I was a little worried not everyone understood the analogy I was trying to make between gay marriage and interracial marriage. Thankfully Douglas Sadler has done a good job of clearing up any confusion I might have left.
"We don't believe they have the right to marry," Sadler said. "In fact, we don't think they have the right to exist."
Nothing clarifies a controversial political issue like unabashed hatred.
Jessica and (more so) her brother David have been writing a weblog called Rhetoric and Culture of Publics. I'm not entirely sure what that means, but it's generally about political issues, and has a somewhat more interesting perspective than the standard "yeah us, boo them" slant.
For example, David recently wrote about the apparent end of the "intelligent design" "debate" with the US district court's recent rejection. He says I fear the fight is not yet over. Creationists are entrenched, they have a plan, and it will not be denied after this singular ruling.
But I disagree. I think the fight was over a long time ago.
David mentions Pastafarians saying One strategy is to follow in line with Bobby Henderson and his Flying Spaghetti Monster and escalate the confrontation.
But I think he misread the FSM. It didn't escalate the confrontation at all; it ended it.
In What You Can't Say, Paul Graham wrote:
No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad.
What the FSM does is make it clear that intelligent design is as ridiculous as 2+2=5, so we need not bother discussing it. Now that we recognize this, it's game over. If creationists want to continue their crusade, they will inevitably be touched by His Noodly Appendage and see the foolishness of it all. There is simply no way to win an argument with a devout Pastafarian in full pirate regalia.
In case you missed it, the President King broke the law by spying on Americans without legal oversight. Though some in Congress knew about it, they apparently forgot their oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic
when they decided not to tell America about it.
In other words, he has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
Or maybe it would be better to say he has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures.
Or maybe the executive branch is just suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
This, after protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States
and depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury
and transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.
Also, he is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
Basically, it looks like he has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
Or maybe I'm thinking of a totally different George with plain, homely, thrifty manners and tastes.
Why are so many priests pedophiles? The official Roman Catholic Church explanation seems to be that the cause is homosexuals in the clergy. That explanation is awfully convenient as it rests on common prejudices and shifts the blame away from Rome's own policies. But more to the point, it does nothing to explain why priests are raping girls.
We might then turn to abstinence as the problem. After all, humans are wired to reproduce. However, a study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that [rape] offenses could be categorized as power rape (sexuality used primarily to express power) or anger rape (use of sexuality to express anger), [but] there were no rapes in which sex was the dominant issue; sexuality was always in the service of other, nonsexual needs.
So apparently sex crimes have little to do with sex, and more to do with anger and power issues. So why are so many priests pedophiles?
I suspect the answer has a lot to do with the broken hierarchy of the Catholic Church. I haven't spent a lot of time in Catholic churches, but pretty much every one I know anything about is messed up, with people who want to do good being restricted by their position in an amoral or immoral bureaucracy. Case in point on Shelley's weblog. The inability to do good naturally makes people angry. The apparent discrepancy between God's will and the Catholic Church's will naturally creates power issues. And anger and power issues encourage sex crimes.
The attempt to mandate sexual orientation among abstinent priests is an ironic symptom of the problem here. It's not enough for Rome to control, to the point of elimination, the sex lives of priests; they also want to control the sex priests aren't even having. It's an unfortunate irony, a disease masquerading as a cure.
Ultimately, I think, priests are responsible for their own actions. But the Catholic Church is an apparent accomplice.
The Guardian: the moral of King Kong is simpler still: "Don't pick a fight with nature."
Letters to an Unknown Audience: The message of Narnia is clear: Don't ask questions. Trust the first person you meet and stick with it. Raise your ill-begotten sword for it.
I haven't seen either, but I'm curious to what extent these morals are injected by the films' creators vs. viewers. I also think it would be an interesting thesis project to compile a list of morals as described by film critics over a few decades, correlate those morals to political party platforms with some sort of text similarity analysis, and then measure ticket sales against election results.
I find it interesting to paraphrase Iowans reactions to a lawsuit seeking equal rights:
The following are statements made about a lawsuit filed today in Iowa by NAACP Legal Defense Fund on behalf of interracial couples seeking the right to marry:
Camilla Taylor, staff attorney for NAACP Legal Defense Fund:
"This lawsuit is about fairness and equality. Interracial couples all over Iowa are devoted and love each. Since marriage is the way the government provides protection, support and respect for families, it is only fair that these couples be able to marry."
Chuck Hurley, president of the Iowa Family Policy Center:
"Defending Iowa's Defense of Marriage Act, and pushing for a marriage amendment has nothing to do with disliking black people. Studies across the spectrum, from liberal to conservative, prove that children do best in a home with two parents of the same race...We want what's best for Iowa's kids."
Senate Democratic leader Mike Gronstal, D-Council Bluffs:
"I still believe that marriage should only be between a white man and a white woman."
"The current law is supported by most Iowans. In fact, an overwhelming majority of legislators ' both Republicans and Democrats ' have already voted for the state law that bans interracial marriages in Iowa. I am confident that the courts will uphold the current law."
Mark Daley, executive director of OneIowa, a nonprofit working to promote full equality of black Iowans:
"Denying loving, committed couples the basic rights, protections and responsibilities of marriage creates a second class in Iowa. Marriage is the only vehicle which offers interracial couples equal protection under the law. We applaud the leadership of NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the courage of these interracial couples."
Senate Republican leader Stewart Iverson, R-Dows, regarding a constitutional amendment that would ban interracial marriage:
"This gives the people the right to vote on this issue. And, it's a very very important issue and we think it is proper that the people of Iowa get to vote on it and I think most legislators will understand that and see it that way...I think it will have widespread support and bipartisan support."
Jason Morgan, 35, who wants to marry his partner of eight years, Charlotte Swaggerty, both of Sioux City:
"We feel that we deserve the right to be married. On an every day basis it is awkward and inadequate to describe Charlotte as just a friend or roommate, when she is more than that. Even partner doesn't really give the same weight as being able to say she's my spouse."
Pastor Jeff Bradley, Central Assembly of God in Des Moines, leads the pastor group for the Iowa Family Policy Center:
"I would never have dreamed that in the state of Iowa that we would have come to this place, where we needed to define the issue of marriage between two people of the same race."
"We firmly believe, as we believe that most Iowans do, that marriage between white people has always been the best way."
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
— Thomas Jefferson.
