Question 344 of 365: Are we ripping the right information?

A DVD was supposed to be one of the most encrypted physical media types to ever be created. It was supposed to have been the best form of Digital Rights Management, one that would stop pretty much everyone from copying software and movies. The days of dubbing VHS tapes was going to be far in the past and we were going to evolve into this brave new world of legitimate content.

As it turns out, when you make anything into a digital version (like a DVD) it becomes infinitely easier to make copies than its analog cousins. It took one single person to reverse engineer the technology and start us on the path of making legitimate backups of the media that we supposedly owned. Now with things like Handbrake, ripping a DVD is easier than recording a movie on TiVo. The one problem is that no matter how easy it has gotten, we still don’t always know where to start ripping. If we rip the wrong sections or the chapters aren’t in the correct order, we end up getting a jumbled mess of media that neither makes sense nor is watchable.

It isn’t enough to have the information. It isn’t enough to have it in a format that is easily transfered. The most important element is putting the puzzle pieces together.

The key for making a good rip of a hard to figure out DVD is to watch what a DVD player does when it plays the movie. If you can see how it navigates on the disk (just by observing the chapter numbers in the right order) you can figure out just how the sneaky disc engineers had constructed it. Once you have all of that chapter information, it is only a matter of dictating what comes next.

That is why we need such good examples of learning for us to rip. We need to be able to watch others who have figured out how to learn and do business and create something new. We need to stop watching those that get the order all wrong and jumble up their intentions so that they are left with no expertise or fulfillment at the end of their projects. We need to stop looking at success as the only factor in determining value.

We need to stop looking at Facebook as something to emulate.

If I rip Facebook, I am going to get the same kinds of unease and mistrust that users all over the world feel toward the service. I will get the mixed-messages of legitimacy and infantilism that are rampant in the millions of Facebook applications available. I will see everyone as a major competitor and no one as a partner. I will not build things that transfer value, but only things that consume it.

Ripping the right information means watching those who listen to the right people and make things work for everyone involved. We should rip writers of great young adult fiction. They have looked into our condition at our most vulnerable time of change and they have figured out what is important to pull out for the rest of our lives. We should rip those who tell the story of Coming of Age because it is all that we ever do.

We should rip those that sing to their children. They have figured out just the right ways of being themselves and playing a part. They have pursued a consistent sense of wonder in children and they persist in the belief that they can hold on to it. If we can rip that moment of shutting the door on the a contented child’s bedroom as they drift off to sleep then we will be one step closer to figuring out being fulfilled.

We should rip those that make up new card games and sports. They have written the rules for complex systems and then they look for ways to win. They have laid out all of the important moves and then they methodically make them. They are masters of using the same 52 items and presenting them in new patterns. If we are to learn anything about the systems we believe in, we must first rip the systems we create.

We must rip all of these elements because we need to copy and remix what is right in this world. We must emulate and augment the reality that we want to see more of. Being the change doesn’t do any good if your change is based upon the wrong information. Rip the good stuff, and being the change becomes the only option.

Question 135 of 365: Why don’t we say shut up more often?

I have been reliving my childhood through netflix on-demand. It seems as though all of the movies that I loved when I was a kid are available for me to pull up at any hour of the day and watch with my children (with the notable exception of Newsies). I have been doing this for a couple of months now, and I don’t see it stopping anytime soon. There are just too many cheesy children’s movies from the 80′s and early 90′s.

Today we watched 3 Ninjas. It is a classic, at least in the sense that it touched off quite the firestorm of chanting about a friend of mine who liked to be call “Rocky” and a girl in our class named “Emily”. (If you haven’t seen the movie… suffice it to say that one is said to love the other, over and over again in a way that only children’s movies can do). It is also a movie in which both children and adults liberally use the phrase, “shut up.” It is not one that we encourage with our children so we had to have a few conversation about why the children were being mean and not using good manners. I was surprised at how many times it came up, though, mostly because I almost never hear it during the course of my day.

Watching the movie made me think about why it is that I don’t use it and why I am so adverse to its use in my household.

I think it really stems from the fact that I don’t like to be silenced. It comes from my unwillingness to allow defacto authority into the settings around me. And that is what Shut Up is all about, establishing authority simply by calling on those words.

Yet, these boys were able to say it to one another (and I said it when I was their age) so easily. They said it without the hint that they would actually shut up one of their brothers. They said it because it was the thing to say. The insult du jour. They said it because other insults were off limits. But, we don’t have those PG limitations.

We can fling the kinds of specific insults that only come with age and maturity. We can attack idiologies and products, figureheads and policies. In fact, we have replaced Shut Up with blog posts and tweets that disallow the importance of entire political figures, world events or fanboydom.

I believe that the crumudgeon in any organization uses his or her equivalent of Shut Up in order to keep the status quo. The adult versions of Shut Up are much more detrimental because they shut out possibilities rather than simply causing silence or frustration. In a lot of ways, I wish that we would recognize and call people out on their use of adult Shut Up behaviors the way that I call out my kids on their use of those words.

I would love to have the same conversations with adults about appropriate behavior when they don’t like what someone else is doing. I would love to create a space for us to talk out our reservations for going forward, instead of simply creating spaces and ways to say no.

So, here is what I believe are the biggest Shut Up actions I see from adults that I would like to have serious conversations about:

To name a few. So, while I am not recommending that everyone go out and watch 3 ninjas, it did provide me wit the ability to have important conversations with my kids, and a blog post.

