Utopian Realities

Yet Another Yearly Post

2010-02-28T05:25:00.001-05:00

Well, at least I'm being consistent. Maybe if I changed the date to February 29, I would only need to write once every four years. Let's see, it's more than five years since I started posting here. A lot has happened, to be sure, but I haven’t commented on it. Technology wise, the most recent significant development in my view at least, is the iPad. Will it have a great impact? And in what area? Personally, I think it will have tremendous impacts, left and right. Look at the track record of its predecessors. The iPod did not invent the digital audio player, but it changed the rules and revolutionized how people listen to what when. The iPhone didn't invent the mobile phone, but changed the rules once again. And the iPad, many argue, didn't bring anything 'new'. But that's the point, it will still change the rules and revolutionize the way we do many things we never thought of doing before. The publishing industry better look in the rearview mirror: things are closer than they appear.

What Was I Thinking (WWIT)?

2009-02-28T07:16:00.002-05:00

When I started this blog four plus years ago. I never had any illusions of a readership. It was for me to write and for me to read. Looking back, I really am impressed at my writing. Considering the fact that I’m not a writer. Professionally that is. I have been pushed to write by some of my friends and readers. But I don’t see it at as a living for me any time soon. I was hoping to find the perfect ‘co’-writer someday. If I’m interested in writing something I feel is worth writing about, that is.

In the meantime, the good thing about blogs is that you can ignore them for years and they’re still here. No rent, no salaries, no maintenance. The only reason I’m writing this so called post is that I promised myself I wouldn’t let (yet) another year pass by this time without at least putting something. Then again, who knows? I might suddenly have the urge, the passion, and (hopefully) the time to start writing again at the same pace as when I started out.

It's About Time

2007-02-27T01:58:00.000-05:00

Did you imagine 2007 to be like this ten years ago? What about 2017? How about 2027? At the accelerated change we're going through, twenty years into the future would be as different to us as seventy years into the past. In other words, 2007 would be as weird to someone from 1937 as the year 2027 would be to someone from today. Looks like we need a remake of Forever Young. With a sequel to boot.

Can't we slow down... long enough to think; to reflect; to know where we're headed? Are we really at the beginning of the Knowledge Economy? How far till the Wisdom Economy? Is the Emotional Economy far behind? The Imagination Economy? The Metaphorical Economy? No, I’m not mocking anything or anybody: there’s no telling what will concern people in the near or far future. And with every new paradigm shift, whole new worlds are built and rebuilt. Knowing that “Change is the only constant” is little comfort for those who’ll have to endure it. Going back the beginning: we seem to see the future only through the rearview mirror. Get ready for a very bumpy ride.

Beyond Blogging, etc.

2006-02-28T01:33:00.000-05:00

Would blogging set off something unexpected that becomes the next killer application for the web? I have a feeling that we're at the very beginning of something revolutionary in communications. Historically, any advances in either transportation or communication, sets off a real and tremendous change in people' lives in general. These days we are riding the communication wave. Transportation, on the other hand, has stagnated for a very long time. Nothing really new has evolved since the introduction of passenger flight a half a century ago. PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) remains, to the dismay of its devote and fanatic believers, a pipe dream. Rail has been going downhill with some exceptions, yet its heir, the car, hasn't evolved much. And as a transportation solution, its taking us to dead end.

But back to blogging; people are raving about it for the wrong reasons. There are those who think that it could actually bring them fame or fortune. I don't like disappointint them, but they remind me of the average teenage basketball player aspiring to be the next Mike Jordan. It's not impossible, but it's a one-in-a-million chance. Same goes for aspiring actors and aspiring writers. Just take a look at these two links to get a more 'realistic' picture. http://news.ft.com/cms/s/384be1be-9eb1-11da-ba48-0000779e2340.html and http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/000809.html#000809

Yet who said that every blogger has to strike it rich in order for us to call the blogging phenomenon a success? Maybe we are asking the wrong question. I still believe that blogging is a revolution. But it's an evolving revolution. How it will affect us in the end is anyone's guess.

“We Shoulda Attacked The Saudis”

2006-02-26T03:50:00.000-05:00

I don’t like writing about politics in general, let alone ‘polarized’ topics, but could someone please tell me what they mean when they refer to Saudi Arabia as being a “better candidate” than Iraq on the "war on terror"? Should the U.S. military be in Saudi Arabia now instead of in Iraq? Why? To get rid of terror once and for all? To set a model for democracy? And would the Saudis have welcomed American soldiers with rose petals, too? If choosing Iraq was a tragic miscalculation; then on a scale of 1 to 10, what would have choosing "The Cradle of Islam" been?