I received my first donation for Graphite last night, and that made me start thinking about it again, which I haven't done in a while. Turns out it is listed on Apple's Dashboard site, though under the "Networking Security" category for some reason. Oh well.
The reason I haven't been thinking about Graphite is that I hit a roadblock with my attempts to add zooming and scrolling to the graphs. Scrolling is all done, but it turns out that numbers and dates don't zoom well together. To keep the numbers somewhat readable in a small space, e.g. "90K" rather than 90,001, I can only zoom numbers by factors of ten. But for dates, the best zoom factor is two, and even that's not perfect: 1 month, 2 weeks, 1 week, 3 days, 36 hours, etc.
But last night I realized that rather than changing the values of the end points on the graph, I can just move the them until they match up with a more readable label. So if that graph goes up to 90,001, I can just move the top line down a pixel or two, and still label it accurately as 90K. Now that I've realized what probably should have been obvious a long time ago, I just need to implement it, which I will hopefully get done this weekend.
Though I said I wouldn't, I made a simple tool to mark trademarked words on a website, based on querying the USPTO, but it turns out to be not at all a useful measurement of corporate influence on a website for two reasons. First, it's incredibly slow. Don't bother running it on any site with more than a couple dozen words, because it will time out. The speed could be improved by saving the USPTO query results locally, but I'm not going to bother with that because of the second problem: nearly every word in the English language has been trademarked. Scary but true.
Dave Rogers has been writing about marketing within the frame of "Social Hygiene" here and here. At the end of the latter he wrote:
If we're going to have any hope of preserving some space for purely social interactions, where someone isn't manipulating us for the purpose of seeking a competitive advantage, we're probably going to have to make one. But I wonder if it isn't already too late?
One of the ways I reduce comment spam is to band certain words from being posted in comments. I was at first hesitant to do this, because someone might have a legitimate reason to mention propecia, for example. But then I realized that I don't want to hear other people's thoughts on propecia even if they aren't spam. So you can't comment on propecia here, depsite my ability to use the word three times in a single paragraph.
After reading Dave's post, I wondered if this technique couldn't be expanded to ban commerce from a social space. Here's how I would do it if I didn't already have far too many projects started:
Run all conversation through a filter. Submit each word in the text to the USPTO trademark search with a URL like this one for propecia. If any results are found, replace the word with [commercial product], and maybe give each user an anti-karma value like "pawn of the man" with a point for each time they use a trademarked word. So because I've used the word propecia five times now, my name would say: Scott Reynen [Pawn of the man level 5] or something like that. And then you could kick me out if my POTM level got too high over a given period of time.
I'm sure this plan could use improvement, but I think it's entire feasible to ban all trademarked terms from a social space, and I think it would be an interesting experiment, if nothing else.
I just sent the following to an email list that has recently been discussing various anti-spam technologies:
Spam is fundamentally a social problem, not a technological problem. No amount of clever technology can end spam as long as there are still significant numbers of people out there who indicate through their purchases that they want to receive spam. The BBC reports:
According to a survey conducted by security firm Mirapoint and market research company the Radicati Group, nearly a third of e-mail users have clicked on links in spam messages.Imagine it costs $100 to send a million spam messages (though it doesn't cost nearly that much), and each message is selling a product with a $20 markup. Only six of those million messages need to get through to a willing consumer to keep spam profitable. And those six people will never be using Bayesian filters or whatever other nifty tools we can come up with, because they don't even recognize a problem with spam. And those six people will also never self-identify, because they are embarrassed about their purchases.
So spammers can only reach them through mass emailing, and the rest of us suffer the consequences. I don't know of any current anti-spam technology that does anything to deal with those six people.
I'd like to see more economists and sociologists look at changing the factors that make spam the most desirable way to purchase certain products. Why do people buy propecia via spam rather than at their local pharmacy, and what could be done to change that? I think that's a more useful question to answer than how to quickly recognize "v14gr4" as a variant of "viagra."
I'm on an email list with a group of university friends, and one of my friends recently sent an email to the list asking for everyone's forgiveness techniques. I was the first to respond, probably both because I spend all day in front of my computer, and because of my short answer: I don't forgive; I forget. I don't forgive and forget; I just forget. I have awful long-term memory.
I'm sure many people have done many mean things to me over my life, but I honestly can't think of one right now. I can think of people who I don't trust, and I'm sure there are reasons I don't trust those people, but I generally have no idea what the reasons are. So forgiveness is not an issue that really comes up for me.
While I don't remember events such as, say, 1990, I gather most people do. And when someone did something hurtful in 1990, that hurt still lingers until it is forgiven. But what does that mean, to forgive?
Dictionary.com says to forgive is to excuse for a fault or an offense; pardon.
I'd like to suggest that this isn't possible, that we are only fooling ourselves when we claim to excuse someone else's offense, that we can't help but hold each other accountable for our errors.
In She loves me She loves me not, Shelley wrote of her cat Zoë:
I woke her up, but she forgave me.
Or did she? Can a cat ‘forgive’? Some people say that animals aren’t capable of sophisticated emotions, such as love or sorrow or, in this case, forgiveness.
I thought about this, and I think I am one of those people. And not just cats — I don't believe people are capable of forgiveness either. I believe people can and do love, and feel compassion, even for people who have done them wrong. But I just don't think this love can excuse the wrong.
I sometimes imagine life as a pool table. We make choices about our direction and speed. If we're smart, we can anticipate the outcome of our decisions. In life, of course, this anticipation is made more difficult because the other balls have minds of their own. But to understand why I doubt forgiveness, I think the metaphor is useful.
The notion of forgiveness here is analogous to a pool ball being struck by another, rolling along, and then suddenly stopping as if it hadn't been struck at all. Pool balls just can't do that, and I submit that neither can people.
I know the idea that forgiveness does not exist seems pessimistic at first, but it need not be. In place of forgiveness, I offer a substitute: reconciliation. To reconcile, dictionary.com says, is to reestablish a close relationship between, to settle or resolve, to bring (oneself) to accept.
The reconciling pool ball says "okay, you struck me and now I'm rolling towards the bank, but I'm going to slow myself down now and stop before I bounce off and hit you." This I think people can do.
We can acknowledge the hurtful decisions of the past, and move on from there, but I don't think we can in good faith excuse them. Excusing them implies the decisions were not really made, that they weren't really choices, that there was some other cause. Forgiveness implies that we can do wrong and not be wrong, but I believe we are what we do. Our decisions form ourselves, even when we'd prefer they didn't.
