a contraction for “You are” and have completely different meanings though they are pronounced the same.

There are a lot of places in our language where we have to have different words in written context than in a spoken context. Why do we need “to”, “two”, and “too” when we write though when we speak we will say “tu” for all three of them. Our brains will figure it out. Your and You’re, It’s and Its are the same spoken so why should I have to spend time to figure out which one to write or put in extra characters in my typing *when your going to read it right anyway*.

Oh, that apostrophe in “that’s” is simply wrong. Feel free to just write “thats”.

So what writing styles bug the ba-jeebees out of you? Leave a comment below to share your favorite faux pas!

I try to walk a mile each day at work. I don’t make this goal as weather, work and errands will get in the way. When I first started, several people busted me for not taking a camera to take photos of the things I was blogging and tweeting about.

So I took the camera out on a stroll yesterday and snapped a few goodies for your viewing pleasure. These will link back to flickr so you can leave comments there and see the larger sizes.