Already, thousands of Muslim youths are flocking to Iraq against incredible odds just to attack "The Great Satan"; could we begin to imagine what the situation would be if the democracy-building, rose-seeking, freedom-defending soldiers were scattered between Mecca and Medina? And would it be politically possible, then, to ban 'foreigners' from entering "occupied Mecca" even if it was realistically impossible to do so? Two million yearly pilgrims (many of whom wait a lifetime) would just have to postpone their ‘hajj’ until the conflict is over.

Or maybe they don’t mean a better “military” candidate. Maybe they’re talking about attacking the Saudi money that’s “fueling terrorism”. But then when they say "Saudi money"; are they referring to the Saudi government, or the Saudi people (of whom a fraction is donating their money, to whatever cause, anyway)? For the former; I doubt very much that the Saudi monarchy has anything to do with even the thought of it. As for the latter; that would, indeed, raise some very interesting questions. Should the actions of ordinary citizens (let alone unlawful citizens or even renegades) make a whole nation liable? Would the United States be liable if some of its citizens did incredible "terror" damage to, say, Nicaragua, for example.

I'd Like to Buy the World a Joke

2006-02-22T01:35:00.000-05:00

I love water. Everyone does. It's THE most basic necessity of life. I thought about this the other day. What if, for one year, we picked a city where all the advertisements targeting the people were only for water? Just inducing them to drink water. What would the health implications be? What would the economic implications be? I, for one, believe that they would be positive. The more people drink water, the less they drink sodas and other unhealthy beverages. The less they spend money on those unhealthy beverages.. For the beverage industry, this is a catastrophe, but then, life goes on. Unless everyone prefers bottled water, then no need to worry about "Big Water" conglomerates filling the void and turning us back into mindless, brand-conscious consumers. (What was I drinking when I wrote that?)

Changing Times

2005-07-10T06:28:00.000-04:00

When it comes to accepting new ideas, people are usually fifty years behind the main drift. Most people are afraid of change since they see new ideas as being frightening, and accept them only when the things they held dear are gone or hopelessly obsolete. It’ll take some time before we start restructuring everything considered untouchable now, only to wonder how we managed without it for so long a little later. And the irony of it: we ridicule people who are so “unrealistic” as to come up with the new idea, then we later sneer at those who are so “unrealistic” as to try to live without it.

One of my favorite ads shows a man standing in the street as another man is walking (horizontally) on the wall next to him with the caption: “those who keep insisting that it can’t be done are always interrupted by those who do”. My college professor warned us in the early days of CAD (Computer Aided Design) that, for technology in general, first it becomes a “possibility”, then it becomes a “necessity”.

Dyer Predictions: The Gee-Gees

2005-01-11T01:33:00.000-05:00

While surfing around I came across a new fun sounding acronym that’s anything but: the Gee-Gees. No it’s not a name of another band , and it gives a surreal meaning to the phrase ‘stayin alive’. It stands for Global Geophysical events, and according to Gwynne Dyer, there’s nothing much anyone can about them when they come.

One such Gee-Gee is a mega tsunami awaiting the Atlantic Ocean. Scientists believe that if a volcano erupts in La Palma in the Canary Islands, it would create a huge landslide that would cause waves as high as 165 feet to hit the East Coast. Some speculate that as many as 150 million would die from such a catastrophe. Of course given enough time, warned people could evacuate to higher grounds before the waves reach shore. The Asian tsunami took nearly two hours to reach Indian peninsula. The distance from the Canary Islands to New York or Boston is much greater. But what if all of this happened in the middle of a sever winter blizzard? Not only will avoiding the crushing waves be difficult, but also rescue efforts in the immediate aftermath, where seconds count, would be severely hindered. Sounds like a plot for another Hollywood disaster movie.

As for reality, ‘other’ scientists dispute these findings as overblown. They say the landslide of the volcanic island would happen in stages and the island would sink, if it actually did, gradually and hence cause mini, not mega, tsunamis.

Take My Blog, Please

2005-01-02T03:54:00.000-05:00

I don't feel like blogging today. I haven't felt like this since I started out blogging ten days ago. What's wrong? Is it blog burnout? Does this happen to other bloggers too? Nobody warned me. And what would become of my blog? Can I hand it down to somebody else to continue on it? What would the readers' reaction be? The ones who didn't read what I wrote to begin with? Will they be let down? Angry? Resentful?

Another thing about blogging is: do I want it one-way? Do I want to write what I want to and exclude others? Or do I want everyone to contribute? Will it be more valuable as time goes by or less valuable? What would I want to read about in my blogs ten years from now? Lets imagine that blogging was available in 1995 and that I was a very active blogger. What would I wish now to have been writing about on a daily basis?