In the comments to my post on endocrinology, Kyle wrote: If you haven't seen it already, you may find this story interesting: Temple Gradin NPR interview
.
I just listened to it, and it was interesting. Temple is an autistic animal scientist. In the interview, she talks about the similarities she sees between the autistic and the animal mind. Throughout, when she talked about animals, I couldn't help but consider how everything she said relates to people as well.
When she talked about how dogs need to know the social hierarchy to get along, for example, I wondered about how the lack of social hierarchy online might be a cause of the superfluousness of flame wars. Perhaps, like the dogs Temple discusses, people online are too often just testing each other until someone comes out on top.
But one part in the interview made me think about forgiveness specifically, and I want to try to transcribe it here, replacing "horse" with "[person]":
Let's talk about fear memories...Let's say a person abused a [person] wearing a black hat, and the [person] was looking right at the black hat. Now the [person] is afraid of black hats...they make an association...
She goes on to talk about how she helps the horse get over its fears by introducing them slowly and demonstrating that the associations are wrong. This is not forgiveness. This is reconciliation. And I don't see any reason to believe that people are any different in this respect.
Like horses, we get hurt. Like horses, we associate that hurt with something (or more often someone). Like horses, we don't recognize when that association is no longer valid. Like horses, we don't just drop the association, because we can't. Our brains don't work like that. Instead, like horses, we form new associations. We reconcile.
I promised myself I would never write about Lisp again after accidentally stumbling into a mob in search of a flame war. But Aaron Swartz's account of an irrational Lisp community sounded too familiar to ignore:
The idea that there is something better than Lisp is apparently inconceivable to some, judging from comments on the reddit blog. The Lispers instead quickly set about trying to find the real reason behind the switch.
One assumed it must have been divine intervention, since "there seems to be no other reason for switching to an inferior language." Another figured something else must be going on: "Could this be...a lie? To throw off competition? It's not as though Paul Graham hasn't hinted at this tactic in his essays..." Another chimed in: "I decided it was a prank." Another suggested the authors simply wanted more "cut corners, hacks, and faked artisanship."
So it's not just me. Turns out Reddit's post followed the same path as my own. It was posted on Lemonodor, without context, and with emphasis that spun it as a vehemently anti-Lisp post, and then it was picked up by Planet Lisp. I take back what I said about the problems with planet sites. It's not the aggregator, it's the writer that removes the context. John Wiseman is the author of Lemonodor. I want to paraphrase Jon Stewart and say to John Wiseman: Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting Lisp.
By provoking unnecessarily emotional defenses of Lisp across the web, John is causing otherwise neutral people like myself to actively avoid the Lisp community, because it comes off as a bunch of irrational trolls. I know there are intelligent people using Lisp, but John's reposts distort people's actual views through half-truths and re-emphasis, and the result makes Lisp look like a language only ridiculous people use, people who say things like When you say that you've never spoken Chinese and have no interest in learning it, you are not being anti-Chinese, but you are being closeminded and parochial
or My first reaction was 'say it ain't so'. Then I decided it was a prank.
This type of comment prompts reactions like I have never been on a lisp forum but the way the lispers here are reacting are sure to keep me off it too...
True that.
So I took my newly acquired recording skills and applied them to a song I wrote way back in high school, Emily (lyrics, MP3). I'm pretty sure I recorded it previously, but I can't find any recording of it, so I made a new one, and added a new verse on the end that totally changes what the song is about. (Before Emily was the antagonist — now she's the protagonist.)
I'm sure there's more I could improve, but after spending over two hours on one song, I'm done with it for now. I could have played two dozen songs in that time and instead I just played the same one over and over and over. This recording stuff is hard work. I guess that's why pros pay other people to do it.
I don't think I significantly slowed the song down, but it ended up over seven minutes, so hopefully it's not awful, or it will be a whole lot of awful. I probably went overboard on the instrumentation: rhythm guitar, lead guitar, drum, harmonica, and voice. It's hard to listen to it after playing it so much, but I think it turned out okay. In any case, it's good practice, and maybe the next song won't take so long.
Seth Godin wrote on the removal of stock quotes from newspapers, because everyone who cares gets that information online. He titled the post "Classified are next" and asked when was the last time you looked something up in the classifieds of your newspaper?
My answer: maybe a week ago. I spend all day online, and I don't buy a lot, but when I pick up a paper, I look at two sections.
First, I flip to the opinion page because it gives me a quick idea of 1) what issues local people care about, 2) what the mainstream (newspaper) positions are on the issues, and 3) what the alternative (write-in) positions are. This is all helpful for me because I don't understand people, but I fake it because people don't like people who don't understand people.
I suspect this has something to do with a vague suspicion that there isn't as much common to humanity as we like to imagine, hence mythology like the Matrix and Battlestar Galactica.
Okay, tangent time. A while back Shelley Powers wrote something about Battlestar Galactica, and in the comments I mentioned that I had no idea what was going on, and then Dave Rogers gave me an excellent summary of the show, and I wrote I’ve seen the show a few times before, but it never seemed as interesting as this was
.
And I really thought Shelley and Dave were just making it sound more interesting than it really was because they were so into it. I've since watched the show from beginning to frustrating to-be-continued, and in the process realized that when Shelley and Dave were writing about Battlestar Galactica, the show I was thinking of was actually Babylon 5.
That's a clue to my general ignorance of TV in general, and SciFi specifically. But I really like Battlestar Galactica, and only wish that the plot itself didn't seem to preclude a long run.
Now then, back to the newspaper... the second (and generally last) thing I read is the classifieds, because local classifieds are often cheaper than eBay, because either the seller doesn't realize the actual market value, or shipping is prohibitively expensive, or they just want to get rid of something quickly and not worry about it.
For all of these reasons, free pianos will always show up in local publications. Because I want a free piano, I will always read the classifieds of the local paper. And because I and people like me are reading them, the classifieds will always be a good place to sell things. And because classifieds bring in revenue on both ends, they will last forever, or at least as long as local newspapers last.
Seth is wrong; classifieds are not next. Maybe TV listings are next. Or are they already gone? Then maybe movie listings. Hard to say, as I don't actually look at newspapers much. But something very timely, unpaid, and easily transferable to another medium will be next to leave the newspaper. Hmm... news is next? Maybe. A newspaper is one of the last places I'd look for news these days.
