I am reminded of the thought experiments I went through years ago when the sound cards went from 8 bit to 16bit to being able to reproduce CD quality sound and better. Now days no one thinks about a computer that can’t reproduce sound with sub-CD quality. I remember talking about how this would change games, music, and entertainment as we knew it. But there were things that were not brought up as I look back. I didn’t think about how sound quality of this nature would make just about every sound emitting platform into a software problem. Now granted not every problem in the sound arena has been solved. We still have not reproduced the human voice synthetically without using another human as the input. But this is about it. Our computers can speak to us, but in the end, they sound like computers. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and its only a matter of years until this synthetic distinction is a matter of choice.

We already have monitors everywhere that can display a larger number of colors than the human eye can distinguish. Now granted these monitors do not fully replicate all the colors a human can see. But this problem was essentially solved most most colors when computers went to 24 bit color depths.

So what does it mean to me that I can no longer see the pixels that make up the interfaces that I work with? I think the first obvious answer is that my images and text look sharper and cleaner. But what does this mean. From a visual perspective, what’s the difference between looking at the Mona Lisa and looking at a reproduction of the Mona Lisa at a resolution above the what the human eye can distinguish. Granted if you had the real Mona Lisa you could move your head and see the 3D textures of the paint on the wood. But in the end, what would the difference be between of an image of the Mona Lisa scanned at 220 DPI and the real thing. Again, there are differences. But they are diminishing.

So what does this mean? I think that what this means is that I now have a choice when I put together a user interface. The question is. Do I want to display a symbol of something or do I want to display the actual thing. Let me put it another way. Years ago, in High School, I was taking a computer programming class. We had to put together a graphics introduction using Apple ][ graphics. The screen supported 40 pixels by 40 pixels with 4 lines of text. The number of colors available was 15/16 (with two being visually the same). My introduction started with a sword imbedded in the ground, catching fire and swinging around to write my name across the screen. It was rather cool for the day, but in the end, it was just a handful of red, yellow, orange, and grey pixels. It would be laughable today. But how would I do this today? I could do it on an Apple Mac Book Pro with such color correctness and pixel density that a person sitting 2 – 3 feet away from the monitor couldn’t tell it from a “real” sword catching fire and engraving my name into the screen. Well, except for the fact that swords don’t catch fire by themselves nor do they fly. More’s the pity.

So what does this mean? I think that the point I am making is that I believe that there are two approaches heading forward in User Interface design. If I can reproduce with accuracy the color and textures of physical objects and items, will I use those analogues for my interface? Why should I? If I can draw the symbol with such accuracy, why don’t I draw the real thing instead?

The problem is that as with most things a computer is not dealing with nouns such as person’s or places, or things. Its dealing with nouns that fall into the category of ideas. And even if you are dealing with persons or places, is that what you really want? Think about the address book of the future. It has your information in it. First name, Last name. Those are text fields. Phone number. Also a text field. Email address. Text Field. Home Address. . . Text Field? No that’s a symbol pointing to a place on a map. OK, so a map. Well, no the map is also a symbol. How about a satellite image of your house? That also isn’t your house. Now granted the home address is probably something you will always need to keep as its a good agreed upon symbol. However how do you represent it to your users. Lets move on and see what other problems we pull up. How about birthday? Do you represent it as a date? How about a birth certificate? How about representing the birthday as a daily counter to the next event? Again, just like the home address, you probably need the date in the computer as the input to give the user and to share with others, but how do you represent it on the screen. You now have the ability to reproduce something with almost 100% fidelity. This leads me to the final entry in the address book. What symbol do I use to point to myself. Some programs let you use an image, some include your name. On a 40 x 40 pixel screen, there is no option for a picture, but on a 220dpi monitor, you could get a really accurate picture of me.

Now lets say we decide on how we are going to do our address book. I really don’t care what you came up with as your decision points on the above discussion, its the next question that’s really important. You launch your computer 5 – 10 years from now. It boots up in almost nothing flat and you are going to go look for your new co-workers information in the address book. What does that application look like. Is that application a small leather bound black book whose pages wrinkle, age, and turn like the Moleskine notebook? Or is it a collection of pictures, maps, and text? Does your user interface at the top look like a symbolic representation of an item or does it look like the items it contains.

It is my opinion that the world is about to see which of these user interface directions is more successful. Apple is clearly going towards the Notebook, while Microsoft with their Metro interface is heading towards the collection of pictures, maps, and text.

What are your thoughts? Which do you prefer?

Now lets talk about Knott’s Berry Farm. I am at the train station, I get on the train and take a trip around the park. As I make my trip around the park do I see into any of the other rides? Are the parts of the park I am seeing clean? Does the music transport me to another place? I get off the train and I arrive at the Stage Coach ride. I take that around the park as well. Same questions. Finally I get off the stage coach and I can walk over to the Log Ride, Silver Bullet, or I can walk over into the Americana / 1950′s Jonny Rockets dinner area where they have bumper cars. I am also go into the Western Town and buy trinkets. Did the trip transport me anywhere? Can I see into any of the other rides. Yes, I can build a narrative from one ride to another, but its not as smooth as the Disney narrative. Its also easy to see the trash on the ground, the paint chipped walls. There is little attention paid to jarring anachronistic items out of place.

