Happy birthday Ego!?

It is my birthday and I haven't blogged in a while. A school friend Mike K said that he had a blog and stopped because he thought it was just an ego jerk sort of thing, I have been considering this take on blogging. Sadly, I think he also deleted/threw away everything he wrote. Yes, I would be interested in reading his thoughts.

I often ask people what were the best five years of their lives and they invariably say high school or the five years after graduation. I wonder if this is why so many people only listen to the music that was popular when they were in high school?

So witness the picture above, found at my mother's, while discussing my current birthday. this is possibly the only known photo of myself and my two brothers where we all look somewhat normal, and somewhat happy as psuedo-adults. During this period of life I worked at Lockheed and had a secret security clearance, worked out and played basketball, I was on a very good softball team, even started wearing a diamond earring. In short I thought i was damn cool. I found the various women of Southern California to be surprisingly aggressive. I thought this period of my life I was maybe at "my peak". in fact if you would have asked me if I could turn the clock back to any point of my life I would have most likely picked this moment pictured,... HA!

Now looking at this picture, I think I look skinny and need a haircut. I realize my recollection of the past is circumspect. How odd to not even remember your own life with clarity. it seems maybe my life right now is the best I can be. Possibly wisdom does come with age. We can be forgetful as we get older but we have many, many more important things to remember as time goes on and we experience more of life. It seems clearly priorities now are much different than they were back then. Realizing this might be my best birthday present. The best might be living fully in the present.

Twitter= Sustainable value? YES!

Of what value is twitter to me?

Me; this 21st century Renaissance man, IMM (in my mind), with a multitude of interests and being very busy of course (don't we all say we are very busy?), what does twitter do for me? Is twitter unique, or just another social media fad that will soon be but a cool shadow in the alleyway of the unused, unwanted and unloved?
I use twitter as a search engine for what is happening in the world and it works very well indeed. With the "lists" feature I can list people, writers, who have their tight little grips on a certain niche of information.

An example would be the "aviation" field, I can follow @flightblogger, @runwaygirl and @Heather_Poole among maybe 25 accounts in all. this gives me a tightly focused news feed from people/sources that I have winnowed out to be valuable to possibly just me.
I ultimately do this myself every day. I hardly ever buy an actual newspaper anymore, I go online, from computer or phone, and scan several news sources for the bits that seem most tasty and useful. If I can locate others that seem of a like mind and they list/mention what they are finding of interest on twitter, it really saves me time, all the while giving me a different, broader perspective, and takes me to places I wouldn't locate on my own. Obviously, searching other people's list of those they follow on twitter gives me leads to the talking heads and info-generators that are tangential to my own life.

I don't see this same ability on; Facebook, Plaxo, Linkin or many of the other social media sites and see them as more of a white pages of who they are. Rated at the top of "social media" are also Reddit and Digg, and they are great but that news is unfiltered as to a particular group of people, and "Youtube" serves a different purpose as well. These sites are often what people put links to on twitter, I don't see them as supplanting twitter. Twitter's use, as far as tweets generated, is over a billion tweets a month http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/10/twitter-now-more-than-1-billion-tweets-per-month/ . Twitter continues to grow in importance regardless of what you may have heard. In the same way that snow in D.C. does not supplant the impact of global warming/climate change, so too does the fact that the "dude in the cubicle three over" tweeted for six months and stopped, does not change the fact of twitter's grip on modern news dissemination.

People have said many times that twitter is rubbish, and several embraced the Pear Analytics study that "40% of twitter is pointless babble" last summer, http://www.pearanalytics.com/blog/2009/twitter-study-reveals-interesting-results-40-percent-pointless-babble/ . Well this is quite true, however about 90% of the Seattle Times is; pointless babble, crap I have no interest or use for, ADVERTISING, and poorly written drivel. It is that 10% of shiny nuggets I look for and value.
If we discuss TV, then this figure of "pointless babble" goes to 99%, most especially if we are discussing a Television news broadcast. To calculate FOX News, a cursory understanding of the principles of Six Sigma would be of help.

So if your twitter is dull it is your own lazy fault my friend. Using many services such as Tweetdeck a inquisitive industrious person can have several columns of spicy, meaty topics, divided according to the users own desires and needs.
From the Iranian Revolution to the recent resignation of the CEO of Sun Microsystems, in this day and age twitter is usually the first source, the most varied and unbiased, and the one that can be tailored to tastes you find the most palatable.

So if you most post 'pointles babble" it's OK, I can live with it,go!

The value of Time

What is the value of time?

People say time is money but that is not true. You can in fact make more money, you can magnify how much money you make in a variety of ways; legal, illegal, risky or safe, but you can never make more time for yourself.

To make matters worse no one knows how much time they will have on this earth. Those old fucks who live to be 97 screw someone else over to make the average in the US around 74 or so, someone has to die quite young to make those averages work out don't they?

It is like musical chairs but you don't win a pie, you just win the right to keep getting up in the morning and going to work, putting the pants on one leg at a time, pet the dog, kiss the wife, call mom once in a while and see what's on TV tonight.
Where I work there are actuarial tables which show if "retire" and move on at 45 your life expectancy is 85, however if you work till 65 your life expectancy is 66.5! Yet people stay on because of medical insurance and "not having quite enough money to get the Lexus paid off first". Of course getting the Lexus paid off is a metaphor because the Lexus of life will never be paid off will it? Just as Sisyphus' boulder will never be up at the top of the hill and set to rest, the Lexus will never be paid off.

I tell the young bucks at work to think about their last day on earth and laying on their deathbed tallying up their lives. Will the new car, the jetski or the 56" TV matter then? Not a whip.

Recently a guy at work, an athlete actually, died at the age of 52, he was a bicycler. At first people said he was 48 and I was comforted just a bit when I saw he was born April of 57. He was always first in his races and first up the hills and now he is first toward the bright light I suppose. The last time I saw him his eyes were red and he was obviously stressed out and irritable, he said he "just didn't have the time for this project" he was supposed to be part of and walked out. Now it would seem he has plenty of time to slow down, be last in races and enjoy things.

So I try and take things one-day-at-a-time and really spend all those minutes in the day as wisely as I can. I think about when I was a child and went to the penny candy store called "Harry Heads" (his actual name), I would look at my small fist "monies" and really calculate how much I would get, how much candy bang for the penny I could figure out. My pennies were precious, and time not so much, time seemed forever and I longed to grow up and have the power to make my own decisions in life and do whatever I wanted.

Now I realize what I really want is to make more time, but more time is not to be made.

http://www.shurupov.ru/time/