In other interesting neuroendocrinology news, Alzheimer's may be something like diabetes of the brain. It would be nice to combine research on the two, but so far it's just a largely unsubstantiated theory.
Hair's Breadth ( MP3, lyrics) is my first recording on my new used guitar.
It's a twelve string (with only six strings currently) Framus, which is a brand I'd never heard of before seeing this guitar. In the picture, you'll note some holes in the front of the body. That's where the pickup knobs are going to go once I have my soon-to-be professional luthier friend JJ put them in and do some other repairs to it.
I never had a pickup put into my six string Ibanez guitar because I dropped it in Taiwan, ironically while exiting the airport after a long trip spent worrying about my guitar getting damaged on the plane. So now it has an unrepairable dent in the back, and even though it plays fine it seems a waste of money to give it a pickup.
After I get a pickup in the new Framus, I'll just need a mic and I'll be ready to play out somewhere. And then I just need to find somewhere out to play. I recently discovered the Ritual Café in Des Moines, which is unfortunately lacking a website of any sort. It has vegetarian food, wifi, and according to Google, is host a lot of musicians I like. So that's my long-term music goal: get the guitar fixed up, get a mic, and get a gig at the Ritual Café.
Meanwhile, I have a bunch of songs to record. I just figured out how to use Tracktion to do real-time editing or whatever you call it where you twiddle the knobs and sliders while playing through the recording to have different volume or other settings in different parts of the song. So that should improve the quality of recordings a bit. Now I just need to learn how to keep time with a click track. I think I'll Ask MetaFilter about that.
The launch of Google Base inspired a bit of armchair quarterbacking about how Google might have done it differently. One suggestion, popular - of course - among the microformats community, was that Google could use microformats to remove the need for submission to their base and leverage the distributed nature of the web.
Personally, I suspect there's just not enough microformatted content out there yet to make it worth Google's cycles parsing it. Lucky for me, my own parsing cycles aren't so valuable. Microformat Base is my attempt at a microformat-based alternative to Google Base. It's slowly crawling the web looking for microformatted content, and adding it to a structured database, searchable by microformat class names. There are plenty of improvements to be made, but it's already functional in the most basic form. You can find several vcards for people named Tantek, for example.
If anyone's interested, it's open source and will eventually be open data in some form or another. I'm not looking to start a new public search engine — just demonstrate that someone with more time and experience than I and maybe an existing web crawler (*cough cough*) could do something like this. I suspect a decent search engine would inspire more microformatting, and may prove the best way to work around the chicken-egg adoption problem microformats currently face. Until someone else builds it better, I'll keep tweaking Microformat Base to that end.
Over two years ago I wrote "i don't believe there are currently any newsreaders that allow users to subscribe to an OPML file." Over a year ago, I repeated "i believe there are still no newsreaders that allow users to subscribe to an OPML file." I've mentioned this to NetNewsWire author Brent Simmons three times now. Still no subscribe-able OPML.
But now that Dave Winer mentioned the idea, it's being discussed more widely, and I expect it will be implemented by the third anniversary of when I first mentioned it. Sigh. Trickle-down idea economics. Oh well. Better late than never.
I have written before on both autism and synaesthesia, but I didn't realize until reading about autistic savant Daniel Tammet and doing some Wikipedia reading, that synaesthesia is a symptom of autism, which makes me wonder if autism isn't just an extreme form of the general case of people losing certain senses and gaining others. Only with autism, the gained sense is mental rather than sight, touch, taste, smell, or hearing.
Ray Charles is probably the most famous of many musicians who appear to have had an improved sense of sound and music due to a loss of sight. I found one mention of autistism on the anosmia Yahoo group, a study on "Co-Occurrence of Autism and Deafness", and page from the National Institute of Mental Health on "Autism Spectrum Disorders," which seems to suggest some correlation between autism and sense of sight. Autism is listed as one possible of cause of numbness, which is the best word I know of for a lost sense of touch, though I'm sure there's something more technical-sounding. I didn't find anything interesting mentioning both autism and ageusia, which is apparently the word for a lost sense of taste.
I don't know enough (or anything really) about human physiology to even know what I'm looking for. I just have a vague suspicion that there are more connections between autism and sense perceptions than I've heard about previously. Neuroendocrinology appears to be where these two fields of study meet. What I'd really like is someone to read the Journal of Neuroendocrinology, and translate where appropriate into something mere mortals can read.
I'd really like to learn more about how brains and bodies interact, and particularly around the fringes like autism and synaesthesia. But I don't have the time to parse a title, much less a whole article like Inhibition by Lipopolysaccharide of Naloxone-Induced Luteinising Hormone Secretion Is Accompanied by Increases in Corticotropin-Releasing Factor Immunoreactivity in Hypothalamic Paraventricular Neurones in Female Rats
. Yes, that's a real article.
I guess what I'm looking for is "Neuroendocrinology for Dummies," but I don't expect that book will be published any time soon.
Earlier this month, Phil Rignalda wrote a post titled "Planetary Damage," the damage being that individuals like Danny Ayers don't feel the need to write about things that show up on sites like Planet RDF. I, like Phil, read Danny and Shelley Powers but not Planet RDF, so if Danny or Shelley don't write about something in the world of RDF, I don't read it. Planet sites run the risk of forming closed communities in which the only people reading about a technology are those already using it. And that's one form of planetary damage
I experienced another sort today when something I wrote (which I thought was about screencasts) made its way onto Planet Lisp. My comments on Lisp weren't altogether positive, and that brought the fanboys out to tell me how evil I am for hating Lisp. The thing is, I don't hate Lisp. I don't even care about Lisp. I know next to nothing about Lisp. I certainly don't belong on Planet Lisp. Planet PHP, maybe. Planet JavaScript would be a stretch. But Planet Lisp? That's just ridiculous. In this case, I wish the community were a bit more closed, with the only people writing about a technology being those who are already using it.
A friend of mine sent me a link to a 'wrongful life' court case filed by a disabled Australian woman. That alone is interesting enough, but here's my favorite part:
Studdert also cited rulings from foreign courts, including the United States, which addressed the esoteric difficulties of putting a dollar tag on "the value of non existence" as compared to the costs of living with a disability.
