Internet

Every time I get a chance to I go to visit the North Coast of Trinidad and Tobago. Some people go there for the beaches. I go there to watch the boundaries. To see where the earth, sea and sky meet in scenarios both mundane and dramatic. It's a constant reminder of the illusion of progress. It's a constant churning of the sea against the earth, a constant churning of the wind against the sea and earth. It's an open system of constant reorganization, incremental reorganization.

Some days they battle each other, some days they massage each other - but there is change every day.

I do not know why boundaries interest me so much. Maybe it's that there is something more out there, hiding behind where the ocean meets the sky. Maybe it's the constant change. Maybe it's the sound of the waves and wind striking some primordial gene in my being - a sense of being home, a sense that there is more to see in this world that I live in. Maybe it's the basic understanding given to me in schools by rote and lash combined with decades of observation of change.

I've been reading 'Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality' in spurts, sometimes stopping to wonder what would have happened had I known some of the things in the book 20 - even 10 - years ago. Where ideas are easy for me, some hard introspection shows that I haven't been able to follow through on some of them. In some instances, it was simply me charging against the world with an idea and a lighter - in others, I probably could have done more to bring things to fruition had I been more organized.

There's a de facto paralysis that happens when one tries to do too many things at the same time. Some people are better at it than others for reasons that could be blamed on gender, genetics or experience. And some people are worse at it. The key, really, is organization and pragmatism - two things that I am above average at but I don't necessarily use on everything I do. I've got at least 6 projects I'm working on, one that will pay regardless, so the triage is somewhat easy. Even so, a little more organization will allow some cross pollenation, and I'm working on that today.

But as I work on it today, I couldn't help but wonder how many people out there are paralyzed by social media - addicted to Twitter streams, to Facebook status updates, waiting for an IM or text message. I daresay that at least a year of innovation is lost every week to that around the world - perhaps even a year of innovation per day is lost as people wait to see what their friends are doing, what someone else is thinking, in the hope that some answer that they need will show up. The odds of that are pretty slim and the paralysis of it is quite real.

As my old man would say: "Get off your ass and do something."

Odd consecutive subject lines in email quarantine combined... sponsored by Nyquil.

World Science: Test could screen for 100s of childhood diseases
Did You Know? The Power Of Email Marketing

Music-Inspired Deals of the Day That Will Melt Your Face
Sarah Palin.

We have Percocet available here
It's*time to*buy-gifts!

CIA Creates WikiLeaks Task Force
High performance: MySQL performance issue with heavy traffic - help!

One of the things that bugs me most about games such as Neverwinter Nights 2 Gold
and the Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir Expansion isn't that, like so many other applications and games, that it asks me to register.

What bugs me is the way that it always chooses Internet Explorer to register with. The default browser on my systems is Google Chrome; it used to be Seamonkey but the separate processes in separate tabs makes Google Chrome my browser of choice. So when I go to register or visit any site from an application, the application should launch the my default browser - not Microsoft's default browser.

Whether intended or not, and whether damaging or not, it is a matter of control. I modify my computer systems to suit me, not some corporate interest. Don't launch a browser that another corporation wants you to launch, launch the browser that your customer wants to launch.