A Rain of Frogs

I am frightened to live in a society that believes that increasing profit margins is ample justification for tampering with the fundamental building blocks of life.

Scientists are adding extra chromosomes to fish in order to make them “larger and more attractive,” because consumers are less likely to purchase an ugly fish. The extra chromosomes prevent the fish (in this case trout) from darkening with age, and also prevents the flesh of the fish from getting soft when it is older. The modifications also reduce the prominence of the characteristic hooked nose.

All in the name of profit. While the scientists insist that these fish cannot reproduce, life always finds a way. These same scientists insist that we’ve been genetically tampering with our food sources for centuries in the form of selective breeding.

I’d postulate that putting select sheep in a position to mate with each other is a slightly different thing that adding extra chromosomes to fish – the difference being that what happens to the sheep genes might have occurred naturally.

It’s hubris to assume we know how DNA works. We’ve mapped it, sure. That doesn’t mean we understand it. This isn’t just having a pile of uranium spontaneously explode (which is scary enough), this is sticking our fingers in the light sockets of the universe to see what happens.

But hey, I’m not a scientist, right? ☿

People have been asking me a lot about my community site. It’s been quite a long time since I originally announced the major rebuild of the site, so long I’ve actually forgotten how long.

But they still ask me. Some parts of me are relieved they’re asking, because it means there is interest. Other parts of me want to rant and rave, stomp and whine.

Huh?

Yeah. I get mad when people ask. Partly because I feel like I’m being pushed, and it’s a well known character flaw of mine that when I feel pushed, I am less likely to perform with any kind of quality.

But that’s not even it. The part that’s gets me is that many of them have asked time and again how they can help, but when I tell them they can help by helping me find a reason for the site to exist, they have nothing to say.

Yeah, I’m bitching. I’ll continue on my merry way with it though, and I’ll quietly ignore all the complaints when I finally do relaunch the site and it’s nothing like they were expecting.

They keep asking me if I’ve given up on it, but can’t see they maybe it’s them who’s given up after all.

I’ve not given up. Never give up. ☿

Try this excercise. Make a list of ten things you hate. No particular order. You have to be honest with this – it’s harder to hate things than you think. If you can’t come up with ten things, move on. This doesn’t have to be an involved thing. If fact, the less in-depth thought given to the list, the more likely it is to reflect reality.

Then make a list of ten things you dislike, following the same guidelines of honesty and ordering. Continue on with a list of ten things you like, again being very honest with yourself.

Make a list of ten things you love. Remember that the order these things appear on the list is irrelevant. You don’t have to include people/family/pets/gods, etc. in this list, because loving those are a given. In these lists, honesty is truly the most important thing.

If you’ve been honest, you may learn something about yourself. I certainly did. My list is below.

What do I hate?

1 – stupidity
2 – greed
3 – injustice

What do I dislike?

1- pollution
2 – making telephone calls
3 – meat
4 – avocados
5 – beets
6 – the dominance of the automobile

What do I like?

1 – music
2 – cycling
3 – visual art
4 – coaching baseball
5 – blueberries
6 – architecture
7 – writing
8 – sailing
9 – looking at pretty girls
10 – hockey

What do I love?
 
 

Interesting excercise, isn’t it? ☿

More than ten years since its inception, the web still sucks. Websites are still built poorly, people still dump disgusting amounts of money into bad parts of their technology infrastructure (IE-specific “web applications”) and refuse to spend money on important things (usability, accessibility, design expertise).

Let’s look at that for a moment. Recently, the very fractured Board of Directors of our local Real Estate board voted to move away from the custom built online system they had been using for many years. While I will freely admit the system was not good (and that I often considered tendering to redesign and rebuild it), it worked almost flawlessly, provided the information the board needed it to and was usable from any browser on any platform.

One of the more influential board members lives out in the country, probably a twenty minute drive into nowhere. What this means is that for that board member, accessing the system was a bit of a pain in the ass, because of the slow Internet service so prevalent in rural areas. This member wanted a downloadable database, something that would live on the computer without a connection.

So, RFPs were put out, and eventually a system was decided on, by an excruciatingly narrow margin. The new system was the way of the future, they said, and they pushed forward with the changeover.

The new system, of course, only runs on Windows. It requires Internet Explorer 6. Yes, they can download the database now, but because there are about a thousand agents in the region, the database is probably out of date within an hour of being retrieved.

And worse, they took a system that worked for everyone regardless of the system and changed it to one that only worked for a proprietary, closed system. And then they wonder why it’s such a pain in the ass to use.

Why does the web still suck? Because people are still stupid. ☿

I once wrote a piece about the difficulty of approaching an empty canvas, a piece which gained a fair bit of readership and comment. It was a good piece, and I think it did a good job of explaining how to overcome the fear an empty canvass can instill.

Lately I’ve been feeling a complete lack of creativity – a sort of depression which only affects the creative centers of the mind. This is a completely different sort of thing than an empty canvas. It’s a lot scarier.

It’s the difference between looking at something you’ve created and seeing that you’ve utterly destroyed the message you were trying to expose, and suddenly looking at your life and wondering if you should have been a plumber instead of a professional artist (in my case, a professional web designer).

Most of this is a result of a complete lack of inspiration. I’ve been pretty dispassionate about almost everything I’ve been doing lately, not because I’m suffering some sort of mild depression, but possibly because I have finally become bored of the status quo.

I’ll look for inspiration. It’s not the first time I’ve lamented my considerable lack of this element. I’ll look for inspiration. I know it’s there. I had a burst of it not that long ago.

Or maybe I’ll become a plumber. ☿