How much is non-existence worth? What a great question. Earlier I tried to explain my existentialist leanings. In the future I'll just point to this case. The woman apparently wants to live or she would have killed herself. Yet she's basically putting life itself on trial to demand that someone else take responsibility for her life's unpleasantness. It's an excellent formalism of bad faith. We all blame others for choices we won't bring ourselves to make. But few of us do it so honestly.
One of the random quotes on the front page is from Simone de Beauvoir:
There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.
For this woman, however, life is an accident and, even though she knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation. It will be interesting to see if the Australian High Court agrees.
Jon Udell, who basically created the genre of screencasts, once wrote:
Now that it's almost trivial to make and publish short screencasts, can we expose our software-tool-using behavior to one another in ways that provoke imitation, lead to mastery, and spur innovation? It's such a crazy idea that it just might work.
Emphasis added because I just experienced the opposite effect. After watching a screencast demonstrating SLIME, or Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs, I have a much clearer idea of how much I want to use this technology: not at all.
Granted, I skimmed a lot of the fifty-five minute video on creating a morse code translator (and they say Lisp isn't useful). But when the narrator says, fifty minutes in, "this example is so simple that I can just look at it, and I know exactly what is going on," I think it comes very close to a perfect definition of irony. And then at the end, when he tries to quit and everything goes haywire, it's just pure comedy. I laughed, I cried (almost), but I did not develop any desire whatsoever to imitate what I was watching. Much the opposite.
UPDATE: Please read this post before commenting here. I didn't post myself on Planet Lisp, and I disclaim any implied understanding of or caring about Lisp that goes with showing up there.
I very rarely look at people. I've made efforts before to change this behavior, but they never last very long. Now I know why. Cognitive Daily (probably my favorite weblog of late) wrote about an experiment looking into what causes people to look away, which concluded: the reason for looking away is probably simply to reduce the overall cognitive demand and focus on the question.
"The question" in the experiment is one asked by a conversation partner, as it is for most people, who tend to look away mostly when considering an answer. I'm almost always looking away because I'm almost always thinking about something. I'm not saying I look away because I'm smarter than most people (though I am - and so are you most likely); I just think with more concentration, more constantly than most people (I think).
Sometimes this is a good thing, but it's not something I know how to control. I put as much thought into the answer to a rhetorical question as I do into a real problem, not because I don't realize it's rhetorical, but because I don't have an off switch for thinking. Sometimes less thinking would be better.
I think most of my music comes from answers to questions no one asked me. Which is good - I like my music. On the other hand, it makes it difficult for me to record music, especially with complicated recording tools. Bias Peak and Pro Tools are probably great recording software, but I can't play a song while looking at all those buttons. There's too much going on to keep my attention on recording. I want something simple, like Audicity, which doesn't tempt me to think when I should be playing. And even that has too much to think about. I'd like recording software that made the screen go black while recording.
And the same is true of looking at people. There's too much going on in a face to keep my attention on the question. I could look at a cartoon all day and think about something, but people are too interesting, and if I start looking at them, I'll start thinking about something, and then I have to stop looking at them or I'll lose my thoughts and never answer the questions.
I gather most people don't care so much about all these questions. And maybe they're right. Today at work I asked someone "if you hire a siamese twin, do you have to pay both of them?" (Yeah, I know, "conjoined twin," but that's not what I said.) That's not a question most people think to ask.
And that's just what made it past my filter. I spent a few minutes today thinking about how web browsers communicate a cancelled authentication attempt back to servers, and why Safari doesn't seem to do this, and whether anyone has submitted this as a bug report, or whether it is in a spec somewhere that this should happen. I didn't ask anyone else these questions because I know they are neither interesting nor amusing to most people. These aren't questions most people spend time thinking about. Instead, they spend time looking at people's faces.
Is looking at people more important than all these questions? That's a question I'll have to think about some more.
I've never watched much I Love Lucy. It was before my time. But I had a vague idea who Lucille Ball was. What I didn't know until just a few minutes ago, when PBS informed me, was that she divorced Desi Arnaz and bought his share of Desilu Productions, making her the first female head of a major Hollywood Studio. Under her leadership, the studio produced a lot of forgettable shows, but it was also home to the original Star Trek.
I Love Lucy ran 180 episodes. Star Trek spawned 6 different series of 726 episodes, ten movies, books, video games, an entire subculture, and it's not over yet. Star Trek has been wildly successful. A temporary page on Wikipedia, not yet included into the main article on Star Trek, gives a history of Star Trek in which Lucille Ball was pivotal to the series making it past a pilot:
NBC rejects the pilot as being too cerebral for 1965 television audiences. However, they like the concept enough to allow Roddenberry to film a second pilot. (This needs to be checked, but I believe "Inside Star Trek" indicates that the decision was the result of Lucille Ball playing hardball with the network regarding other Desilu productions and therefore championing Trek.)
If this is all true, it's especially odd that everyone knows Lucille Ball from I Love Lucy, but hardly anyone knows of her role in the much more successful Star Trek series.
What I like most about the web is how the anarchy of it all encourages niche groups that never would have formed otherwise. The most common example, I think, is the gay teen in Idaho who might have killed himself if not for some online gay teen community.
On the other end of the spectrum, perhaps, is Conservative Veggie: "for the veggie who's right." Discussion topics include "What Do You Think Of Alito's Investment in Slaughterhouses?" "Vitamin D 3," "Churches are Ignoring the Plight of Animals," and simply "Guns." I just love how the people have almost nothing in common beyond being vegetarian and voting Republican.
One of my pet peeves is declarations of what words mean, especially when such declarations dispute conventional wisdom. If most people think a word means something, that's what it means.
This morning Cory Doctorow was apparently in a bad mood, unleashing such scathing grade school recess-worthy rants as Westchester proposes stupid no-open-WiFi law -- stupid!
As a general rule, if you find yourself using the word "stupid" twice in the same headline, you should probably wait until you've regained enough mindfulness to come up with a decent synonym before posting. (Dumb, moronic, idiotic, dense, ... there's no shortage.
But anyway, in the middle of this mood, Cory decided to play language police. In particular, Cory is pretty sure he knows what that word "WiFi" means:
The article's great, though inexplicably, the reporter feel sthe need to point out that WiFi is "short for wireless fidelity." Of course, this isn't true...