Now I can hear the arguments. But Knott’s has a lot of cool rides. Yes it does. Many of them are a whole lot more thrilling then the rides at Disneyland. In addition, Ghost Rider can be ridden for free. Also at Knott’s, the park admission is cheaper. But this all is moot in my opinion. Walt Disney made Disneyland to change the paradigm of the theme park. It was no longer just a collection of rides, it was a mediated experience that took you on a trip around the world, into the past, and finally into a idealized future.

In my opinion, Apple’s iOS is a whole lot like Disneyland. Its a mediated experience of what collaboration, communication, and entertainment should be. All the sight lines and transitions have been thought out and everything is carefully controlled and architected. While Android may have more things you can do with the device because it’s less controlled, it ends up with the details being overlooked. Also Android offers some things for free, just like Ghost Rider, however for the full Google experience, you have to pay to get those apps.

Now I know that some people have taken the Android OS and done things like the Nook or the Fire and made an integrated experience. Yes, this is true, but this is how many years after the first iOS devices was launched? There are theme parks that have gone and themed up learning from the lessons that Walt taught them; Florida has some of them.

So what is the point in all this. Well, there are some people who will never like Disneyland and will love Knott’s or Six Flags because of various reasons, and there are some who will love Android more than iOS. This is good and as it should be. For example, if I was tasked with coming up with a new cockpit for the next Mercedes-Benz, I would be looking squarely at Android to provide that functionality. However if I was looking at a device to enable my parents to take a road trip across the United States, I’m looking at an iPhone and a iPad for them.

I am looking forward to the theme park that does to Disneyland what Walt Disney did to previous theme parks. But Knott’s Berry Farm, Six Flags, and the many attempts in Florida are not it even though some of them have had a sparkle of promise. I am also looking forward to someone coming along and doing to Apple what Steve Jobs did to the phone handset makers. But Android is not it. Neither is Windows Phone. Neither is Blackberry. Neither is WebOS, though it has a sparkle of promise. I want to see something that changes the category instead of following the leader.

The Tessellated Pavement from Tasmania

Tasmania is an island off the coast of Australia which was attached to Australia until about 10,000 years ago with the end of the last glacial period.  The island is home to many interesting animals and was home to the Tasmanian Aborigines.  These people became isolated from the mainland about 10,000 years ago.  It is this isolation and these people I want to focus on.

So what do Aborigines have to do with Collaboration?  What does an ice age glacier have to do with people getting together and working together?  Why are we looking at these specific people at this specific time?  The reason this is all interesting is that 10,000 years ago a divide was created between two people groups.  This divide was big enough that people were not able to travel between the island and the mainland.  Essentially 10,000 years ago, the people of Tasmania became a lab for asking questions about the value of collaboration.

So what questions can we ask?  The first is what happens to the level of culture, technology development, and standard of living after a group of people are no longer able to collaborate?  It turns out that this first question is easy to address.  Ten thousand years ago, when they split from the mainland, the aboriginal people had a technology level that included fire making, clothing, boomerangs, spears, shields, stone tools, bone tools, compound tools (axe head on a handle), tools to create canoes out of downed trees, clothing,  and fishing.  When the Europeans finally arrived in 1642, the aborigines on the mainland still had all these technologies; however the aborigines on Tasmania no longer had any of these technologies.  They had abandoned them.  In the harsh winters they had walked away from clothing.  While living on the coast, they had forgotten how to fish.

What lessons can be learned from this?  Invention is a function of population you are allowed to collaborate with.  Another lesson is that technology is usually invented elsewhere, in other words, technology is invented by taking two ideas from outside and merging them into a third, new idea. Another idea is that technology has to be maintained, and this maintenance is done via collaboration.  Some groups will ignore something and consider it taboo, while others will only use a given technology in a limited fashion.  It’s only through collaboration and seeing what others are doing that a given piece of technology is fully utilized or even maintained.

So what does this all mean for us today?  Well, I will answer that question with another question.  Is there anything blocking your ability to collaborate with peers in other companies and parts of the world or other parts of the company?  Is that thing that’s blocking you something you are doing to yourself?  Are you ignoring other teams because they do things differently?  Are you creating taboos for tools and saying something can’t be used to solve a certain problem?  Are you in an environment that that doesn’t allow you to talk to others in your industry?

Today the progression of technology is at a rate unheard of 10,000 years ago.  Moore’s Law would argue that the level of technology doubles every 18 months.  The level of technology on the Australian mainland didn’t double over those 10,000 years.  So my question is, are you in IT, and have you collaborated with other people outside your industry, company, workgroup, or comfort zone in the last 18 months?   In the last 18 months have you participated in activities that would discourage others who are not in your industry, company, workgroup, or comfort zone from interacting with you?  In the last 18 months has your environment kept you from doing these things?  If the answer is yes to any of these, I challenge you that now is the time for a change.

Adaptability is the behavior of those who survive.

