i installed a captcha plugin on my blog.

this means that when you want to comment, you get to play one of those little games where you type in letters to prove that you are not a robot (sorry victor ;).

i have been thinking of doing this for a while, but never got around to it, until today when i was pushed over the edge by the discovery of the cleverest distributed computing idea since seti@home. and maybe even cleverer. cuz aliens? they might already be here kicking back with some watermelon while they wait for us to wise up a bit. did you see my pictures from last weekend?

the captcha program i found, however, is all about the improvement of our earthly existence. it is called recaptcha, and it works by fusing two pieces of tedious data entry – captcha verification and OCR proofreading – into one handy package. in short, every time you comment on my site, you are helping to create a more complete digital library for us all. as the recaptcha site explains:

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

this is so unbelievably clever that i cannot get over it. and since it took about ten minutes to sign up and pimp my website with the already built wordpress plugin that handles all the computer talky talk, well… let’s just say i can already check “further the revolution in some small way before lunch” off my todo list for the day.

and that just makes a body feel good, ya know?
:)

thanks, as often, to lifehacker for the heads up.

now back to saturday blogroll catchup. fun, ain’t it?

rock on, blue monster.
you won me back.

we read slaughterhouse five in my sophomore english class in highschool, and the day i sat down on the couch to start the book i found myself so transfixed that i read the whole thing then and there. i didn’t know what to do in class the next day when we were only talking about the first chapter or whatever because i couldn’t remember what hadn’t happened yet, so i probably balanced coke cans on the windowsill or something. i was into that for a while in that class.

anyway after that i was hooked, and over the course of the rest of highschool and the beginning of college, when i lived in new york city and used paperbacks were for sale for a dollar or two from random street vendors scattered every few blocks throughout the streets around NYU, i worked my way through every vonnegut book i could get my hands on, which is a tribute i have paid to very few authors. i think i got a kick out of digging up the more obscure titles because, after a point, every kurt vonnegut book is really the same story, and there’s a bit of a geekout factor in recognizing all the recurring themes and characters. it’s also kind of like you get a chance to read the same great book over and over again from a multitude of slightly different angles, and you get to see the ideas evolve over time, like the favorite conversation topics of a close friend.

vonnegut’s wit and cynicism was the perfect fuel for the mindset of my late teens. mortified by the horrors in the world,

so it goes was a rather frequent phrase in my emails of the period.

as he aged, mr. vonnegut became more and more cynical while i became less and less so, and over time we grew apart. i still displayed every title on my bookshelf, recommended them to friends when they came up, and my connection to indiana was surely different than it would have been had i not known it to be the state that he was happy to no longer call home. but i still haven’t read his most recent collection of essays, and i only skimmed some of the speeches and short stories i have encountered over the past few years.

i felt like his trademark points boiled themselves down over the years to a few tired diatribes, and i admit that i grew tired of his crankiness.
i felt bad about this, and i haven’t let myself really think about it because i think i was afraid i would respect him less, and i didn’t want that to happen to someone who played such a role in my ideological development. but when i think about that even just a tiny bit, i know it is silly. i know that i’m at a point in life when things still feel somehow hopeful and idealistic, and far be it from me to begrudge a brilliant and socially conscious man like kurt vonnegut the cynical retreat of his old age. the truth really is that i’m probably afraid that the same will happen to me, but if that’s the case i should continue to embrace the wisdom that maturity brings to those i admire. in the name of not diverting eyes from lessons most needed and all.

this became a bit rambly, so perhaps i should finish my tribute in another fashion. a story, perhaps. a napkin drawing. a bokonon foot orgy. a quote from the headstone in breakfast of champions, which is an unoriginal tribute i am sure – “Not even the Creator of the universe knew what the man was going to say next-perhaps the man was a better universe in its infancy.”

i can think of no better tribute, actually, than just continuing to live and write, knowing that onward life shall go.

this is the kind of high-quality sap that youtube was made to deliver to a wider audience.

it’s a cover of coldplay’s “fix you” by the Young@Heart chorus, a group in Northampton, MA that is composed entirely of senior citizens and apparently tours around and gets NEA grants and stuff.