Fairly certain I'd seen WiFi defined as "wireless fidelity," I consulted Google, which offers ten defintions for "WiFi." Half of those offer the phrase "wireless fidelity" as the meaning of "WiFi." So I wrote in to point out that despite what Cory might want the word to mean, the reporter in question was actually offering a definition in common use, certainly not inexplicable. (I do not think that word means what he thinks it means.)
Apparently other people wrote similar comments, so Cory posted an update:
30,000 or so people have written in to quibble over whether WiFi stands for wireless fidelity.
And he went on to post another paragraph about why these people are wrong. But he's missing the point. It doesn't matter what you want a word to mean, or even what a word should mean. A word means whatever it can successfully communicate. If half the internet thinks "WiFi" means "wireless fidelity" then that's what it means. Cory can post updates for months, but the meaning of the word will still be found in its actual use. Because that's how communication works.
"Quibble" is a good word, because that's what Cory has done here. That's all anyone can do when they see a good word go bad. However much we might like to, we simply can't force the world to adopt our own definitions. I'm amazed that Cory, a professional writer, doesn't realize this.
I'm releasing my music under a Creative Commons license, which means you don't need to ask me to copy it, and you can even republish it, provided you're not selling it and you mention where it came from so others can copy it too. Last night I watched a short video by Nate Harrison on the "amen break". It's not really worth watching, but it's worth listening to. The amen break is a drum loop you've probably heard. For some reason, it's an incredibly popular beat to loop behind a wide variety of music. But it's form a song that wasn't especially popular.
I've been meaning to add license information to my music for a while, and haven't mostly because I can't license Los Vivos' or JJ's music, and the Creative Commons embedded license system is designed to do an entire work all in one shot. So I could either add it to the page, or add it to each individual track, which would take a while. But whatever. Anyone who's interested can figure it out form the CC logo and link above my music.
My previous interaction with Creative Commons has been all donation-purchases. I made a donation in exchange for an autographed copy of the Future of Ideas. And then I made another donation in exchange for a shirt that says "your failed business model is not my problem." A long time ago I bought a shirt that says "I'm the little sister," because I like to spread gender confusion in my free time, and many people would ask me what it means. It was a good conversation piece. I expected the "your failed business model is not my problem" shirt to serve the same purpose, but no one ever asks me what it means. It's a nice shirt anyway.
For my book and shirt, I think I've given about $40 to Creative Commons. So yesterday I received an envelope from Creative Commons. Inside were three pieces of paper asking me for more money. The envelope was stamped with 37 cent postage. So they spent about 40 cents to send a letter to me rather than emailing me for free. This would be silly enough for a standard non-profit, but Creative Commons exists entirely on the internet, is of interest mostly to tech-savvy people, and can probably reach as many, if not more, potential donors via email than mail.
But don't let the pointless tree killing keep you from sharing my music on BitTorrent, or whatever you kids are using these days.
I was looking at my server logs, trying to figure out what happened to overload my database this morning, and unfortunately (or fortunately?), I didn't see anything odd, so I've turned the database viewer back on for now.
What I did see, though, was a reversi game being played out in the logs. Because the reversi game sends the entire board in the query string, the entire game shows up in the log, which makes an interesting visualization (you'll need to scroll to see it all):
I intend to some day redo the reversi game with more of a split between client and server, to make it possible to play across sites. At the same time, I'll probably hide more of the moving parts behind the curtain, so games will no longer be visualized in my logs. But it's interesting to look at for now. Looks like X won the game.
I had some sort of trouble with the database earlier today, and I'm assuming some sort of bot got into the database viewer, ignoring the robots.txt instructions to stay out, which overloaded the database. Until I can figure out a way to throttle database access, I've taken down the database viewer.
I updated the source code tool, and it's pretty cool, if I do say so myself. Instead of submitting suggestions via a form that emails me, you can now submit them via comments. This means you can read what anyone else suggests, you can ask questions about the code, and you're not relying solely on my good word that I will, in fact, give attribution for contributions I use as everyone else could see if I were to pass off your ideas as my own (which, of course, I would never do).
Because it's not in a form anymore, the source is now using syntax highlighting, which is easier to read. You can also now directly download the source of any page as a text file, which makes it much easier to reuse something you find here. In addition to making the tool easier for others, this will hopefully save me some time as I will no longer need to package up files and email them to people.
Now here's the coolest part: Whenever a source file references another source file, the source tool automatically creates a link to the source of the referenced file. This will make it much easier to reuse tools that use multiple files. But wait, there's more! It will also recognize SQL references to database tables, and link directly to the table in the database browser I recently made (and to which I still need to add more tables). So now pretty much everything on this site except passwords is open for anyone to see, download, reuse and comment upon.
Last night Shelley Powers published a lengthy RDF tutorial, in which she wrote I’m focusing on what I call street RDF–RDF that can be used out of the box to meet a need ...
I've read about RDF before, and I read about it again, but the needs RDF meets are still not clear to me. Today Danny Ayers wrote But the statements can be made available by techniques like mapping SQL database tables to RDF ...
Fair enough. I've started making my database available via XHTML, and will add more tables soon. Now if anyone wants to convince me of the value of RDF, I invite you to explain to me how to represent my database as RDF, and show me how this helps me or anyone else.
In a comment to my post on microlending, Jessica asked what I thought about an organization that does what might be called microgiving, giving people animals that grow to be more valuable than they were when given. I'm all for charity in general, but there are several reasons why this would probably work better if the animals were replaced with loans. Loans are better than giving, despite the cliche about not borrowing and lending.
Local knowledge is better than a plan to save the world. Animals aren't the best use of money in all places at all times for all people. The theory behind microlending, largely proven in practice, is that people know what their local community needs, and they just need some capital to provide it. Maybe their local community needs animals. But maybe it doesn't. I remember a story - I don't know the source or if it's true - about a charity that gave cars to poor people, who then sold the cars and bought bus tickets. This ties into the next issue:
Shared responsibility is better than individual responsibility. If I give you a dollar, you are only responsible to yourself in how you spend that dollar. You may want to spend that dollar in the most beneficial way possible, but you may not know what that is, and even if you know, you might not be listening to yourself. You could easily be tempted to spend it on a short-term gain at the expense of a long-term investment. If I loan you a dollar, we have a shared responsibility for how that dollar is spent. We are both responsible to ourselves, but also to each other. Shared responsibility is multiplied, not just added. And when an organization stays around for a while, this responsibility gets multiplied even further over time. Which ties into the next issue:
Individuals are less likely to reinvest than organizations. Reinvestment is good. If I give you money, your wealth has grown. But you won't likely give money to someone else. If I loan you money, your wealth grows, and then you give the money back to me, and I can give it to someone else. And over time, I can give money to more and more people. Reinvestment build infrastructure which improves community. And now that I think about it, this is a problem with Kiva, the direct-microlending organization I wrote about earlier, because the individuals doing lending through Kiva are less likely to loan again than Kiva would be if it were handling the loans.
