OMG, WE HAVE TO PAY FOR SERVICES!

Okay, I’ve got one for you.

Why in hell do people flip out at a rumor that Facebook is going to start charging for its services?

A)     Aint’a gonna happen, my little chickadees.  Facebook’s business model is based on you donating time to market research playing Farmville, favoriting products for free advertising, and writing book reviews, ‘kay?  This is an order of magnitude cheaper than advertising on a sitcom and the audience is much more specifically targeted.  As far as revenue?  I assure you they get more money off of advertising than they could out of charging you.

B)      Even if that weren’t so, why does a company owe you an expensive service that’s a pain in the butt to maintain?

Do I mostly go for the free services? Yep. I use Pandora, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Yahoo, Gmail, Google Docs and Wikipedia.  Shoot, several of the former I even use professionally!  But there are services I pay for.  My Livejournal account is a paid account, because I like the lack of advertising.  My blogs are hosted on a server I pay for, ditto.

Are there a lot of free services offered on the Internet?  Yeah, and a lot of them are pretty cool.  I think it’s a neat development that we can do so much for little money.  If a service isn’t worth me paying for, I don’t.  I have a free Pandora account because I don’t find the ads that annoying, and I never have it playing for more than 40 hours in a month.

But it seems kind of silly to me for people to think that sysadmins and programmers are supposed to work for free or something so people can post about what they had for breakfast, ya know?

Where the Falling Angel Meets the Rising Ape

A favorite passage of mine from Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather:

‘All right,’ said Susan. ‘I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.’

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

‘Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—’

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

‘So we can believe the big ones?’

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

‘They’re not the same at all!’

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET— Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME… SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

‘Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—’

MY POINT EXACTLY.

She tried to assemble her thoughts.

THERE IS A PLACE WHERE TWO GALAXIES HAVE BEEN COLLIDING FOR A MILLION YEARS, said Death, apropos of nothing. DON’T TRY TO TELL ME THAT’S RIGHT.

‘Yes, but people don’t think about that,’ said Susan. Somewhere there was a bed…

CORRECT. STARS EXPLODE, WORLDS COLLIDE, THERE’S HARDLY ANYWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE WHERE HUMANS CAN LIVE WITHOUT BEING FROZEN OR FRIED, AND YET YOU BELIEVE THAT A… A BED IS A NORMAL THING. IT IS THE MOST AMAZING TALENT.

‘Talent?’

OH, YES. A VERY SPECIAL KIND OF STUPIDITY. YOU THINK THE WHOLE UNIVERSE IS INSIDE YOUR HEADS.

‘You make us sound mad,’ said Susan. A nice warm bed…

NO. YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN’T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME?

Toll House Cookies

Tastes and smells can be highly evocative of memory.  I think science has pretty much proven that these senses are hardwired into your memory.

I had an experience of this today.

Snow used to be special to me.  I grew up in Virginia, where it didn’t snow often and when it did, it meant a holiday from school, sledding, an icy butt because few people owned water-resistant snow pants, and…

Toll House Cookies

A snow day meant Toll House Cookies.   Looking back, I realize it was a way for mom to keep us occupied when we were sick with excitement from the snow, and chilled to the bone from being too wet and not wanting to come in from the cold1.   She would get us to go down into the basement and strip out of sopping wet cold snow things, hang them in front of the wood stove to dry and we’d change into warm dry clothes.  Being quick and efficient about this meant a reward of a spoonful of raw cookie dough.

I took a taste of the cookie dough today as my son and I were making toll house cookies in celebration (for him) or consolation (for me)2 of the first snowfall of the year.   When I’m tasting something and want to concentrate, I tend to close my eyes.    As I did so today, I was right back in my mother’s kitchen, asking her if the spoonfuls of cookie dough were the right size to make good cookies, smelling the chocolate, sugar and vanilla, and anxiously staring into the window on the oven waiting for the melty cookies to solidfy and be ready to eat all warm and gooey.  I remember being glad that Mom’s mixer had two beaters, as my brother and I were allowed to lick the beater when the cookie dough was all mixed up.  My Kitchen Aid only has one, so if one child gets to lick the beater, the other is allowed to scrape the bowl.

Toll House cookies were such a favorite in the household that Mom always baked a batch with the other Christmas cookies, so that’s another good memory I tend to have associated with them.  In fact, I don’t think I have a bad memory associated with making them.   They’ll always mean wintertime coziness with loved ones to me.


1Northerners, don’t laugh. Those snow pants we buy every year for our kids are simply not an appropriate use of money when they’ll be used at most twice before the child is too big to wear them. It’s a considerably different proposition when the kid is walking a mile to school in the snow every day for four months out of the year.

2Snow used to be magical to me, even when I first moved up here. Almost nine years on and the magic has worn off a bit. Now it just means shoveling driveways and dangerous driving to me. I should take up skiing or something to return to a more positive view.

Lectures and Classes

I gave a talk on Search Engine Optimization and Content Management Systems at Lebanon College yesterday.   Yeah, I know, the topic was a little too broad for an hour’s lecture.   But it was a decent overview.  greendalekgreendalek said that it got his students excited and engaged for the rest of the class, so I think I did okay.  I’m glad I brought my computer, though.  I’d brought the Powerpoint presentation on a memory stick, and I found that the software on the drive interfered with the computer at the school seeing the files on the drive, confound it.  So we just plugged my netbook into the projector and I did the lecture from that.

If anyone was wondering about Powerpoint presentations and netbooks, I can say that mine (minimal animation, no animated media and no sound) did just fine for the talk.  I think I want a wireless slide advance thingie (how’s that for a technical term?) for the next time I do a lecture.  I prefer to stand in the front of the class.

It makes me more comfortable for the social networking class.   Most of the teach I’ve done has been exercise-based.  While I’ll have several exercises in the class, it’s going to be mostly lecture-based, and I was wondering how I’d do for lecturing without talking people through physical exercises.

It’s funny how perspective can change. I used to marvel at people who could speak “spontaneously” and fluidly on topics.   I ran across a comment once in Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein that sounding spontaneous is often a matter of careful preparation.  That’s so true.  I kept track of how long I spent prepping for that talk.   I spent just shy of eight hours for a one hour talk — and that was on a subject I knew pretty well.  Now, if I give the talk again, it’s unlikely that I’ll spend more than an hour and a half or so reviewing and tweaking.

Still, it was fun.  I find that I almost always learn more about a subject just from researching for lectures.   *chuckles* and looking at this pile of books on various elements of social networking and online interaction at my elbow, I expect I’ll experience the same thing in my class come January.