I received a Google alert today because my name popped up in a blog post. When I first read the alert, I thought it was probably me. It was a blog dedicated to “Fighting the Right Wing Nuts”. When I saw my name, I thought for sure it was about me.
When I clicked through, though, I was disappointed. The article, in fact, has nothing to do with me – not even casually. Instead, it focuses on right wing nuts that donated to the Pro-8 movement in California.
I have long known that there is at least one Michael Turk in CA. He’s a physical therapist with a shitty website. I’m not sure if he’s the one that appears on this site. There are apparently four listings for Michael Turk in Cali, and only one of them seems to be the nut in question.
For those who might stumble upon that list, and think it’s me, let me again state for the record that I think my party is completely backwards on the gay marriage question. We’ve staked out territory in a really bad place, and need to pack up and move the tent.
I have not now, nor will I ever, contribute to a cause that wants to allow the government to decide who can marry. As a matter of fact, I would be more than happy to have the government get out of all marriages – gay straight or otherwise.
So as the title says, “Just to be clear, I’m not the right wing nut in question.” Thanks for listening.
On another note, if you’re the physical therapist version of Michael Turk that is mentioned above: Dude, I’ll redo your shitty website for free just so people who accidentally confuse us don’t think I did that. Contact me through the link to the right to discuss.
For the last hour or so, I have been discussing character alignment paradoxes with Aaron Brazell (@technosailor on Twitter) on Facebook. It all started with a simple status update.
Aaron is in a Chaotic Neutral mood.
For those who don’t get the reference, chaotic neutral refers to one of nine character “alignments” in Dungeons & Dragons. Think of them like a matrix. Lawfulness versus Chaos is essentially your adherence to the laws of society, whereas Good and Evil are your moral/ethical disposition.
Now here’s the problem, and the jumping off point for the discussion with Aaron. I contend that chaotic good and chaotic evil are false choices. Good and evil, just like law and lawlessness, lie on a continuum. That is, there is an order to them. There are degrees between them.
Chaos, on the other hand, is completely random. There is no order at all. Therefore, a chaotic character would be just as likely to be good as evil. As Aaron said, everything becomes situational. A chaotic good character would always tend toward the good. If they are chaotic evil, they would always tend toward evil. By that logic, they have applied order to their own lives. They have chosen a path, and a path, by nature, is not chaotic.
It’s like Johnny Depp’s line from Pirates of the Caribbean.
Me? I’m dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest.
A truly chaotic person can always be counted on to be chaotic, and that means they’re just as lokely as not to swing toward good or evil. As Paul Rodriguez (@pjrodriguez) said, “[A] Chaotic Neutral person might hit you in the face one day and gave you a $100 bill the next and then borrow your car, use all the gas, but [leave] a TV in the back seat.”
That’s pretty much exactly it. In a fight against long odds, a chaotic person would be just as likely to stay with you and fight as they would be to stab you in the leg so they could outrun you in retreat. They’re chaotic, and chaos defies patterns. If they always tend toward good (or evil for that matter) you could always know what they would do within a certain range.
So do chaotic good and chaotic evil exist? I don’t believe they can, and therefore the whole D&D continuum is off. I think the continuum should look more like this:
Anything below neutrality in regard to morals (good and evil) and lawfulness would fall into a base category of Chaotic. You would have no idea what they would do or what their moral leanings would be. I think it would be a much better framework. Frankly, with people stabbing each other in the leg, I think it would make the game more interesting.
To be clear, I still hate Vegas. However, the city of alcholics and broken dreams did get a bit of a boost in my eyes this past week. Maybe it was hanging with Star Trek: TNG’s Geordi LaForge (LeVar Burton – @levarburton on Twitter – to you and me) on the Lovesac bus. Maybe it was also meeting James D. Kirk – his real name – on the same bus. Maybe it was dinner next to Alice Cooper at Osetria del Circo, but the very surreal mix of celebs on Firday night made me think a bit better of Sin City.