Another issue is the relationship created by giving vs. lending. We give down, to people who have less than us. We lend to peers and make them our partners in investment. This is a bit counter-intuitive, but I think it's true. Personally, I don't like to borrow money from people, but I like even less to take money from people. And then, of course, there's the cynical view that poor people are just lazy, which microlending preempts and microgiving doesn't.
So in general I think microlending is better than microgiving. That said, if you want to donate directly to people, go ahead. It couldn't hurt. I think microlending is a smarter way to redistribute wealth. But the world, in my opinion, is not currently lacking in smarts so much as compassion. I should also point out briefly that most of the principles I've described here don't hold true on a larger scale. I favor macro-giving over macro-lending, but I'll go into that some other time.
I recently added some advertising for a few charities to this site. One of the charities is the Grameen Foundation, a microlending institution. I have a BA in International Studies, and much of what I did to earn that degree was learning about various save-the-world plans and their pros and cons. After four years, I pretty much knew why the world would never be saved, because pretty much every save-the-world plan has some major problems. Except the Grameen Bank.
The Grameen Bank gives small amounts of money to people in developing regions, which they then invest in what they need to sustain themselves, and pay back the money. Just like any loan, not everyone pays back the money, but it's not a lot of money, so no big deal. And those who do pay back the money gain both capital and experience helping themselves, which is ultimately much more valuable. It's generally an excellent program, and you can contribute to it via the Grameen Foundation.
Today Seth Godin pointed to Kiva, which does the same kind of micro-lending as the Grameen Bank, only without the bank. Rather than give your money to the Grammen Foundation, you give it directly to the people who need it. I have mixed feelings about this.
At first glance, it appears this direct connection primarily benefits donors, who get to know exactly where the money is going. I also imagine this system requires more overhead than Grameen. But it's also more transparent, which is something all non-profits should strive for. And even if it does primarily benefit donors, that should bring in more donors and ultimately benefit recipients. I think I'll give Kiva a little more time to establish a history before giving it my coveted banner ad endorsement, but it's nice to see new activity in microlending.
At first I didn't like the results Google recently started inserting for searches I maybe should have made instead of what I actually searched for. I'm pretty smart, you see, and I don't need to be bothered by Google treating me like a fool, assuming I don't know what I'm looking for.
And that was basically my thinking up until I searched for something unfamiliar and wasn't entirely clear what I was looking for, and Google gave me some results for what I would have been searching for if I knew what I was doing. At that point I found the functionality very useful.
My profile identifies me as existentialist, and I've discovered over the years that this means many different things to many different people. Yesterday I was thinking about criticisms I've read of the Red Cross and about how such criticisms might give some cause to not donate blood. Personally, I don't donate blood because I was told not to. But I was thinking about people who have no reason not to give other than perceived problems with the Red Cross, and about how such people are very unlikely to give anywhere other than the Red Cross, and about how I make similarly cynical choices of inaction.
As I was thinking about this, I think I came up with a pretty good summary of what I mean when I call myself existentialist: All choices in life should be made between (at least) two courses of action. One should never choose between action and inaction because inaction is just too tempting, and almost always the wrong choice.
There are exceptions, I'm sure, and some rare people may have enough discipline to consider them. But just like we don't offer children the option of cotton candy for dinner, I think we shouldn't offer ourselves the option of doing nothing. We exist, so we should do something.
Indeed we can't help it, as even doing nothing is an action, and that choice makes up who we are like any other. But now I'm straying away from my simple summary. What I mean to say is, we are what we do and if we don't do anything, we aren't. No, that's not quite right ... it's really hard to talk about existentialism without sounding like Strong Sad. Well, I tried anyway, and I guess that's the point.
I gather most people involved in microformats are coming from a background heavy in more formally structured data, e.g. RDF, XML, relational databases. I'm coming more from the opposite background: scraping. Recently Phil Jones described a web in which metadata resides in scraping/parsing applications meaning documents need not be so descriptive, and Danny Ayers predictably responded with an argument for the Semantic Web, in which metadata resides in documents meaning applications need not be so smart.
In Danny's comments, I tried to point out the applications Phil predicts can produce the documents Danny predicts. I already do a small amount of this with all my scrapers. On Disemployed, I add location and time information to each job posting and publish that information in a regular format (HTML, RSS 1, RSS 2, or Atom). I could admittedly be structuring this information more formally to better encourage reuse, but the data is there, in any case, where it wasn't before. But this is relatively simple data to add. I know when I found each job post and where it came from, so my application doesn't need to be very smart. What are the limits of a smart application? Could a very crafty application actually make microformats unnecessary?
Let's take one microformat, hCard, and see how guessable the microformat metadata would be if it weren't there, on a scale of zero to ten:
Average: 5.3/10. In general there are some areas in which microformats are entirely unneccesary, some in which they are entirely necessary, and some in between. Of course, these are mostly rough estimates on the potential accuracy of intelligent scraping. The actual accuracy would need to be determined by writing a scraper and pitting it against some actual data.
In any case, microformats appear well worth the expense to capture that 47% (or however much) of the existing information. Even though email addresses are entirely identifiable without any microformat, as long as we're wrapping names in name tags, it makes sense to wrap the email addresses at the same time so a parser doesn't need to be any smarter.
While not the absolute simplest method, microformats appear to be the lowest common denominator of structured documents. So now I think I was wrong when I wrote that we're headed towards a "semantic web" in which the semantics are forced onto websites by browsers and other intermediaries.
I still expect that will happen (as I notice it happening, and cause it to happen), but given the practical limits of the smart-application method of connecting the world of information, it will only work as a bridge to a semantic web composed of metadata-rich documents.