talk about schmaltzy, but i am always interested in things that are good schmaltz, because knowing what pulls our heartstrings can teach us a lot.

let’s just say this song was very well chosen.

for the curious, this link was brought to me via this blog, which, fwiw, is the blog that most makes me wish that feedreaders imported stylesheets. it’s purty.

last week’s episode of this american life is phenomenal.

apparently it’s a year old, but i didn’t hear it the first time, so yeehaw podcasting. :)

it tells the story of a fundamentalist preacher named carlton pearson, who rose through the ranks of the charismatic movement and led a huge pentecostal church in tulsa, oklahoma that was one of the stars of the fundamentalist christian world.

then, a few years ago, he decided that he didn’t believe in hell anymore, which is a rather startling move for a pentecostal preacher.

he was the kind of guy who thought about things, though, especially when they seemed to be coming from god, and the more he thought about this one, the more he decided that, in fact, the damnation of the pure at heart simply because they didn’t know about christ was anathema to his understanding of god. he had a sort of epiphany where he saw hell not as something that god would ever do to his children, but rather as something that we create for ourselves by not believing in universal forgiveness.

these ideas ran counter to the very foundations of what he had been taught, but he knew that sometimes god had reasons for not revealing everything at once, so it just felt to him as if god was saying that people were ready to advance to the next level, like in mario 3, where suddenly in level 6 it makes sense to use that suit that lets mario turn into stone, but in level 3, where there’s a lot of water, that suit really didn’t make any sense, and actually it sucked hardcore because you just sank to the bottom and sat there like an idiot. but that didn’t mean that level 3 didn’t have it’s place or it’s own wonders. who doesn’t like that frog suit? people just work with what they’re given at the moment, mmm-k?

ok so that’s my analogy, not his, but maybe you get the idea.

anyway, he was used to preaching what felt true to him, so he started talking about changing the charismatic doctrine. he didn’t feel like he should leave the church, and at first, he was just met with disbelief. people did this awkward kind of throat-clearing “how’s the weather?” kind of song and dance because they didn’t Really want to believe that he was serious, and you know, maybe it would pass.

but eventually, his ideas went further and he began to say things like: if you think about it just a little bit, you realize that it’s the Spirit of the word that matters, and not necessarily a literal adherence to the translation that happened to make it into the king james.

round about there he crossed a line, and it wasn’t long before he was shunned and officially branded as a heretic. his church attendance plummeted, he fell into debt, he was asked to leave the board of oral roberts university, and eventually, he was forced to reinvent his church on a much smaller scale.

about 100 of his original members stuck with him through the whole ride, despite being shunned themselves, and today he preaches to about 400 of what may be the world’s only pentecostal universalists, with his numbers slowly growing.

and remember, this is in oklahoma.

i believe that this is an incredibly important story for anyone concerned about the outcome of the faith and values debates that are raging in contemporary america, and it is also the 53839th reminder of why this american life is a great show and i miss out when i forget to listen (so again, yeehaw podcasting!).

it is important because these are people who looked at their long-held beliefs, looked at the world, saw a discrepancy, and realized that they had the choice to either push the discrepancy away as a threat to their way of life or embrace it as a chance to learn more about what they truly believe, even though what they found might be different from what they always expected.

and they chose to take the chance.

bishop pearson’s former colleagues and friends saw this decision as a failure of faith; a failure to trust the bible without question, even if (or especially when) it might seem to contradict itself. the idea that there are compelling reasons to not believe in hell is seen by them as proof that it is a particularly pernicious temptation meant to test them, and they just need to be strong.

but bishop pearson chose a different interpretation of faith, and i think this is important, not because “follow your heart” or “live and learn” are particularly new ideas in this world of ours, and not because, in this case, the people involved happened to have a change of heart that made their beliefs a lot closer to mine.

whatever we believe about damnation and salvation, and wherever we think faith comes from, i think this story is important because, in general, the idea that, when our way of life is threatened, faith could be what leads us to embrace change rather than resist it, is a Big Idea. the kind of idea that changes the shape of our world.

i know it doesn’t sound that revolutionary, but bear with me here, because i’m not sure we really get it.