CES was also better this year.
Don’t get me wrong. The number of booths pimping flash drives still outweighed the number of decent tech offerings about 3 to 1. That ratio is, however, significantly better than the 10 to 1 of last year.
And just in case you think I was joking about the wide variety of shapes and sizes of flash drives on display, the pic to the left is just one booth’s offering. This particular company has a 47 page catalog of options (my favorite is the goofy little sheik on page 13).
If you don’t see what you want (say a banana shaped flash drive to promote a fruit company), just call them, and they’ll crank one out for you. Personally, I think they should do more work with the porn awards that were also going on in Vegas. They could give away little donger shaped drives pre-loaded with clips of the nominees for best threesome and best oral.
As for the rest of the technology, I did find some cool stuff. I’ve shared a couple of the items related to broadband networks and TV via CableTechTalk.com. I really dig the PC Ride (video below). It’s a car shaped CPU that retails at $2,495. I’m not a big fan of the desktop case, so I was pleased to see someone making a different shape. I guess it’s only a matter of time before someone has a 47 page catalog of PC designs, though.
I also really dug the ultra-thin TVs that most of the manufacturers unveiled. Just in case you haven’t heard “Oh my god! It’s so small!” enough in your life, bring one of these home.
Some of the really cool finds I didn’t put up on the cable blog because they aren’t really broadband/connected home specific. For instance, I love little more than the ocean. Any time Mrs. Quip and I vacation, we generally head for a tropic island. While there, I like to snorkel, and often wish I had an underwater camera.
The dive mask to the right has a 5.0 MP digital camera built into the mask (I know, it’s a grainy picture). Push a red button on the top right (your left) to snap a picture.
I’d love to take this with me on my next trip to the Caribbean.
Another cool find (especially for parents with aspiring social media monsters for kids) is Crayola’s kid friendly video camera.
Now your toddlers can film themselves dropping mentos in diet coke and destroying your living room. When they’re done, you can use it to film them washing Diet Coke off the walls.
When the little critters grow up, and tire of tedious housecleaning, they’ll no doubt move on to killing copious amounts of brain cells by vegging out in front of the TV playing video games. By the staggering amount of controllers and promos for it, there’s a good chance Guitar Hero 12 or Rock Band 9 will be the game of the day.
If, however, they decide they’d like to learn to play an actual guitar, you should check out JamVox. JamVox is a software application and a mini-amp. Connect the amp to your PC and an actual guitar, and the software will strip out the guitar track of any song – allowing you to play along with your favorite music. Think of it as Guitar Hero on the extra, extra hard setting. The difference, however, is after your done some chicks will actually be impressed because you can play a real instrument.
I’m leaving for Vegas in the AM to spend several glorious days in Las Vegas at the annual gadget porn fest known as the Consumer Electronics Showcase. I’ll spend about 72 hours wandering through giant exhibit halls at the Las Vegas Convention Center looking for the few truly remarkable new gadgets amidst the sea of cell phone cases, flash drives, digital photo frames, and Wii accessories.
Before my first trip to CES, I had a concept in my head that no event could ever actually live up to. CES, to me, was nerdvana. It was like a car show featuring nothing but concept vehicles – and all of them were cool. Unfortunately, the reality is the show is like the world’s largest Eatser Egg hunt. You have these enormous rooms full of iPod docks, bling kits, and batteries, and tucked into this cavern of a room is one or two truly interesting technologies.
In a way, it’s sort of sad. I imagine the one guy who has come up with a revolutionary idea, scraped together enough cash to rent a 10×10 booth space, and ends up surrounded by 10 booths full of junk nobody will buy that will end up in a dollar store in Topeka. His dream of being discovered and becoming a billionaire is lost in a sea of cheap Chinese imports.