In other microformat news, over the weekend I made a draft version of a "Microformats Zen Garden." The idea, introduced on the microformats-discuss email list, is an obvious knockoff of the CSS Zen Garden, only the (X)HTML is full of microformatted information, and JavaScript is added to the mix. I spent a few hours working on this, and when I was done, I realized the concept was not just an application, but almost a platform - a small hint at the mythical web-as-operating-system. Microformats act as the documents, CSS handles the visual style, and JavaScript acts as the applications. The only important thing missing is the ability to save edited documents, but Mark Pilgrim is already working on using Atom for that. I'll be very interested to see how this all materializes.
I recently worked on a website for the Iowa Military Veterans Band for my day job. It's a static site, which is not my primary interest. Making static websites is more interesting to me than most other tasks, but I'd much rather be working on something dynamic and functional. So I made the site functional in ways no one will ever use.
If you take any page with contact or calendar information from the IMVB site and feed it into X2V, you'll get the relevant information as vCard or iCal, which you can then import into most address book and calendar applications. Which admittedly seems pretty useless at first given the unlikelihood that anyone would want to import such information into a desktop application.
I did this mostly to test out the usefulness of microformats. I had been reading about microformats for a few weeks, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to try it out. I probably spent about 20 minutes extra time adding and testing the microformats, which is relatively little given the enormous time savings for the first person who wants to import all ninety-some IMVB members into her address book.
And this is only what can be done with microformats today. I imagine a future in which X2V is unnecessary because microformat readers are built into browsers. Where Safari and Firefox today recognize syndication feeds and allow users to import that information into a suitable application with a single click, future browsers could do the same with various microformats.
Unfortunately, this future will likely be slow coming, as microformats suffer from the same chicken-egg problem that made syndication adoption so slow: nobody wants a reader application with no content, and nobody cares to produce content with no readers. But because microformats are starting mostly with existing formats like vCard and iCal (and soon Atom), perhaps the future won't be so slow to arrive. In any case, I've done my part to spread microformats and create a more semantic web, and I see no reason not to continue doing so in the future.
Graphite 0.5 is released. I added support for decimals, and removed the "beta." I'm going to submit it as widely as I can now. I've been putting this off in an attempt to catch bugs before most people ever use it, but I'm not getting much feedback anymore, so I need some more users. First stop: Apple's site.
So far I really like the Colbert Report, so I spent five minutes altering my Daily Show RSS feed and produced a Colbert Report RSS feed.
Some day Comedy Central will have useful RSS feeds. They already have a feed for the Daily Show on their RSS page, but it points to pages with completely unnecessary popup windows, which is just bad form.
I keep update notification on in NetNewsWire. Often it's more annoying than helpful. Tom Coates' links, for example, are updated every day, for formatting not content, but I see them all as new when they are updated. But every once in a while I see something valuable in the updates. Most often on BoingBoing, because they don't have comments, so they post selected comments sent via email as addendums to the the original posts. And often the comments are more interesting than the original post.
But today I got another kind of treat via update notification:
Someone at the DNC obviously said "change that to point out that Delay is the Republican Leader and get the word 'criminal' in there too." This is why I don't like the Democratic Party much more than the Republican. I don't have much sympathy for Tom DeLay, but I think the Democrats can let him dig his own grave and concentrate on something else. Maybe health care? Education? Equal rights? Peace? I really hope Democratic candidates in 2006 and 2008 have a platform beyond "Republicans are bad." I'm getting awfully tired of voting for the lesser of two evils.
Over the past few months I've made and eaten dinner while watching TV several times. It's a hectic experience. Tonight I am making and eating dinner while watching a TV show on DVD, and something occurred to me that maybe was obvious to everyone else. Time shifting technology brings with it speed shifting, which is so much more valuable.
The best feature of a Tivo (which I don't own, though almost everyone else I know does) is not the much-discussed ability to skip commercials, but the simple pause button which allows you to stop the show and do other things without worrying about getting back to the TV in time to continue the show. I don't even need to eat dinner in front of the TV now, though I will because eating alone at the table is less activity than I can handle. But having a TV show with time shifting at least makes it easier to slow down, which I think will be increasingly valuable as life becomes more hurried. I, at least, find it much easier to tune out commercials than to tune out the voice in my head saying "hurry up or you'll miss the show."
I think Tivo should release a commercial touting the pause button of the Tivo and using Simon and Garfunkel's "Feeling Groovy" as a soundtrack.
A few weeks ago, my company announced a new corporate discount for Sprint. I have a Sprint account, so I called up to get a free discount, nor realizing how much time it would cost me. The actual discount line only took a few minutes, and I thought I was all good. Just before hanging up, the Sprint representative said something about how I would get two bills - one under my old rate, and one with my discount applied.
In retrospect, I should have just said "no, never mind, I don't want the discount" right then. This was a clear notice that the discount program was new, and the billing system wasn't made to handle discounts. I might have guessed that nothing at Sprint was made to handle the discounts, especially given my previous experience trying to get an overcharge refunded by Sprint. But I was young and foolish then.
Several months ago I signed up for online billing through Sprint. I get notified by email whenever I have a new bill, and I go to the website and pay the bill. No need to pay postage or kill trees. So last week I got my email telling me I had a new bill, only when I went to the website, there was no bill. The website informed me that the service was "temporarily unavailable." After a few days of seeing the same "temporary" problem, I contacted customer service. I still have (I assume) a good three weeks before my bill is due, but I can already see the late fee I will no doubt receive for not paying the bill Sprint has made it impossible for me to pay.
Customer service responded that I don't have online bills because I switched accounts. They even gave me my old and new account numbers, which were two numbers I had never seen before, always referring to my account by the phone number. I wrote back that I was not informed I would lose online billing when I applied the corporate discount, and if they can't bring it back, I'm canceling my account altogether.
I got this account when Jessica and I both lived in Bloomington, but now I have a local Des Moines phone, so I'm only holding on to the Sprint account until Jessica moves here in December anyway. I figured Jessica could just get new phone a few months early if Sprint gave me reason to follow through on my threat to cancel service.
It turns out, I was told, I could pay online. A "specialist" would be calling me within 24 hours. Apparently the specialist doesn't specialize in calling people on time, as that was about 36 hours ago and no one has called me.
So I'm documenting this here for two reasons. First, so I have a record of what went wrong, as I have a suspicion it will go even more wrong in the future. And second, to warn others about Sprint's craptacular service. I'll be sure to post an update when I get that late notice for the bill Sprint won't allow me to pay.