the world around us right now is a pretty scary place.

at the end of the day, we are frightened that the way of life that we cherish is being threatened, and, in one way or another, the weapon we wield against this fear is our faith.

faith in god. faith in democracy. faith in ourselves.

but what are we really asking that faith to do for us?

are we saying “give me THIS! NOW! prove that you love me!”
or are we saying “give me the strength to grow and remember that love is never in doubt.”

because big and grown up and developed as our civilizations might be, we’re still pretty young in the grand scheme of things, and in some ways i think we’re just a bunch of kids with superhero suits that we refuse to take off even when we sleep. we wear the suits because they make us feel invincible, or invisible, or strong or smart or brave. we think the suits are part of who we are, and we’ll fall apart or disappear without them, so if anyone suggests that we might actually enjoy wearing a t-shirt and jeans, or a pinstripe suit, or maybe a sari, we just yell at them and run away and hide under the bed, consoling ourselves with dreams of flight or xray vision or whatever other power we are sure we will have just as soon as our true nature is revealed.

now i’m not a parent, or an expert in psychology, but word round the campfire is that the best thing to do in this situation is let the kid wear the suit as long as they want. that 9 times out of 10, if we come to believe that we are safe in our superhero suits, after a while we just wake up one morning and decide to wear something else of our own accord, confident of the fact that any superpowers that we really need are still with us, and always will be.

what i’m saying is that it’s important to remember that, wherever this world of thinning and shifting borders takes us, and however much it might not look like we thought it should look when we were little kids, we have a choice about how to respond. we can either make our decisions out of fear of losing what we thought we were, or out of faith in finding what we know we will become.

i tip my keyboard to bishop pearson and his church for that reminder.

you can stream the episode or pay a buck to download it here, or sign up for the free podcast here or, as lucy was lovely to announce to the world, through itunes. i still have numerous problems with itunes, but right now i am using it to keep up with this american life and this i believe while i’m abroad, and, as a portal for those progams, it brings me moments of joy that almost balance out the overwhelming sense of fatigue that overcomes me every time i think about all the hours i would have to put into organizing and annotating my music in order for itunes to live up to its distant, barely visible promise of flexibility and power.

i said almost.

if you have an hour while you’re making dinner or something, i hope you’ll give the episode a listen, and i’m all eyes if you wanna let me know what you think.

i warned you i was gonna write some this week, right?
;)

this post took a wicked long time.

and that downloading music. it didn’t take any time at all.

nope.

i still want to go work on that paper, but i might just have to sleep a bit first…

http://www.zefrank.com/thewiki/RunningFool_Trip

there’s a guy trying to make his way from spokane to the east coast and back over christmas break, using only viewers of zefrank’s the show for transport and lodging.

and companionship, of course. :)

anyway, neat idea, and i wish him luck. if you consider yourself a sports racer, and are traveling and/or sitting home with an empty couch over break, give runningfool a holla, eh?

tim points out erik‘s mentions on slashdot and ars technica for his AbiWord/OLPC work with Summer of Code.
way to go, my friend.

you’re building ladders.

i look forward to talking about the view. ;)

so when i went to make the leta reference in the last post, i also, of course, caught up on the last few days of dooce, and this post struck me.
apart from the fact that it must be kind of weird to find yourself dreaming about blogging panels, it struck me as a really interesting example of a kind of personal expression that really has no clear parallel at any other point in history – the ability to share experiences of the type: “embarrassing but still emotionally intense experience that i don’t really want to make a big deal about but it still involved person x and now i think about it when i see them so it feels funny for them to not know about it” in a semi-public forum, where person x doesn’t have to directly respond.

this is something that really fascinates me about blogs, because they open up this space of private stuff that everyone goes through, and that we can all really resonate with, but that we don’t really talk about much because it’s kind of awkward to actually talk about such things, because a lot of what they trigger is hard to put into words. i mean, a lot of us have probably had dreams involving other people that are kind of weird and we want to tell them, but then when you go to tell them, and they’re absorbing the weirdness of it while looking you in the face as you sit there, expectant and kind of embarassed despite your efforts to the contrary, there’s often this air of “ok… that’s sweet, but… what else am i supposed to say?” on one side, and an impulse to dismiss the whole thing and move on to safer territory on the other.
so neither person really gets to enjoy the story much, which is a shame.

