Who is the Man with the Name that Rhymes ?If the name don't rhyme it ain't mine.

 It's been a long time since I've written here. Apologies to anyone (if you're still around) who enjoys reading these posts. It's not a matter of not having much to say, rather than just being distracted by other things. 

Being a home owner has been fun, but the novelty of it has worn off; I love living there but I don't feel I have anything new do around it. That will probably change during the spring when I'll have a couple of things to do with the backyard. Generally, I don't think I'm the type to be a home owner: I live as minimally as possible, I move around a lot, I don't have a family to raise. While my primary motivation was getting $8K for a great place to live with a mortgage lower than renting, that was just some economic calculation; every thing else said my lifestyle doesn't fit. Regardless though, I've enjoyed fixing small things around the place and haven't felt weighted down by the burdens. Hopefully it will stay that way.

Work has been equally novelty-lacking lately. I've been accomplishing a few things but most of my workload has stalled. Since working for a larger operation, my work doesn't depend on just myself, I have to rely on many more people to get the job done. While this is process works on its own merits, I'm the type who rather do everything myself; I understand things better that way and I don't think things are slowing down. Not to say co-workers are slowing things down, it's just my perception; when I'm not thinking about a particular problem I feel that the solution is going nowhere. While specialization of labor is probably good thing to do, there's a benefit from being able to see the bigger picture at different angles. 

What has been left for free time has been filled with enough friends, events, projects, and other distractions that I rarely feel the complusion to blog anymore. Besides, blogging is old hat these days. It's all about social media, micro-blogging, and other latest buzzwords these days. All this stuff makes me think people's attention spans are getting shorter. The skeptic in me wants to say this is bullshit. This might be me playing around with semantics, but I think it's more that people are distracted by a lot more information than it being a case of shortened attention spans.

I think its a sign of the information age we live in. We have all kinds of different media to consume now, books, newspapers, images, text, tv, movies, video clips, videogames, etc. Not only that, we have a huge, ever-growing, volume of information to consume from. Because of this, our knowledge has grown not only in depth (how much we can know about a particular topic) but in width too (how many different topics we're aware of). This means while people can have their attention spans shortened by the distraction of thousands of perspectives/topics/media/etc, they can also have their attention lengthened such that the focus is on one-and-only-one subject and all the events relevant to it. 

I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing; its just different from the past. I do think that the information age we live in does a lot to prevent a pervasiveness monoculture from happening. It's kind of ironic when I think about it. We have such a ubiquity of devices that can rapidly and  unambigiously convey information to almost every person on planet in the amount of time never know before. However that same technology hasn't created such some sort of collective understanding, rather it helps create dissent as it enables people to pick and choose what they will see, hear, read, and understand (I'm looking at you 9/11 truthers). Again, I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing (that will probably determined in the future), it's just different. 

If anything else, I think it just shows people are people and human nature isn't as changeable as the technology we use. Morality put aside, I do think the information age does provides us with a illuminating perspective we've never seen before. It shows a macroscopic view of humanity as some sort of collective organism. This is what I think of when I see the growth of cities on satellite maps that looks rather like mold growing on some surface. I see different social groups (united by whatever interests/perspectives) of varying sizes (from small group to a whole nation) as different parts of a collective brain for this organism. Illuminating in someways, scary in others, these are the times we live in. I love it and can't get enough.

I've been in a constant state of agitation lately. If I had to describe it, I would say its a state of constant pressing thoughts. To use a  'pedia article I read some time ago, my brain is constantly make using of its executive functions. Between my job, finding a home, following the market, and other responsibilities, I've been set into this mode where I'm constantly taking in new information and making decisions on what I should do about them. I'm sure all of this is taking some toll on me. I've been managing my stress pretty well. Agitation turn aggravation has mostly been reserved toward computers whether that be fixing them or just interacting with them.

Recently I've taken a long hiatus from videogaming, a topic I'm sure to cover in here some time soon, but even though I put that down I still find I'm using the same skills in dealing with computers. Perhaps even more so now since less of my attention is focused on performing just-frames or EWGFs in Tekken. There are many times now where I find the computer lagging me where I can input data/keystrokes/etc. For example, the other day I had to bring back my Sanyo RL-4930 phone (with the kung fu grip!) from the dead when my POS Palm Centro fried (last Palm phone I'll probably ever buy). I had to update a lot of contacts in the phone since it hadn't been touched in 2 years.

As I was entering in #'s which was painfully slow, I slowly picked up the same input keys I was using over and over again: down, down, OK, number, OK, OK, right, OK. The more I kept doing it (I think there was 20-30 numbers to update), the quicker I got. Eventually I got to a point where I could time it so fast the display would lag behind where I was entering the keys to enter data and select options. The display was peripheral; at this point my mind had its own mental picture of the computer that was more accurate that what the display was telling me. This stuff usually only has happened when I was in an intense gaming session.

When I've noticed this happening before I get a real spooky feeling. Because as that's happening I notice I can completely take my mind off the physical task at hand. That is to say I don't have to think anymore about the what my body is doing to interact with the computer, it just happens automatically while my brain can think about other things as if my mind is now part of the machine. Of course, I can't do this for too long before I start to lose control. Or as I called it in videogaming, the "oh shit..." moments where I realize that I'm losing control of something in game and failure is eminent.

Thinking about your actions as you do them will help perform them better, but at some point you will level off to where more intensity won't result in better performance. This is because you can't control everything. As much as you can become a master at some action, whether it be typing, running, speaking, or what have you, there are some factors that you can't control. Profoundly, this is the source of my agitation; trying to control every essence of my actions, my life, that, while admirable, is inevitably futile.