If At First You Don't Suck Seed

2005-01-01T02:09:00.000-05:00

Suck, suck again. I love making puns, to the point where I sometimes annoy friends by repeating what they just said in a totally different meaning. That may explain why my name on this blog is (joking aside) Joe King Ass-Eyed. Or should I have chosen Joe Ken Gas-Eyed? Or how about Joe Ken Gus Sighed. (Sighed indeed).

Do I seem unfocused? Maybe it's because I AM unfocused. Not only that, but my writings are very lame. They lack substance. I myself don't know what the point is. Can blogs commit suicide? What if they come back to life again? This is only my eighth posting on my first blog and still I haven't gotten quite the hang of it.

Nine and a half blogs

2004-12-29T05:48:00.000-05:00

I blog therefore I am, said the existential blogger. But maybe the value of this blog, for me at least, is to read it years from now and reflect at how things have changed. It is a snapshot of my thinking as opposed to my image. Right. Um, blogging along now, we go to the next topic. I don't have any topics in my mind right now. I'm supposed to just write 500 words a day and get it over with. And not read it again for, like, ten years or something.

Or maybe it would be better if I had several different blogs to address seven different themes that I'd like to write about. Maybe having just one blog is not only not enough; it actually cripples my very attempt at blogging. I'm beginning to believe that the more a blog is narrow and specific, the more useful it is to its reader. So, what topics should I choose? And how specific should they be? Top on the list, of course, would be the pursuit and building of the Realistic Utopia (whatever that turns out to be).

Clearly, there is a sense that only now are we on the verge of a 'knowledge' revolution. The 'information' revolution is so yesterday. Its the transfer of knowledge that will bring real and tremendous change to our lives, individually as well as collectively. Having all the information in the world at (literally) the tip of my fingers amounts to nothing if I don't know how to make use of it.

Bloggers block?

2004-12-28T16:58:00.000-05:00

Is there a difference between writing and blogging? What would blogging look like ten years from now? How will it evolve? If a blogger falls down in a forest and nobody reads about him, did it really happen? Am I just writing questions at random? Am I trying to be funny? Speaking of funny; Dave Barry is finally retiring (sort of) as of next Saturday. Its hard to believe that, in a country of 300 million (and a world of 500 million English speakers), nobody can compete with this guy. Like Johnny Carson, he is very unique, indeed. So now is the time for all those Dave Barry wanabes to shoot for this wide open vacancy.

The spell checker is beginning to get on my nerves. It's ironic enough not to recognize the words blog, blogger, blogging and blogged, but it also keeps ignoring to 'learn' them.

In The Land of Blogs

2004-12-27T16:45:00.000-05:00

Why would I want to blog? Some do it as another way of writing their diaries: today I did this and did that, this happened to me and so on, blah blah. Others use it as a means of giving their point of views to the world freely. They might try to convince readers of their way of thinking. Others have real and useful knowledge that they want to pass along. Some bloggers try to utilize blogging to attract like-minded people and form a community. Still others don't really know why they're doing it.

Me? I think I fall into the last category. But at least I believe my subconscious knows what's really going on, and that's enough for me. Perhaps I want to articulate. There's a lot of stuff on my mind that I want to get out so that I can sort it out, put it somewhere for future reference, and free the hard disk in my brain. And who knows, maybe someday I (or whoever) might make something useful out of it. Just what the world urgently needs today: a lazy procrastinating semi-philosopher.

About two years ago I began writing at the rate of 500 words per day after reading a book by Roberta Bryant called "Anybody Can Write". The idea was to just write anything that comes to mind, but to do it consistently on a daily basis. I wrote quite a lot and surprised myself. Then after the twelfth day I did something that, in retrospect, I should've postponed indefinitely: I read what I actually wrote. Then I stopped cold. The only other time I picked up the writing habit was when emailing people I don't really know. Of course I had to first find the willing recipients, start some kind of conversation and send and receive until one of us misses a beat; gets lazier ever after; feels guilty and/or awful about it and just terminates the thing.

Then along came blogging. It's better, and more challenging, than just writing to myself on my computer. And, unlike emailing, there's no waiting for a reply before I proceed or jump into another topic. As I've stated earlier, its the rewriting that I hate most. But by just blogging along on a daily basis, I don't really have to worry about redoing anything anytime soon. If someday I look back at all my writings and think that something might be worthy of editing then I can do it with no pressure or time constraint.

Who Moved My Ass?

2004-12-26T13:10:00.000-05:00

Forget about your cheese: YOU are next. Are we on the verge of mass movement? For better or worse, we are. As studies of the urban future indicate, more people will be living in cities than ever. This runs against the notion we had only a short while back when e-visionaries were trumpeting the coming of The New Rural Life. Technology advances (especially in telecommunication) would make us enjoy the proximity to nature and wilderness while alleviating us of the need to live in (filthy) cities. But they missed one important factor: no amount of technological revolution is going to change anything unless the same thing happens to transportation. In fact, advances in mobility alone can determine how far we can live from the city. It was the advent of the car (coupled with cheap energy and subsidized highways) that brought us the suburbs.