Photo by JJ Harrison (http://www.noodlesnacks.com/), (Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-2.5) share alike, attribution required

A statue of Robin Hood at Thoresby Hall, Nottinghamshire

Recently I saw the movie Robin Hood staring Russell Crow. The movie itself isn’t great or grand, but it serves as a wonderful jumping off point for a point I’m trying to make. The movie itself is a story of how Robin Hood became an outlaw and what motivates him to do what he does. Upon returning from the crusades Robin finds himself in a community under attack on all sides. The rightful Lord of Nottingham is dead on the battle fields of France, and his father is a weak old blind man. His wife, now single, turns out to have married him right before he left for the crusades. The church is demanding its tithe and King John is demanding taxes to pay for an army to protect the realm from the French. The old, dying father of Lord of Nottingham asks Robin to protect His son’s community.

What is Robin to do? What is he to protect? It turns out that one of his first tasks to protect the community is to make sure the common fields are planted. Eventually at the end of the movie we find Robin living off the land, an outlaw, still protecting the people of Nottingham by defending the commons of that community. The story of Robin Hood centers on the question of the commons. What makes a member a member of a community? Who has the rights to defend the commons? Who has the rights to tax the commons?

What are the commons in your community? What has brought you together? What is worth defending? What is worth fighting for to protect it from corruption? If you have a hard time answering this question, you probably don’t have a community. Once you have identified this, you are on your first steps to defining your community. With most online communities the commons are a kind or class of information that is specific to your discipline, location, or passion. Spend some time thinking about what this is for your community.

Now that you have thought about this, you need to move to the next step, how will you defend this common ground you have with your fellows? How will you see it grow? How will you nurture it. Think about a garden. You tear up the ground, you fertilize the garden, you plant the garden, you pull weeds in the garden. At some point you enjoy the garden. You might even be the envy of your neighbors and friends about how wonderful your garden is. Remember at some point you harvest your garden and you prepare for next year.

Your Community is your fellow gardeners working on the garden. The commons is the garden itself, and the fruit from the garden is value you provide your larger community. Think about how the fruit, the garden, and the gardeners are not all the same. The fruit is very different than the people working in the garden. The work the gardeners do is till the soil, water, weed, etc… but the fruit and the flowers are very different than then digging in the ground, watering, and weeding. The enjoyment from the garden is very different than the flowers and fruit you get from the garden. But all of this is part of the commons for that community.

In growing your community remember these ideas. They may not make you successful, but they will make you more likely to be.

Good collaboration is easy to spot.  Words that describe it are “rich, face to face, accurate, and real”  These words imply a certain quality of communication with good collaboration.  So what gets in the way of good collaboration?  Noise and cultural differences are the major medium problems.  In addition to these problems we have  artifact problems.  After a collaboration has taken place the artifacts left are messy and  temporary if we are lucky.  Many times a group of people will get together to work on a given deliverable and have nothing except memories to take away from the time spent.

It is the role of Information Technology to narrow the mediation gap and leave memorable, permanent, and findable artifacts.  Let me repeat it again.  It is the role of Information Technology to narrow the mediation gap and leave memorable, permanent, and findable artifacts.

In today’s modern organizations, the role of the employee is to generate knowledge artifacts as the exception handlers in process flows.  When the process of knowledge generation breaks down, it breaks down for certain reasons.  These reasons are finite.  The first is that the tools are not adequate for the job.  You have a hammer and a screw.  The second option is that the individual performing the work is not adequately trained to use the tool.  The only other option is that the tool doesn’t talk to the next tool in the workflow and the artifact generated by one individual must be translated and transferred to the next point of collaboration.  This final option was what took place before we had knowledge management systems such as the modern computer.

The effects of this breakdown are also finite.  The artifacts are not created and the whole process breaks down.  The second option is that the artifacts don’t get stored.  Perhaps they are stored, but they can’t be found.  Finally, the fourth problem is one where the artifacts are found, but there is no way to audit them against the purposes they were created.

In the end, if you have this going on in your organization you will see people reverting to people and paper processes.  You see this with too many meetings and reliance on the “Good ol’ boy “ network.  You will see silos develop and a lot of people will complain because they are not a part of the silo or the network, or they don’t have enough time to process the paper and the meetings.

I should note that if you do have tools in your environment and people are complaining about people using them incorrectly or too much, you probably have a problem with inadequate tools.  Email is the perfect example of this.  It becomes the way to avoid a paper process while still being a paper process.

The Model for Collaboration

I am going to categorize collaboration using three separate properties.  The first is Audience.  With audience I’m looking at the direction of the communication.  I’m not talking about the people listening, I’m talking about the person uttering.  The second property I’m going to look at is the actual artifact.  What is it exactly that we are leaving for those who were absent?  This leads to the final property; time.  How long do we need to keep the artifacts of the collaboration?

We are going to say that the audience property has only four separate variables.  The first is the conversation.  This is a one on one conversation between two people.  The second type of audience is the announcement.  This type of audience is that it starts with one person and goes to many.  The third type of audience is the Brainstorm.  This is a group of many people interacting together to generate an artifact.  Finally we have the feedback look.  This audience is identified as many individuals giving feedback to one individual.

