Colossal PITA

Several decades ago there was a film called Colossus: The Forbin Project. The premise was basically that computers got tired of speaking with humans and dealing with our crap, so they colluded and took over the world.

We’re headed in that direction, as can be witnessed by this ad in my Facebook feed:

So much wrong with this, including Amazon adding me to a list that was somehow transferred to Facebook (I don’t even use the same email address for the two of them), but if I wanted to fend any of this off, I’d have to use different browsers, because the reason I find ads on other websites for products I’ve bought on Amazon is that the browser picks it up and passes it on everywhere I go.

I’ve only got three browsers in use (and one of them, a Microsoft product only gets opened if a site unaccountably won’t work with Chrome or Firefox. So either I clear my web history constantly (which means I have to log back into everything from Amazon to WaPo), or I put up with this kind of peering over my shoulder.

(And even using Firefox in private browser mode doesn’t stop it.)

Second thing is this geolocation crap. If I could figure out a way to turn that off, I’d do it. I’m perfectly happy specifying what area I’m searching in, and in fact I loathe the helpful “looking for a [whatever] in Washington, D.C.?” intrusions. But if it can be done, I don’t know how.

But then there’s the “Manage Your Ad Preferences” link. You can’t manage your ad preferences in Facebook. Here’s their “Manage Ad Preferences” page:

Shifting anything from “yes, bring it” to “no” simply means that you’ll still be buried in ads, but “they won’t be relevant to you”. I do not call this “managing”.

But, finally, that “Tell us what you think” wheeze is as useful as a chocolate teapot. Your choices for “feedback” are binary. I want a text-entry form where I could really tell them what I think.

Light through the night

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we’re in that fulcrum of the year, as days shorten and nights grow long. It’s therefore a time for drawing the curtains and filling the interior with light.

And as someone who loves any excuse to light candles, I’m looking forward to filling my livingroom with their soft light tonight, which marks the beginning of the Hindu festival of Diwali. Because Diwali celebrates the triumph of light over darkness, knowledge over ignorance, good over evil, and hope over despair.

A little like Michaelmas, tbh, but with the addition of candles, since it gets dark earlier. I learned about Diwali when I moved to the Valley They Call Silicon. Since I was struggling with driving back the dark, I glommed onto it like limpets on a rock. Tonight I shall again mass candles (thanks, Ikea!) to drive back all manner of dark things. Not only do I like the soft light that groups of candles give off, the very act of lighting them one at a time and nursing along some of the ones at the end of their life slows me down. It calms me down.

Filling a room with candle light takes time; you can’t flip a switch and move on to the next task on your to-do list. And if you’re lighting those floating jobbers, you have to be very focused on not disturbing the water, because then it dowses the flames and you have to wipe them off and start over again.

It’s like the count-breaths-to-21 methodology of meditation: if you lose count because your monkey mind is distracted, you have to begin again from one.

Sigh. There are some days I never make it into double digits.

But there’s something about knowing how happy the moving lights will make me that enables me to persevere with candles. I light them, sit back and watch; and for at least a few minutes the world around me is peaceful and full of hope. Light prevails over darkness, love conquers fear, knowledge overcomes ignorance, and good triumphs over evil.

Last night I also sat before the flickering light of a yahrzeit candle, on the second anniversary of my BFF’s death. Remembering her helps me to consciously focus on filling my life with light. Or, as she might say, walking in the light.

Like lighting many candles in a dark room, this takes time. You don’t flip the switch and fill your life with light; you light one candle at a time, and nurse the weak ones along to give their best. And you try to be a candle in someone else’s life.

Advice to the young 'uns

A few more thoughts about my experience at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing; specifically on the thousands of young women who are students or recent grads:

Universities should have a required course for all engineering and CS majors in basic civility, courtesy and etiquette. Things like: you can’t go to a party unless you’ve been invited and you’ve accepted. Just because you see people going into a hospitality suite doesn’t mean that it’s open house. If you accept an invitation and discover that you can’t go, notify your hosts so someone else can get in. If a sit-down meal is involved, try to show up toward the beginning of the time slot, not 20 minutes before it ends. Someone planned and paid for a specific number of meals to be prepared; this isn’t your campus cafeteria.

Trade show etiquette specifies that you don’t get the swag unless you listen to the pitch—whether it’s a product sales pitch or a recruitment pitch, you can’t reach across the rep to grab [whatever’s on offer]. The swag’s the come-on, honey; play the game or walk on. Do not whine about the fact that “you have to talk to them to get the tee-shirt.” Them’s the rules; there is no exception, even for you.

