Jesse Ross | jesseross.com

Has anyone else noticed that our mythology of the future, and what is shaping up to be our actual future, are converging at an every increasing rate?

Allow me to demonstrate:

Teleportation
Invisibility cloaks
Androids
Bionics
Instant communication and access
Virtual reality

Much props to The Raw Feed for many of the links above.

The United States is the Internet Explorer of countries.

• When you realize that you really are in over your head, keep only the things that are crucial.
• Chefs are artists and consider themselves as such. For as much as I like food, I should have realized that long ago.
• Don’t put too many hopes into the asides that people make. And, on that note, don’t assume anything. Ever.
• I either need to learn to enjoy the bar atmosphere, or start getting more sleep. Only one of these gives me a better chance of becoming more outgoing.
• Ice can be a very, very bad thing. Especially when you have a baby in your arms, and it’s black and near-invisible. (I didn’t fall — but had I, it would have been very not pleasant.)
• The jury is still out on whether it’s safe for me to have crushes on everyone.
• I want someone to have a crush on me for a change. (Amen, Big Poppa E!)
• The Internet never ceases to amaze me.
• The world would be an exponentially better place if more people figured out a way to barter services with one another. Money means that we can live our lives being anti-social. Bartering brings us together and forces us to forge relationships with people we might not otherwise have met.
• Chinese is a really damn fun language. Or maybe I just like the process of learning and the socializing part of it. Or all of the above.
• Trust your instincts. Regardless of what the “safety-net” in your mind says.

Just a few thoughts I’ve had recently or that have come my way…

• Via Sašo:

  In Terry Prattchet’s Discworld there was a nice sentence like “and then he was surprised like a man is surprised by something which he previously thought only happens to other people”.

• The Internet is important for me, because, just as with other forms of publishing technology before it, the burden of remembering things is placed on the network, rather than the individual.
• In my informal testing at work, between Firefox, Flock and Safari, Safari (with the Sogudi extension) wins in terms of just consumer satisfaction and comfort (for me anyway). The only thing I miss from Firefox and Flock are the “Type to search” feature (and, to a lesser extent, the live, incremental search via page indexing).
• Lucid dreaming might just gain me an extra 6 hours or so of productivity a day. I think that’s worth running into walls for.
• Flash is weird. Period.
• Open source developers might just be good at copying the innovations of others, but at least they’re really good at it. [RealPlayer video]
• It’s not important to take over the world — just leave a positive mark on it.
• People like what I do.

If we decided that community came first, how would we use our tools differently?

I was surfing around, when I remembered something I once heard… The Amish use cellphones. Is that true? Did I dream that up? Naturally, I decided to consult Wikipedia on the matter. At the bottom of the article was a link to a Wired article from January 1999 about the adoption of technology in Amish society. I won’t go into all the details, since you can easily read it yourself, but I must say, even as the tech-friendly, internet-loving guy I am, I think they actually have some really good ideas. There is a deliberation that goes into the Amish exploration of technology that often doesn’t happen here. In Amish society, there is so much weight given to long-term effects — as the article mentions, they’re not necessarily trying to stop the halt of technology, just “slow it down”.

Read the full article on Wired.

Here are some imagination exercises you may want to try today. Do them over a 24-hour period and see what ways they change how you perceive the world. Write down your experiences and email them to me. If you don’t have my address, why are you reading my web site?

• Imagine that ghosts really do exist.
• Imagine everyone you meet has the ability to read your mind, but they’re all pretending to not respond.
• Imagine today is the last day before you have a permanent and irreversible sex change.

If you’re the paranoid type, you might not want to try the first two exercises… I probably should have put that warning at the top of the post…

There is nothing but everything becoming nothing.

And I don’t find that depressing at all, thank you very much.

I am not an advocate of reminiscing. But sometimes, it is good. And bookmarks are good too. I like Franklin because he helps me reminisce in a good way.

I think I don’t often think about the past because I’ve convinced my brain that most of that information is unnecessary and should not be retained. I’ve often asked myself, “If you tell yourself something often enough, will you start to believe it?” I would say that it is true. I’ve been reinventing myself for years now… but I’m not sure I went the right direction. Time to stop and restart.

…

Some good things to think about:

• Sometimes a film doesn’t have a big enough budget to do more than one take of a shot.
• Not everyone is rooting for you, but there’s probably one person you haven’t thought about in a while who is.
• You have muscle memory.