Taking a look at Artifacts, we will divide this into three categories.  Written, Verbal, and Visual.  Each of these artifacts build on one another into the next artifact.  A visual artifact has a verbal component.  Each verbal component, has a written component.

The final property to look at is time.  I will break up time into 4 separate categories.  The first category is Real time.  This type of collaboration leaves very little in terms of artifacts, however it is where most collaboration takes place.  The second category is Queued.  This type of collaboration is unique in that the artifacts are generally consumed by the recipient.  Think email or voice mail, after you have heard a voice mail, you no longer need it.  The third category is Long Term.  These are artifacts that are needed longer than queued, however they are not static or permanent.  The fourth as I have already mentioned is Static or permanent. The difference between the third and the fourth is that the third category has a sense of draft or work in progress where the fourth has a sense of artifact of record.

Now that we have all our attributes on the table.  Lets look at the model.

In my next post I will detail out each of the boxes in the model, and start looking at how the model can be used.

I’m going to start out by being honest.  I lied to you.  There are not three separate categories of people, there are four.  This last category is the people who don’t know about your conversation.  Lets call them the clueless.  These are the people who were not invited to the party.  The best way to increase the size of your entire pyramid is to increase the number of people involved.  This is the invitation.

However, there is a problem with sending an invitation out to a party if the venue for the party isn’t ready.  You will not get that many people to show up to an empty lot, and those that do show up, few will stay.  You need a way to turn those clueless people into consumers, and to do this you need something for them to consume.  You need content.

This isn’t all you need.  You also need a way for those consumers to turn into commenters.  Are there any tools associated with your content that allows them to leave comments?  Are you inviting them to leave comments?  What are the barriers you are putting in a consumers way to make them into commenters?

But this also isn’t all you need.  You need a way to turn commenters into creators.  What are the tools you are giving people to allow them to create their own conversations?  Again, are you inviting them to create their own conversations?  What are the barriers, technological or philosophical, are you putting in the way of consumers to create their own conversations?

This also isn’t all you need.  If you have all the above you will have a great party, but you will not have all the pieces in place you need for a complete package.  You need to put something in place that will allow your content creators to invite their own friends to the party.  Ask yourself what barriers are you putting in place that don’t let your content creators to invite others.  Are you even helping them, or are you thinking that this is their problem to deal with?

Next time we will talk about the tools in each of these areas and the strategy you can use to create each of these tools for different media types.

The first is that there are three basic types of people.  There are people who start conversations.  There are people who participate in conversations.  Finally there are people who listen to conversations.

Think about the last time you were at a party or with a large group.  How many people participated in the organization of the event?  Those are your conversation starters.  Think about all the websites you have been to.  The articles are created by someone.  Those are the conversation starters.

Now at this party or family event think about all the people who are standing around in groups some start conversations.  “Who saw the game last Saturday?”  “Did anyone watch Transformers?”  Each of these questions are put out there by the conversation starters.  The people responding are in the people who are willing to take part in the conversation, but don’t feel like they can start the conversation.

Finally at this party we have people who hover from group to group to group, listening to what people are saying and taking it all in.  These people are your observers.  They want to hear what others are saying but, for various reasons, don’t want to participate in the conversation.

Now as I’m sure you are aware of, these roles change.  At some point in the evening you move from one category to another taking different roles as the conversation progresses.

So what does this all mean to someone who is running a website?  You must first have a place where you can start conversations.  You then need a way to have people participate in the conversation, and finally you must have a way for people to just ‘lurk’ watching the conversation take place.

Now lets say you have all these tools.  You have a blog which allows you to post.  You have a commenting system on that blog.  Finally, you don’t have any restrictions on people reading your blog.  What next?

Take any given population of people and you will only have a certain number of people who are willing to participate in a conversation. Out of those people there will be only a small number that are willing to start a conversation. If you put barriers in the way of individuals you will reduce this number.

What is the value proposition associated with collaboration tools? Office workers generate knowledge by taking data and experience; they make a decision, and create an artifact. A successful employee will create an artifact that has a greater value than the initial data plus the cost of paying the employee to transform that data. You can increase the value of this artifact via communication. This additional value proposition is proportional to the number of people in creator’s audience who can consume the artifacts.

With this in mind, you can start to calculate the value of a collaboration tool. Once this is base lined you can then evaluate the individuals involved in this knowledge creation process and evaluate the additional value they provide by transforming data.

An example of this is found in a study from IBM. They were able to show that there is a relationship between the number of individuals in employee’s address book and the amount of revenue they generated for the company. This additional revenue was ~$950 per person annually. So with this in mind, the question is: What are the tools you are using to allow people to grow their network and what tools are you using to allow them collaborate.

I picked up the chart, briefly scanned it; another waste of time. The deputy who had brought this woman into the ward had left as quickly as he could, and from the report they had left it seemed like he wanted to wash his hands of the whole incident. “Walking in Traffic.” “No known address.”

The whole file read like someone trying to pass the buck. I placed the clipboard back on the wall and motioned for my backup to follow me into the padded room.