now though, i imagine cases where one person writes a blog entry about something they thought or felt or dreamed or sang to themselves in the shower, and the person they thought or felt or dreamed or sang about trips over it while drinking coffee at work, or checking ticket prices, or looking up the name of that guy in that one movie with that other chick from that music video. and then there is this glorious moment where the person can just sit there, with no need to wonder whether a funny expression crosses their face or a funny noise escapes their lips, and give a few seconds of full attention to the reality of this person in their life, and all of the craziness and gorgeousness and scariness and excitement that goes with the package.
and those kinds of moments are awesome gifts.

i imagine the unsolicited hugs, the knowing smiles, and the jokes at the end of the day.
and also all the days where nothing is said and life just trods along as usual, but the air is richer between all of us than it has ever been before.
and it makes me happy, and excited.

but maybe it’s just springtime and i’m a sappy ball of hormone juice.

you can decide on your own time.

today i cleaned the kitchen, started tidying the living room, bought some flowers for the table, and talked with my mom about my capstone.
i have had a few really good conversations this week about my ideas, but i’m still having a really hard time boiling them down to the key points when i sit down to write, and it’s frustrating. i start in on one thing and then it makes me think about seventy-five other things and i get all tangled up in myself and can’t figure out how to tie things together.
i told my mom this and she said i should just write a sentence or two for each of the key pieces and build from there, which is what everyone says (including me), but i have even been struggling with that because it’s hard for me to figure out where one idea ends and another begins, so what starts out as one sentence turns into a paragraph and a half and i eventually just throw my hands in the air and give up. i have been slowly making progress anyway by forcing myself to focus, but it still feels a lot like sludging through thick mud.
my mom said that i had done a good job of articulating the points while we were talking, and i said thanks, but the problem is that the talkie brain doesn’t always cooperate with the writey brain, so i was still worried about what would happen when i sat down before the page or screen. she offered to mirror what she heard back to me, which i thought was a great idea, but i had to go to the commencement dinner ceremony, and i was worried about running up my daytime minutes on my phone.
so i asked her if she would write the points up in an email and send them to me, and she said sure thing.
then when i got home from dinner, there was this wonderful summary of the conversation in my inbox, and suddenly the day feels really productive.
it’s not exActly right, but i have to do Something to earn my degree, right? ;)

it is really cool to have a mom who’s so willing to go the extra mile to help me figure out what i’m figuring out, and so i just thought i’d say so.
also, she’s shy about starting to blog herself, so i figure i’ll give her a little head start by adding her contribution to the public record of my capstone thinking.
hopefully, she won’t mind my sneakiness too much. :)

before you read any more, though, look at my pretty graduation flowers!

thanks, momma.
:)

(more…)

i posted a reference to the HCI list a few days ago about a blog entry i read at “Creating Passionate Users” the blog for the authors (and primarily, the head author) behind the new Head First book series from O’Reilly that is apparently getting quite a bit of buzz (and not just because they won the “Jolt Cola/Software Development Award for Best Computer Book” <- is that not the funniest thing ever?!). i said that one of the posts was interesting as a general user-centered pep talk, and that the blog itself had grabbed my attention because of the effective interweaving of homemade illustrations and incisive commentary. it has not disappointed me since. it's wordy, but i can deal with that. ;) and see? there are pictures, too! i put this one here because it cracked me up, and because you might not have believed me before. so now it's warring with the daily mumps, for the “how did i not know this shit was out there before [incredibly recent date]?!” award.

more on that front later, though.
i just thought i’d post something lucid while i had the chance, because erik asked if i was drunk after he read my last entry.
:)
this while i was chatting in gmail at the office while gallantly trying to salvage some productivity for the day.

here’s my dramatic reenactment:
erik: “are you flagrantly spurning responsible behavior during the work day, kynthia?”
me: “no!” *[she types frantically into the instant messenger client, causing important papers to fly across the room and lose themselves behind a bookcase full of calculus textbooks from the 1700’s.]*

it was awesome.