I concede it’s too much to expect college-age kids to not crowd open bars (and I’m not sure whether their looks of bewilderment at being asked to show ID were genuine or a well-practiced ploy, but all the venues were very careful about whom they served alcohol to), but some kind of moderation around the buffets would be nice. These were lavish spreads, with plenty for all. The polite thing to do is fill your (one) plate and then move away.

Also—and I do understand this is a challenge for the introvert-inclined: these are networking affairs. “Networking” does not happen if you stand alone staring into your mobile phone. Likewise, closely clumped with the besties you walked in with does not constitute networking either. Mingle. Introduce yourself. Conduct conversation. Pro tip: ask a question once in a while and be silent while it’s being answered. (I learned way more about the life of a Carnegie-Mellon University student at a small party, because the chick never drew breath during the 70 minutes we both were there. No matter what the topic, she just blabbed incessantly. The hosting company reps must have wondered what life at the office would be like if she got hired.)

Finally—and you’re not the only offenders, but better to learn this now rather than later: when you click on the LinkedIn link to make a connection, LinkedIn suggests that you add a note to personalize it.

Do. That.

I stopped accepting connection requests from chicks who can’t even be arsed to say so much as “I saw your details on the spreadsheet for GHC mentors, and I’d like to connect with you.” This isn’t a game of Pokémon Go; you don’t get a prize for racking up the most connections. Behave like a professional so as to encourage other professionals to want to connect. Not rocket science.

And, you know, like that.

Here be dragons

We’re heading into Halloween, which means that—among the Christmas decorations—we can also see spooky-scary stuff in the various stores.

Viz: this dragon that I found in Lowe’s a few weeks ago.

Yes, I shot this video in mid-September. I suppose if you’re going to shell out for this sort of ostentation, you want to get your $179 money’s worth. Possibly leave it up all year round.

I haven’t seen a whole lot of it around the ‘ville, but then I haven’t been walking, as I used to do in the Valley They Call Silicon, where I thought they raised the concept of Halloween yard art to Gothic heights. I should really get out more.

Gratitude Monday: The good in us will win

One of the great benefits of being at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing for, effectively, Tuesday through Saturday, was my limited access to news. Specifically to news of the catastrophe sitting on its fat arse in and around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

For those four-and-a-half days, I basically only went online through my laptop to write posts here. The rest of my Internet access was via my mobile phone, to live-tweet the various sessions I attended, to check emails for party invitations/locations and to hail Uber and Lyft drivers. No hourly BREAKING stories about what disgusting, unconstitutional, cruel, petty, vindictive or obnoxious crap was coming from the Kleptocrat and his minions. Just learning, socializing and clocking 14,000 steps on my pedometer every day.

I did not realize what a heavy drag that constant stream of shit was on me until I was away from it and then returned to it. The closest analogy I can make is how I didn’t realize what a burden living in LA smog was until I left the area and only returned for visits. Then the painful throttling of my lungs as I tried to breathe became obvious. When I was living in it, it just…was.

When I got back to the District They Call Columbia last Saturday, and skimmed the Washington Post front page, I felt my lungs constrict in pain, and I wanted to cry. I can’t even recount all the monstrosities that had accumulated in those four days; I just don’t want to give them head room. But the weight was crushing. How, I wondered, are we going to undo the destruction of the environment, the dismantling of healthcare safeguards, the selling of laws to the highest campaign contributors, the plundering of our treasury for the aggrandizement of Klepto and his Cabinet members, the abandonment of the people of Puerto Rico, the undoing of international commitments, the pissing on the Constitution? I don’t think I have ever felt so desolate.

Well, a while ago I wrote about my friend who became bat mitzvah. One of the passages from the prayer book she read was so beautiful, I jotted down parts of it, and looked it up later and wrote out the full text. I was reminded of it by another friend posting this on Facebook:

This is the passage, from the Mishkan T’filah:

The good in us will win,

Over all the wickedness, over all the wrongs we have done.

We will look back at the pages of written history, and be amazed,

And then we will laugh and sing,

And the good that is in us, children in their cradles, will have won.

Dear God, but I hope this is the case. Let me—and others like me, but stronger and smarter—let us find the way to resist this evil, overcome this wickedness; let us—or our children in their cradles—look back, be amazed, laugh and sing, and know that we have won.

This is what I’m holding onto, on this Gratitude Monday.