Sitting in the corner was the thinnest girl I had seen in weeks. She rocked back and forth, black hair obscured her face. The stench of urine had already permeated the room. Janice was going to have to clean this one up and complete a rape kit. Poor Janice, I was going to ruin her day.

“Alice?” The chart had said that was her name.

She reached up with her hand and brushed her hair aside, and peered out from behind the curtains. It was as if she was experiencing sight for the first time. She opened her mouth, but no words came. Yup, no use in it now, get Janice to clean her up and then I could start the tests. Hopefully we would only need to keep her for 72 hours.

The door to my office opened and Janice walked in.

“’Alice’ has been cleaned up and given a gown. It looks like she had a couple bruises on her arms and legs. She also had a garland intertwined in her hair. I had to get the scissors to trim her hair to remove it. The kit proved negative.”

“Thanks Janice. Have George send her in.”

“Sure thing Nathaniel, you know the most interesting thing about that girl. My guess is that she is at least 20 pounds heavier after we washed her up.

The girl that entered looked like someone else. The eyes were no longer wide and grey, they had a ice blue spark to them, and her hair shown. Her cheek bones red with color. If Janice had not warned me, I would not have known.

“Alice, how are you this evening?”

“…”

I stood up and Alice watched me as I walked from behind my desk to sit in a chair opposite her.

“It seems that the shower Janice gave you agreed with you.”

“…”

“OK, well, I’m going to ask you some questions. Please answer to the best of your ability.”

The rest of the 30 minutes went the same way. Alice was there, and she followed me around the room as I moved back behind my desk. However she didn’t say anything. Not a single question was answered. As the interview started to come to a close, I made a note that perhaps I would try again the next morning.

“Alice, I am going to have to say Good bye now. Its been a good half hour, and you haven’t answered any of my questions. So we will being again tomorrow. What do you think about tomorrow?”

“…”

“George, can you come show Alice to her room. She will be staying with us for the evening.”

As George entered, I noticed it. Peeking up from behind her ears, a green garland, the buds of whatever flowering plant had been used to create garland were just forming.

“Alice that’s a lovely garland you have there. Did Janice make it for you?”

“…”

She turned, looked at me, and smiled the most beautiful smile I had ever seen. Our eyes met, and she quickly looked to the ground ashamed.

I got the call a few minutes after 5am. Alice was missing. I raced in. The bars outside her window had been pried open. The police found food prints in the planter under her window; a woman’s, 16 – 18 years old.

The officer who had brought her in said they had found her along the freeway, next to the nursery. She was walking along the access road. No one else was with her. They had already dispatched another patrol car to see if she had returned to that area.

Around Seven, my boss came in.

“Nathaniel, what’s wrong, you look like shit.”

“Stupid animals in the front yard again. Woke me up at three, then I got this call at five. Didn’t even get a chance to take a shower or shave, just came in.”

“Well, It’s just a missing girl. For Christ’s sake, go home and take a shower and shave. I don’t want to see you back before noon.”

I winched. I hated it when he cursed like that.

As I drove home, I kept replaying the events in my mind. Something was unusual about that girl. She had drank up the water, had she been dehydrated? And the garland; now that I think about it, it hadn’t been there when Janice had first brought her in.

I pulled up in front of the house and started to walk through the front yard. I was tired. So tired in fact that I almost missed the new tree growing in my front yard, a shredded hospital gown hanging from the branches.

The red of the flowers, the black branches…

I only found out many years later what Alice went through. But I remember that day like it was this morning. My eyes opened for the first time. I had seen something that wasn’t human and it wasn’t normal. It is growing in my front yard right now. But those eyes, whatever it was it had connected with me. In the end, Alice changed me. I now see the world as a very interesting and unusual place. In my line of work, I see many crazy and unusual things. The only thing that really scares me these days is the quacks and the crazies. The ones who ‘want’ to believe. There is no great conspiracy, no great meaning as these people see it.

But you didn’t come here looking for a lecture on Philosophy or Psychology. You came here to understand that bump in the night. I’m here to tell you that the bump you heard, it’s a little girl just as frightened as you, she trembles when you slam the doors and make loud noises. All she is looking for is for someone to call her beautiful.

So why go to all this trouble? Well, at work I use Feeddemon, and here at home I have a Macintosh. I can’t stand NetNewsWire, I have never been able to use it the same way that I use Feeddemon. So now I’ll use the Readair on my Macintosh.

1. A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

• The Narrative fallacy: creating a story post-hoc to create an identifiable cause for a given event.
• The Ludic fallacy: believing that the structured randomness found in games resembles the unstructured randomness found in life
• The Statistical regress fallacy: believing that the probability of future events is predictable by examining occurrences of past events.

The fallacy I want to concentrate on is the narrative fallacy. What fascinates me the most about this is that religions use Narrative to communicate their ideas. Christianity, the religion I feel is true, even goes to the point of stating that the only way that God communicates to people today is mediated via the Bible, a large collection of stories. When we are told to communicate the Gospel, we are told to tell a story. This story is summed up as follows: The creator of the universe entered reality as a human born of a woman in a small town at the center of the known world. He lived a short life, and then was put to death. Three days later he was alive again. When he was alive he claimed that those be swore fealty to Him as Lord would be able to give Him all the bad things they had done in life and have them killed as he was killed. They would also receive the life he received after being dead for three days.