It’s probably fitting that the event is held in Las Vegas – given that city’s tendency to quash dreams, take fortunes and create hollow alcoholics and strippers. This paean to consumerism could only fit in a city based on squandering cash on the great gamble.
Perhaps I’m jaded on Sin City. I have ended up on some sort of Hell’s Holiday vacation plan that takes me there three or four times a year. Spending that much time in Vegas is like spending that much time at Disneyland. Pretty soon your going to run into a ride that’s out of order, or maybe a chunk of the Peter Pan flight will fall on your head as you careen over Neverland. One way or another, you’ll see the rather sketchy workmanship that holds it all together.
Vegas is like that. Eventually you stop seeing the carefree celebration and you see nothing but desparate people, clad in a trashy wardrobe of sequins with hair bigger than the skies of Texas. Vegas becomes a cavalcade of the beat and weary fresh off the front lines of their life.
The upside to this trip to perdition, and the quest for that one cool gadget that makes the trip through hell worthwhile, is that there are, occasionally, some truly incredible things on display – technologies that make life more enjoyable.
My favorite from last year is the 3D TV. My understanding is this year will see even more of these. They’re difficult to describe, but they offer some cool functionality. Imagine, if you will, two people playing a head to head game on the Xbox360. Watching the game from behind them, the screen is a mess of color and imagery. If you’re one of the gamers, wearing the special 3D glasses, the game not only occupies the whole screen (as opposed to split screen games today) but also stands out away from the TV. You have depth and width not possible on even the best 2D TV.
Over the next few days, I’ll bring you the best of the Easter eggs I find. If I stumble upon the guy with the billion dollar idea, I’ll give him your best.
I haven’t written much since mid-December because, frankly, I’ve been very burned out on politics, and not too thrilled about technology either. Since this is (was) a blog primarily about those two things, I had pretty much run out of stuff to say. It was beginning to remind me of a Doug Stanhope comedy routine about stars who die too young and people who say, “It’s so tragic. They had so much left to give the world.”
Stanhope’s take? What if they didn’t? What if Jimi Hendrix had given all he had and would have ended up doing bad lounge acts or SuperBowl half-time shows with Elton John?
That’s how I was beginning to feel. If the two main topics of your blog leave you cold, what do you do? When most of what you find interesting is beginning to feel like work, and the last thing you want to do is more work, what do you do?
Well, if you’re me, you take a couple of weeks off, you try to pay as little attention to technology and politics as possible, and you alter your persepctive. I spent two weeks almost completely disconnected. I spent a lot of time playing with the kids. I discovered a couple of universal truths.
The world continues to spin if you turn off the Blackberry.
Kids can actually provide a lot of entertainment. You’ve never laughed until you have heard a three year old who has only seen snow once in his life singing “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas/Just like the ones I used to know.”
As I get older, I’m slowly losing my sense of humor.
That last one was the hardest to take. I looked back at some of the stuff I have written over the last couple of years. It made me realize that I used to like laughing. Now that seems like a luxury. I discovered I’ve become a grumpy old bastard, and I’m not happy about it.
So I decided to rethink things. My New Year’s resolution is to embrace the funny. I’m not going to write about things that make me angry (like the RNC Chairman’s race) on this blog. I’ll save my political gripes for The Next Right, my politech gripes for TechPresident and PDF, and my telecom rants for CableTechTalk. This blog is now, and shall remain, a frump free zone. From now on, this site is all about laughter, and mirth. It shall rejoice in good movies, good music, good food, and fun.
To coincide with this rebirth of my lighter side, I have decided a new look is in order. I hope you like it. I think it’s a much better complement to the new vibe.
If there is anything you’d like to share, feel free to leave a comment, drop me a note, or give me a call. I’d love to hear from you.
Anyone know of a good landscape dock/charger for the iPad? 3 days ago
@LizMair Just book hotels in both names. Otherwise you might find yourself locked out at 2am and the front desk has to wake him up. in reply to LizMair3 days ago
