lite pollution

Well, maybe you should. A few days ago, I downloaded the ISO image and booted the Live CD. I was blown away. I hadn’t seriously played with Linux in over 3 years. The last thing I did was set up a firewall and Samba server via the command-line in Debian. No small feat, but it eventually worked.

Fast forward and you have my latest experience with Linux. It’s like night and day. I was able to run a fully functioning OS from the Live CD. I surfed the web, via wireless and did IM right out of the box!

Version 6.10 of Ubuntu was released today. Burn yourself a copy and try it out. If you don’t like it, take the CD out of the drive and reboot into Windoze. No harm, ho foul.

Reading through my daily glut of RSS feeds, I happened upon an article about branding yourself. No, not in the hot-iron-to-the-rump sort of way. It’s written in the context of soccer. It’s advice to would-be professionals on how to make yourself a commodity. It’s pretty fascinating, as I had no idea that soccer in the U.S. would be such a cut-throat hive of politics.

I particularly liked Step 2:

Step 2: Play every game as if it’s the one where the eyes could be on you.

First off, this is the mentality you should have in everything you do - 100% optimization at all times. As a player, it’s crucial that you play with that sense of accountability and urgency. As a recruit, it’s essential. The way you carry yourself will tend to have a greater impact than the tangible performance you turn in on a given afternoon or night. Why wouldn’t it? Every coach knows players have off matches. The integrity and class a player shows during those off-games will give them a much better sense of what they’re in for when you enter the program.

I was reading the whole article and trying to place it in a context that would be beneficial to me. My job as both a martial arts instructor and a student came to mind. The idea that white belts are always watching is not a new one for me. When ever we recruit someone new, the person that was the ‘new guy’ before suddenly becomes senior rank to someone. Forever after, that person who is junior rank will look up to those more senior to them. If you’ve got the magical black belt, that goes double.

What I have realized recently is the fact that there’s another aspect to the ‘all eyes are on you’. If you instruct and have your own students, they are always watching you to see how it should be done. It’s very hard to have an off day when you’re up in front of the class. The other set of eyes that focuses on instructors are those of the governing body of your particular association and the instructor’s instructor. So, you get it from both sides. Your sandwiched in between two sets of people that are watching your every move.

This revelation was because of a mishap at the latest competition I went to. I was in the ring with the rest of the black belts doing hyung, weapons and sparring. I thought for sure I knew the weapons hyung I needed to do. I even managed to get through a third of it before royally botching the rest. Normally, I wouldn’t care. I hate competition.

It was different this time, though. I was being evaluated by the master instructors in my region. They saw me mess up. Moreover, they know that I have my own students. They have to be thinking: If he can’t even remember his own hyung, how is he ever going to teach students? The only positive I could get out of the moment was the fact that none of my students were participating in this particular weekend. Many of my cohorts from the dohjang I train in were there, so it was almost as bad.

I need to start taking seriously the idea that I am always being evaluated, always being looked at and sized up. It is a fact that as I progress in rank and continue to teach and learn, I will have fewer and fewer people of the same rank to blend in with. That’s just the way it goes when you’re a dan.

It’s been awhile.

That’s really all I can say at this point.

I’m resurrecting this site, a bit at a time. I figured the first step was to write something. The next step will be to, um, design something instead of the standard, out-of-the-box Wordpress template. That part is going to take time. But it will be worth it, I promise.

After posting about stupid signs, I got a few comments about how people seem incapable of social interaction. Well, I’ve found the solution: In no time at all, we will all be able to IM one another using glassware! Computer geeks and pre-pubes rejoice!

I noticed that the designer didn’t even bother upgrading the design of the typepad. It’s just cell phone buttons, replicated.

Don’t worry if you don’t know what SXSW is. I didn’t either until this week. All the blogs I regularly read started mentioning it. All the authors were either there or wishing to be there.

SXSW, as it turns out, is many things. Mainly, is a music festival in Austin, TX. Over the years it has also lumped outher conferences into it’s game plan, including SXSW Interactive. That’s where most of my blog authors were congregating. After hearig about the blast that they had, I went and looked around. I’ve made a decision that I am going to go to SXSW next year. It’s too good to pass up. I loved Austin the one other time I was there and I would bet that hanging around with other designer/developers would be really cool.

So, I either need to convince my current job to subsidize it (yeah, right) or find another job that will send me.

A talk by Bruce Sterling has some very interesting ideas, among them ’spimes’:

Spimes are manufactured objects whose informational support is so overwhelmingly extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system. Spimes begin and end as data. They’re virtual objects first and actual objects second.

It’s an interesting read, even for the non-scifi crowd. It’s a little heavy on the tech-jargon, but most of you can muddle through.

By way of BLDGBLOG, here’s an interesting design project. This is another in the long line of I-wish-I-had-thought-of-that posts. You can get the full story from Metropolismag.com. They’ve even got a PDF file available for download, so you can experience it yourself. Pretty cool.