I guess what fascinates me the most is that Taleb tells us that this narrative fallacy is one of the strongest and easiest fallacies for us to fall into. How is it that one of our weakest points in our intellectual armor is also one of the most critical. The book of Romans calls for us to renew our minds. We are called to be crafty as serpents. So we are called as Christians to be ready for this type of post-hoc fallacy.

I guess we can take this in several different directions. The first is that narrative is the mediated way God communicates, therefore it’s not wholly evil. Another direction is that narrative is definitely screwed up I wonder what it looked like before the fall. I also wonder if this fallacy is becoming more and more common as time passes.

Anyway, I thought it turned out rather nice and was worthy of sharing.  I wonder if that’s my black Geek t-shirt or my Steve-Jobs-Black turtle neck I’m wearing.

Enjoy!

Office
I had to purchase Microsoft Office. This is the first time I have ever had to purchase Office. I have a MSDN license, so on Windows, I always used that copy of the application. Office on the Mac is rather nice, and feels like a Microsoft product. Word and Powerpoint have crashed on me several times, and that made me feel like I was back on my PC. At first I hoped to be able to use iWork from Apple, but there really are features in Office that I need. I also had couldn't purchase the Home version of office, as I wanted to use Automator actions. I'm a bit upset that there are so many different versions of office for the Mac. It seems that Microsoft likes to diversify their product line to the point of loosing focus.

Blogging
I have had to do all my blogging in ecto. The application is a good replacement for the blogging tools I have on the PC, but it still isn't as good as Microsoft's blogging tool. On the bright side, the application is still being developed and the short coming of the application can be fixed. I have owned it now for about a month and there have been several updates in that month.

RSS/NewsReader
I have been using NetNewsWire as my RSS reader. I like the application, but I miss several of the features that I loved in FeedDemon. On FeedDemon I use to set up the folder view to display all folders that had unread items in them. The view would be set up to display only unread items, and I would scan feed by feed using the control-d to mark the displayed page as read and move to the next unread section. If I came across anything that looked interesting I would flag it and put it in a bucket to turn into another RSS feed, that I run through Feedburner and import into my personalized home page, and onto my Blog. I can't seem to reproduce this workflow exactly, but I'm getting there.

Graphics
I need to get my license of Creative Suite 3 Professional transfered off my PC and onto this Mac. I have not yet done this.

Development Tools
Well, I purchased this computer to do iPhone development. I will have to say that the customer service I have gotten from Apple vs. the customer experience I got from Microsoft is like day vs. night. I was personally contacted by someone at Apple and they wanted to help me with the process of getting my keys. I had already gotten most of this done, but the personal phone call from someone who sounded like he was calling me from the Bay Area was nice.

As for web development tools, I have tried Coda and BBedit. I have yet to land on a product that I like. I want something that integrates with Subversion or CVS.

Other Cool Tools
iCalendar + SpanningSync +iPhone + iTunes = EPIC WIN! I finally have everything all synced up. On the PC this was almost impossible. I tried to get Vista's calendar, and Outlook, and some syncing tools and iTunes all to work together. It was frustrating. It was doable outside of firewalls and proxy servers, but once you get behind a proxy server the whole workflow fell apart. This one workflow alone was worth the price of admission. I'm also looking forward to getting OmniFocus and Remember the Milk setup.

BootCamp
I installed BootCamp to do Vista. I have yet to use Vista, but I can see that I I will after I get the wireless card I have up and running under Vista (btw, getting it up and running on OSX was as simple as downloading the driver and following the instructions on installing it. It just worked.) I will probably use Vista for gaming only. Sadly I'm now thinking that all Vista is good for is games. It's my new toy operating system.

Overall Impressions
The next computer my Mom and Dad get will be an iMac. I'm also going to make my sister get one as well. I'm tired of doing tech support on PC's. I spent several weeks getting rid of viruses on their machines over the last year. Also it seems that everything Just Works on the Mac. I guess you can say that I drank the Kool Aid and It's GREAT!

During last week’s Life Light I overheard some of you talking about those who feel they do not need the church — the “assembly of believers”. That attitude seems to be increasing in the United States. You can do everything on the “internet” –

http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/wayoflife/03/13/online.confessions/index.html

Here is my response. I’m posting it here as I would like to post all my rather lengthy and perhaps thoughtful stuff here.

I am sorry for the length of this email. I felt I should respond as I was the one who brought this up. Having the ability to write something without the limitations of paper tends to make me very verbose. I have edited several rather large tangents out of this diatribe against the idea of virtual churches. As with most new things in the Church, I think they only point to the novelty of mans ability to create new ways to sin and the churches (the building, not the bride) willingness to scratch the itch.