The question would be then, what kind of transportation 'invention' is necessary to make us really rural? For one, it has to take us from the city center to our rural habitats and back even more swiftly and cheaply than the current car-centric system. The only alternative on the table is what's called PRT (Personal Rapid Transit). But that idea has been criticized beyond recognition. I side with some of this criticism, but only against some of the solutions and applications touted and not against the basic idea. PRT is a sound idea who's time has come. The problem is in not understanding that it's a whole new paradigm that will end up rearranging the very make up of the built environment.

A paradigm change in transportation would very likely bring a change in property values, and nobody wants to see their valuables tumble. Maybe this could partly explain why the Minnesota Experimental City (MXC) did not make it after being only within one year of breaking ground in the late sixties. Two hundred thousand people living in a dome with no cars or schools was indeed too futuristic even for that dreamy era. But not enough 'interest' from 'doers' in government and society in general is probably what put it on hold indefinitely. Until now.

Seismic shifts that would eventually affect the built environment are already being anticipated. Namely; the end of cheap oil; the failure(s) of the car on so many levels (even if oil was forever cheap); the water crises; the energy crises; the communication (especially wireless) revolution, and the aging population are only part of what we're heading into. The, then, readily available solutions of MXC and PRT would have been a marvelous mix forty years ago, yet are seen even today as futuristic and not the future. It seems we don't want to move from the corner that we painted ourselves into. We want to have our cheese and eat it, too.

It's Dark In Here

2004-12-25T11:50:00.000-05:00

Just what am I suppose to do inside my blog? For those of you nonreader who are just nonentering this blog, I've stated before that this is not for anybody to read. I must say that this site is much better than Microsoft's MSN Spaces. I couldn't write a title called "Who Moved My Ass". It was 'prohibited' until I removed the "Ass" word. As for the blogger spell checker, I found it ironic that the word 'blog' was not recognized!

But going back to my title; I can't see a thing here. Not that I should. Ten years ago, the internet was just beginning to catch the interest of the general public, though it would be another three years until the business people jump in on it. If I could have foreseen then what things would turn out to be. And ten years from now? Everybody is thinking in terms of the advances in the wireless revolution, the oil peak, and the still ongoing advances in raw computing power. Yet life in 2015 will turn out to be a complete surprise for many people. The future almost always does.

And this blog is still lame and cautious even though I'm (suppose to be) deliberate about being spontaneous. Have patience, I might yet begin to improve in the coming few weeks. Until then, you nonreaders will just have to wait.

Look World... I'm Naked!!!

2004-12-22T13:55:00.000-05:00

Naked in a literary sense, that is. Isn't that what blogging is all about? It's comparable to taking off all your clothes... in a nude resort. It's unremarkable precisely because everybody else is doing it. So now I can go on blogging about in the privacy of my own publicity.

As I've stated in my first blog, I don't intend for anyone to read what I'm writing. It's a therapy thing, sort of. From what problem, I haven't the faintest idea. But after I'm done with it I'll know for sure what was 'wrong' with me. So it's a blog about nothing, and everything. No, wait, that's Jerry Seinfeld's show (it could turn out to be copyrighted or something).

So, Dave Barry is 'retiring' in a couple of days. From what? Can you actually retire from writing? Well, if Johnny Carson can retire from joking with his guests... But I don't like to comment on current affairs lest my unreaders get the impression that I'm starting a real blog.

Writing as therapy

2004-12-21T11:50:00.000-05:00

I don't want anybody to read this. Which is why I'm posting it to hundreds of millions to see. Does this make sense? My point is if everybody has an equal voice then what we'll end up with is noise. Make that NOISE!!! Sooner or later people will come to realize, as the internet euphoria subsides, that we need to go back to hierarchies. No, to some that's a very bad word. Make that 'deliberate filters'. Or private editors. Or call it what you like.

But I shouldn't give the impression that I'm trying to communicate anything here. I'm not presenting any ideas, nor trying to reach anybody. I'm using writing in of itself as therapy. Writing in an 'exposed' form, that is. I have been a procrastinator and a perfectionist for way too long. Hesitating to write a single word for no logical reason whatsoever. Who cares if what I write is not perfect. I WANT it that way now. You don't have to read it. But that doesn't mean that I shouldn't write it. Or feel bad about writing after I do.

I've discovered that the writing itself is not the most difficult part. The hard part is facing the 'RE-' writing. The editing. The choosing a better word, a more appropriate phrase, a more coherent structure. But I'm done with that now. I will write regardless of anything else, with no concern for putting even a basic idea to unify the jumbled mess that I don't care to review (save for spelling and grammar).