Question 133 of 365: When should you pack up and leave?

“Last Night” is the title of one of my favorite songs (by The Strokes) and my favorite movies (A Canadian Indie Film). The former has a driving beat and the latter has an exquisite plot device. Last night is something that just happened, and that I am still recovering from. It is something that drove me to leave, and stopped the ongoing plot in its tracks.

Last night, my wife and I packed up and drove home with our two kids from the downtown hotel we were planning on staying at for the week. We did this at 10:00 pm. Our children are not accustomed to staying up so late, but there they were, in pajamas and coats waiting for us to pack up the van and go home across town.

Without explaining too many of that particulars, a single hotel room is not sufficient to hold a family of four. Not with phone calls and door bells going off while we were trying to put our children to sleep. Not with a party going on next door. Not with the heat eminating from the four bodies in the room that all want to go to bed, but can’t.

So we packed it in and cut our losses. We thought it would be for the best, and that is exactly what it turned out to be. We slept in our own beds and we rested in the way that only your own home can afford. We left because leaving was the one thing that was going to make us happier and more sane.

And that is what I am seeking now: sanity. The space to be as loud as needed. The ability to own what is around us. The understanding that there isn’t anything else more important than doing right by the people that I love.

With this in mind, I ponder just how much insanity I can put up with. I think through just how many obligations that are unconnected to my passions that I can really handle. It has become something of a masochistic act to assume more responsibility without seeing a benefit.

Starting something is easy, follow through is hard. Follow through is the insane part. It takes you in so many different directions that seemingly contradict your original intentions. It frustrates and offends your reason. But, we offend it all together. It is a process of accepting the insantity for the sake of not having to retreat. It is the hope of a big payoff somewhere in the future that we put up with the insanity.

And that is what I had hoped to do at the hotel. I hoped that having our beds made for us and getting free breakfast would be enough to offset the bedtime craziness. As it turns out, it wasn’t. It wasn’t worth it because I knew all of the benefits concretely. I could see into the future and predict exactly what our family would get out of a week of hotel living.

The future I can’t predict is in writing and doing, startups, books and schools. This is where I can’t see the equasion of insanity. This is where it gets so hard to figure out if I should pack up and go home. I don’t know where it is that this journey will take me. And that is exhilarating and infuriating.

I know what I need to feel comfortable and to rest easy, and for the most part, this isn’t it. I am staying somewhere away from home, away from the classroom. I am staying here for an indefinite period until I can either buy out the hotel and make my own home or run up a big enough bill and crawl back home in a stupor of debt (even if that debt is really only a deficiency of energy).

Is there any shortcut for this equation? Is there any way to figure out whether or not the insanity and uncomfortablility is worth it? I love working toward something, so long as it does have a payoff. Otherwise, I would rather simply go home and rest, gearing up for the next long excursion.

To put it another way, I feel as though I am on a pilgrimage without any directions or definite destination. I am traveling in the shadows of Chaucer’s tales with just as many anecdotes to tell. I don’t know if I am a reeve or a miller. I don’t know if I have gapped teeth. And I won’t for a while. And I won’t know the equation answer either.

And I guess I must sojourn on, staying at the hotel until the voices in my head while I lay there are too strong. Until they beg me to come home and rest awhile. And maybe that day is coming. And maybe I can handle the insanity for a bit longer.

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• Today in Insanity (slog.thestranger.com)

The Ripe Environment: Connecting more than two dots.

There is a severe lack of time in the air. It pervaides every conversation I hear on many days:

“No, I don’t have time for that collaboration right now. Maybe after this quarter is over.”
“Are you sure that it has to be due tomorrow. I really think that having the weekend when I don’t have games or practices or school would make more sense.”
“I don’t even have time to think.”

Hyperbole aside, this lacking is palpable. I think it is one of the only times that a lack of something can be more heavily felt and deeply understood than the presence of it. Many people, though, have just gotten used to having no time to connect the disparate parts of their working or waking lives. It has become the film upon our skin that always coats our interactions but can’t be rubbed or cleaned off.

I am not one of those people, however. I believe that connecting the dots and creating time for that process is possible. I believe that it is all about creating a Workflow of Passion (requires a better name, but that’s all I’ve got).

When I say passion, I do not mean that you must be equally in love with every assignment or task that you come across. Instead, I mean that there is something meaningful within each thing that you do. There is some meat there, no matter how hidden it may be in the luke-warm soup of “other stuff.” The only way to craft the time to connect that meat to something else equally meaty is to plunge your spoon in and not be satisfied with the carrot or water chestnut you come up with the first time. (I would like to apologize to both the literary crowd who sees the metaphor being stretched thin and the vegetarian crowd who beleives that no one should be looking for meat within a vegetarian soup.)

So, what does this spoon plunging action look like. Well, I have recently taken to a maxim for resolving the issue of time suckage and distraction in the classroom and out.

“Use the tool that has everything you want, and nothing you don’t.”

Although the different image settings in Photo Booth are cool, the distraction factor is so high that it is nearly impossible to use it as an instructional tool (for kids or adults).

Wikipedia provides a cornocopia of educational resources, but blind searches are still stabs in the soup that lead to less than appetizing results.

The Ripe Environment is anywhere that makes information clickable, that sets the path of least resistance to learning as the norm. The Ripe Environment is a place that doesn’t waste time on stuff that doesn’t matter. It is a place that the workflow always works for the user, according to their needs and passions.