My first thoughts on reading the article is the first letter to the Corinthians. Paul says that when they have gathered together and that he Paul is with them in spirit they should hand the man over to Satan who has become proud in his sexual sins. Paul also states that he is with the community of believers in spirit. So we do have an example of the lack of the remission of sins due to some form of confession remotely from the apostolic fathers as recorded in the New Testament. In each case that I can think of, including where the Christ lays outs the Office of the Keys, distance doesn’t seem to be a problem.

However, proximity also seems to be important. Paul asks for the community in Corinth to gather together. Jesus tells us that we can bind and absolve sins here on earth and that he will honor that in heaven.

I guess I will tend to lean away from the idea of a virtual church because online communities tends to get gnostic. I use to run the largest Tolkien community on the Internet. At our height we have 50,000 – 75,000 active participants. From that experience I know a virtual community online can be good. They have many strengths and are the source of much blessing. But there are weaknesses to an online community. They tend to emphasize their strengths. The ability to focus on the mind and being virtually present. This means the group will start to deny the physical in favor of the mind and the virtual. This is the exact same problem that the gnostics championed as one of the blessings of their philosophy.

Being a part of a community is touching, tasting, breathing, crying, and in the end living together. The creator of the universe has blessed us with many amazing blessings including a mind that can come up with things like computers and email and virtual communities online. But that same creator did not enter cyberspace to talk to us. He didn’t send us an email. He didn’t touch the heavens and have the clouds form the letters “I LOVE YOU.” No, he entered reality as a messy, dirty, smelly, Human. The creator liked matter so much that creator and creation became bound up in reality in the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth.

In this cases we should follow the example of our God. How did he communicate our forgiveness to us. When Adam and Eve had sinned, e came to them in the cool of the evening. From that point forward, when God came, it was mediated through the medium of prophets, priests, and kings. Finally when the time was right our God entered reality, and when it was all done he yelled “It is finished” for all to hear. And before He left he charged his followers to tell others what they had witnessed.

No our God entered reality. No more mediation is needed. No more prophets, priests, or kings. No need to approach a mountain on fire, or a building or tent filled with the blood. And now that we are this free isn’t it -so- human to say. “I don’t like my freedom. It’s scary. I need my church experience mediated with a computer screen. I need my experience with my fellow believers mediated by the television screen. I need my experience with God’s forgiveness to be mediated through forms of entertainment like a movie. I believe in the communion of the saints like the creed says, but please, I need that experience mediated; the physical reality of the connection between other believers is too much.” These are all the sayings of a sinful man returning to the same attitudes he had before he experienced God.

I suppose I could keep ranting about this, I agree there are good things about having the ability to remotely confess. Sins are hard to confront. It’s easier to leave a note on a car and say “Sorry I ran into you. Here is my insurance information.” than it is to stop and confront the person you ran into. But the absolution of sins needs to be very real and felt, and seeing the words “I absolve you” scroll across the screen isn’t as real as the confessor/pastor saying it; and it’s definitely not as real as the dying God saying “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”

Direct Note Access is a technology that makes the impossible possible: for the first time in audio recording history you can identify and edit individual notes within polyphonic audio material. The unique access that Melodyne affords to pitch, timing, note lengths and other parameters of melodic notes will now also be afforded to individual notes within chords

Click here to look at the companies website. Also make sure you watch the video.

Here is the code that will make it work in Typepad:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<openServiceDescription xmlns="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0">
 <homepageUrl>http://www.typepad.com/t/app</homepageUrl&gt;
 <display>
  <name>Blog in Typepad</name>
  <icon>http://www.tschopp.net/favicon.ico</icon&gt;
       <description>Post this in my Blog</description>
 </display>
 <activity category="Blog">
  <activityAction context="selection">
   <execute method="get" action="http://www.typepad.com/t/app/weblog/post">
    <parameter name="title" value="{documentTitle}" />
    <parameter name="SourceURL" value="{documentUrl}" />
    <parameter name="blog_id" value="16627" />
    <parameter name="text" value="{selection}" />
    <parameter name="keywords" value="{keywords}" />
   </execute>
  </activityAction>
  <activityAction context="document">
   <execute method="get" action="http://www.typepad.com/t/app/weblog/post">
    <parameter name="title" value="{documentTitle}" />
    <parameter name="blog_id" value="16627" />
    <parameter name="SourceURL" value="{documentUrl}" />
   </execute>
  </activityAction>
  <activityAction context="link">
   <execute method="get" action="http://www.typepad.com/t/app/weblog/post">
    <parameter name="title" value="{linkTitle}" />
    <parameter name="blog_id" value="16627" />
    <parameter name="SourceURL" value="{link}" />
   </execute>
  </activityAction>
 </activity>
</openServiceDescription>

1. Copy and paste this into a Text file.
2. Name it typepad.xml
3. Replace blog_Id with your blog ID

1. Browse to http://www.typepad.com/t/app 
2. Click on the blog you want to post to
3. Observe the URL http://www.typepad.com/t/app/weblog/manage?blog_id=16627

My files are located at http://www.tschopp.net/Typepad.html 

Let me know how it goes. I will post updates later this week to get more than just selections working. I also want to expand this to other services. Let me know how this is working for you.

