SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.com http://www.well.com/~bubbles/ Issue #242 New Moon of August 25, 2014 Contents copyright 2014 by Thomas G. Digby, and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. See the Creative Commons site at http://creativecommons.org/ for details. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. Details of how to sign up are at the end. ********************* I'm reminded of some things from my childhood. My parents had a feedback style that could be summed up as "No news is good news." Those of you who have done design or engineering on things to be sold to the military (or certain other government agencies) will recognize similarities to the military design review process. In a design review officials representing the customer give the designers of a product a list of things about the product that they (the customers) see as defects that need to be corrected. The customers go over the list with the designers, going into whatever detail is necessary. The designers make changes and then another review of the modified design is done to see if any problems remain. Repeat as needed. The reviewers ignore things that are OK as they stand. Since no action needs to be taken on those items, praising them would be a waste of time. My parents had a similar approach to parenting. Anything I did that was less than perfect would get their full attention, sometimes with comments about how stupid I was to have done such a thing and how I should be ashamed of myself. Things I did well and had a right to be proud of would hardly get mentioned. This may be all well and good when the military is buying computers or jeeps or helicopters or whatever, but it's not so good as a parenting style. At the same time I wasn't getting along well with the other kids in my school. Some of them started taunting me or engaging in other verbal abuse. My mother kept telling me that if I didn't react to it they would stop, but at that age I didn't have enough control over my emotions to do that. My parents also tried to shame me out of crying. That didn't work very well either. I somehow got the idea that people couldn't criticize what they didn't know about. So as a form of self-defense I started keeping as much of my life as possible secret from anyone who might use it to criticize me, especially my parents. So when they asked me how things were going I would just say there was no news worth mentioning. Getting hired by a company on the other side of the country after I graduated from college made this easy. I felt I had to keep my parents up to date on things like changes of address, and on a few occasions when I was between jobs I needed to ask them for money. On those occasions I would tell them vague generalities about how my life was going, but I kept mum about the details, especially things that I felt emotionally vulnerable about. This also extended to my writing. I may not have made a conscious policy decision on the matter, but I seldom made public mention of things like medical problems and financial crises. I have also tended not to mention things that made me feel emotionally vulnerable. Now it may be time to think about starting to change this. For one thing, I suspect that all this secrecy may have been limiting my creative output. For another, it may have kept me from asking for help from other people when such help might have been useful. And with my parents several years dead I need not fear a lecture from them on how stupid I am and how nobody cares about me. This is not the kind of thing one changes all at once by waving a magic wand. It's a gradual process. But I do think I want to start making that change. ********************* We're getting into September, which feels like a time of changes. Summer is ending and schools are starting, tourist stuff is winding down, baseball is giving way to football, and in general the world (at least the northern half) is getting back to work. Closer to home, the kitchen disposer broke. The manager looked at it and says the sink needs to be replaced. And while they're at it, mine is the only unit in the building that didn't get renovated a couple of years ago, so it's overdue. So now I'm rearranging furniture and shelves and such to clear the kitchen area as well as a path to the door so they can replace things like the stove and refrigerator. Chaos is leading to changes. ********************* The manager also said I'm overdue for a rent increase. He wasn't sure how much it would be, but I'm guessing several hundred dollars a month. I'm not sure I can afford that, so I'm starting to think of other possibilities. One that seems feasible is sharing a place. I've done that before. Sometimes there have been problems, but other times it has worked well. The key is finding compatible people. It's also possible that I won't be staying in Silicon Valley. I have ties to groups like science fiction fandom and Paganism that extend to other geographic areas, so I won't necessarily be landing in a strange place alone. People have suggested that I check mundane forums like craigslist. But I have a bad feeling about that. It just feels like I need to keep it within the various subcultures I'm connected to. Nothing is definite yet. I need to explore the possibilities. But it looks like I'm heading into a time of more changes. ********************* Writing the starting piece in this issue was something of an emotional hurdle. It somehow reminded me of a time back in high school or college when our phys ed class did a sampling of track and field events. One of those events was hurdling. When I saw the track with the hurdles all set up on it, I expected the instructor to give us some sort of explanation of how to run and jump so as to get over the hurdles without tripping over them. But they didn't go into that. They just lined us up and gave the start signal. And lo and behold, I sort of subconsciously knew how to clear the hurdles. I barely saw them going by beneath me, but some part of me was able to synchronize everything. Everybody else seemed to be doing OK as well. I was rather surprised at this, but didn't ask about it afterwards. Is that the normal experience with high-school or college-age people running hurdles? The Wikipedia article on hurdling goes into lots of details about how the runner's legs should be bent a certain way when clearing a hurdle, but that may be for higher hurdles and more serious contenders, such as in the Olympics. Be that as it may, I don't recall any mention of any of that stuff back in that phys ed class. It was pretty much just "There they are. Ready, get set, Go!" And somehow, we went, even if we didn't really know how. There have been occasions since then when I've found myself dreading something off in the future, only to find, when the time came, that I somehow ended up doing the right thing. Is there some cosmic meaning in this, or was it happenstance? Were I the type to write and promote self-help books I might cook up an argument to the effect that there's some kind of meaningful analogy between events in one's life and hurdles on a race track. It may be pure baloney, but even so I might be able to make a good enough argument to sell books. But I'm not that type of author so I probably won't. Even so, there may be a lesson in there if we look at it right. ********************* YouTube has a series of videos about how various things are made. You can find them by searching YouTube for "How it's made". I found one on manhole covers. It showed steps such as making a sand mold, pouring in molten iron, and so on. But unless I just happened to miss it it made no mention of chocolate. Then again there was more than one video on manhole covers, and even if I were to try to watch them all no documentary can cover all the myriad ways they can be made. ********************* The summer tray liner at Wendy's had a theme involving ants at a picnic, and as part of that they had a cartoon of an ant colony. It included ants greeting one another by name. What I noticed as odd was that they were using male names like Jimmy and Bob. I thought worker ants were female, as is the case with bees. The picture of the inside of the ant nest also showed no trace of a queen. Now maybe the queen was hiding somewhere, and maybe some female worker ants were using male names for political reasons or something. If ants are aware of human sexism they might want to use male names to reduce discrimination. Or maybe they don't think of names in terms of gender at all. But if that was the writer's intent shouldn't they have explained it better, perhaps with a footnote linked from asterisks next to the male ant names in question? ********************* September Dreaming September. The party's over. Although my school days are long past, Thoughts of school and studying and homework Seep into my head Like smoke from burning piles Of old summer dreams. In a sudden burst of movement A squirrel grabs one of the many acorns That lie scattered all around. Is each acorn a future dream? In years to come When the new seedlings start to tower over my head I will see that some of them were Even if there is no way to know beforehand Which ones those will be. -- Thomas G. Digby -- Written 2011-09-01 14:51:51 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU There are two email lists, one that allows reader comments and one that does not. Both are linked from http://www.plergb.com/Mail_Lists/Silicon_Soapware_Zine-Pages.html If you are already receiving Silicon Soapware you can tell which list you are on by looking at the email headers. If the headers include a line like this: Silicon Soapware zine with reader comments you are getting it via the list that allows comments (some software may hide part of the line, but there should be enough visible to recognize it). To comment, simply email your comment to ss_talk@lists.plergb.com (which you can often do by hitting "Reply All" or "Reply to List") from the address at which you got the zine. 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