And therefore I observe, that the Will (without any metaphysical refining) is, That by which the mind chooses any thing. The faculty of the will, is that power, or principle of mind, by which it is capable of choosing: an act of the will is the same as an act of choosing or choice. – Jonathan Edwards in Freedom of the Will

Did you eat breakfast this morning?  How about Lunch?  What did you do this weekend?  What choices did you make over the long weekend?  Did you make any choices or did you just go along with what you have always done? 

Right now it’s getting close to 5:00pm and I am hungry.  I have a cup of tea I’m sipping, and I have not had solid food in almost 20 hours.  Sitting a couple desks down from me is a full spread of sandwiches from Togo’s.  Back the other direction is a table with a large jar of smoky roasted almonds, one of my favorite snacks.  I know where there is a cache of Milky Ways and a candy jar full of Kisses.  I’m sure if I spent some time looking around the office, I would find the conference rooms with food from Baja Fresh, Trendy Thai, Pickup Sticks, or Panera. 

But I’m not eating.  My stomach is grumbling a bit.  But I am choosing not to eat.  Every time I walk past a large spread of food here at work I am reminded of my choice.  I choose not to eat. 

During this Lenten season, I have chosen to fast.  I only told an individual or two at work about the fast, but it soon got out to the whole group.  They all now know that I was fasting for 40 day (but not 40 nights).  One of the questions that has been asked boils down to:  “Isn’t it hard to fast, how can you do it?”  This question takes many forms, but it has been asked so many times that I think I will formulate a response that reduces my experiences to some general advice about what I have learned.

From the quote above we can see that Jonathan Edwards, in Freedom of the Will, defines the will as the mind choosing.  This fast has made me start to question what it means to choose.  What is free will.  I am now of the opinion that man has a lot of freedom, but many times he choose not to exercise that freedom. 

I am free to eat.  I gain nothing in heaven or here on earth for not eating.  Perhaps I’ll be healthier.  Perhaps I’ll learn some lesson about my life.  But in the end there is very little ‘value’ in my fast.  It is a choice I make freely.  The value for me is that I chose it.  I chose to act differently.

How many times do we run through life and we don’t choose.  We have freedom to eat whatever we want, but we choose to let the smells of McDonald’s fries choose our meal.  How many times do we let advertising of a product make a choice for us.  Each time I walk past a spread of food here at work, I smell the aroma of those foods.  It calls to me.  The voice reminds me of other voices I hear; the voices that call to me and tempt me to other things, more horrible things. But every time I choose not to eat the food, I make a choice. This leads me to ask how many times do I truly have my mind choose for me. How many times do I truly use my free will?

I can ask these questions about many areas in my life, but we are adults. Let’s make these questions count.  How many times do I actively choose to do good instead of evil.  How many times do I choose to be kind, instead of cruel?  How many times am I just going with the flow of the culture or the social groups around us? How many times do I do just those things that I have always done? How many times do I actually think about each of my actions? Many of us at this point some will probably say the following:

“Well, I’m not so good at this.  I need to work at this.  I need to get better at this.  I’m glad you brought this up.  Now lets see; I’m going to choose to do a better job at choosing things in my lfe.  I’m going to be different than all those other people.  I need work, but I’m not as bad as those other people.  I am no longer going to be a sheep, I’m not going to be like all those other sheep out there.  They just follow each other into stupidity and ignorance.  They do all sorts of evil and wrong.”

Can you hear that voice in your head? No? Wait until you drive to work tomorrow and you go the same way you have always gone without thinking. Wait until you eat the same thing you ate last week for dinner. Wait until you don’t make a choice and you just go along with the way things always were. You will then be a failure. That is when you will hear the voice. It will say, it’s not so bad, you did so good up until now. You are not as bad as some other people who fail all the time. You choose to do two good things this week. You have gotten one nagging habit under control. Well to that voice I have the following to say.

“Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”  Jesus as recorded in Luke 18:10–14

What is that voice in your head saying now?  How do you respond to that voice?

This parable was recorded as occuring when Jesus was heading down to Jeruselem for the last time.  Every step along the way, Jesus chose.  He chose as no man before him or since him chose.  He chose becuase he knew what was going to happen.  He chose, even though he knew the outcome.  Here is the point of all this writing.  Many times we don’t use our free will.  When we do, many times, we choose things we later regret.  But someone else has already chosen.  He chose to die.  In his death he took on all the wrong choices we made and gave us all the right choices. 

In this lenten time remeber that you have a choice.  Remeber the choices that have already been made.

http://l.yimg.com/cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/fop/embedflv/swf/fop.swf

I have done this fast once before and combined it with a one and a half mile walk because Jamba Juice was that far from work.  This year Jamba juice is much further from work, so I will have to go out of my way to do the walking.

So far everything seems to be working great.  I will post more later this week about how the process is going.

There are a couple images I have attached that are to the companies new Portal.  This portal is now available externally at http://portal.edisonintl.com/.  Now I don’t have a username or password you can use to log in and check out all my hard work, but I will post one screen shot of what it looks like from the inside.

Enjoy the screen shots and I’ll hopefully have more updates on this blog this year.